The Woods

“Death is pure, wrecking ball destructive. It hits, you’re crushed, you start to rebuild. But not knowing—that doubt, that glimmer—makes death work more like termites or some sort of relentless germ. It eats away from the inside. You cannot stop the rot. You cannot rebuild because that doubt will just keep gnawing away.”

Death is a motif in the text that illuminates how the characters view their world. Paul finds comfort in death’s finality, but when questions surround a death, as in Camille’s case, Paul struggles to completely move forward with his life. The simile likening unresolved questions about a person’s death to termites weakening a home conveys the eerie sense that a lack of answers could bring the structure of life without that person crashing down.

“It was the best summer of my life. At least it was until that final night. Even now I know I will never know a time like it. Weird, right? But I know. I know that I will never, ever, be that happy again. Not ever. My smile is different now. It is sadder, like it is broken and can’t be fixed.”

This quotation comes from the anonymous journal that Lonnie submits to Lucy for MVD to draw out a guilty reaction about the murders. Lucy is sure that the journal is about her because it accurately describes the sadness she hasn’t been able to shake since that night. Her desire to keep these feelings repressed motivates her to seek out the journal’s author, even if it breaks her ethical code.

“If I sat here and told you money means nothing to me, would you believe me? ‘Course not. Same as if you told me you didn’t care about money. I cared about money before they raped me. I care about it now. I’m not lying. They raped me. I want them to go to jail for that. And if I can get some money from them too, why not? I could use it.”

On the stand, Chamique speaks honestly about her desire to get money from the rich boys who assaulted her. Her words connect to the theme of Negotiating Justice and Truth because Paul chooses not to conceal Chamique’s sordid past, wanting her to appear real rather than perfect.

“What Chamique Johnson does or doesn’t do is totally irrelevant to her being raped. We don’t get to choose like that. Your son doesn’t get to decide who deserves to be raped or not. But either way, Chamique Johnson stripped because she had limited options. Your daughter doesn’t.”

In another quote exploring the theme of Negotiating Justice and Truth, Paul explains why he’s fighting so hard for Chamique, even when the case seems impossible to win. Paul is sympathetic to Chamique’s hard life, and he doesn’t believe her past actions should make her an open target for assault and crime. He detests the Jenrettes for trying to use their wealth and privilege to cover up the truth.

“‘But you could find her, couldn’t you?’

He didn’t nod but he didn’t shake his head either.

‘You have a child,’ Sosh said to me. ‘You have a good career.’

‘So?’

‘So this is all so long ago. The past is for the dead, Pavel. You don’t want to bring the dead back. You want to bury them and move on.’”

In this interaction, Uncle Sosh tries to get Paul to stop his investigation into the past because the truth might threaten the happiness he has found. Using the motif of death, Sosh weaponizes Paul’s belief in death’s finality, hoping that he’ll take the hint to move on.

“Each song was not only slow but a total heart ripper. So she would drink her vodka and sit in her depressing apartment and smell the smoke from a dead woman and listen to aching songs of loss and want and devastation. Pitiful, but sometimes it was enough to feel. It didn’t matter if it hurt or not. Just to feel.”

Lucy is an extremely lonely character, and here she describes how she listens to sad music to feel the emotions she can’t in her day-to-day life. The text uses songs as a motif to explore the characters’ relationships with each other and themselves. Lucy has intense self-hatred, so she uses music to torment herself into remembering her pain and shame.

“There are those rare moments in life—when you feel that jolt and it feels great and it hurts like hell, but you’re feeling, really feeling, and suddenly colors seem brighter and sounds have more clarity and foods taste better and you never, not even for a minute, stop thinking about him and you know, just know, that he is feeling exactly the same way about you.”

Lucy recalls the intensity of her young love with Paul that she can’t overcome in her adult years. The run-on sentence of analogies reflects how overwhelming the feeling of attraction was, mimicking through the sentence’s structure why Lucy is still chasing that feeling.

“Partitioning your life. It should have been easy to leave her behind. A summer fling, even an intense one, is just that—a fling. I might have loved her, probably did, but I was just a kid. Kid love doesn’t survive blood and dead bodies.”

