by Paula Guran
“It takes more than that to make me angry. But if you were thinking, did I send Maude away because the two of you tried to sneak through the forest last year, the answer is no. The guardsman who ordered you back told me about the two of you, however. You were thoughtful enough to give him my name, and he was thoughtful enough to come to me afterward. Lost Lake is dangerous, honey, and so is the forest around it. We keep people away for their own good.”
Eudora felt her face heat up, and she looked away. Her father was lying to her, she was sure of it. There was no way Maude would have gone away without letting her know. There was something off—first Jane, now Maude. Eudora thought of all the girls in Fairlady who had left school abruptly, all the pretty girls who had never been heard from after boarding the train north. Her father knew the truth, but he wasn’t telling.
“Now that we understand each other, let’s get into town and have a nice time, okay?”
“If you say so,” she said.
Eudora looked through her window and watched scrubby wasteland yield to rows of shacks and pawnshops and liquor stores. They drove between two massive strip clubs that faced each other across the two-lane macadam road. Past the neon of the clubs, the town of Lost Lake began to assemble itself and display what it was really about. A street of morose one-story houses with tiny lawns led to a huge brick structure that ended at a square from which narrow roads wound this way and that through and into a clutter of shops, taverns, restaurants and supper clubs, foundries, courtyards and town squares, movie theaters (all but one shuttered), tiny frame apartment buildings, streets of diminutive factories, a cemetery, and finally, the area on the north end of town where stood Den’s huge blank building with concealed vents and hidden windows and multiple entrances, with uncounted chimneys—a building with comfortable living space for twenty people, an underground pool, a shooting range, the library called the “fortress,” a dining room, two kitchens, and all of the hearths, fireplaces, and woodstoves beneath the uncounted chimneys. Described this way, the town sounds enormous, but many of the buildings were of no great size, the streets were narrow, and most of the squares had a toylike quality, not unlike parts of Fairlady. Past Den’s realm lay the tremendous forest, and within the forest glinted the immensity of Lost Lake itself, forbidden to all but a few of the town’s satraps, rajahs, magi, and sultans. Or so Eudora gathered. Maude had promised her to make another foray side by side into that forbidden territory, and that idea overflowed with equal amounts of the fear of capture, the thrill of outrageous adventure, and joy—the blazing joy of sharing both the risks and the adventure with Maude Munn.
It was possible, of course, that Eudora had always liked Maude more than Maude had liked her, that the friendship had been formed out of familial duty. It was possible that Maude was having the time of her life off wherever she was with Clancy, and that if Maude ever thought of Eudora at all, it was with a gentle nostalgia for her childhood, as if she were an old stuffed monkey found discarded at the back of a closet. This consideration had two effects on Eudora: it aroused a sharp, painful shame that seemed centered in her actual heart, and it made her feel that she, too, should move into a more adult phase of her life. Having no choice in the matter, Eudora decided to become a more independent young woman, and took to riding a horse through town by herself; spending hours alone in the “fortress,” reading whatever looked interesting, as long as it also seemed unambiguously grown-up: over a single week, she read Jane Eyre, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Bloody Chamber. All the other children in Lost Lake seemed like simply that—children—whereas Eudora herself felt like nothing of the sort. She was somewhere in between the kids and the adults, and therefore profoundly lonely. Eudora had never before really noticed the extent to which she and Maude Munn had split away from the others to create a self-contained, self-sustaining society of two. She could almost imagine that her friend had been protecting her from the rest of Lost Lake.
On Eudora’s tenth night back in her father’s realm, Den and most of his merry men stayed up very late drinking—it was hard to tell if they were celebrating or mourning, the cries and cheers too loud and too blurry for Eudora’s ears to differentiate. Either way, she knew that it would be a late morning for all of them, even the guards. It occurred to Eudora that she would probably never have a better chance all winter to slip into the forest unseen. Without Maude did she dare, did she even want to dare? Lost Lake might as well keep its secrets, she thought. Secrets seemed to be the world’s principal currency.
