The Bargaining (24 page)

“My grandma used to talk to us about those woods,” she says, startling me. “She used to say, ‘Marjorie, those woods are older than time itself. They've been around longer than any other living thing.'”

Margie continues to stare at her drink, her brow furrowing under the strain. “Something that's been around that long, it has a long time to get lonely. Too long of a wait for something to keep it company. Nobody should've been living there back then, and no one should be doing it now.”

I chance a look at Rob, but he's staring somewhere past Margie now, someplace into the dark of the shadowy pub. I look back at Margie.

“From the time I was little, I knew about those woods. We all did.”

I have to lean in because Margie's practically whispering now.

“They knew not to go in there, but kids are so damned smart. Always know better than their parents.”

“How did you get them back?” My own voice is barely above a whisper, but it's not because I'm trying to match Margie's tone. I couldn't make more sound even if I wanted to.

“We gave the woods what it wanted,” she says, her own words sounding like a surprise to her. “Company.”

Rob and I look at each other now, his eyes searching mine
for what we apparently both missed. He opens his mouth, but I squeeze his hand. I don't think Margie's done.

Her lips fall open, and the next sentence tumbles like a prisoner suddenly unchained and wild. “We brought the ones no one would miss.”

Rob's hand goes limp in mine. Or maybe I can't feel my fingers.

I pull Margie's sentence over the coals of my mind, see if it'll catch fire. I wait for it to ignite a revelation other than the only one I can form in this moment. Because what she's saying can't possibly be true. Because no one—no person, no monster, no one—could have done what it sounds like Margie is saying.

“You . . . brought . . . you brought
other
kids . . . ?” My mind is still on fire.

“They were a . . . miracle,” Margie says, her mouth moving over the debris of ten years. “The old story was right.”

I'm shivering, but I don't feel cold. I'm having a hard time feeling anything, and I think back to the last time I felt this way. It involved a bonfire and a desert. It involved a furious Rae, a notepad that looked familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. A pad I knew was mine, but my mind couldn't own it at that time. My mind couldn't own a single feeling outside the one that shrouded the rest of me in the numbing warmth
of total and complete denial. It couldn't have been me who wrote those awful things about my best friend. It couldn't have been me.

“That's how you got them back,” Rob says more to himself than to Margie.

“No,” she says, drawing the word out so it sounds like “Nooooeee.” She takes a long sip.

“You didn't get your—”

“I got the boys back,” Margie answers him, her eyes on the table again. “Not my sons, though. Not
my
boys.”

“It must have been so hard,”
Rae said.
“Pretending this whole time to be my friend. It must have just killed you to put on another face every day around me.”

“Looked like them,” Margie says, her voice barely ­audible. “Smelled like them. They have a smell, you know. Kids do. Each one their own. Blake smelled like wheat. No matter what you fed him, that's what he smelled like. Russ was more like . . . vanilla and sand. Eyes like sea glass.”

I watch Margie so closely I'm afraid of what I might see. This hard woman, so weathered she looks like she's lived fifty lives already, weaving a delicate poetry about the boys she wanted back so badly she was willing to sacrifice someone else's child.

“I got my boys back, but not really. It wasn't them.”

“What happened to them?” I ask. I know I shouldn't. I
should stop where Margie stopped it. This is her living nightmare, not mine. Except I know that's not entirely true.

“Don't know,” Margie says, resuming her conversation with her drink.

“You mean—”

“I mean I haven't seen either of 'em in six years,” Margie says, lowering her glass long enough to make me read her lips.

“I don't understand,” I say. “You mean to tell me you went through all that . . .
did
all that, just to lose track of them? Just to say you don't know?”

I should have stopped long ago. Rob is already trying to push me out of the booth. But I'm in far too deep, and I can't possibly leave without hearing her say it.

“Don't you dare preach your gospel to me, little girl,” Margie says, her words dousing the burning coals in my brain. “Don't you dare until you have something so precious, the ache of losing it is enough to pull you to pieces. Don't you dare. Nobody was going to miss some abandoned child wasting away at Our Lady of Grace. Not the way I did my boys. If you'd been swallowed whole by that kind of grief, don't you tell me for a minute you wouldn't slit the belly of it open to get free!”

I see Rob nodding to someone as he finally pulls me off
the bench of the booth and onto my feet. It takes me a full moment to understand that he's apologizing to Joe the bartender for upsetting his patron, the woman named Margie who I finally pull into focus, my vision blurred through the smoke of a bonfire that burned nine months ago.

“We're leaving,” Rob says as Joe hands Margie a cloth handkerchief from his pocket.

Once we're outside, the glare of the sun behind its silver clouds is enough to make my eyes throb.

“It can't be true,” I say to Rob once I'm behind the wheel of April's jeep and we're back on the road. The glare from the sky is killing my eyes, and I wish I could look down at my lap like Rob is. At least then I wouldn't have to face the vision of the North Woods the closer we get to the Carver House.

“There's no possible way that could be true.”

And I wouldn't have to contemplate what it means if Margie was telling the truth after all, and the woods really are as lonely as she says.

18

Dear Rae,

You lied to me every single day that we were friends.

It started that day in the gym. There was that assembly, the one where Principal Pittman told us all where to go in case of a natural disaster, even though Phoenix doesn't get earthquakes or hurricanes, and the last tornado was in 1996, and there are tons of people who say that wasn't even a tornado.

But Principal Pittman told us we needed to go to the locker rooms, and you leaned over and told me something I can't
even remember now, but it was hilarious enough to make my stomach hurt from laughing.

