Dec 23, 201712 min read

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

June wakes up feeling foggy and sore. She blinks the fuzziness from her eyes and rolls over, looking miserably at the open bedroom door. She feels like she hasn’t slept all night.

“I woke from the worst dream,” she thinks. “I dreamt Jesse and Kevin were missing.”

Henry is still snoring next to her. Getting up, she puts on her housecoat and goes to the kitchen to make coffee.

June steps into the kitchen to see two cereal bowls on the table. She is about to call out to the boys, Kevin and Jesse, over the bowls left on the table, but she stops. The reality of the past two days crashes down on her like a sledgehammer, making her stagger and nearly fall with sorrow and loss. Her knees weak, she starts trembling, her eyes burning with the tears that fill them.

She looks at the bowls in confusion, a puzzled frown replacing her anguish as she struggles to compose herself.

“I don’t remember anyone being here,” she thinks, wondering how the bowls got there.

Unable to put the thought out of her head, June starts the coffee brewing and washes the bowls, putting them away. Feeling lost, she stands there staring out the kitchen window at the ruined trampled snow of the back yard. There is no longer any tract of her boys’ footsteps. Somehow, that opens up an empty spot inside her that threatens to swallow her up.

“How did you sleep, June?” Henry asks, coming into the kitchen.

June turns and he takes in the strain that seems to have visibly sapped a part of her away.

“As well as I could have I guess,” she says. June can’t help the urge to glance at the table where the bowls had sat moments ago.

Seeing that she hasn’t poured herself a coffee, Henry goes to the cupboard, getting two cups and pouring them both a coffee.

“Come sit and have a coffee June.” He tries to hide the worry he feels when he looks at her.

He goes to the table with his coffee, picking up the paper he set there when he entered the kitchen and starts reading.

June moves, her body detached from her mind, finding herself sitting at the table with Henry. She looks at the coffee cup in front of her like she’s not quite sure how it got there, then looks up at Henry.

“Did you leave cereal bowls on the table?”

“No.” Henry looks from his newspaper to the table, not seeing any bowls. “There’s no bowls there now.”

“I cleaned them up.”

Henry goes back to his newspaper and coffee, thinking that’s the end of it.

June looks at her coffee. She sits there in silence for a while. The bowls are bothering her. She looks at Henry reading his newspaper, back at her coffee, and frowns.

“Was someone here after I went to bed?”

Henry grunts.

“I don’t remember the bowls being there yesterday,” June persists. “They were right there on the table this morning. No one was here after I went to bed that I know about. Who was here Henry?”

“Nobody was here,” he says, still reading.

“Do you remember anyone using the bowls? I don’t remember anyone using bowls.”

Henry looks up from his newspaper. “I don’t remember anyone using bowls. But if they were there, then someone must have used them.”

“I guess so,” June cedes.

Henry continues reading through his newspaper and drinking his coffee, while June sits there quietly, barely touching hers as it cools.

Finished, Henry folds his newspaper and gets up, putting his cup in the sink.

“I’m going to the recreation center to see how the search for the boys is going.”

June looks at him with a look bordering on alarm. She can’t help the thought that rings through her head, “What if he doesn’t come back? What if he disappears like my boys?”

“I should come with you,” June says.

Henry almost changes his mind, remembering June’s breakdown the day before. “I can’t bring her there,” he thinks. “Junie isn’t ready to handle it and I don’t think any of them are ready to handle her.”

“I think you should stay here,” he says. “Someone might come by if they find anything. Someone should be here.”

He wants to say, “In case the boys come home,” but doesn’t. He doesn’t want to get her hopes up for nothing.

June has an urge to scream at him. To tell him she isn’t broken, that those are her boys lost somewhere out there too. “I know why you really want me to stay home,” she thinks.

“Fine,” she says.

Feeling guilty leaving her, Henry nods and leaves.

Left alone, June gets up and pours herself another coffee.

“I should have made Henry breakfast before he went.”

June feels no hunger or interest in eating herself.

“The boys must be so hungry.” She wipes away a tear.

With little else to do and no interest in drinking her coffee, June starts going through the motions of cleaning the house. She gets a rag and starts with dusting.

“Why is there so much dust?”

With the large number of people coming and going since the boys vanished, June would have expected the house to be bordering in chaos. But when everyone left, it was like they had never been there, except for the fridge and freezer overflowing with meals brought by well-meaning neighbours as if someone had died.

June pushes the thought away, and with it the abandoning herself to debilitating grief that she is forever a heartbeat away from. “My boys are not dead.”

There are no toys to clean up. The absence of boys’ clutter is an empty spot inside her. She has to find something else to clean up. She moves on to tidying the already tidy front closet.

June starts straightening the shoes and stops, studying them with a puzzled frown. One of the pairs is missing a shoe.

“It must be here somewhere.”

June searches the closet without turning up the missing shoe. She stops, standing in the living room and looking around, thinking. The only things out of place are the discarded comic book and socks on the floor where they had been left after her earlier insistence they must stay where the boys’ left them.

