“How completely embarrassing,” Whitehall said, and spread his arms wide in an it-happens gesture. “My apologies. That’ll teach me to ignore my backlogs. You’ll have to excuse me for prying, but you’re remarkably articulate. Am I correct in assuming your hearing loss was postlingual?”
Delaney wrenched her gaze away from Colton. “Yes.”
“Ah. And do you sign?”
“A little. At home.” She worried at a loose thread on her sleeve. Her skin felt hot, and she wanted desperately to sink into the floor. “I wear a cochlear implant.”
“Spectacular,” Whitehall marveled. “And do you hear things? In the quiet?”
Delaney blinked, surprised by the sudden specificity of his question. All around her, the early-morning sun fell in swaths of blistering yellow, driving the shadows to the in-betweens and underneaths, the corners and the crevasses.We don’t like it here, they seemed to say.We don’t like it at all.
“No,” she said, a beat too late. All her life, that had been the correct response. This time—and for the first time—she had the distinct sense she’d said the wrong thing.
“Fascinating.” The inflection in Whitehall’s tone was strange, and Delaney thought she must have misheard it, muffled as it was in the airless chamber of his office. “Thank you, Ms. Meyers-Petrov. I think that’ll be all for today. Again, please accept my sincerest apologies for my earlier blunder.”
“It’s okay.” She felt out of sorts—uncertain what, aside from her abject humiliation, they’d managed to accomplish. “Was there anything else?”
“Not at all. Just a quick hello.” Whitehall’s smile was warm beneath the white curl of his mustache. He reminded her of a mall Santa—his demeanor a touch too merry, his sweater a shade too red. “We’re doing something revolutionary here at Godbole, poking at holes in the sky. Because of that, we tend to draw a great deal of criticism from those who don’t understand. It’s incredibly important that our little department stick together. As such, I like to know who’s sitting in my classroom. Put names to the faces.”
His bespectacled gaze traveled to Colton, still framed in the door. Colton’s stare was walled off, his mouth soldered in a tight line. He looked like a stone facsimile of a person, the lines of him too neat, too cold.
“I’m looking forward to getting to know you better,” Whitehall said, distracted. Then, to Colton, “I’ll see the both of you in class.”
This time, Delaney was certain she’d misheard the inflection in his tone, because it sounded like a warning.
Delaney was seven years old the first time she woke in the woods.
It was late June, the air magnolia sweet, and she’d opened her eyes to the oppressive quiet of the forest. Her feet were stippled in dirt, her fingertips gluey with sap, the long white of her braid adorned in winterberry brambles. Like she’d been born of the wood, clawing her way out from a belly of snarled rowan roots.
Her parents found her not long after. They’d carried her home like broken glass, swept up in pieces in their arms. They glued her back together, scrubbing the half-moons of dirt out from beneath her fingernails and phoning someone with enough letters in her credentials to give them an answer.
Her therapist was a stout woman with hair the color and texture of sheep’s wool. That first session, Delaney sat cross-legged on the fainting couch and picked at her nails. She didn’t want to tell the therapist about the boy in the branches, or the way she followed the dark wherever it led. She wanted to say all the right things only, so that the doctor would be pleased with her, but the right things were lies, and so it felt like a test she was predetermined to fail.
Somnambulism, the therapist called it in the end. Typical behavior for a child who’d undergone something as traumatic and as sudden as near death and a total hearing loss.
Giving it a name didn’t stop it from happening. The next time, Delaney woke by a creek, knocked back into herself by the feel of her father shaking her awake. Her throat was raw, her fingers pruned by river water, and she’d been unbearably cold in spite of the mid-August heat. She’d been following the boy through the dark again, calling out for him to stop. Ignoring the bite of blackberry thorns. Awake now, the shadows fell around her like rain, spliced here and there with thin shafts of gold wherever light managed to breach the cedars. There was no boy. There was only the forest, dark and deep.
Her parents gave it a nickname—“episodes”—like she was a Saturday-morning cartoon. She’d wake in the woods, her hands braced against the coarse clefts of a redwood tree. She’d wake in the yard, feet black with mulch and rainwater needling her skin. Her parents put locks on her doors, a baby gate atop the stairs.
“Just give it time,” the therapist assured Delaney’s parents. “She’ll outgrow it.”
And then, one night, she did.
She woke in the street, her kneecaps bloody, pinned in the yellow headlights of their next-door neighbor’s clunky Buick. Her heart looped in her chest and she felt more awake than she’d ever been in her life.
It never happened again.
It was as if the prospect of being mowed down by a car had startled the waking right out of her. As if whatever she’d been drawn to in the dark had finally given up and gone.
***
Delaney was lying in the night-light haze of her dorm. She was staring at a sliver of moonlight on the wall. She was thinking about dreaming. Even now, all these years later, she could still envision every detail of the boy in the wood: black eyes, dark curls, the legs of his pants wet where he’d tumbled into the creek.
“Stop,”she’d cried.“Don’t run. I know you. I know you. I know you.”
She’d spent years convincing herself it was only in her head.
Two weeks into the semester, and she wasn’t sure anymore.
