Page 81 of The Staircase in the Woods

It wasn’t said out loud. Nobody told them,You’re not welcome here. But they each knew it. Matty’s parents and siblings made no bones about giving them the evil eye whenever they saw them in passing—in town, at school, at the Wawa, wherever. And they weren’t the only ones giving them that look. Or casting the accusations at them in mumble and whisper.Druggies. Freaks. Killers. They killed Matty. They worshipped the Devil. Satanists. They took him up there and hid his body. I bet you can find it if you look hard enough—the cops don’t know what they’re doing. I heard it was jealousy—Matty was better than all of them. No, I heard he was sticking it to the girl in the group, and they didn’t like that. No, I heard it was ritual sacrifice. They probably killed people’s pets, too.

Matty was never implicated in any of these stories. He was always the good guy, the best among them. It was never his fault. Always theirs.

So they knew they weren’t welcome.

And yet, they went.

—

The family held the funeral a year after the incident. In the summer. It wasn’t at a funeral home—there was no body, after all, because Matty was still formally listed asmissing. No, they held it at Hansell Park, in the evening. A candelight vigil, they called it, and people would come and share memories and poems about Matty. Inremembrance. Most of them believed in their hearts that he had died and could not return—to them he was not merely missing, but rather, a ghost. Only as present as the memories they could share about him.

Lauren, Owen, and Hamish went. Stayed in the back with their candles flickering. Saw Matty’s parents and sisters get up there and break down crying, sharing all these stories about him—though Lauren whispered to the other two during it all, “Notice none of these things are about Matty. Not really. They’re about hisaccomplishments.” That’s all Matty was to them, she said. He was like a gold medal they could hang around their necks—a shining example of the family, a human trophy.

Other kids from school showed up, read stupid fucking poems about him. Some of their teachers did, too. Teachers that the three of them were once close with, whom they loved a lot—and teachers who now wouldn’t give them the time of day. They were lucky to get a few recommendation letters out of those teachers who still believed in them, who still held faith that they weren’t themega-jealous super-Satanic thrill-kill cultistsothers made them out to be.

(And even there, they had to solicit those letters on the down-low. As if the teachers did not want to be seen with them. Lauren joked darkly with their English teacher, Mr. Knetemann, that it was like they all wore the Scarlet Letter, but he didn’t humor her, and did not seem to find it funny, or even ironic.)

Lauren had a poem she wanted to read during the funeral. The others didn’t know that. They didn’t bring anything, but she did—and when there was a lull, when they were asking if anyone else had anything more to share about Matthew Shiffman, Lauren stood up, handing her candle to Owen before walking to the front, fumbling with the little crinkly piece of paper in her hand, holding it reverently like it was a prayer—

But Matty’s mother walked around the podium with a vigorous stride. Her hand was up, finger pointing. Already she was saying, “No, no,no,” until it became a bellow: “No!” She stood in the way ofLauren’s path, and even as their friend kept going, Matty’s mother grabbed her by the shoulders, seething. “You little whore. You little druggie whore. Corrupter. You corrupted my son! He was better than you.Smarterthan you. He had a future, and you havenone. None!” Already people were gathering behind Matty’s mother to ease her away from the teen girl—Lauren, who was already shaking, already starting to weep. But those gathered didn’t worktoohard to pull her away, did they? It was a half-hearted effort because, really, they wanted this. They liked the taste of blood in the water.

They thought the three of them deserved whatever they got.

And the mother said as much in her final words—

“It should’ve beenyou. You should’ve disappeared. Not my son.Not my son.”

Then, finally, as they eased her away, back to the podium, Lauren turned tail and bolted away from the vigil, dropping her poem, which the wind caught and carried away.

—

Owen and Hamish followed after, of course.

It took them a while to find her, and when they did, she wasn’t alone.

She sat there, at the base of a tree, sharing a cigarette with Nick.

Nick, whom they hadn’t seen since he went away. His hair was short now—buzzed nearly to the scalp. He had a crustache of facial hair. He was thinner than usual—all parts of him lookedsharp,from his cheekbones to his elbows to the edges of his shoulders. Owen and Hamish hugged him, and his hug back felt tense, tenuous, like he didn’t want to be touched.

Already he launched into his pitch: He was back from juvie, no he didn’t want to talk about it, yes he got his GED, and yes, it was time to find Matty. He said he heard from another kid in detention that there was another staircase out toward Pittsburgh, and so Nick said it was time for a road trip—

It was Lauren who told him no.

She sniffed, wiped the last of her tears away, and said coldly, “We’re not doing that. It’s over. They just held a funeral for him, for fuck’s sake.”

Nick scoffed. “He’s not dead.”

“He might as well be.”

That’s when Nick turned to Owen and Hamish. “You hear this bullshit?” he asked them. He told them, “I know you’re both in. You’re with me.”

But they looked to each other, and then to Lauren—

And it was like a star collapsing. A year of bright heat and pain and terrible blinding energy crushing in on itself, a soft implosion. They sagged. They said no. No, they weren’t with him. No, they would not be trying to find Matty. Like Lauren, for them this was over. They were going away soon, to college, and it had to—had to—be over.

Nick was mad as yellowjackets. He pushed Hamish. Threatened to punch Owen. Called them names. Screamed at them in a froth, told them he’d sacrificed so they could all go away to college—he’d gone to juvie, he’d given up so much, they didn’t understand what he’d been through. And now, he said, it was time to pay up.

It was Lauren who dealt the killing blow.

---