20. Tuesday, October 31, 2023 #4
“I’ll grab our coats and meet you at the front door,” Geoff says, finally spurred into action.
“Oh my God, of course you should go,” Libby says, her irritation at Alice’s early exit gone completely. “The poor thing. I hope she’s okay. Keep us posted.”
Alice nods and gives both her friends a distracted hug before leaving the room. Halfway down the hallway she remembers the Tupperware container she’d brought the brownies in. Turning back, she heads toward the kitchen but stops when she hears her name. It’s Kathy talking.
“Alice does not seem okay. Those stories she told, they were fucked-up. I knew moving to a goddamn murder house was not a good idea. I think she might be losing her mind.”
She waits for Libby to defend her, but there’s only silence in response, which as far as Alice is concerned might as well be agreement. She abandons her Tupperware.
Polly
The doctor has left Polly lying on a hospital gurney, under the bright lights of a curtained cubicle in the emergency room to give her “some time to process.” The pain in her stomach is gone, thanks to the painkillers, but Polly feels lightheaded and as though her insides are as bruised as her outside.
She’s wearing the sweatshirt she’d had on earlier and a diaper-like pair of underwear the hospital gave her.
The jeans she was wearing are draped over a chair beside the bed.
Blood soaks the entire crotch and down the insides of both legs.
Polly doesn’t want to process any of what she’s learned in the last forty-five minutes.
She wants to get up and run from that hospital screaming.
Sierra had insisted on driving Polly to the hospital, saying it was faster than any ambulance.
She hadn’t been wrong. Drifting in and out of consciousness, Polly remembers the feeling of the beat-up Honda Accord swerving, taking sharp turns, vibrating with the acceleration as she lay on the backseat, her head against the door, her feet on Quinn’s lap.
He hadn’t said much on the way there. She knew the whole thing was a full trigger from the night of the car accident.
She knew he was sitting there terrified that he was going to lose his other sister.
That’s why, as soon as she could, she asked for her phone to text him from her hospital bed that she was fine.
Just some really bad monthly female stuff.
It was a lie. She would never tell anyone the truth.
She was nineteen, which meant she could keep the miscarriage from her parents.
She’d told the doctor that pregnancy was impossible.
The doctor replied that the pill was only 99 percent effective, and only if taken properly.
Polly didn’t correct her, didn’t say that it was impossible not because she was on the pill but because according to the photo she’d seen, the sex she’d had was with a dead boy.
The doctor told Polly that the blood work was conclusive, indicating that she’d been a couple of weeks along, which would have been right after she’d had sex with Gray.
So is he dead? Polly wondered. Or did he survive the poisoning?
“The part that doesn’t make sense,” continued the doctor, “is the severity of the miscarriage. There was a lot of blood, and your pain level seems extreme for such a short-term pregnancy.” The doctor also couldn’t quite account for what had come out of Polly.
“Large blood clots would have been the norm for a two-week term, but this was a more advanced fetus, eight to ten weeks in size, with a recognizable head and body, covered in hair. Lanugo, we call it in unborn babies, is an occurrence at sixteen to twenty weeks’ gestation.”
Polly immediately thought of the nightmares she’d been having, the furry blob in her belly that grew into a wolf.
She quickly pushed the image from her mind and asked what that meant exactly.
The doctor shook her head. “On very rare occasions, things happen outside the realm of medical understanding, This appears to be one of them. What matters now is that you are on the mend and nothing else seems out of the ordinary.”
Except that I was impregnated by a boy who was most likely murdered by his mother! she’d screamed in her head.
When the doctor asked Polly if she’d like to have the fetus for burial purposes, Polly said absolutely not.
The doctor gave her a pamphlet and told her she had been cleared to go home but that counseling was available if she needed it.
Polly considered asking if she could be admitted to the psych ward instead.
Polly slowly gets out of the hospital bed and pulls on her blood-soaked jeans, now stiff and crusty.
Her legs tremble and her head pounds, but she forces herself to walk out of the brightly-lit cubicle and to the waiting room with a smile on her face.
No one can know what really happened, because how could she explain how she’d gotten pregnant in the first place?
