In the Woods

by Tana French

These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer. This August will not ask them to find hidden reserves of strength and courage as they confront the complexity of the adult world and come away sadder and wiser and bonded for life. This summer has other requirements for them.

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

It was these arcana I craved, these near-invisible textures like a Braille legible only to the initiated.

soupçon

There is a side of me that is most intensely attracted to women who annoy me.

Sam O’Neill drew a deft little caricature of the two of us as Mulder and Scully (I still have it, somewhere) and Cassie stuck it to the side of her computer, next to a bumper sticker that said BAD COP! NO DOUGHNUT!

Men like him—men who are obviously interested purely in what they think of other people, not in what other people think of them—have always made me violently insecure. They have a kind of gyroscopic certainty that makes me feel bumbling, affected, spineless, in the wrong place in the wrong clothes.

He walked like a martial artist or a poacher, a long, easy, balanced lope.

“There is something deeply, deeply fucked up in that house.” I was glad—relieved, actually—that she had said it. I’d found a number of things about the Devlins disturbing—Jonathan and Margaret hadn’t touched once, had barely looked at each other; where you would expect a bustle of curious, comforting neighbors, there had been nobody but shadowy Auntie Vera; each member of the household appeared to come from a completely different planet—but I was so edgy that I wasn’t sure I could trust my own judgment, so it was good to know Cassie had felt something off kilter, too.

Homicidal satanic cults are the detective’s version of yetis: no one has ever seen one and there is no proof that they exist, but one big blurry footprint and the media turn into a gibbering, foaming pack, so we have to act as though we take the idea at least semi-seriously.

Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.

I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect.

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I felt a sudden, unexpected surge of envy, for the unselfconscious freedom of their shouting and tussling, the satisfying arc and thud of the mattocks, their muddy clothes left to dry in the sun as they worked; for the loose-limbed, efficient assurance of it all.

It was more than that, though. I am not superstitious, but if the call had come in a few minutes earlier or later, after all, or if Cassie and I hadn’t just discovered Worms, or if we had wanted a smoke, this case would have gone to Costello or someone, never to us, and it seemed impossible that so powerful and heady a thing could be coincidence. I had a sense of things stirring, rearranging themselves in some imperceptible but crucial way, tiny unseen cogs beginning to shift. Deep down, I think—ironic as it may seem—a part of me couldn’t wait to see what would happen next.

I thought about the question for a long time. My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind:

I understood, rationally, that they had sent me to boarding school to protect me from the unrelenting waves of journalists and futile police interviews and curious classmates, and I was aware that this had probably been an excellent decision; but some part of me believed, unassailably and wordlessly and perhaps with a fleck of justice, that they had sent me away because they were afraid of me. Like some monstrously deformed child who should never have lived beyond infancy, or a conjoined twin whose other half died under the knife, I had—simply by surviving—become a freak of nature.

After boarding school, the solitude was intoxicating. On my first night there I lay on my back on the sticky carpet for hours, in the murky orange pool of city glow coming through the window, smelling heady curry spices spiraling across the corridor and listening to two guys outside yelling at each other in Russian and someone practicing stormy flamboyant violin somewhere, and slowly realizing that there was not a single person in the world who could see me or ask me what I was doing or tell me to do anything else, and I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the building like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night, bobbing gently above the rooftops and the river and the stars.

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony.

I went for old books, the older the better—Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos—so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.

I am, of course, romanticizing; a chronic tendency of mine. Don’t let me deceive you: the evenings may have been roast chestnuts around a cozy turf fire, but the days were a grim, tense, frustrating slog. Officially we were on the nine-to-five shift, but we were in before eight every morning, seldom left before eight at night, took work home with us—questionnaires to correlate, statements to read, reports to write. Those dinners started at nine o’clock, ten; it was midnight before we stopped talking shop, two in the morning by the time we had unwound enough to go to bed. We developed an intense, unhealthy relationship with caffeine and forgot what it was like not to be exhausted.

The Central bar has a stubbornly old-fashioned feel—ceiling moldings, huge comfortable armchairs taking up inefficient quantities of space, shelves of weird old books in elegant bindings—that contrasts satisfyingly with the manic overdrive of the streets below.

I had never thought about this before, and it almost knocked me over: all the things we should have had. We should have stayed up all night together studying and stressing out before exams, Peter and I should have argued over who got to bring Jamie to our first dance and slagged her about how she looked in her dress. We should have come weaving home together, singing and laughing and inconsiderate, after drunken college nights. We could have shared a flat, taken off Interrailing around Europe, gone arm-in-arm through dodgy fashion phases and low-rent gigs and high-drama love affairs. Two of us might have been married by now, given the other one a godchild. I had been robbed blind.

This passage is so beautiful and sad

Escherian

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.

Even the building was creepy: long windowless corridors and flights of stairs that stripped your sense of direction to nothing, tepid canned air with too little oxygen, a low witless hum of computers and suppressed voices, huge tracts of cubicles like a mad scientist’s rat mazes. Cassie shot me a wide-eyed, horrified look as we followed some droid through the fifth set of swipe-card swing doors.

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.

The words tolled through me like the lost bells of some underwater city.

The river was like a sheet of old gold, creased and stippled with black. Slim yellow leaves floated on its surface, balancing as lightly as if it were a solid thing.

The wood had never been so lush or so feral. Leaves threw off dazzles of sunlight like sparklers and the colors were so bright you could live on them, the smell of fertile earth amplified to something heady as church wine.

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.

A case breaking is like a dam breaking. Everything around you gathers itself up and moves effortlessly, unstoppably into top gear; every drop of energy you’ve poured into the investigation comes back to you, unleashed and gaining momentum by the second, subsuming you in its building roar.

It was our last partnership. 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.

This was our last and greatest dance together, danced in a tiny interview room with darkness outside and rain falling soft and relentless on the roof, for no audience but the doomed and the dead.

For a moment the room seemed to fold in on itself, as if some explosion too enormous to be heard had sucked all the air away. None of us could move. Damien’s hands had gone limp around the can; it dropped to the table with a clunk, rocked crazily, came to a stop. The overhead light streaked his curls with hazy bronze. Then the room breathed in again, a slow, replete sigh.

She was flashing her unarmored spots to draw the blows; she was deliberately letting Rosalind hurt her, maul her, delicately peel back layers of pain to feed on them at her leisure. I felt sick to my stomach.

After a few dates, though, and before the relationship had really progressed enough to merit the name, she dumped me. She informed me, matter-of-factly, that she was old enough to know the difference between intriguing and fucked up. “You should go for younger women,” she advised me. “They can’t always tell.”

I never knew, not then, not now, whether Cassie thought she had hung up, or whether she wanted to hurt me, or whether she wanted to give me one last gift, one last night listening to her breathe.