SORROW WOODS, page 11
school.”
“She can’t afford it,” I say. “She only has enough money to get supplies.”
He rolls his eyes. “School is free.”
No it isn’t. It can’t be. My Mother told me it cost an awful lot of money to go to school. Is he
calling my Mother a liar?
“Where does your Mother get the money from to buy her supplies if she lives here with you
and doesn’t work?” he demands.
I open my mouth, close it again, and shake my head. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you see how none of this makes sense?”
I shrug. “Maybe, but don’t you see that none of this makes sense to me either?” I counter.
“Yes,” he says. “I see everything. I just wish I didn’t.” He rubs his hands over his face. “I’m so sorry, Serena. I hope you can forgive me one day.”
“I might, if you tell me what it is that I’ll need to forgive you for.”
He shakes his head. “I can’t.” He looks like he is in pain. I want to comfort him and to tell him that whatever it is that’s making him sad, it’ll be okay. It’s what I would do with Elodie.
“Look,” I say, “my Mamma should have been back a few days ago. Today was Elodie’s
birthday and she’s missed it. I’m worried about her. If I let you stay tonight, will you help me look for my Mamma tomorrow?”
He sighs, sounding relieved. “Sure. Why not?” He lies down on the floor in exactly the same
spot that he slept last time. I take a deep breath and lie down next to him. He sighs and pulls me into his chest. I rest my head against him, feeling his heavy breathing and listening to the sound of his heart that thrums underneath my ear. I crane my neck and see his eyes shut tight. He’s fallen asleep.
I close my eyes and pray that my Mother doesn’t decide to come back in the middle of the night.
Thoughts about my Mother and what she does to get her money swirl around in my head. I
probably wouldn’t have even questioned it if I had never read any of those books that she brings me.
She said books are the fountain of knowledge. I can learn everything from my books. I guess she
didn’t figure that I’d also learn the things she didn’t want me to know from them.
I’m dreaming about the day my Mother brought Elodie to me when the house suddenly
begins to shake from the rumble of car engines. Bright white and blue lights shine through the
windows and light up the room. I push myself away from Kaiden and let the fear that surges through my body carry me towards my sister.
Kaiden
The noise wasn’t what woke me. It was the absence of Serena’s body heat that snapped me awake
and pulled me out of my dream.
I rub at my eyes and lean up on my elbows. I can hear car doors slamming and voices echoing
through the darkness. My eyes finally find Serena and Elodie, who are curled up on a single bed
looking more frightened than I’ve ever seen two people looking before. What have I done?
I rush over to them. “It’s going to be alright,” I say, hoping they know that I’m trying to be
their friend and not their enemy. I’m not the bad guy here. “They’re here to help you.”
“Is it Mamma?” asks Elodie.
“I don’t think so,” says Serena, looking sternly at me. “He’s brought them here.”
She points at me through the darkness. I can see the hatred in her eyes, but I can’t do
anything but nod at her. She’s right. It was me. I gave them the exact coordinates of their shack.
This is it. The life changing moment I was telling her about, except right now it doesn’t feel life changing. It feels like I’m going to destroy them.
They don’t knock or ask if they can come in. They just barge through the door and within
seconds, there are ten of them surrounding the two girls on the bed.
“Are you Kaiden Matthews?”
I turn to the police officer and nod.
“You’ll need to come down the station with us, Sir.”
I nod again. I’ve already written down everything that I know about the two girls on a piece
of paper and have it tucked into my back pocket, right next to the two photographs. I hope to God that I’m right. I’ve never prayed to Him before and probably don’t even really believe. But for some reason I find myself looking up to the stars that flood the sky with twinkling lights as I’m escorted out of their shack and beg for it to be true. I can’t have failed them.
“No! This is my home! You can’t take me from here. My Mamma won’t know where we
are!” Serena screams.
It takes three police women to drag her from the shack. I stand and lean back against the
police car, watching as they wrestle with her. She pushes and shoves them. She’s so strong that I find myself smiling. I’m not smiling at her. I’m smiling at the police women who don’t seem to be handling her very well. She’s like a little wild animal being dragged from the wilderness, her home for the last fifteen years. They keep saying that they’re here to help her and that’s she’s safe now, but she doesn’t listen to them.
“Kaiden!” she screams at me as they drag her over the dusty earth. Bits of sand and dirt flick
up, staining the white silk of her nightie with the orange and deep brown earth. “What have you
done to us?”
