Before Familiar Woods Read online

  Rae Brakeman—the sapper in Iraq—told his baby girl over the telephone that he had gone to the moon when he left for his second tour of Iraq. Even though she was too young to understand. Reggie Brenner told his boy that he had gone off to slay dragons. But Milk couldn’t recall what he told Daniel. He wasn’t sure he told him anything at all.

  It wasn’t something anyone had told him back then. That you had to get to know your child. That it didn’t just happen. That it was work like anything else. But there were lots of things people didn’t tell him. Nobody had told him about Iraq. About how the enemy might not really be the enemy. Or how the fear of killing was so much worse than the fear of dying. Nobody had told him how to turn it on and nobody had told him how to shut it all off.

  The snow continued to fall and Milk watched the road, but he saw nothing. He struggled to keep the truck steady. Long strands of barbed wire on either side of him. Abandoned farms and abandoned lives. The snow coming down over all of it. He slowed the truck when he spotted the birch trees in the distance and then the woodshed. He whispered Please, God, be home and pulled into the drive.

  RUTH FENN

  Ruth saw Milk standing in her driveway beside his truck wearing the falling snow on his arms and shoulders. She watched him for a moment and then shut the engine and stepped out of the truck.

  “He’s gone,” Milk said.

  Ruth looked to the house and the curtained windows and the light behind them. She thought of all the children she had watched over the years and how so many of them had been stretched thin and then broken as a result of being pulled between their mothers and fathers. “I can’t do this right now,” she said.

  “I need to call the police, but I don’t have no phone.”

  Ruth started across the drive.

  “Wait,” Milk said.

  Ruth stopped.

  “This is the only place I could think to come.”

  The snow fell on Ruth’s hair and on the side of her face, where it burned. She studied Milk. His eyes looked everywhere but at her. “What happened?”

  “His mother. She took him.”

  “When?”

  “This morning. Not long ago, I don’t think.”

  “In this storm?”

  Milk nodded.

  Ruth thought of Leo Strobridge lying in the snow with breath hardly coming from him, and then she thought of the deer fence and the tire tracks leading into the snowbank. “Do you know where she might have gone?”

  Milk shook his head. “She came to see him yesterday, but she’s living somewhere out of state. That’s the last I heard.”

  “She’s been staying somewhere close, then?”

  “She’s an addict. I don’t know where she’s staying. Nowhere good. Nowhere for my boy to be.”

  Ruth thought of the motel—pictured Dwyer—and felt the gun still heavy against her chest. She wondered if the woman would be stupid enough to stay in town after running over a police officer but figured it wasn’t logic driving her.

  “Come on, then,” Ruth said. She continued toward the house. The snow still falling. The storm somehow seeming like it was just getting started.

  MILK RAYMOND

  Milk followed Ruth up the snow-covered porch steps and into her home. A man Milk figured for her husband stood in the foyer, but Milk went straight to the telephone on the table in the hallway and called the police. He spoke to a woman who asked whether he had full custody of Daniel and sighed when he said that he didn’t and then seemed almost disinterested while she explained that he needed to go to the police station and fill out a report. He hung up the receiver and gripped the side of the table and listened to Ruth and her husband talk in hushed voices in the next room.

  When Milk entered the living room, the two stopped talking. The man didn’t look well. He sat on the edge of a burlap chair in blue jeans and a white shirt with the skin around his patchy beard blistered and his body thin. Ruth didn’t look well either. Her eyes were bloodshot, and in the light Milk could see that the side of her face was frostbitten.

  “There was an accident just now,” Ruth said. “Out on Higgins Road. The trooper was hit by a car, it looked like.”

  “Jessica.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. The roads are bad. It could have been someone else. Someone who got scared and ran.”

  “It’s Jessica.”

  Ruth held her left hand in her right and rubbed her bare knuckles. “If it was her, there’s only two places I can think she’d go. One of them is that she’s left town. Maybe she stopped at the gas station to fill up first. But the police will put out an alert. The police will be looking for her vehicle on the highway.”

  “What’s the other place?”

  “There’s a place she could be staying. But it’s a long shot.”

  “Tell me where.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Ruth’s husband stood quickly and walked into the other room. Ruth watched him for a moment and then turned back to Milk. “If anything goes wrong, you’ll need someone with you who can call for help. And there’s a devil’s chance of things going wrong. I need you to understand that.”

  * * *

  MILK DROVE CAREFULLY against the storm, resisting again the urge to press down on the gas. Ruth kept fidgeting in her seat and pulling at the front of her coat. She told Milk about the motel where the dealers stayed, and she told him she hoped Jessica wouldn’t be staying in one of those rooms but that it was as good a place as any to start looking. She told Milk that she would call the police from the pay phone outside the Whistler. She would tell them that she saw Jessica’s vehicle leaving the scene of the accident even though she hadn’t. If Leo hadn’t already called in her vehicle, it would be enough to get the police looking for her.

