Winterwood

Instead, I place a pot of water on the woodstove and wait for it to boil. I add more logs to the fire.

“Will you leave after high school?” Suzy asks, and the question actually startles me—as if she cares about me, even just a little—and I swallow stiffly, unsure how to feel. No one’s ever asked me this. Not even my mother, or grandmother. Because Walkers never leave Jackjaw Lake. At least not for long. We find it hard to breathe beyond this forest. The farther we go, the more it throbs inside us, our lungs gasping for air. My mother left for a whole year when she was nineteen. Traveled around Alaska, met my nameless father, got pregnant, then returned home with regret in her eyes—at least that’s how my grandmother told it. Mom thought she could escape who she was by leaving these woods. But Walkers always come back. I think that’s why she travels to the ocean to sell her jars of wild honey; it’s a way for her to escape, to stand facing the open sea and to feel momentarily free—before returning to Jackjaw Lake.

Returning to me: the daughter who has kept her trapped here. Her burden. And a knife digs deeper into my heart every time she leaves, every time she promises to be back but I’m not entirely sure that she will. If this time she’ll leave for good and never return. And I feel guilty for wanting it sometimes, for wishing she would stay away.

Perhaps it’s easier: being alone. Building walls. A solitary life with no one to lose. No one to break your heart.

“No,” I tell Suzy finally. “I won’t leave.” I don’t need to escape—I’m not like her, my mom. I don’t need to run away from here, I don’t need to see palm trees or vast parched deserts or glittering cities at night to know this is where I belong. To know I wouldn’t survive out there. I am a forest creature. I can’t dwell anywhere else.

“But you could,” she says. “You could get out of here. You could come visit me wherever I am. Paris maybe.” Her eyes widen at the thought of it, as if she were already halfway there just by thinking it—the taste of a buttery croissant already on her lips.

I smile in spite of myself. And shake my head. “I don’t think I’d know what to do with myself in Paris.”

“Why not? We could eat pastries for breakfast and gelato for dinner and fall in love with whoever we want. We wouldn’t even have to learn French, we could just let the boys whisper their foreign words in our ears and lose track of the year. Lose track of who we used to be.”

I laugh and sink onto the couch next to her. Suzy snorts, her cheeks rosy red. I like her dream, her imaginary world where we can go anywhere and be whoever we want.

“Okay,” I say, because I like this moment too much. Because I want to believe she’s right and we can do these things.

For this moment, I am a girl who leaves the forest behind. A girl with a friend who convinces her to sneak out her bedroom window late one night and run far, far away from here. A true, forever kind of friend. One you’d go anywhere with. A friend you’ll never lose—no matter what.

“We should pack tonight,” Suzy says with a wink, continuing our impossible little dream. “Make sure we have the right hats, we can’t go to Paris without the perfect Parisian hats.”

“Agreed,” I say. “And shoes.”

“And sunglasses.”

I nod and laugh again.

“We’ll also need new names,” she says, swiveling her head to face me. “To match our disguises. We can’t have anyone knowing we’re two small-town girls.”

“Obviously.”

“Agatha Valentine,” Suzy says, her eyes beginning to water with laughter. “That’s my name.”

I shake my head. “It sounds like a private investigator’s fake name,” I say.

“Or the heiress to a greeting card company.”

I break into laughter.

“You’ll be Penelope Buttercup,” she tells me, raising an eyebrow. “The daughter of a racehorse tycoon, whose champion thoroughbred, Buttercup, won the Kentucky Derby. But not the Belmont Stakes, which was his greatest embarrassment.”

“My backstory seems slightly more elaborate than yours,” I point out, still chuckling.

Suzy’s eyes are weeping now, and I think we have a touch of cabin fever. That feeling that once you start laughing, you can’t stop—when everything becomes funny. Even though it shouldn’t be. “A greeting-card heiress and racehorse royalty,” she continues. “We’ll be invited to all the best Paris parties.” She snorts again.

We sit this way, wiping away tears, giggling the last of our pent-up laughter. And when silence finally sinks over us, the house feels too quiet. The air too still. I realize how absurd it is to be laughing, to find anything funny when we’re snowed in and trapped and Oliver is missing and a boy is dead. I feel embarrassed and stand up from the couch, rubbing my hands down my pant legs.

We forgot where we were, we forgot there are still things to fear.