by M Sawyer
“It’s a little burnt.”
“Sorry,” Nolin said. She made a mental note to turn the knob on the toaster down. Nolin devoured her breakfast while Melissa nibbled her toast. Nolin never took her eyes off her mother, making sure she chewed and swallowed what she ate. Melissa took a tiny sip of water. The sinews in her neck poked out when she strained to swallow.
“How did you sleep?” Nolin asked through a mouthful of toast. Melissa shot her a glare. Nolin held her hand over her mouth. Her mother hated when she talked with her mouth full.
“Badly,” Melissa croaked before sipping more water. “Dreams...Paul never came up.” The skin between her eyebrows folded into its familiar creases. Nolin reached out to touch her leg. Melissa flinched.
“Maybe you should draw today,” Nolin offered, changing the subject. “You haven’t drawn in a long time. I think that mermaid picture is still in there. You should finish it.” Nolin sometimes slipped into the studio to see the drawings. She loved her mother’s illustrations and paintings, the bright colors, swirling shapes, elongated figures, and perfect pen lines. She never dared touch anything or look through the sketchbooks that lined the shelves.
Nolin thought she saw a sparkle in her mother’s eye at the mention of drawing. Then they darkened.
“I don’t think I remember how.” Melissa dropped the half-eaten toast onto her plate next to the cold eggs.
“If you don’t want toast and eggs, I can make you something else. We don’t have much right now, but I can make peanut butter and jelly, or oatmeal...”
“No, I’m done.” Melissa nudged the plate forward.
Nolin stacked her mother’s plate on her own empty one and set them on the tray.
“Okay, I’ll make you an early lunch then. If we have some money, I can go to the grocery store. You could even come with me...”
“I’m not leaving this house, and you shouldn’t either.”
“Oh.” Nolin fiddled with the fork on her plate. Melissa flinched at the clinking noise and snatched it out of Nolin’s hand, placing it deliberately next to the plate.
“Okay, well, why don’t you draw while I clean up today?” Nolin suggested again, her voice cracking slightly on “today.” Melissa sighed.
“Maybe.”
Nolin knew that meant no. She took her mother’s hand. Melissa allowed Nolin’s hand to close around her cold, bony one.
“Come on.”
Nolin gently pulled Melissa to her feet, which wasn’t hard even though Melissa made no efforts to aid her. Nolin felt her mother’s pulse flutter in her hand as they walked to the room at the end of the hall. Melissa’s studio. When had Melissa last left the bedroom? Nolin wasn’t sure. She knew she wouldn’t leave unless led.
The door yawned on its stiff hinges. Pens, pencils, and brushes poked out of cans and jars like strange flowers waiting to bloom. A dusty lamp arced over the work desk on which a half-finished sketch on watercolor paper was taped. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with old sketchbooks, novels, boxes of art supplies, and other mysteries Nolin had never dared investigate.
Nolin pulled up the shades to flood the room with morning light. Melissa squinted and shielded her eyes, pale as a ghost in the blast of light. Her skin had the translucent, faded quality of someone who never saw the sun, like creatures in dark ocean caves.
Nolin pulled the faded office chair from the desk, inviting her mother to sit. Melissa took a few tentative steps forward and carefully sank into the chair, gripping the edge of the desk so hard Nolin worried her pointed knuckles would burst from her skin.
“I can get some water for your brushes.” Nolin plucked a paint-stained marmalade jar from the desk and shifted on her feet. Melissa brushed the film of dust off the drawing without answering. Mermaids with hair swirling around their faces; eyes huge and sparkling looked up at her from the page, half-colored, expectant. Fish of all shapes and sizes flocked around them, emitting tiny ink bubbles from their open mouths. Seaweed and coral snaked around the borders. Nolin hovered expectantly.
Melissa traced the mermaid tails with her fingers. She opened the top drawer of the desk, filled with crumbled tubes of watercolor paints.
“A palette, Nolin?”
Nolin scrambled to retrieve a paper plate from a stack on a shelf. Melissa’s hands trembled as she plucked colors from the drawer, twisted off the caps, and squeezed a tiny blob of each onto the plate.
