The Forest

by Collings, Michaelbrent

  “It must have been a lot to deal with,” Coleman was saying. He turned to Trish. “Getting hurt like that, then losing your friend.”

  He waited. Neither Alex nor Trish said anything, though Alex sensed his wife reaching self-consciously for the neck of her turtleneck, tugging it up a half inch more.

  Coleman sighed. Looking at his notes again, he said, “You named your son Sam, too, didn’t you? After your friend? What were you trying to say with that gesture?”

  Trish said nothing. Alex opened his mouth, realized that if he spoke it would be nothing but a string of curses and maybe a straight-up temper tantrum, and closed it again. “Sammy,” he finally managed. “We called our son Sammy.”

  “Because he was different,” Trish whispered. She sounded like a ghost. “He wasn’t Sam, we knew that. But we also wanted Sam to be alive, so…” She shrugged. She never looked away from her ring once, twist twist twist, turn turn turn.

  Coleman made a notation on his pad. Without looking up, he said, “Do you remember how you got out of the forest?”

  “We called for help,” Trish whispered.

  “What was that, Tricia?” asked Coleman.

  Alex repeated it. “We called for help.”

  “How?”

  Trish whispered something – this time so low that not even Alex could hear it. It sounded like something he had heard before. Not the words, but the tones. It sounded like…

  (The whispers. The whisperers.)

  “What was that?” Coleman leaned forward in his chair. It squeaked.

  Trish whispered it again. This time Alex heard her well enough to translate what he should have simply guessed. “I don’t know.”

  Trish looked up. “But we must have called for help, right? I mean, we didn’t walk out, wounded and with me the way –”

  She tugged at her turtleneck.

  Coleman glanced at his notes, then leaned back – another squeak, and Alex was starting to think he hated the chair as much as the man on it – and said, “What about – what did you call it?” He looked at his notes again. “’The man in the tree’?”

  The tone of his voice, disbelieving, patronizing, and even a little amused – the worst of the three – made Alex tense. Before he could say anything, Trish spoke up. “He was real.”

  Coleman smiled. “I’m sure he is. But you don’t remember who he was, or what he was doing in the tree? Or why that detail keeps coming into your dreams?” His brow furrowed. “Is it just a man climbing a tree in the forest? Was it someone who hurt you? Was he the one who hurt you both and took Sammy – sorry, Sam, away from you?”

  His voice had that caring, patronizing quality one reserved for children. Exceptionally stupid children who ran around chewing on bars of lead and inhaling glue. But Alex couldn’t fault him for it, really. What was he seeing? A man and a woman, marriage in the process of slowly dying. Both of them with genius IQs, able to recite pi to a hundred decimal places, able to recall every word they read in last week’s reports at the labs where they worked…

  … yet unable to remember anything during that single day in the forest.

  Sam was real, they knew that. They knew, too, that they had gone to school that day. They remembered they had gone to the forest looking for him for some reason.

  But beyond that, nothing. It was just a blank space, in which their friend had disappeared.

  Trish had picked up on the man’s tone. Unlike Alex, she was apparently willing to vocalize her disapproval. “I’m sure none of it’s real, actually. We just made it all up because we wanted to hang out with a guy as interesting as you and thought this would be the best way to do it. We made up the dreams, and the big ol’ black hole of a day no one could understand.” Shifting gears, she said, “We have presented a construction that ensures the existence of numerous globally consistent string compactifications with the chiral spectrum of the Standard Model within the framework of F-theory. This is the largest ensemble of which we are aware, outnumbering other quantifiable results published under peer review by approximately ten orders of magnitude, which arise due to variance of the base of a universal class of elliptical fibrations introduced previously.”

  Coleman blinked. “I’m sorry?” he asked.

