The Woods, page 27
Chapter 32
The doctor tells us Julia could go anytime now. She’s been sleeping more, less lucid when she’s awake as her morphine dose increases, fed into her arm with a pump. It’s agonizing and, like Dad, I wish it could be easier for her. I wish it could be a slow and peaceful slip into death, instead of this struggle. We’re taking turns sitting with her so she’s never alone—me, Dad, Sean; Max and Lena. I don’t know if Jack has been in. He comes in and out of the house, is still staying here, but I’ve rarely seen him come in or out of her room.
It’s two in the morning and I’m sitting with her. Her breathing is so shallow I move closer and put my hand gently on her chest to check it’s still moving. Dad came in with a cup of tea a while ago but I made him go to bed, promising I’d wake him if there was any change. None of us has said the word “vigil,” but that’s what it is.
“Tess.” The whisper is so faint I don’t think it comes from Julia at first; I look round expecting to see Bella behind me. But Julia’s hand touches mine and I look back to see her eyes open.
“Do you want me to get Dad?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No. You.”
“Don’t try to talk,” I say, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. The gray has crept farther along the length of her hair. I wish I could color it for her. I don’t want her to die without her hair glowing and red all over.
“Have to,” she says, and the words come out slurred. “Have to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“The wedding.”
My hand pauses, lifts away from her hair.
“Sorry,” she says, the word coming out on a shuddering breath.
“For what?”
“I confronted Jack at the wedding…said I had to tell the truth. Hiding it from Leo, from everyone…it was doing so much harm.”
“Tell the truth about what?”
“The accident. When Ellie died. It wasn’t me driving. It was Jack.”
“Jack? But he was…”
“Too young. Yes. He was seventeen but hadn’t taken his test. His father had taken him out before. The lane was quiet and he nagged and nagged. So I gave in, but he went so fast and the road was icy…”
I shudder, imagining it.
“He begged me to say I was driving. He’d been drinking the night before, could still have been over the limit. He was only seventeen, we both would have been prosecuted. I couldn’t bear…couldn’t bear to lose two children.”
“Oh God,” I whisper.
“I know it was wrong. But I thought I was protecting him. But he seemed to hate me for it. I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t look at him anymore. I knew if I stayed, I’d end up hating him right back.”
I touch her hand. “Oh, Julia.”
“I left and he went more off the rails and then, at the wedding…I saw them. Jack and Bella. Kissing. We had…we had an argument, but he wouldn’t listen.”
I clench my fists and tuck them under my knees.
“I knew he was struggling—drinking and taking drugs. I didn’t want him to drag Bella down with him and I told him to leave her alone. He said he loved her but I ignored that, told him—told my own son he was a bad influence. The look on his face when I said it…I told him to get out and he went. But…” She takes a shallow, shaky breath. “I don’t know where he went and after…after…”
Bella died. After, Bella died. Wearing no underwear or shoes, full of alcohol and drugs.
“I should have said something to the police when they asked all their questions, but they said it was an accident and…it was Jack, he was my son.”
I can see the tortured guilt in the twist of her face, the tears on her cheeks.
I move my hand away from her.
“I’m sorry,” she says again.
“You should have told Dad—as soon as you found out. You knew what he was capable of. Christ, you left because of it. You should have told him what your son did to his daughter.”
She winces and the syringe driver hisses as it administers more morphine. I can see her eyes dulling as it creeps into her bloodstream.
“No,” I whisper. “Don’t you dare sleep now. Tell me. Tell me what your son did to my sister.”
She shakes her head. “He wouldn’t have…”
Wouldn’t he? I think of how Bella changed, how she started withdrawing, how she and Lena would go off together, shutting me out. Jack did that to her, turned her into someone I no longer recognized. Was he getting her hooked on drugs?
