Helen pays homage to the creature in the clearing, watching as the girl’s limbs lengthen, her hair begins to curl, and remembers her own brief pubescence. Helen pines not for her mortal life but for her childhood, lost to her long before she woke in this new wood. Even before the frozen girl’s resurrection, Helen was drawn to her double: that child wrapped in coats and layered stockings, locked away at Helen’s former home. The living girl, always so dutiful, always tightening the laces at her wrists, adjusting the brim of her hat. Helen has long wanted to run to her and shake her, tell her to cast off her clothing, tell her that once she is a woman all her freedom will be gone.
When the child first removed her gloves, turning green seedlings brown, reviving dead grass with her palms, Helen had stood with the other Blakelys and watched with jealous eyes. “Yes,” she whispered, though aware the girl heard nothing. “Take your pleasure while you can.” Helen felt compelled to reach out, and tried to take a few steps past the forest, ready to climb the wooden fence and slip into the yard. But even as she did, she was halted by a painful inner wrenching, as if she’d tried and failed to broach the boundaries of her body, as if she’d peeled off her skin. The trees rustled their disapproval. Like all living things, these are protective of their children; like all children, Helen feels the need to stretch her own branches, to grow.
“I heard her speaking with that boy,” reported Emma, once Helen’s wits had returned, “and now she’s stopped wearing the hat. Why did she ever wear it? She has nothing ugly to hide.”
Immune to Emma’s questioning, Helen did not try to answer. Familiar with Helen’s silences, Emma did not force her to respond. Instead, Emma turned to Mary, who has also kept vigil, watching the home that had once been her own.
“Why does she hide there, all covered up, with just that dog for company?” asked Emma.
Mary sucked her teeth, smiled sharply. “They think she’s something special,” she said, her face tight with disapproval. “But that’s a girl like any other. Locked up. Afraid. It’s the one in the hollow who will save us, when she wakes. It’s the one in the hollow you should praise.”
Mary observes both girls, the cursed one and her double in the clearing, as they grow leaner, grow longer. While the Cothay girl throws balls for the strange woodland creature she calls dog to run after, the other lies cold and still, but breathing. When the Cothay girl fiddles with her sandbox and leaves sandwich crusts for squirrels, the other rests, heartbeat steady and slow. The sleeping girl is biding her time. She is waiting. Mary understands waiting. Mary has always found herself waiting, both in past life and in present. The girl is waiting for something, but what, Mary cannot be sure.
THE FROZEN GIRL’S cheekbones grow hollow, her nipples peak and swell.
Lucy and Kathryn stand by her side, watching. “This girl,” Lucy tells Kathryn, “is the height of evolution.”
“Of what?” Kathryn giggles at the unfamiliar word.
“She’s the fulfillment of a promise, a centuries-old spell of protection. I read of her, of a daughter, a child within a tree. Spirals to death and back again. She is the key.”
Early on, back at Urizon, when the doctors saw that her menses did not come, Lucy had been told that a child of her own was impossible, that in her frail condition she could never nourish life. Now she feels the old book has answered her need. That the wood has been a surrogate, absorbing her desires, building from them, crafting her this gift. Lucy is sure the girl will wake soon, and be pliable, an extension of Lucy herself. A daughter: a way out of the forest, a connection to the future, a way back into the world.
“The wood doesn’t just give you what you want,” warns Kathryn, frowning, twirling a lock of her red hair, eyeing the frozen girl’s darkening pubis. “It’s not a wood that grants you wishes. If it did, I’d have so many more young men . . . the pretty blond one Helen worshipped, Imogen’s husband, that blue-eyed boy with black hair we’ve seen sneaking around the house . . .” Kathryn sighs, shuddering in her chemise, twisting a stiff nipple with her forefinger and thumb. Kathryn has never wanted children. From a young girl, she has known to tell her partner to withdraw, to keep her body free of seed. She’s laughed as she rinsed men’s stymied futures from her thighs and her breasts in the stream. She sees the fluids of young men’s pleasure as accessories to her own unquenched appetite.
“The wood doesn’t care what we want. It doesn’t know what it is to be human,” says Kathryn, who for years has known gnawing libido, fulfilled only biannually at the high seasons when the forest lets down its guard, lowering its veil to let strangers wander through. Pretty Kathryn, seventeen for over seven hundred years. Kathryn dines on these unwary visitors, teasing them, taking them, leaving them empty, sending them stumbling back to mothers and wives. “The wood has its own plans, its own ideas,” says Kathryn. “I hope it uses her as bait to lure in some excitement.”
LUCY IGNORES KATHRYN’S warning. She watches the girl’s double at Urizon and belittles Peter Cothay’s shoddy parenting while praising herself for her own: she uses her skirts to wipe her frozen daughter’s brow, detangles the girl’s hair with her fingers, sings her lullabies. She asks an offering from each of her sisters, to adorn the child in laudatory jewels. The others are eager to share their remaining worldly treasures, despite differing in their ideas of how such tribute will resolve. All but Imogen.
Imogen, the woodcutter’s wife, her stomach still swollen with the child who has been gestating for centuries. Imogen, who will not speak of the loss that she wears as an albatross, that stagnation inside her, the plight of these seven frozen women in physical form, a future with no future at all.
“Do you ever feel it kicking?” Lucy asks her.
Imogen does not respond. Imogen, so pious, still praying to a God the rest have long since abandoned. It takes all of Lucy’s cunning, all her coddling and convincing, to get Imogen to part with the wedding ring she’d brought into the wood.
“If the girl is your savior reborn, you would not want her to forget you,” Lucy reasons. “You would not want to be the only one left here, while the rest of us ascend to her heaven. You would not want to be alone here, once the rest of us are gone.”
Lucy finds her logic sound, and when Imogen concedes, she praises herself. She is too single-minded to realize that Imogen has only given in to stop her prattling, to end an argument that might go on for years if Lucy is not appeased.
No savior of Imogen’s would ever need material gifts of splendor.
Imogen believes the frozen girl to be a dark spirit, her captor. The women’s faults bound to the forest, the culmination of their long-tainted bloodline, a reminder of their guilt. She could be the original evil incarnate: that first taste of forbidden knowledge, the disobedience that cast her whole kind from the bosom of Eden. Or the girl could be the final punishment, once she has awakened. You abandoned your purpose as wife and as mother, Imogen imagines her saying; with your longing, you have done this to yourself.
5
It was a thirty-minute walk from Mrs. Blott’s house to Urizon, but only half that distance through the wood. That morning I’d thought about shortening my journey by cutting through, and elected against it out of practicality: Peter would be livid, I would certainly be lost. The trees here were tricky, shifting things.
Yet after all that had transpired that afternoon, I no longer cared. I left Mrs. Blott, Matthew, and my father behind and marched into the forest with Marlowe as my guide. He showed no remorse as he trotted along with his usual happy posture, tail upright and swinging. He dodged fallen branches and bulldozed mushroom spores, all the while dragging the shinbone, muddying the tissue at its knee. On occasion, he encountered a stubborn rock or root pile and had to turn back and nudge at the leg with his nose, or prod at it with one of his front paws to help it overcome the obstacle.