  Milk followed the road over the bridge and then along Main Street, where small homes were nearly hidden in the snow. He drove past an American flag that hung bright and limp from a pole and passed cars parked in narrow drives and on front lawns instead of on the road. He ascended a hill, and in the distance he saw the motel and the Whistler that wouldn’t be open for several hours. He continued up the hill, and then he saw a couple of vehicles parked in the lot, covered in snow.

  “That’s hers,” he said quickly. “The Jeep there. It’s the same car she was driving yesterday.” He pulled into the lot and shut the engine.

  “Listen to me,” Ruth said. She grabbed Milk’s forearm before he removed the key from the ignition. “I know the men in that motel.”

  “I’m not waiting on the police.”

  “I’m not asking you to. But I got my own problems with them. It’s only right you know that.”

  Milk looked at Ruth. Whatever she showed on her face was something he hadn’t seen before. He thought of her boy and how he had been found in a tent dead of a heroin overdose. Milk had asked around a little after meeting Ruth and was told that some people thought her boy lured the other boy into the tent with promises of alcohol and drugs and then assaulted and murdered him but that Ruth maintained they were friends and maybe something more. Everyone he spoke to told him that her child had been unusual. That he used to sit in class all day with his head on his desk and a book in his lap and that teachers tried to get him to participate but eventually just gave up. He heard about the school plays and how he aced all his tests despite not seeming to pay much attention and how nobody knew about his addiction, but then nobody knew much of anything about him. Milk figured he understood Ruth’s problem with the dealers, but he didn’t see how it mattered now and he didn’t have time to find out.

  Milk pushed open the door. He walked up to the Jeep with the wind whipping around him and wiped the snow from the passenger window and cupped his hands over the glass. He couldn’t see much. He pulled at the door handle and the door cracked open. There was a piece of crumpled paper on the floor and a can of Coke in the cup holder. He opened the glove box and saw several packs of cigarettes stuffed with small plastic baggies. Some of them unmarked and others ma
rked with brown cow stamps. He left the glove box open and put his knee on the passenger seat and looked in the back and saw some clothes and a soiled pair of underwear on the floor.

  Ruth had already started toward the motel. She walked quickly but with a slight limp. Milk closed the door and followed after her but stopped shy of the motel when he spotted something in the snow.

  “Ruth,” he said. He started jogging toward the object, and when he got within a few feet his stomach went hollow. He bent down in the snow and picked up the bright-yellow goggles. He looked across the lot and thought he could make out small footprints leading to the tree line behind the motel, but he wasn’t sure if the footprints were real or if his mind was putting them there.

  “Go on,” Ruth said.

  Milk looked back at Ruth, and then he rose and tightened his grip on the goggles and started for the woods.

  RUTH FENN

  Ruth watched Milk disappear into the woods under tall pines and then turned back to the motel. The light above the door glowed orange. The blinds were drawn and the metal lawn chair where she had first seen Dwyer sat to the side of the door collecting snow.

  She was of the mind that she would shoot first. If he opened the door, she would shoot him, and she would just keep shooting.

  The wind picked up and pushed snow across the apron of light. She hesitated only a moment and then slammed her fist against the door. She waited and eyed the peephole, but there was no answer. She tried the doorknob and then pounded the door again. She studied the blinds and slammed the side of her fist against the window. When the door didn’t open, she reached for her gun, but hesitated and drew her hand back and walked over to the metal lawn chair. She lifted the chair using the wide arms and shook free the snow and then swung the chair violently against the window. The window shattered instantly, and she stood there staring at the shaking blind and expecting bullets to rain out from the hole. When none came, she used the chair to scrape away the shards of glass, and then she reached through the window and unlocked the door.

  The lights were off in the room. Ruth held the gun out in front of her and stepped over the threshold. She smelled cigarette smoke and something rancid. One of the two beds was stripped of its sheets, and there was a large brown stain on the mattress and a black backpack in the middle of the stain. There was trash on the carpeted floor and more trash on the nightstand—empty chip bags and bottles of water and playing cards and a Styrofoam cup filled with cigarette butts atop a Bible where it looked like some of the pages had been torn out and then stuffed back crookedly behind the false-leather front.

  Ruth thought of Mathew and the time she had seen him walking along Merino Street on her way home from work the summer before he died. Mathew hadn’t seen her, and so she pulled her truck to the side of the road and sat there watching him and wondering what he was doing on the road they used to walk together to look at the roses that grew wild against the stone wall. She saw him place something under a stone, and she waited for him to disappear down the road before getting out of her truck and walking up to the wall and pulling a piece of paper from between the stones.

  DEAR MATHEW—YOU MADE IT.

  That was all it said. Like some sort of letter to his future self.

  Ruth heard a faint noise behind the bathroom door. A hollow thumping. Her breath stopped and she raised the gun and waited. No light came from the bathroom, but she could make out what looked like the tip of a boot darkening the gap beneath the door.

