I reach down to collect the glass in my hand.
I see movement peripherally. My head spins in the direction of it.
Shaking, I drop to my knees and look under the bed. The cat is there now, hiding under the bed with its back arched and its tail tucked between its legs, looking scared.
“Did you do that?” I ask, of the broken bottle and the spilled perfume. The cat doesn’t answer back. Maybe it did. And maybe it didn’t.
I get back up on my feet. Still shaking, I hobble down the stairs with the largest shards of glass in my hand, what I was able to collect. “What happened, Nina? What is it?” my mother asks, cleaning up the picture frame glass in the foyer.
“Nothing. Just the cat.”
Cautiously, I search the rest of the house while my mother looks on. I turn on all the lights. I find nothing and no one.
Later, as I sit on the edge of the bathtub, my mother helping me to pick glass out of the soles of my feet, I think how the cat might have knocked the perfume off the dresser either intentionally or by mistake. She does that. She has a tendency to knock things over to get attention or food, or to get a rise out of me.
But the cat didn’t leave that dirty shoe print by the door.
CHRISTIAN
Lily likes to feed the birds outside our house. She has two feeders in the backyard, which she hangs from hooks close to the trees and fills with seeds. She loves to stand at the back window and watch them. Even in the dead of winter, when the birds should have flown somewhere south, where it’s warm, I wake up to the sound of birdsong. The birds come in droves, and because of it, despite Lily’s best efforts, she can’t always keep up with feeding them. Eventually the feeders go dry and the birds disappear, and then the backyard becomes quiet and still. Days pass without seeing a bird so that you’d think they were long gone.
Lily goes to the store. She gets more seed. She trudges outside, sometimes in the cold, sometimes through a foot of snow, to fill the feeders.
No sooner does she come back inside than the birds reappear, emerging from the deepest parts of the trees.
We couldn’t see them. We were sure they were gone, that they’d moved on to someone else’s feeder. But no. All the while they were there, lurking just out of sight, watching Lily, waiting on their next meal.
It makes me think of Jake. It makes me wonder if there is any possibility no matter how remote that he’s there, hidden in the background somewhere, camouflaged like the birds in the trees.
If that’s the case, the question is why. Why would he do that? Why would he only pretend to be dead?
Late Monday afternoon, I leave work early. The first thing I do is go back to the Hayeses house to return the key. It’s around four o’clock when I get there. I park in the same place I parked the other day and retrace my steps, entering the house through the garage. According to Lily, Nina has taken her mother to an appointment and won’t be home. The house, she said, should be empty and she’s right. It is. I put the key back in its place. I hurry out through the garage door and to my car, and then I make the snap decision to revisit Langley Woods. Once there, I leave my car in the same lot where Lily and I parked, and make my way back to where she and I found blood. It’s not easy to find. The ground is soft and wet from the rain this weekend, though, despite the mud, the weather is much nicer today. The sun is finally out and it’s warm. Presumably everyone who was cooped up inside this weekend is here, because the place is more crowded than I’ve ever seen it.
Even having been here before, having found the spot once already where Jake and Lily fought, I don’t find it on the first try. It takes three. Three wrong turns onto the wrong unmarked paths until eventually I come to the right clearing in the trees. I’ve brought a small screwdriver with me, which I found in my car, in a car tool kit. I use it to engrave lines on the trees, to blaze a trail so that I’ll be able to find my way out when it’s time to leave. I don’t want to get lost. Lily doesn’t know where I am. No one does. I walk further into the trees, remembering how Jake isn’t the only person to ever disappear here. Years ago, a woman named Amanda Holmes also vanished in Langley Woods. She went missing from the area. I remember that she was twenty-two at the time, a senior in college. Her case was strange, the kind that captured national attention. It was all over the news. I followed her story at the time because it was interesting. I didn’t think it would ever matter to me on a more personal level.
When Amanda first went missing, her car was found about a quarter mile from Langley Woods. There was a suicide note set on the dashboard. The search for her should have been cut-and-dried. It was anything but. Search parties looked for her for days that stretched into weeks. They used bloodhounds and then cadaver dogs to scavenge the woods and the residential areas around them. Even the dogs couldn’t find her. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people searched for Amanda, whose friends called her Mandy, by air and by foot. Her family was devastated. This was maybe five years ago. I remember at the time watching her parents cry on TV. I remember that months passed without finding her. Eventually everyone gave up. People stopped talking about Amanda Holmes. They came to believe that she wasn’t at Langley Woods or anywhere even close to it, that something else had happened to her, something far more mysterious and insidious, but no one knew what. There were theories, and unconfirmed reports of Amanda sightings all over the Chicagoland area and around the country. Had someone met her and driven her elsewhere? Was the suicide note just part of a cunning plan? Had she abandoned her life, her family, and was she living a new life somewhere else? But why? No one knew.
The case went cold. A year passed and still she wasn’t found, until one day when some hikers stumbled upon her body in the woods.
The medical examiner determined the cause of death: suicide. Amanda Holmes took her own life. She hung herself from a tree. She had been in these woods the whole time everyone was looking for her, and still no one could find her.
I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly. Jake, his blood, his wallet, his phone, a shoe. After an hour of searching, walking aimlessly through trees, marking the trees with each turn, I find none of it, and I wonder if I can’t find them because I’m not looking hard enough or in the right places, or if I can’t find them because they’re not here. Because Jake isn’t here.
Dusk starts to fall upon the earth. The sun sinks low and the world turns to gold. I look at my watch; it’s later than I thought. I need to leave before it’s so dark I can’t find my way back and before Lily starts to wonder where I am.
I turn around, looking at my inscriptions in the trees, following them blindly out of the woods. I don’t notice anything else at first because I’m only looking at my own markings, letting them lead me.
But then I see that there are also dashes etched into some of the trees, with something like paint or chalk. It’s white and fading. The dashes are much more elusive than my own etchings, making them hard to see and impossible to follow because some have already been washed away by rain.
I look around and realize what it is I’m seeing. Not so long ago someone else blazed a similar trail so they, too, could find their way out of these woods.
I make my way out of the trees for the path, following the crushed limestone trail back toward my car as the sky starts to get darker. It’s late September now. October is only a week away. The sun sets around six thirty, so that now, just shortly before, it’s what’s referred to as the golden hour, where the sky has a signature soft golden glow. I’ll be home later than usual tonight and I’ll have to give Lily some reason why, though I wonder if I’ll tell her that I was here. It’s probably better that she doesn’t know.