Nolin loved watching her mother paint. The expert movements of her brush and pen captivated her as the magical creatures came to life under her mother’s hand. Strange how a woman so haunted could produce such magic. Some misshapen chunk of hope in Nolin’s chest told her that if she could just get her mother to make that magic again, everything would be all right.
Melissa slid a sleek sable brush from the can, thought better of it, and slipped it back in before picking another. This brush hovered over the palette for a moment, twitching between the red and blue paints. Again, she stuck the brush back in the jar.
Nolin’s eyes wandered along the bookshelves as her mother agonized over paintbrushes. A sliver of pale pink peeked over the top of the bookcase next to the desk, standing out against the line of black sketchbooks. Nolin stood on her tiptoes and caught something soft in her fingers.
It was a baby shoe, candy pink, faded by time, with dust settled deep into the fibers. One of the tiny flowers on the toe held on by a single ragged strand of yarn.
“Melissa,” she said. “What’s this?”
Melissa’s thin body shuddered under her tee shirt. She twisted her neck around to see. Suddenly, Nolin wished she hadn’t said anything. She clutched the shoe to her chest. Melissa’s eyes bulged behind her glasses. She stood up, still holding the brush, and threw out her hand.
“Give that to me.” Her hand shook, her voice soft and deadly. Nolin stared and placed the shoe in her mother’s palm. Melissa stuffed it into the pocket of her pajama pants without looking at it. “Do not touch that. Ever.” Jagged terror flashed across her eyes before they turned to cold, steely gray.
Nolin nodded. Shame prickled in her stomach. She hadn’t meant to upset her. Why was her mother so afraid of a shoe? Where was its mate?
Melissa looked down at the illustration she hadn’t yet touched. “These damn brushes are full of dust,” she said. She dropped the brush. It clinked and rolled until it caught on the lip of the desk. “Don’t touch anything else,” she said before stomping out of the room. Nolin heard the bedroom door slam.
Chapter 5
THE SHADOW WATCHED from the edge of the woods in the shelter of the undergrowth, her pale hand resting on a tree. Fireflies sparked in the trees and in the yard of the house she’d watched all afternoon. Nolin had fought at school again. Today, she had passed by the windows with dust rags and mops until the father came home from work with a pizza. Nolin and Paul ate in silence, then Nolin retired to bed.
The Shadow drew shallow breaths. Fireflies danced in her dark eyes.
Why did she torture herself like this? Watching this family, wanting what should have been hers but never would be, sneaking into the house to steal things, leaving tiny hints of her existence. A door cracked open, an object slightly moved. What good could it possibly do?
They’d all be asleep soon. At night, she often whispered to the child on the wind to help her remember. Nolin had no idea what she really was.
Melissa, on the other hand, understood.
The Shadow smiled grimly. She wasn’t surprised the mother was unstable, knowing what she knew. It pleased the Shadow in a perverse way. She’d let Melissa see her many times. She knew it frightened her.
For years, the Shadow didn’t think Melissa fully understood what she saw, but she understood now. Melissa spoke to the Shadow at night. Desperate as she was not to believe, Melissa couldn’t deny what she’d always known.
The Shadow wanted Melissa to know she was still there.
The biting chill of the night raised the hairs on her pale arms. She broke
out in goose bumps. Cold, a weakness she’d never overcome. Humans weren’t meant for this life, but she wasn’t human. Not anymore.
She wasn’t quite sure what she was.
Part of the forest. At the same time, not.
She had been ripped from her life and replaced with a demon—a little beast that grew to bear her name, her identity.
Her.
She couldn’t turn back time, travel back to the night when she was stolen from her bedroom window and carried off into the woods and changed into...whatever she was now. She could set things right, more or less. Revenge was petty, but goblin babies tore families apart. She’d seen it, watched her own human parents squabble, drive themselves mad knowing deep down the beast in their life wasn’t the child they wanted. What’s done was done. All she could do was pick up the pieces from the wreckage of her life, salvage what she could, and make things right.
