by Pete Hautman
Gregory Eagen, the so-called Mushroom Man, resigned from the college, sold his house, and moved to Saint Paul. He claimed that the Westdale police were harassing him, stopping his car for no reason and demanding to look in his trunk. His house had been searched six times. He said he couldn’t walk down the street in Westdale without people giving him the “stink eye.”
Elly’s father quit the Westdale Preservation Society. “Westdale Wood is a hazard,” he declared, reversing his previous position. “Children need a safe place to play. This unsupervised wilderness in the middle of our growing community is simply not acceptable.”
Stuey’s mom took over as president of the preservation society. There were petitions, lawsuits, and demonstrations. According to his mom, Forest Hills Development was giving money to the mayor and every member of city council.
“They call them ‘campaign contributions,’” she sniffed. “It’s nothing but bribes. Forest Hills Development — what a joke! All they do is cut down forests and level hills. Your grandfather must be spinning in his grave.”
“Can you stop them?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Stuey. There’s an election coming up in November. We have a referendum on the ballot to make Westdale Wood a nature preserve. If that doesn’t pass, the county will be under a lot of pressure to sell the land to the highest bidder.” She sighed. “Sometimes I feel like we’re trying to hold back the ocean tide. But we have to try.”
The search for Elly continued, but it wasn’t mentioned in the news as often. The posters on walls and utility poles became faded and tattered. The people of Westdale, more fearful and suspicious now, went on with their lives.
Westdale Elementary was four miles away. Every weekday morning at five minutes to eight, Stuey put on his backpack and trudged the quarter mile from his house to the bus stop on County Road 17. He waited there with the Charleston twins, who were in first grade, and the two Hawkins girls, who lived on the other side of the county road. Alicia, the younger Hawkins girl, was in Stuey’s class.
Stuey was the only one who stood outside at the bus stop. The Charlestons and the Hawkinses were always driven there by their mothers. They would sit in the idling cars until the bus arrived, then pile out and follow him onto the bus.
Stuey asked Alicia about that. “You guys used to walk to the bus,” he said. “Now your mom brings you. How come?”
Alicia looked at him as if he was the stupidest person on the planet.
“Because of kidnappers,” she said, giving her blond hair a toss. “I can’t believe your mom lets you walk.”
“I haven’t gotten kidnapped,” Stuey pointed out.
“Well, you could be. Any of us could. The kidnapper is still out there.”
Stuey wanted to say, Nobody kidnapped Elly! She just disappeared. And she’s not really gone! But he said nothing because he knew she would never believe him.
At school that first week everybody was talking about Elly Rose even though hardly any of them knew her. Stuey was surprised by how much older and more mature the other kids were, especially the girls. He had grown too, but not that much. While he’d been playing little kid games with Elly Rose, the rest of them had done things like gone to space camp or the Grand Canyon.
Jenny Garner got a lot of attention because she was one of the few kids who knew Elly. She told everybody that Elly had been taken by the Mushroom Man.
“He probably has her locked in a basement someplace,” Jenny said.
“Why would he do that?” Stuey asked.
“You are so immature,” Jenny said. “You don’t know anything.”
Stuey wanted to say, I know more than you! I saw her disappear. I saw her come back! She’s not really gone! But he said nothing.
A policeman came to the school and talked to them about personal safety. To look both ways. To never be alone. What to do when approached by a stranger. When to say no. When to scream and run.
To always be afraid, Stuey thought.
As the leaves turned yellow and orange and fell from the trees, the kids at school tired of talking about Elly Rose. It had been three months. To them, that made it practically prehistoric. Their new favorite thing to argue about was the referendum. Most of them were just repeating stuff they heard from their parents. Everybody wanted the shopping mall.
“It would be so cool,” Alicia Hawkins said one day on the bus. “They want to put in a theater. We could walk to the movies!”
“But what about the woods?” Stuey asked.
“Nobody goes there,” Alicia said.
“I go there,” Stuey said.
