I’m still bleeding when I unlock the apartment door.


My knee is hopeless, black net tights sticking to the lacerated skin. The scrape on my hand had started to clot, but I rubbed it open while digging for my keys, and now a red glaze slicks the doorknob. I wipe it with my sleeve as I step inside.

It’s not the first time this kind of thing has happened. The first time it’s been this bad, maybe, but over the past five years I’ve been caught, thrown, spun around more times than I could count. All it takes is the right combination: Two teenage girls and a boy, tattered band T-shirts and cheap hair dye, braided laughter. I’ve eavesdropped on them at coffee shops, followed them through parks and down alleyways, sure that when they turn around, I’ll see the three of us.

Lucy. Greg. Me.

Then they shift so I can see their faces, and they’re just three strangers, and everything breaks like a shattering mirror. I’m left staring at nothing at all.

Every time it happens, I sit down to write a letter. That’s what I’m supposed to be, after all: A writer. Really, I’m a shopgirl, a folder of shirts and a monitor of dressing rooms who sometimes writes letters in a ninety-nine-cent notebook.

Hey, Greg.

I saw the three of us in Willard Park in downtown Cleveland today. Then the boy moved, and he had a nose ring and sleepy eyes and didn’t look anything like you at all, and I ran away before they could see me staring.

I tear these letters into scraps before I drop them in the trash.

It’s always the same. Always the flood of love, and then the pit opening inside of me, sucking it straight down.

But today was something different.

It was just a glimpse: Three kids turning the corner ahead of me as I crossed the street. Everything was there. The ragged T-shirts. The pen-and-ink scrawls on their arms pretending to be tattoos. The sound of their laughter. I swear, I even caught the smell of Lucy’s smoke shop incense.

Then Lucy turned toward me.

And it was Lucy.

It was Lucy as if she were dead.

Gray, sagging skin. Teeth gritted behind receding lips. Pits for eyes, with something glinting at the bottom. Something that stared back at me.

I tripped on the curb and hit the sidewalk with one knee and one hand, ripping off layers of skin, sloshing my paper cup of coffee over the shoes of people passing by.

By the time I’d stumbled upright again, the three kids were gone.

Now I drop my coffee-stained shoulder bag on the apartment floor. I sink down in one of the mismatched chairs at the table, trying to shove my heartbeat back into its usual rhythm, and take a good look at my knee. The raw pink patch is still seeping. Strands of black nylon cling to the thickening blood. I peel them away one by one.

Today’s mail, brought in by one of my roommates, is scattered across the table beside me. I glance over it as I blot my knee with a paper napkin: Flyers. Catalogs. Junk. And half-hidden under a takeout menu, an envelope addressed in jade green ink.

To me.

My fingers leave red streaks on the white paper.

Even before I open it, my heart has surged up into my throat.

This isn’t a coincidence. The blood on my hands. The things I’ve been chasing. Or that have been chasing me.

Something’s about to catch up.

For a minute, I just stare at the envelope, the San Francisco return address, my own name spelled out in the green ink. It’s been five years since I’ve seen this handwriting, but I’d know it anywhere: The pretentious put pretty curl on the number 2, the slash of the letter y. I even recognize the ink. Lucy and I stole that fountain pen and bottle of green ink from an art supply store two towns over, because neither of us ever had any money, not even enough to pay for a shitty school lunch. And because your best friend’s eighteenth birthday deserves a present.



December 18, 2004.

Hey, Bree.

I saw the three of us on the street in North Beach today.

Everything around me freezes. A pitch sharp as a needle hums in my ear.

Then the girl in the middle turned around, and it was Lucy.

But it wasn’t really Lucy. It was Lucy’s corpse.

Suddenly the page weighs a thousand pounds. I lean on the table to hold it up.

I knew it wasn’t real, it was just my own head, but now I can’t think about anything else. So here I am, writing to you again.

I say again, because I’ve written to you before. About three hundred times. The more I write, the more my thoughts start to pull me in, and I start thinking about everything that happened back then, and I don’t want to think about back then. So I stop. And then I burn the letters.

Everything is pretty good here. The city’s beautiful. I’ve got a job at a cool design firm. I’ve met some nice people. I’ve been seeing one guy for about six months now. It’s what I always wanted.

Here the handwriting starts to change. The pretty curls flatten. The letters tilt and jag.

Tell me it was worth it, Bree. Because now all I can see is Lucy’s face.

We shouldn’t have let her do it. We should never have left her there.

