Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  “We won’t use it up—just enough for some music, this one time. It wouldn’t be wasted.”

  “Look, Eva, I’m sorry. But we’ve got to save it for an emergency.”

  “And what if it’s an emergency now?”

  “An emergency?” I repeated dumbly.

  She answered in a voice both fierce and desperate, “I need to dance, Nell. I have to dance to music. Just for a few minutes. To give me courage.”

  I looked at her hands, her long fingers clutching the gas container’s red handle. For some reason I remembered my mother’s cold hands cradling her tulip bulbs, and for a second I was willing to go along with my sister’s madness. But then I relived that moment in the forest when my father was bleeding to death and I remembered the truck was out of gas.

  “I want you to dance. Eva, you know I want you to dance. But don’t you see—that gas is our life insurance.”

  “Our life insurance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ours? Half mine?” she questioned.

  “Of course half yours. Everything is half yours. You know that.”

  “What if I just use my share?”

  “There wouldn’t be enough left to do any good. We have to save it all. For when we really need it.”

  I waited for her next argument, but her face grew flat and closed. “By then it may be too late,” she said and left the room, left me standing alone beside the grimy container, hating myself for saying no, hating myself for being right.

  There’s something wrong with Lilith. When I opened the hen house this morning, she was squatting by the door and didn’t even move when Pinkie tumbled over her, rushing for the table scraps. I tipped the bucket to show Lilith its contents—a few thin potato peelings and an apple core nibbled down to the stem and seeds—and she looked at them dully. I pushed at her gently with my foot, and she waddled a few painful steps, but then she sank back down into her half-squat. Her vent looks distended and swollen, and there’s an ugly discharge leaking out of it.

  I have no idea what to do.

  When we were little, Eva and I used to pretend we were the twins we felt we should have been, since for three days every year we were the same age. We dressed ourselves in matching clothes, called ourselves by rhyming names, were equal halves of a single thing.

  When we were little, Eva and I were like a binary star, both of us orbiting a common center of gravity, each reflecting the other’s light. We used to wake in the morning after having dreamed the same dreams so often we grew to expect it. Later, our periods came at the same time each month, until Eva’s became sporadic because of her dancing.

  Of course we argued. Almost daily we engaged in skirmishes of what Father called “The Snot-Stew Wars” because of the way we would reduce any dispute to its essential conflict: “It is not,” one of us would say, in reference to whatever was the cause of our quarrel, and the other of us would answer, “It is, too.” It is not. It is, too. Is not. Is too. ’S not. ’S too. Snot! Stew! By then we would be giggling, our delight in the ridiculous litany of our discord putting us back in harmony once again.

  But now we can’t even agree on what will save our lives.

  When I went out to the hen house this morning, Lilith was lying in a heap by the door, and Bathsheba and Pinkie were pecking at her swollen vent. Horrified, I rushed at them, kicking and yelling. They scattered, squawking their indignation, leaving Lilith unmoving on the floor. Her eyes were open, and I could see her rumpled body heave when she breathed. I knelt beside her but I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.

  I ran to consult the encyclopedia, but by the time I returned with the volume for Poultry, Lilith was dead. I think an egg got stuck inside her.

  I can’t get along with my sister. I can’t even keep a chickenalive.

  I wish at least I had been able to touch her.

  Eva was practicing. It was raining. The yard was filled with a grim mist of fog and wood smoke that the rain fell through but did not clean. I was trying to read the encyclopedia, pushing my way through the ICs as though I were slogging through wet clay, and it was all I could do to keep from cheating by skipping to whatever entry promised to hold my attention.

  I rose from my stale place at the table to pace the room. In an unguarded moment I headed down the hall to Eva’s studio. But then my memory of the gasoline came crashing back like a cold wave in a rising tide, and I turned away from her door. It had been three days since we found the gas, and still we had nothing to say to each other.

