There’s a Better Version of Myself in These Woods
“Darkness Like a Seam” by Rebecca Turkewitz
When I was a child, my grandparents lived in a squat scab-colored house that sat in a clearing carved into the New Hampshire woods. Everything inside their house was a shade of beige or muted brown, the carpets were too thick, and there was a musty smell I associated with basements and garages. In the living room, there was an end table wedged between the couch and the wall that was unusually deep. The table held only a lamp and a set of coasters that were never used. Underneath it was empty space—and because of the way the light fell in the room, there was a spot way in the back, against the wall, so thoroughly wrapped in shadow that it was like it did not exist. It was a remarkable hiding spot for a child, in plain view and yet functionally invisible.
I hated my grandparents’ dim, claustrophobic house, stranded in that enormous sea of oaks and pines and creeping ferns. My mother and I lived in an apartment—or rather a series of different apartments—in a small city an hour away, and I was not used to the sounds of the woods. I’d assumed it would be quiet after dark, but all night, skunks and deer trundled through the undergrowth. Crickets shrilled and whined. Screech owls called and called. The trees seemed to sway more; I could hear shimmying leaves and the unsettling creak of oak branches straining against their own stiffness. From the twin bed where I usually slept, in what had once been my uncle’s room, I huddled under the covers as the forest pressed in around me with its damp, huffing breath, its curious, digging claws.
I was a timid child, afraid of the first day of school, afraid of being left alone, afraid of my mother’s new boyfriends, afraid of swim lessons, afraid of the cafeteria when my best friend was absent, afraid of our apartments’ laundry rooms, and the empty corridor on the way to the bathroom at school. I was afraid of my mother’s episodes—the times when her eyes darted around, and her legs moved frantically, and she told me every single strange idea that tumbled into her mind. I was afraid when she wasn’t having an episode too, because I knew another one would come. I was prone to stomachaches and insomnia and periods of time when I could not force food down my throat.
My point is: I did not have an easy or predictable childhood. Still, perhaps a bolder person, one who was not so terrified of change or outmatched by the daily trials of living, would have fared better. But I was who I was, and so going to stay with my grandparents the summer I turned ten was not just a setback. It was a crisis.
I wasn’t told why I was going. “I’m doing this for you,” my mother said by way of explanation. I learned, many years later, that she’d been having recurring visions of harming me, and her doctor had recommended we spend some time apart to give her fraying mind a break. Her hands shook on the steering wheel for the entire drive to my grandparents’. Her hair—long and thick and bronze-colored—was dull and unwashed. When it was time for her to leave, she sobbed and gripped the fabric of my T-shirt. She took a lock of my hair in her fist and smelled it.
“Enough,” my grandmother said firmly, and then walked Mom back to the car.
My mother blew me a kiss from the driver’s seat, and then said, “You are my whole world,” before she backed out of the driveway and was gone.
My grandparents were stoics. They talked mostly about the weather and food and the goings-on about town and the layoffs that seemed perpetually imminent at the lumberyard my grandfather managed. They cared for me in their way—cooking foods I liked, taking me to town every Saturday morning for pancakes and hot chocolate and a trip to the library, keeping the house clean and orderly. But they did not talk to me the way my mom did: frankly and openly, as if I was a friend and an equal. Children, my grandparents seemed to think, should mostly talk to other children. But there were no other children, and so I did not talk much, except when my worry grew frantic and knocked around my insides before spilling out in an avalanche of questions. When could I talk to my mom again? When was I going home? Was my mom sick? Had my mom stopped taking her medication? Who was looking after her? Was the phone in my grandparents’ kitchen plugged in? Were they sure, sure, sure, sure the phone was plugged in? When was the last time they’d checked?
I became fixated on the fact that I did not know—and couldn’t know until the next time I heard her voice—whether my mother was alive or dead. I would lie awake at night, listening to the slithering and creeping and shaking of those black woods, trying to figure out how to exist in two realities: one in which my mother was alive, and one in which she was dead. When this thought took root, the only things that could break its hold were sleep or the long, muffled whistle of the train, which sliced through the woods every few hours. The train was a reminder that, stranded as I was in that low-ceilinged house of silence, the wider world still existed. The train would soon be racing by the diner with its tired waitresses, who were always complimenting my curls or my dark eyes and teasing me about the way I savored my hot chocolate like an old woman with her tea. People walking their dogs or stopping by the pharmacy would soon be pausing to listen to the jangling of the train-crossing bells, and little boys would be waving and tugging on their mothers’ hands. And then, after it passed through town, the train would continue along the seam of the track like a zipper, bringing the fragments of the world together. For the world had indeed fallen to pieces. For I was as alone and misunderstood as anyone had ever been. For I had lived my whole life in the high beams of my mother’s intense but flighty attention, and now I lived entirely in shadow. For I had been my mother’s anchor—I had always tried to keep her safe, and now she was adrift.