We shouldn’t have.

The writing changes again. I can practically see Greg pulling back his shoulders with a little shrug, shaking his choppy hair out of his face. I wonder if his hair is still long enough to do that.

Okay.

If you’re still reading this, I love you.

Be well.

-Greg

I sit holding the letter for a long time.

Tell me it was worth it. I glance around the little apartment. Traffic growls outside. The smell of old orange peels hangs in the air. I clench the bloody napkin in my fist.

Tell me it was worth it.

Finally, I fold up Greg’s letter and put it in my pocket. I don’t take it out again, but I keep touching it, making sure it’s there. Like it’s a ticket I don’t want to lose.

*     *     *
I’ve never gone home for the holidays.

I’ve never gone home for anything.

There’s no home to go to anymore, anyway. My grandparents are long dead. Mom divorced Daryl just after my high school graduation, and then moved in with a new boyfriend across the Kentucky border.

Now here I am, driving into Red Oak, West Virginia, under a foggy December afternoon sky, steering my roommate’s borrowed car, with Greg’s unanswered letter in my pocket.

Tell me it was worth it.

I can’t tell him that. Not if I don’t know for myself.

My chest gets tighter with every half mile. I feel it as I follow the road down into the holler: How hard this place still pulls at me. How easy it would be to stop pulling back.

Everything in town is just where I left it.

Chain link fences. Clapboard churches. Houses clinging to the slopes, paint peeling from the walls like burst blisters. Main Street is flanked by all the same signs. Cheapest Cigs in WV! Freedom Pharmacy. Smoke Meat, Not Meth, says the billboard for the barbeque place. I pass the old mill, the laundromat, the liquor store where we used to steal bottom shelf wine, all of it tucked into the shadows of the blue-gray hills.

I don’t recognize the few people I see. But people are the only things that change fast in a place like this. The skinny meth head sitting on the park bench might have once taken me to the eighth-grade dance. The teen mom pushing the stroller might have been the little girl who lived next door.

I turn at the end of Main Street.

Even after five years, I could find my way back to Lucy’s house with my eyes shut. I turn at the base of the hill road, winding up into the ridges, past deserted trailers and collapsing barns, up another ridge, where the road narrows and the trees lean in and the pavement dissolves into mud.

Before our lifetimes, before the mining and the logging, these hollers must have been lush. The Appalachians are the oldest mountains in the nation. Old enough that soil and seeds have had more than a billion years to build up on top, covering them with living skin. Standing among them, you can sense it: Something under the layers of rock that reaches back and back and back through time. When I step out of the car in front of Lucy’s house, I can feel it thrumming up through the soles of my shoes, like drumbeats underground. Something is there, alive, beneath me.

I want to run away.

But I need to see her before I can run again.

Lucy’s house is still painted a powdery shade of toothpaste blue. Its two cramped stories lean beneath their tin roof, walls blackening with mold and mud, windows dim. Lucy’s mother died—lung cancer—when we were eight years old, and her father—heart disease—several years ago. That left just Lucy and her older sister Nan to keep up this place. It looks like they’ve stopped trying.

I knock at the screen door.

A minute goes by.

I knock again.

The inner door swings open.

Nan doesn’t look shocked to see me. She just looks tired. Seeing me standing on her front porch seems to wear her out even more.

“What are you doing here?” she says through the screen door.

“I came to see Lucy,” I tell her. Like there could be any other reason.

Nan’s voice is hard. “Why?”

I can’t explain it to Nan. Not what’s happening now. Not what happened years ago. “I just—it just felt like time.”

Nan lets out a deep breath. She pushes open the screen door and leans to the side.

I step in.

The living room, like everything else about this town, is unchanged. There are the same saggy couches, the same crocheted afghans hiding the cigarette burns and food stains. The same baskets of fake flowers, their colors dimmed by dust. I turn back toward Nan.

She always looked a bit like Lucy, but sturdier, darker. She’s wearing pink scrubs. Her brown hair is scraped back into a ponytail.

“Are you a nurse now?” I ask.

“LPN,” she says. “Down at the old folks’ home.”

I nod. Working at the Pines is one of the only good options in this town, but saying that’s great would sound patronizing. “How’s Lucy doing?” I ask instead.

Nan’s eyes narrow. She lets out another breath. Shakes her head. Her gaze flicks away from me for a second, and I see something awful on her face that she quickly smooths away again.

