15. Friday, October 20, 2023
Alice
Alice pours a generous glass of wine. It’s been a bad day.
No, not bad, strange. It’s been a strange day.
She bundles up in her winter jacket and grabs a blanket to go sit outside on the back deck.
Geoff has gone into town to pick up dinner, so she has about an hour to herself.
Polly is working and Quinn is sleeping over at his friend Jason’s house. Her mother is lying down.
The strangeness started this morning. Before work, Alice had gone into the local branch of her bank to order checks with their new address on them.
Standing in line, she’d noticed the person ahead of her, an older woman, looked like she’d crawled out of an earlier time period.
Her gray hair was wild, encircling her head like a storm cloud.
She wore a long-sleeved brown dress in some kind of rough cotton.
When the woman was called up to the counter, Alice noted a slight limp on her left side and a cane on her right, a piece of gnarled, polished wood.
Something about her made Alice sad; it was an air of neglect and loneliness.
The woman had no one in her life to tell her how much she’d let herself go.
Then it was Alice’s turn, and she moved to the window beside the old woman to take care of her own business.
As soon as Alice exited the bank, she heard a gruff voice to the right of her say, “Excuse me.” She turned to see the old woman who’d been ahead of her in line.
“Did I hear you say that your address is 3834 Waverley Lane?”
Alice cringed. Another local interested in the murder house. “Yes. Although I’m not sure what business it is of yours.”
Seemingly unbothered by Alice’s rudeness, the woman nodded. “My sister used to own that property. I live on the other side of the woods. I’m Ruth Crowley.”
“Oh,” Alice replied, shocked that this eccentric old woman was her neighbor. She automatically summoned her warmest voice, the one reserved for the elderly and infirm. “Good to meet you, Ruth. I’m Alice. I guess we’re neighbors, then.”
The old woman grunted. “You getting along okay out there?”
“Absolutely,” Alice said, faking enthusiasm. “We love it. The property is beautiful.”
The woman looked down at Alice’s wedding band. “You live there with family?”
“Yes,” Alice answered, growing a little uncomfortable.
“My husband, my mother, and my kids.” It was on the tip of her tongue to spin some tale about Lucy alive and well and excelling at university, but something about the way the old woman sized her up made her think twice about lying. “Do you have family, Ruth?”
The old woman gave a quick nod. “Not much left. But I got my animals. That’s the kind of company I like. We’re getting ready for the cold weather.”
“So are we. We’ve closed the pool, and we’re getting ready to hunker down.”
“Good.” Ruth’s tone was all business. “Just be careful of those woods, Alice. My advice,” she said, leaning in to deliver her warning, “admire them from afar. Don’t go wandering about.”
“Really?” Alice replied, choosing a charade of innocent curiosity.
Ruth’s gaze was direct and unrelenting. “Nothing good ever comes out of those woods. After what happened with the last ones, those Gordons, I regret that I never said the same to them.”
Alice was suddenly overcome with emotion and her eyes filled with tears. Ruth peered at her. “Spit it out, Alice. Unburden yourself.”
Alice took a step closer to the woman, so close she could smell her musty body odor, dirty hair, and the pong of wet animal fur. “Things are not okay,” she whispered. “Those woods are not okay. First my husband, then my mother, they— What’s out there?”
Ruth frowned, then glanced over her shoulder as though someone might be eavesdropping on their conversation. “Things that cannot be spoken about. You just stay out of there from now on, you hear? And keep your kids out.”
Alice had considered the things she could not speak about. Like pale corpses and eviscerated animals, like occult symbols carved in her daughter’s bedroom floor.
The horror must have shown on her face because Ruth nodded and said, “yes, those kinds of things.” nodded. “Yes, those kinds of things.”
Alice gasped.
“Stop thinking and talking about those woods. They’ll hear you.” She glanced around nervously again. “You be safe out there. And keep an eye on your young ones.”
The exchange stayed with Alice all day, popping up in her head between meetings and emails and phone calls.
An internal debate raged in her brain: Was Ruth a crazy, paranoid old lady living alone in the woods, or was she perfectly sane and wise and cautious?
Alice wondered if she should have told Ruth about discovering her husband’s and mother’s dead bodies.
Maybe that would have compelled the old woman to help her.
Admittedly, she was reluctant to even mention the incident in the woods out loud again.
She’d talked to a doctor about it on the Monday after.
A doctor who’s a client and a friend. He’d checked her head and eyes and hadn’t found any sign of a concussion.
She’d asked him if the hallucinations might be from a brain tumor.
He’d asked her a series of questions, looked in her eyes again, and said there was no reason to believe she had one.
“Maybe I’m going crazy,” she’d said with a little laugh, hoping he’d reassure her that she wasn’t. Instead he’d asked her how old she was.
When she said fifty, he whistled. “Periods have stopped?” She’d told him more or less, with just the odd spotting.
He went over to his desk and came back with a pamphlet titled “Am I Losing My Mind or Am I in Perimenopause?” He’d handed it to her and said, “It might explain a lot of what you’re talking about today, and often the simplest answer is the right one.
” None of it felt very simple to Alice, but she didn’t tell him that.
She took the pamphlet and thanked him for his time.
She didn’t bother telling him that her husband and mother had both gotten lost in the woods and come out acting differently, wearing different clothes.
He’d probably just blame all of that on her aging body too.
She left his office discouraged and embarrassed, resolved that the less she thought about it or talked about it, the sooner she’d be able to forget it.
The strangeness of the day intensified when Alice got home from work.
