The Next Time You See Me (2 page)

And the reward, always, was the immediate transition from frenzy to quiet. The dog was only interested in Emily as long as he could see her, so when she reached the trail opening and disappeared behind a row of trees, the barking stopped almost at once, leaving in its stead a silence so near perfect that Emily’s eardrums hummed. Here she paused and closed her eyes, marveling at the unnatural warmth of the October day. She was searching for words, for an image so bright and true that she could build a story upon it. This was how her private games of make-believe began.

The subject of much of her make-believe was Christopher Shelton. In the woods, it was he she imagined by her side, holding her hand, steadying her when she walked across logs or rocks; Christopher who listened to her talk about her day and told her not to worry about Leanna Burke or Maggie Stevenson, those popular girls who knew only how to tease and shun; Christopher who leaned in sometimes to kiss her, the touch so real that she could feel the texture of his lips (they had looked a bit chapped at school that day) and the cool burn of his peppermint gum. The Christopher she brought with her down Washington Lane and past the Calahans’ dog was more real to her than the boy who had teased her today in Mrs. Mitchell’s English class, and it never once occurred to her to amend her make-believe, to find another object for her interest.

Despite the unseasonable heat, it was late enough in the year that the air didn’t hum with cicadas and birdsong, and the trees were in their last stages of shedding the summer’s leaves, a few bright stragglers fluttering in the breeze like pennants. Emily followed her familiar path,
the one she had spent years rutting, feeling freer and more herself with every step. In the summer, when the temperature sometimes broke 100 degrees and the humidity settled like a damp, napping beast in the valley of town, Emily found her gaze drawn close and downward, to the strange little universes tucked under rocks or in puddles of rainwater. She had started a rock collection, though the pickings here were limited: shale, limestone, sandstone, the occasional chunk of flint. Once she had found a jagged piece of drywall, puzzled over it, then dropped it back into the creek bed. She was more likely to happen across a rusty nail in these woods than an arrowhead.

But autumn was a good time for exploring, the poison ivy and sumac and the clouds of midges dead and disappeared, the way ahead clearer, the sun bright and reassuring overhead, confirming for Emily that she was headed consistently eastward. She knew that the woods were narrowest to the east and west, and she could keep moving in a straight line and eventually resurface on Grant Road, where they were finishing work on the new rich-person development.
Bankers and doctors and lawyers, oh my,
her dad would chant, tediously, every time they drove past it. She had walked to the construction site a few times to pick through the detritus and gotten hollered at during her last visit, when someone saw her using a cast-off two-by-four as a tightrope between cinder blocks. She wasn’t used to being noticed by adults, much less chastised, and so she had run off and not been back since.

To the south, the land climbed steeply toward Harper Hill and the site of the new town water tower. She hadn’t gone there much—that way was longer and harder, crossing an invisible threshold from where she felt justified roaming. But now she halted, conjuring Christopher in her mind’s eye, imagining the brush of his shoulder against hers. “What do you think?” she said aloud. Her words vibrated thrillingly in the silence. There were days when the sound of her voice, real and irrefutable, killed the delicate illusion. But on others, like today, when her spirits were at their lowest, it could provoke in her an almost physical pleasure, a kind of drowsy vibration. Her eyes blurred, so
that the treetops looked painted against the sky, and she spoke again, enjoying the sound even more: “Which way?”

“Let’s climb,” Christopher said. “Maybe we’ll see the sunset.”

She turned right, southward, and started at a brisk pace toward town, already feeling the grade pressing up against the soles of her sneakers. Her rambling had not made her athletic—she was big enough now that last autumn’s pants pulled painfully at her hips and crotch, pushing up the soft flesh between her waistband and bra band so that it stood out from her body, tubelike, visible beneath anything but the loosest-fitting T-shirts. Christopher’s presence at her side was so real to her that she registered embarrassment at the visibility of her exertion, and she couldn’t help calling up the look on his face when he had stopped by her desk that day at school: the disgust, so evident in the curl of his lip, and the spat word,
creep,
said as though he were ridding his mouth of a foul taste. She felt the press of fresh tears (
crybaby
) and pushed herself harder, wheezing as the grade steepened. She was climbing now, grabbing the long, tangled grass for purchase, and the light overhead was slightly less golden than before, the sun starting to bleed into the horizon on her right.