June starts searching the house for the missing shoe. When the search turns up nothing, she finds herself in the kitchen, staring at the kitchen table. It is still set for supper for four. She could not bring herself to put the settings away.

“They must be so hungry.” She stares at the spot the cereal bowls had been.

It’ not the first time she has noticed things out of place. She finds herself searching the house for these little things. They make her feel like the boys are close, right there in the same room even. She looks around sadly, tears welling at her eyes. They burn with the salt of her tears as much as from the pressure of her sorrow pushing out at her eyes and her temple, threatening to explode her head with her deep feeling of loss.

“Where are you? Kevin, Jesse, where are you?” she whispers, looking down at the new object she found.

She had found a stick on Jesse’s bed. It is Y shaped and just the right size to make a slingshot with. The bark had been peeled off, leaving the smoother wood beneath. The ends had been cut amateurishly to the right lengths. It is exactly the kind of thing Jesse would do.

Detail a few other small oddities she’s noticed since the boys vanished, tie them in with their actions.

“That was not there before.” Her voice has a new edge to it. She knows the stick was not there. She had been in the boys’ rooms every day. She can’t help it. She just has to check, just in case. June goes to Kevin’s room, looking for anything out of place. His baseball bat and mitt are where they should be, the baseball still conspicuously missing. She tries to pull up the memory of the last time she saw it. Was it lost before they went missing?

She moves on to Jesse’s room. Nothing else is out of place there either that she cannot be certain was not moved before. She moves on, making another search through the house, looking for any little thing that might be wrong.

In the living room, a few of the books in the bookcase had been shifted, leaning now when she is sure they were straight before. June straightens them.

She goes to her bedroom, looking around. She stops, staring, stunned.

June takes those few steps towards the dresser like a woman knowingly walking to her doom. She stares down at the stuff on the dresser.

“Someone was here. Someone moved things on my dresser.”

She reaches out, tentatively picking up an action figure and staring at it in shock. She is sure it wasn’t there before.

“Jesse? Kevin?” She whispers their names, an icy chill creeping up her back.

“Are these messages? Does that mean you are dead? Are you sending me messages from the grave?”

She shakes her head. “No, it doesn’t feel right. You’re alive. I can feel it. We’ll find you. I’ll find you.”

She looks around hopelessly. There are no answers here. “How can I let them know that I’m still looking for them? That I haven’t given up?

Henry parks in the recreation center parking lot. He sits there for a moment, not ready yet to step inside the building and face his neighbours’ pity. He’s not sure which is worse, the pity over his missing boys, or over his wife’s apparent inability to deal with the situation.

With a heavy sigh, he finally moves to get out. The heaviness of the situation weighs him down as he makes the short walk to the doors.

He reaches out one hand, grasping the door handle, and pauses again. A small smile creases his lips up at the corners. It is not a smirk of amusement or pleasure, but rather one of pain and trying unsuccessfully to control that pain. His eyes burn with the tears that threaten to come. Henry pushes them and all thoughts of his boys away, forcing his mind to go blank; his feelings numb.

Feeling like he regained control enough, Henry shakes his head in a slow sad motion and opens the door, stepping inside.

The redness in his eyes gives him away.

In the recreation center, long worn wooden folding tables are still set out, just as they were on his last visit. Four are pushed together to make a large rectangle table. A large map is spread out and held down by partially drank Styrofoam coffee cups. The cups are new. Someone had picked up some disposable cups. Before, they were ceramic cups.

Two tables pushed together end to end still hold an assortment of small tea sandwiches made into small triangles, lady fingers, and pinwheels. There are platters of assorted dainties, and large industrial sized pots of coffee and tea.

Other tables with worn out old folding chairs are scattered for people to sit at.

A couple of elderly men sit at one having their coffee and sandwiches, talking about the old days. Days when it was safe to let the young ones play outside and roam the town and surrounding rural roads and woods without worrying they would disappear.

A group of searchers on a break are just finishing gathering coffee and sandwiches, and are slowly making their way to a few of the scattered tables.

The police sergeant stands over the large map, staring down at it with a frown; going over in his mind who searched where and what the next step should be. Scattered other people are there, either visiting or looking busy.

“It’s a party that never ends,” Henry muses, feeling empty and desolate at the sight.

He moves deeper into the open room of the hall.

Henry is at the snack table, a plate of sandwiches and dainties on the table before him while he drops sugar cubes into his black coffee, before anyone notices him.

He is frowning down at the film growing over the cream that sat out too long when a hand claps him on the back, resting with a heavy weight on his shoulder.

“Henry,” the older man says. His voice is weighted with the seriousness of the moment.

Henry turns to look at the neighbour, a man he barely knows despite growing up here with that same neighbour living in that same house up the road on the street he grew up on. They had never really talked before.

Henry nods acknowledgement of the man’s offer of support.

“How are you and June holding up?”

“We’re managing,” Henry says.

The look in the other man’s eyes answers the question, which is worse.

