SORROW WOODS, page 10
“Hello, Kaiden.”
I look up and almost drop the cake when my eyes fall onto the face of Angela Scott. She
smiles politely and slips into the seat opposite me. Of all the people I had to see, why did it have to be her?
“Hello, Mrs. Scott.”
She places a cup of tea in front of her and waves her hand at me. “Call me Angela. I
shouldn’t have to keep telling you this, Kaiden.”
I nod. Why do I feel so guilty all of a sudden?
“It’s a nice day,” I offer. I could shoot myself. Am I really talking about the weather with her?
The woman I’ve known all my life? The woman I’ve spent fifteen years talking to whilst having to
stare into her sad, gloomy eyes.
She smiles and nods. I notice the dark circles under her eyes. In all the years I’ve known her,
I’ve never once heard her complain of the effect everything has had on her. It couldn’t have been easy.
“Yes, it’s a lovely day. How come you’re not at school?” she asks.
I shrug.
“Is your shoulder better? Your Mom told me what happened.”
I nod. “Yeah, it’s better thanks.” I offer her my plate. “Do you want some cake?”
She shakes her head. “No, thank you. I’d like to know that you’re alright though.”
I pull the plate back to me and tear a small piece off the cake and huff. “I’m not at school
because I need to think. School will distract me.” Honesty again. It’s beginning to become a bit of a habit, I think, as I shove the cake into my mouth.
Her eyes connect with mine. I hold her gaze for a few seconds before I look away.
“What do you need to think about so badly that you can’t go to school, Kaiden? Is everything
alright?”
I nod, but don’t look at her. “It’ll be fine. I’m sure of it.”
“You’re being very cryptic. I’m starting to worry about you,” she says.
I shake my head. I can’t have her being intrigued. Not now. “Honestly, Mrs. Scott. I’m fine.
Just boy stuff.” I look up at her and give her a weak smile.
She wrinkles her face up. “Ah, in that case I’ll leave you to it, unless it’s a problem about a
girl. I used to be ones of those, you know. I might be able to help you.”
I laugh. I actually open my mouth and laugh out loud. Angela Scott grins at me and tucks a
piece of her short, fine blonde hair behind her ear. For the first time in months, her green eyes are sparkling.
“There is a girl but it’s not what you think.”
She raises her eyes. “Oh really?”
I nod. “It’s complicated.”
Now she frowns. “Is she pregnant, Kaiden?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“Good,” she says, “having children causes so much worry.” She sighs heavily and looks at me
with that look that I’ve seen many times before.
I freeze. I need to say something. Anything.
“How’s the campaign going?” Shit. I should have said anything but that.
She shrugs. “It’s the same as it always is. We run the campaign, we get a few calls, we spend
all the money on chasing those calls, but it turns out to be nothing.”
She turns her head and looks out of the window. “I probably would have given up by now,”
she says, tapping her chest, “but I can feel that she’s still alive.” She taps her chest again. “In here.”
I nod, even though I don’t know how she feels. “I guess it’s hard.”
“It gets worse. I thought it would get better with time, but each time those photographs
come out, it gets harder. The wound in my heart opens up just that little bit more. I imagine all the things she’d be into now. At nearly seventeen, I imagine she’d be a nightmare like every other
hormonal teenage girl. But the truth is, I’d have her arguing with me every single day over not having her at all.” Something catches in her throat and when I look at her, I see tears filling her eyes. She sniffs and I look away.
After a few seconds, I take a deep breath and look back at her. “Do you think it would be
strange if she just walked back into your life?” I ask, hoping she doesn’t find the question too
strange.
She blinks at me. “I would imagine it would be equally wonderful and terrible at the same
time. I have no idea what sort of life she’s had. All of these horrible thoughts go through my head every single day. It would probably take a lot of adjustment on her part if she’s been living a
completely different life.” She sighs. “Sometimes, I wonder if she even speaks the same language as we do. Can you imagine if she came back to us and we couldn’t even communicate with one
another?”
I shake my head, but don’t look at her. I shouldn’t be talking to her about this.
“I never thanked you,” she says, surprising me.
I look up at her and sip the last of my coffee. “Thanked me for what?”
“For helping us over the years. I know you were only little when she was taken and it was
your parents that originally ploughed all of their efforts and money into helping us with the
campaign, but I know you’ve helped over the last few years. Your Mother told me.”
