The Frenzy Page 5

  I trailed my fingers into the cool water of the stream and listened to the forest sounds. The branches were crackling and I held my breath. Maybe it was Corey? A feeling of anticipation crawled along my spine like when Corey and I had seen the gray wolf. I turned my head.

  There was a woman standing in the shadows of the quaking aspen.

  She had gray hair that fell over her shoulders but her face looked young. She wore a gray cotton T-shirt and blue jeans and her eyes were pale blue.

  We stayed poised, unmoving, looking at each other until I shifted my weight slightly and then she backed away and disappeared.

  I had no idea who the woman was but I knew that seeing her meant something. There was a dreamlike quality about it, like where you know the image you are seeing is a symbol for something very important, a secret that your unconscious wants to reveal to you but can’t. I shivered in the heat, the forest suddenly growing cold and full of whispers.

  I ran back through the trees into the fading light at the edge of the wood, got my bike and headed home. On the way, I rode past the haunted house. I never lingered there long when I was alone; it gave me the creeps and I only liked to get the creeps when I was with my friends. Was Pace there? I needed to talk to him. Behind the old Christmas trees the gray house loomed up with its high-pitched, cantilevered roof shading the stone gargoyles from the sun. The posts and balconies were carved so elaborately that they looked like lace. Some of the windows were carved into large rosettes. I dropped my bike on the sidewalk and made my way among the fir trees and pieces of broken statuary—I recognized one of the gargoyles, smashed to bits, his leering face more angry than ever in its ruined state—to the porch. The sky was finally getting dark and I could hear the cicadas starting up. Through the pointed arch of the front window I saw a very faint light.

  I wondered if Pace was there. I would have just walked in, but maybe he was with Michael? So I knocked.

  “Pace?” I said. “It’s me.”

  I heard sounds inside and then after a couple of minutes the peephole opened, then the huge, heavy door. Pace stood there. His eyes looked very big. They darted around and he wasn’t smiling.

  “Oh, man,” I said. “Do not disturb, huh?”

  He glanced back behind him into the darkened house. His voice sounded distracted. “No, it’s okay. Come in.”

  He beckoned for me to follow him into the dusty foyer with the parquet floor and through a door to an old-fashioned parlor with shabby lace curtains and furniture covered with sheets and tarps. A few rays of light came in through cracks in the walls.

  “I’m sorry to bug you,” I said. “I can’t find Corey.”

  Pace was looking around, not really listening.

  “Pace?”

  “Oh. Sorry. Where’s Corey?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to reach him. I went to his house. He wasn’t there. And then I saw this woman….”

  Pace was still looking around, confused.

  “Is the guy … Michael? I want to meet him.”

  “Michael?” Pace said softly. His eyes had a soft, cloudy look in the faint light. “He was just here.”

  “I hope I didn’t …”

  Pace shook his head. “It’s okay,” he said again. “I don’t know where he is. Maybe he went to the bathroom.”

  “I’m going to go,” I told him. “I’ll leave you guys alone. I’m going to try Corey again.”

  I walked back to the front door. The air in the house felt frosty in spite of the heat outside. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I could have seen my breath. The quiet made my head hurt.

  “Cool place,” I said. “I mean, literally, too. It’s a little freaky, right?”

  “Yeah.” Pace looked around with that same vague expression.

  “You okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Call me later.” I opened the door and ran down the front steps.

  I rode my bike around as fast as I could until my legs were shaking. I wanted to make sure all the upset of the day was wrung out of me before I came home. Maybe it was good that I hadn’t been able to find Corey….

  Late that night I was lying in bed when I heard a clicking sound against the window. I’d texted Corey about ten times before I’d finally given up and curled into a ball under a sheet.

  I looked outside and saw him standing there looking up at me, holding a handful of pebbles. I pulled on jeans and shoes and ran out to him.

  “Where were you?” I almost started crying as I fell against his warm chest. He had the woodsy-clean smell. When he tried to move away I put his arms back around me and clung to him.