Bella is vivid in my mind when I stand up, in my face, her hair tangled, her eyes burning bright. Don’t, she says. Don’t get distracted. Remember, remember…
But I push past her, shoving at empty air as I leave this room full of death. I don’t need to remember. I know now. Julia has told me. However Bella died, accidentally or deliberately, Jack is the cause.
Chapter 33
I leave Julia’s room and go directly across the landing to the room Sean and Jack are sharing, throwing the door open with a bang.
Sean sits up with a gasp, but Jack’s bed is empty.
“Where’s your brother? Where the fuck is he?” I shout, pulling the quilt off Jack’s bed like he might be hiding under there.
“I don’t know. What’s wrong?”
“He…” I pause, remembering Julia’s words. Were they in on it together? Some kind of twisted plan to fuck with their mother’s new stepdaughters? If I hadn’t kissed Sean first at the wedding, would he have come looking for me? And yes, I kissed him, but he did come looking for me, didn’t he? It wasn’t me who sought him out.
“I found out,” I say, sinking onto Jack’s bed. “I found out about him and Bella.”
Sean rubs a hand across his face. “But you already knew that, didn’t you? They were together on and off for ages before the wedding.”
I shake my head. “But the drinking…the drugs. She died and it was his fucking fault.”
“Tess…” His voice is gentle. “Listen, they might have been…experimenting. But if you’re trying to say Jack was in any way responsible—”
“I’m not saying he killed her. God, the whole world has drummed it into me that it was a bloody accident. But she changed. She stopped taking photographs, stopped working hard at school. You know your brother, you know how manipulative he can be. Whatever happened, it was his fault, I know it was.”
“But…” Sean gets up, comes to sit next to me. “Even if all this is true, it still doesn’t make him responsible for her death.”
But I want him to be. I want someone to be responsible. Because…because I stopped listening to her. I didn’t know any of this was going on because we stopped talking. When I close my eyes, Bella is in front of me and she’s crying, standing there in her tank top, jeans half-undone, barefoot. She tried to talk to me and I didn’t listen. She was going into the woods alone or not alone. She was walking to Dean House and visiting Greg, who I thought was my friend, and, instead of listening to my sister, instead of trying to get her to talk, I recoiled and pushed her away. This admission pulls all the rage out of me and I sag, so tired all of a sudden, tired enough to sink onto the bed that smells of Jack, tired enough to sleep. But I’m close. I sense it. Close to remembering.
My mind skitters away from the nagging memories in panic. I don’t need to remember this now. I need to confront Jack, I need to make him admit what he did, make it all his fault, none of mine for not listening. I could have talked to her about Greg and Dean House, but I never knew about Jack, so I couldn’t have helped her there, it can’t have been my fault if it was Jack’s.
“I thought it was him,” I whisper—confess. The first time I’ve spoken these thoughts out loud. Thoughts I’ve buried for ten years along with the argument we had about it. “I thought it was your father who hurt her and I knew about him, but I never said anything. She told me they were friends,” I say. “I reacted like a child, like we were five and she’d stolen my best friend. We argued about it.” My breath catches and I pause.
“I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand her anymore. I was angry with her for messing everything up—she had it all. She was so bloody beautiful and popular and brilliant. She could have done everything. Then she dropped all her friends and started hanging out with Jack and you and Lena, who wanted nothing more than to get drunk or high, and she fucked up her exams. No one knows that. We got her test results after she died and she failed them all. She was never going to college, even if she’d lived. She was never going to be a teacher, or a photographer, or anything. I was so…so angry with her.” I take another trembling breath. “I didn’t know about Jack and the drugs. I didn’t know about Max.”
I open my mouth to say something else, but there’s a sound from Julia’s room and we both freeze. Sean pulls on his jeans and walks across the landing, me following.
He crouches next to Julia and touches her face. “Tess,” he says, looking up at me. “Go and get your dad.”
My legs are shaking as I go to Dad’s room, shaking his shoulder. He opens his eyes and looks at me, but he doesn’t ask anything. I think he knows.
