I sit up, grabbing a notebook and pencil from my bedside table. Sometimes, if I can’t sleep, it helps to do train-of-thought journaling or doodling. Distract the part of my brain that can’t sleep until my body can do it.
In a cursive so lazy no one else would be able to read it, I write Jane is gone. She’s alive but she’s gone and I think she’s still in the forest but I don’t know how to find her and I don’t think I can tell anyone and
I trail off, my eyes drawn to the window. The forest. My hand keeps moving, shifting into drawing. If she’s really out there, then why am I here? My breath comes in a little faster, a little more shallow. Anxiety is building and if I don’t get control of it, it’s going to be a panic attack, and how can I be allowed to have a panic attack if Jane is the one who’s out there, in the forest, alone—
Find me.
My hand stops moving. On the page, without thinking about it, I’ve drawn the messy but clear shape of something that stands on two legs and has no face. Its antlers reach up to the top of the page and disappear.
I throw my blanket off and stand up. I pause, listening to the house. No movement. No sounds. I go into the hallway and pause again. Every few steps down the hall, down the stairs, I pause, I listen—but everyone else is asleep. There’s nothing blocking me the whole way to the tunnel, and then inside, and down, down, down, all the way to the tree line.
I close my eyes, and all I can see is blood, and shadows chasing me. I hear the roar of a thousand cicadas.
When I open my eyes, I see light. Hundreds of slowly blinking lights. The forest is full of lightning bugs.
Lightning bugs have long been my favorite. I’m not a huge fan of bugs in general—I get the appeal of Gabriel, and from a distance they’re all fine. Lightning bugs, though, are the only ones I’ll willingly touch. As a kid, their glow always seemed impossible and magic. I’d catch dozens of them every summer night in the backyard, and wish on each one. I wanted a little bit of their magic for myself.
That wish came true, I guess.
I step into the forest and, imagining that I’m six or seven years old and standing under the big oak I remember in the backyard, I gently close my hands over one flashing little bug.
Its legs are so small, so delicate, that I barely feel them as more than a faint tickle. I open a space between my fingers juuust wide enough to see the glow, but not enough for the lightning bug to get out; not yet. You can’t let them go until you make a wish.
I wish for Jane to come home.
I open my hands. The lightning bug doesn’t fly away immediately. It crawls up to the tip of my finger and pauses, as if making sure I’m paying attention.
When it takes flight, I follow. Hope rises in my throat, but it’s a hope I’m scared to have. It doesn’t feel like joy. It feels like nausea and bile. It’s a hope that whispers, You know it’s not taking you to her, so you shouldn’t even think it.
Unless?
I follow the lightning bug deep into the forest. The hundreds of other lights have politely parted, making my lightning bug easier to follow.
Eventually, it lands on a tree. It stays there, flashing, as I approach.
“So . . . a tree,” I say, aware that I’m talking to a bug. “In a forest, of all places.” This is obviously not a wish-granting lightning bug, since Jane isn’t a tree.
The lightning bug rises off the tree, circles me, and lands again. Okay. Maybe it wants me to copy it. Sighing, I spread my hand across the trunk.
I’ve been talking to plants for as long as I can remember, even before I knew about magic. At some point they started to respond. When I asked them to grow, they did. I couldn’t hear them, though. I just knew they were listening because they grew.
When I touch that tree, I hear them. They want to grow. They want me to tell them about a dream and make it real. I ask them to cover the tree with a dozen giant flowers, bulbous and glowing yellow like lightning bugs. They rush up to the surface. I laugh, and they laugh with me. They’re proud of what they can do. They’re proud of what I can do.
I pull away from the tree, dizzy, still laughing. Blue flowers bloom up and down my arms. They fall thickly to the ground as I brush them away. I don’t remember the last time magic felt like this. Like I’m tapping into something wild and splendid and sparkling. Frank taught me to control my magic. I memorized a million pictures of plants and did his breathing exercises and made the magic orderly. Even when my siblings and I go out to the lake and Frank’s nowhere to be seen, I always try the square breathing method before anything else. I try to bend myself to his theories, his way of doing magic.
