My Throat an Open Grave, page 2
“You should’ve called if you were running late.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, going to the kitchen and searching for formula. There’s not much left in the tin, but it’s not like I can go out and get more—the small store in town is a thirty-minute walk, and I’m not putting Owen in a stroller and dragging him down the winding, sidewalk-less road. I’m too paranoid for that. If anything happens to Owen on my watch, Mom will kill me. “We’re low on formula,” I call to her.
“Right, because I don’t have eyes,” she says. “I hope your brother grows up to be just as smart as you.”
I wince, but let it go. It’s not worth pushing, not worth fighting. Mom brushes past me in her blue skirt and white uniform blouse. I watch her back as she disappears down the hallway to Owen’s room. While she struggles to get him to sleep, I gather up the discarded bottles from the living room and kitchen and wash them one by one. She leaves Owen’s door cracked when she comes back out.
“I’ll be home late,” she says quietly. “Need to stay to close.”
“No worries.”
“Make sure he sleeps.”
“I will.”
“And eats.”
“Of course.”
“And don’t you dare go out or have anyone over,” she says, pulling on her shoes. “I don’t have time to clean up after you, Leah.”
“Right.”
With that, she’s out the door, and I hear her noisy, old Toyota start up in the drive. I stare straight ahead at the window over the sink, the window that faces out over the river, out at the wood. I take deep breaths. I listen. After I feel like my heart is no longer self-destructing, I get started on the dishes.
Two
My brother Owen is nine months old. He was born in December, the night before the shortest day of the year, coming into the world with a full head of hair and ice-blue eyes and a voice he hasn’t stopped using since. An hour after I get home, when I’ve finished the dishes and I’m halfway through folding onesies and burping cloths and matching up tiny socks, he shouts from his room.
I swallow hard. But unlike a grown person, this call cannot be denied.
I go in and peer into his crib. He’s squalling, his little face red and wrinkled, his hands mashed into fists that he waves into the air. I take a deep breath—I don’t know what to do with him, how to hold him, how to calm him, even though he’s alone with me just as much as he is with Mom, and far more than he is with Dad. But I grit my teeth, gather my nerves, and reach into the crib. He’s heavy, heavy and squirmy and hot. He does not go easily against my shoulder, but instead scratches at my face and pounds on my shoulder with his tiny hands and nails.
“I know, I know,” I murmur against his sweaty head. “I wouldn’t wake up either, if I didn’t have to.”
He does not listen to me, nor understand. He just yells and yells and yells.
I do everything I can think of: stroke his hair and change his diaper, feed him half a bottle, rock him in the chair in the corner of the living room, even though I get queasy with the press of his warm skin against mine. But nothing happens. It’s as if he knows I’m not Mom, knows I have no idea about any of this. Sometimes, in the dark of the night, when I’m in my room next to his and he’s screaming like this, I wonder if he hates me even though he’s not old enough to feel anything like hatred. I wonder if he’ll grow up scowling at me, if he’ll speak to me like Mom does, with derision and cruelty, as soon as he learns how to walk.
“I’m trying,” I say to no one.
Soon enough, I can’t take it. I put him in his Pack ’n Play in the corner of the room where he sits and screams and yells. Mom has taken him to the doctor so many times, even though we don’t have the insurance to pay for visits like that—but if the baby needs something, Mom makes whatever sacrifices she needs to. I guess that’s what it is to be a good mother.
But there’s nothing wrong with him. Maybe he just hates me,hates us, hates the fact that we brought him into this world and kept him.
I try and read a book, an old, cozy mystery from the collection Grammy left me when she died, but it’s impossible. I even try to go through some of my English book, or watch a cooking show, but nothing can drown him out. I go to the kitchen and fix another bottle.
When I look up, I swear I catch a flash of amber across the river, just from the edge of the trees. It’s probably a deer, or a fox, or even a charm hanging from a tree. It’s probably not him, the Lord of the Wood, the name they whisper in town with even more reverence and fear than the name of God.
