After the Woods by Kim Savage Page B

with a reporter doing a stand-up, which is when they plop themselves at the scene of the action, like town hall or a burning house. And that Liv had bumped into her on the way in.
    â€œI have no idea,” Liv said. I don’t know why she lied.
    â€œSo she doesn’t know you’re here,” I said, sulking. Even half-sedated, I wanted Mom to see what a good friend Liv was, checking up on me.
    â€œDid you really think I was dead?” Liv asked.
    â€œNo. I get confused. Like I said, it’s the pain medicine.” I held up the round end of my morphine pump. It had a button in the middle that I pushed every hour. The other end was tipped with a cannula that delivered the drug into my spine. Every part of me hurt, but mostly my ankle, the one Donald Jessup snapped. Ropes and pulleys forced my body to form new bone to repair the break: an impressive contraption that you might mention if you were seeing it for the first time.
    â€œI bet the morphine confuses things. Makes your memories unreliable. But all things considered, that’s probably best. Forgetting, in order to move on,” Liv said.
    â€œThere are gaps. But I remembered his face enough to ID him. And the things he said.”
    Liv’s smile went stiff, as though she caught it before it slipped away. “Things?”
    I shimmied down into my blanket a touch. Jessup’s voice was still in my head: the jangly shouts and the sharp orders. The stammering when he was jonesing. The spooky calmness when he arrived at an idea. “He talked a lot.”
    â€œDid you tell the police what he said?”
    Her question confused me. “They weren’t interested in what he said to me. They were interested in what he did to me.”
    â€œYou weren’t raped. They told me you weren’t raped,” Liv said quickly.
    There are other violations. Like forcing someone to see something in a pit that will haunt them forever.
    â€œI wasn’t raped.” I said it wearily.
    â€œSee? We’re both fine now.” She reached for my hand, but I left it there, tethered to its needle.
    â€œWhy are you downplaying it?” I said.
    She grabbed my other hand and patted it enthusiastically. “I’m simply trying to say we’re okay.”
    â€œWe’re okay now.” I sounded sour. For a second, I had wished I was her, unblemished and upbeat. Already looking ahead. Maybe I could act normal too, if I could get the fractals of my memory and how Liv was acting right then to make sense. “Can I ask you a question?” I said.
    â€œYes?” Liv said.
    â€œWhat did you do after you got away?”
    Liv asked if I was chilly and didn’t wait for my answer. She pulled the sheet to my chin and perched on the bed, speaking mechanically, with measured beats and pauses. “I ran back down the trail. I had no cell—you had yours, remember?—so I had to drive all the way home before I could call the police. They went and looked for you, exactly where I told them, where the Hill crests, to the exact spot where I—”
    â€œLeft me.”
    She sighed like I was a child.
    â€œWere you with them? The searchers?” I asked.
    â€œEveryone was there. The whole town came out, it was over the top”— Did she roll her eyes? —“you’d just vanished.”
    â€œWere you there looking for me?” I had to force myself to be still under my blanket.
    â€œI wanted to,” she said, smoothing the blanket across my chest. “But they wouldn’t let me. I had to be examined. Make my report. Besides, they said if I went back in the woods, it would distract the volunteers.”
    â€œThey wouldn’t let you?” I asked.
    â€œOf course not. I mean, he was still out there,” she said.
    â€œSo was I.”
    Liv stared hard at the muted TV, twisting a bit of blanket between her fingers. Red, white, and blue streamers rippled across the screen and dissolved