She’d already begun.
***
Nolin woke slick with sweat. The full moon spied on her from its station in the ebony sky, its light oozing through the open window like a silvery liquid dripping off the windowsill and furniture. The potted plants on her dresser twitched in the breeze from the window.
Had she heard something? She couldn’t remember.
Silently, she slid off the bed, tiptoed to the bedroom door, and crept into the hall. She listened. Nothing. Alert and suspicious, she inched back into her room.
She’d dreamt of the forest again, running barefoot, leaping over rocks and fallen logs, darting between trees like a deer. The dreams were getting more frequent, more vivid.
They were the same each time. Always running, but from what? Or toward what? She never felt afraid in the dreams. She only felt longing, like she was searching for something. The forest was misty in her dreams, hazy, only partially formed. She always stopped before a massive tree, a half-fallen timber whose five thick roots still gripped the ground like a gnarled hand refusing to surrender completely. The Claw Tree, she called it. She stood before it, marveling at its size, the strength of the roots that clung to the ground. She felt on the verge of solving some mystery she’d unraveled like a knot all her life, the answer a breath away.
She sat cross-legged on the mattress, looking out the window at the woods beyond the yard. Black trees stood like soldiers at attention, forming a striking silhouette against the sky. How would it be to slip out of the house and disappear into those trees forever? The thoughts scared her. She wouldn’t be the same person among those trees. She could swear the forest whispered to her: an invitation into its depths.
She spread her hands wide on the cool glass. A mosquito bounced on the outside of the screen before darting away into the night. Lightning bugs twinkled, mirroring the stars above them. The tips of the trees swayed in the wind like hands.
Movement.
A small, pale figure slid into the trees.
Her stomach lurched. Goose bumps raised on her arms, either from fear or excitement. Had she really seen it? She trained her eyes on the spot where the figure had vanished. There was nothing there except the spark of a firefly.
She settled back into the bed, heart thudding in her chest.
It was nothing, she told herself. Just a trick of the moonlight.
Chapter 6
HER HANDS WERE red from scrubbing the kitchen floor. The hot water and soap made her hands wrinkled, dry, and raw. At least the downstairs sparkled: vacuumed, dusted, furniture polished, windows washed, everything in its place. Maybe her father would notice how nice it looked. Nolin imagined him praising her, telling her what a good job she’d done. Even more fantastic, she imagined her mother smiling, looking around the spotless house and nodding her approval.
That scene only ever happened in Nolin’s imagination. Cleaning the house when she was suspended was a punishment. It was silly to expect praise.
Melissa was still in her room. Aside from that bedroom, Nolin couldn’t think of anything else to clean. She dropped the rag into the gray water with a splash.
Wait. She hadn’t finished the studio. That room held so much of Melissa, maybe more than Melissa herself did anymore. Maybe a clean, inviting studio would tempt her mother back to her drawing desk. Maybe it would make her happy.
She grabbed the feather duster, a few rags, and furniture polish and trekked upstairs. The house creaked around her. She felt a funny feeling of being watched that visited her so often.
Nolin crept down the hall to the studio and opened the door. The dirty carpet turned abruptly grayer at a line along the door, contrasting with the cleaner carpet in the hallway. Dust coated every surface. She’d need to wash the brushes out, rinse the water jars, and work a cloth into the cracks between drawers and books to get all the grime out. Cobwebs flourished in the corners of the ceiling and on the domed light fixture.
She stood on the chair to clean the bookshelves. She sneezed and blinked the flying particles from her eyelashes. She read the titles of the books on their worn spines while she worked. Which were her mother’s favorites? What was she like when she had read them? Someone very different from the Melissa she was now, Nolin was sure of that, though she had no idea who that person might have been.
She imagined a different version of her mother, someone with the same pale eyes and thin face, with blonde hair thick and flowing instead of stringy and unwashed, who wore long dresses that curved along healthy, round hips, not jutting bones, who smiled instead of staring into space. That woman read fantasy novels, created worlds in her sketchbooks, ate entire meals, and savored ice cream cones on hot summer days. Her mother was alive and fiery once, she was sure of it. No one who could create such art could have been anything else.