And so it was that late one afternoon several weeks into my stay, while my grandmother slept in front of the TV, I packed a small bag, took the big flashlight hanging by the basement steps from its hook, and opened the heavy back door, which was always bolted shut and rarely used. I’d heard a story about my mother running away into the forest as a girl, screaming that she was going to live in a cave as a hermit. It was short-lived—her rumbling stomach brought her sheepishly back—but I wanted to imitate her. I looked through the screen door into the endless line of trees and lost my nerve. I couldn’t imagine entering those woods, the object of my nighttime terror. So, I retreated quietly to the living room and crawled into the empty space under the end table. I was surprised to find that it was cool back there. I tried not to shift too much; from time to time I stretched out my legs and then curled them up again. I was small for 10, and even with my backpack and the flashlight, I didn’t really feel cramped. I could hear my grandmother’s labored breathing over the low drawl of voices from the television as she slumbered in her recliner on the other side of the room. I rested my head against the side of the couch and waited.
It was not my grandmother who realized I was missing. I heard her wake and go to the kitchen to begin dinner. When my grandfather arrived home and went to get me from my uncle’s old room, he came back puzzled but not alarmed. My grandmother couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen me. The discovery of the open door to the yard and the missing flashlight triggered the first wave of panic.
“Don’t worry,” my grandfather said, though of the two of them, he was the worrier. “She hates those woods. She won’t have gone far.”
“She’s not like her mother. What if she can’t find her way back?”
They went to the yard and shouted my name. Maribel. Maribel. Maribeeeeeel. Their voices grew faint as they moved further into the trees.
I don’t know how far in they went. Perhaps as far in as the train tracks. Maybe even further.
After some time, I registered the strain of the spring and then the crack of the screen door hitting the jamb, then light footsteps moving through that carpeted house. Every so often, I heard the swish of a closet door opening or a heavy piece of furniture being wiggled out of place. Occasionally my grandmother said my name, but very softly, as if she was afraid of what she might find if I answered. I slowed my breathing as she searched the living room. I watched her, in full view of me, move to the fireplace, open its glass doors, and look into the flue, as if I might have scrambled up there, like a horrible, sooty goblin. I watched her shudder a little as she rose unsteadily to her feet. The arm of her yellow cardigan had a black smudge on it. She fished a Kleenex out of her sleeve, where she always kept one, and wiped her nose. I did not feel that I knew my grandmother well, but this intimate gesture, so recognizably hers, filled me with remorse. Then she muttered in frustration—“That child!”—and went to the kitchen.
Occasionally my grandmother said my name, but very softly, as if she was afraid of what she might find if I answered.
When my grandfather returned, I could tell it was growing dark outside from the way the light in the room had changed. As he walked past, I leaned forward to look. His pants were caked with mud.
“Lynne?” he called. “Any luck?”
“You didn’t find her,” my grandmother said.
In the kitchen, my grandparents conferred anxiously. When should they call my mom? Should they call the police? What if they waited, just a little longer, to see if I would return on my own? Eventually, I heard the clatter of plates being pulled down, the scrape of chairs, then forks and spoons against porcelain. They were eating their dinner. Something that smelled of wilted onions and beef. Something that made their chewing wet and spongy. They didn’t speak at all as they ate.
I’d felt mostly a vacillating sense of panic and guilt as they’d hunted for me, but I began to resent them as they filled their hungry bellies while I, for all they knew, was treed by a frothing coyote or lying at the bottom of a gulch. But the longer I waited, the sillier the stunt became. The problem was that it was already too late to reveal myself. I wouldn’t be able to pass off my hiding as a prank or a joke or a whim. They’d been searching at least an hour. The floor plan of their house was relatively open—the living room had two doorways and no doors. There was no way to clamber out on my stiff limbs and slip outside, no way to pretend I was returning from the woods. I was too old—far too old—to cause this kind of stir over nothing. And I was already not held very highly in their esteem.
An hour or so later, they called the police, and all hope of salvaging the situation evaporated. I’d have to wait until after the search, until after my grandparents fell asleep. I wondered if what I was doing was now a crime. Wasting the officers’ time, faking a kidnapping, causing a false alarm. I was despicable. I was an unwanted child, revealing to everyone why I was unwanted. My stomach was cramping with hunger and shame, but I was paralyzed. I could not bring myself to emerge.