It’s defiance alone that keeps me at the window, staring out with a glare that I hope would frighten even a deity away. He’s taken from Winston many times before, but I can’t find it within myself to care. The Lord has never hurt nor helped me, so I don’t have the time to spare worrying about him.
If he’s not real, he can’t—
The particle board underside of the counter gives when I dig my nails in, stopping the thought in its tracks. I wish I had some name, some religion that I believed could save me. I wish I could look to the stars and whisper the name of my own personal god and be whisked away somewhere new, somewhere that didn’t hurt so much.
But I can’t, and it doesn’t matter if the LoW exists if he only lurks in the forest and lives on in bad memories and folklore, and in the real world, Owen is still crying. He takes his bottle as reluctantly as he does anything else, and by the time the sky turns red with the light of the dying sun, he is fussily closing his eyes in that sleepy way that signals bedtime.
I bathe him and dress him, touching him always but as little as possible. I dress him in a brown sleep sack with little bear ears, even though one ear is hanging by a thread. When he’s cuter, it’s easier to handle him.
He starts crying again in earnest the second I lay him down. But now, I can deal with it—we have a routine, one full hour of the day when I can understand him, when he can’t hate me with his scrunched face and tiny punching fists. I open the window to let in the cool air and settle in front of the little electric keyboard piano.
This room used to be mine, before I moved into the one next to it, barely bigger than a closet. There was no space for my keyboard, so it lived here, and I was practicing very quietly one night when Owen was three months old, and he just went quiet behind me—then, I realized how easily he fell asleep, with the sound of me playing. After that, it became a ritual, the only thing I could conclusively get to work—but only in the hours when night is falling, only in the dim haze of twilight.
I turn the volume down and begin to play. Immediately, Owen quiets, his cries turning to small squeaks, then eventually, to silence.
I run through scales, through arpeggios, through a nocturne that I knew fully once. I started playing piano when I was in kindergarten, back when Dad had a job at the mill before it shut down for good. Before he took the trucking job that kept him from home for weeks on end, with only a scant word between assignments.
I play even when I’m sure Owen’s asleep. I used to sing, too, before Owen was born. Look up chords to any song I heard on the radio, figure it all out, play like it was the only thing that could get me out of Winston. And maybe it could—I was good. But I don’t sing anymore. I’m too tired.
These hours, when Owen is finally asleep and I can let go of the feeling that he hates me, when we can coexist, are my favorites. I can play piano, the muscle memory coming back with every chord, until it’s all a wash of music. Until everything else fades away.
Sometimes, I play until Mom comes home and she catches me here and scolds me. She thinks I’ll wake the baby up. But truthfully, I think my playing is the only thing that keeps him sleeping most nights.
Not tonight. My heart feels odd and heavy. I think again about what I talked about with Jess at the riverside. She’d said Cassie Lewis was out with Trent McCoy, just as casually as it was nothing, and I’d let it slip by as if it was nothing. But I remember when I was the one out with Trent.
It started with a flirtation over winter break a few years back, going to his basketball games with his jersey number written on my cheek in black face paint. That was all it should’ve been—a flirtation, and maybe a kiss at a party. It shouldn’t have extended to the river, to his car. When I close my eyes, I can recall how his leather seats smelled of peppermint.
I don’t want to remember any more. Anything else is jagged, too much, a reminder that Trent cast me off just like everyone else. I was just a girl whom he could waste his time on before moving on to the next.
I leave off playing piano. There’s no point—Owen is asleep. My work is done.
Like one of the Lord of the Wood’s wraiths, I haunt the house. Unlike the wraiths, I’m productive, switching out laundry and vacuuming floors, cleaning the bathroom until it’s up to Mom’s standards. Only then do I let myself curl up on the couch and half-heartedly look through my history homework. But shock of all shocks, even that can’t hold my attention. I lie back on the couch, staring up at the water-stained ceiling, thinking of nothing. Of everything.
