The Waking Forest

by Alyssa Wees

  “It was all just a dream, love,” Dad says at last, turning to me. “It can’t hurt you.”

  “Breathe,” Mom adds. “Relax.”

  A pair of green eyes glows in the dark from the far side of the attic, which might alarm me if I didn’t know for sure it was only Gabrielle, my pet fox. She’s been my constant companion since the day she found me, and hasn’t left my side despite my parents’ initial reservations. Gabrielle and I have a special connection that I know I’m not imagining: Even from several feet away I feel her little heart beating as if it were my own, our pulses tangled up together. Now she sniffs around as if to make sure there are absolutely no dead bodies hidden in the room. Finding none, she slinks out of the shadows and follows us as we all shuffle down the stairs. Yawning, Renata and Raisa drag their feet back to their own room, while Mom and Dad follow Rose and me into ours.

  “You have an overactive imagination, Rhea,” Mom says as I slide into bed, Gabrielle jumping up and curling at my feet. “But it’s not real, remember? It’s only in your head.”

  “I’m not overactively imagining anything,” I reply stubbornly. “I’m cursed.”

  The visions have been appearing for as long as I can remember. When I was little, most of them were simple, no more than a flicker, there and gone: the ceiling of my bedroom crumbling to ash as I lay in bed awake. The sky cracking like dry skin, the stars crawling across the universe like mites. Thorny brambles sprouting from the wood floors of our house and twisting up the walls like vines.

  But as I grew older, the visions matured, so when I’m on a crowded street or in the grocery store, people start to look different too: some have wet, green-blue hair, salt water dripping from their fingertips; others have eyes that flash, lightning-fast; and a few have horns and moss between their teeth; still others are rendered nothing more than deep, dense shadows slinking across the floor. Once, a large metal mailbox outside the post office transformed into an enormous animal with the body of a lion and the head of a human, blinking at me and letting loose a storm-snagging roar.

  And then there is the wood, clustering thick behind our house. Where normally there is open space, a tall dark forest rises, an endless swarm of close-together trees with leaves the color of bone, and gleaming spiderwebs stretched like strings of saliva between the trunks. The forest goes on and on and on, no end in sight, and every time I’ve tried to enter—it vanishes. Just like that.

  But I’ve never had a vision like this, like my own dead body before me. It’s getting worse. I’m getting worse—and I don’t know why.

  I’m not even sure that the therapist my parents sent me to, when I was seven and just old enough to find the right words to explain what was happening to me, would know what this was. She said I had severe anxiety, and she taught me breathing techniques to help me calm down when I started to panic. Techniques that would probably be helpful if I could actually remember what they were when the visions come. Mostly I just forget how to breathe altogether. Or worse, like tonight, I scream.

  “I know it feels like a curse, Ree,” Dad says, “but it’s not. Anxiety affects a lot of people, and that’s okay. You’re not alone, and you will get better. Always remember that.”

  I nod and settle back into bed. Mom and Dad shuffle out and flick off the light, but as soon as I hear their door click closed, I run to the bathroom and brush my teeth—cinnamon toothpaste to cancel out the flavor of moldering meat in my mouth, the only thing left of the vision. I keep my gaze on my own eyes in the mirror, daring my face to deteriorate, to display my demise again.

  But when my reflection doesn’t change, doesn’t crumble or corrode, I say, all in one breath, “I am not afraid, I am not afraid, I am not afraid.”

  If you say a thing often enough, it’s bound to come true.

  A ghost appears in the mirror. She wears my bony body and my features: the same olive skin and thick black hair, brown eyes and long fingers and pink pearl earrings. But where my lips are tight and white, hers are forged into the sharp scythe of a smile. And when I see her, I smile too.

  She says, Listen, you. Fear itself doesn’t hurt.

  She says, You could be pierced from stomach to spine with an iron blade, and though your body would bleed, still your soul would remain untouched.

  She says, Go back to bed.