  Instead I wandered up the cold stairs and into the room that had once been my bedroom. It was dim and chilly and lifeless. It smelled of dust, and beneath that there was the faint sweet scent from some long-vanished sachet. Tacked to the walls were my travel posters—islands and oceans and castles and electrified cities at night. My computer was uncovered, and stuffed animals and hair barrettes and bright strings of beads were scattered on the floor as if whoever had once lived there had left in a hurry.

  We haven’t yet tried to inventory our own rooms, since we know what they contain, and since they contain so little that will be of help to us. Idly I began poking through the drawers of my dresser, looking at all the clothes there was no longer any reason to wear. It seemed as though they belonged to a stranger, those wrinkled panty hose, those anklets edged in lace, those jewel-colored knee socks. I buried my arms up to the elbow in a cool tangle of slips, and suddenly my fingers felt something hard.

  I pulled it from the drawer—a little heart-shaped box my father once brought me from a conference he had attended. Almost absently I lifted the lid, trying to remember what treasures I might have hidden inside. There, on the red satin lining the bottom of the box were a broken charm bracelet, a ticket stub, some brightly colored hairpins, a bluebird’s feather, two seashells.

  And four pieces of chewing gum.

  And a chocolate kiss wrapped in silver foil.

  I shut the box. I opened it again, and they were still there—four pieces of gum and a foil-wrapped kiss, put there back in a time when a stick of gum was nothing, when it took a handful of kisses to satisfy a moment’s craving, back in a time when I was so wealthy I could afford to forget four pieces of gum and a chocolate kiss.

  I wanted to sit down on the floor of the room in which I had been a girl and stuff them all in my mouth at once, gum and chocolate together in a sweet, soft mass. Then I remembered Eva, and for a second I wanted to run into her studio.

  But she had yet to forgive me for saving the gas.

  I stood weighing the kiss in my open palm. I remembered all the times she used to get angry with me when she saw me eating sweets. Don’t let me see, she would snap. If you have to eat that junk, just please don’t make me watch you. The smell alone could make me fat.

  By this time I had eased the silver foil off the kiss as though I were teasing the petals of a flower open. The candy inside was pale with age, but it still smelled like chocolate—the deep velvety smell that seemed the essence of all my cravings. I balanced it in the palm of my hand for a moment, and, before I could think, I lifted it to my mouth and scraped the mottled surface with my teeth. Chocolate bloomed in my mouth, and my toothmarks scarred the kiss.

  Then it was too late to turn back. Besides, I thought, Eva will never have to know I’ve eaten it. She was too busy, she had her dance. She’d probably be grateful. And anyway, she shouldn’t have been so stubborn about the gas. I thought, I’ll give her a piece of my gum.

  I sat on the cold floor, sucking the kiss, suffused with a profound and earthy satisfaction. I forgot Eva and the rain and the gasoline and ate the whole chocolate in a delicious, ravenous dream.

  When it was over, I smashed the foil into a tiny, hard ball, dropped that silver nugget back into the box with the gum, and tucked the box back into the drawer. Downstairs, I went straight into the bathroom. Facing my reflection, I wiped my lips again and again. Then I rinsed my mouth, drinking and spitting until I spat only clear water.

  After a sunny morn
ing the March rain begins again. Eva retreats to her studio. I return to the ICs, reading so stupidly I might as well be running my hands instead of my eyes across the pages. I would sell my soul for the VCR to flicker on.

  Just before dark, Eva comes out of her studio, opens the stove door, and sits on the floor, rubbing her calves and staring at the caged flames.

  “What should we have for dinner?” I ask.

  “Pm not hungry.”

  “Rice and tomatoes?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “There’s one jar of apricots left. We could have those.”

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she tells the fire. “I can’t keep dancing to a metronome. I was working on my leaps today, and I know Pm not getting the same elevation I used to.”

  She looks up at me with the ferocity of a trapped animal. “Bal-anchine said that music was the floor for dancing, and I don’t have any floor anymore, nothing to push off against. It’s like I’m just falling. Like I’ll never leap again.”