This way feels like freedom.
It’s intoxicating.
“Thank you,” I whisper to the lightning bug. But it’s gone. I turn in a slow circle, scanning the forest for its light.
I clap my hands over my mouth to muffle it, but I can’t stop the scream that escapes.
A girl stands in front of me. She’s pale and dark-haired with huge dark eyes. Her gray dress has buttons from the high white collar all the way to the calf-length hem.
The shadows around her are a little too deep.
Her lips move as if she’s speaking, but nothing comes out. Not for a moment. After she’s already closed her mouth, upturning it into a smile, I hear the “Hello.” It’s like when one of the too-often-used DVDs skips and lags.
“Uhm,” I say. I feel faintly dizzy. Every sound is impossibly loud. Tree limbs creaking. Leaves rustling as something scurries through the underbrush of a forest where I’ve never seen an animal. My own shaky step backward, my own too-quick breathing.
The girl makes no sound at all. She doesn’t move, either. She’s eerily still. She doesn’t shift her position the way people do when they’re just standing around. There’s no movement in her chest that might indicate the movement of lungs. Her eyes dart curiously over me, but she doesn’t blink.
Everything about her is subtly wrong. It could be imperceptible if all the little wrongs weren’t compounding on each other, or if fear hadn’t honed my sense of her. Some deep-buried survival instinct is telling me to examine her, catalog everything for weakness or strength in case I need to fight, only there is nothing to find.
The one thing I know is that I’m not about to turn my back on her.
I struggle to swallow with a mouth gone dry. “Hello,” I say.
It happens again. Her lips move, but there’s no sound until her mouth is closed. This time, it doesn’t even sound like speech. It’s scrambled and garbled. Hearing it is like an itching in my brain, and I shudder involuntarily.
I don’t have a chance to say anything else because the girl disappears into thin air.
“Cool,” I whisper, backing away. “Cool cool cool.”
When the low hum of cicadas starts to build, I don’t wait. I run. I run until my legs and lungs hurt and I have to collapse halfway through the tunnel to drag in big, ragged gulps of air.
I stay in the tunnel until I can breathe quietly again. Eventually, my lungs stop hurting. Eventually, the fear fades away.
There’s this thing that can sometimes happen when you’re removed from a source of fear: you forget why you were scared. The adrenaline is gone, and you feel a little silly for freaking out, and you decide it can’t have been that bad. I know this, and I know I should hold tight to the fear and the way just looking at the girl hurt, but instead all I can think is:
I want to go back.
The girl scared me, but it’s not like she did anything. Yeah, the whole lagging-speech thing was unpleasant, but not dangerous. She’s obviously magic. Her magic might just be different than anything I’ve seen before. That doesn’t make her dangerous.
Maybe she’s even here looking for help. She heard about Frank, however it is that people hear about him, and she knew she’d be safe here. Maybe her magic is some kind of out-of-control teleportation. That’s why she disappeared. The speech—that could be like the flowers that grow when I use my magic. I probabl
y overreacted. Fear isn’t always a reliable indicator of whether or not you’re really safe.
And . . . these are all justifications I’m making because I want to go back and hear the plants again. I want to have that actual two-sided conversation again. I want to hear them laugh and feel their pride in me.
I press my hand into the floor, and glowing flowers spring up. Their light dips into the grooves Jane carved into the wall.
My heart sinks. I should have done more to look for her. A wish on a lightning bug is nothing. I got distracted by the magic and the strange, glitching girl, and I didn’t even look for Jane.
That’s just more of a reason to go back. I can talk to the plants again, but this time I can ask them if they’ve seen Jane. The girl may have seen her. If we can get her talking coherently and staying in one place, we can work together.
It’s not just that I want to return to the forest. I have to. For Jane. Tomorrow night, after everyone’s asleep—that’ll be my chance.