Jess asked if I wanted to go to homecoming. Maybe I do—but I can’t afford a dress and I have nothing nice enough and no one to go with. I don’t have to go with anyone either, but if Jess is taking a date, then … well, I’ve sworn off dating, so there is no then. It’s nice to pretend, though. To imagine it. Dressing up,going out, Jess’s arm linked in mine. Laughing, like we used to.
I don’t realize I’ve fallen asleep until I jolt awake, heart pounding. I must’ve been having some nightmare that I don’t remember—but no. There’s a crackling noise coming from down the hall, from where the bedrooms are. If I focus, it sounds like fire.
I leap up and tear down the hall. My mouth is full of bile, my heart pounding in my throat, and I can’t stop hearing the crackling, smelling smoke in the air. I burst through Owen’s door—
And nothing is wrong. There’s no fire. The crackling has stopped. At least, that’s what I think until I turn on the light and peer over the edge of the crib, and then I’m screaming before I even know what’s happening.
There’s a bundle of sticks in the place where Owen slept only an hour ago. They’re tied together with white ribbon, laying in the middle of the baby mattress. There’s a scattering of petals over them, red and white, unfamiliar.
Hideously, in a moment that I cannot take back nor deny, the first thing I feel is a terrible rush of relief. Like his whole life has been a dream.
But that is an irrational reaction, one that I would regret if I wasn’t so deeply rotten—and I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for that. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel as guilty about the relief as I should.
When I press my hand to the place where Owen slept, it’s still warm. That detail is enough to call me back: because Owen is not here and he was only minutes ago, and I spring into action. Owen has to be here.
The Lord.
I turn the mattress over, look everywhere in the room, under the bed and down the hall but I know the truth: He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone.
The Lord has come.
He takes babies from our homes in Winston, leaving behind a changeling of sticks or ice. And though I haven’t put any trust in God since I was fifteen, I whisper prayer after prayer under my breath as I tear our tiny home apart. It’s a lesson in futility—even if I didn’t believe in the Lord of the Wood, I’d know that—but I have to do it. I have to do something.
There’s no sign of Owen in the house, so I take my flashlight and search the perimeter outside. His window is wide open, wider than how I left it, but that only deepens the fear in my stomach.
Above his window, on the siding of our house, there’s a dark handprint marring the white. I lean close enough to see the outline of where it drips, to note that it is still wet. I can’t tell if it’s blood or juice or paint—but in the growing darkness, it is red-tinged black.
Distantly, past the river, in the woods, I hear the high-pitched sound of a woman’s laugh.
A few feet from Owen’s open window, a bit of brown fabric is caught on the grass. I stoop down and turn it over and over in my hands. It’s the bear ear from his onesie, the thread torn as if it was left here to taunt me.
Owen is gone.
Three
When Mom comes home, I’m still out in the field between our house and the river, scouring the grass for any sign of him, hoping desperately I’m wrong. But there’s a bloody handprint above Owen’s open window, still wet, and I know that I can’t be.
“Leah?” she shouts from the drive, barely illuminated by the dim bulb of the porch light. “What are you doing?”
I look at her, and the words flee from my mouth. Oddly, for a flash of a moment, I’m sure she’s going to think that I did this.
But Mom grew up here. She’s the one who told me the stories of the Lord of the Wood in the first place. Other towns might have scares and spooks and ghosts that haunt the bridges and long stretches of empty road, but here in Winston, we have the Lord. Always have, always will.
Some say he’s a faerie that snatches babies from their cribs to crunch their bones. Others think he’s a ghost, too—maybe a father who lost a child, or maybe an immortal murderer, hunkered in the wood. And of course there are the holdovers from the panic that don’t think there’s just one Lord of the Wood, but a whole slew of them, a cult out there primed for devil worship.
It doesn’t matter what or who he is, or how he and his followers have come to be. What matters is that he takes. Every few years, just when there’s a lull of peace, just when people get too comfortable, he comes back again and takes one of our own.
This time, he’s opened his terrible claws and slipped through the window and taken what is mine.