Dad sits in the chair next to her bed, Sean on the other side, me standing behind Dad. Her breathing has become shallower and there seems to be an endless gap between breaths.
“Shall I call the doctor?” I whisper.
Dad shakes his head. “There’s nothing he can do. We just have to…”
Wait.
Julia opens her eyes and looks at Dad. The morphine glaze seems to have gone, she looks at him and she’s fully there, the Julia who moved into this house more than twelve years ago, with her bright red hair and her loud, loud laugh.
God, she had a good laugh. She woke the house up. She woke us all up. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time resenting her at the beginning. I wish I hadn’t left her room angry just now. There’s no more time to apologize, to explain, to ask. Dad is holding her hand; he leans forward to kiss it, to kiss her cheek and smooth back her hair.
We wait.
The gaps between breaths become longer. There’s a lump in my throat, a growing quiet panic in my stomach. No, not yet, not yet, not again. But I can’t will her to breathe harder, to breathe faster, I can’t will her heart to keep beating, and at three twenty-six in the morning Julia dies.
Sean buries his head in his hands, Dad keeps stroking her hair and whispering things I can’t hear, and, behind him, I swallow down the lump in my throat but I can’t stop the tears from falling, hot and fast down my cheeks and I’m so sorry I wasn’t here more, I’m so sorry I didn’t get to hear that bloody great laugh of hers more.
Chapter 34
Lena brings the vodka. We sit in a row on the fallen tree in the clearing in the woods where Bella and I were found and she passes the bottle along from her to Max, to Jack to Sean to me. Julia’s funeral is tomorrow. I came out here alone. I came here looking for Bella but she wasn’t here. I don’t know how long I sat on this tree before the others arrived. Not together. Sean first, sitting next to me without a word. Max and Lena then, Lena swinging her bottle, and finally Jack, who wasn’t there when his mother died, who’s barely said a word since.
We did this before the wedding, but Bella was with us then. It was two or three days before, I can’t remember exactly. Bella and I had come here, and the others drifted along, one by one. Who was it that first mentioned the murders of Nicole and the other girl the previous summer? I can’t remember, but I remember we passed stories along, like campfire ghost tales, stories that painted a serial killer stalking the village, some twisted perverted monster. It was mostly Lena talking, the rest of us quiet. Bella kept looking at me. It was the next day that we had our fight about Greg.
I take another swig of vodka, feeling the burn right down to my feet. The world keeps doubling, blurring. When I look at the others, sometimes they’re as they are now, sometimes they’re the teenagers we were ten years ago and Bella is sitting with us. Ghost Bella takes the bottle Lena passes down and tilts it to drink. Tonight’s conversation overlaps with our horror stories from then. My hands are shaking when the bottle comes back to me; vodka spills down my chin as I take a drink. It wasn’t vodka last time, I remember, it was rum stolen from our kitchen; sweeter, darker, a warmer glow going down.
Jack lights a cigarette, offers the packet to the rest of us. We all take one, like we did that night. I didn’t smoke then, not properly, don’t smoke now, but I take one and light it anyway and the harsh smoke makes me cough, hurts my chest as I try again, inhaling deeply. I was sick last time—not in front of everyone, but when I got back to the house. It was the last time I smoked until now, first and only time drinking rum.
I wonder if Sean’s told them about the camera he found. I think, as we all sit here again, I want to find who we were back then. Maybe we’re all captured on that film of Bella’s and the nostalgic ache I feel as time slips in and out as the vodka level gets lower makes me long to be back there, Bella safe and alive next to me. I’d talk to her if she were really here. I’d make her tell me what was worrying her, I’d make it all better and, in doing so, I could stop what happened, reverse it, wipe it out.
But maybe I won’t find this—togetherness, a group bonded in grief and reminiscence. I’ll find instead a secret Bella, proof that I really didn’t know her. The Bella who took Max from me, who was taking drugs with Jack. It’s taken on too great a significance, a half-full film on an ancient camera that might not even work. I might collect the photos and get an envelope full of blank paper. I don’t think so, though. I think I’m going to find my sister again on that film. Something steered Sean to find the camera in the chaos of Dean House—what else but the ghost of Bella, still trying to talk to me?