Two days earlier, she had been dawdling bored past the big conference room, peeked in through the half-inch opening in the doorway, and seen, far back at a little table near the enormous fire that filled the hearth, her father in the act of counting the money he was transferring from a knee-high metal safe on the floor into a bunch of shoeboxes piled up on the side of the table. He was not counting bills, he was counting stacks of money, bundles of cash held together with thick paper bands. Behind him and closer to the fire, an oversized guard in a black uniform without any identifying symbols stood with his arms crossed over his huge chest. The clearest thing about this tableau was that it was not supposed to be seen. A kind of dirty intimacy surrounded it. Eudora had moved away as swiftly and as quietly as she could manage. Yet Fairlady, too, had its dirty secrets. When she sat in her mother’s pretty kitchen sometimes, shelling peas or cutting up sweet potatoes, watching and listening as the older women chattered about nothing much—about trivia, really, half of it in that distant time when they had been girls themselves—the empty space she had begun to notice in the air between people’s words and what they really meant widened and widened until the kitchen seemed an abyss. As Eudora lay in her narrow bed with the dull clamor of drunkenness booming from the floor below, it came to her that she herself, Eudora Hale, was in imminent danger of succumbing to the depths of the empty spaces, and that she could drown in the emptiness, the meaninglessness yawning all about her. She had this one chance, she thought: this one, now. And Maude would be with her, too, she thought, not the Maude who had disappeared into “town business” with Clancy, but the other, more real Maude, her Maude, who had created meaning with a glance of her eye as she beautifully flaunted her flame-licked face and ran straight at any obstacle that dared place itself before her.
Just before dawn Eudora slipped quietly out of bed and put on as many layers as possible, buttoning herself up with trembling fingers. Carrying her boots to avoid making any noise clumping across the floor, she crept along the hallway and tiptoed down the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase was the entrance to a large room with a concrete floor that Den used chiefly to put up short-term visitors. The sounds of snoring and sleepy mutterings told her that this monastic space was not empty. Alarmed, she moved quietly past the half-open doorway and peered in. Something like twenty men lay asleep on cots and pallets, about half of them in the black uniforms of Den’s guardsmen. A stench of flatulence and stale alcohol hovered above the snoring men. Eudora took long, silent steps to a back door and walked outside into fresh, cold air that smelled wonderful to her. The long, flat-roofed stables lay only a few steps on a concrete path away.
Her horse exhaled warm steam onto her palms in greeting, and Eudora stroked his velvet nose, moved down his side, stroking and patting as she went, and like a true girl of Lost Lake vaulted onto his back. With a dig of her heels and a whispered word she urged him forward and stayed flat against his neck while they were still in Lost Lake proper. This was it, Eudora realized with something like shock, she was committed, she would see this through to the end. Never before in her life had she been so flagrantly and willfully disobedient. A ghost-Maude, a shadow-Maude, rode beside her, egging her on with the courage of her own native, utterly out-there flagrancy. That blazing wine-stain on Maude’s cheek had demanded more courage than Eudora thought she alone would ever have.
Disobedient? Very well, I will imagine my Maude at my side, and my disobedience will be root, trunk, branch, and leaf
.
As she rode the horse at a steady walk past the shuttered taverns and empty inns that lined the empty ring road, she wondered how her parents had ever met in the first place, how they had been in the same room long enough to make her out of thin air. The number of things that had to align to bring her into being! Maude had had a mother too, years ago, and Jane and Lily had both had fathers. Why did no one get to keep both? Surely they did in some parts of the world. Eudora thought that next year, before she was forced to go before the judge and make a choice, she might jump off the train with a bag full of clothes and food and walk until her new, separate journey took her to a nice town that looked like it might be a good place to live. In this place, parents would not get divorced; it would have neither Fairlady’s well-swept corners nor Lost Lake’s darkness and mystery. Surely such a place existed, somewhere. Didn’t it, didn’t it have to? Yet . . . were she to make her separate journey, instead of losing merely one of the places she already had, she would lose both of them.
