Page 38 of The Woods

Quinn stops the podcast. Polly’s snoring softly. He wonders when she fell asleep. Did she hear the part about Justine Gordon not letting her sister-in-law and niece go into the woods at Christmas? Polly was right, the podcast has made him more worried. What’s in those woods that scared Justine Gordon so much? Is his dad in there with it right now?

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2023

Alice

When Panda jumps off her lap, Alice wakes up. Outside on the deck chair, she’s slept on and off through the night, and now she’s stiff and cold. The dog stayed with Alice all night, growling, shifting nervously, her eyes never leaving the woods. Now she’s bounding across the backyard toward the path.

A weak morning sun is slowly rising and a low fog drifts over the ground. Alice unwraps the duvet and stands up on creaking legs. Panda has stopped in the same spot as usual, right at the edge of the woods, and is pacing back and forth. Alice moves toward her, hoping she’s not growling at nothing, hoping she’s sensing Geoff’s return.

There’s a strange silence to everything, as though the entire landscape is holding its breath. The quiet is so deep, Alice can hear the swish of her pant legs through the grass, and her shallow breaths as she hurries across the yard, her body not yet fully awake but working to be. Arriving at the opening to the woods, she’s flooded with disappointment. Panda is down low, growling at nothing. She thought border collies were supposed to be smart.

Alice’s entire body is tensed tight with shivering, from the early-morning cold and the abrupt waking, mostly from the shock of realizing that her husband has been missing in the woods for eight hours now. Hot tears fill her eyes, and a low, quiet moan escapes her. She can feel the panic rising, along with the urge to scream her husband’s name and run headlong into the woods, but that won’t do any good. She’s determined to keep her shit together. She’ll go inside and call the police right now, demand a proper search party.

The image of dozens of people and police dogs combing the woods for her husband causes her breath to catch. How is she here again so soon after Lucy? Terrified that she’s lost another person she loves, she mentally puts together an action plan even though so much is out of her control. Anything to prevent her brain from sliding to horrible scenarios.

Panda suddenly barks and Alice jumps. “Panda!” she scolds. The dog runs away, back to the house, where she frantically scratches at the door to be let in. She’s about to turn and follow when she hears movement just a few feet away.

“Geoff?” she calls out.

“Alice?” Her husband steps out of the woods.

“What happened?” she asks in complete disbelief, so awestruck at his appearance that she doesn’t move, doesn’t hurry to throw her arms around him as she imagined a million times last night that she would, if she could only see him again. “You’ve been in there all night?”

Geoff stops just short of her, shakes his head, looking as awestruck as she feels. “I have no idea,” he says. “The last thing I remember is going into the woods last night to pee and then being on the path just there.” He points to a spot only a few feet into the woods. “And hearing you say my name.”

Alice steps up close to him, putting her hands on his head. “Did you fall and hit your head?” She runs her hands across the front, top, back and sides and feels nothing but his even scalp and soft hair. His clothes look untouched, clean, not covered in the soil of the forest floor, or bloody from fights with wild animals, not a leaf or twig caught in his nest of curls. Not a single scratch on his skin, no dirt under his fingernails.

“Did you sit down and pass out against a tree?” She bends down low, circling his body, pulling at his pants, front and back, looking for signs that he spent the night sitting on the forest floor. Not a single stain or speck of dirt. She peers into his eyes, looking for dilated pupils. “How do you feel?” she asks. “Cold? Hungry? Scared?”

He shakes his head. “I feel. Well. I feel. Amazing.” He laughs. “Alice, I feel fucking amazing.”

Finally, she wraps her arms around him and holds on tight. He smells like the forest, a mixture of earth and wet leaves and pine needles. She starts to cry from confusion, relief, the comedown of an adrenaline-fueled night sleeping outside.

He tightens his grip on her. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “I’m here. Everything is okay.”

She waits for his words and the warmth of his body to sink through her skin and settle the unease that lingers, but that never happens. Staring over his shoulder into the shadowy depths of the woods, the place that held her husband for an entire night and spit him back out, seemingly untouched, she can’t help but wonder.

What the hell happened in there?

Beverley

Something is off about her son-in-law. She grips the mug of coffee that he just made for her, only an hour and a half after emerging from a night alone in the woods, and studies him closely. Firstly, the coffee is actually good. She’s known him for twenty years, and not once has he ever made her a good cup of coffee. Secondly, he’s being especially nice to her daughter, making her a cup of coffee, too, rubbing her back as he stands beside her. Thirdly, he says he doesn’t remember a thing about last night.

He’s showered and Alice has apparently inspected every inch of him and there’s no bump on the head, not a scratch on him. It irritates her how the whole family is acting like Geoff is some war hero returned from battle. He’s a selfish man who got too drunk and wandered off. They’re a dime a dozen as far as she’s concerned.

“You must have been so drunk you blacked out.”

She’s surprised when Geoff nods, instead of his usual defensive protest. “You’re right, Beverley,” he says, one arm slung over Alice’s shoulders, another over Quinn’s. “I was drunk last night. I can’t say whether or not I passed out, but it’s a possibility. And that’s why I’ve decided to lay off the booze for the time being. I need to do better.”

Beverley notices her daughter flinch and wonders why, hoping she’ll remember to ask her later. “Well,” she says, “seems like a night in the woods has done you some good.”

Panda is pacing at the far end of the room, growling intermittently, the way she does at the edge of the woods. “What’s wrong with Panda?” Beverley asks, hoping someone will do something about it.

“I think she’s just spooked from all the excitement,” Quinn answers. “I’ll put her in my room.” Quinn drags the dog out of the kitchen and shuts her in his room. She lets out a few angry barks and then seems to settle.

“Maybe there are extra-strong psilocybin mushrooms in the woods, and you fell into a patch of them, and they got you so high you don’t remember anything,” Polly offers, her eyes lighting up.

“Now, wouldn’t that make for a good story,” Geoff says with a laugh. “Unfortunately, Polly, even if that was what happened, I couldn’t take you back there, because I don’t remember.”