Chapter 25
I found the note sticky-taped to the back of my bedroom window.
You’ve been gone so long you missed everything.
Trav.
I replaced his note with my own.
Meet me at the Wicked Woods tonight.
I squint at the sunset, and a fat bead of sweat drips onto my fist. The bats screech in the ghost gums, wings pulled tight against their teeth.
I shiver under the tree shadow, watching the crows clambering up and down its powder-white branches.
They call for the night, their whole bodies hungry for it.
Their nighttime orchestra has begun, and tonight, nothing in the world could stop the dark.
My town is stirring, casting off the sunset like a shirt that doesn’t fit. Bring me the dark, it insists. The darkness is ours. The darkness is mine.
The Wicked Woods shudder with the weight of the madness, and I’m stretched so fucking tight that if the bats screech any louder, my bones will burst out of my skin to tumble through the red dirt, and I will be nothing more than a feast for the crows. There’s something right about that.
I spit on the red dirt and wait for Trav against the backdrop of a blood sunset. I see us as children, him with his matted blond mullet, my dirty-blond hair to my waist, sprinting through these woods, lighting it up with fire and our madness: We’re coming! We’re coming! Watch out!
We were so young, then. Hungry for everything.
Sometimes, to avoid Dad, Heath and I slept at the cabin.
Luke and the older boys would wander down, drunk off stolen cans of beer, and pass out on the cabin floor.
Heath remained alert enough to check on me throughout the night.
Trav and I slept under the stars as they blazed above and the nights dragged and burned, like a sun refusing to set.
I’d wake in the morning with his hair in my mouth, his cheek in the hollow of my throat.
The sun finally surrenders to the night, and darkness enfolds us all.
I lean against the ghost gum, stomach uncoiling.
I exhale shakily, blowing red dust into the dark night.
I wait for Trav, and I wonder. All our lives, we played games according to my rules.
Even Amy. I still believe I’m the reason he stabbed her.
A crow lands at my feet, wings folded disapprovingly behind him, talons caked in the rusty dirt. I spit on the ground, rub it between my fingertips, and smear it onto my forearms.
The crow lifts off, and I watch until he’s just a speck in the night sky. Trav arrives, head down, hands in his pockets, and I whisper to no one, “He’s back.”
—
Trav nods once, instantly looks down like he’s done something wrong, plunges his hands back into the deep pockets of his black board shorts. His black T-shirt is sleeveless, hooded.
You’ve been gone so long you missed everything.
I have. I’ve only seen Trav in a full-length wet suit. The man standing a foot away is covered in tattoos, from the arches of his feet to the tops of his thighs. Two sleeves end neatly at his wrists. His lower half is sea-themed, swirling waves and busty mermaids, twin anchors on both knees.
But his arms tell a different story.
Woods. These woods.
I scan his forearms, and he slowly lifts his head.
A grove of towering ghost gums reach up to his elbow. Trickling through is a bubbling creek, lit by moonlight. A crow sentry circles the sky, guarding a boy perched on a bone-white branch. The boy is bare-chested and filthy, eyes set on the creature half hidden in the creek bed. Me.
In his tattoo, I’m half fish, half girl.
Not a mermaid or a siren. Something else.
My scales are molar-shaped and shine wetly in the moonlight.
The colors are repulsive, the red of raw meat, tobacco-stain yellow.
Crammed in my mouth are rows and rows of needle teeth.
My hair is mud-slicked, my hands are shark teeth, and there are two incisors where my eyes should be.
Trav spits on the dirt, scrapes it in with the heel of his reef walkers. The creek hums over my left shoulder. I slink to it, wordless, wondering if he’ll follow.
He does.
A handful of stars shine weakly, spilling their reflection onto the creek. They look like they’re trapped in there. My favorite spot was the shallow trench lined with sun-warmed pebbles, slick with silky mud. It’s not lost on me that the fish-girl was hiding here.
I sink to my knees and plunge both fists in, grabbing at pebbles. Trav steps around me and lowers himself like he always did, propped up on his palms, the tips of his toes. I squeeze the pebbles in my fists, and my blood burns thick enough to turn me to stone.
“Did the surfer make it?” I finally ask, half opening my fist, peeking in.
“Think so.”
Did you want him to? Or did you want to watch as the life drained out?
Like you did with Amy.
I inspect a pebble, rub it with the back of my thumb. It’s oval-shaped, the color of a ghost gum, looks like the moon. How instinctive it is that I want to give it to him. Ten-year-old me would have reached out, fist clenched. Guess what I got?
He’d scramble forward, wait for my fist to open. I’d make him wait, too. Just enough to make him sweat with need. Then I’d uncurl my fist, place it into his sun-brown hand. You can have it.
The thing about Trav was that he could never accept a gift without giving one in return. A simple gift like a moon-shaped pebble and he’d disappear into the thorny gully where the wild blackberries grew. He’d emerge, shirtless and bloodied, T-shirt tied in a tight knot, bulging with berries.
