The Woods, page 5
He looks the same but different as well, same lean frame and short brown hair, same brown eyes that I’d wistfully sigh over in the way only a teenage girl can. The years have added a couple of fine lines, turned the teenage lankiness into a more muscled leanness, but he’s lost none of the crooked-smile gorgeousness I daydreamed about.
“God, you look amazing,” he says. “It’s weird, I never thought you and Bella were alike, but look at you now.”
I pull away too quickly, almost shoving him away from me.
“I’m sorry—but you walked out and if it weren’t for the hair, it could have been her.”
Always her, never me. Even if she weren’t in my dreams, her ghost would still be with me.
“Where’s Lena?” I ask, interrupting him, looking for his sister.
“In the car,” he says. I look over and see her through the window. She’s slumped on the back seat, asleep, dark glasses covering her eyes.
“Is she okay?”
“Don’t ask.” He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “She was drunk when I picked her up.”
“At eleven in the morning?”
“Tell me about it.”
It used to be indulgence I’d hear in his voice when he talked about Lena, an eye roll, a bit of exasperation, but more tolerance. The disapproval I hear now tells me more about how Max has grown up and maybe Lena hasn’t.
“She hasn’t changed, then.”
I look at him and he shakes his head. “She moves from job to job because she keeps getting fired and every job she takes is worse than the last. Mum and Dad put a brave face on it, calling her work PR, but basically she hands out club flyers in the city center. Then she goes to the club and drinks away her entire earnings.”
My smile fades.
“Where is she going to end up?” he says. I don’t think he expects me to answer.
“And you?” I say. “I can see you’ve grown up.”
Max touches my hand. He lifts it, traces circles on my palm with his other hand. “I’ve missed you, Tess.”
I pull my hand away and clench my fist. “Really?”
“I called you. Back then. You know I did. You never took my calls.”
“Because you left.” The words burst out. It’s stupid to still be angry, but I am.
“Tess…”
“I know you had to go when your parents did, of course I do. But before all those awful days leading up to the funeral, I never saw you, you avoided me. You were like a bloody stranger.”
“I’m sorry, but I was freaking out. I was seventeen—one minute we’re at a wedding and the next, Bella was dead. And you…I couldn’t cope with your pain. It was awful, you and Leo…I couldn’t handle it.”
“And you think I could? You didn’t even visit me in the hospital.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I know it was wrong. If I could have the time again…”
I shudder. I don’t want to live that time again.
“It hasn’t felt like ten years,” he continues. “I haven’t seen Julia and Leo much, but every time they’ve told me all about you, shown me photos.”
They did the same with me—snapshots of Max and Lena, little snippets about their lives, news about Max I’d store up and daydream about, never quite brave enough to pick up the phone and call him, despite Julia’s encouragement.
“What about Jack and Sean? Have they shared lovely photos of them, too?”
He hesitates. “They’re actually…not too bad now. It’s been a long time for all of us, Tess.”
I flinch. “You’ve seen them?”
“Of course.”
He sounds surprised. It hurts to hear that surprise. It feels like a betrayal. I’d forgotten he knew them first. That they were all friends years before Bella and I came into the picture. No, not forgotten. I’ve very deliberately not thought about it because I always wanted Max to be mine, not theirs.
“I see Sean for a drink sometimes. Not often.”
“And Jack?”
He shrugs. “Not as much. Jack is…well, Jack is still Jack, I guess. Only not as…”
Not as what? Angry? Scary? Intimidating? Bitter? That’s what I remember about Jack. That and his bloody shark smile. At least I always knew where I stood with Sean, with his obvious anger and hate. Jack would smile that wide smile of his, but his eyes…there was never a smile in his eyes.
“You know he got married?”
I nod. Dad told me.
“He got married, had a son. I have to say, I never thought he’d be the one to settle down and be the grown-up.”
I can’t imagine it. Like Bella when she appears as dream, ghost, or hallucination, whatever it is, I imagine the others being the same age as they were the last time I saw them. Jack, married with a child? Does not compute.
