What Lies in the Woods(33)

The trees opened up at the edge of the pond. Frogs creaked and croaked in the water, and insects danced along the surface. The scene had a bedraggled kind of charm to it, but the magic of that summer was long gone.

“Is it at all possible that you were mistaken?” Ethan asked, his voice keeping me brutishly anchored in the present. I wished he would leave—and I was glad he didn’t. Time here was slippery. I didn’t want to be alone with the past. “Can you see any possibility that the man who attacked you wasn’t Stahl, but someone else?”

“Will you just let it go? I’m not going to play along with your pet theory,” I said.

“Naomi.” He grabbed my arm. I snarled, wrenching away from him, and turned with my fingers tightening into fists. But he wasn’t looking at me. His gaze shot past me. I started to turn. He reached for me again, as if to stop me, but he couldn’t. Nothing could stop this, the moment when endless possibility collapsed into the cruel certainty of fact.

It was her hand I saw first, fingers bent. And then the oil slick of her hair seeping out across the surface of the water, obscuring all but a fractured sliver of her cheek. Then the dark blotch of her torso, loose shirt billowing around her, obscuring the shape of her until my mind refused to see that it was a person at all, was more than this collection of fragments. Shape and shadow jumbled on the surface of the water into something that couldn’t be Olivia.

My mind rejected it, but my body knew. I was in motion before my tattered thoughts could stitch themselves together.

Ethan’s hand scraped against my arm once more, but I plunged past. I ran straight into the water, thrashing my way through to her. I clawed my way past cattails, feet sinking into silty mud. Hold on, hold on, I thought, logic left behind me on the shore. She couldn’t be alive and it didn’t matter because I had to get to her. I was eleven years old and she was in the water and I couldn’t find her, the silt too thick, my hands groping at nothing, nothing, nothing.

And then she was in my arms, and I was dragging her up. And she had coughed and sputtered and fought me, and breathed, and lived. She had lived, and she would live now, if I could only get to her.

Her face was swollen and gray when I turned her over. “It’s okay,” I murmured inanely. I pulled her against me. Her eyes were shut, her mouth slack. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” I bent over her, my breath knotted in my throat.

You promised, I shouted, but the words lodged in silence. I’m here. You said you would be, too.

“Naomi. There’s nothing you can do. You shouldn’t touch the body,” Ethan said. He stood in the water beside me, his hand outstretched toward my shoulder, not quite touching me. “We need to call the police.”

I shook my head, on my knees in the muck. “I’m not leaving her here.” I tried to lift her. She was so thin. Like she was worried that if there were any more of her, she’d only be in the way. But I couldn’t get my arms under her, couldn’t find my footing. I slipped, struggling under her weight. I couldn’t leave her in the water. She was so cold. She hated the cold.

“She’s dead, Naomi. She’s gone,” he said. I shook my head. She couldn’t be. She couldn’t be, because she’d promised she wouldn’t try again. Because she knew I would be there and I would help and we would fix it, together.

But I breathed in the scent of rain and old growth and tipped my head back, let the cold water patter over my eyelids, and I made myself stop. Be still.

Let go, I thought.

Let go, a girl thought twenty years ago, rain pattering against her cheek, the scent of rotting wood and blood in her nose. Let go.

“Breathe,” Schreiber said.

“I’m breathing,” I told him, though I wasn’t sure it was true. I didn’t see how it could be. I was supposed to be dead. Olivia was supposed to be alive. I looked at Schreiber. “I’m not leaving her here,” I said again, firmly.

He stepped forward, and for a moment I thought he meant to pull me away from her, but instead he slid his arms beneath Olivia’s body. “I’ve got her,” he said. He lifted her from me slowly, gently, angling her so that her head rested in the crook of his arm. The tips of her fingers trailed in the water as he waded back to shore, as I followed shuddering in his wake.

He set her down there and placed his coat over her face like a shroud. I sank to my knees beside her. My mind was empty. I couldn’t think. Didn’t want to.

“I don’t have signal here. We have to go back to the trailhead and call the police,” Ethan said.

“I’m staying here,” I said. I pressed a fist against my stomach.

Ethan nodded. “Okay. I’ll be right back. Don’t … don’t go anywhere.”

There wasn’t anywhere for me to go. I was where I was supposed to be: with Olivia. In the woods.

“Why did you do it?” I asked her now. Asked her then, lying in her bed together, the blanket up over our heads as Cass snored on the floor. Silt from the pond still in our hair, the taste of it still on our tongues. “You didn’t have to stay under that long.”

“Yes I did. The goddesses were watching,” Liv said.

“Do you really believe in them?” I asked.

“Don’t you?”

“Of course,” I said, pretending it was true. “Of course I do.”