by Susan Dunlap
“What about?”
“Anything. Uh . . . Aeneas. What did you expect to find here?”
Slick dead leaves covered the path as if a river of leaves had flowed down the hill. They were dark, maybe from desiccation, maybe from dusk. I didn’t dare look up and see how quickly night was closing in here in this deep, narrow canyon. I stepped gingerly, moving before my feet had time to slide. The flood of leaves ended abruptly and the footing, no better than it was ten minutes earlier, now seemed like pavement.
“Amber, what did you think you’d find out at the monastery?”
“No. You talk. What are you afraid of?”
Oh, God, that was what I was trying to forget about. “This isn’t the place for—”
“Uh-huh, it is.”
“It’s all I can do to get through this without talking about the past.”
“Well, you talk, or we’re quiet. I’m sick of being the one to spill. You spill for achange. I mean, I’m doing you a favor, a big favor here. The least you can do is talk about what I want for a change.”
“You’re not doing me a favor; you’re getting yourself out of sitting cross-legged facing the wall.”
“Yeah, well. You don’t want to talk, I’m outta here.”
“Just what the fuck do you need to know, Amber?” I was braced, listening for a rewarding little gasp, but Amber merely slowed her step, said, “It’s a long walk. Gimme everything.”
“Don’t you . . .”
But there was no point lecturing about privacy or manners. She didn’t have any sense of privacy, not out here. I stomped after her, feeling the breeze on the heat of my face. A branch slapped my shoulder. Leaves began to crowd in from both sides. My throat tightened. I focused blinder-like on Amber’s back, but the trees still pushed in, squeezing out my breath. I could have tried to face my fear, feel the sensations that comprised my panic; it would have been the Zen way. The hard way. I took the other.
“You win, Amber. I was the youngest kid, a toddler when my sibs were teenagers. We kids went to Muir Woods, or maybe Tilden Park in the Berkeley Hills, I don’t know. We went to woods. I must have wandered off and they forgot about me.”
I had given this explanation before, said it just as matter-of-factly, but now, here I felt nowhere near blasé. The thick woody air pressed in on me. The brook gurgled beside me, but it was as if its sound no longer entered my realm.
“There must have been some reason you were so scared. I mean, lots of kids get lost.”
“In the woods? In the dark?”
“The dark? Were you lost overnight?”
“No, of course not.”
We were moving again. Beside us the stream crashed and gurgled. The damp smell of leaves and bark and mud thickened the already heavy air. A glimmer of sun broke the clouds to sparkle off Amber’s blond hair and then die away.
“I don’t remember it being really dark in Muir Woods or Tilden,” Amber called back to me over the splash of the brook. “More like dappled. Did your family go somewhere dark in there?”
I had to think. Of course I hadn’t been back to either place.
“I doubt it.”
“But you remember it as being dark.”
I did. I had always remembered the dark. Nothing more, just dark. Branches hung over us, turning the muted afternoon light to dim stripes. Dead, wet leaves covered the mud. I had to plan each step, watch for leaves, for roots, for hidden roots, things that can grab you, smack you down. The air was so thick I was breathing through my mouth.
“So, either,” Amber said, shoving past a fat shrub, “either it was night, or you fell in some deep hole or steep canyon or something, right? Not like the kids down the well stuff, probably, right? But deep, under lots of trees, you know, like here, once the sun drops beyond the hills and—”
“Amber! I don’t know! I was four years old.”
She muttered something, but the blood was surging in my head, my ears ringing and I was about to break into a sweat and I had no idea what she was saying now. I just walked, focusing on her legs, one lifting, swinging forward after the other. After a bit I heard the river gurgling and sometime later I felt the breeze on my face. I didn’t look up.
“So, who are your siblings?”
Amber had taken pity on me; I grabbed.
“Gary and Janice and Grace would have been—let’s see—fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. And John’d been nineteen. Kathleen’s older but she was away at school then. And Mike must have been about eight, so he was just another nuisance to be watched.”
