“The villagers are frightened of your family,” said Mr. Pepper, the sniffling solicitor still on retainer to handle her parents’ wills, the affairs of the house. “Really, they are frightened of the women. There’s little chance you’ll meet Prince Charming here.” He’d blown his large nose loudly with the handkerchief that Laura offered, afterward leaving it, crumpled and wet, on the carpet at the edge of the settee. Laura was middling pretty, but she had large breasts, yellow hair. “You’ll waste yourself in Coeurs Crossing,” said Mr. Pepper.
Laura wanted to waste herself, spend weeks without a shower, let the hair grow on her legs, under her armpits. She wanted to make a jungle of her pubis, a dank, dark wood that shouted Keep away! This is mine, mine, mine, and here I will hide. Urizon suited Laura’s purpose perfectly.
So she read. She gardened. She took up oil painting, lugging her small easel to the village green, the forest, well aware she had no talent, but calmed by the ritual of brush against palette, against canvas, into water to rinse paint. She became a proficient baker, sending pies to the firehouse and cookies to the school. She played piano. The years went by, and she was happy.
Happiness, Laura had realized, was a matter of decision. If she told herself that rolling piecrust mattered, that the care with which she cut the phyllo flowers and stirred the fruit was more than herself in the kitchen, sweating in the heat, she could find pleasure in the simplest of actions. Weeding the lawn to let the shrubs breathe. Polishing the silver. If she slowed to watch the afternoon sun deluge the front parlor, closed her eyes while listening to an aria, smiled at the postman on his route, she could forget the self she might have been if she had not, that April night, gone to the party at the gallery, if she had not set down her small flute of champagne. That self departed was just one of so many selves lost. There was no need to mourn it.
By the time Peter Cothay came poking about the village, intent on proving the existence of a Blakely family curse, Laura had conquered her reclusion, resumed general hygiene. She was content, comfortable, missing only a companion to share in her comfort and contentment. The owners of the souvenir shop in the village directed Peter’s inquiries about the Blakelys to Urizon, and when Laura opened the front door to see him, wiping off his glasses, tucking in his shirt, fumbling through a speech about his research and his theory of her family, she knew that she would welcome him into her existence, that together they’d one day welcome a child.
THE AFTERNOON BEFORE her death, Laura had a headache. She lay down for half an hour in the library, shutting the blinds. Laura knew from her reading that early pregnancy was rife with headaches and nausea, swollen breasts. She thought herself twelve weeks along. In two days, she had a trip planned to the city for her first prenatal visit.
Of course it was too early to say, but Laura thought it was a girl. A little girl baby, fie on Peter’s fears, the silly rumors. She would give all of herself to the child regardless. She did not fear a stretched stomach, sagging breasts, as she once might have. She did not fear her own end, now that this newness had begun.
Peter would like an egg salad with his tea. She’d slice the crusts from the bread, use extra spice, as he preferred it. She would bring him his sandwich with a wink, a little smile, tell him Now you must interpret, here’s your clue. Laura imagined a fully formed child the size of a blueberry, wheedling for attention, sending a request for love up from the depths of her belly to her brain. Beaming, she shrugged off the headache.
To the kitchen, where the eggs had cooled, the teakettle whistled, where, through the thin-paned glass, she watched a robin make a meal of an earthworm, the oak leaves shiver with excitement, the tabby kitten mew.
Next, to the garden at the edge of the wood, to gather fresh parsley and dill.
Bending over, her knees sinking into the soil, Laura felt her vision double, then go dark. A deep pain, like forked lighting, pressed up through her pelvis. She felt a wetness at the back of her skirt, and took a long, deep breath, took a fistful of dirt. Were the trees moving, coming closer? When her sight returned, the edge of the wood seemed to waver, the trees stretching arms and gnarly fingers to grasp at her dress, their leaves whispering, Finally. Laura stood, unsteady, trying to remember the list of early symptoms she’d been told to expect. Maybe a bit of blood, but certainly not this much. She stumbled, herbs falling from her hand.
No! she thought. I’m finally happy. Finally strong. The wood rustled its agreement. It wanted its daughters to be happy. It had waited so long.
The forest seemed an open pair of arms, offering protection, offering to save the unborn child who even now she could feel being forced from her womb. Tears in her eyes, Laura accepted its embrace.
Strength comes from strength, Laura thought as she walked toward the tree line, her thighs slick with blood, offering her open palms.
THERE PETER FOUND her, at the edge of the wood. A lone root, wiry and thin, had curled into her abdomen, piercing her navel, and was ever so slowly pulling her closer to the boundary between estate and trees. Laura was smiling, not struggling, though Peter swore he’d heard her scream only moments before, a cry of pain that had sent him running from his office. He looked on a moment, frightened, and then grabbed his wife before the wood could take her, pulling her free of the forest, detaching her from the hungry vine. When he lifted her, a mass of black blood left an outline of her torso in the soil, frightening him further still. He couldn’t know that the forest had already taken a part of his unborn daughter—had splintered off a piece of the girl’s consciousness, and in the splitting left her with the curse of half life and half death. That, in doing so, the forest had saved her.
Peter cradled Laura, calling for help. He hoisted her onto his shoulders and into the house, bursting across the terrace, fumbling for the telephone once inside. Yet even then, he knew he was too late.
Too late in one sense, the forest understood. In another sense, all had been perfectly timed.
31
It is one thing to summon strength when in the company of others, quite another to maintain it alone. As soon as I passed under the bent tree, my body begged me not to continue: the air sucked out of me, each step forward warning Death, you walk to death. The forest itself was no consolation: rather than closing off the path behind me, the arched tree taunted me with a view of Marlowe and Alys framed beneath it when I paused, turned to look back. I decided that I would not look back.
I walked a long aisle, rows of trees on either side, until I reached the opening of what seemed to be a cave. Dark, deep, descending far under a hill of knotted roots and fallen branches. Teeming with a blackness that sucked up all sound, so that to enter would be to lose myself to the utmost. Death. I forced myself forward.
At first I thought that I had passed into the body of the forest, to its bloodstream. That somehow I had found my way into a woodland womb.