The police came, with their loud footsteps on the kitchen tiles and the hollow sound of voices through their walkie-talkies. They asked some routine questions, and then they traipsed through the heavy door—there were two of them—to see what they might find in the backyard. I could hear through the open windows that the woods were waking up: the rhythmic and staccato hissing of grass-dwelling insects that sounded like sprinklers on a soccer field, the chittering cries of bats, the thunk of moths and beetles against the window screens.
My grandparents were talking so low in the kitchen, I could scarcely hear them, but when they said my mother’s name, I strained to listen. “Rose cannot handle this,” my grandmother said forcefully. “It would undo everything. We’ll call her when we find Maribel.” Then: “Hard to imagine that girl is actually turning out to be more trouble than her mother.” She laughed, and it was the most joyless laugh I’d ever heard.
When the police returned, they were radioing into the station. They had not found me. My whole body felt hot, and I wondered, with a flash of hope, if I was actually ill, if my motivations could be blamed on an intense and disorienting fever. Do it. I told myself. Get up and get out.
But before I could crawl forward—though I would have, I’m sure of it—there was the sound of tires on my grandparents’ gravel driveway, then a car door slamming. The kitchen door was yanked open, and then I heard a voice, a voice that sounded very much like my own voice, saying, through tears, “I’m here! I’m so sorry! Grandpa, I’m back!”
The kitchen chairs scraped as my grandparents stood up in a chorus of concern. “Your arm!” my grandfather said. “What happened?”
A muffled voice, perhaps from being pushed against my grandfather’s chest or my grandmother’s cardigan, said, “I got lost! I got so lost, and it was so dark. And there was a monster, a monster that looked like a pig with no eyes, but he had teeth like a wolf! And it was cold, even though I know it’s not cold out. And there were no stars!”
A man’s soft voice—not one of the policemen—said, “I found her at the railroad crossing, just standing there, underneath a streetlight, sobbing. She told me your address and I brought her back. I live over on Wildwood. I didn’t know what else to do. Her arm is hurt pretty bad.”
“Thank you,” my grandmother said. “Thank you so much for bringing her back.”
The police took the man outside, and their voices became low rumbles.
“Maribel,” my grandmother said sharply. “What were you thinking?”
“Leave her be,” my grandfather said. “We’re just happy you’re home, little one.”
The child that they were calling by my name, who sounded just like me when I cried, whose voice was my voice, began to cry harder then.
“Let me see your arm,” my grandmother said. “Dear lord! Robert, look at this gash.”
“I fell,” the girl in the kitchen said. “I fell when I was running away from the monster, but I got up and I just kept running. And I made it to the road!”
“Good girl,” my grandfather said, with more feeling than I would have expected.
“I dropped the flashlight. I think I broke it. I had to leave it there—I’m sorry!”
Under the table, I groped behind me until my hand closed on the base of the flashlight. I resisted the urge to test if it would still turn on.
“Don’t you worry about that one bit. How’d you find your way to the road?”
“The train whistle,” the girl said with pride. “I hid until I heard it and then I knew which way to run. It led me out of the bad place, back to where it was warm and there were stars again, and the pig monster couldn’t follow. He’s stuck in the cold place.”
“There’s no monster,” my grandmother said.
At almost exactly the same time, my grandfather said, “That’s right. He can’t get you anymore.”
While I was listening to the bizarre scene in the kitchen, I’d stopped flexing my toes and straightening my legs, and I realized I couldn’t feel them at all. I shifted tentatively and it felt like someone had wound a hot wire around my left calf and was tightening it slowly. It was unbearable. My legs shot out, knocking against the table. I heard the lamp above me rocking slightly. The voices in the kitchen hushed.
“What’s that?” the girl whimpered.
“Nothing. Not a thing,” my grandfather said.
Someone turned on the sink and then there was a hiss of pain.
“This’ll need stitches,” my grandmother said. “No way around it.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” my grandfather said. “You must be tired. But we have to take you to the doctor. You can rest in the car.”
“Is my mother coming?” the girl asked.
There was a long pause.
“We’ll call her in the morning. It’s very late.”
The girl began to cry again, and the three of them left through the front door. There was more low talking. Then a series of car doors opening and closing. Tires crawling backwards along the driveway. Then just the night.
