by Jon Cohen
“Everything is a story,” she said. “And this one’s so big you came to the forest. With your rope. Why?”
The girl played rough. Harry rubbed his neck. She was right, of course. For an endlessly endless year, he’d kept it inside. Never telling a soul.
Oriana reached into her pocket, waited a beat, then opened her hand and revealed the lottery ticket. “I didn’t want to give it back until I was sure you’d stay.” She held it out to him.
He didn’t want to touch it. She had to uncurl his fingers to place it in his hand. He immediately closed his fist over it.
“Harry. You have to look at it. You have to look at it really hard.”
He snapped at her. “How do you know all this? How is it that you have a rule for each and every thing?”
The girl wavered, then jutted her chin at him. “Rules are important in fairy tales. It’s just the way it is. We won’t get anywhere unless we do it right. The ticket is like a book you have to read. The story’s inside it.”
My God, she was exhausting. How much was he going to have to give this child? He met her steely eyes.
“Fine. Okay. All right.” He slowly opened his hand. Looked. “So, okay, here’s how it goes. Here’s the story.” He stared at the worn, crumpled ticket as he spoke. “It was a year ago.” He flicked his eyes at her. “You know the exact date. Obviously. And my wife and I—Beth and I—we were in Philadelphia on our way to a movie.”
Oriana grabbed his arm. “No. Not that way. Like a fairy tale. You have to tell the lottery ticket the right way.”
“What?”
“Once upon a time...”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Once upon a time...” she pushed.
Harry, tired of arguing, closed his eyes. And saw Beth on Market Street as she handed him the mini Snickers. Then saw the same Snickers waiting for him in the knothole of the sugar maple. The gold wrapper glinting with a blindy shine.
He opened his eyes, blinking and squinting in the suffusing light of memory. Oriana, unstoppable Oriana, was right. It was a fairy tale. A grim fairy tale, absolutely unreal, absolutely true.
And at last, it came out of him. After a year of holding it in, he told his story.
He stared hard at the lottery ticket—his unlucky talisman—and began, his voice quaking like the leaves of an aspen. “Once upon a time, an endless time that was only yesterday, when the sun was shining and all the world was before them, there was a beautiful woman and a selfish, weak man who loved her very much.”
Harry faltered. The tree house swayed in the night wind. Everything swaying everywhere. He was in the tree house, but he was also on Market Street as a cold March blustery gust blew Beth’s new red coat against her legs.
Back and forth Harry bounced, unstuck in once upon a time.
“You’re doing good,” whispered Oriana from somewhere. Harry present yet far away.
“Very, very much, did he love her,” continued Harry. “But the man was full of cowardice that was really a kind of greed. Greed, like a toad that sat on his heart, like a dragon that burned his soul. He was greedy for all that was safe and for all that was secure. His desire for sanctuary was insatiable. Always, he was in search of the safest place.
“When he was a child, a little boy, the safest place in the world was the giant beech tree that stood in front of his house. The tree was safe, the house below the tree was unsafe. He loved his tree. All trees. Trees rooted solidly to the earth.
“And only once did he ever dare to come down from his tree. And that was to marry the beautiful woman. Only once, did he take a chance. And from then on, he devoted his life to protecting her. He lived in a safe house on a safe street and worked in a safe job.
“And that was his undoing.
“Because one day, he realized he was unhappy. Safe but unhappy.
“What was it that made him so unhappy? He had lost something he cherished, something vital. Trees. He worked in the safest place in the world, in a tree sort of place called the Forest Service, but it was an impenetrable, treeless forest. There were trees everywhere but nowhere. How could he escape this forest and reach the real trees that meant so much to him? How could he safely escape?
“The beautiful woman who was his wife stood at the edge of his treeless forest and said, ‘Come to me. I love you, I will help you.’ She held out her hand. ‘My love,’ she said. ‘Take my hand and I will lead you out of the treeless forest into the world of living trees. Trees that bloom and turn color and have upon them the scent of winter and spring.’
“But there was another voice. A dark voice. And it was his own. ‘Don’t risk it. There’s an easier, safer way to escape the treeless forest. Through black magic. There exists a single, magic ticket. And that ticket is the only way out of your treeless forest.’
