ROB AND I SIT IN the parking lot of The Washingtonian, staring at the front doors like the answer of what to do next might be written on them.
“I can’t count all the ways that this is a bad idea,” Rob says, running his hand up and down the seat belt absently. The flashing Bud Light sign reflects off the surface of his eyes.
“I could have come alone,” I say. “I’m sure you have to get this car back to your friend. He’s probably missing it. Plus, don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’ve managed to avoid explaining how you snuck out of soccer clinic without being noticed.”
He looks down, a tiny smile fighting its way to his lips.
“She doesn’t need the car back for a couple of days.”
“Ah. I see. She,” I say, arching an eyebrow at him. “And I suppose she is also the one covering for you while you play hooky from your very expensive summer camp?”
“Okay, one? She is Gwen Brzinski, and she’s really funny and smart and beyond gorgeous, and she’s a better forward than me. Two? When you say summer camp, you make me sound like I’m nine. Three? I’ll give you a ride to school every day this year if you promise to let me be the one to tell my mom about her if I ever get anywhere with her.”
I’m getting that feeling again: the urge to take him by the shoulders.
“You would have given me a ride to school regardless,” I say.
His eyes plead.
“Okay! Yes. Besides, I’m not really sure how I would have told her about your maybe-girlfriend without somehow involving the story of you actually being here. Which, according to me, you never were,” I say before he can beg me not to tell April that part, either.
“And not Dad either,” he adds, which only gets a grunt from me in return.
“What?” he asks.
“Oh, come on, Rob. When am I going to confide that little secret? During one of our daily chats?”
Rob isn’t as good at ignoring sarcasm as April. “Well, when’s the last time you tried talking to him?”
“Don’t you start on me too. April’s tried,” I say, though I try to think back to her nagging me about my relationship with my dad, and I can’t think of a specific instance. Maybe it’s just the way she cocks her head at me whenever I blow off a message my dad has sent through her.
Because he can’t say anything to me directly.
“Sorry,” Rob says, and for a second I forget what he’s sorry about. “It’s just . . . why would a guy who doesn’t care about his daughter carry that stupid penny around in his wallet?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, because I’d rather not be having this conversation at all right now. Since when is my relationship with my dad on the table for discussion?
“The one he keeps in the picture part instead of a picture. He said he got sick of never getting school pictures from your mom, so he put the penny in there instead.
A penny. For Penny.
I stare at Rob for a full minute, and he starts to look supremely uncomfortable. But I am searching for the lie I know he’s incapable of telling me, even if he suspected there was a chance it could make me feel . . . it’s a thought I can’t possibly finish. I have no idea how I feel right now. But there’s that sensation in my throat again. The one I can’t swallow away.
“I keep telling him nobody actually prints pictures anymore,” Rob finally says, trying to cap the conversation he looks like he’s regretting starting.
We sit for another strained minute, searching for a life raft in all that silence we’re swimming through.
Finally, I can’t take it anymore. “So can we go inside now, or what?”
I’m totally faking confidence, of course. I have not a single clue what I might say to this poor woman once I get in there, assuming she’s there at all. I only now start to think of all the ways this could go horribly wrong, the smallest consequence being that I force a mother to rehash what was likely the worst event in her life, the thing that keeps her coming back to this weather-worn building with tiny windows that blink beer advertisements. I think about the last expression on George’s face as he stood in line and waited for Roberta to change the topic no one meant to bring up.
I remember Ripp’s warning to me, the wish he made that I would not disturb the soil of a long buried past with Miller. The wish that I have already made sure wouldn’t come true.
“Tell me again what that guy said in the library,” Rob says, but I know he’s just stalling.
I told Rob most of it, but not everything. I left out the story the little girl’s father told.
And I haven’t told Rob about any of what I’ve seen. I can’t seem to find the right time to say something like that.
What’s strange, though, is that Rob didn’t seem too surprised when I told him that one of the parents still hangs out here, and that I wanted to talk to her.
“Rob? Why did you bring up those kids when we were in the woods?”
I expect him to take a little longer to follow my thought, but he seems to arrive at it almost before I do. He looks down at his lap.
“Rob?”
He looks up at me, the blinking beer sign now lighting the side of his face. “I saw the articles online when I was looking up how to get here,” he says. “It was weird and all, but I didn’t really think much of it. And you know, Mom knew some of it, but she just thought it would add to the intrigue or whatever. And the house is kinda . . .”
Now it’s taking me a second to catch up with him. But just a second. I suddenly remember the look on his face when I pulled up to meet him in front of the Carver House. How he was looking at it. Couldn’t stop looking at it, actually.
