What Lies in the Woods(5)

“You’re under a lot of stress.” Translation: He’d find a time to bring this up when he could be the unambiguous victim. But I let him wrap his arms around me and tuck my head against his chest. I held my hand curled awkwardly, my thumb throbbing, as he made soothing sounds and stroked my hair. “Come on. Let’s drink. It’ll solve all our problems.”

I laughed a little, surrendering. I’d have a drink, and we wouldn’t fight, and Stahl would stay dead, and the past would remain the past, and no one would ever have to know the truth.

Then I heard it—the faint buzz, buzz, buzz. My phone was ringing in my purse. I maneuvered past Mitch in the narrow hall and got to it on the last ring. Liv—really Liv this time.

“Hey,” I said as soon as I picked up, Mitch trailing behind me.

“Naomi. I’ve been calling all day,” Liv said, fretful. I could picture her perfectly, folded up in the corner of her couch, wrapping her long black hair around her finger. “Did you hear?”

“About Stahl? Yeah. I heard.”

“I can’t believe he’s dead.” She sounded far away.

“I know. Liv, hang on.”

Mitch was standing too casually halfway across the room. I held up a Just one minute finger and slipped back through the hall into the bedroom, shutting the door behind me.

“Are you okay?” I asked quietly when the door was shut. If I was a mess, I couldn’t imagine how Liv was holding up. “Have you talked to Cassidy?”

“A little. She texted. I haven’t … I wanted to talk to you first,” Liv said carefully.

“About Stahl?” I asked.

“No. Not exactly.” She took a steadying breath. “I did something.”

“Liv, you’re kind of freaking me out,” I told her. “What do you mean, you did something? What did you do?”

Her words sank through me, sharp and unforgiving. “I found Persephone.”





I hadn’t opened the box in years. Through several moves, assorted boyfriends and girlfriends, and three therapists, the box had remained in the back of one closet and then another, collecting stains and dents.

The corner of the lid had split, and my fingers came away dusty when I opened it. Most of the box was taken up with the quilt that the school had delivered to me in the hospital—a square of fabric from each of my fellow students and teachers, signed with get-well wishes. It smelled faintly of disinfectant, and there was a blood splotch dried to dull brown at one edge.

I am sorry you got murdered, Kayla Wilkerson had written. Almost was added in with a little caret.

There were cards, too. Some from the same classmates, some from locals, most from total strangers. They’d filled many more boxes than this, but after years of guiltily hanging on to all of them, I’d grabbed a fistful to keep and shoved the rest into trash bags, holding my breath the whole time.

Below the cards was the binder. I paged through, not really reading any of the articles. I knew them all by heart. There were photos, too, of me in the hospital and after. Some were snapshots, others professional, and in none of them did I recognize myself, even knowing it was me.

Toward the back was a photo of the three of us. It must have been on one of the days of the trial, given the somber way the other two were dressed: Cassidy in her polished Mary Janes and Liv in a dress with a lace collar—the same one she wore to church. I was wearing a faded Bugs Bunny T-shirt and jeans with holes in the knees. That meant that it was early on. Not long after, someone had pulled my dad aside and told him some of the money that had been flowing in—donations, money from the few interviews I did and the many my dad did—better go to getting me decent clothes. Cassidy’s dad, Big Jim, was the one who made sure that it all got collected up in a trust, ensuring it went to my care and medical bills rather than Dad’s twin habits of drinking and collecting broken junk.

We were smiling. Someone must have told us to, because I couldn’t imagine us doing it spontaneously. Cassidy had the bright, practiced smile of the mayor’s daughter, used to being photographed. Liv’s smile was barely a tug at the corners of her mouth, her hands knotted together and her feet crossed at the ankle. She always had a vague look in the photos around that time. In the weeks after the attack she’d gone into her first major spiral, but they were still scrambling for a diagnosis and the meds weren’t right yet, leaving her disconnected from herself.

And of course my smile was pitiable. My cheek was still bandaged up—presumably not from the original wound, but from one of the surgeries to attempt a repair to the damaged nerves and muscles, which had been at best semisuccessful. The downward pull of one side of my face had only served to make me seem more sympathetic. So did the wheelchair, which it would take me a few more months to go without consistently, mostly due to pain and sheer exhaustion.

Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I still counted them. Seventeen scars. Seventeen times the knife had plunged into me and slid back out again. I still could not understand how I had survived. People had told me over the years that I’d been blessed, brave, determined, fierce. I hadn’t felt like any of those things. Survival had never even crossed my mind as a possibility or a concept. I’d crawled across the forest floor because in my blood loss–addled brain, I was trying to get away from the pain, like I could leave it behind if I got far enough.