“Resourceful. Your boy Rafe would be proud,” Coulton told me when he saw my jerry-rigging. He nodded and brought me a larger bucket and a mop with which to clean up the rest.
I shuffled awkwardly in my chains, but sopped up most of the water. I tidied the mess I had made of the plaster, brushing the chips of paint into a pile. I washed myself, wiping my armpits, rinsing the sweat between my thighs. I ate my bitter soups, swallowed my crackers, forced down boiled potatoes and cold gruel and stale breads. I held my arm out when Coulton reached for me, unflinching at the prick of the needle, steady when he gave my head a pat before he left.
Each time I heard the locks click into place, I thought that surely Rafe would be next to unbolt them. Each time I looked up to see Coulton, I felt my hope shrink. I became the pit of the fruit that had once been me, my meat eaten slowly, bite by fleshy bite.
RAFE DID NOT come.
He was not coming.
Perhaps he had decided I could not be cured. Perhaps he’d sold me. Perhaps my life would end here in this basement room, with Coulton. Perhaps I was to be the body drained of blood.
Please just kill me, I prayed silently, as I did now every time Coulton came to check my temperature, stick me with his needles. Kill me now and make it quick. If you aren’t going to set me free, just kill me. For wasn’t this already a sort of living death? Nothing to look at, nothing to listen to, nothing to touch. The sunlight that crept in through the basement windows was weakened by the frosted glass, and though I could move myself into its clouded beams I could not feel its power.
AS A CHILD, I’d asked my father, “What is death?”
Heaving earthward on a far point of our property, a large tree was threatening the byway. Mr. Abbott had told Peter to cut it down, claiming that it could, at any time, flatten his Trixie, the little terrier soon to suffer a less common fate at my hands. Supported by a last leg of trunk not yet splintered by the force of its leaning, the tree arched long over the spackled path that split our land from Abbott’s, a seldom-weeded trail that made a line—I had been told by Mother Farrow—from Urizon to a burial mound at the northernmost tip of the wood. Peter caught me by the tail of my oversized jacket as I tried to pass under the tree arch, my weight at age four no match for the grip of his fist.
“Why does the tree bend,” I said, “if it’s not making an entrance?”
“Because it’s dead,” said my father.
So I asked Peter the question that all parents must one day prepare to answer, the question that all children will eventually ask: “What is death?”
Peter released his hold on my jacket. He crouched down on the gravel and gestured for me to mimic his action. He lost his balance slightly while wiping the lenses of his glasses, preparing to speak.
“See these thick roots here, all stretching? See how they reach past the road, past the base of this tree? They fought with the roots of another species, and that lucky tree came out the winner.”
With this verbal sleight of hand, Peter had answered the much easier question: why. Why is this tree dead? A different wonder altogether, fascinating in the concrete traceability of its answer, opposing the unknowable what, the impossible where of the question I’d asked. What was death? My father, still living, could not tell me.
What really happened when I fingered a ladybug, fell to my knees upon the grass, or patted poor Trixie? Where was my mother? Where would I go now if I yanked off the bandages plastered to my arms, squeezed the skin at the inside of my elbow, heightening the blood flow?
Was death, as I had long suspected, darkness? I imagined a fathomless, floating nothing. No needles or pills or sweaty men with foul breath leaning over me. Just peace.
A Body Drained of Blood
Kathryn no longer knows what to make of the black-eyed girl risen from her bier, now that she is a sentient, blinking being, rather than a fresh-kept corpse. She is unsettled by the appetite with which the black-eyed girl watches the women, her undisguised hunger. Kathryn has spied the girl kneeling before the old corpse of a roebuck, her fingers tearing into its stiff body, raising the rotted flesh to her lips. The first death in the forest in centuries. Now Kathryn finds herself jumping at the crackle of a pine cone, the echo of a wood thrush, the scrape of a penknife against twigs. Will it be now? Has the black-eyed girl come for her? The wait is torturous.
She tries to focus her attention instead on those traveling the forest, the other breed of unlike body to consider, within and yet still so far from her reach. It feels to Kathryn like centuries since midsummer, although Lucy tells her it was just the other day that the wood opened, that Kathryn had her dalliance with that young man from the town. Kathryn had hoped that the awakening of the girl would mean a difference, that the wood would let her lovers stay longer, enter more often. Kathryn has been disappointed with the black-eyed girl’s slow stalking of the forest creatures, her apparent disdain for Kathryn’s needs. If she can open the wood on a whim, why not use it to all of their advantages?
This is not to say that Kathryn does not respect the black-eyed girl. She does. Hers is a boundless respect born of fear. She tries to work up her courage to ask the girl for favors, to start a simple conversation, but the uncanny darkness of those eyes, the languid movements . . . Each time Kathryn gathers her courage, she imagines the girl hissing at her. She imagines her own body torn open, the black-eyed girl fingering her unbound muscles, tasting her blood.
SHE GOES WITH Lucy to gather a bouquet of bluebell and honeysuckle to lay at the black-eyed girl’s altar. As she stoops to pluck a flower, Kathryn feels someone moving in the other wood beside them, kneeling where she kneels. Mumbling. Praying. A man.
“I can see him,” Kathryn says. Though still shut, the veil has been thinner since its recent midsummer opening, in a way it never has been before. Kathryn hears movement, smells cologne, catches sight of shadowy profiles. “I can feel him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Lucy.
“Perhaps if you were to ask the girl to bring him inside . . .”
“Contain yourself,” says Lucy. “He’s clearly trying to come in. As if he thinks he’s owed entrance. I know of men like that. He isn’t worth the risk.”
“But she let the other’s father—”
“That was different.”
A rush of air sputters through Kathryn’s lips. “Imagine,” she says, “the wind screaming. Imagine the scrape of his boots. I wonder if it has snowed. I wonder if the snow has melted.”
“Silliness,” says Lucy. “Besides, it is summer, remember?”
Kathryn sighs again, brimming with desire. She turns and leaves Lucy. She thinks of the dark-haired boy with blue eyes, lithe and muscular. The boy she’s seen before, a shadow slipping through Urizon. He’d peered in through a back window, sweating through his white collared shirt, and Kathryn could see the ripple of his biceps, could easily imagine the rest of his lean body underneath.
She pictures him now, and tries to reach for him with her mind, following his scent. When she inhales, an overwhelming new odor arrests her. Bullfrogs sing mating songs, trees shiver in the breeze. Kathryn inhales again and stops, looking down at her clogs, which are grimy with age, but still boast small patches of their original color. They are sinking into new-formed mud, a rich red stew of sticky earth. Kathryn kneels, sinking her hands into foreign soil. When she lifts them, her fingers are stained red with blood.
22