Into the Forest

by Jean Hegland

  “What’s happening in town?” Eva finally asked, trying to keep her voice light, the way our father had when he talked with Stan in Fastco.

  “In town?” Eli’s voice was thick, as though he’d been startled awake. He cleared his throat. “Not much.”

  “Do they have electricity yet?” I blurted.

  “No. Not yet.”

  “What’s the news? Any idea when they’ll get it?”

  “Not really. Someone said they’d heard, well, that there was power back East.” He paused for what seemed like a moment of indecision, then added quickly, “But it’s all rumor.”

  “What other rumors have you heard?”

  “Not much. People stick pretty close to home. Everybody’s real afraid of germs. And there’s not much reason to go out. No work. No school. And lots of people are gone. Or dead.”

  “Dead?” asked Eva.

  “There was about six weeks this fall when everybody was getting the flu—or something,” he said, watching the fire, speaking to the fire. “No one was really sure what it was. No one knew what to do. But lots of people died and it made everyone paranoid. My mother died.”

  “Your mother?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He paused for a moment and then rushed on, “The Plaza people—some of them died, too.”

  “Who?” I asked, though I wanted to know what had happened to his mother, how it had been for him to lose her.

  “Justin and Bess. That I know of. Oh, and Big Mike. They think he had appendicitis. I thought you’d died, too, when you stopped coming to town.”

  “We ran out of gas,” I said. “We went in once last summer for groceries, but we didn’t see anyone.”

  “Do you guys have bikes?” he asked.

  “No,” Eva said, and I explained, “Our father gave them to some children at his school. They were just kids’ bikes, anyway.”

  “Too bad,” he said, but before I could ask why, Eva changed the subject. “So why did you come all the way out here, if you thought we were dead?” I cursed and thanked her and held my breath.

  “Like I said,” he answered, “there’s nothing going on in town. I guess I thought I’d give myself a change.”

  We forgot to lock the doors last night before we slept. I woke once, shocked at the sound of Eli’s breathing in the corner of the room, but the crystal of fear that the sound planted in my stomach melted, and a new warmth spread over me, along with a tingle of town-excitement.

  When the morning came, there he was, the muscles of his shoulders and arms bunching and pulling when he rose out of his blankets to stretch. He looked over at me, rumpled in the rags of my father’s flannel shirt, and said, “I always knew you’d look gorgeous in the morning.”

  I felt the burn of a blush, hot and tight and dizzy. I couldn’t separate irony from honesty in his voice, and the only reply I was able to muster was too long and sad. “At least you still remember how to joke,” I said, and rushed to hide in the bathroom.

  In that dim sanctuary I fumbled through the cupboard until I found the box Eva and I had labeled Makeup, Etc. I opened it and took out the bottle of French perfume that had once resided on my mother’s dresser. I had pulled out its stopper before I realized I hadn’t asked Eva if I could use it. But the room was already flooded with the smell of my mother on those rare nights when she and our father went out without us, when she was taller than usual in her high heels, and she smelled foreign and delicious as she kissed us goodnight.

  I lifted my shirt and touched the stopper to my solar plexus. The sweet sting of perfume rose to my nose. I fitted the stopper back into the bottle, put the bottle back in the box and the box back in the cupboard. In the eternally dull light of the bathroom, I sought out my reflection in the mirror, as though I would be able to see a knowledge there that I couldn’t yet feel inside my skull. My eyes met themselves, and I drew back, astonished for the first time in my life by my own face. It was the same face I had barely glanced at the day before, the same blue eyes and light hair, the same wide mouth and bland nose, but today it seemed different, a face worth watching, a lovely face, both soft and striking, with a fresh intensity flaring in the eyes.

  At that moment Eva walked in to brush her teeth, and I turned from my reflection with a feeling of embarrassment, as though she had caught me looking at something I shouldn’t have seen.

  She sniffed the air and glanced sharply at me, but said only, “What do you think?”

  “About what?” I lowered my face into the pool of cold water trembling in my cupped hands, savoring its icy shock against my eyelids.

  “About Eli.”

  “It’s nice to see him,” I said, lifting my dripping face, wondering why I felt reluctant to answer, why I felt duplicitous and confused saying something as innocent—and honest—as that.

  She looked at me almost shrewdly for a moment, as though she knew a secret I had yet to find out.

  “Well,” she said, handing me the towel.

  After breakfast, we showed Eli around. During a brief break in the rain we introduced him to Bathsheba and Pinkie, led him through the tidied shop, took him down to the dormant orchard. He clucked at the hens, opened a few drawers in the shed to admire their organization, let me tell him which trees were which, but I could tell we were more eager to show than he was to see.

  I asked him when we should start pruning, whether he thought the truck battery would hold its charge, how I might have saved Lilith, but he said he’d never pruned a fruit tree, didn’t know much about batteries or chickens. He seemed distracted, as though the life that mattered to him were being led somewhere else.

  As I write, Eli lounges in front of the stove, blowing gently on his harmonica. He holds it cupped in his hands like he’s whispering his thoughts to it. Every now and then he glances at me, and when he looks away and keeps on playing, it feels as though his music is a secret he’s telling about me in a language I don’t really understand.