I put my bag in the trunk and climb into the car next to him.
“I never thought this is how we’d meet up again,” Max says as he pulls out into the main road.
“Really?” I say. “It seems to me that all our meetings have been surrounded by death.”
He winces at my words and I look over at him, this oh-so-familiar stranger, waiting for some memories to come flooding back, but there’s nothing. Did you kiss me back? I want to ask. When I made my clumsy love-filled pass at you, did you kiss me back, Max? Was it you who helped me upstairs, was it you, your lips brushing mine?
But ten years is a river too wide. So we sit in a strange car and my memory remains blank.
Lena wakes up nearly two hours into the journey, as we pull off the highway onto the lanes that lead home.
“Jesus Christ, I need a drink,” she says, leaning forward, hooking her arms over the back of both our seats.
Max’s face twitches and I squeeze his hand where it rests on the gear stick.
“Bloody hell, fast work, Tess. Ten years apart and already you’re holding hands.” She laughs as I snatch my hand away.
She’s still a damned teenager then, isn’t she? Her laughing words reignite the anger that built when I saw Lena in Rebecca Martin’s face. All that teenage angst, all the turmoil stirred up by the arrival of Julia, her family, and Max and Lena. I forgot, for a moment, seeing Max again. I forgot he was never really my Max—they formed a gang: Bella, Max and Lena, Jack and Sean. And then there was me, forever on the outside.
She’s still drunk; I can see that as I look back at her and she takes her sunglasses off. Her pupils are so huge that her eyes look black, so maybe she’s more than drunk. She’s wearing that curling half-smile that used to scare me when I was a kid. Back then she seemed so big, bad, and dangerous. She’s lightened her hair since last time; streaks of blond run through it. Last time I saw her, she had dyed it black to go with the black clothes she wore, even on the hottest, hottest days. It doesn’t surprise me, what Max told me, about the disaster of her life. I never could imagine Lena doing anything more than smoking, hiding out with Bella in the village, swigging stolen vodka, and flirting with anyone who stopped by, for all the outrageous future plans she used to make.
And Max…Max has done just what he planned. Back then he’d constructed nothing more than sandcastles, but he had his architect’s dreams. He’d sketch glorious buildings in the ground with a stick. Fantastic, impractical buildings that belonged in a sci-fi film. I used to pick flowers and make gardens for his houses. We were going to meet up at Chelsea Flower Show the year I won my first award there.
“So what’s it like back there?” Lena asks. “Still the same? And how’re Julia and your dad doing? It’s so shit, what’s going on.”
“I…don’t know. I haven’t been back myself for a long time.”
“Seriously?”
“Lena—shut up.” Max’s voice is sharp.
“No way. Goody-goody Tess takes over my role as bad girl by failing to visit her dying stepmum. Halle-bloody-lujah, Lena is not the worst person on stage.”
“You don’t know anything,” I burst out, twisting in my seat to look at her, getting a faceful of her stale, boozy breath. “I’m not ‘goody-goody Tess,’ I never bloody was. It’s been ten years, so shut your drunk mouth and stop acting like a child, okay?”
Lena lapses into silence and, in my mind, Sophie lets off a tiny confetti cannon.
I can do this. I can.
Chapter 7
My heart speeds up as we reach the outskirts of West Dean. Everything looks the same—the shop, the pub, the dilapidated kids’ playground. It’s like time has stood still, everyone and everything locked in an enchanted sleep in the years I’ve lived away in a city that grows and changes by the day. People stop and stare as Max’s car passes and I swear I can hear whispered observations filtering in through the closed windows. There she is, back at last, took her time, didn’t she? It feels like they’re swirling all around me, closing in. Wonder what happened. The sister who lived. My head is spinning. Wonder what really happened in the woods?
“Stop!” I yell to Max, and almost fall out of the car before throwing up on the grass verge. It feels like everything I’ve eaten in the last month comes up and I stay leaning over, my legs shaking, waiting for the black spots to stop floating in front of my eyes.