Then she fell, turning her ankle as she went and throwing up her left arm in time to shield her face from a jutting branch. The breath was knocked out of her. Stunned, she flopped onto her back, getting her first good look at how far she’d ascended. She’d nearly reached the top of the hill, so the land rolled away beneath her steeply, offering her an unimpressive view of the woods, her woods, and the homes infringing on them both ways. In the distance, Highway 68-80 wound past the rock quarry toward Bowling Green. Much closer, only a hundred feet or so away, was the outer perimeter of Sheila Friend’s property; a ragged barbwire fence penned in a few goats, small enough to be mistaken for dogs at a distance. She sent her mental fingers out for Christopher, as though she could catch the shirttail of the illusion she’d constructed, but he was gone, winked out. All that remained was an emotional residue, like a bad taste. A kind of sneering, hateful feeling, a whispered word:
creep.

“I’m not a creep,” she said aloud, lonelier than ever before.

She pushed herself up to a stand, putting most of her weight on her good right ankle, and tried shifting to her left. A twinge of pain arced up her leg from the instep of her foot, unpleasant but not excruciating. She could get home on it, and more easily if she cut across Sheila Friend’s land to the road, where the rest of the going would be easier. She started hobbling toward Sheila’s fence line, but as she approached it, she doubted herself. The barbwire snarled thick and furred with rust in three layers separated by only eight or nine inches, the highest strand about three feet off the ground. As she tested the spring of the barbwire under her palm, she could see two or three of Sheila’s goats watching her with their black little eyes, waiting. Her parents had taken her and Billy to a petting zoo when they were small—Emily four or five, Billy eight or nine—and Billy had ruined the day, as he so often did, with one of his tantrums. “No, no, no,” he’d started in a low, steady voice when the first goat came toward him and sniveled in his pockets for the treats Billy had bought from the dispenser outside. When the second goat approached, he had shrieked, then screamed. Emily remembered terror, quick movement; she remembered the swelling power of her own voice joining Billy’s in affront. And then, dimly, the car ride home, and her mother’s tired voice:
He’s turned us all into prisoners.

Emily backed away from the fence, embarrassed by her fear. The sun was going down, the goats silently assessing her, and her ankle yammered with increasing insistence. She needed to get home.

She hobbled downhill parallel to the fence line, moving quickly, feeling chilled as the sweat from her climb started to evaporate. At the corner of the fence she turned, prepared to follow it to the road, but no, that wouldn’t work: the land sloped down steeply here into a small ravine, the barbwire in one spot grown around and even into the trunk of a maple tree. The tree itself was long dead, its roots exposed and dangling into the opening, leaving an ominous-looking hollow of darkness behind them. The gully was carved sharply into the hillside, narrowing as it ran down the grade, looking like the remnants of a
streambed, though Emily couldn’t determine where a stream would have originated. Certainly it was a spot where things fetched up after hard rains: limestone, looking like bone in the low light; rotten logs; tangles of limbs and the soft down of dead leaves—a hundred dark crevices where a snake or a rat might sleep, a hundred dark crevices where a twisted ankle could turn into a broken one. Right now, the girls in her grade would be talking to one another on the phone about boys, and the boys themselves would be playing Super Mario Bros. or a game of HORSE out in the driveway. And Christopher—what would he be up to? He lived in one of the Civil War–era mansions up on North Main, his (it was rumored) three full stories tall with a ballroom, a library, and a separate servants’ quarters out back, now converted into a guesthouse where Christopher was sometimes allowed to host overnights with his friends. She could imagine him out in the little building she’d only seen from the road—it was gray stone, with a copper roof—bent over a pool table or playing foosball with his friends, a lock of dark hair trembling over his right eye as he twisted his wrist or thrust his hips to the left or right. She could—

But that’s when she smelled it.

She stopped, peering into the gulch. The smell didn’t hit her instantaneously—she’d been sensing it for a while now on some subconscious level and attributing it to the nearby goats—but her realization of it was instant, wrenching her from the safety of Christopher’s guesthouse and plunging her back into this twilight wood, where the shadows were starting to stretch and run into one another. When she inhaled again, more deeply this time, and tried to determine what it was, or identify its source, her stomach trembled. She knew this smell precisely because she did not know it, because it was too alien, too removed from her safe, familiar world to be anything but what it was. It was death. She was smelling death.

