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Authors: David Jack Bell

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BOOK: The Girl in the Woods
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CHAPTER FIVE
Diana's mother looked semi-conscious, her eyes half-open, the blankets tucked underneath her armpits as though she were imprisoned in the bed. The curtain had been pulled between the two halves of the room, blocking Diana's view of her mom's roommate, Mrs. Platcher, eighty-eight years old and convinced that she had to catch a school bus every morning, prone to wander out of the building in her nightgown looking for the ride that never came.
The TV played low. A cable newscaster droned on and on, even though Mrs. Platcher was asleep as well. Diana looked out the window. There was nothing to see. It was full dark now, and the window reflected back the pale light of the bedside lamp, the reflection of Diana's face an isolated oval in the black pane. Visiting hours were almost over, and at any moment, Diana expected an efficient-looking nurse to come by and shoo her away. Diana wasn't even sure why she had stayed since her mom was out of it and she still had the long drive back to New Cambridge. Guilt again, she supposed, but there was more to it than that. She actually wanted to talk to her mother, who now stirred a little, muttered something in her sleep.
Diana leaned forward. "Mom?" She waited. "Mom, are you awake?"
Her mom muttered again, turned her head a little. "Diana?"
"Yeah, Mom."
Her eyes came open more. She licked her lips. "Is that you, honey?"
"It's me, Mom. Diana."
"How long have you been here?"
"Not long." Diana knew her mom would have no memory of the incident at the art show, no awareness that they had had a very public dust-up. It was all gone, lost in the shadows. "I want to ask you something."
"Tired..."
"I know. You can go to sleep in a minute. Do you know a woman named Kay Todd?"
Her mom remained silent for a long moment, and Diana thought she had drifted away, but then her mother opened her cracked lips. "Who?"
"Kay Todd. Do you know her?"
"I don't know anyone by that name, honey." She closed her eyes all the way. "You should go home. It's late...go home."
Music swelled on the newscast, the cue for the audience that either something dramatic was happening or an important commercial was about to play. Diana turned to the window and looked at the darkness. Thoughts of the long drive home and the return to the empty apartment didn't appeal to Diana. Something about the hospital room, the rhythmic breathing of her mother, and even the TV's strange voices brought Diana a sense of comfort, a return to childhood nights huddled against her mother, the rest of the world temporarily held at bay.
She leaned back against her chair, closed her eyes, blocked out the day's events, and tried to convince herself, really convince herself, that just for those moments and in that place she was as safe as she could be.
* * *
Diana woke in the half-light. She felt cold, and wrapped her arms tighter against her body, hoping to generate warmth. But the movement only aggravated the pain in her neck, the result of spending hours in the uncomfortable chair beside her mother's bed.
Diana groaned and stretched. She had to pee.
"I was just about to get you a blanket."
It took a moment to locate the source of the voice. The sun wasn't fully up, and the light in the room was still hazy and indistinct. Diana's eyes finally settled on the nurse standing on the opposite side of her mother's bed, a tall black woman who was writing something in her mother's chart.
Diana sat up. "I must have fallen asleep."
"It's okay," the nurse said. "We're not supposed to have sleepover guests, but I figured it's not hurting anything to let someone stay close to their mom all night."
"Thank you." Diana worked her neck one way and then the other, trying to get the kinks out. "Is she okay? Did she have a good night?"
"She always has a good night," the nurse said. "The stuff they give them sends them off to Never-land."
"I brought her candy bars," Diana said.
The nurse smiled. "I found them, honey. I put them in the drawer at the nurse's station. She'll be happy to have them when she wakes up."
Diana stood up and moved to her mother's bed. She rubbed her mother's exposed forearm and squeezed her hand. "I'll be on my way."
"How did
you
sleep?" the nurse said.
"Pretty well for being in a chair." The nurse raised her eyebrows, and only then did the images from her dreams come back in tatters and fragments. Rachel's face...Rachel trying to speak...Kay Todd and her cigarettes. "Why do you ask?"
The nurse raised her eyebrows again. "You call that thrashing and moaning 'pretty well'," she said. "I call it having more trouble than just sleeping in a chair."
* * *
On the drive home, the images from her dreams pecked at Diana's subconscious. They didn't step into the open, didn't crystallize into anything three-dimensional that she could remember or analyze. Instead, the images nuzzled and scratched, almost as though they were toying with her, trying to provoke her into some response, although Diana couldn't imagine what that response might be besides unease or disquiet.
She made sure she kept her eyes on the road. The sun was climbing the sky, the horizon red. The flat farmland stretched away into the distance, and near the tree lines, low-lying fog gathered, wispy as spirits, something ghostly that remained from the night before. Like her dreams. During the night, she had seen the face of a woman. From what she could remember, it didn't look like Rachel, but with the strangeness and certainty of dream logic, she knew that it was her sister. The dream image showed Rachel not as the skinny, swaggering fifteen-year-old who had disappeared from her life, but rather as an adult, a fully-grown, mature woman, one whom Diana had never seen before.
And this woman opened her mouth, and she spoke to Diana in the dream.
But no sound came out. Nothing. A split second of moving, noiseless lips, and then she was gone, lost to the night and the darkness.
Diana shuddered, turned the heat up higher against the morning chill.
Which was worse?
she wondered.
The dreams that came during sleep or the visions that came when she was awake?
