by Beech, Mark
She lowered her cigarette and quietly appraised him. She and her sister could not have been more different. Kristen had never left home, never would. Her whole world was the town where they’d grown up, her family, and her job as a respiratory technician at the hospital in town. Marc was from—somewhere, Diana couldn’t even remember where now, out west maybe?—and had done two tours of duty in Iraq and had a calm ex-soldier’s acceptance about him. Maybe you’d seen some things, done some things. So had he. Want to forgive each other for them and go have a beer?
She said, “God, I could use a beer.”
He laughed. “You should’ve said something. You didn’t strike me as the champagne type. Hold this.” He handed her his cigarette, went back inside, and came out with a six-pack of Miller Lite dangling from one hand. “Here.” He pulled one off and handed it to her and opened one for himself, setting the other four at their feet. “If you can call this beer. Kristen likes it.” They touched the two cans together in a show of solidarity and drank silently.
Then she said, “My parents—” at the same time that he said, “Your parents—”
They both stopped, and then he resumed. “I wish I’d met them. The way Kristen talks about them.”
“Well, at the time, they were just, you know. Mom and Dad. We were kids. It’s looking back that I can see how special they were—how much they loved each other. It used to embarrass us, the way he indulged her and how demonstrative they were and all. I always told myself they’d have wanted to go together like that. Well, not like that, but you know. It helped to think that, kind of.”
You had to tell yourself those things. You couldn’t think about it any further, think about whether they knew, whether one was alive longer than the other, did they suffer, was there terror, was there grief You had to tell yourself it was over in an instant, existence winked out just like that. You couldn’t bear anything else.
“I know,” he said, and of course he would know. She could see it in his eyes that were older and sadder than the face in which they were set.
“So,” she said, “I left. Took off. Couldn’t deal with it. I guess it was an awful thing to do. Kristen was my little sister. She was only thirteen, and I was seventeen. Older sisters are supposed to take care of younger ones.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Marc said. “None of it was your fault.”
She said, “No, all of it was.”
The boy she had picked—that was the worst of it. Not that there was anything wrong with him. But if it had been true love, or at least something she thought was true love, she might have been able to excuse herself in the days and the months and the years that followed. It was nothing like true love. It wasn’t even true lust really. He was a boy she’d made out with a few times, nothing more, and she was curious and felt like the last virgin left on the face of the earth. It hadn’t even been that great—it hadn’t been horrible and painful like some people said it would be, there hadn’t been blood and agony, but it also hadn’t been especially rapturous. It had been nice. That was all. Nice.
No, even that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that she had known what she was doing. She knew it would anger Pan. She knew, and she didn’t care, and she didn’t think about the consequences because she was seventeen and because she was stupid and because she was selfish and then her parents were dead and now they were still dead and it was all her fault.
Had she known what would be, the first time Pan showed her the dryads, those mad impetuous tree-spirits, she would not have laughed with delight; she would not have tried to embrace them, tried to be them. She would have tried to kill them. She would have razed the land, cut down every tree by hand if necessary and driven them out or died doing so.
They had been savage, yes, but everything about Pan and The Secret Woods Pan’s world had been savage, and she had loved that. She had not imagined that Pan, in his jealousy, would unleash the dryads, that they would do his bidding and sacrifice themselves, and that storms would rage and trees would fall, in the end crushing the roof of her parents’ car and their fragile human bodies trapped within.
Marc seemed like the kind of guy you could talk to, the kind of guy who would listen without judgement, but there was no way she could tell him that story. So instead she reached for another beer.
“Kristen never held it against you,” he said. “She never saw it the way you say. She didn’t think you had a responsibility like that or anything. She missed you, but she didn’t blame you.”
“She should have then.” She needed to be careful. Alcohol would loosen her tongue. She avoided it most of the time; and not just alcohol but almost any class of drugs. She had to stay clear-headed at all times both to keep herself safe and to keep herself from talking. She’d made that mistake a few times, early on, and learned her lesson quickly. Even people on the fringes like gutterpunks and squatters or people who imagined themselves there like burners and wanna-be artists would start shunning you when you went on and on too long about your friend the goat-footed god, about murderous dryads and magical dances and childhood secrets sown in deceit that felt like innocence, or maybe they were the same thing. It was easier to believe of herself that she was unhinged than that any of it was true, and if she kept the madness to herself everything would be okay.
“I don’t know why I came here,” she said. “It’s so dangerous for me to be here. I guess the guilt got the best of me this time.” Maybe it was already too late. The words rolled off her tongue before she could stop them.
“I know something about guilt,” Marc said mildly. “Sometimes it’s right on the money, but you know, sometimes it lies to you. Especially when you’re seventeen years old and you think the world revolves around you and so everything must be your fault. Even tornadoes.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “There’s stuff you don’t know about. It was my fault.”