  “You didn’t write me back. Were you mad?” I asked. But he didn’t seem mad now.

  I felt him sigh almost imperceptibly, not really a sound, just a slight movement of his chest.

  “I’m sorry, Liv. I needed some time.”

  “It’s okay.” I closed my eyes and hugged him even tighter.

  “I know I shouldn’t have come by the party but when I saw you with McIntyre, pretending … it just makes me sick sometimes. Why we all have to pretend like this.”

  “I know.” I tried to kiss his neck but he moved away.

  “Serious, Liv. It’s messed up. We should be able to be who we are.”

  “But I’m not sure I know who I am,” I said. “What if who we are isn’t okay?”

  I wanted to tell him so badly then about what had happened to me when I was thirteen. But I couldn’t do it. I was afraid he would leave me if he knew about the rage inside of me and what it had made me want to do. And I was afraid that if we made love, if we got that close, whatever lurked inside me might come out and hurt him somehow, or scare him away. That was the truth. That was why I was waiting. Maybe he sensed it, too, because he didn’t push me.

  “Who you are is more than okay. I love who you are. What are you so scared of?”

  “Everything,” I said. “Even you. Especially you. Because you might leave.” I buried my face in his neck. “I was so scared today when I couldn’t reach you.” I didn’t tell Corey how scared I was of myself.

  “I’m not leaving, baby. I told you I’m never leaving you. I just needed time to cool down. When you looked at me through the window, there was something weird about it….”

  I thought of how Corey looked like a deer in my mother’s garden. Gramp had scared me, I was angry and afraid, and then I had wanted to run outside and … and what? Grab Corey by the throat, drag him inside?

  I was mad, I told myself. Not at Corey. At Gramp for scaring me. At Mom for what she had done to that wolf and whatever it meant now. But in the moment it had all gotten confusing and I hardly knew what I felt.

  I didn’t tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn’t understand and could never run away from.

  It was myself.

  Abstinence

  I was sitting at dinner with my parents and Gramp, thinking about the woman I’d seen in the woods. I hadn’t had the chance to talk to Corey or Pace about her yet—there had been too many other things going on. But I wanted to find out who she was and there was only one person I could ask. I’d go see Joe Ranger the next day, I told myself.

  My dad and Gramp were watching ESPN while they chewed their chicken and Scoot begged for scraps.

  My mom was singing softly to herself and flipping through a gossip magazine. I stacked peas on my fork.

  “That Jennifer Aniston really better just face the fact that kids might not be in the picture,” my mom said. “She looks good, but still …”

  I ignored her.

  “I mean seriously cuckolded. Angelina Jolie. Can you imagine?”

  I stared out the window into the garden looking for deer. Once my mom tripped in her high heels when she was running to get her gun to shoot one. She twisted her ankle and had to stay off it for a few weeks.

  “Damn deer,” she’d said. “Eating all my flowers and now they’re trying to break my leg, too.”

  �
�Here’re pictures of Angie when she was younger,” she said now. “Do you know she had her lips done? And her nose? But the thing is, her lips were actually bigger! It’s just ridiculously unfair.”

  My dad turned up the sound on the TV.

  “Jeff,” my mom said. “I can’t hear myself think.”

  He shrugged and lowered the sound again.

  “May I be excused?” I asked.

  “You didn’t eat your chicken,” said my mom.

  “I’m a vegetarian, Mom, remember? I have been for four years.”

  “But you can eat chicken, right?” She winked at me.

  We had this conversation at least once a month. I knew she wasn’t stupid; she was just hoping I’d change my mind.

  “No. Chicken is animal flesh. I don’t eat animal flesh.”

  “You don’t want to become anemic. The Micheners’ girl Kim, the oldest one? She’s anemic. She only eats pasta. Now she has to take iron pills and you know what they can do to your bathroom habits.”

