What Lies in the Woods
Kate Alice Marshall
For all the wild girls who search for magic in the woods
There is a wilderness in little girls.
We could not contain it. It made magic of the rain and a temple of the forest. We raced down narrow trails, hair flying wind-wild behind us, and pretended that the slender spruce and hemlock were still the ancient woods that industry had chewed down to splinters. We made ourselves into warriors, into queens, into goddesses. Fern leaves and dandelions became poultices and potions, and we sang incantations to the trees. We gave ourselves new names: Artemis, Athena, Hecate. Conversations were in code, our letters filled with elaborate ciphers, and we taught ourselves the meanings of stones.
Beneath a canopy of moss-wreathed branches, we joined hands and pledged ourselves to one another forever—a kind of forever that burns only in the hearts of those young enough not to know better.
Forever ended with the summer. It ended with a scream and the shocking heat of blood, and two girls stumbling onto the road.
The way Leo Cortland told the story, he thought at first that the sound was some kind of bird or animal. His spaniel’s ears perked, and she barked once, staring intently into the trees.
The truth was he knew right away that the sound belonged to a child. The story he told was a way to explain to himself why he stood for so long, unmoving. Why, when the spaniel lunged toward the noise, he hauled her back, wrapping the leash around his fist. Why he was starting to turn, to walk the other way, when the girls stumbled out of the woods, the two of them wild-eyed and whimpering and their clothes soaked with dark blood.
“What happened to you?” he asked, still in shock, still seized with the urge to get away.
One girl shivered and shook her head, wrapping her arms around her body, but the other spoke. Her voice was hollow and lost. “There was a man,” she told him. “He had a knife.”
“Are you hurt?” he asked, wishing that he had his gun, wishing that his spaniel had ever been a threat to anything but his shoes.
“No,” the girl said. When he told the story, Leo would linger on this part. The way she stared right through him, like there was nothing but a ghost behind her eyes. “But our friend is dead.”
This was the one part of the story that was Leo’s and Leo’s alone; after that, it belonged to everyone, and each found a different part to tell again and again, polishing it smooth. Some spoke of the bravery of the two of us who had stumbled to the road to find help, who despite the shock gave the description that would lead to the attacker’s arrest. Others focused on the monster himself, fascinated by his wickedness and his brutality, the darkened corners of his soul.
Our parents always spoke of the moment they found out—of hearing that three girls had gone into the woods and only two had emerged, knowing right away that it was their girls, because it was a small town and because they knew the way the wilderness called to us, the way we slipped down deer trails and searched for the tracks of unicorns beside the creek.
Knowing that three of us had gone into the woods. Not knowing which two had returned.
Others spoke of the young man who found the last of us. Cody Benham was walking through the woods with the search party—three dozen men and women, most of them armed, all of them angry. He spotted the small form lying sprawled over the rotting hump of a fallen tree, as if she’d tried to climb over it with her last failing strength. The rain ran over her, rivulets of blood-tinged water tracing lines down to the tips of her pale fingers.
He didn’t call out at first. He fell to his knees instead, all the breath going out of him. He pressed his face against her cold cheek.
Her fingers curled against the bark.
Some people talk endlessly of the miracle it was, when they carried that little girl, still breathing, from the woods. They praise her strength and her bravery. They remember the television image, the girl in a wheelchair with a scar twisting up her cheek like a knot in a tree, and how she nodded when the prosecutor asked her if the man who’d hurt her was in the room.
They told the story again and again, until they thought they owned it.
We tried to forget. We didn’t tell the story.
Not the real one.
Not ever.
I tried to appear attentive as the couple across from me flipped through the binder of photographs, murmuring appreciatively. Normally, I’d say it was a good sign—except for the telltale tension in the bride-to-be’s shoulders, and the way her eyes kept darting up to my face when she thought I wasn’t looking.
My phone, facedown on the table, vibrated. I pressed the button to silence it without picking it up, resisting the urge to check who was calling.
“Your portfolio is really, really impressive,” the bride said, fiddling with the edge of her paper napkin. “Really.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I replied, mentally calculating how much I’d just lost on gas by agreeing to this meeting. I should have known better. The groom being the one to contact me, the way he’d specified, I showed Maddie some of your photos, when I asked if she’d seen the website.
“It’s just,” she began, and stopped. Her husband-to-be, an earnest-looking young man with a chin dimple and too much hair gel, put a hand on her wrist.
“Babe, it’s exactly what you were looking for. You’re always complaining about washed-out photos. You wanted someone who isn’t afraid of color.”