“You all right, Tess?”
I can hear the concern in Max’s voice. I straighten up and try on a smile.
“Fine. I’m fine. Something I ate, that’s all.”
He nods, but the frown of concern doesn’t go as I get back in. I lean back and close my eyes, taking shallow breaths as my stomach continues to somersault.
The world is getting weird as I feel myself drift—stretching out and warping, a crap song on the radio merging into Bella singing in the garden, wind whistling in through the window becoming footsteps crunching through the woods. Bella and me and Max and Lena, hide-and-seek among the twisted trees. Then there’s Sean and my eyes fly open and there’s a house in the road, white and crumbling with black staring windows like eyes, and we’re heading straight for it. I almost lurch sideways, almost try for the steering wheel to steer us away when it blinks back out and it’s just the empty road out of the village again, nothing in front of us but a tractor, slowing us to a crawl.
My eyelids feel weighed down. Something heavy sits on them and they keep drifting closed. The car stops and it pulls me out of a half-sleep. It takes me a minute, because I think sleep has carried me here and this is a dream. We’re outside my old house with the ivy and the peeling paint and the broken gate. I expect to see Bella at the upstairs window, Dad in the garden. Maybe even Mum, if this is a way-back dream. Me, seven again, with my mum still around, tall and curly before she got sick, looking just like me.
But I blink and the fog clears and I get that I’m awake. It’s still daylight but the house is dark because of the woods directly behind it, huge trees looming up and arching over the house and in its narrowness, the house could be one of them: a tree-house, tall and thin and higgledy-piggledy, with mean windows and a red door. If it were a house on its own in the forest it would be like something out of a fairy tale.
“Here we are then,” Max says.
Yes. Here we are then.
Dad comes out and gathers me in a hug and, despite myself, it’s so good to see him. I hold on tight, closing my eyes, pretending I’m a kid again, breathing him in, the familiar smell of his aftershave, a lingering hint of coffee on his breath. He smells like home and this hug, this moment, is worth everything that’s to come.
He’s shaking as I hug him back and I cling on, stroking his back. Yes, I can do this, I want to say, to convince us both. I will be here for you.
Dad looks grayer and older, thinner, hunched over as he greets Max and Lena, like more than a few months have passed since I saw him last, like years have gone by. I touch my face, expecting to feel lines, sagging skin.
I squeeze Dad’s hand. “Come on, Dad, let’s go in and see Julia.”
“I’m sorry about Lena,” Max says quietly, picking up a tea towel and drying the mugs I’ve washed. Dad nodded off in the living room, so Max and I tiptoed out to the kitchen while Lena went outside to smoke. We’re all still waiting for Julia to wake up so we can visit, the last hour spent in halting, awkward small talk punctuated by the ticking clocks Dad has all over the house.
“It’s okay,” I say, not looking at him. “Like you said—she was drunk.”
He pauses and puts the mug he’s dried down on the counter. “But I was surprised, too. You haven’t been visiting? I know Lena shouldn’t have spoken like she did. But Julia’s been so ill and…”
I feel like I’ve been slapped.
“I did visit her in the hospital,” I say. “Which is more than Lena bloody did. But I couldn’t come back here. When I was sick on the way…it wasn’t something I ate, it was coming back here.”
He glances toward the window, to the woods outside. “Jesus—still? After all this time?”
“Yes, still. Yes, after all this time. I come back here and I see those woods and I want to pass out or puke or run screaming every time. So yes, I’ve been a crap daughter, a crap stepdaughter, but I’m here now, aren’t I?”
“Sorry,” he says, and hesitates. “Do you still not…?”
“Remember? No. A lot of that whole wedding weekend is a blur and I still don’t remember anything about what happened to Bella.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “But me and Lena are here with you. We can help.”
I want to laugh at the thought of Lena helping, but he chooses that moment to pull me into his arms and I hold my breath instead.
