Nov 11, 20175 min read

17 The Woods – Henry and June (1985) by LV Gaudet

June blinks her eyes. They feel grainy, dry, and sore. The room is fuzzy and she feels groggy, like she had stayed up much too late and drank much too much wine. The only thing missing is the nausea and slicing migraine of a hangover. She wants to move, but every muscle is tight and sore.

“I must have not moved all night.” She realizes that’s how she feels, like she slept like a sodden lump of detritus, sore because she never moved, never turned over or shifted position, slept like the dead.

The next thought in her mind makes her feel that nausea that is missing. Her stomach swoons with it. It comes slithering back into her mind, unpleasant. It makes her feel weak and a rush of disorientation, the fading memory of a most horrible dream that refuses to fade fast enough. She dreamt her boys went out to play and never came back. She blinks back the tears. Her muscles are stiff.

“It’s only a dream Junie girl, get a hold of yourself.” Lying on her side facing the edge of the bed, she stretches out her legs, feeling the tight pinch of her muscles on the verge of going into painful leg cramps, and relaxes them gingerly. She tries flexing her feet to stretch the muscles, but the movement almost brings on the muscle spasms.

A burning hollowness washes through her and the room would spin and turn over if she were not already lying down.

A low keening moan begins to slip from her lips and she clenches them, cutting the sound off.

“It is real. My boys, Kevin, Jesse.” Her face twists in a grimace of pain and she wishes it would wash her away to nothing. She buries her face in the pillow, fighting through the sorrow and loss gripping her, fighting to control it, concentrating on her breathing and trying to make her body feel the bed and the sheets again. She tries to push the thought away. “My boys… No, they will come home.”

Finally feeling some control, she reaches behind her, feeling for Henry beside her to find his side of the bed empty and cool.

June rolls over and looks. Emptiness threatens to swallow her up again. She needs him more than she needs anything right now. She fights back a sob. She doesn’t think he came to bed at all.

She gets up and quietly creeps to the living room to find him sleeping on the couch. He looks so exhausted. She sees that he had stayed up to clean up the trays and bowls and pans of food brought, and the mess left by the searchers. She knows he stayed near the door so he would hear it open and wake if the boys came home.

She bites her fist to stifle a sob.

Quietly, she goes to the kitchen to make coffee. June looks out the window while she is filling the coffee pot at the sink and sees people approaching the house. She glances to the open doorway to the living room and back out the window. She hurriedly puts down the coffee pot and rushes to meet them at the door.

Opening the door before they get there, she has her finger to her lips, motioning them to be quiet, and waves them in. Inside, she points to Henry sleeping on the couch, puts her finger to her lips again, and waves them to follow her to the kitchen. Quietly, they take their shoes off and follow.

June puts the coffee on and they hover around the far end of the kitchen, away from the open doorway, talking in hushed whispers.

Henry wakes up, thinks he hears whispering voices, and wants to dismiss it. He feels disconnected. He had dreamt the boys were there. They were in the yard playing, and came in the house, running through the house and calling for their mother. He thought it was real for just a heartbeat as he swum up through sleep to consciousness. If it was real, it would have woken him up. The house is silent. Then he hears it again, the faintest whisper of voices. He is sure it’s just his imagination.

Wearily, he gets up and stumbles to the kitchen, hoping June is still sleeping. She needs it. He’ll have coffee made for her when she wakes up. He walks in to find June and some people whispering in the kitchen.

June is tired but alert. She looks at him and gives him a worried smile. He smiles back, his grimace filled with the same dread as hers.

“More will be coming soon to start searching for the boys again.”

June pours Henry a coffee and brings it to the table. She sets it down and looks up at him. “We need to start warming the food to feed them.”

Henry looks into her eyes, sharing her pain. “We’ll find them Junie.”

She nods quickly and looks away, blinking back tears. She wavers on her feet and he puts a steadying arm around her, leaning in and putting his head against hers. “It’s okay Junie, I can be strong enough for both of us,” he whispers into her hair. It is the only brief interlude of intimacy they will be allowed.

He leads her down into one of the chairs and sits in the other, holding her hand, their hands resting on the table.

There is a knock at the door. The first of the searchers have arrived. Before long, the house is filled once again with people. Search groups are organized and sent out with flyers and knocking on doors, going door to door to alert their little world of the two missing boys whom everyone has already heard about. Searchers tromp through the woods, struggling through the deeper snow there, and lines spread across the fields, walking amateurishly too far apart. They haven’t enough searchers to stretch as far as they do and walk a proper distance apart. They could easily miss the body of a child lying beneath the snow still covering the fields.

The morning stretches to noon and Henry and June helplessly watch a parade of volunteers come and go, giving them their hollow sympathy and leaving glad they are not the grieving couple whose sons are missing. They can see it in their eyes that cloud over and never quite meet theirs.

June is kept mindlessly busy warming food to feed the volunteers and cleaning up the endless mess they leave behind.

The same women who had hovered over her the day before are back, clinging to her and fluttering about her like a bunch of clumsy butterflies, their lips constantly flapping like their wings.

“Do they never shut up?” June thinks as they prattle on endlessly with their stories and gossip. They are doing their best to try to comfort and offer her support. There is no comfort for the mother whose children are missing with no sign of their fate or whereabouts.

Noon wears on through the afternoon, and with it, everyone’s eagerness wanes into dreary exhaustion.