Her breaths had gotten rapid and shallow. She put her hand on her chest and forced herself to exhale slowly.

It was an animal, almost surely. A possum, a skunk. Maybe even a dog. She had seen such death before: shapeless bags of fur drawing
flies to the shoulder of the road. She had once watched a dog get run over by a car, run home to tell her mother, and returned to find only an oblong streak of blood on the faded cement. The smell was new; the idea of it wasn’t.

She hesitated, suppressing a tremor of unease, and then leaned back a little, palm behind her for balance, and started working her way down into the trench. She picked her footing as carefully as she could on her bad ankle but slid on a decomposing fall of leaves, and so finally she sat and simply pushed herself downhill, aware that getting back out, scaling the other side, would be harder.

In the end she very nearly stepped on it. She was inching along the floor of the gully, wobbling from one loose-fitting stone to the next and clinging to the nimble trunks of trash trees for balance, when she slid, then overcorrected, planting her left foot against a stone and finally stopping her forward motion. She trembled with relief, her heart racing, and then she looked down at the stone she’d shifted and froze. The light was already dimmer than it had been when she first approached the crevasse—a light so low and gray that Emily could see better with her peripheral vision than she could straight on. What she thought she’d seen she didn’t quite believe; she focused her eyes to the left of it, squinting, and then, still uncertain, she crouched down, her left ankle squealing now—and yes, there it was, pale and threaded with fine lines, dimpled in the center with dark soil: a human palm.

She jerked back. Then, slowly, she leaned in again. She grasped the neck of her shirt and pulled it up over her nose, but it did little good. The death smell was here, sitting atop that palm as though being held aloft, and she knew that she ought to turn away and go for help, but she also knew that she wouldn’t be able to stand it later on if she didn’t get a look while she had the chance. There was, along with the mounting horror within her, a curiosity, too, almost scientific: the same curiosity that drove her each day to flip the switch on that UV lamp, not because she didn’t think it would kill the tadpoles, but because she wanted to know
how
it would kill them. With her
left hand still pinching her shirt tight over her nose, Emily used the right to grab a nearby stick. She poked the shifted rock; it wobbled, then fell back into place. She poked again. At last she had to hold her breath and use both hands, moving the stick like a golf club, dislodging the rock and revealing beneath it the underside of a puffed wrist, pale but bruised looking, the hollows between the prominent tendons purple as grape Kool-Aid.

She felt her neck and face break out with heat, the sensation so shocking and instant that the roots of her hair tightened. There was, in this pocket of soil below her, a hand and a wrist—and the sight of both together, joined as they should be, discolored but still recognizable as human, set her off balance in a way that the palm alone could not. Before she knew what she was doing, she started knocking other stones and leaves away with the stick, and then she tossed it to the side and pulled the leaves and soil off barehanded, and when she finished half a minute later she’d unearthed the rest of the arm, the shoulders, and the head.

The body rested loosely in the soil, as if it had been hastily covered before the rocks were set in place. There was a wrinkled elbow, grimed and whorled like a thumbprint, and a couple of inches of exposed upper arm, the flesh so bloated and tight that it strained against the sleeve of a thin white T-shirt. The shoulders and back were also swollen, the weave of the T-shirt puckered, and Emily thought of the Halloween dummies she and her mother used to construct each year, before the time some bullies from Billy’s school had set one on fire as a prank. They would close the sleeves of one of her father’s old flannel shirts with rubber bands and stuff so many leaves into the torso that you could see the points spilling out between buttons. This body, too, was overstuffed, the back humped, the neck bulging against the razored edge of short hair. A man, Emily thought at first—the body seemed both fat and muscular, the hair too short to be feminine—but there was some detail throwing off the image of maleness, a clue that she was grasping with the edges of her mind but not yet consciously. She crouched down and put out a trembling hand, a pointed finger,
and touched one of the fingers of the exposed hand. The nails, she’d noticed from above, seemed longish—had she once heard that they continued to grow in death? When she pushed, something gave and came free, and Emily didn’t even jump this time; she just squinted in the low light, the vein in her neck pulsing with her excitement, and came as close to the object as she could stand to. It was a press-on nail, painted peach with an even white tip. It lay bright against the dark ground, like an opal.