The Yellow Wood

by The Yellow Wood (v5. 0) (epub)

  Over the next months I carefully built upon that first step, with more visits to the cave, more elixirs and emollients, a few small rituals with fire and water and certain words of my own composition. By the time Galen entered kindergarten, he was ready to lecture the other children about animal rights, to be the designated caretaker of the classroom pets, to achieve a certain fame for his precocious commitment to the greater good. Even people who did not agree with him—and in our district the schools were closed on the first days of doe and buck season—took note of his ardour and ability to express it, and a few told us he had changed their attitudes.

  But I did not intend for him to stop there. Killing a rabbit before the eyes of a four-year-old had been the easiest route I could think of into his psyche, but there were many other important social causes. We continued our work.

  In third grade, Galen spearheaded a fund drive at his school for a local family whose house had burned; I myself could never ask people for money. At the age of eleven, he was collecting signatures on petitions to decrease federal defence spending; I had explained to him at some length the immorality of war in terms a boy his age could understand while he chewed a certain efficacious gum. By the time he entered junior high he had rallied for peace and civil rights, and in high school he led a delegation to the Mock U.N. where his team took first place.

  When he came home I would be waiting to hear all about it. I was very proud, and very watchful. Now and then he would protest, mount a short-lived resistance to ingesting what I gave him, or otherwise resist, but without much passion or stamina.

  To my satisfaction, Galen continued his social and political activities well into middle adulthood. He was an activist against the Vietnam and Gulf Wars despite this area’s simple-minded patriotism. He was successful, at least for the time being, in thwarting efforts to develop the southeast quadrant of the wood into a housing tract, even though he did not seem fully convinced of his own position. I applauded, silently, his skill and commitment which allowed me to effect social change by proxy. At the same time, I chafed. I could do more.

  Now that he has married, Galen is obviously weary of his role. He would not say so directly, but he does not want to be away from his wife. He has no interest anymore in large-scale social action. He merely wishes to nest. And the time is long past when I might have had more direct access to his psyche.

  There is, however, no dearth of worthy causes someone in this family must address. I maintain a list. Through Galen’s agency, the Koves have been a force for the greater good, and we will continue to be.

  Will’s gardening and Vaughn’s music were easy enough to impart. Will was and is simple-minded in a more literal sense than the term usually implies—not unintelligent, but also not complex or deep or difficult to penetrate. I worked the soil with him a few times, demonstrated to him the wonders of germination and photosynthesis—processes that I understand but do not experience as wonderful—and tamped the gift into place in his spirit with a simple, well-placed chant; he has not been free of it since.

  Vaughn’s psyche was characterized from a very early age by high degrees of both suggestibility and obsessiveness. Therefore, that particular transference (I say “transference” in this case because I did once have a musical bent and still listen to the classics because it is a worthwhile activity, although anything that could be termed enjoyment has long since faded) perhaps would have required only a single sprinkling of rarefied singing stone to lock in his natural aptitude with the natural aptitude of the music itself. However, I decided to test the injection technique, by this time developed and refined to a limited degree. On two occasions, once in his bedroom when his older brothers were at school and once in a misty yellow clearing, I filled myself with the imagined need and ability to create music, as fully imagined as I could tolerate, and then shot it into him. Back then, I required physical contact. My son and I sat facing each other, on the Mickey Mouse rug and again on the damp yellow ground, and I held his head in my hands, pressed his temples with my fingertips and his eyelids with my thumbs. At first it was a game to him. Very soon it was not. I was stronger than he and did not let him go until the transfer was as complete as my power and stamina—considerable at that time in my life—would support.

  Earl has more to do with Emily’s fecundity than I. However, having missed the opportunity with her mother, I blessed and cursed her with a devotion to parenthood that has worked well for her and for her children. Until now, until this child who can scarcely be called a human child. I have no spells or magic substances for this, nor do I have the energy or fortitude to concoct any. I am too weary to try to imagine what claiming a child like this would be. I am used up. This is asking too much.

