Page 78 of The Woods

Their faces are identical—long and thin, stretched out of proportion. Their skin as rough as tree bark and as white as a cold winter moon, their mouths in a permanent grimace. But it’s their eyes that frighten Polly the most. Holes of deep black shadow, perfect voids. They are ancient, powerful, and terrifying. A word flies into her brain.

Coven.

Gray leaves their side to come to her. Putting both hands on her shoulders, he says, “Tonight is your time to be reborn.” His eyes shine with emotion. “You won’t remember any of this, any of the bad things. Only the good will remain. Good thoughts. Good feelings. Good memories. You will emerge, leaving behind the shell of your former self, the version of you that is a lie, a lie that you have been living since the car accident that killed your sister. All of that will disappear. That is the gift of the woods. That is the love of a mother.”

Shock makes her forget that she is immobilized. She tries to speak, to ask how he knows, to beg him not to tell, but her lips are frozen shut. If her lie comes out, then her whole world will fall apart. There will be nothing left to fight for. A strange calm comes over her, and she stops struggling.

I would have kept your secret forever. Her sister’s words are the softest whisper, fluttering through her mind.

Gray leans in and kisses her softly on the lips. “I love you so much, Lucy.” A black shadow slides across his eyes, disappearing as quickly as it arrived. He nods to whatever holds her from behind and smiles at her kindly. “I will see you on the other side, my love.”

The grip on her shoulder lifts. Without it, her body crumples to the ground. She can feel the unevenness of the bones beneath her. She hears Gray scold someone, telling them to be more careful. Everything goes black.

Lucy

As soon as they left the house to pick up Quinn from the sleepover, Polly told Lucy to give her the keys. “I’ll get us there faster,” she’d said. Lucy had tossed them to her, not wanting to fight about it because taking on Polly took a lot of work and she didn’t care that much. She just wanted to get home and get to bed early for her basketball game. It was an important one and the team was depending on her to play well.

Only once they were in the car, with Polly behind the wheel and Lucy in the passenger seat, did Polly add, “We’re on a tight schedule. I need to get to that party before the molly kicks in, and you drive slower than Nana.” She peeled out of the driveway.

Looking over at her sister casually palming the steering wheel with one hand, the other tapping her thigh to the house music that she’d turned up full-blast, she felt both dread and exhilaration. Polly was reckless and unpredictable—and Lucy loved her for it.

Polly’s hair was a thick, straight curtain hanging down her back. Her glossy pink lips were mouthing the words to the song and the glitter on her cheeks was catching the last light of evening coming through the car window. Lucy was envious of how free Polly was. Free from people’s expectations of her, from pressure to do well or be good. Polly had made it very clear at a very young age that she was not one to conform, or live up to people’s expectations, or follow rules. She was her own person and everyone else adjusted. Including their parents, whose only expectations of Polly were that she stay out of jail and finish high school.

Lucy, on the other hand, was being crushed under the weight of her parents’ expectations. But it was her own fault. She overcompensated for her wild, tenacious, unpredictable twin. Always top of her class in marks, star of the basketball team, never getting in trouble or worrying her parents. Lucy had started to think that maybe she overperformed so that her sister could underperform and get away with it. Or maybe she did it for the approval. Either way, she felt trapped. If Polly was the black sheep, she was the sacrificial lamb.

They were only blocks away from picking up Quinn when it happened. Lucy was telling Polly off for lighting a cigarette in the car and Polly was calling her a nerd when Polly’s phone rang from her bag on the backseat. Polly told Lucy she’d put out the cigarette if she got her phone for her. There was a stop sign up ahead and Lucy saw her chance. She unbuckled to reach back and get the phone.

She heard Polly mumble something about the drugs kicking in and felt the car accelerate. A car horn, an explosion of glass and metal. She felt her body fly forward.

The world disappeared.

They didn’t know it, but Lucy could hear them while she was in the coma. Just bits and pieces drifting through the soft walls of unconsciousness to float down to her. She heard her mother call her Polly—“We love you, Polly. We’re right here with you, Polly. Please come back to us, Polly.” She heard the nurses talking over her while they gave her a sponge bath and refilled her intravenous—“The other one was called Lucy. She died in the accident, poor thing. This one wasn’t wearing a seat belt so she was thrown clear before the fire. You know the doctors couldn’t figure out who was who for hours?”