“You can see for yourself,” she says. “And to answer your questions before you ask them: Yes, I’ve tried to get her help. She won’t take it. No matter what I do. And no, I don’t know who’s selling her the shit or how she pays for it, but I can’t be her babysitter every second of every day. If you have any other questions, you can keep them to yourself.”

She points down the narrow hallway, toward the closed bedroom door that is still Lucy’s, has always been Lucy’s.

“I have to get to work,” Nan tells me. “Lock up behind you when you leave.”

She steps out the front door. I hear her car cough and grind to life, and then the sound of tires crunching away down the steep hillside.

I wait for silence before I step into the hallway. There I pause again, straightening my clothes, dragging my fingers through my hair. I’m in my usual pretend-cool shopgirl look: layers of fishnets under a pleated skirt, an army surplus coat. I can almost feel the letter in my pocket tugging me forward, like a magnet, toward Lucy’s door.

I tap twice. There’s no answer, so I push the door open and lean inside.

Lucy’s bedroom is exactly as it was the last time I saw it. Every frayed-edged picture of Kurt Cobain and Björk and Trent Reznor torn out of a magazine and taped to the walls, every stuffed bear, every cheap chain necklace still dangling around her wicker-framed mirror: It’s all the same, just slightly faded, peeling, bleached by daylight. It’s all still there.

Lucy isn’t.

Because the person sitting on the bed can’t be Lucy.

Lucy was pretty. The best looking of the three of us by far, with her sharp features and big eyes. She’s the one police officers would smile at while warning us it was too late at night to be out on our own, the one gas station clerks would flirt with while Greg and I filled our pockets with chips and licorice.

The girl on the bed is someone else. Her face is craggy and sunken, like the bones underneath have started to dissolve. Her skin is gray. Even from the doorway, I can see the holes in her arms, the puncture marks and scabs and sores. When she looks up at me and opens her mouth, I spot the gap of a missing tooth.

No wonder I saw her as a corpse. This girl is halfway there.

“You,” she says. And the voice is Lucy’s voice. High and soft, with a slight Appalachian twang. “You’re not supposed to come back here.”

“… Sorry,” I say, because I’m still too shaken by this, by her, to string words into a line.

“No,” she says, louder now. “You’re not supposed to come back here.”

“I wanted to see you.” And suddenly I know it’s true. I didn’t want to come here, to the holler, but I’ve missed her. I’ve missed her like a color that someone leached out of the world.

Gently, like this might hurt her, I sit down on the edge of the bed.

“See me,” Lucy says, voice soft again. She turns partially away from me, and I wonder if she’s trying to hide the gap in her mouth, or if it’s her eyes she doesn’t want me to see. They’re like two rain puddles in deep black holes. “Well, here I am.” She scratches her forearm. Flaking scabs. Old tracks. “I’m probably not what you expected.”

There’s something so sad and fragile and hopeful about the phrase. Like I might argue, tell her that she looks fine. That I’d have sworn it’s been days instead of years.

When I don’t answer, Lucy straightens up. She tosses back her stringy hair. Shifts a bony shoulder under her shirt.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she says, one more time. “But as long as you are, tell me.” She angles slightly toward me now. She leans against the headboard, unfolding one leg so it nearly reaches mine. “Tell me everything. Tell me about living in New York City.”

“I’m in Cleveland, actually.”

The words fall through the air like bricks.

“What?” Lucy says, blinking, frowning, like I’ve just said something impossible. “But you always wanted to go to New York. You were going to be a music journalist there. You were going to go to all the shows, and meet all the bands, and write reviews and articles and biographies.”

“I couldn’t afford New York,” I say, like that’s all it was. “I couldn’t afford college, either. I stopped after three semesters.”

Lucy’s frown deepens. “What about your scholarship?”

“It wasn’t renewed.” It wasn’t renewed because my grades plunged. Because I stopped going to class. Because this place and everything in it haunted me. But I don’t say any of this aloud.

“Oh.” Lucy blinks again, hope fluttering in her eyes. “But—you’re still writing?”

It’s somewhere between a statement and a question. Like asking it will make it so.

“I’m a movie reviewer for an arts weekly. It doesn’t pay much.” I force a smile. “But I get free tickets.”

Lucy nods, although she doesn’t smile back. “What about Greg?”

“He’s in San Francisco, working in design. He’s got a boyfriend.” The smile gets easier now. “Sounds like things are good.”

“Good,” Lucy breathes. Relief and joy wash over her face. “Good.”