“You’re weird. It’s all buggy. Besides, you could get kidnapped.”
“But what about all the animals that live there?”
Alicia gave him that look she was so good at — the look that made him feel clumsy and stupid. “You don’t know anything,” she said.
People were always telling him that.
There were times when Stuey didn’t think about Elly at all. When he did remember her, it felt like a soft punch to the stomach. As the weeks passed, the punch became softer. He didn’t go to the deadfall much anymore, and when he went he didn’t stay long. He brought his compass but no longer expected Elly to show up. When he stretched out on the slab, nothing happened — no sense of movement, only a paralyzing stillness. The voices were still there, but they sounded distant and forlorn. Without Elly the magic of Castle Rose was fading.
He thought about what his mom had said about soul mates: They make you whole. He hadn’t really understood that until Elly went away. Without her, he was incomplete.
Twelve inches of wet snow fell on election day. The apple trees sagged. Grandpa Zach’s gravestone, capped with a crown of snow, was barely visible.
The storm didn’t stop people from voting. When the official results came in the next morning, they learned that the referendum to save Westdale Wood had been defeated.
Stuey was afraid his mom would be mad, but she just seemed tired. She sat in the kitchen for a long time drinking tea and paging through a photo album. Stuey sat down across from her.
“Look at this, Stuey. Do you remember?” She rotated the album and pointed to a photo. A much younger Stuey was sitting at the picnic table in the orchard, grinning over a lopsided, candle-studded cake. He was missing a front tooth. Next to him sat a dark-haired boy wearing a baseball cap.
“That’s Jack Kopishke,” Stuey said.
“Yes. Your seventh birthday.”
Stuey hadn’t thought about Jack in a long time.
“Happier days,” his mom said.
It felt like a thousand years ago.
“What’s going to happen now?” Stuey asked. “Are they going to wreck the woods?”
“Nothing is certain,” his mom said, closing the photo album. “We’ve reached out to the Nature Conservancy and some other conservation groups for help, but I’m afraid it’s a long shot. Everybody seems to want a new shopping mall. Do you still go to that place in the woods?”
He nodded.
“And?”
He shrugged. “I think about Elly. Sometimes I pretend she’s still here.”
“You miss her. We all do.”
“You don’t think she’ll ever come back.”
“It’s been four months, Stuey.” She held out her arms. “Come here.”
Stuey went to her. She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed him and kissed his neck and said, “I can’t imagine what the Frankels have gone through. I can’t imagine losing you. It’s been so hard. First Grandpa, then Elly Rose, and now the woods. If you were gone, I think I’d go mad. But we’re still here, aren’t we?”
Stuey thought about the last time he had seen Elly, how they had held hands and she had tried to take him with her. To wherever she was. He thought about how she had said his mom was going crazy.
“I’m here,” he said.
Stuey made two new friends at school: Deshan Nelson, who had moved to Westdale that summer and was the only
black kid in their class, and Grant Hellman, who everybody called Heck. Both Heck and Deshan liked to draw. They were impressed by Stuey’s animals, especially the fox he had drawn on the cover of his notebook.
“I saw it by my house,” Stuey told them. “It’s a red fox.”
“All foxes are red,” Deshan said.
“There are gray foxes and white foxes too,” Stuey informed him. “But I’ve never seen one.”
“What about green foxes?” Heck asked.
“I’ve never heard of that,” Stuey said. “But I bet I could draw one.”
Deshan specialized in drawing cars with long hoods and fire coming out of the tailpipe. Heck liked to draw faces, the uglier the better. He made a picture of Ms. Galligan with fangs, bloodshot eyes, and a wart on her nose. Ms. Galligan didn’t know it was supposed to be her. She thought it was a gargoyle, and she pinned it up on the board. The three of them got the giggles so bad they had to be moved to separate corners of the room.