  MILK RAYMOND

  His hands stung with cold as he ascended the steep hill behind the motel. He pocketed the goggles and pushed away branches. He slipped and fell several times and had to grab onto the raveled undergrowth that barely pushed up through the snow. The footprints had widened like the brushstrokes of an owl’s wings and then widened even more so that he couldn’t tell if the tracks were from his boy or an animal or something else. His legs ached and he began to question whether the footprints he had seen were real. Could his boy make it up this hill? The trees blurred together and the snow and the sky seemed to merge. The wind picked up and he thought he heard someone moving behind him and then in front of him. He clenched and unclenched his fists to keep the circulation moving through his hands. He grabbed the trunk of a sapling and turned back to where he had come from and then grabbed another sapling and pulled himself up the hill. He looked from tree to tree and spotted an open grove of pines at the top of the hill and then a close grouping of paper birches and then something at the base of one of the birches.

  He scrambled up the hill toward the object huddled there, and as he got closer he made out a small figure sitting with his legs pulled to his chest against the trunk. He thought for a moment he was dead, but he was upright, and Milk ran to him, and when he saw his boy’s eyes track him, he reached down and grabbed his coat collar and pulled him close.

  It was a long time before Milk let go.

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said.

  “Are you okay?”

  The boy nodded. His face was pale and his lips were chapped.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “She was in the motel. She told me to wait in the car, but she didn’t come back. I knocked on the door, and a man answered and I saw her on the floor.” The boy started to cry.

  “Did the man follow you?”

  “I don’t know. He grabbed my arm and I ran. He told me to stop, but I just ran.”

  Milk turned back to the woods. He scanned the fallen snow and the deep gray furrows and steep ridges of the white ash trees. Everything was quiet. He saw nothing and heard nothing. The falling snow seemed to slow for just a moment, and then the report of a gun broke the silence and he felt something like a sledgehammer strike his leg. He fell, and the palms of his hands punctured the snow. Cold moved through his body and his heart beat against his chest like a battering ram. He struggled to his feet, and an intense pain moved through his right leg. He fell again and closed his eyes and let the breath move through his lips and told himself that it wouldn’t be here and that it wouldn’t be now, and then he stood, grabbed his boy, and did his best to run.

  RUTH FENN

  Ruth studied the dark spot beneath the door and braced herself. She listened to the hollow thumping and watched the dark spot suddenly jerk away.

  She kept the gun pointed at the door and quietly approached. Her wet boots caused the floorboards beneath the carpet to whine. She moved slowly past the unmade bed and stepped around a row of plastic bottles. The wind picked up and the blind that covered the broken window trembled. The thumping continued.

  When she reached the bathroom door, she stood to the side of it and pressed her back against the wall and waited. Her palms were sweaty and she had to switch the gun from her right hand to her left and then back to her right. She tightened her fingers around the grip and reached for the doorknob.

  She turned the doorknob quickly, and all at once she pushed the door inward, but the door caught on something and she struck the wood clumsily with her shoulder and stumbled a little. She regained her balance and held the gun high and forced her way through the opening but stopped when she saw the body.

  A woman not more than thirty years old on the floor in the nude. Her back arched and her legs and fingers twitching. A thin line of foam spread from her mouth, and the back of her skull struck the base of the toilet over and over. Thump. Thump. Ruth dropped the gun on the floor and bent down beside the woman, unsure of what she could do. She grabbed the woman’s shoulders and pulled her away from the toilet. A spot of red blood crisscrossed with black hairs shone on the white porcelain.

  Ruth studied the fresh bruises on the woman’s neck and the dried blood on her fingertips. She settled on the woman’s eyes. Her pinpoint pupils seemed to register Ruth for a brief moment, and then her body came still. Ruth reached out and touched the woman’s neck gently but couldn’t find a pulse. She studied her damp hair and pale face.
Ruth’s breath seemed to release from some unknown grip all of the sudden, and she fell back against the wall.

  She studied the small bathroom. The moldy shower curtain and the toilet spackled with puke and the torn wallboard over the mirror where someone had written in black marker URINE THE WORST PLACE and beside it I JUST FUCKED AN ALIEN.

  The smell of the room grabbed her all at once. The puke, piss, and smoke. She sat there for a long time with the bathroom door open, the motel door open, and the woman lying there dead. She lost track of time and lost track of her thoughts.

  She watched the snow swirl in the wind. It seemed to bend around the dark motel room, and she thought back to the book Mathew had left on his desk and the page he had marked with a leaf. She had sat down at his desk holding the leaf between her fingers and studying the illustration of the black hole surrounded by bright matter. She had read the caption about how light became distorted around the hole and how once the light slipped beyond the horizon it could not escape. And she wondered, was she the light being distorted, or had she already been pulled into the hole? Had Mathew known where he was? Did he think he could escape? Could she escape? She studied the snow, turned a cloudy orange by the outdoor light, and pictured the orbits of stars that circled the darkness.

  She heard something then. Snow crunching underfoot. She got to her knees and grabbed the pistol from the floor and then stood and pointed the gun at the open door. She stood there exhausted and saw the back of a child in the far distance. Thin shoulders covered in snow and held by someone. Then she saw Milk’s face. She watched him walking slowly—dragging his foot across the parking lot like it was stuck to the ground—and she started to tell him to stop, not to enter the motel, but he stopped on his own and then she heard something else. More snow crunching and then a voice that sounded familiar.