I scrambled out onto the living room rug. When I tried to stand, I crashed back down to my knees. My back ached as I tried to unfurl my spine. I gave up and stretched out, lying on my side, until the screaming in my calves and neck dulled. Eventually, I walked, shakily, like a newborn colt, to the door, which was still standing open, and shut it hard. I turned around to face the kitchen. A bloodied hand towel was scrunched on the table. Two bowls were soaking in the sink. The stew pot was still on the stove, and I grabbed a spoon and shoveled several large bites into my mouth, struggling to swallow. I drank frantically from the running faucet. I barely made it to the bathroom to relieve my aching bladder. When I returned to the kitchen, I noticed that the floor was a mess of muddy footprints. The room smelled feral, like sweat and body odor and the ground after it rains.
I checked the clock, which my grandmother kept five minutes fast. It was only 11 PM. I’d been sure it was the early hours of the morning. I did several quick laps around the first floor to get the blood flowing in my legs. I had never been alone in the house before, and it felt almost as unnerving as the evening’s preceding events. I was in shock, I think. I couldn’t process what had happened enough to ask the relevant questions. Who was that imposter? Why had my grandparents not been able to discern that she was not me? How did she and I sound so similar? And the monster? Where was the cold place she spoke of?
If nothing else convinces me that this experience was real—not just a trick of my memory or a fanciful story I invented and then wove into the tapestry of my childhood—it is the period of time that I remained alone in the house that night. I recall those hours with complete clarity, as I tried to sort through what had happened and tried to guess about what might happen next. What would I do when my grandparents and the shapeshifter returned? What if they did not return? What if my grandparents were just then being chewed by the imposter’s suddenly razor-sharp teeth?
In the kitchen, I steeled myself. Then I picked up the phone. She answered after only two rings, sleep rounding the syllables of her “hello.”
I need to come home, I thought, but did not say.
“Hello?” my mom repeated.
I listened to her breathing, to the swish of the phone’s mouthpiece brushing against her cheek as she hoisted herself up in bed.
“Maribel?” she asked, and something about the searching tone of her voice filled me with doubt. How could I answer, when the imposter would have said yes too, probably with equal or greater confidence? I thrust the phone receiver back into its place on the wall.
“It’s Maribel,” I said into the empty kitchen. “I’m Maribel.”
I retrieved my bag and the flashlight from beneath the end table and went upstairs. I climbed into my uncle’s bed, alone with my uncertainty and my cowardice. I didn’t sleep. Eventually, the car’s headlights shone on the wall beside my bed. I grabbed the flashlight and quickly slipped into the closet, closing the door firmly.
There was a longer wait than I expected, and I flicked the flashlight on against the closet’s suffocating blackness. Eventually, my grandfather brought the girl to bed and asked if she wanted him to sit with her. To my surprise, the girl declined. It was the first time she’d acted differently than I would have. Then she asked him to leave the light on, which he readily agreed to. “I’m proud of you,” he said. “Our brave girl. You’re more like your mother than it sometimes seems.” From my grandmother, that would’ve been a barbed remark, but my grandfather meant it, I think, only with love. He slipped into the hallway. My grandmother was elsewhere, perhaps already in bed.
I waited several minutes. I turned off the flashlight, bumping against the rough fabric of my uncle’s old clothes. Then I pushed the door open.
The girl sat up in bed, bunching the covers around her. I could tell she wanted to scream, but all that escaped her mouth was a wet gasp. Her hair was damp and she was in fresh pajamas. So, she’d showered before bed. That accounted for the long wait. Her face was exactly my face, except for the beginnings of a bruise spreading across her chin and a faint scrape on her forehead. Her eyes were the same deep brown as my eyes, her hair the same shade as mine and my mother’s. Her curls were just beginning to spring back as they dried. She had the same short, upturned nose that I’d always wished was longer and more elegant. The same two-tone birthmark rested on her collarbone.
The girl’s terror was so earnest and intense, it diminished my own. “Who are you?” I demanded.
The girl’s terror was so earnest and intense, it diminished my own.
Her eyes filled with tears. “Did the pig monster make you?” she asked.
“I’m real,” I said. “I’m the real Maribel.”
“You came from the closet,” my doppelganger said—and it wasn’t terrible logic. She had been tucked sweetly in bed, and I had slunk out of a monster’s lair.
“You came from the woods,” I said back. I took a step forward and she whimpered, pushing herself toward the wall. I put my hands up and took a showy step away from her.
She got out of bed, watching me. “I’ll scream,” she said.
“Who are you?” I asked again. “You don’t belong here.”
“This is my uncle’s room,” the girl said.
“I know that,” I snapped. It was my uncle’s room.
We faced each other without speaking. What was there to say? The wind gusted and we both glanced nervously at the window. We looked back at one another. I took a step towards her. A sharp pain flared in my arm.