Stuey looked forward to school days. Deshan and Heck were fun. It wasn’t like with Elly — they didn’t get him the way she had — but Stuey liked hanging with them. At home he was snowbound. There was no place to walk to, and his mom was pretty much obsessed with saving Westdale Wood. She was always on the phone or writing e-mails.
In February she was able to enlist an organization called the Midwestern Wetland Advocates in the battle. Their idea was to turn the center of the woods into a natural wetland by putting Barnett Creek back on its original course. That would flood nearly half of the woods, forming a lake. Stuey didn’t love the idea of the woods being flooded, but at least most of it would be saved. It would be better than having a shopping mall in the backyard.
The preservation society presented their new proposal to the state and county in early March. It was rejected. A few weeks later it was announced that Westdale Wood would be sold to Forest Hills Development.
That didn’t stop Stuey’s mom. The phone calls and letter writing continued.
“I’m going to fight this,” she said. “We’re going to win.”
“What if we don’t?” Stuey asked.
“We will,” she said. “We have to. For Grandpa.”
While his mother did battle with calls and letters, Stuey drew pictures, read books, watched television, listened to music, and played video games. Every now and then he would think about Elly, and it would be as if the lights dimmed for a moment. He had learned how to put her aside, in a back corner of his mind. By the time spring arrived he hardly thought of her at all.
The first day of spring break it rained, a slow, steady drizzle that promised to last all day. The last snowbanks were reduced to dirty, icy lumps. Everything looked dead and sodden and gray. Stuey had planned to go over to Deshan’s house, but his mom had another preservation society meeting, so he couldn’t get a ride from her.
He looked out over the dreary orchard from his bedroom window. Several of the apple trees had lost their limbs. He wondered how the deadfall looked now, after the long, snowy winter.
There was only one way to find out.
He put on his raincoat and rubber boots and trudged out into the woods.
The path was muddy and slippery; Stuey kept his hood up and his eyes on the ground. Last summer felt like the distant past, far away and blurred by time.
At the bottom of the knoll, he came upon a set of fresh boot prints. A man, by the size of them. He stopped and looked around. Gray-brown tree trunks, dead grasses, and a hazy mist of drizzle. Who would be out here at this time of year? Elly’s father, still searching for her? The Mushroom Man? After a few yards, the prints veered off to the right. Stuey continued on his path, and soon a shadowy, pyramidal shape rose through the mist. The rain had darkened the cottonwood trunks nearly to black. The deadfall seemed to have sagged slightly, as if the weight of winter’s snows had pressed it a few inches into the earth. Stuey peered inside. It was smaller and dimmer than he remembered. He ducked through the entrance. Elly wasn’t there.
“You were never here,” he said aloud. Hearing his own voice speak those words sent a hollow pang through his guts; he immediately felt horribly guilty.
“I mean, I’m not sure,” he added. It didn’t help. He sat down on the cold, wet slab and thought about the last time he had seen Elly. When she had tried to take him with her, to wherever she was. Had he made that up?
He felt for his compass, but it wasn’t there. He had left it on his dresser. He lay back on the slab and closed his eyes. The slab moved, a small shifting, like a raft on still waters. He imagined the deadfall rising, drifting through the woods. He imagined Elly Rose sitting on the end of the slab. He listened to the faint hiss of drizzle sifting through the branches. He imagined Elly as he had seen her last, wearing a green T-shirt and jeans.
“Aren’t you cold?” he whispered.
She smiled. He opened his eyes.
He was alone.
He sat up. The crinkling of his raincoat obliterated the sound of the rain. He stood up and went to the entrance and looked outside. Everything exactly the same. He ducked through the doorway and began the long walk home. He had gone only a few dozen yards when a flash of color caught his eye. A few feet off the path was a wooden stake, about three feet high, with a fluorescent-orange ribbon tied to its top.
Looking around, he saw several other stakes scattered through the woods. Earlier, with his hood up and his eyes on the path, he hadn’t noticed them.
He knew what they were — survey stakes for the new shopping mall.
On the way home, he pulled up every stake he saw, even though he knew it wouldn’t make any difference in the end.