He went on like she wasn’t even talking, and now she was hearing him through a red haze of rage. How dare he presume to know. “So maybe you had a fight with your parents beforehand or something and it all gets mixed up in your head with the trauma and all and you come out the other side convinced that something you did made it happen. You even try to make it logical maybe, tell yourself if they hadn’t been upset at you, they’d have been paying attention, things would have been different. Maybe it’s easier to think it’s your fault than to think that anybody you love can be taken from you at any moment like it’s the whim of a god.”
“Are you two ever planning on joining us again?”
That was Kristen, at the front door, leaning round it and smiling at them, her face open and guileless—happy her long lost sister and her husband, two of the people she loved most in the world, seemed to be getting along. Diana looked at her and the rage evaporated; fear stormed in to replace it. She was so unbearably vulnerable—they all were—and so unsafe. And she knew suddenly, as though Kristen had told her though she hadn’t said a thing: she’s pregnant again. Even when she was little, Kristen had always said she wanted a big family, loads of kids. Three kids now, another on the way, maybe more after that.
It was no safe place for them, here at the threshold, in a place where worlds fissured into one another in a way worlds never should. She had given these creatures names that made sense to her from a book she had as a child, Gods and Goddesses of the Ancient World, but only because naming them made them seem safe. She had no idea what they were, what they wanted, why they were. Or why her. And if she did know, surely it would make no sense at all anyway.
The seduction of their enchantments. The terror of their rage.
Kristen and Marc were both talking to her now but their words were coming through to her as though the air were a bad transmitter, buzzing and sparking and expiring before they reached her. What they were saying to her didn’t matter. They had to stay safe. She had to keep them safe, whatever it took. She had failed people who loved her once and she would not again. She said, “I need some fresh air
, I need to go for a walk,” and she thought one of them said her name but she could not be sure and she was in back of the house, across the yard, and she stepped across the threshold. She stepped into the forest.
The moment she did so, everything changed.
She still had every notebook in which she had written down all of the important things that she had learned. Throughout childhood she had filled them with writing and sketches; now they seemed embarrassing and painful but to destroy them or throw them out was unthinkable. A day had come when she had written some last words in them and put them away under her bed, putting away childish things. She had only made the mistake of looking back at them once, as a teenager, and she’d sworn then to never do so again. That one time, she’d read them aghast at the things she’d written there and the things she had forgotten and the things she had lost, and she had raised a tear-stained face hours later and vowed to seek it all back out again, but then the phone had rung, her friend Amy calling, and the spell had been broken. She had been tugged back from the brink.
That had frightened her. It was one thing to think she had been an imaginative, dreamy child; it was another entirely to think she might have been a mad one, and that she had set down that madness so methodically in evocative words and pictures, and that the madness might claim her again if she let it too close again.
All children were mad, she told herself. Wasn’t childhood itself a state of insanity? The things you did, and the things you believed! Growing up was simply a matter of coming to some sort of consensus with everyone else about what those beliefs would be.
By her seventeenth summer, Pan had retreated to the ragged edges of childhood memory. She dreamed of him but then she dreamed of many things. She rarely went into the woods any longer because she was busy, because there was school and friends and movies and boys and all the sweet unexplored possibilities of sex. When she did venture near the forest she sometimes caught the rank and rutting scent of him, but that was impossible, she had made him up, nothing else could be true.
And yet the notebooks had been among the few items she took her with when she fled, and she had kept them close to her all these years, unread; she carried a few with her wherever she went. It was a way of keeping something close that seemed vital but unspeakable. Now, in the forest, she scrabbled through her bag for them, pulled one out, and let it fall open to a random page.
We found a blackberry bush and fed one another, but the berries were overripe, squashed and rotting, bursting and pecked to pieces by birds. My mouth was still purple when I woke up the next morning. I said it was all real, but it might have been a dream.
It might have. In those days, real and dream had been relative states to her; working out which was one and which the other had seemed a matter of little import. What did it matter when the dreams were more real than the world itself?
She turned the page.
I liked going to Mr. Lee’s house up the road to see his goats. I went there today and his wife told me they were all dead! But I just saw them the other day! I started crying, I couldn’t help it. I loved those little goats. She said it was because they had some kind of disease. Then she said he slit their throats, one by one. Why would she tell me that? About that time Mr. Lee came in. He’s this real old farmer, he saw me crying and normally he’s real nice to me but this time he wasn’t, he said I should go. He said he did the right thing but it wasn’t something I could or should understand. I was crying so hard I could barely talk like when you’re a little kid you cry until you make yourself sick and also because I was scared for him and his wife too, like what might happen to them for him doing that, and I was crying and stumbling back toward home and so I went into the woods and Pan was there and I told him what happened, I had to, and he said he knew and that it was because people were afraid of him still without knowing why or even that he existed and sometimes they went crazy and did crazy things and all the time he was telling me that, he looked more like a goat than a person. Then he changed again and said I should forget it and I asked him not to hurt the Lees and he said why would he do that, and we went down by the creek and the dryads and the naiads taught me another game that I can’t write down here or speak about but they let me draw them so I did.
