The Space Between Trees (25 page)

She’s the one to speak. “What are people saying about me?”

I figured she’d ask this, and I have an answer ready. “That you got in a fight and that you got suspended.”

“
I
attacked
him
,” she says.

“Yeah?” I’ve made a promise to myself to sound casual, no matter what she tells me.

“Do people know that?”

“Maybe,” I say.

“It wasn’t him at all. He only hit me because I wouldn’t stop. I told Capp and everything.” She shrugs, and the fabric of the sleeping bag whispers under her shoulders. “I don’t care anyway.”

I wait for a second. “Hadley?” She doesn’t answer. “Hadley? Why’d you . . .
do
that?”

Silence, then finally, “Dunno.”

“Did he, you know, threaten you?”

“No.”

“Did you argue?”

“No.”

“You just attacked him?”

“I guess so.”

Neither of us says anything after that. I’m exhausted suddenly, body tired. I’m dropping down into sleep when I think I hear Hadley say, “I wanted to know what it felt like.” But by then, I’m already gone.

I have the dream about Zabet again, the one in the mall, all those identical beaten faces on sale. I wake up to find Zabet herself, sitting Indian-style at the foot of my sleeping bag. I almost say her name, but then I realize that it’s not Zabet but Hadley, her face painted in a soldier’s camouflage of shadows and bruises.

When she sees that I’m awake, she whispers, “Get up.”

“It’s still night,” I mumble.

“Yeah,” she agrees and rises, grabbing my wrist and half pulling me up. I stand the rest of the way and stumble after her as she gathers sweaters and sneakers.

When I see the shoes, I’m suddenly all the way awake. I shake my head. “I’m not going outside.”

“Get dressed,” she says. She already has her jeans on and her nightshirt tucked into the waistband.

I take a step back and grab on to the edge of her dresser. “I’m not going into the woods,” I say because suddenly I realize that of course that’s where she wants to go, where she’s wanted to go all night, where she wanted to go when she invited me over.

She doesn’t respond, just yanks a sweater over my head. I stand and endure it, feeling suddenly like a child dressed hurriedly in the dark. She lifts her backpack from the corner and shrugs it on.

“Come on,” I say, sitting down. “Let’s go back to sleep.”

“No.”

“What’s the point? No one’s . . . nothing’s out there.”

Hadley sizes me up. “So why not go, then?” she asks.

And that’s how I trap myself, because the reason I don’t want to go into the woods is precisely the opposite of what I’ve said: I’m scared that something—someone—
is
out there, which, Hadley
would argue, is exactly the reason to go look. She kneels down in front of me, lifts my leg, and wrestles my foot into a shoe. I wonder if Zabet were here, alive and here, if she would go out into the woods at night if Hadley had wanted her to. My shoe draws tight against my foot as Hadley gives the laces a last yank and crosses them into a knot.

In stories the woods always look completely different at night than they do during the day, spooky and scary and oogy and boogy. But in Hokepe Woods, the trees are still trees, and the leaves are still leaves. And Hadley is still tugging me along after her, like always. She’s got ahold of my wrist, and she counts off the tree ribbons as she passes them, “One, two, three . . .”

We get to the spot where I know we’re headed, the muddy spot where Zabet was found. But instead of stopping there, Hadley yanks me past, a few rows of trees away, until I can’t see it anymore. She stops in front of a toppled tree. Tree into log, body into corpse. Hadley sits on the log, crossing one leg over the other, and pats herself down until she realizes that she has no coat and, therefore, no cigarettes. She shrugs her backpack off and sets it on her lap to rifle through it. As she does, something in it clanks, metallic.

“What’s even in there?” I ask. “Tent poles?”

She looks at me mysteriously, then reaches in and pulls out a flashlight.

“You didn’t want to use that while we were walking here?” I grumble.

She shrugs. “Someone might have seen it.”

“No one’s out here,” I say; then wish I hadn’t, because it sounds like a dare.

There are night bugs shuttling along the grooves of the log, their shells silvery and bluish, their legs translucent. Hadley gives up looking for cigarettes and looks around at the forest instead, nodding like she’s satisfied.

“We’ll hear anyone coming from here.”

I squat down in the leaves in front of the log. I touch two fingers to the ground to hold myself steady, and my fingers sink into the soft dirt. The ground is cold at its surface, warmer underneath.

“Killers return to the scene of the crime all the time.”

“In the movies,” I mutter.

“I wish this were a movie,” Hadley says.

“Why?”

“My boobs would be bigger.” She gestures at them. I smile despite myself before looking away, embarrassed.

“And if we were in danger, we could tell by the music,” I offer.

“And, in the end, he’d come,” Hadley says.

We both hush then, and I feel a frisson, something cold trickling at my center, drip after drip. I reach out for Hadley’s arm, even though I’m angry at her for waking me, for dragging me out into the woods, for calling the killer to us with her bravado. It seems like wherever he is now, whatever pickup truck he’s driving, whatever bar fight he’s fighting, whichever back alley he’s lurking in, his path will bend to us, curving along the line of her voice.

As I reach for Hadley, she’s reaching for me, too. When we see what we’re both doing, we laugh at how we’ve spooked ourselves,
and it feels like a regular slumber party again, as if we’ve indulged in nothing more serious than scary stories. It would have been something if the killer had come crashing through the woods right then and there. You wouldn’t believe it, not even in a story.

In reality, it takes almost an hour more before he arrives.