When Mom gets close enough to see me, to see the wind whipping the sheer curtains in Owen’s open window and the bloody handprint on the dirty siding of our house, her face twists into a mask of rage.
She doesn’t say anything, not in words. The cry that comes from her mouth is visceral, horrible, as she throws herself toward the window. She leans in, her body half-enveloped in shadows, tangled in the curtains.
Mom turns to me, and I cannot look at her. I only wince when she gets close and grabs me, when her nails dig into my cheek. “You,” she hisses, her breathing unsteady and raw with despair. “You fucking let him go, Leah. How could you do this? To your brother? To me?”
“I didn’t know,” I insist. “I didn’t hear—I didn’t see—”
She pulls away, jerking my chin hard. She doesn’t feel like my mother anymore—in her eyes is something unknowable, a dark pit of grief that I cannot comprehend. I want so badly, in this moment, to be someone else.
“You’ll pay for this,” she says.
Please, I want to beg, grab her hands, fall to my knees, and bury my face in her skirt like I used to when I was a scared child. Don’t blame me. Don’t make me do this. Don’t make this burden mine.
“Mom—” I plead, grasping at her hand. She pulls it away, quick and final, and for just a moment, I see her for who she was before Owen was born.
“You knew the risks,” she says, looking out toward the dark, snaking river and the wood beyond. I wonder if he’s watching us, the Lord who takes without warning, who ruins us all in the end. “You know what I’ve gotta do,” she says, her voice even softer.
I nod, vicious tears clawing at my throat. I refuse to cry. I will not be weak, standing before her, understanding the weight of what she’s about to sacrifice.
“Please don’t,” I say, but my voice carries no weight. “I can find him. I can fix this.”
I wish I could see the part of her that was a girl, growing up in the shadow of this town, before she let it decide to own her. Consecrated in the waters of the church in the watchful gaze of the Lord of the Wood’s domain, in this place where the forest takes more than it ever gives back.
“Of course you’ll fix it. You’ll have no choice,” she says. “But you’ll have to do it right.”
Mom is up the rest of the night, making calls. I roll into fetal position in my threadbare nightgown on my twin bed, staring out at the moon through the window.
Mom said I should bathe and pray, offering my sins up. She knows what’s going to happen tomorrow when dawn breaks, and I guess I do too. Not the details, not yet; but the general idea of it has been scolded into me since I was old enough to know what rules I was never permitted to break.
If the Lord of the Wood keeps Owen, his soul is lost to us. He’ll die out there. They’ll sacrifice him, or eat him, or keep him among their cult—whatever they do, we’re not getting Owen back.
But I lost him, and I have some odd sense of power here. As long as I act quickly, according to the rules of Winston, I can go appeal to the Lord of the Wood. Get him to grant us mercy, if that’s possible.
Except, I don’t know if it is possible—no one does. Every girl who’s been sent to bargain has never been seen again.
I remember her. The last girl. The last time the terrible maw of the wood opened; the last time the jaws of the Lord gnashed down on a girl that was ours.
The only time I was old enough to remember, it was with Maria Sinclair and her baby. It was a hot summer night, hotter than this one, and she’d gone to bed with the baby next to her after drinking a bit too much whiskey. When she woke, she found she was clutching a half-melted hunk of ice to her breast. Something about the story never struck me right—perhaps it was because Jess knew Maria from dance, and Jess swore Maria wasn’t that type of girl; perhaps it was because Maria always seemed too nice to catch the eye of someone like the Lord.
After Maria was gone for a year, the rest of the Sinclairs left town.
I wasn’t old enough, that time, to go to the church when dawn broke. Just shy of thirteen, I wasn’t allowed to see the truth of it. I don’t know what waits for me, what they’ll say or do, or how they’ll send me away.
What I do know is that Maria Sinclair and her baby were never seen again. Sometimes, when I go to a party with Jess at the Grady’s or the Tate’s or the Pingo’s, when the night is dark and the fire is crackling down to embers, someone claims that they’ve seen her ghost.