“What did you see in the house?” I ask, cringing against the answer I’m already expecting.
He shakes his head. “Nothing.”
I keep looking at him. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Rob lie, and now I know why he never does. He’s terrible at it.
“You saw one of them, didn’t you?”
“Nah,” he says, and the red light on his face looks even darker. His own color has drained entirely.
“Someone was just in the house,” he continues, denial looking ridiculous on him. “A repairman or something. Mom said she was trying to get a plumber out—”
“No repairmen will come to the house,” I say, and now we’re both quiet.
“I didn’t see anything,” Rob says again, as though maybe the lie will sound more convincing the second time. “But maybe you guys should just come home.”
“Are you kidding? Do you have any clue how invested your mom is in this? I mean, it’s not just the money. She’s obsessed.”
“So she’ll be disappointed,” Rob says, his conviction disproportionately strong for someone who just saw a repairman. “But I mean, if the whole point was to help you recover by bringing you out here, and she can’t get anyone to work on the house anyway, then what’s the point?”
“What am I supposed to do? Tell your mom to drop everything because I’m seeing things? ‘Hey, April, remember those hundreds of thousands of dollars you sunk into this dream of yours? I’ve got a cool idea. Let’s ditch it and get the hell out of here! See, I’m kind of afraid of the dark, and—’”
“Who cares what she thinks?” he says, but his voice cracks under the weight of doubt.
“Rob, I have no place else to go!”
And here’s where we finally understand each other. He knows as well as I do that there’s nobody left to pass me off to. If I can’t make it work here, with April, who else will take me?
“What if they’re trying to tell me something?” I ask. I’ve been so wrapped up in denying they were there at all—that Rae was the only one haunting me—I hadn’t wanted to consider this possibility. But what if these kids who disappeared for six solid months are screaming to be heard, to be understood?
To be needed.
The little girl. Those boys behind the curtains. The articles referenced two brothers, a girl, and . . .
“Jack,” I whisper, too quietly for Rob to hear.
And Margie is my last hope to find out what it is they might want.
“There’s nobody trying to tell you anything because there’s nobody there,” Rob says, his tone flat. But I can’t see his face. I just see the back of his head as he stares at the front doors of The Washingtonian again, and he must be thinking the same thing I am: Going in there feels like a worse idea now than it did before.
And now I’ve given him my sanity to worry about, too.
According to the bartender, the woman named Margie is the one sitting on a stool at the far side of the bar. In profile, she looks like a reversed C, her back and head curving toward a nearly full martini glass. Rob and I look back at the bartender, who warily eyes us from his post behind the counter. He’s been toweling off the same glass since we walked in. Rob engages him again, as though he’s done this a million times—talking to bartenders in shadowy dives.
“We’re just here to talk,” he says, then turns toward Margie, whose head looks a little closer to her drink than it was a few seconds ago.
“This isn’t exactly a ‘talking’ kind of establishment,” the bartender says, still working his glass over with a towel. Then he sees me staring at Margie. “But you’re welcome to try. She’s about three deep already.”
I lead the way toward Margie. From farther away, she looks like she might be sleeping sitting up. Upon closer examination, her eyelids are drooping but open, focused on nothing in particular.
“Well, you found me,” she says, slurred and slightly amused.
Rob and I look at each other.
“Hoping we wouldn’t?” Rob asks, playing along.
“Yes,” Margie replies without hesitation.
I look at Rob again, but he just frowns and continues to study the woman in front of us. I don’t know if he’s seeing what I see: black jeans faded to greenish, black shirt faded to brownish, boots creased as deeply as the skin around her lips. Her hair might have been black at one point too. But so many gray corkscrews of frizz halo her head above the loose elastic pulling the rest of her hair back, who could ever say how she might have looked ten, twenty years ago?
“Let’s have a seat in my office.” Margie’s voice crackles, and she coughs to clear whatever lingers in her throat. She slides from the stool and lands with a surprisingly sure foot on the sticky floor, knocking back the martini with a single swallow and raising the glass in the direction of the bartender before returning it to the bar top and guiding us, a little slowly, to a shadowed booth at the back of the tavern.
“Ask what you want,” she says, her eyes on the table first, then on Rob, then for a long time on me. She squints at my forehead, my eyes, my mouth. She looks like she’s trying to mentally reassemble my features.
“I’m sorry, but who is it you think we are?” I ask, uncomfortable with the amount of time this unsolicited charade has already gone on.