W
E BOTH HEAR IT AT THE SAME TIME
, and Hadley makes a sound around the thumb she’s biting on, not a shushing sound but more of a hiss, which still means
quiet!
At first, I tell myself that the noise we’re hearing is just one of the deer crashing through the woods, but the footfalls are even and distinctly human. It’s a sound I’ve had hours of experience learning to recognize: a person walking through the woods. Each step—each limp turning of leaves—is a little louder than the last.

I can’t see anyone through the striping of trees. So instead of looking for whoever’s approaching, I watch Hadley perched up there on her log. Her pupils scan from the left to the right across the patch of woods in front of her and then skip back and slide left to right again, like she’s reading lines in a book. She is still, straight as a reed, as if called to attention, and her thumb is a small pink creature caught between her teeth.

“Hadley,” I whisper.

She lifts her hand from the log and brings it down palm flat, like a director on a movie—
Silence!
Her eyes dart to me, to make sure that I know she means business; then they return to the trees, scanning,
scanning. I tell myself that it must be Hadley’s dad who’s approaching, returned home with the taste of mistress in his mouth to find our sleeping bags empty, or her violent little blond brothers, who followed us out on a dare, or some insomniac Hokepe housewife, some dreamer, charmed by the night woods. I can feel the hollow places in my body, the arteries that flutter with the coming of my blood, the chambers of my heart that flood and void. The footsteps and my heartbeat become one plodding rhythm. And it takes me a moment to realize that the footsteps have stopped, because I’m still hearing my own pulse in my ears.

Hadley’s eyes halt and lock on a spot over my shoulder and to our left, about a dozen yards away. I know that spot.

We stay still, frozen, for another minute, or maybe it isn’t even a minute; it seems long, as long as a staring contest, as long as holding your breath underwater, as long as the moment before you confess to a lie. Our eyes are the only things that move, finding and holding each other’s; then Hadley’s eyes let go of mine, flit back to the trees, back to me, back to the trees again. I think of a statue game that Zabet and I used to play when we were little. We would finish a hand-clapping rhyme—
sunshine, sunshine, moonshine, freeze!
—and freeze, staring at each other, our palms still pressed together from the last clap, children praying, until one of us twitched and the other laughed.

Slowly, I turn my head to the spot where Hadley’s looking. There’s too little light, too many trees; I can’t see anyone. I hear another shuffle of leaves and then a groan—a voice! Under the cover of this noise, simultaneously, as if we’d practiced it before, Hadley and I stand and step toward each other, pointing our toes along the ground so that our feet slide silently under the leaves. Hadley leaves her backpack
on the log, though she pulls out the flashlight and slips it into her back pocket. I reach out for Hadley’s hands, and she’s reaching out for mine, too. I grab and then nearly drop them. They’re hot; mine are cold, clammy. Hadley leans the front of her body against my back, urging me forward. With our hands knotted together and our bodies near joined, like some circus freak of a girl, we begin to step toward the stranger.

“Stop when I stop,” Hadley whispers right into my ear. I can feel her heartbeat, echoing up through her bone, muscle, skin, and sweater, pounding against my back. Or maybe it’s my own heart I hear. I nod, and she flinches as my hair brushes against her face. I can smell our sweat, not the typical muggy, locker-room perspiration, but a sharp, acrid flop-sweat brewed from adrenaline. I hear another groan, which makes me stop in my tracks, but Hadley keeps moving, pushing us forward, her toes clipping my heels.
It’s nothing
, I think.
Some drunk
. But at the same time, I know what Hadley’s thinking:
It’s him.

I catch a flicker of movement between the trees, and Hadley must have seen it, too, because we both stop at once. He is where we knew he’d be, near that little muddy patch where Zabet died. We stop behind a tree. When I peer out around its trunk, I can see his legs, his faded blue jeans, and a ratty pair of yellow work boots, the same brand the boys in our school wear to try to look tough. He’s sitting a few feet from the mud, facing it, his legs stretched out straight in front of him. Something glimmers in his hand—a knife? a gun?—and it makes me draw back, knocking my head into Hadley’s nose. It must hurt but she doesn’t make a sound. I start to say
sorry
, but then, not wanting to risk the noise, squeeze her hands instead. She
squeezes mine back. There’s the click and gasp of a bottle cap, and I exhale as the bottle just has. The glimmer was his beer bottle, that’s all.

Hadley squeezes my hand again and leans into me with one of her shoulders, and I know what she means by this. We can’t really see him from here. We should move one line of trees closer. There’s an oak in front of us with a wide, leathery trunk, wide enough to hide the two of us. We shuffle forward, and I worry that he’ll be able to hear us, that he’s already heard us and is feigning drunkenness and ignorance, that as soon as we get within striking distance, he’ll turn and pounce. We reach the oak, and I let go of Hadley to touch my hands to its trunk, like it’s a goalpost or a base, the object in a children’s game designated safe. I rest my forehead against the tree, the rough whorls and ridges of its bark, and wait while Hadley leans around to look at him. I wonder if I’ll be able to feel the knowledge enter her just by standing here next to her, like the ozone of a storm, like the crackle that comes from running my hand over a skirt full of static.

“Vie,” she breathes.

“It’s him.”

I look.

Jonah Luks is beautiful. Drunk, in the mud, in the middle of the night, he is still beautiful. He sits on the ground. He holds his bottle of beer with both hands, one gripping the neck, the other caressing the label, the base. He stares at the muddy patch of ground with no wisdom or remorse in his eyes. He is blinking, not crying, just blinking. He’s staring at her, of course: Zabet. He can see her there, in his memory, clear as he saw her months ago.