“It was all my fault,” Matthew said, squeezing his eyes shut. “I was stupid. I dared him to climb up a tree with heart rot. The whole thing came down on top of him.”
The twins had just been born, and her own mother was indisposed, so Elodie Hareven packed up her motley brood of six and moved them temporarily to Aunt Abigail’s cottage. It was crowded, and noisy, but Matthew thought it must be a treat for Mrs. Blott, who had been lonely in the years since her husband’s passing. She told neither me nor Peter of her guests. In turn, she told her niece nothing of my existence, the nature of Peter’s work, the reality of her days at Urizon. The older Hareven children attended the local school, the younger ones played at the cottage.
“I was never alone,” Matthew said. “Either busy with schoolwork or helping Mother with the babies, or with Charlie.” He chewed on a thumbnail between sentences, uncomfortable, it seemed, with sharing personal details. “I don’t remember much of it. I shared a double bed with my brother Ben, and I remember that his feet were always cold. Charlie was past the worst of his injuries, and milking it for all he was worth—he used to call us to his room, then say never mind, he’d forgotten what he wanted, we could leave, then call us back. And so on, you know.” I smiled at the thought of young Matthew scuttling to and from his brother’s bedside, stiffening his face to hide his mounting frustration.
“He thought it all very funny, though I wasn’t entertained. I felt so guilty for my part in the accident, and Charlie clearly knew it. I decided I’d become a doctor someday. Running up and down the stairs, bringing him snacks and books and adjusting his window just so—I tried to see it all as practice. And as penance, I guess.”
“And do you still see it as penance?” I asked. Matthew shrugged. “You’ve been so good to me. So good at taking care of me. You shouldn’t feel bad about what you said or did before you knew better, back when you were young.”
Matthew smiled. “I’m sure you know that’s easier said than done.”
Most of that school term was a blur of busywork and simple mathematics, but Matthew did clearly remember one excursion: the Year Threes on a school trip to the forest, led by the new art teacher, who carried a bag of sharpened pencils with which her students would sketch.
“It was my first time in the wood,” he said, “though Ben, who was seven, had gone exploring and come back with tales of chattering voices, tree trunks that spanned caverns you could walk across like bridges, mangy wild boars. Mother spanked him and sent him to bed without supper as a warning to the rest of us. She told us that the forest wasn’t safe.”
“But the art teacher didn’t know that?” I asked, anxious. I had a sudden sense that I knew where his story led.
The art teacher had arrived along with the Harevens at the beginning of the school term and was unaware of the wood’s dangers. She had the students hold hands as they walked down a back road to a clearing she had come across one weekend and thought perfect for artistic inspiration.
“It went well,” Matthew said. “No one was eaten by animals. No one was lost. My sketching, if you don’t mind my saying, was quite accurate for age eight, and earned me full marks. I was the last in the line of children walking down the road, returning to the schoolhouse, when our group walked past Urizon.”
I bit my lip.
“There was a girl there, in the bushes. A girl in a sun hat and overly large gloves.”
I had been six, then. Wrestling with the ivy. I’d come over to watch the children passing.
“I remember,” I whispered. “I remember you. You spoke to me.”
“I think I said hello, and I let go of the girl’s hand that I’d been holding. She went ahead, then called out for me to catch up. We were not, under any circumstances, to let go of our partners.”
“You ran after her.”
“I did. But that night, after my bath, once I was squeezed in bed with Ben, I asked Mother about you. She passed the question on to Aunt Abigail, who said you were a fantasy, that you must have been imagined. There was a little girl who lived at the house, but she had gone into the city for the season and would not be back for months. There was no way I could have seen her.”
Mrs. Blott would not have wanted her nephew exposed to my condition. She would not have wanted me exposed to what I now knew was a harsh, carnivorous world. I could see why she might squelch his curiosity by saying that the girl Matthew saw was a trick of his mind, that the girl at Urizon was off traveling. I understood, but her words hurt me.
“I wish she’d let you see me,” I whispered. “Let me meet you. Your hands . . . you and the others . . . I didn’t know that children’s hands could touch. I didn’t know I was alone until that day, when I first saw you all together.”
Matthew looked at me solemnly, giving my confession its due.
Four months after our encounter, he and the rest of the Harevens had returned to the city. Upon leaving, he had asked if they might see me there, invite me for a visit, but Mrs. Blott claimed, by coincidence, that I would be returning to Urizon on the very day they left. The next time that he visited, she promised she would make an introduction. Of course, this was not to be.
Matthew did not return to Mrs. Blott’s cottage until he’d turned eighteen, and had begun his studies at the university. When pressed, Elodie declared the family too busy for a visit to Aunt Abby, or reasoned that their holidays should be to places they’d not yet explored. But she’d discovered something, thought Matthew, during that six-month stay in Coeurs Crossing, though he never knew just what. Something worrisome. Something that scared her.
“Likely the men who went missing in the wood for several days and lost their minds. I’d imagine your mother wouldn’t want that fate for her children.”
“Perhaps,” Matthew mused.
By now I was two weeks into my recovery. Matthew had spread his story over the hours I was not feverish or sleeping. His armchair was pulled close next to my bed. We could hear the household bustling below, the children stomping through the Hareven home, which, I’d learned that morning on my first trip outside, looked exactly as I had imagined from my bed: comfortable red brick, clean white shutters, flowers adorning every window, a well-manicured lawn. It sat on a cul-de-sac with six other homes, also brick, similar in style but not so close as to be copies. Predictable, suburban. The sight had left me longing for Urizon.
“I knew from the first moment I saw you in the cottage,” Matthew said, “that you were the girl that I’d encountered. I never believed I’d imagined you.”
“Adults must not think much of children,” I said, “to suppose you could deny such a meeting. To call it a dream.”
“Adults see a world that suits them. So as long as I didn’t bother them about it, both my mother and my aunt decided the matter was closed.”
“Well, I will not be denied,” I announced, attempting a smile.
Matthew remained solemn. “No, you won’t.”
I waited for him to continue, but instead he stared at the hands he had clasped in his lap. I wondered what other fantastic parts of childhood had been denied him. I wondered how much of the reality of my own upbringing had been denied me. Were there clues I had missed back at Urizon? I’d always assumed Peter to be truthful, that our work together demanded transparency. How could it be otherwise when so much of its outcome was immediately determined, our experiments’ effects established right before my eyes? Peter never coddled me, for as long I remembered had addressed me with the same language he used with his peers. But now he’d disappeared, leaving me no answers to the questions that had crested in his wake.