Maze of Trees: A Dark Fairy Tale Romance Short Story

by Claudia O'Keefe

  I begged off from staying in those free hotel rooms, but never once suggested that we go to my place. Landry didn’t question me about it outright, but I could tell he thought this strange and he had every right.

  “I live in a shack,” I told him. “An honest to God hillbilly shack.”

  “Don’t tell me. With an outhouse?”

  “Three.” I neglected to mention that they were no longer used and that my farmhouse had two perfectly usable bathrooms.

  “What’s the third one for?”

  “The third one?”

  “One for boys, one for girls. What’s the third one for?”

  “Around here? Lord only knows,” I said.

  And the topic was dropped, at least momentarily. I can’t say why I didn’t want to bring Landry home. Instinctively, I sensed there was danger for us there. From what, I couldn’t say, but I knew it the way I knew where to find the missing boy who wandered off in early February, leaving the safety of his parent’s condominium before the sun came up.

  One afternoon I observed Landry scribble furiously on napkin after napkin he yanked from the dispenser on the window bar at Starbucks. Our seats looked out on the heart of the village. It was one of our favorite spots. That day, however, Landry was deep into his own head, inspired in a way I had never seen him before.

  “What is that stuff?” I asked about his writings.

  “When they let me go, after I was forced to train my Pindladoor replacement that was, they took away my whole life in the name of profit,” he said. “I’ve been searching for a way to take that profit away from them, and this,” he stabbed violently at the latest in his series of napkins with a happy, mad-computer-programmer gleam in his eye, “just may be the way to do it. A new service that makes theirs obsolete!”

  “I was wondering why you fled from the city to our fair metropolis,” I said.

  He looked up at me then, really hearing me for the first time in half an hour. I saw that gleam in his eye wink out and die like a cheap light bulb from China. He stared at me, reluctance on his lips, and said nothing.

  The silence progressed until it was close to awkwardness. Then more than a dozen non-tourists, most in sheriff and rescue uniforms rushed by our window. Next came a flurry of civilians, among them a fellow waiter Landry recognized from the restaurant.

  Landry rapped on our window, calling the waiter’s attention. The man pushed open the coffee bar’s front door and leaned inside.

  “Hey, Landry.”

  “What’s up?” Landry asked.

  “A kid’s gone missing from Mogul Monkey.”

  Mogul Monkey was a townhouse style condo complex adjacent to the resort’s snowtube park.

  “They think he’s been abducted, but they’re mounting a search anyway,” the waiter said.

  Landry looked stricken.

  “Okay,” he said. ‘We’ll be right there.”

  He hurriedly crammed his notes into his pockets and then grabbed me by the hand. I barely had time to lunge for my purse before I found myself rushing along with the others toward a command post erected under an E-Z UP tent outside the administrative offices. SUVs filled with searchers pulled up as if in a precision driving drill and two women dashed out of the admin building with stacks of photocopied photos of the boy. Radios squawked all over the parking lot.

  “Landry, slow down a minute,” I said. “Landry.”

  As if suddenly aware that he clutched my hand fiercely in his he stopped so hard on the ice I skidded into him. “Sorry. Do you want to go back to Starbucks and wait for me?”

  I studied his expression, trying to figure him out. “No, of course not. You know how well I know this area. I want to help. It’s just that—”

  “Good girl,” he said, squeezing my hand and continued our sprint toward the command post.

  He finally released me once he reached the line-up dividing the volunteers into search parties. I backed away into the trees. Landry didn’t even notice. If the boy was still in my territory, I could find him. I only needed a moment.

  Most people think of the forest as an insensate thing, but it feels just like the rest of us. I closed my eyes and touched the nearest spruce. The trees were frightened, absorbing the child’s own terror and sending it outward in waves. They told me what I needed to know. Confused by the pre-dawn mist, the boy had walked off a cliff. When I returned to the E-Z UP, Landry already had our search assignment. He showed me our section of grid on the map. I shook my head.

