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Lily is quiet, but there’s a change in the way she walks, more mindful, more alert. “You recognize something,” I say. It isn’t a question.
“Yeah,” she says. “I do.”
“Do you think this is where you were?” I ask. She never has a chance to tell me.
“My God,” she says and she stops.
About ten feet away, the grass is discolored. The discoloration is clearly blood. The redness of it is a disturbing divergence from the greenish-brown grass. There looks to be a large amount of it, enough that I swear under my breath. A small smear heads deeper into the woods, though the blood in the grass, like the blood on Lily’s shirt, is still hard to quantify. It may just look like more than I think. Maybe. It’s possible.
Lily and I see the blood at practically the same time, Lily just a millisecond before me. Our feet come to rest a few meters before it. We say nothing at first. We stare down at the blood, Lily’s hand rising to her mouth like she might puke. “You can’t be sick, Lily,” I say, offering her water, because vomit contains DNA. The last thing we want to do is leave any more evidence that she was here.
She takes a tentative sip of the water, her hand shaking on the bottle. I help guide it.
“Are you okay?” I ask, watching as she struggles to swallow.
She nods. “It was here,” she says, as if that much isn’t obvious. She takes another sip of water and this one goes down easier. She can’t bring her eyes back to look at the blood. “I remember. I remember this clearing. This is it.” The clearing is still thick with trees, but there’s a small break in them. Still, the trees stop the sun from getting in. The sunlight on the ground is mottled at best, patchy through the treetops. The land here is more woodchips and dirt than the soft bed of grass I’d imagined when Lily described how Jake pushed her to the ground and how she fell on her hands and knees. No wonder her knees were so torn up.
“The deer, he said, were in there,” Lily says, crouching down and pointing to a place where the trees stand a little further apart and you can see inside, into the forest, like through a peephole. I come to stand beside her. I crouch down like her, following the direction of her finger.
“Did you see them?” I ask, and Lily shakes her head, sad, because we both know there were never any deer here.
“He got close to me,” she says, “like this,” pressing the side of her body into mine. “He wrapped his arm around my waist, like this.” Lily’s hand wraps around me from behind, her cold fingers coming up under the hem of my shirt, touching skin, stroking me somewhere just above the hip. My whole body tenses, not because my wife is touching me, but because some man touched my wife like this.
Lily is talking fast now, like she does when she’s scared. “I could feel my pulse in my neck, Christian. I wanted him to get his hand off me. I wanted to go back, to the main trail, but I didn’t know what to say, how to make that happen. He kept pretending he was looking for the deer, and I thought that if I just played along, he’d eventually give up on looking for the deer, and then we could go back.”
A noise from deep in the woods startles us. Lily flinches. She jerks, backing away from the trees, grabbing onto my arm to feel protected. Her fingernails leave little crescent moons in my skin.
I press a finger to my lips to keep her quiet. I wiggle my arm free, and then I step closer to the woods, gazing deeper inside, acutely aware that, though we found blood, we found no body.
The trees are the kind with white trunks and bark that flakes off. They stand in a line like soldiers. The trunks are even, equidistant from one another like a man’s legs. There is no end to the number of trees. I stare into them so long that they become an optical illusion. It becomes almost impossible to tell if the trees are moving, if they’re coming closer, or if they’re rooted to the earth.
The noise—like the rustle of leaves, the crackle of footsteps—gets closer.
Lily whimpers. The sound of it is a scared puppy.
The leaves are still thick on the trees. The trees themselves are thick, wide enough for a person to hide behind. It’s dark and shadowy deep in the woods. I have no idea how far we’ve walked away from the main trail. Maybe a quarter mile. Our car is even further. I think of Lily tearing away from this place and how desperate and terrified she must have felt running back through these woods alone and away from Jake.
I part the boughs of the trees with my hands. I take a step deeper into the woods. Branches reach out, scratching at my arms. The noise gets closer and closer until it’s upon us, and yet I still can’t see what it is.
“Christian,” Lily moans.
And then, suddenly, a chipmunk beetles out from the trees. It crosses between us. I jerk back and almost step on it. “Shit,” I say, exhaling loudly. Lily’s hand is pressed to her mouth, holding back a scream. It takes a second to catch my breath. I let go of the trees and fall back. “Fuck. It’s okay,” I say to Lily. She’s gone white. I go to her. I wrap my arms around her and pull her into me, feeling the beating of her heart against my chest. “It’s nothing, just a stupid chipmunk.”
What did we think was going to happen?
“Christian?” Lily asks when she catches her breath.
“What?”
“Where do you think he is?” she asks.
I release her so that I can see her face. “Honestly? I think he left. I think he’s fine.”
“But the blood,” she says.
“It’s not that much. It’s deceptive. It looks like more than there is. You’ve donated blood before,” I remind her. “They fill a whole bag with it. You can lose a lot of blood and still survive.”
I try to decide if the blood on the ground was more than a blood bag’s worth. I don’t honestly know.