  “It’s from a paper a grad student wrote –”

  “I’m not sure how that –”

  Trish spoke right over him, as though he didn’t exist. “– in my grad course. He wrote it over a year ago, and that’s word for word. Bottom of page four, and it has two footnotes which I can also recite. But I just thought it would be cool to pretend to forget some things, so I came up with this strategy. What do you think?”

  In that moment, Alex remembered – all at once – what he loved so much about her. She had always said the things he was thinking. When he didn’t have the strength or the will or the desire to say a thing, she was there. If it needed to be said, and he didn’t… then she did.

  Coleman looked at his notes, and this time Alex didn’t mind. Because this time he could tell that the man was embarrassed. Just like everyone was. Whenever Alex or Trish told the story, everyone was incredulous. Anytime they finally trusted someone to hear about the forest, they always ended up gazing on eyes filled with disbelief. Even now. Even someone paid – by them – to listen, could not hide the anger or the embarrassment or the laughter or whatever awful thing greeted them whenever they talked about what had happened. Or rather, what they didn’t remember happening.

  Sam was gone. They all knew that. But everyone they talked to after that agreed that he had just left. His mother transferred him out of the school, and left no forwarding information – which was strange, but hardly unknown.

  Alex and Trish knew different. They knew he wasn’t at another school. They knew he was dead. But they didn’t know how they knew that, or if that had prompted the empty day. They assumed it did, because on one side of that void was their new friend, Sam, and on the other side he was notably absent.

  Trish, her outburst of ire spent, went back to twirling her ring. The ring Alex gave her, along with the promise that they would love each other forever. That he would have her and hold her and possess her as his own, and she would have and hold and possess him as well. They would own each other, and so would take the greatest care with their greatest possessions.

  Then it went south. Not just because of that one dead day, but because of what happened after that.

  First Sam, then Sammy.

  Silence. When it stretched out so long there was no bearing it anymore, Alex looked up. Coleman was staring at him. The look on the man’s face – blank, neutral, so carefully vacant it spoke volumes – crashed into him so hard he almost gasped. He looked away, looked for Trish. She would help. She always helped. She –

  She was looking at her ring. Twist, twist, twist. It started to slide down her finger, like she wasn’t just twisting it, but trying to take it off.

  And watching her ring coming slowly off her finger, he realized that they had spent decades believing what they said. That, he suspected, was the only reason they hadn’t been put in a nuthouse for kids – they both said the same things. They went into the forest. They came out again. No idea what happened in between those hours.

  But they had stood together. They repeated the story as one, they married and were one in so many ways. They made a child.

  Now the child was gone. And so was the unity that had brought them through their first, forgotten ordeal and into one another’s arms.

  So what if none of it was real? If the thing he knew better than anything – Trish – had turned away… what else could be counted on?

  “There was a lot going on that day,” he said. It came out almost as a sigh of relief. A whisper that said, “Please, let it all have been a dream.”

  Trish finally looked up; looked at him. “No,” she said. Then she shouted it: “No! Don’t start denying what you know. We saw something, we did something, and Sammy was gone, he –”

  Her eyes
widened as she realized she had said the wrong name. She had meant to say “Sam,” but instead named their child. She fell silent and pulled at her turtleneck.

  Coleman’s blandly smug expression returned. “Look, you two are obviously meant to be together. I mean that. You have so much in common – born in the same town, went to school all the way through grad school together, working together to this date. More than that, you married and had a child, which is a blessing for some, a curse for others, and a stressful event for everyone. And then….

  Trish stiffened at that. She never wanted to talk about the “and then” that was their lost boy.

  Alex automatically reached for her. He wanted to hold her hand again, the way they always had. He wanted everything back to the way it was before they lost their child.

  She pulled away from him. It made Alex feel like a leper. Coleman noticed, too. He opened his mouth to say something, then shut it for a moment as Trish’s hand darted out. She held Alex’s hand – clutched it so tightly it hurt. But the gasp that came from his throat wasn’t one of pain. It was relief. It was joy.