  My stomach churned the pasta and peas. I got up.

  “Gross, Mom. I have to go.”

  She watched me walk away. “I’m just trying to get the point across,” she said.

  Later, she came into my room without knocking and sat on my bed. I was reading a Swedish vampire book I’d ordered from Amazon.

  “What are you reading?”

  I closed the book. I was at the part where the zombie tries to rape the transgendered vampire child but the vampire gets away. “Nothing. Can you try knocking?”

  “Sorry. I got lonely out there with your dad. I wanted my little girl’s company.”

  She reached out and patted my leg and I pulled it away. I didn’t like her touching me that much anymore. I was afraid she’d start talking about depilatories. I folded my legs under me so she couldn’t reach up inside my jeans and feel the hair that had started to grow back. I hadn’t shaved yet; it was hard to keep up.

  “You know, that Pace is a nice-looking fellow.” I wondered if my hairy legs had made her think of him—God forbid my boyfriend would have to touch them.

  I nodded, just relieved she still hadn’t found out about Corey.

  “You know, I remember what it was like when I was young.”

  Here it comes, I thought.

  “But it’s really important to abstain. There really isn’t another option, except getting married and I know you’re not ready for that.”

  I turned my head away from her and stared at the wall. I had hung a poster of a male and female gray wolf kissing, surrounded by their fuzzy, fat pups. Their gray fur and blue eyes ringed in black reminded me of the woman in the woods.

  “What about you and Dad?” I asked. They’d gotten married right after college.

  “We were young and we made a mistake,” she said.

  I looked back at her and she smiled. “Not that you are a mistake. We just might have done things differently.”

  Yeah, right. Sometimes it felt like my whole life was a mistake. But I hadn’t known that my mom felt her marriage was a mistake from the beginning. I wondered if she would have married my dad at all if she wasn’t pregnant; it wasn’t okay in her family to be a single mother. My parents didn’t seem to love each other anymore. Had they ever?

  The thing was, as much as the whole conversation irritated me, I agreed with her about the abstinence; I knew that I wasn’t going to have sex yet. But it wasn’t for the reason she thought. And the boy she was imagining was the wrong one.

  Sasha

  After work the next day I went to see Joe. Cooper was sleeping in the shade out front. I knelt down and let him lick my face.

  “Hey, boy. Where’s Joey? Where’s Dad, huh?” His eyes shone beams into me. Dogs saw everything but if they loved you it didn’t matter.

  The shop was hot, only a small fan revolving feebly. The prosthetic limbs hung from the walls. So lifelike: Joe was an artist. They gave me the creeps. One black and two ginger cats were sleeping around the fan. Joe was in the back. He came out to see me and grinned so all his teeth showed.

  “What up, dearest?”

  “Hey, Joey.”

  “Did you bring me some rocky road?”

  “I would’ve but it would melt in five seconds.”

  “Hot out, huh?” He sat on a stool and wiped his forehead with a rag. “Air’s broke and I couldn’t get the part to fix it.” He took two bottled waters out of a refrigerator and handed one to me. “Take a load off and tell me what’s on your mind.”

  I slumped onto a chair with the water. Joe could always tell when something was up with me. When I was thirteen and the first thing happened, I came to him the next day. I didn’t tell him about it. I just sat with him and he rambled on about his childhood, how he used to play in the woods, make sculptures out of clay from the riverbed, how his dad lost a hand to the steel mills and that got him into the prosthetics business, how he used to drink too much until he quit. Because of his serious, gentle tone, it was like he was talking to me about what had happened to me but using different words so I wouldn’t get scared and run away.

  “Do you know anyone new to town? A woman with gray hair and blue eyes?” I asked.

  I wanted to find her. Had I really seen her? It seemed like a dream now, a hallucination caused by the heat and my upset state after not being able to reach Corey.

  Joe knew everyone and everyone knew him. He ran the local AA meeting and the whole town came to him with their problems. Well, not everyone. The riffraff, as Joe would say. The rich folk went to my mom and dad for help.

