The Forest's Son

by Aleo, Cyndy

  Bożena crouches next to where he lays.

  “You could have kept her with you for as long as you wanted, if that was what you wished, even with no Dziwozona blood in her. We don’t know the full extent of your power, but we’re sure you could have managed that, at least. Instead, you chose to send her away. You neither asked, nor looked for answers. When she was ill, you didn’t trust in us, but thought constantly of human trappings and medicine for her. Why?”

  “Because that's where she belongs,” he says. “he never asked to be part of this. She fell for a very tall, human boy and all that came along after with me was forced on her, without her consent. I brought her here because I was convinced she wouldn't be safe if I didn't, but the truth is that I brought her here because I was selfish, and I never asked her if this was what she wanted.

  “In the end, she was kidnapped, tortured, and nearly killed. She watched my mother die. I can’t protect her here, and have to leave her to the care of strangers in order to keep her alive. The whole time she was terrified and screaming for me and I couldn't do a damn thing for her.”

  “So then you showed her with your body how much you love her and cut her out of your life afterwards without asking what she wanted once again? I may not understand human customs, Jakub, but that doesn't make sense even when I include your explanation in trying to understand.”

  A burst of anger escapes him, and Bożena jumps back. It's the first time he's managed to frighten her with his emotions, and he instantly regrets it.

  “I don't know what I'm doing with her, so it's better she find someone human to spend her life with. Someone normal who will love her and care for her and protect her.”

  Bożena shakes her head and walks away from him.

  “She had that here until someone took her heart from her.”

  Jakub’s pulverizes the closest tree in his anger. Bożena makes everything sound so simple when it's anything else but. He gets to his feet and starts walking out of the forest. Regina will be back in a day or two, and if she has the skills and knowledge to travel, she can probably also help him buy a house. It will be easier to check on Donovan from time to time if he has access to things like electricity and Internet. A house will solve some of his problems, and right now, he needs to get away from Bożena and her overly simple logic and her lectures.

  He'll wait for Regina’s return at the edge of the forest. It will be faster to get everything he needs that way.

  47: Foreign

  Donovan is a foreigner in her own country. Stumbling through customs and immigration, every person who comes in contact with her passport is surprised to see her citizenship. They repeat instructions to her slowly, using simple words someone with little understanding of English might understand, but even those are difficult to follow.

  She finally collapses into a cab, giving the driver an address she hopes is her own. There are too many people and the cars on the road are enough to make her even more disoriented. She's not even sure of the date, of how long she’s been in the forest, but it’s long enough that the bustle of the city feels alien to her. She wants to go back, but she can't. He sent her away.

  Tears run again, though she should have run dry by now. She closes her eyes and shuts out everything. With her eyes closed, she can pretend she's anywhere: back in the forest hut in a warm bed, sleeping in his arms. Or in the castle, with nothing bad having happened yet, and Grace still alive. Her heart not yet broken, and everything still a possibility rather than a reality.

  The cab is at a full stop and the cab driver is clearing his throat noisily before she realizes she's supposed to be doing something. More tears fall when she realizes she gave him the address of Grace and Vance's — Jakub's — house rather than her own, but she feels too stupid now to tell him it's the wrong house. Besides, they have cypher locks, and she's known the combination for years. She hardly thinks he'll care at this point if she spends a night here before making it back to her own apartment.

  She pulls out a wad of cash to pay him, only to see she has Polish zlotys and not American bills. Stuttering, she offers her debit card and adds a fat tip in embarrassment, fleeing into the house after she scrawls her signature.

  Everything looks exactly as it did when they left it; Grace must have asked someone to take care of the plants in their absence, because there's not a brown leaf to be seen.

  Donovan wanders from room to room, touching the worn corduroy of the couch, the cool granite of the kitchen counter. She hesitates at Grace's computer, where she's done so much work to earn extra money, and sees an envelope in Grace's old-fashioned-looking script. Of course, now she knows why the woman's handwriting had always looked so ancient, but it seems out of place seeing this note addressed to her now, from beyond death.

  She walks away from it three times then returns to it, too afraid to open the envelope to see what Grace might have written. What could she have wanted to say to her before they left that she'd leave a note here, of all places? How could she have anticipated Donovan would return here, much less alone, without Jakub? Or is there also a similar note left back at her apartment?

  The fourth time, she can't resist, and she lifts the envelope, sliding her finger under the seal carefully, like tearing it will ruin something. It's nothing more than a single sheet of printer paper inside, and the note is written in ballpoint. It looks like it was written hurriedly, like Grace had done it while they were preparing to leave.

  Donovan,

  While my son believes things will turn out differently, I know my fate. I also know that after my death, he will be afraid of where his path has led him, and he will likely send you away. I made contingency plans for that eventuality, and this house, and my business, have been signed over to you, as well as a bank account.

  Be well. Be safe. Be happy. You were the daughter I never had, and you would have been a joy to raise as one of my sisters.

  Grace

  Donovan is sobbing by the end of the short note. Grace had seen what she couldn't see: that Jakub would send her away. She only wishes Grace had told her, so she wouldn't have been so stupid as to have sex with him before he could cast her aside.