I stand. My pulse is still racing and my throat feels scraped from the panting, so once I’m out of the tunnel I go right into the kitchen. I chug a whole glass of water, and then fill it again to sip at more slowly. With each drink, I tell myself this is the right path. This is how I find her.
A whisper in the corner of my mind reminds me about the too-deep shadows around the girl. I can ignore my fear all I want, but didn’t those shadows rustle a little unnaturally? Didn’t they seem familiar?
A floorboard creaks behind me, followed by a yawn. “Derry?”
Violet’s in the doorway, rubbing their eyes. Their hair is tinted blue, and when they open their eyes, they’re green instead of gray.
We call them sleep-glamours. Violet’s a vivid dreamer and an active sleeper—they flop and mutter and half the time their blankets are on the floor by morning. They do a lot of things in their sleep they can’t remember, and the big one is sleep-glamours.
“Hey,” I say, grinning as they yawn again and dark freckles populate their cheeks. “I was just getting a glass of water. Want one?”
They nod and flop onto one of the stools, draping their torso across the kitchen island while I pour a second glass. “I had this dream that we were living under the lake,” they say.
Violet’s rambling dream stories are such a perfectly normal part of life that it grounds me here, to the kitchen. The forest and its lightning bugs and its strange girls seem very far away, as if I’m the one who was dreaming.
Violet continues. “And you were there and Winnie was there but Winnie was also kind of my mom? And you were a mermaid, and there was another mermaid who wasn’t Brooke but also was, you know? Like she didn’t look like Brooke but she was Brooke, I could tell. And she was teaching us to play the accordion, but you kept wandering off into the deep water, and Winnie would scold you and say ‘no, that’s where the snakes are’ but you wanted to see them. And I was really good at the underwater accordion, and I wanted you to come listen, but you kept going deeper and deeper until I couldn’t see you, and I was kind of scared but figured you must know what you’re doing, and anyway the accordion contest was coming up and if I didn’t win then the snails—oh yeah, there were all these snails—they’d hate us. And then I woke up.”
I don’t say anything for a long time. I feel cold all down my throat and into my stomach. Violet doesn’t seem to notice. They yawn so big their jaw cracks and their hair streaks blond.
“Let’s go back to bed,” I say.
I don’t know if prophetic dreams are a thing. I’m pretty sure, though, that dreams aren’t magic. They’re brains making a mess of things while we sleep so that maybe our waking lives are a little tidier. Violet’s dream was The Little Mermaid getting all mixed up with stress over Jane’s disappearance and a million little things in their head and that’s what came out.
Except that I can still see bursts of yellow flowers on a tree trunk, and hear the laughter of plants, and feel the tug of the forest that stole my sister. I wonder if it’s trying to steal me, too. I wonder if I’m heading into the deep water.
7
The first time I met Dr. Sam, I thought that he would save me.
I’m not special in that regard. Each one of us was desperate to be saved in our first months at the lake house. It wasn’t our home, and these weren’t our siblings, and Frank wasn’t our guardian—this was a strange house full of strange people. We didn’t want to be magic. We wanted our parents.
Then came Dr. Sam. He’s friendly and warm. He looks a little bit like my dad. He never asks us to perform magic; he doesn’t scold or yell. His jokes are bad, but in that nice, normal way. A dad way.
He listened solemnly during our first visit when I told him about the headaches I’d been having. Stress headaches, he said. From the crying, he said. It’ll get better, he said. And we’ll check the prescription on those glasses, just in case—sound good, kiddo?
He gave me a sucker at the end of my exam. It felt like a promise.
I waited for him to make his move. He probably couldn’t whisk me away right then. It needed to be the right moment, when Frank had been convinced to let me go, or when he wasn’t paying attention.
It took a year for me to stop believing that my parents were going to come back.
It took another six months after that to stop believing in Dr. Sam. I remember the moment it happened. I was having my usual exam, and he asked how I was doing. I described my anxiety and depression, how hopeless I felt. As always, he listened with a furrowed brow and a slight, encouraging smile. His eyes were kind.
And distant. Distracted.