“So—roomies then! It’s like being back at boarding school. We can stash cookies and stolen vodka under the bed. Hang out of the window smoking,” Lena says.
I stuff a pillow into a pillowcase and raise my eyebrows. With Max in Bella’s old room, Lena’s having to stay in with me. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed swinging her legs, making no attempt to help.
“I don’t have those Enid Blyton boarding school moments to reminisce over—me and Bella went to the local school.”
“Still got a chip on your shoulder about that?”
I squeeze the pillow between my hands and resist the urge to hit her with it. Why does she always have to be so…so Lena?
“And it was never remotely Enid Blyton, anyway,” she says. “Just a lot of miserable girls like me whose parents either didn’t want them at home or worked abroad. All starving themselves or making themselves sick or slicing up their arms.”
“Wow. Sounds…well, it sounds absolutely horrible.” I pause. “You know, Bella always wanted to go to boarding school when we were kids.”
Lena smiles. “I know. She used to ask me so many questions. I’d tell her how shit it was, but she’d still be sighing over it like it sounded amazing.”
“Oh. That must have been…never mind.”
“What?”
“I was going to say it must have been frustrating. If you were trying to share something you hated and she wouldn’t listen.”
Lena picks up her pillowcase and lays it on her lap, tracing the floral pattern with her fingers. “It was a bit, I suppose. But she was so damned sweet with it. It ended up making me feel better in a way. All I used to do was moan about it, but she wouldn’t let me. She made me find some vague nice things about the whole experience.”
“Well, we only have to be roommates for the weekend, so hopefully there won’t be any nasty trigger moments.”
“Yeah, and no doubt you’re already counting down the hours until I’m gone again.”
I don’t say anything because she’s right. A few hours in her company and I’ve already got a knot of anger and anxiety building inside me.
“It was awful after she died, you know,” she says into the silence, her usual mocking tone missing. “For the rest of us as well. I had to go back to that fucking school and our parents pissed off again and it was so shit. Did you ever get, for even a second, how crap it was for us?”
My throat goes tight and any warmth I’d been feeling evaporates. “I’d just lost my sister. I was a bit too caught up in grieving to worry about your feelings, funnily enough.”
“God, Tess, I’m not having a dig. She was the best friend I ever had, you know.” She sighs and chucks the pillowcase back onto the bed. “I probably should have come back to visit Julia more, but it was weird, you know?”
I nod. “Yeah. Same for me.”
“Poor Julia. And poor Leo. They’ve had the shittiest time of all, haven’t they? While you and me and Max wallow in our own self-indulgent woe-is-me crap.”
She’s voicing everything I’ve been berating myself about and it startles me to be so on the same page as Lena. I don’t think I like it.
She sighs again and stands up and stretches. “Look, I’m sorry we weren’t here for you and Leo and Julia. And sorry I was such a bitch in the car on the way down. It’s freaking me out, coming back here. Anxiety makes me bitchy.” She pauses and smiles. “Bitchier.”
Apology or not, I’m not sure how long I’ll last in a room with Lena without it ending up in an argument. I glance toward the window. I can’t see the woods from here, but I know they’re there. Time to rip the bandage off. If I’m going to stay here and be with Dad and Julia, I can’t be throwing up or passing out every time I see a bloody tree.
“I think I’ll go for a walk.”
The wind has picked up, moaning through the trees behind the house. I zip my coat to the top and tuck my scarf in tight. My phone buzzes as I step away from the house and get a mobile signal again. I have two new voicemails. It could be Sophie, checking to see if I’m okay, full of plans for nights out when I get back. But what if it’s Karen, what if Rebecca’s parents have decided to press charges? I haven’t let myself think of that. I’ve accepted that in all likelihood I’ll be fired, yes. But being charged? Arrested? A police record? I put my phone back in my pocket, letting it be Schrödinger’s cat for a while—my future both dead and alive at the same time until I listen to the messages.