In the car on the way home, Quinn tells Polly that he called their mom and told her what happened.
She wants to ask him why the fuck he did that, but she knows: He was scared.
She’s also working hard to keep her shit together.
Now that the pain is gone and the hospital ordeal is over, what she learned about Gray is sinking in.
“Sierra, you need to get your séance shit out of the house before my parents come home,” Quinn says from the backseat. “My mom is super paranoid about the whole murder-house thing, and if she sees evidence of it, she will lose it.”
As soon as they get back, Polly leaves Ethan, Quinn, and Sierra to clean up and she gets in the shower.
Looking down at the drain triggers the memory of the night she and Gray had sex.
The sensations all come rushing back: sinking into the earth as he thrust inside of her; the strange chanting echoing through the cave; the taut, pale skin of his throat stretched above her; the low growl of his climax.
What happened that night? The question is a deafening scream inside her, and her entire body begins to shake violently.
She slides down the shower wall onto the tiled floor while water beats down on her back.
You’re in shock. Her sister’s voice comes through clearly.
It’s the first time in two weeks that Polly has heard it.
Did the pregnancy block out her sister’s voice?
she wonders. Could that be a thing? Or maybe she’d been too obsessed with Gray to experience anything other than thoughts of him.
Hearing her sister’s voice again is such a comfort to Polly that she starts to sob into her knees with relief.
Losing that connection had been like her sister dying for a second time.
Get up, her sister’s voice commands. Polly listens.
She crawls out of the shower, uses the wall to help her to stand up, and, still trembling, wraps herself in her bathrobe.
Moving very slowly, she shoves her bloody jeans down to the bottom of her laundry hamper and is just lowering herself onto her bed when she hears her parents’ car pull into the driveway.
At the same moment Quinn bursts into her room and shoves the folder at her.
“Sierra forgot this. Hide it and give it to her at work.” Then he shoots out of the room to greet their parents. Polly hopes he’ll be able to calm her Mom down before she comes to Polly’s room.
Flipping open the folder, Polly finds the photo of Gray sitting there right on top.
Some part of her had hoped she’d been mistaken when she’d first looked at it.
That the whole thing had been a misunderstanding caused by the ominous séance energy, the storm outside, the run-in with the shadowy figure, the searing pain in her gut, the sudden power outage.
But now there is no doubt. Staring back at her from his high school photo is her Gray, with his mossy-green eyes; beautifully angled face; wild, dark curls; and smile like he’s just shared an inside joke.
The confirmation summons the smell of him—pine needles, damp earth, and cold forest air.
It brings to her the feel of his fingers on her skin—light as a feather and as chilled as the bottom of a dark pond.
He was real, she knows he was, and she can remember the solidity of his body, the pressure of him when he was on top of her.
So, then what is he? Not a ghost. A boy brought back to life by the woods?
Is that what happens in there? she wonders, still staring down at his photo, his scent as strong around her as if he were right there in the room.
Like the popping of thread pulled too tight, Polly feels herself coming undone.
Because if Gray died in those woods like everyone thinks he did, and somehow came back to life, then maybe her dad and nana did too.
Quinn
His parents’ car pulls up outside and within seconds his mom charges through the front door. “Polly?” she calls out. She looks like a surrealist deer. The white dots of face paint have smeared into the brown, and the black of her nose has spread into a slash that reaches under her left eye.
“She’s in her room,” Quinn says. “She’s okay now, so don’t freak out.”
His mom, who barely seems to register him, drops her purse at the front door and rushes into his sister’s room. He follows close behind, ready to help Polly defend the séance if his mom makes a big deal about it.
Polly’s not sitting on her bed anymore, where Quinn saw her only minutes earlier when he ditched Sierra’s folder. She’s pacing in front of her bedroom window, sobbing, one hand clawing at the scar from her brain surgery.
Seeing their mom, Polly’s sobs intensify and she throws herself into her arms. His mom holds Polly tight, rubbing her back and making shushing sounds.
She looks at Quinn searchingly but all he can do is shrug.
He doesn’t want to launch into the whole story in front of Polly in case it makes things even worse.