I swallow, suddenly feeling like there’s a piece of cake stuck in my throat. “You don’t need to
thank me,” I whisper.
I didn’t help at all, so God knows what my Mother has been telling her. The worst part about
all of this is that I’ve resented the Scotts and how much time my parents have spent at their house and how much they have talked about them and their missing daughter. I hated that they seemed to
feel guilty whenever they looked at me. It was as if they felt bad because their child hadn’t been taken.
She takes a deep breath and stands up. “Well, I am. So, thank you.”
She offers me her hand which I shake.
“See you again soon, Kaiden. I hope you manage to think about whatever it is that you
needed to come here and think about.”
I smile. “I think you helped a lot, actually. I’ll speak to you soon.”
She leaves the café. I stare at her and watch as she crosses the road. Decision made.
I hope she’ll be able to forgive me.
Serena
I put my book down and stare at the clock. It’s only ten but it feels much later. Elodie went to bed an hour ago and I’m thinking about blowing the candle out and joining her when there’s a knock at the door. My immediate thought is that it is my Mother. She was due back three days ago but never
came. I wasn’t worried at first because she’s been a day or two late before, but today was Elodie’s birthday. How could she have missed it? Why isn’t she home? I don’t care what supplies she thinks we need, she should never have missed Elodie’s birthday. That’s something that I don’t think I’ll be able to forgive her for.
I stand up and realise that it can’t be my Mother because she wouldn’t knock on her own
door. As I walk towards the door, I remember the knock that came last week when Kaiden decided
to visit and feel my heart flutter in my chest.
“Who is it?” I call.
“It’s me, Kaiden.”
I sigh with relief and smile at the same time. I rush over to the door and swing it wide open. I
want to jump into his arms and hug him. I’m so happy he’s come back to see us again, but when I see his sad face and eyes, I stop in my tracks.
“What’s the matter?” I ask, looking him up and down. He’s wearing his coat and scarf again.
“I’m not here for a visit this time, Serena.”
He sounds sad. He sighs and leans against the door frame.
I feel myself frowning at him. He looks as if he doesn’t want to be here. He hasn’t even looked
at me properly yet. “What are you here for then?”
“Can I come in please?” he asks, sounding impatient.
I take a tentative step back. This feels wrong. This isn’t how I imagined it would be if I saw
him again. He walks past me but doesn’t look at me. The last time he was here, he never stopped
looking at me.
Once inside the living room he stands in front of the fire and shoves his hand into his pocket.
“I’ve come to show you this,” he says, shoving a shiny piece of paper into my hand, “and to explain.”
I take it from him and stare at the picture of the girl in front of me. She looks familiar. “Who is she?”
He takes a deep breath and pinches the skin in between his eyes. “That is a digital picture
called an age progression photograph.”
I look at the girl with straight blonde hair and sparkling green eyes. “A what?”
“It’s a picture,” he says.
I nod. “I can see that. Who is she?”
“She’s a girl that went missing when she was two years old. This is a picture of what she
looks like now,” he explains, looking at me cautiously.
How does a child go missing? Why has he come here to show me this? “She doesn’t look two
in this picture though. She looks about my age. Does that mean she came back?”
He shakes his head. “No, Serena. The parents of the missing girl gave the police a
photograph that was taken of her when she was two years old.”
“So she’s still missing?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“How can she still be missing if you have a photograph of her looking older?” I shake my
head, trying to figure out how to ask all of the questions that are swirling around in my head. “How does someone go missing?”
He takes a deep breath. “She was taken by someone.”
I look at the girl again and feel myself frowning.
“After she went missing,” he continues, “the police issued these age progression
photographs on every anniversary of her disappearance. They show what experts think she would
look like as each year went by, so that people could keep an eye out for her.”
“I really don’t understand.” I huff and look at the two pictures again.
“I didn’t realise this would be so difficult,” he says. “I forgot that you don’t know anything.”
“I know stuff,” I say quickly, feeling hurt.
“I’m sorry, Serena. I’ll start again.” He paces up and down the living room, making me feel
nervous. “Scientists can guess what people will look like when they’re older by using photographs that were taken of them when they were young. They can guess how their faces would change, how
their bones would grow, and things like that. People’s eyes never change and in children, the colour of the hair would not be different, unless it was dyed.”
A sick feeling starts to swarm in the pit of my stomach. I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.
“So why have you come all the way out here to show me a photograph of this girl?”
