Chapter 35 Steffani
“It’s here—arrived this morning.”
I’m sitting at the kitchen table, phone tucked between my cheek and shoulder. The cardboard envelope waits before me.
“You haven’t opened it yet?” he asks.
“I wanted to wait for you.”
“Well, you have me.”
I’m already reaching for the envelope. It’ll be another few days before Tom returns from his business trip, but I can’t wait that long.
This phone call will have to suffice. My finger eases under the flap, ripping it open and revealing the single sheet of card stock inside.
I pinch the corner and drag it out. “UNIVERSITY OF OREGON,” it reads, “on recommendation of the Faculty and the COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, confers upon GREER WOODS the degree of BACHELOR OF ARTS.”
I stare at my name until it starts to go blurry, then quickly wipe away any tears that might fall onto the paper.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
“I’m thinking we need to get this framed as soon as possible.
Knowing me, I’ll knock over a mug of coffee and ruin the damned thing.
” My laugh gets all twisted up in my throat, and before I know what’s happening, I’m sobbing into the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
Before arriving here, college seemed like little more than a pipe dream, but now, the life I always imagined for myself waits just around the corner.
Diploma today and tomorrow, my first full-time job as an accounts manager at Woods and Sheridan Architects.
And to think, I came so close to throwing it all away.
“We’ll get it framed as soon as I’m back,” he says. “Hang it next to the bookshelf.”
“No putting it on the refrigerator?”
“Well.” He stretches out the word like he’s seriously considering it. “We do need to use those magnets for something.”
The front of our refrigerator is covered with tacky tourism magnets, the kind you pick up in airports when you realize at the last minute that you’ve forgotten to buy something for your wife or kids.
He brings one back whenever he goes away on a business trip.
My favorite’s the one from Tokyo. A little good luck cat that waves at you when you boop it.
I’ve never been anywhere like that, of course, but it reminds me of the closet door my mom and I filled with our AAA brochure clippings.
He took down the photo of the girl a year after I arrived. His daughter, he told me.
Later, he replaced her photo with one of mine.
“Okay.” I wait for him to say goodbye, but he must be able to tell that something’s wrong. “Do you think—” I start but cut myself off.
“Yes?”
“Do you think she would’ve been proud of me?”
I don’t have to specify who she is.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know anything about her except for what you’ve told me.”
I grab the envelope, trudge back upstairs to my room. “But,” he continues, “I’ll tell you what I do know.”
“What?”
“I know how proud you make me.”
“Thanks.”
I try to prop the diploma on my bedside table, but it keeps slipping away.
“I know how much better my life has been since you came into it. I know how hard you’ve worked to get where you are, and I know how much you deserve every good thing that’s come your way.
” He hesitates before adding, “I know how much I love you.”
The diploma slides to the floor, but this time, I don’t pick it back up.
No one’s said those words to me since before my mom left.
Foster families would tell me how much they cared about me, how glad they were to have me in their home, but that’s as far as they went.
Eventually, I accepted that I just wasn’t love material—that my dad had broken something inside me, that no one wanted a defective product.
Like the Tickle Me Elmo on the clearance shelf that bashes its head against the floor and giggles, “Again! Again!” You take a video with your phone, maybe you even coo and set it back on the shelf, but you’re not going to waste good, hard-earned cash on it.
“Um.” I’m so out of practice, it takes me a moment to respond. “I love you, too.”
It’s not until the words have left me that I realize how true they are.
I try to remember the desperate girl who hitchhiked across the country, all so she could hurl herself off a bridge, but I can’t.
She’s disappeared in the rearview mirror.
I’m someone completely different now—someone who falls asleep every night feeling safe.
Someone who has a home.
As if reading my mind, he says, “I’ll be back soon. Promise.”
The phone disconnects with a click.
I set it aside, start fiddling with the diploma again.
I’ve just gotten it standing upright when there’s a rap on the front door.
It’s too late for a delivery, and we’re miles away from our nearest neighbor.
I creep over to the window and peer out from behind the curtain.
A girl stands in our yard. She can’t be older than sixteen, maybe seventeen.
Her skin’s gone ashy, the color of old mop bucket water, and her hair’s matted into clumps.
“Help!” she calls. “Help! Please!”
I drop the curtain like it’s caught fire.
This can’t be what it looks like. There must be some other explanation.
Maybe… maybe her car broke down, and she noticed our driveway while she was heading to the nearest gas station.
It’s hard to get a cell signal in this area.
She probably wants to use our phone, that’s all.
“Help!” She sounds like she’s about to cry. I shuffle closer to the window and look down at her feet.
They’re bare.
I shrink back into the shadows until I’m pressed against the edge of my bed, then sink onto the mattress. He promised me that he’d stopped, that things would be different now that we were together. He promised. He wouldn’t—
BANG.
I jump at the sound. My breath sticks in my throat.
BANG BANG BANG.
