Page 4 of The Bleeding Woods

I step out of the Warner family Hummer, then pad up to my sister. She towers several inches over my head, so her build dwarfs mine completely. Where I have pathetic chopsticks, she has biceps sculpted by years of rage.

“I didn’t know you started boxing again. Grandma would be furious.” I offer a verbal olive branch.

She scoffs, rejecting it. “We don’t live with Grandma anymore.”

“I . . . well . . .” I stammer. She’s burning me alive on the spot. “Th-thank goodness for that, right? I hated those porcelain dolls.”

Silence.

I wish I could vanish.

“Clara wanted to know if you kept your parents’ old things,” Grayson intervenes, ever the knight. “There was a box, wasn’t there?”

Jade’s expression darkens, but through the storm clouds, there is a pocket of drizzle.

Redness swells into the spaces beneath her bottom lids, and her bruised lip falls into a poorly concealed quiver.

She looks away, then back. Then away, then back again.

The air itself trembles as she forces it down her windpipe.

It escapes in a puff of heat chased by a string of whispered swears.

“Why?” she snaps.

“I don’t know,” I lie. “I just . . . wanted to have a look. It feels important. I was too young to appreciate it then, but I’m glad you put all their stuff in one place. I’m grateful that you—”

“Do we have to do this now?” Shaking, she lights a cigarette crunched by the pressure of her pocket. “Aren’t we supposed to be off on some big adventure?”

“I’m not coming,” I correct her. Her relief is visible and obvious enough to call rude. However, like the wound she’d landed earlier, it’s well deserved. “That’s why it has to be now. You, Grayson, and Joey are leaving. The anniversary is—”

“I know when it is.”

“Let her speak, Jade,” Grayson mediates.

Jade retaliates with an eye roll and a plume of secondhand smoke. The bitter scent of scorched tobacco makes me nauseous. If not for that pill, my one-second salvation, I’d have vomited all over the sidewalk. Too much tension gathers in our orbit. We are binary stars on course for collision.

“It’s in my closet. You can have a look, but that’s it. Don’t take anything. In fact, don’t touch anything. Got it?”

I nod. She throws a jangling duet of keys my way like a set of shuriken.

Jade’s apartment is deplorable.

Clothing stained in every shade is strewn across the floor.

It parts like a fabric sea to create a barely walkable path.

The kitchen is splatter painted and smells faintly of stale tomato sauce.

The living room consists of three beanbag chairs and a smashed television screen.

Instead of curtains, she’s hung a butterscotch bedsheet that likely started out white.

It conceals windows misted with dust and plaster walls ravaged by cracks.

Jade’s apartment is despair.

I follow the directions to her bedroom she gave between nicotine swigs.

There, a naked mattress sits atop a block of solid plywood.

Beside it, a desk overflows with newspapers, nacho wrappers, cigarette butts, and ash.

Her comforter is navy blue. It is the same one she slept with when the two of us shared quarters.

Memories are such mercurial things.

The sight of Jade’s ancient bedspread should fill me with the same hatred that’s kept us apart all these years.

She always stole my hopes of feeling human.

Before our parents’ blood stained the snow, she and I .

. . we used to sit across from one another and chat about things young girls are meant to know intuitively.

She’d prattle on about her most attractive peers, and I’d seal my lips, a bundle of confusion.

She’d gush about video games, sports, and her latest gaggle of good grades.

I’d listen, wondering how one could move with such ease through the world.

I needed dance classes just to learn how one limb ought to sync with another.

I couldn’t figure anything out on my own.

Hatred isn’t what I feel, though. I feel like an intruder.

The closet slides open with a deafening plea to be oiled at the joints.

Two dozen hangers and four puffer coats dangle from a bar that is more rust than metal.

On the floor, a cardboard box big enough for a couple of sneakers has been kicked to the backmost wall.

In crude, bleeding black-marker cursive, Jade has written the words see ya later, guys on the lid.

My throat becomes an inferno.

Inside the box, files, photos, and an assortment of artifacts rest atop a bed of dust.

Dad’s leather bracelet, tightened to fit Jade’s wrist at its tiniest. A gift for his firstborn on her first birthday.

Mom’s favorite coaster, chipped on one edge. I’d let it fall from a high cabinet while grabbing a bag of sugar; we were baking cupcakes.

A photograph of our sole attempt at a holiday card. Jade threw up on the photographer. Dad couldn’t stop laughing. None of us could stop laughing.

I find a ballet slipper and despise myself more than ever. It’s from one of my recitals, and it’s been autographed: “If anyone messes with you, tell ’em I’m your sister. Break a leg. —Jade.”

My cheeks are drenched. My head is pounding. I have to get out of here.

I claw through the cinders of our childhood in search of what I came here for.

I must remember what I came here for. I’m not this girl.

No matter how desperately I wanted to be, I never was.

The pills allowed me a daughterly, sisterly form, but it was just an illusion.

A uniform, an exoskeleton. I’m here for the means to maintain it, not to weep my way down Memory Lane.

I’m not worth the spilling salt water. Jade owns the copyright on crying about this.

Two cards, each laminated and embossed, catch the attention of my fingertips.

They seem to glimmer despite the deep-closet gloom.