“It’s good to see you getting out of the house for a bit. Is June alone at the house? I could send the wife over to keep an eye on her.”

Henry shakes his head. “That’s not necessary. June needs a little time to herself just now.”

The other man lowers his head, the pitying look deepening as he glances at Henry then turns away to look somewhere else.

“And there it is,” Henry thinks, “the pity look over Junie. They don’t think she’s strong enough to handle this. My Junie will surprise them. She’s stronger than they think. She’s stronger than she thinks.”

Two more neighbours join them.

“Why don’t you come sit with us Henry?”

Henry reluctantly lets them pull him away after pouring the cream into his coffee and stirring it, if only to escape that pitying look from a near stranger, who can’t even look him in the eye. The older neighbour watches them go with relief.

Conversations drop to a whisper and looks are exchanged as they pass others. It makes Henry feel like an outsider, not someone who grew up in this town. Someone not privileged to be included in the secret, the object of town gossip.

He hears June’s name whispered accompanied by sidelong glances from two middle-aged women and knows what they are talking about.

They settle him at another table, purposely out of earshot of the two women, and surround him.

“Here to see how the search is going?”

“Yes,” Henry says, contemplating the plate of food he really doesn’t feel like eating and does not know why he even took. He turns his attention to his coffee instead.

The police sergeant looks up, noticing Henry, and comes to stand over the three men.

“How are you holding up, Henry?”

Henry looks up at him, nodding. “We’re holding up.”

It does not escape him that the officer did not include June. “He doesn’t think she’s holding up either,” he thinks.

“Come to the map table, I’ll show you where we’re at.”

Reluctantly abandoning his coffee and unwanted snack with a small pang of loss, Henry obediently gets up and follows.

They stop and stare down at the map as if it might somehow reveal the boys’ whereabouts.

The officer points, moving his hand to gesture as he talks.

“We’ve covered this area here up to here. I’ve got search teams here, here, and here. We expect to have this area covered by nightfall.”

“We already searched there,” Henry says, feeling empty. He knows the reasoning, but can’t help but feel the futility of having search teams keep searching the same areas.

The officer nods.

“We are covering new ground too, but if those boys are alive they could be moving about, trying to find their way home. It’s making the job much bigger, but we have to keep searching the same places too, just in case they made their way back there.”

“You have found no signs of them at all,” Henry’s voice is flat.

The officer shakes his head again. He drops his voice. “We are going to want to talk to Mrs. Bennett again, see if there is anything she missed. Maybe she forgot to tell us something. If it’s easier for you, I can have a couple of officers come by the house later to talk to her, instead of,” he pauses, “you know, having to bring her in.”

The use of the formal “Mrs. Bennett” sends a cold chill down Henry’s back.

“They’re suspicious of her,” he thinks, quickly pushing the thought away as ridiculous. June would never hurt those boys.

“That will be fine. After dinner.”

“We have another search crew getting ready to leave in about ten minutes, if you want to join them,” the sergeant says, indicating the group of searchers who are now visiting and joking over their coffees.

“That will be good,” Henry says with an appreciative nod.

Twenty minutes later, Henry is squeezed into the front seat of a car with two other searchers, heading for the other side of the woods his boys vanished into. Their start point will be a farm there with a number of abandoned out buildings, just the kind boys would be curious about investigating. The group Henry was with had searched the out buildings thoroughly. They did find signs that suggested some local kids use the buildings to hang out, but the evidence pointed to older kids. There are a few parents who will be keeping a closer watch on their daughters from here on.

The car pulls up in front of the house, letting Henry out.

“You hang in there Henry,” the driver waves as Henry closes the car door. Henry waves them off and the car pulls away. He enters the house, calling for June as he takes off his coat and shoes.

“June?” Henry calls again. He is in the living room looking down the hall towards the bedrooms. He calls again, listening for an answer. There is none.

He starts towards the bedrooms, stopping when he passes the kitchen doorway. He looks in.

June is in the kitchen. Her body language is stiff and anxious. He goes into the kitchen.

Upset, June pulls out the bowl and measuring cup, setting them on the countertop. She gets out the wooden spoon and puts it with the bowl. Then she pulls out the bags of flour and sugar.

Henry watches silently at first.

“What are you doing, June?”

“I shouldn’t have made the cake. I’m fixing it.”

“Fixing what? It’s done. The cake is made.”

She turns to him.

“The boys, they knew I was going to make a cake after supper. It needs to be the same way when they come home.”

“They knew, but they won’t be bothered that you made it already.”

She turns back to the baking items, fussing over them. They need to be exactly like they were. “I have to be ready. They know I am going to make a cake.”

“June, put it away. The cake is already made.”

She stops, the items placed as she wants. She does not add anything more to the cake ingredients set out. It is exactly as it was when the boys left to play outside.

Shaking his head and worried for June, Henry turns to walk out of the kitchen and leave her to her crazy. He pauses, staring down at the cake dumped in the open garbage.

“If the boys see that I’m still waiting to make the cake, they will know I’m still waiting for them to come home,” June says quietly to herself.