Her palms slam against our front door. I press mine against my ears. The louder the banging gets, the more I curl in on myself until my arms are wrapped around my knees and my head is buried between my thighs. I’m trembling with the force of her blows. And then—
She stops.
I wait for the noise to start up again, but it doesn’t; when I finally work up the courage to return to the window, the backyard’s empty.
You should’ve opened the door, a little voice whispers in the back of my mind.
How could you let her go back into those woods?
He must’ve left the shack door open, the same way he did with me.
Which means he’s nearby—waiting in his car, hidden in the same sharp curve of the road where I found him.
What does he do with them? I remember the phone with its bright blue light.
Does he coax them into the road, trap them there?
Does he run them down?
I imagine those girls denting the bumper, cracking the windshield, tumbling over the hood, then disappearing into the night as he guns it down the road.
BANG BANG BANG echoes through my head.
One girl slams against the hood, two girls, three girls.
I wait for her to return, but nothing stirs outside except the shadows. I should go to sleep. When I wake tomorrow, everything will be back to normal, and all of this will have been nothing more than a bad dream.
Instead, I snatch my jacket from the closet and set off into the night.
I haven’t revisited the shack in almost a decade, but hurtling through the forest, my feet remember the way.
With each step, dread tightens around my lungs.
When I finally stagger into the clearing, the door stands open, padlock and chain abandoned on the ground.
Turn around now, the voice hisses. Go home, while you still have one.
I step inside.
It’s difficult to see in the dark, but the shack looks the same as when I left.
I inspect the corners for crumpled-up blankets, discarded paper cups, any indication someone was confined here recently.
Nothing. I breathe a sigh of relief, am about to leave, when I notice the scratches on the wall.
The morning I woke up here, I carved my name into the wood with a blunted nail, but that was way down at the juncture where wall met floorboard.
These scratches climb almost to the ceiling.
I take out my phone and switch on the flashlight.
The beam finds my name at the bottom, then slowly traces the carvings up the wall.
In high school, the art teacher instructed us to walk around the room while maintaining a soft focus.
“Don’t let your eyes fix on anything,” Mr. McLaughlin directed.
“Instead, let them relax, so you can take in the whole picture.” I shift into that same soft focus now, so I can only make out the number of names instead of the letters comprising any particular one.
There must be thirty up there. Maybe more.
All except mine written in the same orderly handwriting.
Tom’s handwriting.
My phone tumbles to the floor, the light snuffed out.
I press my fist against my mouth and scream, a thin, reedy whine escaping through my fingers.
He lied to me. He’s been lying this entire time.
All those so-called business trips, he was never jetting off to foreign countries.
He was cruising the highways across neighboring states, looking for girls who’d wandered off on their own.
I reach for the phone, but my finger stalls above the keypad.
If I call the police, then my home—the one I waited so long for—will disappear.
I’ll once again be left standing by the gas pumps while happy families zoom by in their minivans.
In my mind, the police are already filing into the cabin, stripping my closet and dresser drawers.
Out come the black plastic garbage bags.
Time to hit the road, kid. You can’t stay here.
Panic creeps over me, but I shake it off. I’m not a child anymore; I can get by on my own. The next girl whose name goes on that wall probably won’t.
A dispatcher picks up immediately. “Nine-one-one,” she says, “what’s your emergency?”
The flashlight’s still on, and light spills across the name at the top of the list: AUDREY BANERJEE. “A girl’s been injured in the woods, near Foxcroft Lane.”
“What’s your name?”
I hang up, take my keys out of my pocket, and snap open the knife attached to the lanyard.
Drive the blade straight through STEFFANI.
Wood chips shatter to the ground as, one by one, the letters disappear.
“I don’t want it,” I mutter to myself, destroying the last traces of who I used to be.
I don’t want to go back to being Steffani Arnosti, alone and unloved.
I want to stay Greer Woods forever.
But as soon as Tom discovers what I’ve done, that I was the one who reported him, things will never be the same.
The walk back to the cabin feels like the longest of my life. I try to keep that soft focus, to not think about anything that’s already happened, anything that’s still to come. But then, a sharp snap detonates, followed by a keening yowl—the sound of a hunted animal.
Fuck. Oh, fuck.
I start running.
Back home, I lock the door and pause to catch my breath, then climb the stairs, change into my pajamas with shaking hands, and crawl under the comforter.
Opening my bedside table drawer, I dig through the paper clips and cartoon Band-Aids and notepads that only have writing on the first pages.
My shit drawer, I realize. I finally have a shit drawer of my very own.
Tears sting my eyes as I take out a blister pack of sleeping pills, dry-swallowing two before switching off the lights.
A police siren, somewhere in the distance, rips through the stillness, but by that time, I’m already drifting off.
In my dreams, I’m coasting down I-94, curled up in the passenger seat of Tom’s car, lulled to sleep by the dips and rises in the pavement. For once, feeling completely safe.