“I’m sorry,” I say, going to the kitchen and searching for formula. There’s not much left in the tin, but it’s not like I can go out and get more—the small store in town is a thirty-minute walk, and I’m not putting Owen in a stroller and dragging him down the winding, sidewalk-less road. I’m too paranoid for that. If anything happens to Owen on my watch, Mom will kill me. “We’re low on formula,” I call to her.
“Right, because I don’t have eyes,” she says. “I hope your brother grows up to be just as smart as you.”
I wince, but let it go. It’s not worth pushing, not worth fighting. Mom brushes past me in her blue skirt and white uniform blouse. I watch her back as she disappears down the hallway to Owen’s room. While she struggles to get him to sleep, I gather up the discarded bottles from the living room and kitchen and wash them one by one. She leaves Owen’s door cracked when she comes back out.
“I’ll be home late,” she says quietly. “Need to stay to close.”
“No worries.”
“Make sure he sleeps.”
“I will.”
“And eats.”
“Of course.”
“And don’t you dare go out or have anyone over,” she says, pulling on her shoes. “I don’t have time to clean up after you, Leah.”
“Right.”
With that, she’s out the door, and I hear her noisy, old Toyota start up in the drive. I stare straight ahead at the window over the sink, the window that faces out over the river, out at the wood. I take deep breaths. I listen. After I feel like my heart is no longer self-destructing, I get started on the dishes.
Two
My brother Owen is nine months old. He was born in December, the night before the shortest day of the year, coming into the world with a full head of hair and ice-blue eyes and a voice he hasn’t stopped using since. An hour after I get home, when I’ve finished the dishes and I’m halfway through folding onesies and burping cloths and matching up tiny socks, he shouts from his room.
I swallow hard. But unlike a grown person, this call cannot be denied.
I go in and peer into his crib. He’s squalling, his little face red and wrinkled, his hands mashed into fists that he waves into the air. I take a deep breath—I don’t know what to do with him, how to hold him, how to calm him, even though he’s alone with me just as much as he is with Mom, and far more than he is with Dad. But I grit my teeth, gather my nerves, and reach into the crib. He’s heavy, heavy and squirmy and hot. He does not go easily against my shoulder, but instead scratches at my face and pounds on my shoulder with his tiny hands and nails.
“I know, I know,” I murmur against his sweaty head. “I wouldn’t wake up either, if I didn’t have to.”
He does not listen to me, nor understand. He just yells and yells and yells.
I do everything I can think of: stroke his hair and change his diaper, feed him half a bottle, rock him in the chair in the corner of the living room, even though I get queasy with the press of his warm skin against mine. But nothing happens. It’s as if he knows I’m not Mom, knows I have no idea about any of this. Sometimes, in the dark of the night, when I’m in my room next to his and he’s screaming like this, I wonder if he hates me even though he’s not old enough to feel anything like hatred. I wonder if he’ll grow up scowling at me, if he’ll speak to me like Mom does, with derision and cruelty, as soon as he learns how to walk.
“I’m trying,” I say to no one.
Soon enough, I can’t take it. I put him in his Pack ’n Play in the corner of the room where he sits and screams and yells. Mom has taken him to the doctor so many times, even though we don’t have the insurance to pay for visits like that—but if the baby needs something, Mom makes whatever sacrifices she needs to. I guess that’s what it is to be a good mother.
But there’s nothing wrong with him. Maybe he just hates me,hates us, hates the fact that we brought him into this world and kept him.
I try and read a book, an old, cozy mystery from the collection Grammy left me when she died, but it’s impossible. I even try to go through some of my English book, or watch a cooking show, but nothing can drown him out. I go to the kitchen and fix another bottle.
When I look up, I swear I catch a flash of amber across the river, just from the edge of the trees. It’s probably a deer, or a fox, or even a charm hanging from a tree. It’s probably not him, the Lord of the Wood, the name they whisper in town with even more reverence and fear than the name of God.