Another of Paul’s central character traits is his ability to “partition” his life. Partitioning—or compartmentalizing—allows him to deal with the various aspects of his life separately so that they don’t overwhelm one another. Here, Paul describes how he used this technique to forget Lucy despite the strength of their bond. By visualizing himself as a “kid,” he distances himself from the emotions he felt then. However, the words “[i]t should have been easy to leave her behind” reveal that his attempt to forget her isn’t entirely successful.

“When I approached the building, I could actually feel my body shaking. I scolded myself. I was a grown man. I had been married. I was a father and a widower. I had last seen this woman more than half my life ago. When do we grow out of this?”

When Paul and Lucy reconnect, they both describe feeling like they mentally regressed to their teenage selves, as if no time has passed since they were together. This quotation describes the physical anticipation Paul feels when he’s about to see Lucy again, despite his mental attempts to calm himself.

“So I lied. I said I checked the cabins and that they’d been safely tucked away. Because I didn’t realize the danger. I said I was alone that night—I stuck to that lie for too long—because I wanted to protect Lucy. I didn’t know all the damage. So yeah, I lied.”

Paul’s thoughts in this passage connect to the theme of The Unresolved Past Haunting the Present. He explains the lie he told 20 years ago on the night of the murders that he continues to feel guilty for. Paul believes that solving the murder and uncovering what happened will alleviate his guilt for neglecting his duties.

“When we were outside the door, Mrs. Perez said, ‘Don’t come back. Let me grieve in peace.’

‘I thought your son died twenty years ago.’

‘You never get over it,’ Mrs. Perez said.

‘No,’ Lucy went on. ‘But at some point, you don’t want to be left alone to grieve in peace anymore.’”

In this interaction, which connects to the motif of death, Lucy catches Mrs. Perez in a lie about her grief for her son Gil. Mrs. Perez accurately describes how grief can stay with a person all their life, but the renewed intensity of her grief makes both Paul and Lucy suspicious.

“‘It’s not your fault.’

I said nothing.

‘If anything,’ she said, ‘it’s mine.’

I stopped the car. ‘How do you figure that?’

‘You wanted to stay there that night. You wanted to work guard duty. I’m the one who lured you into the woods.’

‘Lured?’

She said nothing.”

The text doesn’t reveal why Lucy feels so guilty about the murders until the end of the book, but this quotation foreshadows her confession. She almost confesses to Paul that she lured him into the woods on Wayne’s request. At the last second, however, she backtracks to protect her new relationship with Paul.

“But sometimes it feels like I was pushed down a hill that night and I’ve been stumbling down ever since. That sometimes I sort of get my bearings but the hill is so steep that I can never really get balanced again and then I start tumbling again.”

Lucy describes how she has felt since the night of the murders, using the analogy of tumbling down a hill. Lucy feels like she can never get over that hill to move on because the pain of the past keeps pushing her back. Her words connect to the theme of The Unresolved Past Haunting the Present.

“I closed my eyes and shook my head. ‘He stole from a charity. He stole from your sister’s charity.’

‘Not my sister’s,’ she said. ‘Yours.’

I let that one go. ‘I wish I could help, Greta.’

‘You’re turning your back on us?’

‘I’m not turning my back. But I can’t lie for you.’

She just stared at me. The angel was gone. ‘I would do it for you. You know that.’”

This conversation between Greta and Paul contributes to the theme of Family Loyalty and Protection, showing how the revelation of Bob’s scandal (skimming funds from the JaneCare charity) creates a string of betrayals that affect both Greta and Paul. Paul feels betrayed by Bob and Greta because they stole from the charity, but Greta feels like Paul is negating their entire relationship of trust and loyalty because of a single mistake.

“‘If lying would have saved Jane’s life—if lying would bring back your sister—would you do it?’

‘That’s a hell of a hypothetical.’

‘No, it’s not. Because this is my life we’re talking about. You won’t lie to save it. And that’s pretty typical of you, Cope. You’re willing to do anything for the dead. It’s the living you’re not so good with.’”

Paul’s biggest fear is being abandoned, but in this quotation, Greta exposes how he always abandons the people he loves. Greta forces Paul to contemplate his history of cowardice using a hypothetical, since Paul—despite his claims of upholding honor and justice—always runs from these morals when times get tough.

“It was a fairly rare classic from Bruce Springsteen called ‘Back in Your Arms.’ I sat there at my computer and listened to it. Bruce sang about indifference and regrets, about all he’s thrown away and lost and longs for again and then he achingly begs to be back in her arms.”