Did I take advantage of him?
I’m not sure.
I know only that something changed the day we went to Amy’s house. I don’t know if Trav felt it, too. Maybe it was only me who went home to an absent mother, a rage-filled father, briny sheets, and a paper plate of bloodied kangaroo. Maybe I was the only one who burned and burned and burned.
Violent kids are overt or covert. The blood boys simmered with hot anger and obscene punch lines. Meanwhile, I was small and wordless and raging so silently.
The afternoon I tried to drown Amy, Trav was there. Watching from the low branches of the ghost gum. I never told anyone that. Only he and I knew.
I hauled Amy up, her swimming cap askew, ears burning red. Half of me ached to apologize, the other half said, Let the fucker drown.
Trav had that watchful, predatorial hunger. Was I surprised he finished off what I couldn’t?
No.
Was I sorry about it?
Yes.
And no.
It’s hard to be mad at someone who sees what you desperately want and gives it to you, no matter the consequences.
I don’t know what to say and I suspect Trav feels the same. I roll the pebble in my fist and get to my feet, the creek bathwater-warm. I hover over him, and he watches me silently, raising his chin.
“Got something for you,” I say, revealing the moon pebble.
He gets to his knees, reaches up, and I have a flashback that leaves me sweating. Dizzy, I drop the stone into his palm, stagger back.
“Thank you,” is all he says, holding it up to the moonlight.
“Where’s Chris?”
He closes a tattooed fist over the pebble.
“Trav?”
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want to know where Chris is. Will you tell me?”
He won’t answer. Cradles the pebble in his hand, opening it, closing it. You’ve been gone so long you missed everything.
“What have I missed, Trav?” I ask softly.
He gives me a doleful look; I’m not going to answer that.
“Do you know what happened to my mum?”
“No,” he says emphatically, eye contact unwavering. “If I did, I’d tell you.”
Trav never lied about what he did to Amy; he admitted it frankly when he was brought in for questioning. I’ve never known him to lie to me, either. I believe him, but I’m not going to let it go.
“Do you remember Hannah Striker? The first attack?”
He nods, once.
“Before her death,” I begin carefully, “someone left a pair of shark jaws on her doorstep. Do you know anything about that?”
“On her doorstep?”
That’s a strange question to ask. Why not, Did you say shark jaws? Someone left a pair of fucking shark jaws for her? Why?
“What do you know about Hannah?”
He sighs like I’m asking the wrong question. “We were, what”—he frowns, calculating—“ten when she died. She was swimmin’, yeah? It happens.”
“Yeah, but what doesn’t happen is someone dropping off shark jaws right before the attack.”
“I don’t know anythin’ about her,” he insists.
“Something came for me, too. Teeth. Great white.”
That gets his attention.
“Who left it for me?”
“Heath leaves the house most nights, yeah? ’Bout midnight?”
My spine stiffens. “Yeah. He and Luke check the nets.”
“…Do they?”
I flinch, dropping my head. There’s a heavy feeling in my stomach, a sudden coldness behind the back of my ribs. I didn’t want to believe Heath was a part of any of this, but there were times I wondered. In a halting voice, I ask, “Where do they go?”
He glances up the winding track, past the ghost gum, like he thinks he’s said too much already.
I press ahead. “Do you know there’s a video of Hannah’s attack?”
There it is. The hunger. That flash of heat and teeth, like his mouth is flooding with saliva, body aching with a craving that has nothing to do with choice.
“You watched it,” he says quietly. “Didn’t you?”
“I had to.”
“Right,” he murmurs. “And how many times have you watched it?”
Since I got home from Rachel’s mum’s house, I’ve been bolting awake from fever dreams and reaching instinctively for the video. I watch it until I’m sick and sweating and my father murmurs approvingly in my ear, You can hear it, too, can’t you, Min?
“I had to,” I mutter again, lowering my gaze. “There’s something about the video…I can’t explain it, but there’s something I’m missing. Some clue. I feel it.”
That’s what I keep telling myself. I watch it not because I’m drawn to the violence. But because there’s something in the video that holds the key to solving it all.
He says nothing. I step forward, nudge his abdomen with my knee. “Would you lie to me?”
“For you.”
There’s a hum in my skin. A heavy pulse in my neck. Everywhere I turn, there are memories of us. The cabin. The creek.
I think of Chris, smell his peach soap, hear his work shirt rustle, see his nose wrinkle when I swear.
Then I think of a boy with a matted mullet. Magpie wing cradled between his palms. He splashes silently into the creek, drops to his knees, reaches up, offers me something. Everything.
My eyes drift to his forearm. He catches me watching and nods just once. Yes, you remember.
He raises his arm, the one with the Wicked Woods and the fish-girl-teeth.
And I grab it up greedily like I always did, stuff it in my mouth, bite down hard while he tugs at his board shorts and runs his tongue over his teeth.