“Who watched over him?”
“Janice, my middle sister. She was always the nice one, the one who could deal with an eight-year-old all day.”
I flashed on them, walking ahead of me somewhere in the city, sunlight turning Mike’s red curls pale next to her long coal black hair. I don’t know why I even remembered that insignificant moment, but now I clung to it, with its safe, citified background, and the memory eased my panic.
“And you? Who watched out for you?”
“John. John was in charge, always. He was careful, a good planner. A rock climber . . . knew how important it is to plan.”
“There’s a rock climbing wall in Tilden, right?”
I tried to inhale, but couldn’t, not enough. The air was too thick. I knew what she was thinking and she was wrong. Wrong.
“Yeah, there’s a wall, but John wouldn’t have been going climbing that day, not with all of us there.”
“But he could have gotten distracted, spotted the wall, seen it was empty, grabbed the chance—”
“No he wouldn’t!” My breath came fast, my shoulders were jammed tight against my neck.
“Okay, okay!” Amber picked up the pace.
The light was fading and I had to watch the ground for roots and rocks. Maybe silence was better than dumb questions. John was a police officer; he’d always been a future police officer. He would never have abandoned his sister on a whim.
“What about your other brother and sister? What did they do on these trips?”
I hesitated; I didn’t trust Amber anymore, but I didn’t dare not answer. I felt too much like a four-year-old here, desperate to hold the hand of someone bigger. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself.
“Grace. Grace was into herbs even then. The joke was she’d never notice if it rained because she never took her eyes off the ground. And Gary was, you know, the second son.”
“The funny one? The one who sneaks beers underaged?”
“Exactly. Gary had a million friends.”
“So neither of them would have noticed if you wandered off.”
“Not if I wasn’t their responsibility. But if John had told them to watch me, they wouldn’t have—”
“Darcy, they were kids! Maybe they ran into friends? Maybe your sister saw a cute guy the family didn’t like? Maybe your funny brother ran off to meet friends and you followed him without him realizing. Maybe—”
“No! They left me, and the trees closed in on me, and there was no way out!” Sweat coated my face and back. Bile gushed into my throat. I stood shaking in that dark, dark place with no way out.
“Don’t tell, Darce.”
“What?”
Amber had said something, but Don’t tell, Darce had been whispered in my head, in my memory, in a tone too hushed to recognize, too scared to ignore. I saw the dark woods as I had back then, felt my four-year-old scaredness, and my relief, my head bobbing as I promised not to tell, and a hand wrapped all the way around mine to lead me out of the dark place as if there had been a way out all along.
I breathed in, deeply, more easily, oddly proud of myself for not telling all these years. For blocking out the memory so completely I could never tell. “Mom would have killed anyone who let me wander off.”
“Huh?”
Amber must have been talking about something else. Relief washed over me. It was so simple, so small a thing to cause all my panic all these years. In a wave of bravado, I
looked up at the trees . . . and almost puked.
“You okay?” For the first time Amber sounded panicked.
“Yeah, as long as I don’t see the trees. This fear thing is too engrained in my body to disappear by thought alone.”
“So much for shrinks, huh?” She laughed. “Listen, we gotta move.
I moved along behind her, squinting to make out the vagaries of the path. The chill breeze cooled my face. Tension flowed out of my shoulders. I felt ridiculously relieved, as if everything was back in its rightful place again.
Amber stopped, turned.
“What now?” I demanded.
“Hey, don’t take my head off. I’m the one leading you! Here’s the path to the fire tower. It’s steep here. You’re going to need to grab onto these saplings here. See? If I hadn’t stopped you, you’d have missed it altogether. You’d have gone on walking in the woods to who knows where.”
“Okay,” I said, relieved.