  I feel impatient and exposed. I want him to leave. But the rain that began the afternoon before he came continues to fall two days later, and he seems in no hurry to venture back into it. The hens come out occasionally, searching the sodden yard for any crawling or sprouting thing they might have overlooked; otherwise the clearing is empty of everything but rain.

  We stay inside, Eli and I in the front room, Eva in her studio with the door closed. She has quit even coming out to check the fire. But feeding the woodstove gives Eli and me something to do, something other than each other to attend to.

  It’s hard, after all this time, to have someone else in this house. Yesterday I was delighted to be alone in a warm room with Eli while the rain came down outside. It was as though in some convoluted way my life were finally beginning to take the shape of my desires. But after a morning of talk as bland and fumbling as it had ever been at the Plaza, I found myself thinking of all those fairy tales whose moral is be careful what you wish for. Here I was, unable to sit or stand or speak without feeling like an oaf or a child or a spinster, unable to work things out with my sister, unable to study, unable to do anything but suffer his presence.

  So far we’ve talked a lot about the rain and a little about the Plaza people, though even that subject seems risky, haunted now by the kind of candor our talk could never bear the weight of. Eli paces the room while I sit primly at the table, trying to keep talking, trying not to say anything, wishing he would go.

  This morning Eva was in her studio before Eli or I were up. She hadn’t stopped to wash her face, hadn’t even stoked the fire. At noon when she came out for a couple of shriveled apples, she smiled distantly, but didn’t meet my eyes. Then she rushed back to her studio and closed the door.

  Eli looked up from his harmonica to ask, “Is she always like that?”

  “She practices a lot,” I said, disconcerted by how evenly my loyalties were split, startled to realize how little allegiance I felt towards either of them—Eva still angry because of ä few gallons of gasoline and a chocolate kiss, and
Eli a stranger taking up too much space in my house.

  “I thought she was friendlier.”

  “She is friendly. She’s just working hard. It’s hard to push yourself when you’re all alone.”

  “Why does she do it?”

  I started to shrug and change the subject, but suddenly I found I didn’t care what effect my words had on Eli. I was annoyed with politeness, was tired of being cautious. Eli was eating our food. He was keeping me captive in my own house. Why not make him endure my sorrows? Maybe if he saw me red-faced and gasping, he would go and leave me in peace to study the encyclopedia and try to get along with my sister.

  So I started talking.

  I told him how Eva had discovered ballet and how abandoned I felt when she first devoted her life to dance. I told him how I had decided to go to Harvard, and how during all the dark months when my mother was dying, I had focused on my studies and Eva had kept dancing. I told him what I’d imagined I could never tell anyone, confessed those startling moments of relief that I had outlived my mother. I told Eli what had happened on our last trip to town, how Eva and I buried our father, how we had survived since then, how Eva had kept dancing.

  I didn’t cry.

  In a funny way I wasn’t even sad or ashamed as I spoke, though I was telling Eli the stories I used to imagine would melt his heart, the secrets I had thought would disgrace me. But I no longer wanted pity or sympathy or even understanding. In fact the emotion I felt most strongly seemed kin almost to anger. I was sick of my own stories, tired of having lived them, and tired of having had to lug them around with me for so long. Now I wanted to be rid of them, and Eli just happened to be there, in their path. In a way it reminded me of the old Paul Bunyan legend, how one winter it was so cold in the lumber camp that all the words the men spoke froze, and when the spring thaw finally came the air was thick with melting talk as all their frozen words came back to life.

  Then it was Eli’s turn.

  He told me about how it had been in town, and what he told me was worse than I had thought. All this time I’ve been imagining that our struggles were the hardest, wondering if things weren’t easier and safer in Redwood, and worrying that we were making a mistake in not going back to town.

  But Eli told me about the hunger and anger and fear, about the revival of suspicion and superstition, how people had finally grown impatient with the grim present and the vague promises of change, how they began to distrust the neighbors they had only recently gotten to know. He told me about the bewildered way that people clung to habit long after habit ceased to make sense—housewives trudging out every morning to check the mail half a year after the last delivery, men polishing their cars on Sunday afternoons even though it had been months since there had been water pressure enough to wash them or gas to drive them. He told me about the cheer and roar in the Plaza one night last fall, and how the bank president was found dangling from a streetlight the next morning, his face the color of a rotten eggplant, his toes just scuffing the browned weeds.

  He told me about how the flu came, and the shock and anger and terror people felt when they realized there was no one and nothing to turn to for a cure. He told me about the fear of contagion that settled on the town, how people quit shaking hands and sharing food, how they hid in their houses, and still they died, well one week and gone the next.

  That’s how his mother went. He told me how they buried her, in a coffin he and his brothers made from an old fence and a broken door while his father sat in the living room, staring at the empty TV screen and drinking the bottle of brandy they had been saving to celebrate the return of electricity.

