The Children(113)

Like a pilgrim, she would walk. She kept to the side of the road, hungry and sweating beneath her pack. The journey worked her like a paring knife, peeling away all that she hoped might protect her: age and time and distance. Her thin veneer of expat sophistication evaporated like alcohol.

The woods stirred and darkened as two phantom children on bikes raced through her in icy bursts. Swam through a ghost! The sun made a moving mosaic behind the trees to her left, then a red smear. She imagined a black bear breaking sharklike through the green ahead of her, a vision so clear it held the weight of prophecy. Its odor would hit first, slamming the panic button in the oldest part of her brain. Then the animal itself, so close she would see the pale roots of its muzzle, the flat brown shields of its eyes.

When she reached the rutted dirt drive that led to the Farmhouse she turned without hesitation, making her legs a machine, making them ruthless. If she stopped she might never make it this far again.

She still believed she would see the house. She was here in part to kill that fatal certainty. And it did feel violent, to reach the top of the drive and look over that awful blank where the house was not.

It was quiet. Only the symphonic rush of blood to her head was louder than the breeze. Guin thought it was fear that made her anticipate the impossible worst: blowing ash heap, littered with bones. Snow-globe dome of twisting smoke, the fire so devastating it left behind a pocket of permanent aftermath. She realized now that she’d wanted that. Would’ve welcomed crashing rafters and flickering embers over this, the house’s perfect deletion from the world.

She unbuckled her pack and dropped it to the earth. This was her land, she could do as she wished. She’d had half an idea of spending the night in Art Church, but that was gone, too. Not even the orchard existed anymore. The falling light flattened everything into soft purples and greens, made it feel like her nightmare was playing out in mute. Something was moving, low to the ground, where the house should be. Something with a little more heft than the grass. It wasn’t until she was very close that she identified it.

Flowers. A whole—she ran to their edge, heart lodged in her throat like the fat, faulty muscle it was—a whole field of them. Nodding bursts of blue and yellow and pink, already tucking their petals in for the night. The garden bed was formed exactly to the footprint of the house.

This was a phenomenon, wasn’t it? Flowers that bloomed after fire? Guin circled the blowing garden, thinking, Here was the dining room, here the kitchen, here the great room. There, high in the air. That was the room with the seven windows. The twilit bed seemed as charmed and impenetrable as a fairy ring. She didn’t set foot inside it.

The flowers said, Something was here. Something happened here. A confirmation more real than any headline or sympathy offered from a stranger. When she’d walked around the flowers twice, once widdershins then back again, she turned to face the woods.

Without the orchard as a corridor, it was too abrupt. Nothing, then trees. But she’d chased Ennis everywhere and found him nowhere, so maybe he was here. In their clearing, in a cottage, living as he promised they’d live. After two years of dead ends and almosts, she might find him in the literal first place she should’ve looked. Hope burned in her hand like a last-chance lottery ticket. She’d been so sure yesterday. Now she couldn’t feel him anywhere.

She would travel the woods to find out. Soon, any minute. When the sky turned darker. When the stars showed through. When the cold came crawling from the trees to snuff the very candle end of the day, and Venus hung over her like a searchlight. She would start walking.

The girl stood unmoving at the edge of the forest.



* * *




The door Guin unlocked with her brother’s key opened onto those same woods. Summertime woods, deep and shaded. Leaves moving and small things adrift, pollen and blown seeds and insects in flight. This time, Ennis was waiting for her. She could sense him, a pulse in the trees.

There are journeys you cut off your hair to take. Places you can only enter on your feet, with your own empty hands. In tales the forest kills you, or it provides. She stepped through.





Sixty-Two




The door didn’t vanish. It hung in the air behind her, already less real than anything else she could see. Guin breathed in an irreproducible matrix of leaf and rot, stone and flower. The air not smoky but filled with the promise of it. Good, clean, haunted air, moving with a deliberate slowness and barely cooler than her skin.

She knew these woods. Knew them three times over: the Vermont wilds, vast and indifferently dangerous. The playland she and Ennis had made of them. And the Forest, the first one, where stories are set. A million stories begin like this: a girl went walking through a great wood. A traveler, moving along the stitched borders of countless possible tales. The breeze rose and she shivered, though not with cold.

The air held that suffused yellow dusk that happens rarely, on the hottest days of summer. As she walked, a little aimlessly, it cooled to purple. The stars began to show.

She and Ennis used to lie sometimes on the lawn at night, watching the stars come out. They began as discrete silver spots. If you looked long enough, you’d start to see the faint milky mapping of the galaxy behind them. And if you looked even longer the stars changed color. They flashed opalescent shades of blue and orange and palest red. They literally twinkled. Before Vermont she’d thought that was just a song.