It’s defiance alone that keeps me at the window, staring out with a glare that I hope would frighten even a deity away. He’s taken from Winston many times before, but I can’t find it within myself to care. The Lord has never hurt nor helped me, so I don’t have the time to spare worrying about him.
If he’s not real, he can’t—
The particle board underside of the counter gives when I dig my nails in, stopping the thought in its tracks. I wish I had some name, some religion that I believed could save me. I wish I could look to the stars and whisper the name of my own personal god and be whisked away somewhere new, somewhere that didn’t hurt so much.
But I can’t, and it doesn’t matter if the LoW exists if he only lurks in the forest and lives on in bad memories and folklore, and in the real world, Owen is still crying. He takes his bottle as reluctantly as he does anything else, and by the time the sky turns red with the light of the dying sun, he is fussily closing his eyes in that sleepy way that signals bedtime.
I bathe him and dress him, touching him always but as little as possible. I dress him in a brown sleep sack with little bear ears, even though one ear is hanging by a thread. When he’s cuter, it’s easier to handle him.
He starts crying again in earnest the second I lay him down. But now, I can deal with it—we have a routine, one full hour of the day when I can understand him, when he can’t hate me with his scrunched face and tiny punching fists. I open the window to let in the cool air and settle in front of the little electric keyboard piano.
This room used to be mine, before I moved into the one next to it, barely bigger than a closet. There was no space for my keyboard, so it lived here, and I was practicing very quietly one night when Owen was three months old, and he just went quiet behind me—then, I realized how easily he fell asleep, with the sound of me playing. After that, it became a ritual, the only thing I could conclusively get to work—but only in the hours when night is falling, only in the dim haze of twilight.
I turn the volume down and begin to play. Immediately, Owen quiets, his cries turning to small squeaks, then eventually, to silence.
I run through scales, through arpeggios, through a nocturne that I knew fully once. I started playing piano when I was in kindergarten, back when Dad had a job at the mill before it shut down for good. Before he took the trucking job that kept him from home for weeks on end, with only a scant word between assignments.
I play even when I’m sure Owen’s asleep. I used to sing, too, before Owen was born. Look up chords to any song I heard on the radio, figure it all out, play like it was the only thing that could get me out of Winston. And maybe it could—I was good. But I don’t sing anymore. I’m too tired.
These hours, when Owen is finally asleep and I can let go of the feeling that he hates me, when we can coexist, are my favorites. I can play piano, the muscle memory coming back with every chord, until it’s all a wash of music. Until everything else fades away.
Sometimes, I play until Mom comes home and she catches me here and scolds me. She thinks I’ll wake the baby up. But truthfully, I think my playing is the only thing that keeps him sleeping most nights.
Not tonight. My heart feels odd and heavy. I think again about what I talked about with Jess at the riverside. She’d said Cassie Lewis was out with Trent McCoy, just as casually as it was nothing, and I’d let it slip by as if it was nothing. But I remember when I was the one out with Trent.
It started with a flirtation over winter break a few years back, going to his basketball games with his jersey number written on my cheek in black face paint. That was all it should’ve been—a flirtation, and maybe a kiss at a party. It shouldn’t have extended to the river, to his car. When I close my eyes, I can recall how his leather seats smelled of peppermint.
I don’t want to remember any more. Anything else is jagged, too much, a reminder that Trent cast me off just like everyone else. I was just a girl whom he could waste his time on before moving on to the next.
I leave off playing piano. There’s no point—Owen is asleep. My work is done.
Like one of the Lord of the Wood’s wraiths, I haunt the house. Unlike the wraiths, I’m productive, switching out laundry and vacuuming floors, cleaning the bathroom until it’s up to Mom’s standards. Only then do I let myself curl up on the couch and half-heartedly look through my history homework. But shock of all shocks, even that can’t hold my attention. I lie back on the couch, staring up at the water-stained ceiling, thinking of nothing. Of everything.