Nolin ran the feather duster over the spines of the hardbound sketchbooks. Something whispered that she’d find answers there.
Heart thudding like a thief’s, she slid a black sketchbook from the tightly packed shelf and opened the stiff cover.
Dark, angry scribbles covered the first page. If Nolin looked closely, she could see the faint outline of a half-finished human form, frantically scribbled out. The same thing on the next page. Nearly half the book was just scratched-out drawings, outlines of arms and legs hidden in the pencil marks.
Toward the middle, abstract forms started to appear: aimless swirls and zigzags, twisting tree branches, disembodied faces, and skinny, headless bodies. Faceless, deformed figures. Androgynous figures with long necks and pointed chins, all bending strangely.
She turned the pages. The figures gave way to trees, some of them sprouting limbs from their torsos or leaves from their heads. Soon they were dancing trees, bending and swirling in the invisible breeze. Puzzled, Nolin flipped through the rest of the pages, replaced the book on the shelf, and pulled out the next one.
She flipped through that one to find more of the same. Pencil marks smudged on the yellowed paper. The books smelled faintly chemical, like spray paint.
Three books later, Melissa was drawing large, elaborate trees in scratchy pen, sometimes with tiny, faceless figures with spindly limbs and wild hair. Nolin leafed through slowly, studying the pictures. The figures started to gain faces; tiny eyes and wide grins.
She turned another page. A stone dropped into her stomach.
A thick black tree tilted on the page, five massive roots curling up out of the ground like fingers and a forearm.
The Claw Tree.
The tree from her dreams. The same giant, half-fallen tree she saw almost every night, on the page in her mother’s scratchy ink lines.
Nolin ran a trembling finger up the trunk, her heart beating like a kettle drum. How did Melissa know that tree?
The leaves seemed to twitch on the page. Nolin could almost smell dark soil and bark. Her hand jerked back as if she were afraid the page would suck her in. She slapped the book shut and shoved it back into the bookshelf.
Nolin’s mind spun. She could only think of two possibilities: either her mother dreamed about that tree as well, or the t
ree was real.
Nolin wasn’t sure which troubled her more.
Chapter 7
THIS HAS SURE been a rainy spring, Nolin thought. Thick droplets tumbled off leaves and tulips from a downpour that had ended moments before. Earthworms and snails stretched across the dark sidewalks. Clouds pulled themselves apart like cotton balls, allowing sun rays to shine through in golden pillars.
Nolin set off for the library with a gallon-size zip bag in her pocket to protect her book if it rained again. She needed to clear her head, and she’d run out of things to clean anyway, so she’d decided to return to the library while the sun was shining. Melissa hadn’t made a sound all morning, so Nolin doubted she’d notice her being gone for a little while.
Her flip-flops scratched on the pavement as she carefully trod around worms and snails, occasionally stopping to bend down and examine them. Years ago, she’d collected dozens of snails in a box. Melissa made her throw them all out in the road so they’d get run over instead of eating the plants in the flowerbed in front of the house. Nolin hadn’t told her there were no flowers in the yard. There hadn’t been for years. The flowerbed was full of weeds.
An earthworm squished under her shoe. She resumed her watch on the sidewalk to avoid the creatures and cracks.
“Hey, Nolin!”
The call snapped her out of her thoughts. She turned and saw a skinny boy from class waving from his front walkway, which was littered with clumps of wet lawn clippings, clutching a broom taller than he was. Drew, Max’s friend. Nolin didn’t stop.
Drew stood still for a moment, grasping his broom. Nolin turned the corner so that she walked along the other side of the yard of his corner house.
“Max tried to come over today. I told him to get lost,” Drew said. “He shouldn’t have teased you.”
“You didn’t have to. I don’t care who you’re friends with.” Nolin kicked a pebble, sending it skittering across the street. “Why are you sweeping that while it’s wet?”