She couldn’t remember what had happened to the Lees, or even if they were still around. She would ask Kristen when she got back to the house.
Her drawings had not been at all representational; there was a sense of movement about the lines but no figures depicted.
Another page:
Today I tried to show Kristen some of the games. I showed her the one about the stone and the sky and the moss and Mom even came in and watched for a little bit and laughed at the dancing part and asked what we were doing. Then Kristen started crying like the big baby she is and said she didn’t like it any more and Mom made me stop playing it with her even though we were just getting to the good part.
What was the game about the stone and the sky and the moss? Diana couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember trying to bring Kristen into any of it either. There was still so much she couldn’t remember.
She was deep in the woods now. The forest had come alive around her, and she could hear the trees waking up and stretching their branches toward the sky. Did they remember her? She could wait until they did.
But as she waited, doubt seeded and grew within her.
Everything had changed from that spring, just as she had known it would. Her body had changed and she had changed, and so Pan had changed and so the whole world as she had known it up to then had changed as well. The very thought of venturing into the forest had begun to seize her with an inchoate fear. She bled along with the cycles of the moon, she could track her own waxing and waning with a lunar calendar and then she later read that was a myth, that the moon had nothing at all to do with the rhythms of a woman’s body. But then Pan was a myth as well, wasn’t he, and yet so much realer than anything, realer than the school bus and the clock ticking down the minutes in math class and the buzzing fluorescent classroom lights. Real as he was, he receded as all memories do. And as they abandoned one another, she nearly forgot him until that terrible night.
This was her own myth, the one she had always told herself, but had she not just been an exceptionally imaginative child? She felt foolish now, standing in the woods with the pages of her notebooks fluttering in the breeze, having run away from her sister’s party and in doing so made the scene anyway that she’d so hoped to avoid. The only myths in her life were her own, the complicated lies she invented to explain why she was the way she was. A lifetime of celibacy, of not making things, of loving no one, of piercing and painting her own body when the urge to create something became too desperate because anything else might invite the panic, the pandemonium, and the loss that would surely follow. And telling herself at the same time that she believed none of it. Holding two conflicting beliefs at the same time was the easiest thing in the world; everyone did it; why did anyone say otherwise? But the madness had not been something from outside her that she had to avoid at all costs lest she conjure it up again. It had been embedded deep inside, delusions of gods and grandeur hiding the terror of a loss of control.
She let the notebook slip from her hands and lie where it landed in the dead leaves. All of it was false. Marc was right. She was not to blame, and never had been.
“You’re not real,” she said. “You never were.”
The trees trembled and shook around her. A wind was coming up, a summer afternoon thunderstorm threatening. She should get back before she was drenched.
She should, she thought, be relieved, but she was not. It wasn’t your fault, none of it was your fault. What did that matter when she had sacrificed her life to the belief that it was? And what did any of it say about her? There was something wrong with her. There had been since childhood.
What she might have been. What she might have become.
The notebook had fallen open where she dropped it, and as s
he bent down to pick it up, the words swam up at her, words she had not seen in twenty years, since she set them down and closed the book for the last time.
Here was another thing she could not remember: writing anything down in the aftermath of that terrible night. Had it not been so clearly her own familiar messy scribbles there on the page before her, spotted with ink blots from her beloved fountain pen, she would not have believed it.
The first fat drops of rain spattered down then and smeared the page, and suddenly the sky cracked open and the deluge was upon her. She snatched at the notebook but it was already too late; the pages were a sodden mess in seconds but in the end it did not matter because the past had come flooding back to her in all its vengeful fury.
On that night twenty years ago, she hadn’t gone home. The boy—she couldn’t even remember his name—had dropped her off at her house, but it had been dark. No one home, her parents out to dinner in town, Kristen sleeping over at a friend’s, and she hadn’t gone inside; she had gone walking instead. The moon had been full and the night had been warm and she had wondered if she were still herself or if she had been turned into something different.
Looking back, she had always remembered herself as fearful on that night, but that had not been the case, had it? She had been many things, but fearful was not one of them.
She had been at once different and not-different in the same way Pan was real and not-real. The crescent moon had been high and bright and silver, and the night was so hot and still though she could feel the storm on its way, gathering its forces, and she knew it would be a bad one which meant a good one; she adored thunderstorms.
Most of all what she remembered was that she had felt so powerful. In her mind she spoke to Pan: I don’t belong to you. I don’t belong to anyone. Heat lightening illuminated the sky although clouds rolled in with the coming storm and obscured her moon. The air crackled with electricity. The stillness was swept away; gusts of wind tossed the treetops and then fierce sheets of rain drenched her. It was a glorious storm.