14. Sunday, October 15, 2023 #6
“Someone else was out there with me.” Her voice rises with panic as the thought sinks in deeper. “Maybe they pushed me?”
Geoff takes the phone from her hand and brings it closer to his face to examine the photo.
Alice tries to recall if she heard anyone behind her when she was walking.
She’d had that feeling that she wasn’t alone, but the woods always give her that feeling.
Maybe she was wrong. Maybe someone was out there all along.
She slides off her stool, tries to shake the trembling from her hands, tells herself to breathe.
“Should we call the police?” she asks. Geoff’s probably beside himself at the thought of someone pushing his wife down a ravine.
He looks up from the phone, passing it back to her calmly. “Honey,” he says, a wariness to his voice that she doesn’t like. “I can’t tell what’s up or down in that photo. It’s just a bunch of blurred colors.”
“But you can see my clothes,” she argues, “and someone else on the path.”
“Gray, black, and green are all colors in the forest. We could be looking at anything.” She looks back down at the photo and he puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes. “Isn’t paranoia part of menopause? I mean, could this whole thing just be that?”
She gets up from the stool. Knocks his hand away.
“I know it’s really hard for your particular gender, but can you please not mansplain my lived experience?
You can’t blame everything on menopause.
It makes you sound like an ignorant chauvinist.” She picks up her glass of wine and carries it into the living room.
“I’m just trying to help,” he calls after her.
No, you’re gaslighting me and weaponizing a natural stage of life.
Seething, she plops down on the couch, working hard not to cry.
Tears will only confirm the theory that she’s a paranoid, emotional, perimenopausal mess.
Easily patronized, easily manipulated. “Fuck you,” she snarls.
That relieves some of the pressure inside of her. So does a long sip of wine.
Opening the photo app on her phone she checks to see if there are any other shots of her time in the woods.
She’s relieved, and a bit disappointed, that there’s only one.
She could use more proof. Tapping on the last photo, she stares down at it, doing her best to look with a critical eye.
She zooms in on what she thinks is the figure on the edge of the ravine looking down as she’s falling.
She stares at it intently, studying every gradation of shadow, searching for defining features, until a face starts to develop.
A mouth, open wide, black holes for eyes, a nose long and thin bisecting the grin.
A hand clamps down on her shoulder from behind. She screams and her phone goes flying from her hand and onto the living-room rug.
“Mom?”
Alice turns to see Quinn standing behind the couch. “Why would you sneak up on me like that?” She presses a hand to her thumping heart.
“I’m sorry. I called you from the doorway, but you didn’t hear. Dinner’s ready.” He gives her a searching look, a questioning-her-sanity look, before heading back toward the kitchen.
Alice reaches down for her phone. Looking at the photo one more time, she wonders the very same thing.
Polly
Polly doesn’t even have a joint to smoke, but she stands outside her bedroom window, arms wrapped against the cold, hoping Gray will appear.
She needs to ask him how the hell she got home on Friday night and if she did or said anything embarrassing.
She can’t remember much, and that really freaks her out.
She also needs to know where he got those mushrooms and what was in them that made her so sick.
Her stomach is still queasy, two days later.
At dinner, her mom wouldn’t stop talking about what happened to her in the woods, which freaked out Polly even more.
Obviously, her mom was just hallucinating, but after Polly’s own experience on mushrooms, and the things she saw that night, like those watchers, something feels very wrong about those woods.
She really doesn’t understand why Gray loves them so much.
As though on cue, she hears a rustling in the bushes and Gray appears out of the trees.
Butterflies fan the queasiness into full-fledged nausea and she instinctively puts a hand on her belly to settle it.
He’s smiling sweetly, his hair is a perfectly-tousled mess, and his earthy scent wafts over her, this time laced with the smell of the autumn cold.
“Hey,” he says before leaning down to kiss her.
For a split second she forgets all about her upset stomach and her worry that she may have done something to embarrass herself.
“That was a great night on Friday,” he says after pulling out of the kiss.
He takes one of her hands in his. “I can’t stop thinking about it. ”
“Yeah. No. Me too. That was, like, the most intense mushroom trip I think I’ve ever had.”
Gray smiles even wider. “Good. I’m glad.”
She laughs nervously. “I mean, I don’t even remember how I got home.”
He tilts his head and looks surprised. “Really? You just followed me out of the woods. I made sure you got through your bedroom window safely, and then I left.”
“So, nothing weird happened? I didn’t do anything weird?”
“Nope. Not at all. You were the perfect date.” He gives her hand a squeeze.
She laughs again, but this time with relief. “Okay. Phew. I was worried. I don’t usually have blackouts like that, which is why I’d really like to know what was in those mushrooms. I threw up some nasty stuff the next morning and I still feel a bit sick from them.”
He shrugs and shakes his head. “Nothing out of the ordinary. They were all natural, straight-from-the-forest mushrooms.”
“What about you? Did you have an upset stomach after taking them?”
“I didn’t take any.”
Polly hears his words but can’t quite believe them. “You didn’t do any mushrooms on Friday night?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
Polly is mortified that she’d been that high while he was completely sober, taking it all in. “Why did you say you did, then? That’s a real asshole move, you know.” Defensiveness arrives to mask her mortification. She yanks her hand from his.
His eyebrows jump in surprise. “I never said I did. I offered them to you, and you took them. You didn’t even ask me if I’d taken any.”
Polly’s brain scrambles to recover the memory of when he met her at the side of the house and asked if she wanted to go on an adventure. She can’t remember the details clearly.
“That’s a bit creepy, don’t you think? Do you also go to bars and roofie girls’ drinks? Is it a power thing? Being sober while the girl is off her head?”
Gray appears genuinely confused by Polly’s reaction. “I guided you into the woods, and I guided you through your trip,” he says calmly. “Nothing creepy about it. And I don’t go to bars.”
“Let me guess,” she says. “You prefer the woods and your cave?”
Again, he shrugs, seeming nonplussed by what she’d meant as an insult.
“I guess you could say that.” He shoves a hand through his hair and seems to be searching for the right words.
“Look, I’m sorry about the confusion. I just wanted to have a night totally focused on you and your good time and I thought it was safer if I didn’t do them and made sure nothing bad happened. ”
Polly’s annoyed by his refusal to be baited into an argument.
How is she going to expel this feeling of shame and discomfort if she can’t fight it out, blame it all on him?
“Okay,” she concedes, feeling like he hasn’t left her much choice.
“It was an intense and creepy trip, and it feels even weirder now that I know I was the only one experiencing it.”
He holds up a hand. “So, wait, you didn’t like it, then?”
She covers her face with her hands. “I don’t even know. I don’t remember getting home. But I do remember waking up at four a.m. and puking my guts out. And I saw some really fucked-up shit: like creepy things in the woods and a bunch of figures standing over us when we were having sex.”
“What? You saw them?” She watches his face fall, like he’s said something he shouldn’t have.
“Them?” Polly’s voice rises with panic. “Who’s them?”
He holds up both hands. “No, no. There’s no them.” Gray is uncharacteristically flustered, which does not make Polly feel any better.
“You said ‘them,’ ” she shouts at him. “Did you see them too? Are they real?”
“No, I didn’t mean it that way. You were mumbling about so many things that night, figures and voices and shadows. I didn’t think that you were actually seeing things. I thought it was all in your head.”