She’d arrived to an empty house and Panda pacing at the back door.
She’d opened it to let her out. The dog went racing toward the woods, stopping right at the edge of the path to growl.
Alice was about to go back inside when she saw her mother appear through the opening in the trees.
Something seemed odd, and as she got closer Alice could see that she had dirt around her mouth and streaked across her face.
“Mom?” Alice rushed out to meet her. “Are you okay?”
Her mother’s head snapped up, as though Alice had broken some kind of spell. “Hello, dear. Did you have a good day at work?”
That’s when Alice noticed that the dirt was not only around her mother’s lips but in between her teeth and on her gums. It looked like she’d eaten fistfuls. Alice put both hands on her shoulders. “Mom, what happened?”
Her mom shook her head. “What do you mean?”
Alice began to brush at the dirt on her mother’s face. “You’re covered in filth.”
Her mother knocked Alice’s hand away. “Oh dear. I must have wiped it on myself.”
“Wiped it from what?” Alice asked, confused.
“I stumbled a little coming up the hill and put my hands down to catch myself.”
“No. It looks like you fell mouth-first into a pile of dirt.”
Her mother scoffed. “Don’t be silly. I didn’t realize it was still on my hands and must have wiped my mouth.”
Alice didn’t buy it, but she didn’t push it either, because she didn’t want to know. What answer would satisfy? Then a terrible thought dawned: Was this a sign of dementia?
She went with her mother to her cabin to help her clean up properly.
Then she suggested her mother lie down for a little while.
Surprisingly, Beverley agreed. Alice looked for the cats, but they were nowhere to be found.
Normally they would have been weaving in and out of her mother’s legs the minute she walked through the door.
Alice checked under her mother’s bed, but they weren’t there.
She went into the living-room area and found them huddled together under the couch, looking like one giant multicolored dust ball.
She tapped the floor to encourage them to come out, and they slowly slid along on their bellies until they were within reach.
Alice gave them all scratches under the chin, which brought them out even farther and got them purring.
“Can I do anything to help with dinner later?” her mother called out from the bedroom.
At the sound of her voice the cats skittered back under the couch, one of them letting out a low growl.
Alice wasn’t sure which seemed stranger, the cats’ reaction to her mother’s voice or her mother offering to help with dinner.
“Ahh, no, that’s okay, Mom. Just get some rest,” Alice called back, pushing herself up off the floor. She waited a few seconds to see if the cats would come out. When they didn’t, she quietly let herself out of the cabin.
Now Alice takes a sip of her wine, staring out into the woods. There are still a few leaves left on branches, but she focuses on the ones swirling to the ground in a hypnotic dance.
The back door pops open and Alice startles. It’s Geoff, holding his own glass of wine and wearing a coat and a winter beanie.
“Mind if I join you?” he asks, easing himself into the chair beside her. “I’ve put the food in the oven. It should keep for one drink.”
“Of course not,” she answers, even though she’d prefer to be left alone with her thoughts.
After leaving her mother’s cabin she’d gone straight to Geoff’s writing studio to tell him what had happened with Beverley.
He’d listened, looking sympathetic, and promised to check in on her more throughout the day when Alice was at work.
He’d said all the right things, but Alice felt like deep down he wasn’t really that concerned.
He’d changed the topic too fast, offering to get takeout for dinner.
They’d left the cabin together, but Alice forgot her phone so went back for it while Geoff carried on to the house.
His laptop was sitting open, and curiosity got the better of her, as it always did, and she snuck a peek.
It was a different story from the one she’d read the last time, and it was good—really good.
The setting, from what she could glean, was the woods.
She’d left the cabin feeling hopeful that Geoff might get something published after all. But the hope was laced with disquiet. It was a sense of something lurking, just out of sight. Is that a perimenopause feeling? she’d wondered. Or women’s intuition?
Geoff sits down next to her, and she scolds herself for begrudging the interruption.
She should be grateful that he’s taken care of dinner, and that he wants to sit out there enjoying a drink and talking.
Their relationship hasn’t been this good for years.
She should just relax for once and enjoy it, stop looking for fault, stop being so anxious about everything.
“Tell me about your day,” Geoff says, sounding sincerely interested.
“I met a woman at the bank this morning,” Alice tells him. “Ruth Crowley. She owns the other half of the woods.” Alice shifts in her seat so that she’s looking at Geoff.
His eyebrows rise in interest. “Oh wow,” he exclaims. “What was she like?”
“Odd,” Alice says, not sure how else to explain the woman. “She warned me about the woods. She said we should all stay out of them. That it’s safer to admire them from afar.”
“Well, it’s too late for that now, isn’t it?” Geoff says, sounding pleased and a little bit excited.
“So, you’re not concerned?” Alice asks, incredulous. “About the carvings on Polly’s floor, the dead animals, the rumor of a witch in the woods, the horrible things I saw?”
“Not in the least,” Geoff answers with a smile in such opposition to Alice’s mood that it feels like an insult.
“I’ve gone in and lived to tell about it.
What further proof do you need?” Alice is readying a rebuttal when Geoff adds, “I noticed you were out of that lotion you like, so I picked some up on the way home.”
“Thank you,” Alice says, her previous argument stunned right out of her head by his act of kindness. He smiles back at her and takes a sip of his wine.
She sinks into her chair, the fight in her having evaporated. They sit in comfortable silence, both gazing out at the trees around them. Geoff with awe and wonder. Alice with a nagging feeling she’s forgotten something important from her strange, strange day.