Mom and Dad smile for pictures taken against two emerald-green backdrops.

Dr. Cedric Lovecroft and Dr. Adelina Dolion, researchers with level 6 clearance on an endeavor titled “PR-U.” The seal beside their biometrics is a sigil that combines the letters E, H, I, and K.

This is . . . something. It isn’t much, but it is something.

My phone buzzes. A text from Grayson appears on-screen.

Jade’s getting antsy. You okay up there?

An antsy Jade is a dangerous Jade. I pack her grief box to near perfection, dust bunnies and all. The only artifacts out of place are the aging identification cards, which go straight into my pocket. They are my only chance at tracking down more pills, and thus, they’re worth the risk.

PR-U.

E, H, I, K.

The fate of my humanity hinges on seven disjointed letters.

We’re on our way up.

Grayson’s warning sends a deluge of adrenaline to my blood.

My legs move before my brain’s given them permission to, muscle memory of arabesques carrying me across the space.

I sail over congealed clumps of loungewear, avoiding edges that might ensnare.

Sadly, I’m a long way from the dances that helped me find believable form.

My toe catches on the makeshift bed frame. I fall frown-first onto Jade’s desk.

A sticky film that reeks of citrus holds my cheek to the cherrywood. A few eyelashes lie severed in the shimmering glaze. From beyond them, a newspaper headline glares at me: Flames or Falsities? Mass Disappearances Linked to Local Forest Fire. The issue is nearly twenty-five years old.

I can’t help but regard the withered pages like sacred parchment stolen from the timestream.

It’s been read, highlighted, underlined, and annotated with care uncharacteristic of my sister.

Wedged between a crude cartoon and an advice column, the article reads: Plumes of smoke have been spotted over the southernmost edge of Blackstone Forest. Insisting wildfires to be the cause, local authorities have indefinitely suspended investigation of the area.

However, concerned citizens link the event to a mass vanishing that occurred days prior.

I snatch the paper from its place beside a tipped-over can of cola. It proceeds to explain the sudden loss of contact with dozens of scientists and researchers. Family members were reluctant to speak about them, leading many to believe their silence had been bought.

“Weeks after, the forest started growing like crazy,” a witness admits in inky, grayscale honesty.

“The feds came rushing in. They started buying up property around Blackstone, and then there was a whole barricade. Eventually, the trees stopped growing. I haven’t got a clue why.

The agents hightailed it out in their fancy cars, then started telling people Blackstone had always been that big.

I don’t go up that way anymore. Something’s wrong with that place. ”

Jade has circled the word feds several times. In the same handwriting she’d left on the bottom of my ballet slipper, she’s written, “The EHKI?”

The desire to scour every notebook she’s left beside this newspaper is almost too much to manage. Before I can, the door slams open, and Grayson’s voice arrives like a fire alarm. “Clara?”

There’s no time. I make my way to the foyer with the most convincing sniffle possible. “Sorry. It was just . . . really hard, harder than I thought it would be.”

“My sympathies,” Jade growls. “Now, let’s go. Joey’s waiting for us.”

I sit beside Grayson in the passenger seat of his Hummer, resisting the urge to adjust the cards rattling toward the mouth of my pocket. Jade seethes from the back, her duffel bag in the spot saved for Joey.

“I’ll drop you off before we get to the high school. Unless you’ve changed your mind?” Grayson’s eyes, two moon-kissed pools, go wide and hopeful.

“How far is it, again?” I ask, allowing for the illusion of contemplation. I’m a Clara who’s pondering.

“Eight hours, but we’ll make a pit stop after Blackstone. If you want, I’ll buy you some . . .”

His voice fades into obscurity. They’re headed toward Blackstone Forest. That explains why Jade’s been so willing and well behaved.

Grayson serves as a taxi driver, oblivious to her plan to make their getaway into an investigation.

If our parents were connected to this case, it’s one she’ll never abandon.

If following this lead could get me more pills, I’ll have to be equally relentless. It’s my only chance.

However, if this truly is the end of my supply, I’d rather be nestled in the middle of nowhere when the inevitable comes creeping.

I could slip into oblivion, lost to some pocket of unholy darkness betwixt the sugar maples.

I could dissolve, far away from folks with lives that a sudden, inexplicable monster might disrupt.

“You wouldn’t mind?” Gently, I interrupt his princely rambles.

He lays a warm palm atop my knuckles, and suddenly, this is the safest place in the world.

It’s against every moral I maintain to feel this way, but damn him and the crooked starlight in his smile.

I can’t resist. Here comes that fantasy Grayson just can’t help but induce.

Here comes the wave of seawater and citrus that makes me feel inexplicably, unfathomably . . .

“Never,” he says, and I believe him.

“I wouldn’t be too much trouble?” I am trouble embodied, but when he shakes his head, I believe him, again.

We stop at my apartment to pick up the bag I left by its lonesome.

Joey joins us shortly after, leaving his flock of high school friends waving from the edge of a blacktop basketball court.

Jade colors the start of our journey with an orchestra of complaints.

She makes her displeasure known in every way at her disposal, but I will not be swayed. She needs this trip to mourn the dead.

I need it to maintain what’s left of my life.