It surprised me. I lost my train of thought. His eyes didn’t look any different than they had in all the other exams. It just took me a year and a half to recognize that he wasn’t actually listening. He put on the right face, he nodded. He upped the dose on my meds.
I got a sucker at the end of every exam. He’d tell a corny joke. He’d smile and ruffle my hair.
Each time, he’d leave me in that house with Frank and never look back.
I know that he never carried me out the door like a rescued princess because I never needed rescuing at all. I was just a scared kid in a new place. I’ve grown up enough to see that.
I still don’t like Dr. Sam. I don’t know why I can’t grow out of the sense of betrayal, but I can’t. No matter how warmly he smiles, no matter how pleasant his behavior, I know I can’t trust him. I know that he’s not seeing me, and he’s not really listening.
Today is one of those regular checkups. We’re all gathered in the living room, waiting. Frank comes through first, carrying the cases Dr. Sam brings with him to every appointment. Then, the good doctor himself.
Dr. Sam would be handsome if I didn’t hate him. He’s a little older than Frank, I think. His brown hair is graying, and there are small lines around his mouth and his blue eyes. His cheeks dimple when he smiles, and he smiles a lot.
“Hello, girls and Violet!” he says. His voice is deep and boisterous. “Let me get set up, and then we can get going.”
The first thing that goes up is a set of screens to partition the living room from the kitchen, where Dr. Sam does his tests. Even if we couldn’t hear everything happening, we’d tell each other everything, but there’s something comforting about the illusion of privacy.
We start getting called in, oldest to youngest. Winnie. Brooke. Irene. Elle.
While we wait, London snuggles against me on the couch and flips the pages of the dictionary, looking for a word of the day.
“Per-AM-bu-late,” she says, pronouncing each piece of the word carefully.
“Isn’t that just a fancy word for walk?” I ask.
“Walk or travel through or around a place or area, especially for pleasure and in a leisurely way,” she recites. She peers up at me through long lashes and round glasses. “One more?”
I laugh. “Okay, one more.”
She flips through the pages again. “Tenebrous.”
“Hmmm. I
don’t think I’ve heard that one.”
London opens her mouth to read the definition, but Frank calls my name. I’m up.
“Tell me after,” I whisper to her.
“Derry,” Dr. Sam says as I round the screen. His smile is smaller than Frank’s, less like he’s going to eat you and more like he’s actually trying to get you to like him.
Well, Dr. Sam, that stopped working on me somewhere around age eleven.
I climb awkwardly onto the stool. Frank stands off to the side, not speaking or interfering, just watching. Dr. Sam picks up the blood pressure cuff first, getting my least favorite out of the way. He’s considerate like that.
“How have you been doing?” he asks, ripping apart the Velcro and wrapping the cuff around my upper arm.
I just stare at him. Frank has to have told him that Jane is missing.
“Right.” Dr. Sam slips the stethoscope into his ears and starts pumping. I try not to hold my breath even though I really, really want to. He pumps until it hurts, until I think I can’t take it anymore. I glare at Frank and fill my mind with good words.
Disembowel. Exsanguinate, decapitate, defenestrate.
Then the blessed hiss of releasing air. I break eye contact with Frank and images of his blood disappear. Dr. Sam doesn’t tell me what my blood pressure is. He just nods and writes on his clipboard.
He presses his fingers against the veins in my wrist and feels my pulse. He looks at his watch for a few moments and he nods, satisfied. He also presses his fingers against my neck and temples, feeling for who knows what. He listens to my lungs, uses a light to look in my eyes and my ears. Looks in my throat and at my teeth. Says the same thing he always says—“I’m no dentist, but that’s a good pair of chompers on you.”
If I was still nine and starry-eyed, waiting for him to rescue me, I would have laughed.
Dr. Sam puts a weird clip on my finger, takes my temperature, takes the clip off. He has me get up and stand against a screen. It’s taller and wider than me, white and blank, but I’ve seen him fold it back down into something portable at the end of his visits. Dr. Sam sets up his laptop on a high stool and begins the directions.
A Dark and Starless Forest Page 6