  He put his free hand over hers. She did the same, all four of their hands knotted so closely it was hard to tell where one stopped and the other began.

  Coleman smiled. A genuinely kind smile this time, and Alex suddenly wondered how much of the man’s sanctimonious disbelief was actually there, and how much of it was just Alex. Just projection.

  Most of it?

  No.

  All of it.

  The room shifted a bit. The maddening pastels and beiges seemed to brighten. The room seemed to come closer, to seem more real. Trish’s hands in and on his own made the world come alive.

  Oh, I’ve missed that.

  Coleman sat back and steepled his fingers again, and now Alex saw the movement for what it was: not a patronizing motion, but a nervous tic. Just a habit picked up from a professor or a parent, and carried on throughout Coleman’s life.

  We’re all products of what has gone before. That’s certainly true of me, so why not of him?

  The world sharpened. It became real for the first time in ages.

  Then that reality spun away so quickly it left Alex dizzy as Coleman said, “Have you ever gone back there? To the forest, I mean?”

  Trish said something. At least, Alex thought she did. Everything was far away again. Trish was drawing away, and would soon be lost to him.

  All Alex could see in that moment was Coleman’s eyes, watching him carefully. All he could hear with any clarity was Coleman’s voice. “I didn’t think so.” The psychiatrist took off his glasses, sighed, then put them back on again. “I think you should. You have an anniversary coming up. You lost a friend in that forest, and a child while passing by it years later. But not since. If you look at the place where you were so afraid, and see that it’s…”

  Silence again. The world ricocheted from here to there, from clear to confused in Alex’s mind.

  “What?” said Trish. “If we see it’s what?”

  “Just trees,” said Coleman. And now Alex saw both real kindness and that smug superiority. He saw them superimposed over one another like film negatives that had melted together, and he couldn’t tell which was real and which was only happening in his mind. “Maybe if you see it’s just a forest, then you’ll be able to move on. Or at least begin to heal.”

  He was right. Alex knew that. He was making perfect sense.

  So why was Trish twisting her ring so fast he could see the skin start to bleed? And why was Alex himself so very, very afraid?

  Because if I remember, it’s like it’s happening again. What happened to Sam will happen again, and we’ll live it over, and we don’t remember it but whatever it was we know it was a –

  (monster)

  – bitch to get through.

  And besides… going back means we’ll have to see where we lost Sammy.

  5

  Interlude

  (When Sammy Was Young)

  He sits in the back of the car. Daddy and Mommy sit up front, laughing. Then the laughing stops. A silence grows – but even so young, the little boy in the back of the car knows that it is an odd silence. A wrong silence.

  He knows this, just as he knows many things that most children his age do not.

  The silence grows heavy. Like another seatbelt across his shoulder, crossing his heart and hoping to die to die to die die die.

  He holds his unicorn tightly. Its name is Silly Corny, which he thinks is hilarious, because Mommy tells Daddy his jokes are Silly and Corny. It is red and soft and he loves to put his cheek against it when he’s scared.

  He puts his cheek against it now.

  “You think Erika will liked my present, Daddy?” says the child.

  Daddy answers absently. “’Liked,’ not ‘will liked,’ Sammy.”

  Mommy reaches for Daddy. Sammy can see that her hand is clenched so tight on Daddy’s that both are turning white.

  Daddy seems to shiver a bit in his seat.

  He looks out the window.

  Sammy looks out, too, though he has to scooch forward in his carseat to do so. He sees nothing but a forest. Buncha trees. Trees are interesting, but not terrifically so. Not like Star Wars or the cool stuff where Daddy and Mommy work.

  Daddy looks forward again. Mommy, Sammy notes, never moves. She does not even glance at the trees that stand so tall as the car whips past them.

  The boy has a strange thought: What if the car isn’t moving? What if the trees are? What if the whole universe is spinning, and the car is the only thing not moving in everywhere?