  Suddenly she’s pleading, “Nell, please let’s use some of the gas. Just a little. Just give me ten minutes of music. Please.”

  I can’t respond. I’m terrified to see Eva slumping towards despair, but I’m equally terrified at the thought of using even a drop of the gas.

  Finally I say, “Eva, I’m sorry, but we’ve got to hold on just a little longer.”

  “I can’t,” she says dully. “I can’t keep dancing like this.”

  “You’ve got to,” I say, startled by how much I’ve come to depend on my sister’s dancing.

  I grasp at the first idea that offers itself. Like a mother trying to distract an unhappy child, I say brightly, “I’ve got a surprise. It’s not as good as the gas, but I found it yesterday, and I think you’ll like it.”

  She doesn’t lift her head as I leave the front room. She doesn’t even look up when I come back downstairs with the heart-shaped box.

  I thrust it towards her. “Open it!”

  When she doesn’t respond, I lift the lid, tilt the box towards the fire so she can see its contents.

  “Look—four pieces of gum,” I say.

  “Where did they come from?” she asks, touching them with a tentative forefinger.

  “I found them yesterday while you were practicing. In my underwear drawer. There was a chocolate kiss, too.”

  “Where is it?” she asks.

  “I ate it.”

  “When?”

  “When I found it.”

  “Where was I?”

  “In your studio.”

  “While I was in there trying to dance, you were eating chocolate?”

  “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “You didn’t think I’d mind”

  “Well, you were practicing. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “You never eat chocolate, anyway.”

  “I still have a right to half of everything in this house.”

  “But it was my kiss.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I found it in my drawer.”

  “Does that make the gas mine because I found it?”

  “But it was in my drawer. I put it there. It was mine, back before all this began. Look,” I said, teetering between anger and misery, “I’m sorry.”

  But she had already stormed back into her dark studio and slammed the door.

  It’s been two days since the kiss fight. I gave Eva all the gum, though whether she’s chewed it or not, I don’t know. It is no longer a pleasure we can share. Neither of us has apologized, but life dribbles on. Sometimes I want to scream at her, “It was only a stupid piece of chocolate!” Sometimes I want to weep, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Use all the gasoline. Forgive me.” But I say nothing, and neither does she. We sleep by the same stove, share the same kettle of hot water, eat the same spare meals, and there are times when I could almost believe our quarrel was only another of my nightmares.

  Even fighting is a luxury you can’t afford if your whole life has been pared to one person.

  We were in for the night. Bathsheba and Pinkie were in their coop, the wood was stacked by the stove, the doors were locked, our bathwater was heating. Late in the afternoon, the few white clouds in the clear sky had begun to thicken and darken, and when the rain arrived, it was so steady and quiet it seemed almost a comfort. Eva and I still hadn’t spoken much since our fight, but the silence was beginning to soften, and it felt as though a new bruised tenderness were developing between us.

  We were sitting opposite each other at the table by the window, eating canned beets and shreds of boiled macaroni by the day’s last grey light. We were eating quietly, listening to the sound of the rain and the noise of the fire and the hum of the kettle as its water gathered heat, listening to the sounds that seemed to ease the night in around us.

  There was a knock on the door.

  It was a light tap, tap that tore through us like a scream, left us each paralyzed in a wake of adrenaline. We sat stunned for a moment. And then it came again—three more quick taps against a door that hadn’t been knocked on for what seemed like years, the sound that meant either our deepest fears or our greatest hopes had finally arrived.

  “Open the stove,” I hissed at Eva.

  She knelt, pulled the stove door open.

  By firelight I fumbled in the coat closet and found our father’s gun. I didn’t know how to hold it or where to point it, so it stuck out in front of me like a stiff third arm, and I was almost as afraid of it as I was of whatever was outside. I slipped to the door, pressed myself against it as if I could feel the intent of the person it hid from us through some pulse in the wood itself.