“So each and every week the man tried to get this magic ticket. With it he would unlock the door to untold riches—he would buy his way out of the treeless forest and risk nothing. He knew that taking hold of his beautiful wife’s hand might not work. Something could go wrong. It was not safe. But money would protect him. It would protect them both.
“Money, vast, measureless amounts of money, would cloak him as he escaped the treeless forest. He would slip away, invisibly, effortlessly, safely.
“His wife begged him to take her hand. ‘You do not need the treasure you seek,’ she said. ‘All you need is me.’ But he didn’t listen. ‘Wait here,’ he commanded. And turned his back on her.
“He bought yet another ticket, and this time when it touched his hand a wave of terror passed through him. The man turned to look back at his wife. She was gone. Everything that he had feared came to pass. All that was terrible and frightening and dark came crashing down upon her.
“What he loved, he had killed. And he didn’t mean to. But greed undid him. Cowardice blinded him. She was his truest treasure, and instead of reaching for her hand, he reached for a paper ticket and the mountain of gold it promised—and he lost everything.
“Everything,” whispered Harry, sitting on the edge of the cot. “Everything, everything.” Somehow there was a paper towel in his hands. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose.
Oriana handed him another one. She said gently, “That was a really hard story to tell. I’m sorry I made you do it, but you had to. Right? You had to.”
“Yeah,” said Harry weakly. He stared out a window into the dark trees, and began to shake his head. “But there’s more. Shit, Oriana. I bought a lottery ticket in that convenience store. And told my wife to wait outside. There was construction going on, and there was an accident. A big, impossible accident. And she died, she was killed.”
“I know,” said Oriana quietly.
“No. There’s more, listen. There’s a thing people do when something like this happens. My brother took me to a lawyer to sue the company that caused the accident. Oriana, you get money when something terrible like this happens. A kind of awful reward.”
Oriana sat, taking it in.
Harry said, “That’s why I came to the forest with the rope. I was in shock. I fell to pieces. I didn’t win the lottery, but Beth’s death brought me lots of money. Four million dollars of terrible money.”
“Oh,” whispered Oriana, stunned. “Wow.”
“But I get it now, what’s going on. This is where Beth wants me to be. If I’d taken her hand that day, she’d have led me here.”
“Out of the treeless forest into the world of living trees,” recited Oriana. “Trees that bloom and turn color and have upon them the scent of winter and spring.”
He nodded. Then shook his head. “But the money...” He gripped the edge of the cot mattress with both hands.
“You have to get rid of it. Right?”
“As fast as I possibly can.”
They both looked at The Grum’s Ledger, sitting closed in Harry’s lap
.
Harry opened the book. Doleful eyes stared up at him. For the last year, looking into the morning mirror as he shaved before work, those eyes had stared back.
“I’m the sad-hearted guy with the money. I don’t know how you knew it, but you did. This book, the lottery ticket. I get it. All right? The grum feels better after he gets rid of his money. And so will I. I already decided that. It will be gone soon.”
“But you have to do it right. You have to follow the rules.”
“What? No more Oriana rules! I just make some calls, talk to a lawyer, maybe. Donate it, I don’t know. Just get rid of it. Like the grum does. He gets rid of it. I get rid of it.”
Again, she recited from the tale of the lottery ticket. “Harry Crane lived in a safe house on a safe street and worked in a safe job. And that was his undoing.”
She reached into her pocket and took out a mini Snickers. Studied the gold-wrapped candy sitting in the palm of her hand. Lifted her gaze.
“Harry. What if it’s all about how you get rid of the money?”
With that, she tossed the candy into the air. Flickering lamplight reflected off the wrapper as the candy bar spun and twirled, turning the little one-room tree house into a vault of glittering gold.
13
Six miles north, in a little A-frame cabin, Ronnie Wilmarth tossed and turned in his bed, beset by thoughts of Amanda. While the arrow on Stu Giptner’s mental Amand-O-Meter pointed steadily at Unsavory Brooding, and Cliff Blair’s twitched between Desire and Remorse, Ronnie’s arrow was ever-aimed at Ineffable Concern.