  When Eli finally ran out of words, he sat, inert as stone, looking out on the weary rain. I watched him for a moment, and then, abandoning words myself, I rose, crossed to where he was sitting, and laid my hands on his slumped shoulders, let them wait there, heavy and patient and wiser than I’d known, until he turned to face me.

  All our stories vanished in his gold-flecked eyes.

  Then the door to Eva’s studio burst open, and we jumped as though we had been scalded.

  “How’s the fire?” she asked, tearing open the stove door and jabbing at the coals. “It looks a little low.”

  That was yesterday. Today I feel shy once more, but today my shyness has a sweetness to it, and our talk, though not as deep, lacks the stumble and sting I used to dread. Today I can study, can even get up to go to the bathroom without agonizing over what he’s seeing, what he’s hearing, what he’s thinking. Today when Eli plays his harmonica I like the sound of his music.

  “Just don’t get pregnant,” Eva hisses when she and I go out together in the late afternoon for firewood.

  “What?” I gasp.

  “Whatever you do, be careful. That’s all I ask.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The last thing we need right now is a baby. And you know he’d be gone in a minute.”

  “What makes you think he’ll do anything?”

  “Not he. You and he.” She smiles, and I’m so taken off guard I’m unable to read the mix of emotion in her voice.

  This morning came clear and bright—chilly and damp when I let out the hens but with a promise of later warmth in the air.

  Eli was waiting at the door for me when I returned with a load of wood in my arms. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  I knocked on the door of Eva’s studio, and when there was no response, I opened it a crack. She was standing at the barre with her back turned towards me, but I could see her face in the mirror, serene as still water. Her hand was laid regally on the barre, and she was doing grandes battements, her working leg rising over and over as crisply as an exclamation point.

  “Eli and I are going for a walk,” I said to her straight back.

  “Good,” she answered, and her leg rose again.

  “See you,” I said wistfully.

  She turned to face me. “Have fun. Don’t eat anything wild.” She echoed our mother’s words so wryly that I moved towards her greedily, eager to share her joke. But when I met her eyes, I was shocked to see not humor or even irony, but a raw split-second of grief.

  Eli and I scampered outside like released children, ran breathless and giggling across the shining, rain-soaked yard. We passed the workshop and as we leapt over the rotting mat of last year’s tulips I thought I felt a momentary tug. But I shook it off like a dog shaking water from its coat and entered the forest with Eli.

  After all this rain the woods were humid—steaming and voluptuous in the sudden gift of sunlight, and I felt both bewildered and newly alive, as though I had just woken after a long illness. Water dripped from every leaf and twig, a bright after-rain that sounded like a far-off stream, while the nearby stream ran riotous as a river. The redwoods’ needles were glistening, and everywhere were the hard, tight knobs of buds, like tiny fists or taut nipples. The air washed our lungs. We squinted in the blaze of wet light and headed up the stream.

  Even after five days in his presence, I felt as though I were walking with a stranger. We had left behind the fusty room in which we paced and ate and slept and talked, and now—for the first time ever—we were truly alone.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked, as he clambered along behind me over the branches and boulders that edged the stream.

  “Why should I take you anywhere?” I teased.

  “It’s your forest.”

  I was about to protest that it was not my forest when I remembered the redwood stump Eva and I had once claimed as our own.

  I felt a twinge of guilt and wondered if she would say I was betraying her by showing that place to Eli. But then I remembered how many times she had refused to leave her studio when I begged her to go there with me, and I thought, She won’t care. And anyway, it doesn’t matter.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll take you somewhere. Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.” We had reached a place where the wooded hills
ide sloped steeply upwards, and although there was no path in sight, I started climbing. Knees bent, feet cocked sideways to the hill, I clambered, trying to dig footholds into the litter of oak and bay leaves that blanketed the ground, holding my hands out from my body, ready to balance or clutch.

  “Just don’t grab the poison oak,” I called down to Eli. I could hear him scrambling below me. I could smell the leaf mold my feet disturbed. Once I slipped and fell to my knees, grabbing wet handfuls of leaves and hugging the hill with my thighs until I quit sliding. I was breathing hard when I finally reached the plateau at the top, and the knees of my jeans were damp. I turned to watch Eli climb the last few feet.

  “What’s up here?” he asked, panting.

  “Forest.”

  “All that climbing for more forest?”

  “You’ll see,” I teased.

  We stood side by side for a moment while our breathing settled, and I tried to get my bearings. That far above the stream the forest begins to open up a bit. There’s less undergrowth, although the trees are still dense enough to make it hard for your eyes to know where to focus, dense enough to make you long for a stretch of open sky. The trees are bigger, and here and there a circle of redwoods rings the wide depression that is the grave of some ancient tree.

  “So what am I supposed to see?” Eli asked.

  “Come on,” I said. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

  He gave me a bow, and we set off again.

  Once we began walking, my self-consciousness returned. I remembered when Eva and I used to pretend we were Indians, and to crack my shyness, I tried to teach Eli to walk as stealthily as possible through the ankle-deep leaves and over the tangled snags. Finally he decided I was quieter than he was. He pushed me against a fallen tree, and the game turned to chase. So we ran through the sparkling forest, panting and laughing, loud as the stream.