I breathed in as shallowly as possible, to avoid the smell of the earth and the leaves, as if they were girding up for one last desperate go at me. I focused on the climb, silently describing each intended move: Now grab this branch, pull, now this one. Brace your foot, push. At some point the words stopped and I was just climbing, hand over hand, foot bracing for foot. After a couple minutes the path leveled off, still steep, but a walking path.
Panting, Amber turned back to me. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” I said, still looking down at the damp safe earth. Now that we’d stopped I could hear the wind snapping the leaves. If I looked up I would see trees. I stared at Amber’s shoes.
“It’s a switchback from here on,” she said, shifting her feet to turn.
She started up the path, pulling herself by branches. I followed, feet sliding, head down. I climbed, reaching for steadying branch after branch. I looked only ahead, zeroed in on Amber’s back. I climbed but I didn’t look up. Someone had made steps from old railroad ties. Some were firm, some were not, some were gone entirely. By the time we got to the top of the mountain it was nearly dark.
The fire tower stood like an erector set creation, a square room atop long support legs, reached by a staircase three stories high, one that did not inspire confidence.
“Oh no,” Amber said, “I’m not going up there.”
“Why not?”
“I’m just not.”
“What? Afraid of heights?”
“No!” Which meant yes.
“Here. Sit on the step. And listen, thanks. Thanks. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
I moved around her and started up the steps. They were wide, planks that turned at right angles at the corners of the structure. I kept my eyes aimed up at the small square room as I climbed eight steps, turned, eight steps turned, thirty-two steps per story. It was almost dark and I had to concentrate on the steps, seeing nothing but them as I climbed, but I was relieved to be out of the woods proper and on man-made stairs, even decrepit ones that creaked in the wind. I climbed and turned, my breath coming faster. The moon was already out and for a while I thought that it was reflecting off the tower window, but as I neared the top of the stairs it was clear I was wrong.
I stopped with three steps to go. “Dammit! Dammit to hell,” I muttered inadequately. Then I climbed the last three steps.
The lookout room here was a square box, three yards long, three yard wide, windows on all sides to let the watcher spot a fire in any direction. There was no chance of a surprise visit. For the person inside, no chance of hiding. I peered in.
The first thing I saw was a candle flame.
The second was a skull.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Aeneas?” I gasped, staring in through the window.
On a low cabinet a candle flickered next to the dry white skull. The light twitched its cheekbones and winked through the holes where eyes once had gazed.
Wind smacked my back as I stood on the widow’s walk surrounding the tiny room. High up here, unblocked by trees, the air current was cold and sharp. It shook the whole structure. I braced myself, hands flat on the glass and peered inside the ten-foot-square room. In front of the cabinet and the skull was a black mat and cushion but no one was sitting cross-legged on them. Meditating on the skull of the dead is a revered practice in some Buddhist sects. It is a reminder of the brevity of life and the importance of the moment. But it’s not a Zen practice. And certainly not appropriating the skull of a dead friend.
What kind of people had they become here? I thought for a moment I was going to throw up. But I just stood with my roiling stomach and the biting cold. My hair slapped my face. Curly strands stuck on my sweaty skin, and I stood peering as through a hurricane fence, shivering. The door was halfway down the walk; the knob was stiff, but it did turn. I stepped inside the room.
Then I saw her.
Maureen sat clutching knees to chest, her back to the wall by the door. Her fine blond hair hung so limp her ears stuck out, as if the hair could no longer be bothered covering them. Her bare arms rested on her knees and despite the muscling of years of gardening the skin seemed to hang as limp as her hair. Her gaze was straight ahead; no part of her body was moving. She didn’t look up.
For a moment I thought she was dead. But when I touched her shoulder she turned toward me, slowly, as if she’d forgotten how to move. The wind rattled the windows and slithered through holes in the molding and the boards. In here it was barely warmer than outside and I was glad of my sweater and jacket. But despite her thin T-shirt and goose-bumped arms, Maureen didn’t shiver. The first time I’d met her she seemed impervious to the chill wind, but she was racing around then. Here there was nothing to keep the cold from pooling in her marrow.