  “Who has that?” I pointed at an area well beyond the last black diamond run.

  “No one, I think,” he said.

  “I think that would be the best place to look.”

  Vertical lines appeared between his eyebrows and his lips turned down. “Why?”

  “There’s an old mine down there.”

  “A mine. What kid would want to check out a mine in the middle of February?”

  Landry was right. Besides, the mine was actually securely boarded and miles from where I sensed the boy at this very moment dropping exhausted into a shaded ice bank, immobile and curling into a fetal ball.

  “Please, Landry,” I said. “I have a hunch.”

  He sighed. “Alright.” He went to speak to the search coordinator.

  A few minutes later we were in my Tracker, bombing down an officially closed road on the backside of the mountain. Snow heaped on the road in two- to four-foot drifts and beneath that rock hard berms crisscrossed both lanes. As testament to the strangely grim mood affecting Landry, he made no mention of the road’s condition or my outrageous driving. I saw a torment in him I didn’t like. My sole concerns were to rescue the boy and relieve Landry’s unexplained suffering.

  Once we reached the only route accessible to us I knew we were even further from the child than we had been at the top of the mountain. We’d find his bloody footprints in the snow approximately four-and-a-half miles to the north-northeast.

  How would I direct Landry where we needed to go without drawing his suspicion? As he trudged forward into the calf-high snow, I hesitated at the side of the road and glanced up at the sun’s position in the sky. We wouldn’t reach our destination before dark and Landry, as strong as I knew him to be, didn’t have the energy to make it to the boy’s side before nightfall. No one did.

  What does it sound like when you’re struck by lightning? People who imagine the event often think that the unlucky victim hears a crash, a bang, something on the order of a sonic boom, a fiery crackle from God’s own hand. In reality it’s nothing like that. The last thing you hear before you die is a simple click.

  That’s what Landry heard next. Behind his back, I lifted my hands to the sunny blue and whispered a single word.

  Landry cried out, not in pain, but surprise. For a split second the skies over my miles and miles of territory went totally dark.

  “What was—”

  The borrowed light caught him in the breastbone like a lance as he turned to ask me if I’d just seen what he’d seen, a moment’s pitch black.

  He staggered back, gasping like a fish who has suddenly learned to breathe, and clutched at his chest. A second after that he sucked in a deep, confident breath. His cramped shoulders pushed down and back and he stood taller. His head came up, a near-delirious smile lighting his face, truly from within. His eyes and his cheeks warmed with a healthy, sure glow. He had no idea what had happened to him, wouldn’t even be certain that something had happened to him, but he liked it.

  I pretended frustration. “I’m sorry, Landry, now that we’re down here, I’m not sure which way to go. All these trees and no path.”

  He turned in the direction we needed to go, beckoning me to follow. “Don’t worry. This way.”

  His legs carved unfailingly through virgin snow crust, covering ground at a pace that I hoped he wouldn’t compare to normal speeds. I also prayed he wouldn’t wonder how I could possibly keep up with him. The light inside him touched the salt cedars as we swept past and the trees told t
he light inside him what it needed to know.

  By twilight, he knelt by the crumpled body in its hollow of ice.

  I gasped when I saw the boy, lips dark as frozen blueberries and his right foot nearly cut in half from his fall onto rocks at the bottom of the cliff. How had he managed to march so far with his foot flapping the wrong way at every step?

  Humans amaze me, I thought with wonder.

  The boy whimpered. Landry scooped him up and we took off at a run. At first Landry lead the way unerringly back to the car as the child grew quieter and colder. Halfway there, though, we knew we were losing him. Landry ran faster, then began to wheeze, the light inside him rapidly leaking away. Not only did he slow dangerously, but—

  “I don’t remember which way,” he said, faltering.

  “I do,” I prompted gently. “I remember.”

  I practically had to drag them. When Landry broke through the final knife sharp stretch of ice between us and the car, he tripped and crashed to his knees, almost dropping the boy in his weariness.

