Page 74 of The Woods

“Have you heard from the kids?” Geoff asks, trying to move past the moment.

The question causes a spike of anxiety so strong it breaks through the wine and the pill. Alice realizes that she hasn’t checked her phone in ages. She hasn’t even taken it out of her purse since getting to the party. She spins in circles trying to remember where she put it and then spots it hanging from the back of a kitchen chair.

Libby and Kathy have started talking to Geoff about his current writing project, but Alice isn’t listening. She’s located her phone and discovered she’s missed several calls from Quinn, followed by a text message:

Forget my messages. polly ok. just bad period. going home soon.

“Fuck,” Alice says, punching in the code for her voicemail and stepping away from her friends into the privacy of the hall. How could she have been so irresponsible? She left her phone for almost two hours without looking at it, and in that span of time her children held a séance in their house, her daughter started bleeding profusely and had to be taken to the hospital, and her brother thought she was dying, but she has now recovered.

She steps back into the kitchen. “Geoff?” The hysteria in her makes it sound like she’s yelling at him. She takes a deep breath and tries again. “Geoff, did you get any texts or phone calls from the kids in the last hour?”

Geoff pulls his phone out of his back pocket, looks at it, and shakes his head. “No texts or messages. Why? Something up?”

Alice wants to scream. Why was she the only one Quinn tried to reach, the only one set up to fail? Geoff’s phone was probably in his back pocket all night, where he would have felt it vibrate, and he probably pulled it out and looked at it a few times. She, on the other hand, had no pockets and for once, in God knows how long, got so caught up with her friends she actually forgot to worry about her children.

“We need to go home,” Alice says, gathering herself.

“Do you have to?” Libby asks. “It’s still early.”

Alice is flooded with more guilt. Friend guilt about leaving the party, and mom guilt about not being there when her kids needed her. Not that there’s any competition; mom guilt trumps all kinds of guilt, always. “I’m sorry,” she says, rubbing her friend’s arm. “I’ll make it up to you. I’ll have you both out for dinner soon.” She turns to Geoff. “Polly’s not well.” She flashes him a look, hoping to communicate that it’s serious, but he just looks back at her blankly. “She had to go to the hospital.” She lets her words land before adding, “It was something to do with her period. She’s okay, but we should be there.”

“I’ll grab our coats and meet you at the front door,” Geoff says, finally spurred into action.

“Oh my God, of course you should go,” Libby says, her irritation at Alice’s early exit gone completely. “The poor thing. I hope she’s okay. Keep us posted.”

Alice nods and gives both her friends a distracted hug before leaving the room. Halfway down the hallway she remembers the Tupperware container she’d brought the brownies in. Turning back, she heads toward the kitchen but stops when she hears her name. It’s Kathy talking.

“Alice does not seem okay. Those stories she told, they were fucked-up. I knew moving to a goddamn murder house was not a good idea. I think she might be losing her mind.”

She waits for Libby to defend her, but there’s only silence in response, which as far as Alice is concerned might as well be agreement. She abandons her Tupperware.

Polly

The doctor has left Polly lying on a hospital gurney, under the bright lights of a curtained cubicle in the emergency room to give her “some time to process.” The pain in her stomach is gone, thanks to the painkillers, but Polly feels lightheaded and as though her insides are as bruised as her outside. She’s wearing the sweatshirt she’d had on earlier and a diaper-like pair of underwear the hospital gave her. The jeans she was wearing are draped over a chair beside the bed. Blood soaks the entire crotch and down the insides of both legs. Polly doesn’t want to process any of what she’s learned in the last forty-five minutes. She wants to get up and run from that hospital screaming.

Sierra had insisted on driving Polly to the hospital, saying it was faster than any ambulance. She hadn’t been wrong. Drifting in and out of consciousness, Polly remembers the feeling of the beat-up Honda Accord swerving, taking sharp turns, vibrating with the acceleration as she lay on the backseat, her head against the door, her feet on Quinn’s lap. He hadn’t said much on the way there. She knew the whole thing was a full trigger from the night of the car accident. She knew he was sitting there terrified that he was going to lose his other sister. That’s why, as soon as she could, she asked for her phone to text him from her hospital bed that she was fine.

Just some really bad monthly female stuff.

It was a lie. She would never tell anyone the truth. She was nineteen, which meant she could keep the miscarriage from her parents. She’d told the doctor that pregnancy was impossible. The doctor replied that the pill was only 99 percent effective, and only if taken properly. Polly didn’t correct her, didn’t say that it was impossible not because she was on the pill but because according to the photo she’d seen, the sex she’d had was with a dead boy. The doctor told Polly that the blood work was conclusive, indicating that she’d been a couple of weeks along, which would have been right after she’d had sex with Gray.

So is he dead? Polly wondered. Or did he survive the poisoning?

“The part that doesn’t make sense,” continued the doctor, “is the severity of the miscarriage. There was a lot of blood, and your pain level seems extreme for such a short-term pregnancy.” The doctor also couldn’t quite account for what had come out of Polly.

“Large blood clots would have been the norm for a two-week term, but this was a more advanced fetus, eight to ten weeks in size, with a recognizable head and body, covered in hair. Lanugo, we call it in unborn babies, is an occurrence at sixteen to twenty weeks’ gestation.”

Polly immediately thought of the nightmares she’d been having, the furry blob in her belly that grew into a wolf. She quickly pushed the image from her mind and asked what that meant exactly. The doctor shook her head. “On very rare occasions, things happen outside the realm of medical understanding, This appears to be one of them. What matters now is that you are on the mend and nothing else seems out of the ordinary.”

Except that I was impregnated by a boy who was most likely murdered by his mother! she’d screamed in her head.

When the doctor asked Polly if she’d like to have the fetus for burial purposes, Polly said absolutely not. The doctor gave her a pamphlet and told her she had been cleared to go home but that counseling was available if she needed it. Polly considered asking if she could be admitted to the psych ward instead.

Polly slowly gets out of the hospital bed and pulls on her blood-soaked jeans, now stiff and crusty. Her legs tremble and her head pounds, but she forces herself to walk out of the brightly-lit cubicle and to the waiting room with a smile on her face. No one can know what really happened, because how could she explain how she’d gotten pregnant in the first place?

In the car on the way home, Quinn tells Polly that he called their mom and told her what happened. She wants to ask him why the fuck he did that, but she knows: He was scared. She’s also working hard to keep her shit together. Now that the pain is gone and the hospital ordeal is over, what she learned about Gray is sinking in.

“Sierra, you need to get your séance shit out of the house before my parents come home,” Quinn says from the backseat. “My mom is super paranoid about the whole murder-house thing, and if she sees evidence of it, she will lose it.”