For a moment, we’re both quiet, thinking of Greg. Thinking of his brilliant artwork and quick hands. Thinking about him in San Francisco, far away from here.

“Lucy.” I swallow hard. Force myself onward. “Even though Greg and I were … we were so lucky that you pushed us to get out … we shouldn’t have left you here.”

Lucy snorts a tiny snort. “Left me here. I chose it.”

“No, I know, but I mean—” I’m doing this badly. It’s coming out wrong, weaker than it needs to be to carry us both. “Lucy. What you’re doing … It’s hurting you.”

I look down at her arm, at the blood-marked skin.

Lucy folds her arms around herself. She pulls back her leg too, and I wonder what other marks she’s hiding.

“It needs to stop,” I say.

And Lucy laughs.

It’s a genuine laugh. Lucy’s old laugh. Bright and golden.

“‘It needs to stop’?” She laughs again. “Listen to you. ‘It needs to stop.’”

“It does,” I say. “It can. If you leave.”

Lucy shakes her head. She’s still smiling brightly at me, with her cracked lips and missing tooth.

She glances at the old clock radio on her bedside table.

“It’s time for me to go up there,” she says. “Do you want to come and see him?”

My mouth floods with nausea. “Him,” I echo. “You can’t call it him.”

Lucy just keeps smiling. She swings her knobby legs off the bed. “You can drive me partway, or I’ll hike.”

I’m not going to fight with her. I’m not going to let her walk.

I stand up, and I hold out my hand, and together we head out to the car.

*     *     *
There are abandoned mine shafts all over these hills.

But this one, at the top of Oak Knob, was ours.

The three of us would head up there when we had one of those stolen bottles of wine to share, or when our parents were mad at us, or when a gang of redneck guys was out looking for Greg or other freaks like us whose asses to beat. We’d climb up the long-overgrown trail, through the bracken, between the rotten boards, and down into the mountain’s mouth.

We’d hide in the tunnel, passing around a bottle or a joint or a cigarette, telling ghost stories. We never sensed the presence of any dead coal miners, though. What we felt was something much bigger. Much stronger. Much older.

One night, at the start of senior year, we’d been talking about how few people left the holler. About how few people even tried. About how there had to be some magical force keeping everything in place, just where it was.

I’m not sure who had the idea for the ritual, whether it was me or Lucy or Greg. I can’t remember which one of us came up with the steps, who lit the candles or made the marks on the stone walls, who said we should cut off locks of our hair and fill a little cup with drips of our blood. I’m not sure if we really believed in it, either. I didn’t, not deep down. Greg, maybe, with his tarot cards and his art altar. And Lucy … who knows? There were things about her that I would never have guessed.

We arranged our little offerings, the blood and the hair and the candlelight, and we asked the spirit of this place if it would let us go. Then Lucy did something else that we hadn’t planned. She shouted out that she would stay here, bringing it gifts, if Greg and I could get out for good. I remember her voice echoing away into the tunnel, down into the glittering black. Swallowed up.

And, afterward, that’s what happened. Acceptance letters. Scholarships. A way out. For two of us, anyway.

So Greg and I left. We left her behind.

Now Lucy walks ahead of me up the steepest part of the path. We left the car at the spot where the road ends, tapering into nothing. Young trees jut up from the places where the mine tracks used to be. It’s late afternoon, and there’s enough light in the sky that I can see everything: the crackling carpet of dead leaves, the bare oaks and maples and birch trees, the top of Oak Knob looming above us. It’s a cool, damp day, and the wind twists between the hills like a whip.

I’m shuddering, and it’s not just from the cold. My knees keep threatening to give out under me. But Lucy strides ahead on her bony legs until we reach the curve into the mine shaft, the heaps of brush gathered around it, the few last boards angled across its mouth like crooked teeth.

She looks over her shoulder at me. I’m several yards behind. Not moving anymore.

“You’re not coming in?” Lucy asks.

I shake my head. Because that’s all I can manage.

“All right,” she says, unsurprised. “Probably better that you don’t.”

She ducks into the opening, her skinny body slipping between the boards, and the dark swallows her up.

She didn’t even bring a flashlight.

And I just stand there.

Remembering.

I’ve told myself that I imagined it—the thing that came up from deep in the tunnels that night. The huge, impossible shape that hulked out of the darkness ahead of us, a patch of thicker black against black. It had no face, but it was watching us. It was listening. I don’t know if it breathed—if it even had lungs to breathe with—but icy air swept around it like an exhalation, trailing toward the three of us, snuffing out half of the candles. The others sputtered and shrank, afraid to burn.

