Page 68 of The Woods

“What is it?” her mom answers, sounding scared.

“Do you think the strange things that have happened since we moved here are just weird coincidences, or is something not right about this place?” She nods toward the trees outside the window.

Her mom looks away from her and out the same window. She’s silent for a while, as though really considering what Polly is asking. Then she moves so that she can put an arm around her and pull her in closer. “It’s just taking some time to settle in, that’s all.” She rubs Polly’s arm. “The house is great, and the woods are too. Exactly what we all needed. Not a thing to worry about.”

There’s not a whole lot of confidence in her mom’s voice, and it seems like she’s trying to convince herself as much as she is Polly, but she doesn’t push it. She’s tired. They’re both quiet then, thinking their own thoughts, staring out the window at the deep, dark woods.

Alice

Geoff bringing her Sunday-morning coffee in bed has turned into Geoff getting back in bed with her naked, pulling her T-shirt over her head, and doing things that make her forget that she has morning breath and needs to pee. By the time he moves on top of her, she is already wrapping her legs around his hips and pushing him in deeper. He looks down at her with a smile, loving the effect he has on her now, and that’s when she sees it. His eyes flash all black and then back to normal again.

She puts both hands on his chest and shoves him off her. “Something is wrong with your eyes!” She pushes herself up to sitting, clutching the sheets to her chest.

He comes up on his knees to face her, looking as confused and alarmed as she is. “What’s the matter?”

“Your eyes, they went all black for a second.” She points at his now perfectly normal eyes. “Did you feel anything?”

He shakes his head and laughs. “Oh my God, Alice. It was probably just a shadow reflected or something.”

“No, I saw it. It was like ink covered your entire eyeball. Then it went back to normal.”

He widens his eyes and leans toward her. “Look now.”

Perfectly normal. “But I saw it,” she insists, feeling less sure of herself. He moves in closer and tries to nuzzle her neck, but she pushes him away.

“What’s the matter?” he asks, wearing that wounded look that he always gets when she rejects his advances.

“I’m sorry. I’m just not in the mood anymore.”

He slides away from her and starts searching for his boxer shorts. “That’s fine,” he says unconvincingly. “But I’m worried about you, Alice. You seem, I don’t know…” He stands up to pull on his underwear and turns to face her. “Paranoid? On edge?”

She leans over the bed to retrieve her T-shirt. Her nakedness suddenly makes her feel vulnerable. “Do you ever wonder if we did the right thing, moving here?”

He huffs and throws his hands up in the air. “I can’t believe you even need to ask that question. As far as I’m concerned, our family has never been happier.”

“Except for when Lucy was alive,” she’s quick to reply. She pulls the T-shirt on. When she pops her head out, Geoff is looking back at her in total confusion. “Your daughter Lucy,” she snaps. “We can’t possibly be happier than when she was alive. I mean, it’s literally impossible to be happier than ever, because none of us will ever be happier than when she was alive. That’s just a fact of our lives now. There will only ever be a certain degree of happiness we can achieve without her.” Alice’s voice escalates with each sentence, but she can’t help it. Even contemplating greater happiness feels like a betrayal.

Geoff nods. “I understand what you’re saying,” he replies calmly, as though to counter her heightened emotions. “We all miss Lucy, but at some point, we have to focus on the family that we have left. Be grateful for that and let everything else go.”

Alice isn’t sure if she’s being overly sensitive, but it feels as though Geoff is trying to convince her to forget about Lucy. “I will never let Lucy go,” she says through gritted teeth, wondering how the conversation has taken such a turn.

“I’m only saying it for your sake, Alice,” he says, looking right at her. “All I want is for you to be as happy as I am.” Before she can respond, he goes over to the work bag she’d dumped beside the dresser when she got home on Friday. He reaches in and pulls out a folded paper.

“This fell out of your bag the other day,” he says, passing her the pamphlet the doctor had given her on the symptoms of perimenopause. “I put it back and wasn’t going to say anything, but… well. I know it may be hard to accept, but I think there could be more going on with you than you’re ready to admit.”

Holding the pamphlet up she asks, “What does this have to do with anything? It was your eyes that turned black. Not mine.”

He reaches down and rubs her shin poking out from under the sheet. Staring down at her with what might possibly be pity. “What I was saying before,” he explains. “The paranoia, being on edge, imagining things about the woods and this house. Maybe it can all be explained. Just consider it. Maybe go back to the doctor. See if there are any drugs that could help.” He gives her leg a quick squeeze. “Now, I’m going to go make us a nice big breakfast.” He flashes her a wide smile, like he’s already forgotten their disagreement and flipped back to his default setting of happy, compliant, vacant husband.

He leaves the room, and she stares down at the pamphlet in her hand. There it is, paranoia, listed along with jittery feeling, hot flashes, stress, fast heartbeat, irritability, and restlessness. It pretty much perfectly describes how she’s been feeling lately. She hears the doctor’s words in her head again: Often the simplest answer is the correct explanation.

Images flash through her mind—the decapitated bird, the bodies in the ferns, the dirt between her mother’s teeth, the black ink spilling over Geoff’s eyes, the sniffling snout of Ruth Crowley’s blind fox. Is she losing her mind? Then she remembers in the middle of the night, Polly asking if she thought something was not right about the house and the woods. Polly feels it, and Quinn does too. She rips up the pamphlet and shoves it in her bedside drawer.

She offers to clean up the breakfast dishes and tells Geoff he should go get some writing in. After Polly leaves for work and Quinn retires to his room to play videogames, she’s in the clear. She puts the last plate in the dishwasher and then heads out to her car. Glancing around to make sure no one is out there, she opens the back hatch to retrieve the cardboard box that Ruth Crowley gave her on Friday. This is the first chance she’s had to go through it.

The garage is probably the best place to get some uninterrupted time to herself. No one goes in there unless they absolutely have to, because it’s still a mess from when they moved in. A mountain of empty cardboard boxes waiting to be broken down and recycled takes up half the space. The rest is full of pieces of furniture that used to be in their old house but just don’t work in the new one.

Alice clears off an armchair that has already started to smell musty from being outside for two months and drags over a low bench to use as a table. She sits down, pulls out the leather-bound book, and starts flipping through it from the beginning. Everything is in Latin, which means she can’t understand it, but she pulls out her phone and finds the photo Geoff sent her that day of Polly’s floor. It takes her no time to match symbols from the book with ones in the photo. They’re all labeled in Latin as well, so she opens the Google Translate app.