What Lies in the Woods(4)

My scars had climbed across the skin of half a dozen characters already. Sometimes he sublimated them into metaphor—gave a girl a faulty heart, a cracked mirror to stare into—but reading those stories, I could always feel his fingertips tracing the constellation of knotted tissue across my stomach, chest, arms, face. He’d gotten permission at first, but after a while it was like he owned the story just as much as I did.

The parts I’d told him, anyway.

“It was Liv,” I said.

“Having another one of her spirals?” Mitch asked knowingly.

I bristled. I hated Mitch talking about her like he knew her. They’d never even met. “I didn’t actually talk to her,” I said. I needed more wine. The bottle hadn’t been full when I started, and it wasn’t hitting me hard enough to blunt the edges properly.

Mitch reached for my hand. I stood and walked to the kitchen, pulling another bottle of red down and casting about for the corkscrew. Alan Stahl was dead. He would never get out. He would never come after me.

He’d promised to. After he was sentenced, he’d told his cellmate he was going to get out and slit my throat. Part of me had always been waiting for him to show up at my doorstep, ready to finish what had been left undone twenty years ago.

I set the knife against the rim of the foil and twisted. The knife slipped, the tip jabbing into my thumb. I swore under my breath and just put the corkscrew straight through the foil instead, pulling the cork out through it. Wine glugged into the glass, splashing up the sides. The bottle knocked against the glass and almost tipped it, and then Mitch was grabbing it from me, taking my hand and turning it upward.

“Naomi, you’re bleeding,” he said.

I stared. The cut on my thumb was deeper than I’d thought, and everything—the bottle, the glass, the corkscrew, the counter—was smeared with blood. I wrenched my hand free of Mitch and stuck my thumb in my mouth. The coppery taste washed across my tongue, and instantly I was back in the forest, the loamy scent of the woods overlaid with the metallic smell of my blood, the birds in the trees flitting and calling without a care for the girl dying below.

When I remembered it, I pictured myself from above, crawling over the ground, dragging myself up onto that log. I didn’t remember the pain. The mind is not constructed to hold on to the sense of such agony.

“Look at me. Naomi, come on. Look at my face,” Mitch said, touching the underside of my chin delicately, like he was afraid I would bruise. I met his eyes with difficulty. “There you are. What’s going on? If you didn’t talk to Liv—”

“I know why she was calling,” I said. I swallowed. It was mine until I said it out loud. Then it belonged to Mitch, too, and all the people he told, and the people they told. But of course the story already belonged to countless others—Cassidy and Liv and Cody Benham and whatever journalist found out about it first, and surely there would be some footnote article in the papers tomorrow, “QUINAULT KILLER” DIES IN PRISON.

“Naomi. You’re drifting again,” Mitch said. This was why I liked him. I remembered now.

“Alan Stahl is dead,” I said. “Cancer. He died in prison. He’s gone.” If I could say it in just the right way, it would make sense. Everything would fall into its proper order, and I would know how I was supposed to feel.

“Oh my God. That’s great news!” Mitch seized my shoulders, grinning. “Naomi, that’s good. I mean, I’d rather he be tortured every day for another twenty years, but dead is the next best thing. You should be celebrating.”

“I know. It’s just complicated,” I said, sliding past him. I grabbed a kitchen towel and pressed it to my thumb. The bleeding wasn’t too bad. It would stop soon.

“It must be bringing up a lot of trauma,” he said with a wise nod. And that was why I didn’t like him.

“Can you stop talking like you know what I’m going through better than I do?” I stalked to the hall closet, pawing through it one-handed for a bandage.

“You’ve never really processed what happened to you. You shy away from it in your work. You need to confront it head-on. This is a perfect opportunity. Turn it into the catalyst you need to really dig in. You could do a series of self-portraits, or—”

“Oh, for the love of God, Mitch, will you let it go?” I said. I found the package of Band-Aids and held it under my arm while I fished one out. Mitch moved in to help, but I turned, blocking him with my body. “I don’t want to turn my trauma into art. I don’t want you to turn my trauma into art.”

“You’d rather churn out identical images of identical smiling people and never create anything of meaning or significance?” he asked.

I slammed the closet door shut. “Yes. If those are my two options, I will take the smiling people. Who are not identical, and neither are the photos. They’re happy, so you think they’re beneath me. But you know what? It means a hell of a lot more to a hell of a lot more people than a story in an obscure magazine that doesn’t pay and never even sent you the contributor copies.” That was harsher than I’d intended, but I didn’t back down. I couldn’t. I was running blind through the forest, and the hunter was behind me. I could only go forward.

“I didn’t realize you thought so little of my work,” Mitch said stiffly.

“Whereas I knew perfectly well how little you thought of mine,” I snarled back. Then I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. “I’m sorry. Can we just pretend that I didn’t say any of that?”