Ronnie believed he was inextricably connected to Amanda by way of Dean. What Ronnie had not done for Dean, he would do for Amanda. He would be there. He was her guardian angel. Although she didn’t want an angel and didn’t need a guardian and often told him so explicitly.
“Ronnie,” she’d say when he’d sidle into view, “go away.”
There was not a woman in Susquehanna County more capable than Amanda Jeffers, even in widowhood. Especially in widowhood. But a guardian angel, even against strong pushback, must guard, so for a year now Ronnie had doggedly hovered, keeping watch from the outskirts of Amanda’s life.
Every few weeks his beat-up truck would sputter and cough up her long drive and he’d drop off five or ten pounds of fresh-butchered venison for her freezer, or maybe she would hear a chain saw start up, and she’d look out back and see Ronnie, hunched in the rain or snow or thick summer heat, working on her woodpile.
Sometimes he’d just be standing out in the yard at a respectful distance, cap in hand, and she’d call, “Hey,” and he’d clear his throat and call back a greeting in his Pennsylvania mountain twang thick with the lilt of the Mississippi lumbermen and the guttural of the Polish coal miners who once populated the region. “Hey to you, Amanda. You need anything?”
Amanda would study his sun-leathered face, and if she discerned within those scrunched-up lines and creases an overload of Dean-remorse she’d give him some purposeful activity. But generally she shooed him away.
“Ronnie, it was an aneurysm that killed Dean, not you going off to lunch at Jim’s Diner. I know this for a fact, because I read the autopsy report. So can you lighten up a little with the guilt thing, please?”
“Oh sure, sure, I’ll go away.” He’d go, but he always came back. Aneurysm may be on the death certificate, Ronnie knew, but Abandoned by His Pal was also stamped on that document, invisible to all but Ronnie Wilmarth.
He tossed and turned in his bed. He’d hoped that now that he had commenced the maintenance and repair of Pratt Library, it might assuage his nighttime frets. He’d had such a good morning at the library, trapping the ceiling raccoons. Though there’d been some pushback in that situation, too. One little sharp-toed son of a bitch attached itself to the leg of Ronnie’s pants, and he had to hobble-run to the front door and launch it with a catapulting kick out onto the front walk.
He slammed the big oak library doors and leaned against them, panting.
“That’s a wondrously resourceful method of pest control, dear,” Olive called over from the circulation desk.
He had hoped that the little glimmer of mental relief he felt as he fixed the toilet and caulked the storeroom windows and straightened out the gutter over the library’s back steps might induce a measure of calm into his nights. Because if what Olive said was true—that helping Pratt Library would ultimately absolve him from Dean-guilt—shouldn’t he be having a wee nighttime taste of that promised redemptive peace? Just, like, a thimbleful of calm, or something? I mean, it was only a couple of days in, but jeez, Ronnie thought, why on this night in particular am I so anxious about Amanda? What is going on? I feel worse than ever.
“If only,” he said in a haunted whisper, staring up at the glowing cobwebs in the moonlit rafters of his cabin. If only he’d been there on that snowy field last year, and done CPR on Dean, he would not be a cursed soul in constant pursuit of absolution.
Compounding his guilt, he was certain that if he, Ronnie, had collapsed in the snow, Dean would not have been off gulping hamburgers at Jim’s Diner. Dean definitely would have been there to catch him. Dean would have whisked Ronnie to Susquehanna Hospital where Amanda would have revived him with a powerful application of CPR.
Ronnie sat bolt upright in bed. Amanda. CPR.
Amanda leaning down to press her lips to his to breathe life back into him.
Amanda’s pillowy lips.
Ronnie cringed in the dark and called out, “I’m sorry, Dean! Those are not my real thoughts.” Dean’s ghost had every right to come howling through the wall to throttle him. Ronnie felt short of breath. He jumped out of bed and skittered across the chilly floorboards and found his cigarettes in the pocket of the jeans he’d tossed on a chair along with his shirt, socks and underpants. He lit up and took a deep drag.