  I stare.

  “Okay,” I say, even if it is only to feel my own lips move and not the ghost’s.

  I go to bed but not to sleep. Rose’s little night-light is hard at work on her side of our bedroom, while five feet away I lie in near-complete darkness.

  From across the space between us, the faintest of murmurs reaches my ears.

  “Am I going to die?” Rose whispers, and I don’t answer right away, confused. “Is what you saw a premonition of the future?”

  It takes me another moment to realize: She thinks the body I saw was hers. She misinterpreted the glance I gave her. Right then I make a decision. Though I know it’s cruel, I won’t correct her. It makes me feel like we’re in this together.

  “No,” I say flatly, willing for that to be true. “It was a bad dream.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  “Would you tell me if I was going to die?”

  “Yes, I would,” I lie again.

  “What do you think happens when you die?” she asks, shifting her weight toward me.

  For a moment, I consider this. Not what I want to say but how I want to say it. Since I started having visions, I often think about the afterlife while I lie awake at night. I don’t think of it in logical terms—for all we know, the afterlife is just an endless nothingness—but rather, I think about what I want it to be. What if, after we die, we live in a dream of our own making all the time, without ever having to wake up? If I think of it like that, then it doesn’t seem so terrifying.

  So now I ask myself: What would Rose’s dream be like?

  “I think you become the wind, and you can go anywhere in the world you want to go. You can go to the stars, if you want, and even the brightest ones won’t burn you.”

  After a pause she says, “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I agree.

  “Good night, Ree,” she says, and her breath scintillates in the space above our heads, sticking to the ceiling like static on a television screen, eerie and bright. Mesmeric.

  I blink once, twice, and it’s gone.

  “Night,” I say. Sometimes I wish I could tell her everything, everything that keeps me awake at night. But telling her or anyone else would only make it more real.

  Because there’s more. In the vision, and for a few moments after I shook myself awake, behind the attic door that I’d opened, I heard someone breathing. A long and loud and ragged inhale.

  The kind of breath someone would take if they were about to scream.

  * * *

  —

  The minute the first morning light appears, I get up and wash my face, no bony ghost saying hello. Last night’s vision was the first time I’ve ever been able to get past the stairwell door, and I don’t want to forget a single detail. Hurrying back to my room, I see that Rose’s bed is now empty too. I rummage around in my nightstand until I find a journal with a plain black cover, every page blank. The one Mom gave us a long time ago, back when she first started homeschooling us and told us our dreams were important to remember and to write down. Mine were always the same: the darkness, the staircase, the door. I didn’t bother opening the book. Now I can’t waste a minute. Stealing a pen off Rose’s nightstand, I sit on my bed, one leg dangling over the edge, and I write.

  When I’m done, I chew on the end of the plastic pen and look the words over, my handwriting slanted and loose: A door at the top of a tall spiral staircase. A prickling in the backs of my knees that warns me to turn back and to run as fast and
as far from the door as I possibly can. I never open it. I must not open it—there are secrets behind it and to know them would be to live forever after with a terrible burden, to swallow those indigestible secrets and feel them always inside me, gnashing in my stomach, chewing through my veins.

  But I’m done not knowing, so I reached out and gripped the knob, and I turned it.

  Here is usually where I wake up.

  But last night, I did not.

  The coolness of the metal knob in my palm, the sickly screech of the hinges, a decayed carcass on the floor. A breath hanging in the air belonging to something or someone else. And a scream.

  I’ve always wondered what was behind that door, and now I know.

  Or do I? Because the more I think about it, the more I’m certain it’s not my dead body. That’s what I saw when I opened my eyes, sure, but I don’t think my body is there in the dream. Because I heard breathing behind the door. And if I am dead, then who is breathing?

  With a groan, I throw the journal and pen down onto the bed. Gabrielle raises her head, questioning.

  “I’m hungry,” I tell her, standing up, refusing to think about this any further until I’ve had some breakfast. “Let’s go.”