He looks at my face and then down at the photo that I’m holding in my hand. “That girl was
taken from her garden when she was two. Here,” he says, handing me another picture of a very
young girl wearing a pink, flowing dress and a white sun hat. She’s wearing strappy sandals that
wrap around her chubby feet.
I stare at the little girl’s smiling face and feel a lump in my throat. “What’s her name?”
He holds my gaze for a long time, but he doesn’t answer my question. He just shakes his
head. I hold the two pictures side-by-side and compare them. She has the same eyes and same
coloured hair. It isn’t hard to believe that this was the same girl, just older.
“You keep saying she was taken or that she was stolen. Why would someone take a child that
isn’t theirs? Maybe she just wandered off and got lost or something?”
He sighs. “She was stolen. Someone climbed over the fence and shrubs in the garden and
took her away from her real parents. There are evil, messed-up people in the world, Serena, and
sometimes they do things that people don’t understand. Even if you wouldn’t dream of doing it
yourself, they would. People are capable of horrible things.”
“You tried to take me,” I remind him.
He snaps his head up and opens his mouth as if he wants to say something, but he just looks
at me with his sad eyes.
I shrug. We’ve already had this conversation, so I guess we don’t need to have it again. I look
back down at my hands. Of course there are evil people in the world. I know this. I read the
newspapers that my Mother brings back, but I’ve never read a book or a newspaper where someone
has stolen a child. I think about how my Mother would have felt if she had come back to find me
gone.
“Her real parents must have been terrified,” I whisper. I feel sorry for the girl that was taken
and her parents.
He clears his throat. “They were.”
“So they’ve never found her?” I ask, trying to figure out what all of this is about.
“No, but her parents have never stopped looking for her.” He nods towards the
photographs. “This is what they think she would look like now. They released this last May. It would have been her sixteenth birthday.”
“It’s very sad,” I say, handing them back to him, “but I don’t understand what it has to do
with me.”
“I’m sorry, Serena, but I’m not really sorry at all, if I’m honest,” he says, confusing me even
more.
Why does he talk in riddles all the time? “That doesn’t even make sense. Why are you sorry
but not sorry? What do you have to be sorry about?” I ask.
“I’m sorry because what I’m going to do will change your life.”
“Change my life?” I take a step towards him. Where is the Kaiden that spent nearly three
days here with us? “How will you do that?”
“You’ll see,” he says, “and you’ll hate me for it.”
I frown at him. “Why would I hate you?”
“If you don’t hate me for that, you’ll hate me for something else. Everyone does,” he says
unhappily.
Why is he so sad? What is going on inside his head? He isn’t like us. We just say what we’re
thinking and we say it simply. I wish he would talk to me like that. It’s hard not knowing what he’s thinking or why he seems sad. He seems vulnerable like Elodie in some ways, but in others, he seems so strong and confident. He’s unbreakable in a way that I’ve only read about. I was jealous of it before, but now I’m not so sure. What’s going on with him? What’s happened out there to make him
be this way with me?
“I am not doing this for me,” he sighs, “I’m doing it for you. I need you to remember that.”
“What is it that you’re doing then?” I ask, feeling a little panicked.
“Are you happy here?” he asks, ignoring my last question.
I’ve never questioned if I was happy here or not before, not until Kaiden showed up and
asked me that exact same question. This is what Kaiden does to me. He makes me question things
that I’ve never even considered before.
“I’m not unhappy,” I say, giving him the same answer that I gave him before because it’s the
truth. Why doesn’t he understand that everything I say is the truth? Why is he asking me this
question again?
He blinks at me. “But?”
I shrug and look away from him. “But I guess I wanna know more about the world that I live
in. You’ve seen things that I have only read about. I wanna see those things one day, but I’m not sure I’ll ever get the chance.”
“Do you know where your Mother is?” he asks.
I freeze. I don’t want him thinking bad things about my Mother, and the way he talks about
her makes me think he already doesn’t like her. I don’t know why when he doesn’t even know her.
“She’s in the city getting supplies.”
“Why do you need supplies?” he presses.
“To run the house. To eat and drink.”
He blinks. “Why do you live here? Why don’t you live in the city and go to school like normal
children?”
“We are normal children,” I say. “Don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry,” he sighs, closing his eyes for a moment. “Every child in the world needs to go to
school. We have laws that say that. Your Mother is breaking those laws by not sending you to