“When a snake eats a, oh, I don’t know, a gopher,” she says after a long pause, “did you know it can go for months without eating after that? Months.”
Rob said he couldn’t count the ways this was a bad idea, but I’m thinking I can. I’ve already counted one.
“You people,” she continues, “haven’t been fed a good story in years! Guess you had a nice fat rodent to feast on last time,” she says.
I duck my head toward Rob. “She thinks we’re reporters.”
“We aren’t—” he starts.
“Do you really think it matters?” she asks, and I’ve just counted the second reason this was a terrible mistake.
“If I’m talking, I’m talking, so just ask me what you want to ask me, and let’s get this little chat over with.”
“The Carver House,” I say. I consider saying more, but wait for Margie to fill in the blanks first.
She does not. Instead, she stares at my face even harder, her head looking heavy on her neck.
“It’s near where . . . where . . . ,” Rob tries now.
“I know where it’s near,” she interrupts his efforts. Reason three.
Margie continues to stare at me. I find a groove in the wooden table and run my finger along the crevice, dropping my eyes to get a closer look. The bartender appears beside us with another martini for Margie. He plunks two beer steins in front of Rob and me, filled three quarters of the way with cloudy tap water.
“Thanks,” I say, but he’s already gone.
“Joe’s the thoughtful type,” Margie says into her glass before taking her next sip and lifting her cocktail in salute to Joe the bartender. She laughs a little at a joke in her head.
“So ask what you really want to ask,” Margie says. “Or we can drag this out for another ten years.”
Margie’s words are crisp and clear now, the kind of sudden sobriety that occurs when emotion regains control. Her hand shakes a little on the table, and I have this sudden urge to put my hand over hers, an urge I fight because I know that’s not what she’s looking for.
“How did you find them?” I delve in. What else can I do? We came to ask her a question, and she’s just demanded we do that.
Margie shifts her suddenly clear gaze to me. “It was a miracle.”
She smiles the worst smile I’ve ever seen. It’s like facial scar tissue, like an old wound never healed right, and her features have had to maneuver around the wreckage for years but never quite learned how to avoid the worst of the damage.
“I keep hearing that. It’s just . . . it feels like maybe there’s . . .”
“Just ask, goddammit!” Margie slaps her hand on the table.
Our respective drinks tremble under the force. I gasp before I can stop myself. Rob grabs my free hand under the table, and I hear Joe the bartender clear his throat from across the tavern. But Margie holds me with her eyes. It’s like Rob isn’t even there. She’s dismissed him. It’s me she’s having this conversation with.
“How did you get them back?” I ask, my voice clear and steady, even though I’m having a hard time catching my breath.
“There it is,” Margie says. Her voice burbles from someplace deep inside her.
“So then they didn’t just come back?” Rob asks, but we all know that he doesn’t need to. He does out of obligation, a final wish for the convenient truth.
“Why’d you ask me about that house?” she asks, thrusting the interrogation back at me.
“I’m living there for the summer,” I say. “While my . . . I’m living there,” I say. It occurs to me this has become a sort of quid-pro-quo questioning.
Margie’s face darkens under the shadow of her tilted martini glass.
“And why on earth would you be doing that?” she asks.
“What happened there?” I say. It’s her turn to answer.
But she only smiles. “I haven’t the slightest clue what happened in that place,” she says, and for some reason, I believe her. It’s something in her mangled smile. Like this is one truth she can bear, but she can’t feel any pleasure in it.
“So then what happened in the North Woods?” I ask, trying again even though it’s not my turn.
“What’s the point in asking pointless questions?” she snaps, snatching an olive from its toothpick and grinding it between her teeth to a vodka-soaked pulp.
“I don’t think they’re pointless,” I say, pressing my luck. Rob must think I am too, because he’s squeezing my hand under the table a little harder now. “Actually, I don’t think you’d be acting like this if you didn’t know I was asking for a reason.”
Margie stares at her drink for so long, I’m certain we’ve lost her for good. The alcohol has taken hold, and we have officially gotten all we’re going to get from Margie.
“My grandma used to talk to us about those woods,” she says, startling me. “She used to say, ‘Marjorie, those woods are older than time itself. They’ve been around longer than any other living thing.’”
Margie continues to stare at her drink, her brow furrowing under the strain. “Something that’s been around that long, it has a long time to get lonely. Too long of a wait for something to keep it company. Nobody should’ve been living there back then, and no one should be doing it now.”
I chance a look at Rob, but he’s staring somewhere past Margie now, someplace into the dark of the shadowy pub. I look back at Margie.
“From the time I was little, I knew about those woods. We all did.”