  I find Renata in the kitchen, eating alone at the table. The sun shines warm and bright through the open window to her right, illuminating one side of her face and casting the other in shadow. She smiles when I come in.

  “Shay wants me to tell you that she forgives you,” Renata says with no prelude, her hair in a high ponytail slumping to one side of her head. She tears off a corner of her buttered toast and drops it onto the ground for Gabrielle.

  I’m not sure which part of this statement to address first. I walk over to the pantry and pull out a box of chocolaty cereal, pour myself a bowl.

  “Forgives me for what?” I ask finally, sitting down across from her. We’re the only two at the table—Rose no doubt already at her ballet class, Raisa probably still sleeping, and I can see Mom and Dad working in the garden.

  “For running away!” she says, flicking her milk-shiny spoon for emphasis, as if she can’t even believe I asked something so obvious. Her dream journal is open on the table beside her cereal bowl, pen resting in the center crease. “She says you don’t have to be scared to come back, because she forgives you, and a lot of other people do too. What’s done is done, and now she just wants you to be safe.”

  “Ah,” I say, nodding. “Okay.”

  And I should just leave it at that. But because I’m curious, and because I only ever have one dream while Renata has so many, and mostly because my heart knocked on my ribs at the words scared and forgives, knocked hard and fast like a rock tossed at a window, like someone saying, Let me in, let me in, let me in—which doesn’t make sense anyway, because my heart is already in, isn’t it?—I say something I regret as soon as it uncurls from my lips: “Okay, but who is Shay?”

  Renata drops her spoon into the still-full ceramic bowl with a clatter and a splash. She stands, arms long and palms pressed flat on the table as she stares across at me. “Shay, Shay!” she cries, stamping her foot twice. “She eats men and she’s your friend and she loves you!”

  “Oh, oh, of course,” I backtrack. “I just—”

  Renata turns and runs from the room.

  I finish my breakfast before following her, allowing some time for the silt of her despair to settle. Her journal still lies open on the table, and though it’s tempting, I don’t lean over to read it. My sisters haven’t been as ambivalent about their dream-keeping as I’ve been over the years, but Renata is the most prolific of us by far. She even talks about the people in her dreams as if they were old friends, as if we know them too, and when we tell her that it’s not real, she becomes confused, upset.

  And then she hides.

  Usually we know right where to find her; over the years, we’ve gotten to know all her favorite spots, become familiar with her proclivity for seeking the spaces where no one else would think to go. The seashore is one—specifically, she prefers to wedge herself between two boulders near the local lighthouse a mile down the coast. Another hiding space is a particularly deep dip in the sidewalk outside the local cemetery. She likes to stand there after a storm, up to her calves in rainwater, staring at the graves beyond the black iron fence.

  And her easiest-to-access slip-away spot: the corner of the closet she shares with Raisa, tucked far to the side of the double folding doors.

  It is there that I find her, in the closet, her knees pulled tight to her chest. When I open the sliding doors, she tips her head back against the wall, the tube of her trachea protruding from her pale throat, embellished with a trident of tender veins. I lower myself to the floor and crawl inside, crouching beneath the clothes hanging above our heads. Together we close the doors; now we’re entirely in the dark except for a thin line where the doors don’t quite touch.

  “I just want to find the place where I begin,” she says. “That’s what it’s all about. The place where I begin. Because I don’t think it’s here, Ree. I don’t think it’s here.”

  I match her position, folding my knees to my heart. “I don’t think it’s in this closet either.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  And I sort of do know what she means, sitting here in the semi-dark and the semi-silence. I have a scratchy, restless feeling, as if my soul were grinding against my skin, my bones, not necessarily wanting to get out but urging my body to go to impossible places, convinced I can touch the stars and not burn.

  At least, I think that’s what she means.

  “So,” I say, “tell me more about this Shay of yours.”