  Seeing Eva Marie after all this time is asking too much. Not seeing her when she is close by and has asked for me is unthinkable.

  I am soaked to the skin and shivering. Every joint in my body protests. I have come to a fork in the path. One direction seems more worn than the other, though in the driving rain I may be misperceiving. As is my wont, I take the more travelled route.

  Cognitively, it doesn’t even compute at first, but I have an immediate visceral reaction—chills, tingling, ringing in my ears. Gaping stupidly, I manage, “Mom? Here? Here at the house?”

  “She’s at Vaughn’s.”

  “At Vaughn’s?” The thought of my mother—I couldn’t say the image, since I have no current mental picture of her—in my youngest brother’s decrepit one-and-a-half-room cabin, among the clutter of musical instruments and dirty clothes and pop cans, is so grotesque it makes me laugh. “You mean you guys have been in touch with her all these years? All of you have? I’m the only one who hasn’t?”

  “You weren’t around, now were you, Alexandra.”

  Emerging from the house with Bella, Will is kinder. “Not all these years. She contacted us when she was diagnosed.”

  “Diagnosed with what?” Not that the name of it matters.

  “Some kind of heart thing. She says she doesn’t have long. She wanted to see us.”

  Galen corrects him. “She wanted to see Dad.”

  “How long has she been here?”

  “A week or so.”

  “A week? And you didn’t think to mention it to me?”

  “You didn’t seem all that interested.”

  “Fuck you. Does Daddy know she’s here?”

  “He didn’t until a few minutes ago.”

  “He didn’t know? How could he not know?” My brothers shrug and shake their heads and look away. After a while I breathe, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “She wants to see you, Alexandra.” This is Galen, of course, setting up the moral order.

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  “She’s your mother.”

  “In name only.”

  “You owe her—”

  “I owe her nothing.”

  “This may be your last chance.”

  “Good.”

  “Sandi.”

  “Anyway, that’s what you said about Daddy to get me here.” I’m shaking.

  “And it was the truth.”

  “While you’re here,” Will points out, wanly cheerful. “Kill two birds.”

  The turn of phrase makes me snort, offending both Galen and Will for different reasons. “Where is Daddy anyway?”

  “Who knows?”

  Returning the baby to me, Will says, “Think about it, Sandi. Will you at least think about it?”

  “Like I’ll be thinking about anything else, you idiot.”

  Galen issues orders. “Be here at five o’clock. We’ll take you to see her. All of us. Emily, too.”

  “Emily won’t leave the house. Emily won’t leave her room.”

  “Oh, she will.” Promise or threat, this declaration isn’t hollow.

  I make a declaration of my own. “I’m not doing it, Galen.”

  Without e
ven exchanging a glance, my brothers have formed a two-person phalanx and started moving out into the woods, presumably to find our father.

  “No way!” I shout after them, clutching the baby. “You hear me? No fucking way!” In my arms Bella stiffens and then goes limp, panting and rolling her big blue eyes.

  Chapter 11

  At 4:45, fifteen minutes before the appointed time, I’m ready, whatever “ready” could possibly mean under these circumstances.

  I’ve regarded myself in a mirror half a dozen times, trying to imagine how my mother will see me, how I want her to see me, whether and why I care. I look fat. I look old. I look sturdy and solid. Humidity makes it another bad hair day. The blue shirt and black jeans look good. There’s no resemblance to the seven-year-old she left behind.

  I’ve called home twice, both times got voice mail, hung up without leaving a message. Home—that home—seems not so much distant in time and space as stowed for safekeeping.

  I’ve tried to think what I’ll say to her. She’s old, reputedly ill. She’s a stranger, and my long-lost mother. I’m her abandoned child, and a woman well into middle age—which is to say, with much less than half my life to live. My children have been abandoned, too, though not—I hope—by me. Somehow I am not only the aunt but also the guardian of this unreachable baby Bella, her unreachable granddaughter. If she and I have any current link, it’s through Alexander Kove.

  That’s the best I can do. I don’t know how to think about any of this.