Jess asked if I wanted to go to homecoming. Maybe I do—but I can’t afford a dress and I have nothing nice enough and no one to go with. I don’t have to go with anyone either, but if Jess is taking a date, then … well, I’ve sworn off dating, so there is no then. It’s nice to pretend, though. To imagine it. Dressing up,going out, Jess’s arm linked in mine. Laughing, like we used to.
I don’t realize I’ve fallen asleep until I jolt awake, heart pounding. I must’ve been having some nightmare that I don’t remember—but no. There’s a crackling noise coming from down the hall, from where the bedrooms are. If I focus, it sounds like fire.
I leap up and tear down the hall. My mouth is full of bile, my heart pounding in my throat, and I can’t stop hearing the crackling, smelling smoke in the air. I burst through Owen’s door—
And nothing is wrong. There’s no fire. The crackling has stopped. At least, that’s what I think until I turn on the light and peer over the edge of the crib, and then I’m screaming before I even know what’s happening.
There’s a bundle of sticks in the place where Owen slept only an hour ago. They’re tied together with white ribbon, laying in the middle of the baby mattress. There’s a scattering of petals over them, red and white, unfamiliar.
Hideously, in a moment that I cannot take back nor deny, the first thing I feel is a terrible rush of relief. Like his whole life has been a dream.
But that is an irrational reaction, one that I would regret if I wasn’t so deeply rotten—and I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself for that. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel as guilty about the relief as I should.
When I press my hand to the place where Owen slept, it’s still warm. That detail is enough to call me back: because Owen is not here and he was only minutes ago, and I spring into action. Owen has to be here.
The Lord.
I turn the mattress over, look everywhere in the room, under the bed and down the hall but I know the truth: He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone.
The Lord has come.
He takes babies from our homes in Winston, leaving behind a changeling of sticks or ice. And though I haven’t put any trust in God since I was fifteen, I whisper prayer after prayer under my breath as I tear our tiny home apart. It’s a lesson in futility—even if I didn’t believe in the Lord of the Wood, I’d know that—but I have to do it. I have to do something.
There’s no sign of Owen in the house, so I take my flashlight and search the perimeter outside. His window is wide open, wider than how I left it, but that only deepens the fear in my stomach.
Above his window, on the siding of our house, there’s a dark handprint marring the white. I lean close enough to see the outline of where it drips, to note that it is still wet. I can’t tell if it’s blood or juice or paint—but in the growing darkness, it is red-tinged black.
Distantly, past the river, in the woods, I hear the high-pitched sound of a woman’s laugh.
A few feet from Owen’s open window, a bit of brown fabric is caught on the grass. I stoop down and turn it over and over in my hands. It’s the bear ear from his onesie, the thread torn as if it was left here to taunt me.
Owen is gone.
Three
When Mom comes home, I’m still out in the field between our house and the river, scouring the grass for any sign of him, hoping desperately I’m wrong. But there’s a bloody handprint above Owen’s open window, still wet, and I know that I can’t be.
“Leah?” she shouts from the drive, barely illuminated by the dim bulb of the porch light. “What are you doing?”
I look at her, and the words flee from my mouth. Oddly, for a flash of a moment, I’m sure she’s going to think that I did this.
But Mom grew up here. She’s the one who told me the stories of the Lord of the Wood in the first place. Other towns might have scares and spooks and ghosts that haunt the bridges and long stretches of empty road, but here in Winston, we have the Lord. Always have, always will.
Some say he’s a faerie that snatches babies from their cribs to crunch their bones. Others think he’s a ghost, too—maybe a father who lost a child, or maybe an immortal murderer, hunkered in the wood. And of course there are the holdovers from the panic that don’t think there’s just one Lord of the Wood, but a whole slew of them, a cult out there primed for devil worship.
It doesn’t matter what or who he is, or how he and his followers have come to be. What matters is that he takes. Every few years, just when there’s a lull of peace, just when people get too comfortable, he comes back again and takes one of our own.
This time, he’s opened his terrible claws and slipped through the window and taken what is mine.