I want to look away. The guilt of listening to her scream is making me feel sick, but I know if I look away then I’m admitting that I know I’m wrong. She might think I’m wrong but I’m not. This is the only time in my whole life that I’m certain I’m doing the right thing, and I’m not even doing it for myself. My Father will wet himself when he finds out what I’ve done. The sound of the helicopter
circling above us drowns out my apology to her.
“Serena! Help me!” I finally look away from Serena and when I see the tears streaming down
little Elodie’s face, I feel an ache so deep in my chest that I want to take back what I’ve done. She’s too young to be able to make sense of what’s happening. When they tell Serena why they’ve been
taken, I hope she’ll be able to understand why it is I’ve done what I’ve done. I don’t expect Elodie to understand.
“Elodie! I’m here. It’ll be alright. They’ll get Mamma and then they’ll know it’s all a big
mistake. Whatever it is that they think we’ve done, we know we haven’t done it and Mamma will
know too.”
Serena screams the words over the noise of the helicopter and over her shoulder but
doesn’t get a chance to say anything more. They push her head down and, even though it looks like they’re manhandling her, they actually gently coax her into the back of the waiting police car.
Serena is still fighting as if her life depended on it. They bundle up Elodie, who doesn’t fight at all, into the back of the police car that’s idling noisily behind the one Serena is in. I watch her eyes as they follow Elodie, seeing her safely into the car, and then her green eyes snap onto mine. She
knows I can’t hear her, but she mouths the six words to me that I’ll never forget for the rest of my life.
“I. Wish. We’d. Never. Met. You.”
Before I can open my own mouth to say something back to her, the cars abruptly drive away.
I take a deep breath and look back at the shack that is now being searched by several police officers.
A tall, bald man with soft brown eyes steps up to me and tucks his hands into his bullet-proof vest.
“Mr. Matthews?”
I nod.
“Well Sir, if what you claim is true, you’ll be a hero. You know that, right?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t want to be a hero. I’m not doing it to be a hero.”
He studies my face and nods. “I actually believe you. Not sure why, but I do.”
I roll my eyes. He’s no doubt read through my record. “Thanks.”
“We need to take a statement from you. Can you come down to the station with us?”
I nod. “Where are you taking the girls?”
“They’ll go to the hospital. We need to run blood and DNA tests, and they’ll be examined for
any physical or mental problems,” he explains.
“They’re not mental,” I say, following him into the car. The warmth of the vehicle bathes my
skin in a delicious heat, making me forget what I was about to say. “If that’s them, when will they be able to meet their real parents?”
He climbs into the seat in front of me and turns the heaters up even more. “Well, there are
lots of things to do in the hospital first, but we have notified both sets of potential parents of the girls. It’ll take time. It depends on how the girls handle everything.”
I nod and watch the tiny shack as it disappears from view. It takes us two whole hours to get
onto a paved road. No wonder no one has ever found them before.
Serena
It’s been two days since the police crashed into my life and shattered it into a thousand tiny pieces.
This means it’s been two whole days since I’ve seen Elodie and that kills me more than it being
nearly twenty-six days since I’ve seen my Mother, who apparently isn’t my real Mother. I stand at the window, looking out at all of the buildings and bright lights below me and sigh.
The last few days have been the hardest of my life. They’ve touched me, prodded me,
questioned me, tested me, and have made me feel like I am being accused of committing a terrible
crime. They won’t let me see Elodie; they say she’s too upset. Why don’t they listen to me when I tell them that I can calm her down? I turn around when the door behind me opens.
“Hello, Serena.”
It’s Janet, the woman who has been assigned to make sure I’m not going mad. I keep telling
her that I’m not crazy, I’m just angry. I’m angry every single second of the day. I want to run. I want to swim. I want to do something other than just sit here in this room, worrying about what I’m
supposed to do now.
Sometimes I have nightmares where I’m running through trees being chased by the police.
Sometimes I dream about swimming in the lake with Kaiden. In those dreams, Kaiden doesn’t tell
the police about me. He swims with us every single day and sleeps in our house. In those dreams,
he’s a real friend.
Sometimes I sit up in bed in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat and panting, as a
horrible feeling grows in my throat. Sometimes it feels as if I can’t breathe. Alone and angry, I pace up and down the length of my room. It consumes me. I can think of nothing else.
“Hello, Janet.”
She smiles and quietly shuts the pale wooden door behind her. I walk over to my bed that’s
covered in a blue and green coloured cotton cover and sit on the edge of the soft mattress that sinks underneath me. Janet places some brown files onto the table that’s tucked in the opposite corner of the room and sits down.