  This momentary weakness put a fear in him I didn’t understand. He hugged the boy tighter to his chest, cradled him.

  “Got you, got you, got you,” he crooned, a mantra.

  “Landry,” I said.

  “Got you, got you, got you.”

  I repeated his name. He didn’t hear me. He let go of the boy with one hand and raised the hand to cover his eyes in a universal expression of anguish. The woods around us, previously lit by the light shining through him, dimmed. His golden skin grew as dusky as the twilight.

  In the dark I said, “You have a son.”

  “Had,” he answered. “A son.”

  “What happened?”

  “My wife. . . .”

  “Won’t let you see him?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Oh, Landry.”

  “It was after I lost my job. I didn’t understand how much it effected her. The foreclosure, the prospect of living on the street. The house was hers originally. It had been in her family for generations. I didn’t pay enough attention,” he said. “I think she felt trapped. I think that was why she did it.”

  “What?”

  He dropped his hand from his eyes and the sun looked up at me, with clouds in the way.

  “Fire,” he said. “She chose fire.”

  Though the boy’s unexpected and miraculous return stunned the rescue crews, Landry never expressed doubts about how we managed to reach the boy in time, much less find him at all. Almost a week after we rushed the child to paramedics and his hysterical family, the event was old news. I believe Landry regretted his confession to me about his family and his part in their deaths and didn’t want that day brought up again. I wished many times he would revive the topic so I could reassure him, but he never did.

  We picked up our old routines. Though I was in agony much of the time, I joined him enthusiastically again in our pilfered luxury condos. March came, then April, but the slopes remained white and deep. Spring skiing season didn’t want to end. Everyone at the resort remarked about the freakishly long season that looked as though it might stretch into May. It wouldn’t. I had limits and should have known the forest wouldn’t let me tamper much longer. It wanted to wake, to get the growing season up and running. Summers are pathetically short here, and the land needed every sunny or thunderously rainy day it could harvest from the sky.

  On the last Sunday in April, we spent several hours hiking the Greenbrier Trail, reclaimed land along the Greenbrier River on which the C & O Railroad used to transport timber and coal and isolated Appalachian families to the big city. Landry snapped photo after digital photo of Dutchman’s breeches, bloodroot, Jack-in-the-pulpit, and trilliums that grew by the river, every wildflower sparkling with droplets that condensed out of the mist. Afterwards, hungry, we stopped at a gas station, which sold pizza and biscuits in its convenience store.

  I knew the store well, because the owner was my neighbor nearly an hour away in Cherry Lick. I didn’t like Vernice McCalder and she had been antagonistic with me from the day I moved into Ariel’s place. She wouldn’t admit it, but I suspected that the two of them had had a thing for each other. She’d probably been expecting to inherit his place.

  “How much do you want?” Landry asked as he pulled my Tracker up to the pump.

  “Better fill it,” I said. “It’s a long way back to the resort. I’ll get us something to eat.”

  At the back of the store I chose a pizza from one of the two or three habitually boxed and waiting in the glassed warming oven, plus a couple of bottled teas out of the cooler.

  “You know the only difference between a Methodist and Baptist, don’t you?” an old farmer said to another man I recognized and knew dug wells for a living.

  His listener didn’t answer.

  “Methodists can read.”

  Both men chuckled.

  Incredibly, though his audience didn’t grow, and no significant conversation had occurred in-between, the farmer told the same joke a second time just seconds later. I tried to shut out their voices, but still heard the two laugh softly and mindlessly as if the joke was fresh.

  I set the pizza box and drinks on the counter and reached into my purse for my wallet, when, as if caught in a time loop, the farmer by the beer nuts clapped his companion on the shoulder, and sucked in a breath to begin again.

  “You know the only difference between a—“

  I nearly bolted from the store.

  Vernice stopped me. At her post behind the counter, she’d faced the pumps, observing Landry filling up my gas tank. Now she turned and set something on the counter so she could take my money, which I realized I gripped convulsively in my fist. I looked down and saw what she’d been holding, a partially completed plastic canvas picture of a teddy bear holding a balloon that read WWJD? What would Jesus do? Smoker’s lines around her mouth puckered as she studied me.