At the end of the school year they sent Elly home. That was almost as jarring as going to Atlanta in the first place. Her mom met her at the airport in Minneapolis and covered her with perfumy kisses. She was the most dressed-up Elly had ever seen her, and she talked nonstop all the way home. As they entered Westdale, a billboard came into view with Stuey’s face about twenty feet high next to giant letters spelling out MISSING CHILD. The billboard had gone up last summer. Over the winter the sun had bleached most of the color from Stuey’s face, and the red letters had faded to pink. It had been almost a year since he went away.
That was how she thought about it. Stuey went away.
Her mom wasn’t mad at Stuey’s mom anymore. Instead, she felt sorry for her.
“Anne Becker is back home,” she told Elly. “She was in the hospital for a time — depression, they say — but now she’s back in that big house — I can’t imagine how lonely it must be. Daddy and I went to see her a few weeks ago — I brought her a casserole. Noodles and cabbage. She’s a vegetarian, you know; I feel so bad for her. I don’t think she’s eating right. She looked thin as a rail. She showed me a painting she was working on. A robin. She said the robin is a sign of spring, of hope. No mother should have to lose a child.” She sighed. “Even after . . . what happened last summer . . . she still wanted to save the woods. So there’s that, at least.”
Elly’s dad had taken over the preservation society after Stuey’s mom got sick. They had finally worked out a deal between the county and a conservation group called Midwestern Wetland Advocates. Half of the woods would be saved, but the other half would be turned into a lake.
According to her dad, letting Barnett Creek go back to its original course would return the area to its “natural state”— the way it was before it had been drained to make a golf course. He showed her a map of how it would look.
The Castle Rose would be underwater. And it would be impossible to walk from one side of the woods to the other with a lake in between. Not that she had any reason to walk all the way across the woods with Stuey gone. But what if he came back?
Everything was changing. The only thing that stayed the same was her cat, Grimpus, who was waiting for her in her room, perched on her pillow as if it was a throne.
“I’m sorry I left you for so long,” Elly told him. “You wouldn’t have lik
ed Atlanta. All the cats there are mean.”
Grimpus blinked his good eye. She scooped him up and hugged him to her chest.
“I’m back now, Grimpy. I’m not going anyplace.”
The next morning, as soon as she could sneak out, Elly went to visit Castle Rose.
The woods had changed. A lot of the small saplings had been trampled last summer by the searchers, there were trails where there had been no trails before, and her usual path had been blocked by a fallen cottonwood. To get past the downed tree she had to detour around a boggy area, then wade through a bunch of nettles to get back to the path.
When she finally reached the deadfall, she hardly recognized it. It seemed lower, smaller, and darker — less like a castle and more like a pile of logs. Lots of new green plants had sprouted up around it. There were no tracks or any other sign that Stuey had been there.
Inside, the castle was ankle deep with blown-in leaves. She ducked through the doorway and shuffled through the leaves to the slab and carefully brushed it clean. She sat on the cool stone, feeling bereft. She closed her eyes and reached out, but felt only emptiness.
The deadfall moaned.
Elly’s eyes popped open. She looked around fearfully. It must have been wood rubbing against wood, the sound of the deadfall slowly sinking into itself. She lay flat on her back and looked up at the chaos of interlocked branches above. She closed her eyes again and listened.
After a few minutes she felt as if she was floating, the same familiar feeling she remembered from before. Then came the murmuring, the sound of distant voices, and faint music. The voices slowly became louder and more strident. It sounded like men arguing, their muffled shouts garbled and distant. The stone beneath her seemed to quiver with their rage.
She opened her eyes. The voices fell silent, and suddenly she was afraid. Heart pounding, she tried to sit up, but she couldn’t move. She weighed a thousand pounds. Even lifting her arm proved impossible. The slab was holding her, rough stone hands pinning her down, glittery quartz nails tearing through her shirt, digging into her ribs, dragging her into the stone.