“We need more booze,” Jack says, getting up off the log.
“I’ll come with you,” I say, jumping up, ignoring Lena’s raised eyebrows, Max’s startled look. Max stands up as well.
“Do you want me to come?” he asks, and I have to look away from the frown on his face, the one that says he’s worried about me. The one that says he’s worried what I’ll do. It’s half concern, half wariness and it’s been there since that night in my flat.
“No, it’s fine,” I say, voice stiff. “I’ll be fine.”
“I knew you were waiting for a chance to get me alone,” Jack says as I follow him along the path, feeling the avid attention of the others burning into my back. “Bit tasteless, though, Tess—the night before my mother’s funeral. At least wait until the day after, when I’ll be all weak and susceptible from grief.”
He says this too loud, still playing the bad-guy role, because he knows the others are still in earshot. A role I know is not an act. I don’t answer. What I have to say I don’t want the others to hear.
He carries on the teasing at normal volume as we get far enough away not to be overheard. He keeps slipping away—one minute he’s three feet in front, his voice almost in my ear, the next he’s a hundred feet away. I know it can’t be real, so I keep my gaze focused on the path in front of me. I keep seeing flashes of white in the trees, Bella flitting her way between the trees. Also not real, I tell myself.
“You’re right,” I call. “I did want to get you on your own.”
My words stop him dead and he spins round on the path to face me, no longer retreating and advancing, but staying put, planted tall like a tree.
“Julia told me,” I say. “Before she died—she told me about you and Bella. About the drugs.”
He smiles, laughs. “Seriously? That was my mother’s deathbed confession that’s had you in such a spin? What—I suppose she made out I was this shady figure tempting precious Bella to the dark side. It’s a joke—half of what we took came from Bella, not me.” He shakes his head. “Have you any idea how weird you’ve been acting? Lena’s convinced you’re the one on drugs.”
I wince. I’ve barely spoken to anyone but Dad in the five days since Julia died. I left a message for Sophie when I knew she’d be at work and haven’t taken any of her calls since. I’ve thrown everything into helping Dad arrange the funeral and avoiding everyone else. I thought I had it together, concentrating hard enough on the little tasks to mask my exhaustion. I thought maybe I’d sleep after Julia died, but instead the insomnia is getting worse and I still haven’t found the missing sleeping pills. There’s too much happening in my head—every time I close my eyes, all the bad things go skittering through my mind, like monsters released from cages. In the day, I can keep those cages locked, but at night…
“Stop trying to make out that it was nothing—you were Bella’s boyfriend when she died. Her bloody drug dealer. You were with her that night. She kept you secret. Don’t try to make out that it’s not significant.”
“I wasn’t her boyfriend,” he says, smile all gone, taking a step closer to me. “We were having sex, that’s all. And I wasn’t the only one. Come on, Tess, you are not that naïve, not that obsessed still with pretending she was some perfect princess. I was not the only one she was sleeping with. I wasn’t even the only one at the bloody wedding she’d slept with. Do not try to turn this into something the day before my mother’s funeral.”
I step away from him, poised to run. “Scared I’ll go to the police and they’ll start looking a bit harder at you?”
He smiles again, faintly. “No, just warning you. What do you think I’ll tell the police if you send them my way? I’ll tell them all the stories about Bella they won’t have heard before. And they’ll pass those stories on to Leo. Do you think your father wants to hear the police telling him what a little druggy slut his dead daughter was?”
My hand flies back to slap him, but he catches my wrist, squeezes it until I gasp.
“Leave it alone. Leave your dead sister to sleep.” He lets go of my wrist and marches away.
“And what about your dead sister?” I call after him. “The one you killed?”
He turns back and stares at me, white-faced.