  The thought is both strangely comforting and bizarrely funny. Sammy pictures a universe spinning around and around with the car at the center, like a tiny black hole (black holes are something he learned about recently, too – though from Mommy this time).

  He laughs.

  The laugh does something magical. It makes Daddy smile, too. And a moment later, Mommy smiles as well.

  Daddy looks at Sammy in the mirror. His eyes crinkle. “I think Erika will liked her present great.”

  Sammy laughs louder. He looks out the window again. He sees not only trees this time, but fog. It looks puffy and cloudy, but as he watches, it seems to come together and turn from cotton candy to a thick blanket. He can see shadows inside it, which he figures are the trees in the forest.

  Only… some of the shadows seem to move.

  He doesn’t like it.

  Sammy scooches up in his seat again, this time not to see out the side. He has discovered he can see out of the front window if he turns his head just so. He can see between Mommy’s neck and the outside wall of the car, and he would like that now. He doesn’t want to see the fog or the weird shadows.

  So he scooches, he leans, he sees. The fog is already laying across the road, like it distracted him with bits of cloudy white, almost silver, on the side, while its main body went in front. Like it was trying to stop them. Or maybe eat them.

  Sammy suddenly feels like, if they drive into the fog, it will turn out to be solid. The car will crunch like an aluminum can did when Daddy crunched it before tossing it in the recycle bin.

  And worse, there are shadows there, too. But Mommy and Daddy don’t see them, because Daddy is glancing back at him as Mommy turns in her seat so she can look at Sammy, too.

  “You okay, champ?” she says, and Daddy says, “You all right, bud?”

  Mommy and Daddy do that sometimes. They talk along with each other, and sometimes say just about the same things. Sammy usually likes that. Now it seems creepy. They are looking at him, which means they aren’t –

  “Watch out!” shouts Sammy as he sees one of the shadows move right into the path of the car. He thinks it is a man. Maybe a woman.

  Either way, he/she is right in front of them.

  Daddy’s eyes had been watching him. Now they snap forward, and Daddy says a Bad Word. He spins the wheel and the car jerks sideways so hard that Sammy’s head, still tilted and craned
just so, slams into his window. He hears the sharp crack of glass breaking, and everything inside his head spins around.

  An instant later, everything outside his head spins, too. His thoughts jumble and tumble the same as everything else: The car isn’t the center after all. The center is me, and the universe is spinning around but please Daddy please Mommy I don’t want it to spin please make it st –

  The prayer works. Everything goes black.

  A moment later – or maybe longer; Sammy feels like he was asleep forever, and will wake up Way Old like maybe thirty or even thirty-five – Sammy feels heat. He sees flickering. At first he thinks, in a jumbly-confused way, that the fog must be flickering.

  He opens his eyes to flame.

  “Daddy? Mommy? MOMMY!” he screams. But no sound comes to his ears. His screaming was inside his head.

  Even my sounds are spinning.

  Then a good sound, a real sound comes to him. “You okay?” screams Daddy.

  “I think so,” Sammy manages. He realizes his hands are hanging above his head.

  No. Below. I’m upside-down.

  Sammy tries to turn his head. It hurts. He looks up/down and sees a thick pool of blood below him, still growing from the drip, drip of blood coming off his own fingers.

  Bleeding! Bleeding! I’m not okay, I’m –

  He tries to look away. He sees Daddy, also upside-down. Daddy’s trying to turn to look at Sammy, and Sammy screams when he sees all the blood on Daddy’s face.

  Mommy isn’t moving.

  “I’ll get you out of this,” Daddy murmurs. “Get you out…” His eyes flutter. He shivers, harder than when he looked at the trees. The shivers turn into a strange jerking – a comvulshon, Sammy thinks. Mommy and Daddy didn’t teach him about comvulshons, but he saw about them on one of their late-night shows after he snuck onto the stairs.

  Daddy stops comvulsing.

  Is Daddy dead? DON’T LET DADDY BE DEAD!