She couldn't formulate a clear answer.
It had been at least a year since she had dreamed of Rachel. In the long days and weeks after Rachel's disappearance, Diana dreamed of her sister nearly every night. She saw her face, pleading for help. She saw a grave—her sister's grave—covered with freshly turned earth. But the dreams had faded along with any hope she had of ever finding her sister alive. Her mother declined, and any spare energy that Diana had to give to someone else went to the care and eventual placement of her mother in Vienna Woods.
Kay Todd had brought all of that back.
Diana had dreamed about her, too. And she remembered the dreams about Kay Todd with much more clarity. She saw her weathered, leathery face, her stumpy teeth, and in the dreams—and even awake—the face seemed like a threatening, grinning mask, and in the car, alone, in the new light of the day, Diana felt an icy touch climb up her spine, and she checked the rearview mirror to make sure she was alone and not being watched by that very same face.
But not only was the car empty so early in the morning, the road was empty, too, and Diana traveled the open distance between Leesburg and New Cambridge like someone walking down a dark street at night, listening for footsteps or pursuit. She accelerated, hoping to get back to town even faster.
She couldn't know anything, could she?
Diana thought.
She's just fucking with me, right?
The entire ride home Diana tried but could never quite convince herself of the fact that Kay Todd was just another crazy, just another lonely and disturbed voice crying out in the wilderness of the world.
CHAPTER SIX
When Diana turned the key and stepped into her small apartment, it felt like she hadn't been home in months, even though she had last walked out the door about sixteen hours earlier, out the door and into the meeting with Kay Todd. But the apartment felt strange when she entered. The blinds were drawn, the lights off, and her shabby furniture and the scattered belongings around the room looked as though they were someone else's property. She moved quickly through the room, flipping on lamps and overhead lights.
She went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. She felt greasy from having slept in her clothes. While the water warmed—always a long process—Diana checked herself in the mirror. She thought she looked thinner and likely older than her twenty-four years. Her eyes were a little red around the edges, and her skin looked blotchy and pale.
Sleeping in a mental hospital chair will do that to you.
She quickly brushed her hair, untangling the knots, then shed her clothes and climbed into the shower. The water felt therapeutic. She took her time—a luxury she could afford ever since she quit her job—and let the water push and press against her body, washing away all remnants of Vienna Woods, the smell of decay, the closed-in, stuffy atmosphere.
The feel of her mother's palm against her face in the day room.
Diana closed her eyes tight, let the water do its work. First Kay Todd with the cigarettes, then her mother with the slap. It hadn't been a good day for dealing with mother-types. But she couldn't remember the last good day she'd had for dealing with her mother. When would that have been? Before Rachel disappeared? Before Dad left?
Diana stopped the water and stepped out into the steamy bathroom, toweling off and then wearing a different towel around her body as she moved through the apartment. It was cool outside of the bathroom, and her skin prickled into gooseflesh as she walked to the bedroom where she kept her laptop. She logged on, called up the web browser and clicked on her bookmarks bar.
There was no shortage of sites devoted to missing persons on the internet. There were non-profits run by organizations, sites run by parents turned advocates, and sites devoted to individuals who had disappeared or run away, usually maintained by a family member or friend and full of heartfelt pleas and grainy snapshots. Diana went to one of the national missing persons clearinghouses and typed in the name "Margaret Todd." Nothing came back, so she tried "Margie Todd." Again nothing, which didn't really surprise her. Diana had learned that people who disappeared prior to the internet age were much less likely to show up on any of the big missing persons sites. Someone had to post the information, and in the case of Margie Todd, that burden would have fallen on Kay. Diana didn't take her to be much of an internet user.
Diana went back to the search feature and typed Rachel's name. By this time, Diana had seen the details of her sister's profile so many times that she knew them by heart, right down to the pathetic little narrative—one paragraph long—that gave the details of the night Rachel disappeared:
Fifteen-year-old Rachel Janet Greene left her house sometime between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. on the morning of August 22nd, 2004. She had been at a party the night before and had been involved in an altercation with another girl. A friend dropped Rachel at her house at approximately 1:30 am. Rachel was seen by her older sister at this time. In the morning, when her family went into Rachel's room to check on her, she was gone. A neighbor reported seeing Rachel walking away from the house some time during the night, but couldn't be certain of the time. It is not clear whether Rachel Greene met with foul play or disappeared of her own accord. Her family has not heard from her since that night.
Diana stared at the photo of Rachel that appeared on the screen. It was a high school portrait, taken during Rachel's freshman year, about a year before she disappeared. She looked wide-eyed and somewhat innocent, her hair straight and past her shoulders, her teeth slightly crooked since they couldn't afford braces. Diana ran her tongue over her own teeth, which were even worse than her sister's.
The photo and the narrative told so little of the story. They didn't reveal the depths of her sister's unhappiness and rebellion, the volume of the fights she'd had with her mother and Diana. They didn't explain the long nights waiting and pacing, the nights in bed staring at the ceiling, the gap left in the center of their lives that seemed to expand like a black hole, gobbling up large chunks of matter and nearly swallowing her mother whole. And Diana knew that if Rachel's entry didn't reveal the whole story of her life and disappearance—and how could it?—then none of the thousands of missing persons entries did.
BOOK: The Girl in the Woods
2.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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