They gather up their outdoor things. Elijah leads her through the house, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. He picks up the garbage bag puddled by his easel, and then they head out the sunroom’s side door.
Sarah hasn’t been outside since the day Graham was supposed to pick her up, and the morning chill is an unforgiving slap to her cheeks. The wind tousles her hair and drags it across her face like a veil. She shoves her hands into her pockets, regretting she didn’t ask to borrow a pair of mittens.
“This way,” Elijah says. He doesn’t need to tell her. The gap in the woods yawns up ahead, the path smoothed over from the previous night’s snowfall. The snow is soft, and it yields like flesh to the press of their boots. The pines stretch up to the sky like so many church spires.
The pines had simply looked tall from Sarah’s bedroom window. Now, standing at their base, they are colossal. The top boughs sag like collapsed umbrellas under the weight of snow, and at eye level, the branches are bare and broken. Sarah feels like she’s underground. Below the surface of the earth, where the bones of the trees have taken root.
From a distance, driving by in the safety of her car, the forests she’d passed had been postcard-perfect landscapes. Within their depths, however, it’s all scraggly, amputated branches, bark peeling like hangnails. A harsh gauntlet between naked shrubs and brittle saplings. So many broken, half-dead things to reach out and scratch you. Sarah glances back at the house, but can’t see it. It doesn’t matter. Branches creak like bowing floorboards. In a way, they’re still inside Sweetside Manor. There is no leaving.
“Caleb figures we should scatter Ben’s things deep in the woods,” Elijah says, his breath swelling into clouds. “That’s all they ever found of the others. Just a wallet or a hat.”
“Did they ever find anything of your dad’s?”
“Just this coat.”
Sarah touches his sleeve. The sheepskin feels cool and slippery, like Elijah’s own skin. “I’m sorry you don’t know for sure if he’s gone. That must be scary, the thought he could return any minute.”
But he’s already here, Ben whispers in her head. Sarah silently tells him to shut up. He can’t talk to her; he’s dead.
“In a lot of ways, he never left,” Elijah says, and Sarah knows he’s right.
“What about our footprints?”
“It’s going to snow again soon.” He squints up at what little of the marrow-grey sky they can see. “And everyone knows I walk through here all the time, and you’re wearing my old boots.”
He hops over a fallen log, and then takes Sarah’s hand and helps her over it. The latex gloves feel cold and clammy against her bare skin. Is this how Ben’s bloodless flesh felt as they rolled his body up in the dropsheet? She shoves her hands back into her pockets to ward off the chill, but it’s too late. The chill is inside her, tensing her shoulders until they’re as stiff and huddled as Ben’s corpse.
“If you were really upset, maybe even hallucinating, what would you drop first?” Elijah asks.
Sarah imagines herself finally answering the call of the woods. Stumbling between the trees with nothing but the yearning to disappear.
The wind circles the canopy, making the branches sing. “The phone,” she says. “Because fuck the outside world and everyone in it.”
Yes. Rage first. Always rage first. That initial flame, kindled in your body before it snuffs out into misery. Sarah thinks of her own dead phone, tucked in her backpack. She hasn’t missed it at all. Because fuck everyone outside her little bubble. She called Graham, and look what happened.
Elijah takes out the phone. The battery’s at five percent. Ben was always forgetting to charge it, or so he claimed whenever Sarah couldn’t reach him. The screen displays a notification for a missed call from Graham. She could try to call him back, but what would she say? That she’s calling from a dead man’s phone? Anyway, Graham had sent Ben to claim her, as if she were a shopping bag forgotten in a coat check. It’s really his fault Ben died.
Rage first. Sarah lifts her chin. “Throw it. Throw it as far as you can.”
Elijah hurls it with surprising veracity. It whistles through the air until it strikes a tree trunk and plummets into a nest of snow and fallen branches. Just a thing, in the end, like the Ben-shaped body stiffening in the garage.
“What next?” Elijah asks.
“The scarf.” Because you’re boiling with fury and disbelief at how your life has gone. The scarf itches, burns, strangles. You plow deeper into the woods and you’re too hot and you tear it off and toss it aside. You’ll show them. They’ll be sorry.
Sarah fiddles with the neck of her borrowed parka, unzipping the suddenly too-tight collar. “Just drop it,” she says.
Elijah pulls out the scarf and lets it slip to the ground. She’d bought Ben that scarf last Christmas, because he’d lost his. It’s a nice scarf, from the same expensive store where he got his coat, and she bets he told people he’d bought it himself.
“The coat,” she says, unzipping her parka all the way.
It’s still too hot, even without the scarf. You’re burning up. You want to make it stop. You want to make all thisfeelingstop. You want to burrow deeper into the woods until it devours you.
You want to disappear.
Elijah takes out the coat. Dark grey wool, carefully lint brushed before every outing, the lapels sharp and crisp. Appearances had always been important to Ben. No one could know he was a failure, that he hadn’t been able to pay off his credit card bill for months after he’d bought that coat.
“Hang it over a branch. Neatly,” Sarah says. Even in Ben’s state of mind, he wouldn’t leave that coat crumpled in the snow. He’d treated it with more care than he’d treated her.