  She lifts her head from the wall. “Who?”

  Renata’s dreams are ocean waves, rushing in and rushing out. Floating on the surface for a while before sinking and drowning, all the way down.

  I sigh. “Never mind.”

  We continue to sit in the closet in silence, the closeness of the walls and the thickness of the shadows reminding me of the attic. Will I sleepwalk again tonight? And if I do, will I have the vision again? Or will it be a different vision this time? Now that I’ve thought it over, I truly don’t think the vision of my corpse is a premonition, despite Rose’s fears. None of my other visions have ever come true. Possibly it was a latent fear manifesting itself, a constant worry that something bad might happen, to me or to my family. I want us all to be safe and together and happy, always.

  But if my dead body isn’t really what’s behind the door in my dream—then what or who is?

  “Wait,” I say aloud, an idea blooming. Beside me Renata startles, having been lost for a moment in a private reverie. “The attic! What if I slept in the attic? Then I wouldn’t sleepwalk, because I’d have nowhere to go.”

  I could still sleepwalk to another part of the house, but why would I? In the dream I’m always climbing up the stairs, and if I’m already as high in my house as I can go, it stands to reason that I’ll simply stay put. And that I might then dream of whatever or whoever is really behind the door.

  “It’s so dark and cold up there,” Renata says as I jump to my feet and push through the closet doors, this time leaving them open. “Won’t you be scared?”

  But I’m already rushing through the house, too frenzied by my idea to respond.

  “Rhea, what is it?” Mom asks when I come bursting into the garden, out of breath. She’s wearing a floppy sun hat, a smudge of mud on her chin. “What’s wrong?”

  I tell them my idea.

  Dad nods, gazing past me as he thinks about it. His hair is thick and black, but the stubble all over his jaw and his chin is a stark silver, gleaming in the sunshine. After a minute, he smiles. “I think something can be arranged.”

  For the next six hours, there’s a chorus of scraping and banging and even a bit of swearing as we clear out the atti
c, transporting sunken cardboard boxes to the basement and a clunky, dusty old stereo straight to the trash. There are clothes Mom and I sort for donation, along with other odd trinkets and useless treasures my sisters snatch right up: a jewelry box that must have been fatally submerged in water at some point, with a headless ballerina that twirls to a discordant, drowning dirge; a hot-pink lava lamp that emits a dull glow after being plugged in; a crushed bouquet of fake flowers; and a deck of cards missing every single queen. Only a few pieces of furniture that no one wants to get rid of are left alone. Dad carries up a spare bed from the basement, with me following, lugging a fan in case it gets too hot.

  After a final skirmish with several long-legged spiders and a thorough dusting, my new room is finished. All I need to do is wait for night, when the dream will come again.

  * * *

  —

  Gabrielle paces on the bath mat in front of the shower while I get ready for bed. For a minute I simply stand in front of the mirror, waiting for my ghost self—or whatever she was—to appear in the glass, smiling and shining and saying wise, aching things that maybe only sound wise and aching in the dead of night. When it finally seems like she’s not coming, I reach for my toothbrush, and suddenly I can see straight through my sternum to my heart, like my skin was a window all this time that was just waiting and waiting for me to notice and look inside. My heart, right there, red and jarring and wrong, wrong, wrong—hearts are meant to be heard, not seen—and it’s not beating so much as it’s opening and closing, opening and closing, very, very fast. Almost like a mouth, gasping, or a fist, unfolding.

  Slowly, as if I might scare off a fly, I bring my fingertips to my chest—but all I feel is warm, smooth skin. Exhaling, I drop my hand, and the illusion is gone, just as if it never happened.

  None of this is real.

  I am not afraid.

  There’s a knock on the bathroom door as I pick my toothbrush up and put it into my mouth.

  “Yes?” I don’t say it so much as croak it, my mouth full of bristle. A grimy croak, scratching and scrambling its way past my teeth. I choke, spitting into the sink.