This quotation explores the motif of music as Lucy recommends a particular song to Paul. Lucy uses music to express the feelings she can’t articulate, so she sends this song to Paul to explain her regrets about their stunted relationship and her hopes that they can rekindle it.

“It was the woods, of course. The old campsite. She knew exactly where this was. He had gotten every detail right. Amazing. She knew that he no longer had any pictures, and really, you’d never take a picture from this angle. Ira had remembered it. It had stayed locked in his brain.”

Ira paints a landscape of the woods surrounding Camp PLUS to soothe his mind after Lucy’s questions about the past agitate him. Throughout the text, the woods symbolize mystery and pain. Ira’s accurate painting of the woods from memory exemplifies how this troubling setting imprinted itself in Ira’s mind.

“And, hypothetically speaking, if Gil was alive and we knew it, then the entire case was based on a lie. We would be open to fines and perhaps prosecution. More to the point, law enforcement investigated a quadruple homicide. They based their case on the belief that all four teenagers died. But if Gil survived, we could also be accused of obstructing an ongoing investigation.”

Glenda Perez speaks hypothetically to Paul about Gil being alive, since confirming this suspicion would have major implications for her family. This passage connects to the themes of Family Loyalty and Protection and Negotiating Justice and Truth. Glenda wants to protect her family and what they’ve built, but she also sympathizes with Paul’s quest for answers about his sister—answers that her family holds.

“These woods you’re walking through. There are some old-timers who think a sound echoes forever in here. Makes sense when you think about it. This Billingham kid. I’m sure he screamed. He screams, it echoes, just bounces back and forth, the sound getting smaller and smaller, but never entirely disappearing.”

Sheriff Lowell describes the eternal feelings of grief that exist within the woods, as if the victims are still screaming among the trees. The symbolic connection between the woods and the murders is so strong that the general public has ghostly legends about the location. His description evokes an aural memory of the murders, suggesting that the echoes of screams never stopped but grow ever fainter, alluding to the theme of The Unresolved Past Haunting the Present.

“‘He didn’t understand, Cope. It’s over. They’re dead. The killer is in jail. You should let the dead rest.’

‘Gil wasn’t dead.’

‘Until that day, the day he visited me, he was. Do you understand?’

‘No.’

‘It’s over. The dead are gone. The living are safe.’”

Ira tries to stop Paul from digging into the past by explaining that the crime already has its resolution: Wayne Steubens is in prison, and the dead are long gone, never to return. Ira’s words, which connect to the theme of Family Loyalty and Protection, convey that he desperately wants Paul to give up because the present reality of Gil and Camille being dead is the only thing keeping Lucy safe.

“Maybe she should have tried to work through what happened that night right away. Instead you bury it. You refuse to face it. You’re scared of confrontation, so you find other ways to hide—Lucy’s being the most common, in the bottom of a bottle.”

Supporting the theme of The Unresolved Past Haunting the Present, Lucy’s words describe how she has dealt with the past: by drinking to numb herself and forget her pain. She regrets wasting her time this way when she could have found answers with Paul sooner, avoiding a pathetic life of loneliness.

“But yes, okay, Vladimir chose to save his own children over his elderly in-laws. He didn’t know it would go so wrong. He thought that the regime would just crack down a little, flex a little muscle—that’s all. He figured they’d hold your grandparents for a few weeks at the most. And in exchange, your family would get a second chance.”

Sosh’s words explore the theme of Family Loyalty and Protection. He explains how Vladimir gambled with his in-laws’ lives because it offered him the opportunity to make a better life for his own family. Paul uses this moment as a catalyst for thinking about how he’s handling Greta and Bob’s predicament, as he doesn’t want to abandon his family similarly.

“We are not taking it slow—we plunged right in, as if trying to make up for lost time. There is a maybe unhealthy desperation there, an obsession, a clinging-as-though-to-a-life-raft quality in what we are. We see a lot of each other, and when we’re not together I feel lost and adrift and I want to be with her again.”

Paul compares his rekindled relationship with Lucy to being on a life raft. When they’re together, they feel safe, but when they’re apart, they feel “lost” and isolated, even more intensely than before they reconnected. He notes that he realizes these feelings seem too obsessive to be healthy.