Page 6 of The Woods

“You said exactly that,” Polly shoots back.

“The last owners,” Alice’s mother explains. “Justine Gordon was the woman who murdered her whole family.”

“Mom!” Alice shouts. “Stop.”

“For heaven’s sake, Alice,” her mother huffs. “She’s nineteen. Technically an adult. You shouldn’t hide things from her like she’s still a child.”

Why not? Alice thinks. And in any case, shouldn’t she have been the one to make that decision, since Polly is her daughter?

“Are you telling me that you moved us all into a fucking Amityville house?” Polly asks.

“No sailor slang,” Alice’s mother replies.

“I cannot believe that you’ve just turned our lives into a bad horror movie,” says Polly. “You know Quinn’s going to get teased at school about this. As if the whole shitty town doesn’t know about it.”

Alice’s mother huffs at the swearwords but turns her annoyance on Alice instead of Polly. “This is what you get for not telling us about it. People don’t like to have secrets kept from them.”

“I wasn’t keeping secrets. I didn’t want it to influence how you felt about the place. I was trying to protect all of you!”

“So that we could walk around this town with everyone knowing but us, like idiots?” Polly says, with an indignation that can only truly be summoned by someone her age.

“Exactly!” Alice’s mother says before putting her half-drunk Champagne down on the counter and walking out of the room. Leaving Alice to clean up the mess, as per usual.

“People won’t know that it happened in this house specifically,” Alice says calmly. “It’s not like they publish the address. And in any case, I’m sure people have forgotten all about it. It happened four years ago, and we all have memories like goldfish these days because of our phones.”

“Sounds like a load of shit to me, Mom, but nice try. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.” Polly turns and leaves the room.

Alice feels as though she’s been ambushed. She finishes her glass of Champagne and is starting on the half glass her mother left when Geoff walks through the back door. “This your idea of getting the kitchen organized?” She gestures to the mess she’s standing in the middle of, turning the fury that was just directed at her onto him.

“I unpacked it like you asked,” he replies, with the attitude of an insolent child. “There’s no point in putting it away. You would have just told me I’d done it wrong anyway and then reorganized it.”

“At least it would have been put away. And how do you know that I would have said it was done wrong? Plates and glasses can only go so many places, Geoff.”

“How do I know?” He pauses, for effect. “Because no matter what I do, it’s always wrong.”

Alice laughs at the irony. Only seconds before, she was the one doing everything wrong with Polly and her mother.

“I’m glad you find that fact so amusing,” Geoff says before going to the fridge for a beer.

“That’s not why I was laughing,” she says, ready to explain so that they can bitch about her mother together.

“I’ll be in for dinner,” he says, before she has the chance to. He takes his beer and leaves the kitchen to go back out to his writing studio.

Alice stands alone in the kitchen, feeling like the family outcast. Everyone is mad at her for one thing or another. She reaches for the glass of Champagne that the realtor left mostly untouched. Taking her time with it, staring out at the trees from the back window, she tells herself moving days are always a little bit bumpy, that everyone will feel better once they’re unpacked, that she did the right thing for her family.

Whether they realize it or not.

Beverley

When she sees Alice sit down in one of the Adirondack chairs on the back deck with a glass of wine, Beverley decides she should go out and join her. Spend some quality time. She’s not sure where Alice got her high-strung nature—not from her—but she’s noticed it’s gotten worse since Lucy died. It’s to be expected, she knows, but now that her daughter is middle-aged she’s wondering how bad it’s going to get.

She had some serious reservations about moving in with Alice and her family. She’s used to her independence. She likes not having to answer to anyone, especially her own daughter. When Alice was a child, Beverley found her seriousness off-putting. Even when she was playing, she wore a pensive expression, as though she already had the world’s problems resting on her shoulders. Beverley just couldn’t relate and often found herself avoiding her child altogether. Looking for escape from Alice’s constant stream of questions and worries; her need for comfort and reassurance.

At the time it filled her with guilt, but she’s come to reconcile it with the belief that she made her daughter more independent. If Beverley had coddled Alice the way Alice coddles her own children, she would have made her fretful nature worse. Every now and again Beverley can feel Alice’s resentment for it. Beverley tells herself that it’s Alice’s problem, not her own. She did the best that she could, and if Alice can’t see that, so be it.

Beverley makes herself a martini, hoping it will wash away the aftertaste of the greasy pizza Alice ordered for dinner earlier. They’d had takeout burgers the night before. She wonders how long Alice is going to milk this moving thing so that she doesn’t have to make dinner.

“All finished unpacking?” Alice asks as Beverley approaches the back deck from her cabin.