There was a moment then, when I was looking, suddenly, at myself—my real self, standing there in my rumpled clothes from the day before, my hair matted and dry, my eyes swollen and tired, my chin unbruised. Then I was looking back at the imposter, in her soft pajamas, a hospital bracelet still on her wrist. And then I was looking back at myself, the closet door open behind me. Then I felt very dizzy. I reached out my hand, trying to find the edge of the bed, but felt only open air because I’d reached with the wrong hand. The bed was now on my left instead of my right. I sat down hard on my knees and shut my eyes against a wave of nausea.
When I opened my eyes again, my jaw was throbbing and my arm hurt. I pulled up my sleeve to find a bandage. On my forehead, my fingers brushed the thin layer of Vaseline my grandfather must have smeared on my imposter’s scrape. When I rose again, I felt my pajama bottoms brush against tender spots on both my knees.
I was alone in the room.
I did a quick accounting. I remembered it all: my time under the end table, my grandparents’ search, the policemen, the imposter. My experiences from that night were my own—and yet there was the inarguable fact of my damp hair, my various wounds, the hospital bracelet hugging my wrist. I climbed into bed.
It took a long time for me to fall asleep, but eventually I did. I woke to my grandfather’s hand pressed against my forehead.
“No fever,” he said, noticing I was awake. “You slept for a long time.”
“What time is it?” I asked. “Don’t you have work?”
He waved his hand dismissively. I felt a surge of pleasure in the understanding that he’d altered his routine for me.
He took me down to the kitchen. Even though it was almost 1 PM, he poured me cereal and a glass of orange juice. He microwaved his coffee mug and sat down at the table across from me.
“Do I look different?” I asked.
He smiled and pretended to study my face very hard. “You’re no worse for wear, sweet one. Just a bit of bruising.”
My grandmother stepped in from the garden then, and eyed me for so long that I began to wonder if she suspected something. But then she said, simply, “So you’ve had your adventure. I hope you learned your lesson about running off like that.”
“Ah, Lynne. She knows.”
“I won’t run away,” I said, swallowing the “again” before it could slip out. “I promise.”
“Good girl,” my grandfather said.
But I was not the girl he thought I was. The sudden light of his attention had been earned by my imposter. The girl had fooled them both.
My grandmother sat down. “We called your mother,” she said. “She’ll come pick you up by the end of the week.”
“This isn’t a punishment,” my grandfather said quickly. “We’ll miss you.”
My grandmother threw an annoyed glance at my grandfather, but the truth is, I didn’t much care if she was trying to get rid of the difficult child that I, or my imposter, had become. I was focused on the dam of relief that had opened in my chest.
Later that afternoon, I searched the floor of my uncle’s closet, where I’d left the flashlight. I wasn’t sure if it would still be there, and couldn’t tell if I was relieved when I found it. I waited until the next morning, when my grandfather was at work and my grandmother was in the shower. I slipped outside and slunk to the property line. I gazed into the trees, then hurled the flashlight, as far as I could, into the woods.
I don’t have my doppelganger’s memories from that night, as hard as I’ve tried to tap into them, save for one. It’s a brief moment: my feet on hard pavement, standing in a streetlamp’s cone of light. I remember what it felt like to let the light wash over me like water. I remember thinking it was a miracle I’d found it, reached the safety of its glow.
For years, well into adulthood, when I felt afraid or despondent or unable to face a challenge—a classmate’s cruel remark, visiting my mother in the hospital, enduring her long depressions or frantic episodes, my first day at a new job, returning to my grandparents’ house for Christmas—I thought of what it felt like to stand in the yellow wash of light, the warm pavement firm under my feet, the woods receding behind me. I still find comfort and confidence in that triumph, a triumph that is not my own, my bravery radiating from a stolen moment.
I have never told anyone, not even my mother, about this incident. I do not like to dwell on it. But, sometimes, late on summer nights, when the cicadas are throwing out their circular songs or the wind gusts or I wake from vivid dreams of a giant beast moving through the undergrowth, I remember the way that girl, my double, looked at me, with her bruised eyes and deep mistrust. Where did she go? I do not think she is in me. I do not think that we merged together, a blip on a fractured timeline that repaired itself. Nor do I think that she is a repressed memory, a nightmare that I absorbed. I’ve always known we are separate beings.
So, perhaps, she is still out there, a version of me who was just as selfish but much braver, who acted with conviction at great personal risk, then fought her way home—all while my legs fell asleep under a side table. What happens if she finds her way back into the light? What if one day she returns to claim this life she fought so hard to keep? What if this life is, by all rights, more hers than mine?