  He scowled at me and patted his chest pocket for his cigarettes. “Why you wanna know, Livvy?”

  “I saw this woman. In the woods. She was just watching me.”

  “It freak you out, darling?”

  “A little.”

  “But you want to know more?”

  I nodded. “She seemed like she wanted to tell me something.”

  Joe leaned forward, elbow on the knee of his grease-stained jeans, and tapped his lip with his forefinger. “I guess she wanted you to see her or she wouldn’t have let you,” he said as if he were talking to himself. Then he added, “That’s Sasha, Liv. She’s not new to town, just keeps to herself. She and her boys live in a cabin out there in the woods.”

  “A cabin?” I sat up. “The wood cabin with the well?”

  “So you’ve seen it, huh?”

  “Once, years ago. I’ve been looking for it ever since. I thought I made it up.”

  “Like I said, she wouldn’t have let you see her unless she thought you were ready.”

  My head started to hurt. What was he talking about? “Joey,” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “I think it’s time for us to go talk to Sasha,” Joe said. “You got plans?”

  “I’m supposed to meet Corey.”

  Joe stood up and stretched his long arms above his head. “Up to you,” he said. “I close shop in a few.”

  Joe and I walked for a long time among the dense growth of trees. Sunlight trickled through the greenery and sweat trickled down my neck. Birds, butterflies and squirrels seemed to linger near, drawn to Joe Ranger in some uncanny way. One bird, so blue it looked purple and with a fierce expression, even landed on his shoulder when he stopped really still and called it. When it flew away he continued on, walking ahead, his long legs taking big strides while I scurried to keep up. He didn’t look back at me much but he held the branches so that I could pass through unscratched most of the time. Under my feet the earth throbbed with life and I could smell the sap in the trees and the minerals in the mud.

  I knew that forest really well but I felt confused, as if we’d been walking in circles. Then Joe stopped suddenly and I almost bumped into him.

  There was the cabin.

  It looked abandoned except for the chickens squawking in the pen. There were no boots in front and the windows were shut tight. The trees had grown closer around it since the last time I’d seen it; they overhung the tin roof as
if trying to protect it.

  Joe walked up to the door and knocked gently. He was so tall that he had to stoop down so his head wouldn’t hit the porch.

  We waited. After a while Joe said, “Looks like they’re not home. Maybe I was wrong….”

  He came back to where I was waiting. I hadn’t wanted to get too close. I turned and started away. I wasn’t so sure about this idea after all, anyway.

  Just then we heard a sound and the cabin door opened. The gray-haired woman stood there. Her blue eyes shone through the dim. I held my breath.

  “Joe,” she said. It sounded like the way you would greet someone you had been waiting for for a long time.

  “Sasha.” I’d never heard Joe’s voice like that. So serious and quiet, deeper than usual.

  “You’ve come,” she said. Her tone was low and a little rough. I wanted to fall under its spell—let it lead me into a dark place where I could find who I was, but part of me did not want to know. I grew suddenly so weary, as if the forest were a dream weighing down on me, pressing me into sleep. I closed my eyes.

  When I woke I was lying on a small cot in a darkened room.

  I sat up. “Joey?”

  There was silence. Then a woman’s voice said, “He had to go back. I told him you’d be safe here.”

  She came toward me. She was wearing a floor-length silvery nightgown and her hair was the same, almost metallic in the candlelight. She had long, sinewy arms, strong arms. I looked at her hands. The middle finger stretched out beyond the others just like mine.

  “I’m Sasha,” she said. “You’re Liv.”

  I nodded.

  “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  We? Who else was there? I looked around the room. The walls were made of rough-hewn logs. There was a large, soft deerskin rug on the floor. Besides the bed there were very few furnishings. Who was “we,” where were they and why had they been waiting?

  As if she heard my thought, she answered it with a similar question. “Why did you want to find me?”