Eudora stopped fantasizing about something she was probably never going to do, especially not without Maude, when her horse’s steady, one-foot-at-a-time gait had taken her across the ring road’s wide expanse and up to the irregular row of oak and birch trees that marked the beginning of the great forest. She was at the exact point where she and Maude—so fearlessly, so confidently, so ignorantly—had entered the forest. This time around, she was fearful, uncertain, and aware that normally a squad of the black-uniformed soldiers would be poised and hidden within the trees, ready to pounce. She nudged her horse into a gentle, quiet walk through the first row of trees and into the forest, where the pale, gray light of the northern dawn almost immediately surrendered to the velvet darkness of the long night. All of the soldiers couldn’t have been celebrating with Den, she knew. Probably an equal number had been left at their posts, or whatever they called it. She would have to be a lot cagier today, and softer of step.
The trees seemed sometimes to creep toward her out of the absolute darkness behind them, and sometimes invisible twiggy fingers reached out to dig at her hair, her shoulders, her chest. With better eyesight than hers, the horse did not flinch or panic, but sure-footedly stepped around the thick trunks and lacy deadfalls on their wandering path. If it was a path. In daylight, she and Maude had followed some old trail, half overgrown with fiddlehead ferns, but now she had to leave all of that up to the horse. Eudora’s only function was to avoid low-hanging limbs and keep the animal moving in more or less the right direction.
She lost track of time. Now and then, she brought the patient horse to a halt and paused a minute or two to listen to what was going on around her. In the darkness and without a watch whose dial was readable at night, a minute becomes a very flexible unit of time. Eudora listened to the forest breathe around her, a faint rustle in the leaves, a quick scurry of tiny feet on the forest floor, a bird’s exploratory-sounding call answered or challenged by another bird. Some animal brushed against a tree trunk, and she felt the horse stiffen and shift its legs, and knew it was rolling its eyes in terror. Eudora patted its neck and urged it forward again, grateful not to know what kind of animal it had been, and hoping it was not following them. Then it occurred to her that the animal might have been a human being with an automatic weapon slung across his back. Night vision glasses, and a black uniform with a black hood. Black boots with rubber soles. She let herself be carried another thirty feet, and feeling protected by the darkness no longer, squeezed the reins gently to halt the horse, swung her legs over the animal’s back, and dropped silently to the ground.
A faint gray light was leaking into the darkness. Eudora began moving slowly forward through the ranks of the trees and for a moment had the illusion that they grew in straight military rows that exposed her every time she moved into one of the spaces between the neat rows. Far overhead, a squirrel barreled along a slender branch and yelled in squirrel-speak, I see her! I see her! Here she is, you idiots! She whirled to look behind her, and the forest, as if by command, snapped back into its old disorder. More carefully, she examined the tree trunks, the bushes, the green sprigs that sprouted from the gray-green mulch, straining to see what she could not see: hidden traps, gleaming wires, soldiers with their faces painted to look like moss. “Okay,” she muttered to herself, and led the horse by the reins in the direction she thought she had to go. Ten minutes of patient going later, Eudora heard the unmistakable sound of a group of men moving through the forest with no thought of precaution. She froze; she listened, hard. The men seemed to be coming right toward her from the very direction she was going. Making as little noise as possible, she led the horse behind a deadfall where a huge broken trunk slanted gray and lifeless through a cobwebby tangle of lesser branches entwined with parasitic vines. She knelt down and as the noise came nearer peered out at the space she had just left. Soon a small troop of the guards, weapons slung across their backs, relaxed and clearly in a good mood, entered the space before her and mooched along through it.
When they had passed, Eudora waited a few minutes, then emerged and listened to them passing away from her, now and then saying something she could not make out. It did not have to make sense to her, she told herself, she should merely be grateful they were making themselves so easy to avoid. Then she resumed walking northward again, toward the lake, the horse treading amiably along beside her.