“Maureen?” I squatted beside her and waited for her reaction to tell me what I was dealing with. She didn’t move. Instead of me drawing her out, I felt as if I was being pulled into her stasis. Had the cold seeped into her organs, her brain?
“You’ve got to walk around, warm up.”
She seemed to consider replying, but didn’t.
I planted my feet, grabbed her arms, and pulled her up. She was so light and limp the momentum sent her past my shoulder and I had to brace my legs to keep us both from sailing into the windows behind. She was standing, but shakily. I shifted behind her, pulled her against my warmer body, and held her icy hands in mine. She felt like clothes held up by memory. I don’t know how long we stood like that, she leaning into me, me braced against the window, the windows thinly separating this bare room from the cold bare darkening sky. When she took a step I released her, unzipped my jacket, pulled off my heavy green sweater and held it out. “Put it on.”
“I don’t need—”
“I brought it for you.”
“It hardly seems worth—”
“Maureen, put on the damned sweater.” I smiled to cover my fear and frustration. She didn’t return that smile, but she did don the sweater. It was only then that I glanced around the now-dark room. Fire towers are always sparsely furnished, but this one held only a nylon sleeping bag, wadded in one corner, an office swivel chair that must have been a bear to get up here, the low cabinet, and the skull.
“Aeneas?” I asked, returning to my original question.
“Oh no,” she said, and uttered a sound that could almost have been a laugh. “I don’t know who she was. She was a woman.” She walked, still shaky, across the small room and stood in front of the cabinet, which I now realized to be an altar of sorts, and looked down at the skull as she might have at a favorite aunt with whom she’d spent a lot of time. “There are differences in a male and female skull, the ridge over the eyes, for instance. She was a Caucasian. I wanted a Caucasian . . .”
“Because?” I prompted.
“I wanted her to be as much like me as possible. So I could never delude myself by thinking she had died in a massacre in a foreign land that would never happen to me or from Ebola I’d never be exposed to, or malaria I could handle
with quinine.” She was talking half to me now, half to the skull, almost-animate in the flickering candle light. “I wanted to—I have—thought that she sat in a room like me, probably here in California. They said she was in her forties. I’ve thought she walked along an unpaved road when she was thirty-six like me, never imagining that in ten years she would be dead. Never picturing a truck racing over a rise, the driver drinking a beer and arguing with his girlfriend. Or the doctor saying, ‘If you’d only come in sooner.’ Maybe never imagining things would get so bad she’d pick up a knife and draw it across her throat. Never dreaming she . . . would cease to be. Never imagining . . .”
Beyond her, beyond the skull, a wisp of cloud drifted east. Silently I mouthed the possibility she couldn’t bring herself to consider: Never imagining the teacher she’d trusted would be like the ballet director she’d just escaped, at her door wanting a piece of ass.
I didn’t dare bring that up, not here. Break the mood, that was it. I moved beside the chest into her line of vision.
“But really understanding you’re going to die in a short time gives you a whole different take on life, don’t you think? I mean, if you’re only going to live another year or ten years or even twenty years, you’d better enjoy things now, ‘cause there’s not going to be much more.”
She looked at me, appalled, as if I’d suggested we take the skull out to hit the hot clubs with us.
“We need to walk. Circle for circulation.” I reached for the sleeping bag, draped it around her shoulders, and started us on a slow circumambulation of the room. Anyone who hadn’t spent thousands of ten-minute periods in the slow half-steps of kinhin would have balked, but when I slipped my arm around Maureen’s waist she moved compliantly.
“Maureen, if this skull isn’t Aeneas, then where is he?”
She shifted unsteadily foot to foot as if they had frozen into rounded knobs. The nylon bag swished and our feet clacked stiltedly on the wooden floor. I couldn’t decide if she was considering my question or was unwilling to answer. Finally I said, “You were planting the red maple. You buried him, didn’t you?”