  She clutches the note to her chest and wanders the house, crushing the paper like it's an extension of Grace. She’d hug her if she could. Donovan can't wrap her mind around the idea that this house she has spent so much time in is now hers.

  Part of her loves the idea that she'll never have to leave it again, never have to go back to her tiny apartment. The other part is devastated that she's here alone. No Grace floating from room to room in her gauzy dresses or singing to her plants when she thinks no one is around to hear her. No Vance greeting her at the door in some state of confusion or poring over his laptop searching for the video telling him what to do or how to act.

  She walks upstairs to pick which bedroom to sleep in. She immediately dismisses Grace's bedroom i as too alien, and too large. There's no way she could ever sleep in here. Vance's bedroom — she doesn't think she can ever associate this room with Jakub — has too many memories for her: the last night they spent here before they left for Poland, the big reveal of who and what he is, the days spent there just hanging out and doing absolutely nothing before she knew everything. When she thought things couldn’t get any stranger than they were.

  Donovan can't get back downstairs fast enough. Without even changing her clothes, she curls up on the couch, pulling a fleece blanket off the back and over herself. She leaves all the lights on, but the brightness doesn't keep her from feeling lonely, and it doesn't make her feel any safer.

  Safety is back in a dark forest in Poland.

  48: Guardian

  Regina is frustrated with having to travel in the human world, especially with following Jakub's instructions as they were funneled through Bożena. First, she travels to an apartment, but the place is locked up tight and dark.

  She smells cat, but there’s no noise inside — not even a heartbeat. The apartment is empty. She guesses
the girl could be asleep inside, but the piles of mail stacked up outside make her think he doesn't know the girl as well as he thinks he does. Donovan is definitely not here.

  Determined not to fail before she even finds the girl, she decides to try the address where she now knows Grażyna and Jakub were living. Edyta may not have always been aware of where they were, but Bożena was careful. She only tracked them if the boy's powers were manifest. If they were hidden, she left them be. It had apparently been one of the many secrets it turned out were being kept from the tribe as a whole.

  It was never understood why sometimes they vanished for decades at a time, but Bożena seemed to think the boy's human nature was in conflict with whatever nature he’d inherited from the Dziwozony. She thought maybe, in the end, his human nature might win, and he would live the rest of his years as a human.

  Regina always thought her to be too much of an optimist, but she followed Bożena's lead. No one wanted to kill one of her sisters, and she, having killed a male infant of her own, had never blamed Grażyna for what she had done. After killing that precious child, she'd never again lain with a man. It wasn't worth the grief in the end if the result was a boy.

  Regina taps the cab driver's shoulder and asks him to leave her at the end of the long road leading to Grażyna's property. The last thing she wants to do is alert the girl if this is where she is. She also longs to be outside again, away from the smelly, noisy machines humans rode in.

  She’ll have to stay in the clothes, but as soon as the cab is out of sight, she removes her shoes and puts them in her backpack. She takes off at a run, finally feeling free, and soon finds herself in the small forest outside the house. The trees here tell her all she needs to know, and she's so happy to be in this small area that reminds her of home that she hugs one of the trees.

  The girl came here instead of her own home. Regina wonders if she meant to or if she did so accidentally. There isn't a sister in the forest who hadn't seen the girl's anguish, or experienced Jakub's grief.

  Regina will never understand human interactions. Dziwozony love their sisters, but humans have relationships between men and women that are so strange; they mate for life, or at least some try to.

  She knows the girl mated with Jakub with the intention of doing so again and again, and spending the rest of her life with him, but Jakub sent her away like he intended the mating to be that of a Dziwozona and a human male. Regina could have almost understood that if he hadn't crippled them all with his grief after sending the girl away.

  And now, she’s here, with the humans, checking up on the girl. If he wants to know how the girl is, why did he send her back here in the first place? He could have kept her with him in the first place and then he would always know how she is.

  Regina sighs and gives up trying to understand what he’s thinking. She opens her pack again to pull out the phone Jakub sent with her. She needs to send a message back to him to let him know she’s found the girl, that she’s made it here safely, and where she went when she arrived back in her home country. Hopefully, there’s someone who can retrieve the message quickly, and she'll be allowed to return to the forest soon.

  It's only when she pulls the phone out of the backpack that she remembers she forgot to do one crucial thing: plug the stupid thing in at some point during her travels. Jakub had reminded her that it would need to be charged, that the newer phones don't hold a charge as long as the older ones she is more familiar with, but she forgot. The phone is dead. Now she's out here, needing to get a message to him, with no way of doing so. If she can’t fix this quickly, she’ll have to stay here longer, and that’s the last thing she wants to do.

  She's angry with herself for forgetting, but the house is right here in front of her. She creeps closer to the windows and sees the girl sound asleep on a couch, her face red and puffy from crying. Regina can easily go into the house, charge the phone, message Jakub, and be out again before the girl wakes up. She probably spent the entire day crying, and is now sleeping the sleep of the exhausted. Grief does that to people.