  “Who is it?” I growled—or tried to—through a throat clogged with fear.

  “Nell?”

  “What do you want?” “Is Nell there?”

  “Oh,” whispered Eva, rising from the stove, looking at me. “Nell? It’s Eli. Is that you?”

  Suddenly I was wild with relief. I felt the quick stab of Eva’s glance, but I didn’t stop to care. A giddy sense of joy flowed down me like a warm rain. In the second it took me to unbolt the door, I tried to remember what I was wearing, whether my hair was combed.

  It wasn’t the Eli of a year ago who stood outside. He seemed larger, his features stronger. His face was wet, and water dripped from his matted hair down the poncho that hung to his knees, covering the pack on his back so he looked like a huge sea turtle.

  Perhaps it was just the shock of seeing any person other than my sister, but for a moment I wanted to slam the door shut, to pretend we’d never heard that knock, to stay, if not safe, then at least familiar with all that threatened us. But I moved aside, and he stepped through the door.

  It crossed my mind to reach for him, to touch him somehow in welcome. But while part of me wanted to, another part was aware of what seemed like countless layers of change and time that separated me from that girl at the Plaza, and I remembered with a little flare of resentment what I had realized the last time I’d seen him—we were so loosely connected, I had no right to claim even a hug.

  “Hi,” I said, a little flatly.

  He didn’t seem to notice. “Eva. Nell.” He gave a half-bow, first in Eva’s direction, and then in mine, though his pack and poncho crippled some of the elegance of that greeting.

  Then he reached out a wet forefinger and touched me, fitting his finger for just a moment into the notch at the base of my throat where my clavicles meet. It was a curious gesture, more intimate than any way he had touched me before, and I glanced at him to see if it was another prank. But his face had lost its pleased and detached look, and seemed solemn, tired. My throat tingled in the wake of his touch, and I had to restrain my hands to keep from fingering that spot myself.

  “Where’s your dad?” asked Eli, trying to peer into the blackness beyond the stove’s dim glow.

  We were silent for a moment, baffled by having to reduce what we had lived through t
o a few spoken words. Finally Eva said, “He died.”

  “Oh,” he said, still standing just inside the door. “But you’re okay?” he asked, looking first at me and then at Eva. “You’re not sick or anything? You two are okay?”

  “We’re fine,” I said, wanting to cry.

  “How’d you get here?” Eva asked.

  He pulled the poncho over his shoulders, shrugged off his creaking pack, shook his head so water scattered from his flung mane, and there was a quick sizzle when the drops landed on the stove. “I started out on my bike, but it got a flat I couldn’t fix. So I walked. Started yesterday. I didn’t know which house was yours, so I had to try every one. You know you’re out here by yourselves? There’s no one else on this road for at least ten miles.”

  I wanted to throw myself against him, to weep myself soft and raw and open, to cry until I could finally sleep, my head still pressed against his chest. But the last time we had seen each other we hadn’t even spoken. He had always been a stranger, and now he was a stranger in the place where I lived.

  I asked, “Are you hungry?” and bent shyly over our little pots of food, scraping out more than his share onto a third plate.

  How different that room seemed with him in it, with another voice to fill the darkness. And how strange it felt to be with Eli away from the spotlight of Saturday night, helping him spread his clothes out to dry, showing him to the bath we fixed for him in the dark bathroom. While he soaked and sighed, I groped upstairs and fumbled through the closets for blankets and an extra pillow.

  After he had bathed, Eva stoked the stove so that the flames cast a wedge of light across the floor, and the three of us sat cross-legged at the edge of that trembling half-circle, our knees firelit, our faces shadowed. For a while we were silent, watching the flames. I remembered the Plaza, tried to connect those fires with this one, the aloof and mocking Eli with this quiet man. But the Plaza was a world away, and we were no longer the same children who had once strutted and giggled beneath those palms and redwoods.