When Mom gets close enough to see me, to see the wind whipping the sheer curtains in Owen’s open window and the bloody handprint on the dirty siding of our house, her face twists into a mask of rage.
She doesn’t say anything, not in words. The cry that comes from her mouth is visceral, horrible, as she throws herself toward the window. She leans in, her body half-enveloped in shadows, tangled in the curtains.
Mom turns to me, and I cannot look at her. I only wince when she gets close and grabs me, when her nails dig into my cheek. “You,” she hisses, her breathing unsteady and raw with despair. “You fucking let him go, Leah. How could you do this? To your brother? To me?”
“I didn’t know,” I insist. “I didn’t hear—I didn’t see—”
She pulls away, jerking my chin hard. She doesn’t feel like my mother anymore—in her eyes is something unknowable, a dark pit of grief that I cannot comprehend. I want so badly, in this moment, to be someone else.
“You’ll pay for this,” she says.
Please, I want to beg, grab her hands, fall to my knees, and bury my face in her skirt like I used to when I was a scared child. Don’t blame me. Don’t make me do this. Don’t make this burden mine.
“Mom—” I plead, grasping at her hand. She pulls it away, quick and final, and for just a moment, I see her for who she was before Owen was born.
“You knew the risks,” she says, looking out toward the dark, snaking river and the wood beyond. I wonder if he’s watching us, the Lord who takes without warning, who ruins us all in the end. “You know what I’ve gotta do,” she says, her voice even softer.
I nod, vicious tears clawing at my throat. I refuse to cry. I will not be weak, standing before her, understanding the weight of what she’s about to sacrifice.
“Please don’t,” I say, but my voice carries no weight. “I can find him. I can fix this.”
I wish I could see the part of her that was a girl, growing up in the shadow of this town, before she let it decide to own her. Consecrated in the waters of the church in the watchful gaze of the Lord of the Wood’s domain, in this place where the forest takes more than it ever gives back.
“Of course you’ll fix it. You’ll have no choice,” she says. “But you’ll have to do it right.”
Mom is up the rest of the night, making calls. I roll into fetal position in my threadbare nightgown on my twin bed, staring out at the moon through the window.
Mom said I should bathe and pray, offering my sins up. She knows what’s going to happen tomorrow when dawn breaks, and I guess I do too. Not the details, not yet; but the general idea of it has been scolded into me since I was old enough to know what rules I was never permitted to break.
If the Lord of the Wood keeps Owen, his soul is lost to us. He’ll die out there. They’ll sacrifice him, or eat him, or keep him among their cult—whatever they do, we’re not getting Owen back.
But I lost him, and I have some odd sense of power here. As long as I act quickly, according to the rules of Winston, I can go appeal to the Lord of the Wood. Get him to grant us mercy, if that’s possible.
Except, I don’t know if it is possible—no one does. Every girl who’s been sent to bargain has never been seen again.
I remember her. The last girl. The last time the terrible maw of the wood opened; the last time the jaws of the Lord gnashed down on a girl that was ours.
The only time I was old enough to remember, it was with Maria Sinclair and her baby. It was a hot summer night, hotter than this one, and she’d gone to bed with the baby next to her after drinking a bit too much whiskey. When she woke, she found she was clutching a half-melted hunk of ice to her breast. Something about the story never struck me right—perhaps it was because Jess knew Maria from dance, and Jess swore Maria wasn’t that type of girl; perhaps it was because Maria always seemed too nice to catch the eye of someone like the Lord.
After Maria was gone for a year, the rest of the Sinclairs left town.
I wasn’t old enough, that time, to go to the church when dawn broke. Just shy of thirteen, I wasn’t allowed to see the truth of it. I don’t know what waits for me, what they’ll say or do, or how they’ll send me away.
What I do know is that Maria Sinclair and her baby were never seen again. Sometimes, when I go to a party with Jess at the Grady’s or the Tate’s or the Pingo’s, when the night is dark and the fire is crackling down to embers, someone claims that they’ve seen her ghost.