  “Not a good idea,” she said, gaze flicking toward Landry. “Ariel would know better.”

  I was stunned. She knew. She’d always known what I was.

  “Ariel played bondage games with his vegetables and then hung himself in his barn,” I said. “Is he really an example to follow?”

  “I’m warning you,” Vernice said. “Don’t use cuss words in my store, Carly.”

  I struggled to locate the expletive in my previous two sentences. “Bondage? Since when is that a swear word?”

  She hissed at the repetition of the word and clutched her plastic stitchery to her breast. “God bless you, child. I’ll pray for you at revival tonight.”

  “Please don’t,” I said and slammed out the door.

  I have never since felt the way I did the night before Landry was due to leave. I understood my power better then than I had in all the years I’d possessed it. Loneliness is a fearsome enemy. Humans can stand any number of setbacks—poverty, starvation, the worst pain their bodies can inflict, homelessness, disaster, the moment before death, and the centuries upon centuries of life that remain once a loved one is gone forever. They can weather it and emerge from under the sledgehammer of it all as long they have one thing. Someone to go through it with them. Even if that person is not kind to them, they know at least that they are not alone.

  What would you do if you were the last person on earth? I know what I would do: shoot myself the instant I was certain no one else remained alive. Would I stop to write an epitaph? Something that extraterrestrial archeologists might discover thousands of millennia from now? Hell no. Over and done with. B’bye.

  What would you do, however, if dragged off to an environment that was too different from your own for you to ever be happy? Not strange enough to make life impossible, but filled with a people whose mindset was so alien from yours that you would never, as long as you lived, find yourself laughing honestly again, had to guard who you were from them, sensor everything you said or did, had no one, absolutely no one to talk to or walk with or run to when life was crap and something dev
astating happened? What if you knew you would never see home again?

  Then, by miracle, a piece of home comes to you, not just a sliver or a suggestion or an empty memory, but a huge, comforting, bathrobe-sized piece of it. It wraps you up in its remembered cocoon. You sink back into its warmth, hug its security around you and for the first time in years you breathe the type of sigh that signals everything is right with your world.

  That was Landry to me. Home and much more. If he and I had discovered each other before the earthquake, I never would have ended up in this breathtaking dump called Cherry Lick.

  He expected me to go with him the next morning.

  We’ll do this when we get back, Carly. We’ll do that. The start-up will take a lot of work at first, but you don’t have to worry that I’ll neglect you. I’ll make certain we have all the time we need together. I’ll never lose track of us.

  I heard echoes of the tragedy with his wife and son, but I also heard the beginnings of something real for us. You can’t fool the breeze that carries the words your heart speaks. It ferries your soul across spaces open or close and not even the sturdiest door can keep it out. Only you can refuse to hear it. That is one of humankind’s strongest powers, the ability to not hear another’s heart.

  I heard his heart. I knew my own. I couldn’t go and I couldn’t tell him why. I could change the course of floods, ask a valiant, forgotten apple tree to sacrifice itself so the forest could reclaim its place, calm a frenzied owl before it shredded its wing on a barbed-wire fence, but I couldn’t face the man I loved and tell him good-bye.

  Is it any wonder I did what I did?

  Blinding rain savaged my mountains that night. Storms bloated the creeks, sent torrents of frigid mud sweeping down into the hollows. Below my farmhouse, the Greenbrier roared. Water sheeted from chin. Ropes of it snaked across my breasts and down my arms.

  I stood motionless in the downpour until I lost track of time. My teeth began to chatter and my skin grew icy.

  It’s time, I thought.

  I sank my hand into my own chest and pulled out my heart. For several minutes I held it, studying it without amazement, simply staring. It was a ghostly version, still pumping and bleeding ephemeral red mist. I hurled it at the ground with all the anger inside of me.