  Regina circles the house until she’s on the side that has Grażyna's greenhouse and works at the lock on the structure’s door. She lets herself in as quietly as she can, watching that she doesn’t disturb any of the plants, and climbs the wooden stairs until she’s on the second floor of the greenhouse. It's a simple matter to let herself into the master bedroom, plug the aggravating phone in, and curl up on the giant bed to get some rest. She'll wake long before the girl will, and be on her way.

  49: Remains

  A hotel room has to suffice until Regina returns; Jakub lacks the patience to wait for online access for even the day or two it will take for her to check on Donovan and message him before she returns to Poland. He kills time buying a cell phone, getting the hotel room, texting Regina, who doesn't respond.

  It worries him that she doesn't respond.

  His fingers hover over the keys, wanting to text Donovan, to check on her, to make sure she got home okay, but he won't. He’s the one who sent her away; it doesn't make sense to tell her he doesn't want her here, then text her and ask if she's okay and found everything his mother had left her.

  He sends an email to his mother's attorney instead, asking him to contact Donovan and explain everything Grace has left her. Documents have been forged here, including a death certificate, and he sends them along. He takes the time to assure the lawyer that Donovan was like a daughter to his mother and a sister to him, that he's decided to stay on here with family, that he knows his mother would want Donovan to be taken care of back home, especially since he's so well-cared-for here.

  In other words, he lies.

  Donovan isn't anything like a sister to him, and he needs her here. No one can care for him here like she can. No one can anticipate what he needs like she can. The sisters, he knows, will scatter from him, even when he’s able to rein in his out-of-control emotions. There’s too much ingrained belief with them, and his inability to contain his emotions has only made his alien nature more obvious to them.

  The worst thing for him, however, is Bożena, with her mannerisms so much like his mother's. She’s come with him to the hotel room, telling him she wants news of Donovan as well, and he catches her watching him out of the corner of his eye every so often. The look she's giving him is always disapproving.

  He paces the room; he texts Regina again; he paces some more; he looks at the phone wondering why he doesn't have a text in response. Occasionally, he opens the clock function on the phone and calculates the difference in time zones to see if Regina might be sleeping.

  Even if she is, though, the sound of the texts coming in should be unfamiliar enough to wake her. She and Donovan have been gone long enough; she should have had plenty of time to find Donovan's apartment by now. Why the hell isn't she answering?

  “You should have kept her with you,” Bożena says.

  He turns on her. Already irritated, he's spoiling for somewhere he can vent his anger, and she’s a perfect target.

  “No, I shouldn't have. She's not safe here. She needs to be safe, to have a house and access to medical care and science and someone who can take care of her.”

  “She had someone who could take care of her here. Only now he's trying to take care of her from thousands of miles away, and that's an impossible thing to do. Think, Jakub. You’re pacing like this waiting to hear from Regina simply because she's on a plane. She's been gone a day.

  “How do you plan to handle months away from her? Years? Will you leave Regina over there forever, reporting back to you every few minutes? If you needed to know what she was doing and how she is every second, you should have kept her with you. But if you truly want her gone, you need to let go and learn to live without knowing.”

  He glares but doesn't respond. Bożena takes that as an opportunity to make sure he really understands what the rest of his life without her will be like.

  “By sending her back, you expect her to meet someone else. To
mate with someone else. To bear someone else's young. To die long before you do. And you might never know when any of those things happens.”

  He slams the door so hard on his way out of the hotel room that it splinters. Bożena lifts the phone to call downstairs and apologize, mentioning a wife's death and describing the damage as the result of a grieving widower. She only hopes she hasn't angered Jakub to the point where his emotions will bleed out onto the hotel staff when he races through the lobby on his way out.

  Jakub has taken the stairs to avoid the lobby altogether. Once outside, though, he has nowhere to go. There's nowhere he wants to be other than back in the States, getting Donovan and bringing her back, but that would be the wrong thing to do.

  He sent her away to do the right thing, and getting angry at Bożena won't change anything. Everything she said to him is exactly right. He’s going to have to learn to live with it. Donovan is provided for; his mother saw to that before they left. He’s being ridiculous in his paranoid worry for her. The lawyer will contact her, and she'll move into the house and eventually she'll look back on the weeks she spent here as a strange aberration in an otherwise normal life. Or a dream.

  But why do these thoughts only make him feel worse, not better?

  50: Visiting

  The repeated sound of incoming — and unanswered — text messages wakes Donovan. She opens her eyes to pilled, gray corduroy and recognizes Vance's couch, but she's disoriented. There was a dream about a forest and very tall, naked women. And why is she asleep on Vance's couch?

  She rolls over, groping for her phone, but no missed texts appear on her screen. The beeping, however, continues. Curious, she gets up and starts a search through the house for the source of the beeping. If she remembers correctly now that she’s slightly more awake, all three of them had their cell phones with them in Poland. She's sure she hears something coming from somewhere in the house. It's possible either Grace or Vance had another phone they'd left behind, but …