Nearly an hour later, the sun higher in the sky and sending great shafts of pale northern light down through the trees that were greener and taller than those farther back, she felt the ground beneath her feet grow spongy with moisture. The air was colder and clearer, and she thought it smelled like water. Eudora gave the reins a tug and began to move along faster. Before her, a cluster of matter where none should have been—an unnatural shape, a harsh angle, a brown too red to be alive—resolved itself into a sort of shelter, a hut, a shack. A shack with a dark, glinting window and a wood stove’s chimney jutting through the roof. A dark green pickup truck encrusted all over with a rind of dried mud had been drawn up beside it.
Her heart seemed to swing to a stop, then resume after the skipped beat. She thought she knew that pickup. For a moment she could not move. Then: “You stay here,” she whispered to the horse, dropped the reins, and set off, crouching and moving despite her terror toward the rear of the shack and its glinting window. It could not be, it had to be. Of course it was. She remembered walking toward it through a blast of freezing air at the side of the station. Since that night, the pickup had known a lot of bad weather.
The real test of her courage was whether or not she could straighten up enough to peer through the window, and as she scuttled across a resilient carpet of weeds murdered by the cold Eudora wondered what she would do when she got to the red-brown wall. Then she got there, and she knew she had to risk taking a look. The shadow-Maude, the silent, insubstantial Maude insisted on it. Yes. A look, really just a peep, a second’s glance into that enigmatic space, and off to the next big challenge. Such as, for example, trying to get back home before Den noticed she wasn’t in the building.
Very slowly, in fact reluctantly, Eudora came up out of her crouch and plastered herself to the boards next to the window. She inhaled and exhaled, inhaled again and held her breath. It was time. She turned her head, then her whole body, and raised the top of her head and her left eye to the window. Inside the cabin, Clancy Munn sat at a card table, his broad square back to her, counting out bills from one of the stacks Den had been organizing. He placed the bills into three separate piles. Then he waved at someone, telling them to come up to him. Eudora lowered her head again, counted to twenty, then rose up and risked another peep. Two of the soldiers in black were grinning down at Clancy and reaching for the money he was extending to them. Everybody seemed to be extremely happy with the way their lives were going. Payday, Eudora thought, okay, that’s all I need. The guards stepped back from the desk, and Eudora found herself looking at Maude Munn, her radiance considerably dimmed, her face drawn into a s
cowl, standing there in blue jeans and mud-daubed blue sweater, her hands jammed into the pockets of a dirty-looking duffel coat. She was just thinking that Maude didn’t own that sweater, or that ugly coat either, when her onetime darling and best friend glanced up and looked right into her eyes. Eudora froze, and her mouth went dry.
Maude nodded once and looked down at her father, who gave her a couple of bills and waved her off. She backed away and slid her eyes sideways. When Eudora failed to move, Maude frowned more deeply and nodded her head to the left. Get out of here, she was saying, and Eudora got out of there on the spot. She scrambled, trying to be as quiet as you can be while scrambling, and disappeared, she hoped, back into the trees. When she got to shelter, she realized that along the far side of the cabin had been a stack of the long, narrow black boxes from the train—from her trains and all the others.
No longer quite in control of herself, Eudora moved aimlessly away from the cabin and finally took in that the trees were thinning out and the ground becoming squishier. And directly ahead of her was a glinting, silvery, molten surface that had to be Lost Lake. She glanced back, assured herself that her horse was within reach and not going anywhere, and turned back to the lake that had been her goal all along. It was vast, but she could see across it, dimly. It looked very cold and very deep, like an enormous quarry. Way off to her right, a truck had been drawn up along a wooden dock. Two of the guardsmen were pulling something from the back of the truck and loading it onto a dolly.
Eudora strained to see what the object was, but the men’s bodies obscured it as they pushed the dolly along the pier jutting out from the dock. At the end of the pier, they tilted up the dolly, and something black slipped away into the water and instantly sank from view.
It was enough: it was too much, she needed no more. Eudora stumbled back into the woods, took up the reins, and walked the horse back far enough to feel safe getting on its back again. They plodded through the forest, with every step Eudora seeing before her the shock, as if by flashlight, of Maude Munn’s altered face, the face of a gloomy, altered Maude Munn, older, sadder, compromised, another person altogether. The black thing slid into the lake and disappeared. Something had gone away, gone away forever.