I’ve told myself ten thousand times that it wasn’t real. We were stoned. We were impressionable. We’d built this story for ourselves, justifying everything that happened before and after.

But those were always lies.

It takes what feels like forever for Lucy to come out of the tunnel again. When she does, she’s moving more slowly than before. There are fresh wounds on her arms. Small cuts, trailing blood. She’s holding her mouth strangely, jaw twisted to the side, and when she gets closer to me, I can see that another tooth is gone.

“All done,” she says, with what’s supposed to be a smile.

This is when I grab her by the arm.

I pull her down the hillside, skidding and stumbling. She doesn’t resist, not even when I shove her inside the passenger door and jump into the car after her. I gun the engine and start to back down the hill, looking for a place to turn that won’t send us end-over-end through the trees.

“Bree,” she says, turning toward me. “What are you doing?”

“I’m getting you out of here,” I tell her. Even though it’s obvious.

“Bree,” she says again. My name is just a sigh.

Finally the road widens slightly, and I get the car turned around. I’m barreling down the hillside now, trees lashing past in the thickening dusk.

I glance over at Lucy. Her skin is waxy. A thread of blood trails from the corner of her mouth.

This place is going to eat her whole. Blood. Skin. Teeth. Next it will grind through her sinews. Swallow her bones.

She’s still giving me that little amused smile, like she knows something I don’t know. Her eyes are steady. “I’m not leaving,” she says.

“You’re not thinking straight.” I turn on the headlights, but that just makes the trees around me seem closer. Branches flash through the beams. “We’re going. Together.”

“I told you not to come back here,” Lucy says, but I barely catch the words through the sound of the engine and the crunch of dead leaves.

And then there’s a new sound. A deep, low drumming. A vibration strong enough that the steering wheel trembles in my hands.

“Stop the car,” says Lucy.

I ignore her.

There’s a deeper rumble, and then a crackling sound as something juts up beneath the tires, nearly sending the little car over the edge of the narrow dirt road. I clutch the wheel and bite back a scream.

“Stop the car, Bree.”

I don’t stop.

The next instant, a massive boulder crashes down from the hill above. In a flash of headlights, I see it thud right in front of us, so close that the whole car rocks, so close that the front bumper hits the earth. The boulder bounces onward, down the hillside. Snapping trees trace its path.

I throw the car into park. Adrenaline spears through me so hard, I think I might throw up. We were a half second from being crushed. Below us, in the hill, there’s another rumble.

It’s a threat.

I whirl toward Lucy. “Is it doing this?” I choke out.

Lucy is still leaning back against the seat, smiling at me. The trail of blood on her chin sparkles in the dashboard lights. “I am,” she says.

I stare back at her, trying to breathe.

“I’m part of this place now,” she says. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you see what it’s giving me?” Her eyes glow. “When this part of me finally disappears …” She holds up both bloody arms, like they’re the sleeves of an old sweater, and gestures at her skinny body. “… I’ll be part of something so much bigger. I’ll be right where I belong.”

I stare at her gray face like I’ve never seen it before.

Maybe I never have.

When Lucy pushed us to leave, I didn’t see what kind of plan she’d made for herself. I didn’t see who she was becoming. I only saw the pretty girl she’d been.

“Lucy,” I say. Or I think I say. But I’m not sure my lips move at all.

“I’m going to get out of the car now,” she tells me, putting her hand on the door. “You keep on driving. Don’t stop. Just go.” She shoves the door open. “And this time,” she adds, with a widening smile, “don’t come back.”

She climbs out and slams the door behind her.

I wrench the car into drive. Then I streak down the hillside, veering along the twisted road, and the drumming of the mountain starts to fade beneath me.

I want to turn back, to catch a last glimpse of Lucy before she’s gone.

But I don’t.

*     *     *
The letter comes a week later, while I’m packing my things for the move. Philadelphia isn’t New York City, but it’s closer. It’s something new.

I recognize the handwriting on the envelope instantly. It’s not slashing and elegant, like Greg’s, but bubbly and rounded, and it’s not written in green fountain pen, but blue ballpoint. Just like always.

I rip it open.

Dear Bree,

Thanks so much for the visit. It was nice seeing you again.

Everything’s pretty good here, same as ever. You know how this place is.

Say hi to Greg for me.

I love you.

-Lucy