“As I explained to you yesterday, I think it’s important for you to see these before you meet
your real parents,” she says.
I open my mouth to speak but she holds her hand up.
“I know you don’t want to see them just yet and that’s fine, but I think knowing what
happened to you will help you to understand why you’re here. I think it’ll help you to understand them.” She pulls some papers out and spreads the sheets over the table. I take a deep breath and walk over to her.
“This picture is the one that was circulated immediately after your disappearance.” She hands
me the picture of the little girl in the pink dress that Kaiden showed me. I nod.
“This is where you were taken from.” The second photograph shows a flowery, colourful
garden with a white blanket spread out on the grass and several toys dotted around the lawn. A
small bike stands in the very back of the garden.
“She used the bike as a step to get over the fence at the back,” she tells me and my eyes move
over to the fence. I don’t remember anything. I thought looking at these sorts of pictures would
trigger a memory of my life before the woods, but there’s nothing.
“What was my name?” I ask.
“Excuse me?”
I hand the pictures back to her. “When they were taking the blood from my arm, I heard
them saying that Serena wasn’t my real name. What was my name before I was Serena?”
She looks up at me with her big grey eyes and gives me a small nod. “Your real name is Ayla
Scott.”
Ayla? I wrinkle my face up. I don’t think I look like an Ayla.
She smiles warmly at me. “Don’t you like it?”
I shrug. “I guess I’ve just always been Serena. When it’s all you’ve known for your whole life,
it’s hard to be told something else and accept it immediately.”
She nods. “You’re a smart girl. But you never went to school, is that right?”
I shake my head. “My mother answered my questions, and everything else I learned from
books. I read all the time.”
“She’s not your Mother, Serena,” she gently reminds me.
I sigh. “I know. It’s just hard to forget.”
She pushes another photograph and a collection of newspaper clippings across the table to
me. “Your real Mother is Angela Scott.”
I ignore the photograph for now, glancing at the newspaper headlines. I see the word
‘abduction’ and take a deep breath.
I was two and a half years old. It was the middle of summer and Angela Scott had decided to
have a picnic outside on a blanket. During lunch, the house telephone had rung. She walked ten
metres from the garden into the dining room to answer the phone, which turned out to be a wrong
number. When Angela Scott returned to the garden, the blanket was strewn across the grass and her daughter was missing.
Me.
I was missing.
I had been taken.
“They did several televised appeals and raised thousands of dollars to fund the search for
you, but you were never found,” Janet tells me.
She pushes the picture farther across the table to me. When I look down, I see a man and a
woman who look like they’ve been crying. They’re seated at a table covered in blue cloth with
several microphones dotted along the edge of it.
“That was taken during the one year anniversary appeal,” she continues.
The woman, Angela Scott, looks a little bit like me but older. She has light blonde hair that’s
cut just above her shoulders and bright green eyes. The man has light brown hair, blue eyes, and
looks tall, though it’s hard to tell because he’s sitting down in the picture. They both look like nice, normal people. Then again, I’m not sure what normal really is. I guess they don’t look mad or crazy, or horrible and mean.
“What’s my Father’s name?” I ask.
“Auden Scott.”
We all have names that begin with the letter ‘A’? I find that a little strange. “Wouldn’t I have
some memories of my real parents?”
“Not necessarily,” she says, “not now anyway. Back then, you probably cried for many weeks
for your real Mother.”
I don’t know what to say. How could the woman who told me she was my Mother do this to
them? How could she do it to me?
“Do you understand everything that I’ve told you?” she asks as if I’m stupid, even though
she’s said that I’m smart.
I nod. “Of course I understand what you’re telling me, but asking me to believe you is the
same as asking me to admit that my whole life has been a lie. I’m not sure I’m ready to say that yet.”
She squeezes my hand. “What are you ready to say?”
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
I don’t want to talk to her and tell her about my life in the woods. I don’t want to share my
memories of Elodie with her, or any of them. “What about my sister?”
She clears her throat. “She’s not your real sister.”
“I know that, but no matter what you tell me, I won’t stop thinking of her as my sister. We
have only had each other and I love Elodie.”
She nods. “I know you do. She was stolen from another couple just over six years ago, but
she’ll be reunited with her real parents too.”
“When?” I ask panicked. Will they not let me see her before she goes to them? Will I ever
get to see her again?
“Not yet. She’s a little more upset than you are. We don’t want her mental health suffering