  At 4:55, Will and Galen tromp into the house and announce they haven’t found Daddy. Emily is with them, pale and shaky but more or less dressed and moving more or less under her own power. I start to go to her but she backs away, from me or from her child in my arms. Abruptly past my limit with her, I fix her with my best disapproving glare. Not looking at my brothers, I demand of them, “Should we worry about him? Should we call the cops or something?” Galen snorts.

  “I bet he’s with Mom,” Will offers, and in fact this preposterous notion does seem the most likely among a host of utterly unlikely scenarios.

  Bella squalls for no apparent reason. It’s by no means the first time I’ve heard her make this cry, different from that of a normal infant in some subtle, creepy way. Emily flinches and hugs herself. When the noise has run its course, the baby’s mouth stays open, copiously drooling.

  Galen commands, “Let’s go,” and the whole wildly dysfunctional band of us troops off through the goddamn yellow wood. At the moment, no actual precipitation is penetrating the leaf canopy, but everything is dripping and the sky is so low it’s like a sodden web down here among us, among the trees. On my shoulder, Bella whimpers, and of course I don’t know why.

  Deliberately I formulate thoughts of my husband and children. Right about now, Martin should be getting home from work and Ramon would have just left for the restaurant—if he’s on the schedule for tonight; if he’s even still working there. It unnerves me that I don’t know that, or how Martin’s day might have been, or whether he’s taking Tara out for dinner tonight or they’re ordering in pizza or one or the other of them is cooking, that I’m not up to date with the details of my daughter’s summer vacation: Does she have any friends? Is she watching too much TV? Are her allergies kicking up? It unnerves me even more that I’m fumbling for details. I miss them, but in such a non-specific way it’s not much more than theoretical.

  With even less success, I try to think about work. Have I missed any deadlines? How much longer will I be able to cobble together telecommuting and email conferencing and what’s left of my family leave? Beyond a vague anxiety, I can’t even bring myself to care.

  Bella squirms against my shoulder. Herpie makes a rivulet through the yellow-brown leaf mulch. My brothers and sister and I march in age-old formation through the woods in search of our parents. Music I can’t help thinking of as yellow, though that’s nonsense, keens very softly, the music of the goddamn spheres.

  A cabin emerges from the sodden, faintly yellow wood, surreal although I know perfectly well it is Vaughn’s cabin and I have been here before. I know this. Harmonica music fountains out of it, simultaneously rollicking and mournful as only harmonica music can be—cabin, music, wood, all of a piece. Something—a snake; Herpie—swishes through the underbrush just behind or just ahead of me, peculiarly audible, setting off little sprays of water droplets like sparks. Wondering what Herpie has in mind, I chide myself for the persistence of the anthropomorphizing habit. The music draws me. I am somewhat lost in the self-perpetuating forward motion of my own bent body, stumbling feet, mind and spirit overfull. The music fades and stops.

  Eva Marie opens the door.

  Someone opens the door. An old woman. Confused and alarmed, I stop. My clothes are wet. Trees and the cabin’s ragged roofline drip vertiginous yellow. The door, which has been opened, opens farther.

  “Alexander,” she calls. Eva Marie calls my name. “Alex!”

  I cannot do this. It is asking too much. Although it is the right and necessary thing to do, it is well beyond my capacity. I must designate a representative, a surrogate.

  Alexandra, of course. Alexandra must do this for me. For all of us.

  Behind me, Emily gasps. Will exclaims her name, and I look over my shoulder and over the baby’s lolling head to see my sister on the ground and my brother grasping her arm in a misguided attempt at assistance that twists her head and torso into what looks like a painful angle. Galen pivots, pushes past me to help Will get Emily to her feet. It figures that Galen would be one of those people whose idea of righting a situation is to get someone upright, no matter what’s wrong with them.

  I turn and keep walking. Too late, I realize Bella and I have been manoeuvred to the head of the procession. No one tells me to wait. I suppose they’re all following in one way or another, but the sounds from back there are garbled and the path has become too slippery and overgrown for me to risk another backward glance. The responsibility of carrying this baby is huge and inchoate. The responsibility of dealing with my mother—my mother—is more than I ever signed up for. What I find myself fiercely thinking is: No. Forget it. You can’t make me do this. Leave me the fuck alone.