I have to lean in because Margie’s practically whispering now.
“They knew not to go in there, but kids are so damned smart. Always know better than their parents.”
“How did you get them back?” My own voice is barely above a whisper, but it’s not because I’m trying to match Margie’s tone. I couldn’t make more sound even if I wanted to.
“We gave the woods what it wanted,” she says, her own words sounding like a surprise to her. “Company.”
Rob and I look at each other now, his eyes searching mine for what we apparently both missed. He opens his mouth, but I squeeze his hand. I don’t think Margie’s done.
Her lips fall open, and the next sentence tumbles like a prisoner suddenly unchained and wild. “We brought the ones no one would miss.”
Rob’s hand goes limp in mine. Or maybe I can’t feel my fingers.
I pull Margie’s sentence over the coals of my mind, see if it’ll catch fire. I wait for it to ignite a revelation other than the only one I can form in this moment. Because what she’s saying can’t possibly be true. Because no one—no person, no monster, no one—could have done what it sounds like Margie is saying.
“You . . . brought . . . you brought other kids . . . ?” My mind is still on fire.
“They were a . . . miracle,” Margie says, her mouth moving over the debris of ten years. “The old story was right.”
I’m shivering, but I don’t feel cold. I’m having a hard time feeling anything, and I think back to the last time I felt this way. It involved a bonfire and a desert. It involved a furious Rae, a notepad that looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. A pad I knew was mine, but my mind couldn’t own it at that time. My mind couldn’t own a single feeling outside the one that shrouded the rest of me in the numbing warmth of total and complete denial. It couldn’t have been me who wrote those awful things about my best friend. It couldn’t have been me.
“That’s how you got them back,” Rob says more to himself than to Margie.
“No,” she says, drawing the word out so it sounds like “Nooooeee.” She takes a long sip.
“You didn’t get your—”
“I got the boys back,” Margie answers him, her eyes on the table again. “Not my sons, though. Not my boys.”
“It must have been so hard,” Rae said. “Pretending this whole time to be my friend. It must have just killed you to put on another face every day around me.”
“Looked like them,” Margie says, her voice barely audible. “Smelled like them. They have a smell, you know. Kids do. Each one their own. Blake smelled like wheat. No matter what you fed him, that’s what he smelled like. Russ was more like . . . vanilla and sand. Eyes like sea glass.”
I watch Margie so closely I’m afraid of what I might see. This hard woman, so weathered she looks like she’s lived fifty lives already, weaving a delicate poetry about the boys she wanted back so badly she was willing to sacrifice someone else’s child.
“I got my boys back, but not really. It wasn’t them.”
“What happened to them?” I ask. I know I shouldn’t. I should stop where Margie stopped it. This is her living nightmare, not mine. Except I know that’s not entirely true.
“Don’t know,” Margie says, resuming her conversation with her drink.
“You mean—”
“I mean I haven’t seen either of ’em in six years,” Margie says, lowering her glass long enough to make me read her lips.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “You mean to tell me you went through all that . . . did all that, just to lose track of them? Just to say you don’t know?”
I should have stopped long ago. Rob is already trying to push me out of the booth. But I’m in far too deep, and I can’t possibly leave without hearing her say it.
“Don’t you dare preach your gospel to me, little girl,” Margie says, her words dousing the burning coals in my brain. “Don’t you dare until you have something so precious, the ache of losing it is enough to pull you to pieces. Don’t you dare. Nobody was going to miss some abandoned child wasting away at Our Lady of Grace. Not the way I did my boys. If you’d been swallowed whole by that kind of grief, don’t you tell me for a minute you wouldn’t slit the belly of it open to get free!”
I see Rob nodding to someone as he finally pulls me off the bench of the booth and onto my feet. It takes me a full moment to understand that he’s apologizing to Joe the bartender for upsetting his patron, the woman named Margie who I finally pull into focus, my vision blurred through the smoke of a bonfire that burned nine months ago.
“We’re leaving,” Rob says as Joe hands Margie a cloth handkerchief from his pocket.
Once we’re outside, the glare of the sun behind its silver clouds is enough to make my eyes throb.
“It can’t be true,” I say to Rob once I’m behind the wheel of April’s jeep and we’re back on the road. The glare from the sky is killing my eyes, and I wish I could look down at my lap like Rob is. At least then I wouldn’t have to face the vision of the North Woods the closer we get to the Carver House.
“There’s no possible way that could be true.”
And I wouldn’t have to contemplate what it means if Margie was telling the truth after all, and the woods really are as lonely as she says.