Lucy didn’t worry about their mistake. She knew they’d figure it out eventually. She was alive and Polly was dead. She knew this for a fact because Polly came to see her in the coma landscape. They had tea parties like they did when they were little, and played hide-and-seek, and lay in meadows full of flowers, talking. It’s where they said goodbye.

When they finally brought Lucy out of the coma, she couldn’t talk. They called it post-traumatic mutism, not uncommon for people suffering from a severe head injury. They said she would recover her speech in time, along with the use of her arms and legs, but not until the swelling in her brain was completely gone. That’s why when Lucy’s mom rushed into the room calling her Polly, she couldn’t correct her. It’s why when her mom and dad gathered at her hospital bed to break the news to her that Lucy had died in the accident, she couldn’t tell them that they were wrong. She shook her head, despite the pain of it, but they thought it was her reaction to hearing the news, her denial that she had lost her sister.

At first Lucy felt like she was trapped in a waking nightmare. Her own mother didn’t recognize her? How could that be? What was the point of being the good one, the responsible one, the overachieving one, if no one knew? If it didn’t make her stand out when it counted? Then it dawned on her: If Lucy died, so did all their expectations of her. As Polly, she would be free.

They were all mourning her anyway, all learning to live without her. Wouldn’t it be creating a whole new tragedy for them to find out that it was Polly who had died? Then they’d suffer another loss. That’s how she rationalized it. They all got something out of her pretending to be her dead sister.

It was easier than she’d thought. At first, they blamed any odd behavior on the brain injury, but in no time she was answering to the name Polly. She adopted her mannerisms to a tee, even her attitude, and when she started speaking again, a few weeks after waking from the coma, she started talking like Polly too. It was like being Polly was already in her DNA, transferrable upon request. Like flipping a coin.

The guilt was awful though, when she heard her brother crying in her old room, or her mother calling her name through her sobs, when she saw her dad pounding back bourbon staring at a photo of her on his phone. It was hard not to step in and tell them that she was right there. Flip the coin back and show them it was Polly they should be mourning. The lying wasn’t easy either, but part of her felt like they deserved it, for not being able to tell the difference in the first place. How could they so easily dismiss what had always distinguished her from Polly? She was the good one. Well, not anymore. She was an imposter the whole family accepted and there was no going back.

That was fine with Lucy. Polly’s skin was much easier to wear. She could swear, disagree, act out, do whatever she felt like, and nobody stopped her; nobody told her they were disappointed in her, that they expected more, that she could do better. She was allowed to be—for the first time ever. All she had to do was pretend to be her dead sister for the rest of her life.

Alice

Alice sits in her parked car, staring at her house. There are lights on inside, making it glow warmly in the fading afternoon light of the gray and rainy November day. There’s nothing sinister about it in appearance; it looks inviting, it is her home, and she’s the one who chose it—but now she’s afraid to walk through the front door. Afraid that Polly is still lying half-asleep in her bed because of something that happened the night of the séance. That she’ll see that strange black shadow that keeps eclipsing Geoff’s eyes. That her mother will show up to dinner with dirt in her teeth. That the minute her head hits the pillow she’ll have dreams about finding her husband’s penis in a field of ferns. Or that she’ll discover she’s the crazy perimenopausal woman who everyone keeps hinting she is when the next hot flash comes.

Fuck that.

Alice unclicks her seat belt and gets out of the car. On her way to the front door, she makes a plan. She’ll check on Polly and if there’s been no improvement then she’ll call the therapist and get her in for the earliest appointment. Then she’ll make an optometrist appointment for Geoff and get his eyes checked out, and then she’ll book her mother in with her doctor for a full physical and psych evaluation. Lastly, she’ll see her own doctor about the myriad things she’s experiencing. It’s time to get some professional opinions, time to tackle these things with real, logical methods.

Stepping through the front door, she feels energized by her new resolve and heads right to Polly’s room, not even bothering to take her coat off. “Sweetie?” she says, pushing on the partially open door. She’s surprised to find the bed empty, and Polly’s pajamas discarded on the floor. She turns to go and almost collides with Quinn, who suddenly appears in the hallway.

“Polly went into the woods,” he says without preamble. “Dad said she left almost two hours ago. Right before I got home from school.” He’s vibrating with nervous energy, and he’s wearing what Alice refers to as his old-man face, furrowed and dark with worry.