  Around me, the woods hiss. Insects after rain, maybe, or sodden branches sliding against each other, or an insinuating voice—it’s a sound both ominous and arousing. Bella pees and poops into an already full diaper then spits up, so now I’m splotched with a variety of excretions out of this spasming little body. My shoes catch in mud and sticky wet brush. This short trek to my brother’s house in the woods has taken on epic proportions. I’m tired. I’m not even sure I’m going in the right direction, but nobody tells me otherwise.

  I hear Vaughn’s cabin before I see it, the wail and rollick of a harmonica playing a song I for some reason try hard to identify but can’t. I yearn to sing along. I put a little dance in my step, gently bouncing Bella in time. Obviously, I’m losing my mind.

  The cabin materializes out of the wood. I haven’t rounded any bend in the path, and there’s no obvious clearing. It’s just there now where I swear it wasn’t an instant ago, small and rundown, grey tinged yellow.

  My father is approaching from an intersecting angle. I should have expected that. We don’t hail each other. He may not even know I’m here. I don’t believe that for a minute. In one way or another, he always knows where I am.

  Someone opens the door, and the music stops. I have to forcibly remind myself that the almost translucent person who opens the door and raggedly calls my name is my mother. “Alexandra.”

  “Hello, Eva Marie.”

  I don’t know what to call her. Any maternal name sticks in my throat. Before I can bring myself to take her extended hand, she’s let it drop, as if it’s too heavy for her to hold up. A cannula in her nose is connected to the plastic tubing on a tall, green, torpedo-shaped oxygen tank on wheels. I just stand there, feeling stupid, feeling helpless and trapped and tric
ked, but more than anything else feeling afraid. I reposition the baby from my shoulder to my chest, where her body heat can seep into me. It takes both hands to support her as she twitches and flails. Thus shielded and occupied, I say to my mother, “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “I didn’t know you were here, either.” Although it’s weak and shaky, it’s obviously a retort. Nothing about the creaky voice evokes any shred of memory.

  “Eva Marie,” my father repeats. “Eva Marie.”

  But it’s me he’s looking at, and now I’m aware of him messing with my mind. Oh, no you don’t. Not this time, you old bastard. Not anymore. I’m not taking any more of this shit. No way.

  But I’m the one who goes to her and takes her in my arms. Because Daddy wants me to. Because Daddy gives it to me to do.

  She’s probably as tall as I am, but very thin, and now I can feel as well as hear her laboured breathing. Pressed between us, the baby should struggle; she doesn’t, but her presence gives me an excuse to disengage quickly, which feels infuriatingly like an act of adolescent rebellion. “Somebody take her,” I hiss at my siblings. At first nobody moves and the baby dangles from my hands.

  Finally it’s Will who steps up. To our mother he says, “I brought you some tomatoes,” and he presents her with a basket I hadn’t noticed him carrying. Hands thus freed, he reaches out for Bella. Surprised and displeased by my own trepidation, I cautiously pass her to him, reluctant to let her go, relieved and bereft when I do.

  I don’t much want to go into the cabin, either, but everybody else is moving in that direction, including Will, with Bella now snug in his arms. Resisting the twin urges to scurry after him and to escape altogether, I summon the wherewithal to stay where I am until they’ve all gone ahead of me.

  When my father shuffles past me, to all outward appearances a frail and befuddled old man, he raises his wizard’s eyes to mine and something streams from his will into mine. This time he’s not even being subtle; he must be desperate, or desperately tired. Steeling myself, I hold his gaze until he lowers his head to navigate Vaughn’s uneven threshold, but the sensation of being injected with a hot, viscous, mind-altering substance doesn’t stop, is not dependent on any other connection between us. I should have known that; he’s never had to be anywhere in my physical proximity to bless and curse me with his “gifts.”