He never had Amanda thoughts like that invading his brain. Well, okay, he did have them, but only exceedingly, extremely rarely. And darn it all, Amanda doing CPR on him? She’s not my guardian angel, I’m her guardian angel. I’d be the one leaning over her doing the CPR kiss of life.
He smacked the wall, as if smacking himself. “Not kiss! The breath of life, that’s what I meant, Dean. No kissing, just breathing.” He jabbed the cigarette into the silvery dark. “I don’t think of Amanda that way, okay? When they yak about her at Green Gables, I don’t participate. That’s Stu and Cliff and Tom and the EMT guys.” He sucked on his cigarette and exhaled a factory stack of smoke.
Across the room in the dark, Grandmother Wilmarth’s mantel clock whirred to life and began to bong loudly. Ronnie jumped. “Damn you, clock. Scared the shit out of me.”
Ronnie didn’t have a mantelpiece, so he kept the clock on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen section of the one room cabin. He was never absolutely certain what time it was, because sometimes when the refrigerator kicked on, it unnerved the clock into a series of bongs that kept going past twelve to thirteen, fourteen or fifteen o’clock.
Twelve bongs. He’d driven home from Green Gables around eleven so it really was midnight, Ronnie figured. The clock had gotten it right.
He flinched when it bonged one more time. Uh-oh. Thirteen. He’d never heard the clock deliver an isolated thirteenth bong. He hugged himself. “Dean?” he whispered into the moonlit dark of the cabin.
Somewhere in the living room, something twitched imperceptibly. Supernaturally. Ronnie yanked the pull chain on the overhead light and looked.
The living-room section of the cabin was defined by a tired sofa, a temperamental TV, three deer heads mounted high up on the wall so close together their racks entangled like vines, and an enormous Victorian bookcase (also inherited from Grandmother Wilmarth), its dark wood embellished with carved angels and birds and roses. Like everything else in the cabin, it was flecked with dust and wizened mouse droppings as small as caraway seeds.
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nbsp; An array of Ronnie’s treasures was visible through the beveled lead-glass doors of the bookcase, including: a grinning raccoon skull; five bird nests; a row of spent shotgun shells arranged chronologically from the year Ronnie had bagged his first deer at age thirteen; a pirate ship he’d crafted out of birch twigs, copper wire and cigarette rolling papers, topped with a pirate flag of black cardboard; a lime-green enamel bowl he’d purchased at a street fair in New Milford that held two of his wisdom teeth and the claws of a black bear.
Atop the bookcase, isolated from the benign collection within, sat a huge, red-handled Italian switchblade that Great-Uncle Wade Wilmarth had given him in 1981 when Ronnie was twelve and Uncle Wade, an old coal miner, was on his deathbed. Ronnie fixed on that shining switchblade and thought back to Uncle Wade’s final moments.
Quaking in his boots, young Ronnie stood at the foot of the four-poster bed where Uncle Wade lay on a horsehair mattress beneath a patchwork quilt. The old man was eighty-one years old but looked a hundred and fifty, and his nostrils were ringed a permanent black from the coal dust he’d breathed in for more than half a century.
Ronnie had gathered his courage and approached the bed, trying to ignore the spectacularly spooky sound of Uncle Wade’s slow wheezy breaths, which even close-up sounded far away, as if emanating from an infinitely deep mine air shaft.
The old man held the big red switchblade in his arthritic claw. Gestured for Ronnie to take it. Then he motioned the boy closer.
Ronnie leaned down. He was certain he saw a puff of coal dust rise from Uncle Wade’s lips as the old man whispered, “She’ll bring ya luck.”
What kind of luck, good or bad, Uncle Wade failed to describe, because upon uttering those words he gave a single violent hiccup and died.
Although he generally delighted in knives and guns, Ronnie was terrified of this knife. He never activated the switchblade’s release button, not once.
Ronnie stood now, smoking and eyeing the knife. He felt a pressure building in the cabin, a gathering of unearthly emanations. Whoa, was the knife quivering? Oh, man, it was. The knife was quivering! Or no, wait, it’s just my eyes watering. Ronnie smiled in relief, and when he smiled, he blinked. And in the dark flick of an eyelid, the knife made its move.