In the Woods

by Tana French

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this—two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

I think sometimes we demand the truth from others because we want to know everything we can, but we hold on to the truths we hold because we want to control what other people know.

this is the only story in the world that nobody but me will ever be able to tell.

This makes me think he does remember, and that he had a part whether accidentally or purposefully, in the deaths of his friends

I don’t want to give the impression that my life was blighted by what happened at Knocknaree, that I drifted through twenty years as some kind of tragic figure with a haunted past, smiling sadly at the world from behind a bittersweet veil of cigarette smoke and memories.

It would feel naïve and basically cheesy to unweave my personality, hold up a strand and squeal: Golly, look, this one’s from Knocknaree! But here it was again, all of a sudden, resurfacing smugly and immovably in the middle of my life, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart’s desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities.

If he were the killer, maybe he is looking back and seeing his friendships differently

That first night of second year I sobbed myself to sleep, and then I woke up the next morning and decided that I would never be homesick again.

Like katy

I have no time for people who sigh about how quickly children grow up nowadays (my grandparents, after all, were working full-time by sixteen, which I think trumps any number of body piercings in the adulthood stakes), but all the same: Katy’s friends had a poised, savvy awareness of the outside world that jarred with the happy animal oblivion I remembered enjoying at that age.

The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that

left you crackling to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other’s hands.

Most people have no reason to know how memory can turn rogue and feral, becoming a force of its own and one to be reckoned with.

All through this case, since the moment the car crested the hill and we saw Knocknaree spread out in front of us, the opaque membrane between me and that day in the wood had been slowly, relentlessly thinning; it had grown so fine that I could hear the small furtive movements on the other side, beating wings and tiny scrabbling feet like a moth battering against your cupped hands.

I took it for granted, at the time, that she dreamed this guy followed through on his threat. Now I think I was wrong. I failed to understand the one crucial thing: where the real danger lay. I think this may have been, in the face of stiff competition, my single biggest mistake of all.

Was Sam the competition? Was he the danger? Intimacy? Did the guy actually follow through?

There’s a specific crumbling in the mouth and spine, a sagging as though the underlying musculature is dissolving to water, that every detective knows: it belongs to the instant before a suspect confesses, as he finally and almost with relief lets his defenses fall away. Cassie had stopped rocking her chair. My pulse was running high in my throat, and I felt the photographs behind me catch tiny swift breaths and hold them, poised to swoop off the paper and down the corridor and out into the dark evening, freed, if only he gave the word.

I felt as if I had been moving among empty dresses hung in some dim attic and had suddenly bumped smack into a human body, warm and solid and alive.

If you, like me, are essentially a city person, then the chances are that when you imagine a wood you picture a simple thing: matching green trees in even rows, a soft carpet of dead leaves or pine needles, orderly as a child’s drawing.

And then, too, I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn’t find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.

Did he decide Jamie and Peter were going to leave him behind, and did something to them?

Fasting is, I think, a profoundly instinctive form of appeal. I’m sure I believed, in some inarticulate way, that if I ate little enough for long enough Peter and Jamie would be given back and everything would return to normal.

Given back… because he took them? So he has to fast?

Sometimes I think about the sly, flickering line that separates being spared from being rejected. Sometimes I think of the ancient gods who demanded that their sacrifices be fearless and without blemish, and I wonder whether, whoever or whatever took Peter and Jamie away, it decided I wasn’t good enough.

Did they reject him? This is why they “disappeared”?

I wish I could show you how an interrogation can have its own beauty, shining and cruel as that of a bullfight; how in defiance of the crudest topic or the most moronic suspect it keeps inviolate its own taut, honed grace, its own irresistible and blood-stirring rhythms; how the great pairs of detectives know each other’s every thought as surely as lifelong ballet partners in a

pas de deux.

Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.

Changing his perspective of what happened?

“Any more than I did,” she added, and went back into her bedroom and banged the door.

So he slept with heather

Take, they replied, the oak and laurel. Take our fortune of tears and live Like a spendthrift lover. All we ask Is the one gift you cannot give.