That was the first day we became friends, and I know that because you told me so. You said, “So you and I are friends now.” We'd hung out before that, and you'd called me or texted me practically every day since the first day we met, but you'd never called me your friend. And because no one ever says things like that, I believed instantly that you were right.

So when you came to get me the other day and said, “This is the perfect night for a drive,” and I knew it wasn't because it was raining, and the roads were slick after ten months of draught and the gorges were high with rushing water, I still didn't believe myself.

I believed you instead.

And when you drove up to that wash and said we could make it even though the water was up to the tops of the tires and your eyes got wide and you looked like the fear was what was keeping you whole, I wanted the same fear to fill in my gaps, too.

So how come all I feel now are big, drafty spaces?

That's how I know now that you've been lying this whole time. Because if we were really friends, you'd be able to hear the wind whipping through those gaps in me, and you'd want to insulate me against it somehow.

I know you've been lying because you told me after we got through the wash that the car had lifted off the ground and almost rushed away with the water. You told me that even though I was in the car with you and felt no such thing. The wheels stayed on the ground. We weren't almost carried away. But I agreed with you anyway. Because I knew how much you needed me to.

I'm making a story for you, Rae, but it's actually a story for me. I'm building up the walls of what you called our friendship because you actually never built the walls yourself. I guess you figured I'd get around to that eventually. And these are only paper walls, and each one is pinioned to the ground with “Dear Rae,” but that's all I really need them to be because they aren't permanent anyway. They just need to stay up long enough for me to tear them down. Sometimes a story
has to be ripped to shreds so you have pieces to build something new out of it.

And I think I'm just about ready to build something new. These pieces aren't for you, Rae. They're for me.

Love,

Penny

I don't remember rescuing the notepad from the bonfire. I remember Rae throwing it in there after she unearthed it from her bag, a found artifact from the ruins of my life I hadn't seen starting to form.

I can look at the notepad now, its singed edges still smelling of smoke, sitting there underneath a patiently waiting Linda, and know that I did indeed pry it from the hands of flames that night. I might have used a stick or my foot to kick it out of danger. I might have stomped the glow from the pages until it was nothing but desert scrub and shoe prints, although I see traces of neither as I look at the pages now.

All I know is that when I saw it tip from Rae's fingertips to the edge of the rock-rimmed fire, I couldn't bear the thought
of it burning yet. I couldn't comprehend that the notepad would perish at her hand instead of my own.

The notepad lived, and Rae died.

My phone buzzes again, nagging me to check the text that came in several minutes ago. I've ignored the last three, and it seems I won't be able to get away with disregarding the fourth. I know it's Rob checking on me again. He hasn't let half a day go by without texting me since he went back to soccer clinic and Gwen Brzinski and a life much simpler than the one that faces his mom and me in the North Woods. We argued for at least another hour after we got back to the Carver House, sitting in April's car while I watched the minutes tick away, becoming increasingly aware that she was mere seconds away from officially becoming a prisoner of war at the Registrar's Office, Cynthia Doom the key master.

But really, we both knew that what he was arguing for—that we both leave with him that night—was a ridiculous proposition. Aside from Margie's likely made up (or alcoholically imagined) story, nothing had changed. April was still in this house up to her eyeballs, I still had nothing of substance to tell her aside from ghost stories, and neither of us could point to any reason that she and I might be in any kind of actual danger.

So off Rob went, shaking his head as he backed out of the
in-road to the house, but we both knew all that head-shaking that made me look so unreasonable was just so he could feel better about wanting to get the hell out of there and back to a happier place without people like Margie and with people like Gwen Brzinski. We bartered secrets: I promised not to tell anyone he'd escaped from soccer camp (borrowing his maybe-girlfriend's car), and he promised not to tell my dad I was cracking up.

So now he texts me every several hours to make sure we're still alive. Some of the texts make it through the black hole of cellular connectivity I'm quickly growing used to. I know when some haven't because the ones I finally do receive show Rob's increasing anxiety at my nonresponse.

“Yes,” I say to my phone. “Yes, okay? Still kicking.”

But when I see the screen light up with a fourth text, I'm surprised to find a 253 area code behind it.

There's more 2 it than u know.

I back up and read the first three.

I was an asshole the other nite.

I'm sorry, k? But I need 2 talk 2 you.

I know what u heard.

I reread the texts three more times. Miller hasn't so much as called since I left his house the other night, and now he's suddenly sorry.

But that's not all. He knows that I talked to Margie.

And though I should be happy that there's more to the horrible story than what she left me with, I had been trying to convince myself ever since hearing it that I didn't need to know any more. That so long as April could get this stupid house fixed up well enough to sell it and get us out of here without me having to see anything else in the middle of the night, whatever happened or didn't happen in these woods could remain the business of the trees and weird little coffee shops and shadowy dive bars in this closed-up town.

And even though April didn't learn much about the house itself in all those papers that Cynthia Doom gave her, she did learn that it'd had only a few owners in all its years, with decades passing between ownership that never lasted more than a year or so, all the remaining years taken up by bank ownership. She surmised that the cost of tearing the house down was too much for anyone to actually take on, especially since nobody really came to these woods anyway, and most seemed to rather just pretend the house didn't exist at all.

Then she erased voice mails from the sixth plumber who refused to come and take a look at the toilet and the at least apologetic lady from the cable company who basically told us we should give up on ever getting decent Internet access out here.

In the meantime, I'd spent the last couple of days convincing myself I could go the rest of my life not hearing from that guy with the burnt red hair and evergreen eyes and be perfectly fine with it.

Now I stand with my cell cradled in my hand, staring at the texts that somehow managed to get through while I pace the upstairs hallway back and forth and contemplate my response. If I respond at all.