Winterwood

I watch the moth wheel away into the forest beyond Mr. Perkins’s home, vanishing into the rays of sunlight peeking through the dense trees. “Leave me alone,” I hiss up at it, but it’s already gone.

Death lingers. Death is already here.

OLIVER

The pocket watch is gone from my coat.

Nora found it. She knows.

I stand at the window, my heart caving in, and I know nothing will be the same now. She fled the house. Escaped into the dull morning light. And I lied to her. Told her I didn’t know how Max died, didn’t remember. But I had his watch in my pocket.

And she’ll never trust me again.

The wolf is gone too, and when I walk downstairs, Suzy is still passed out on the couch, snoring softly, muttering to herself. I leave through the front door, because I don’t belong here. Not now. Maybe I never did—only fooled myself into believing it. Fooled myself into thinking I could sleep in her home, in the loft, the scent of her pillows like jasmine and rainwater, the feeling of her hand in mine. That I could stay and my memories wouldn’t find me. I could stay and the dark would be kept at bay. Always the dark. Knocking at my skull, finding a way in.

Nora’s footprints pass through the trees, a trail in the snow. But I don’t follow.

I walk around the lake, every step heavy, each inhale a pain in my chest. I should have told her the truth—but the truth is gray and pockmarked, no clear lines separating it from the lies, gaps still marring my memory of that night. My mind an untrustworthy thing.

But the watch was in my coat when I woke in the woods.

And it can only mean one thing.

I reach the boys’ camp and pass the mess hall—everyone already inside for breakfast. They won’t return to their cabins until after dinner, when they will sneak cigarettes and eat the candy bars they keep hidden under their mattresses, where the counselors won’t find them. But the counselors are lazy. They’ve barely taken notice of my return and then immediate disappearance again. I’ve spent only one day in my bunk since I returned from the woods, and not once did a counselor come to speak to me, to haul me off to the main office where the camp director could ask me questions about where I’ve been. About where I was the night a boy died. They’ve stopped caring.

Or maybe the other boys told them a story, a lie. Said I ran away again. Said I made it down the mountain.

The fresh layer of snowfall from last night dusts the landscape, and I make tracks through the trees until I come to cabin number fourteen, and slip inside.

The room is as unremarkable as it was the last time I was here. But this time I’ve come looking for something: a memory maybe, something to explain the black spots in my mind.

Something to make all the pieces fit together.

The cabin smells of damp earth, and I walk to the bunks, willing my mind to remember the rest, to remember what happened that night. The cemetery. Jasper and Rhett and Lin. And Max was there too—he was there and we were all drinking. We were laughing about something, our laughter ringing in my ears. A bell that won’t stop.

I climb the wood ladder and lie on my bunk. Lin’s bunk below mine. And on the opposite wall, Jasper’s and Rhett’s. Four boys to a cabin.

But where did Max sleep? Not here with us—somewhere else.

In a different cabin?

I roll onto my back and squeeze my eyes closed. Why does my brain refuse to remember? What is it blotting out? The truth about what happened. About what I did.

A hole is widening in my chest: the place where I have ruined everything. Where I lied to her. Where I have nothing left to lose.

Nothing to go back to.

No one to trust. No one who trusts me.

I open my eyes and peer up at the low ceiling—at all the little knife marks, the divots and slashes that form words and images and meaningless symbols. The face of a rabbit etched into the wood stares back at me. Several trees carved along the lowest, sloping part of the ceiling, crude lines for every branch, create a tiny forest. Every cussword you can think of has been slashed into the boards. Permanently preserved. Boys’ names crisscross the wood beams, a way to mark their time here—a reminder that a hundred boys have slept in this bunk before me.

But a name catches my eye, carved where the ceiling meets the wall, nearly hidden. Each letter is cut deeply, as if in anger. A night when he couldn’t sleep. When the trees felt too close. The air too cold. His home too far away.

The letters spell: MAX CAULFIELD.

Max slept here. In this cabin. In this bunk.

I sit up and touch the wood grain, my finger sliding along the indentation of each letter. Max slept here.