After Forever Ends (28 page)

“No,” She answers in the same voice, “I love that you’re telling me. It makes me feel special that you’d share it with me.”

“Sometimes I think parents consider their children’s history to be part of theirs…like a continuation. And they think of their grandchildren as perpetual infants. I think we forget that when it comes down to it we are all a shadow of those who follow. You should know you shadow. How old are you now, Dear?”

“I’ll be thirty-three in September.”

“You don’t look a day over twenty.”

She laughs, “I wish!” Then she smiles at a vendor and helps a little girl pass between chairs. “Do you want to tell me more?”

“I think I can go on,” I absently fiddle with my wedding ring. I have never taken it off in all the years I’ve had it longer than to wash a dish or have a bath. “Where was I?”

“You left Bennington,”

“OK, OK. We left Bennington. Now what came next?”

It had been four years since we’d left Bennington College. Oliver and I were twenty-one that spring, completing our degrees at university, both working, and completely settled into the cabin by then. We’d worked our tails off since we’d moved in making it a right and proper home. By the start of that first summer the twins had finally managed to get the walls up around the room that would be the toilet with the window up high. With the discount that Professor Walker’s son had given us, we had the well tapped and working plumbing installed. He jokingly asked us if we wanted the tub left in the front room, but we opted to move it to the new toilet instead. I picked out this beautiful little porcelain sink that looked like a shell and Oliver bought an oval shaped mirror to go above it. We’d felt it was quite an accomplishment. To us it was another testimony that there was nothing we couldn’t do.

“Unbelievable,” Oliver stood in the middle of the room with Alex, “We managed to finish one whole project. You ready to start the next now?”

“I’m ready to start drinking whiskey,” Alexander replied. “But the room is nice.”

“I think we’ve learned enough to get the next up more quickly.”

“Oh, you think that, do you?”

“Oh aye!” Oliver turned to his brother, “At least I learned enough from my mistakes if you didn’t! I used the phone and asked for help! Dad and our cousins, Mike, Dennis and Artie, and Uncle Ian and Great Uncle Jack are going to come help us on the weekends!”

“You are the clever one, Oliver!” He put his hand on his brother’s shoulder.

“Tell me about it!” Ollie sounded very satisfied as he returned the gesture.

“Well,” Alex said quickly after a moment of silence, “Let's go get pissed then.”

“OK.”

With the extra help from Oliver’s family and Lance, who came down to visit whenever he could, we had two bedrooms and a kitchen with a larger wood burning stove to cook on by the time the second snow fell. We called Professor Walker’s son in once again to set us up with plumbing in our kitchen. It worked very well each year until December when the pipes would freeze and we were back to boiling pots of water on the stoves. We redid all the floors with new oak and had new windows cut and installed. The house was still small, but really quite lovely.

Alexander was so fascinated with the process of adding on to the cabin that he changed his direction at university from engineering to architecture. Devising and building structures had become his passion and he was talented with it. By request, he designed and built a tree house for the mayor’s children. It sat proudly in a great oak in the man’s front garden and demanded attention from passers-by, particularly because of its Northern tower and the spiral steps leading up to it that wrapped around the tree. It wasn’t long before Alexander was sought out to make more. He earned loads of money on the side customizing tree houses and play houses for people’s children. He loved it, too. I never saw Alex as happy or satisfied as when he was sitting with his drawing pencils in front of graph paper or when he was standing near a pile of timber and steel.

It was such a busy point in time, those four years. Oliver and I had full time jobs, both of us, as well as being full time students at Cardiff. Oliver still worked as he always had at the mill loading bags of flour into the back of trucks, only now he was a manager and was making better money. I had gotten a position just off the university campus at a cafe as a server until I finished my Biology degree. I then went off to work part time at a hospital, spinning blood in test tubes and scraping cack on to slides in search of parasites. It was better pay, but it was boring. Oliver and I tried to set our schedules as close to each other as we could, but it was more or less impossible. We didn’t see much of each other and life was becoming less and less fun.

Still, we were so happy when we were together. We must have been completely mental. It’s hysterical. There we were living in the middle of nowhere, still in a minuscule little house. We had no electricity at all and no running water in the winter, plus it took half the spring for our pipes to regain water pressure and they never did decide whether to give us hot or cold and water when it rained hard enough. I did have a fantastic garden, though. I found I had a knack for keeping it, and we’d managed to afford two decent cars, using part of Oliver’s trust, that could make it up the path to the cabin even in the worst weather. And we had each other, best of all.

Oliver and I would still go into town and use our mobile phones to keep in touch with people since we couldn’t get a signal at the house. We were too far out to have telephone lines, so a home phone was out of the question. I rang Sandra as often as I could to see how she was doing and Lucy, too, on the days she could receive calls at Bennington. Lucy was sixteen now. She’d matured into a young lady with her own notions. Headstrong and independent, she had gotten over her anxiety about being at school without all of us and had fallen into a groove of her own. Lucy, from what I had gathered, had taken over the campus and was back to doing anything she could to avoid actually learning anything. Bless her heart, she couldn’t seem to be serious about anything but worrying about Alexander.

“How is he?” She’d ask, “I only talked to him a minute about a week ago. He sounded a bit boggled. Have him ring me, right? I miss you all so much. I know you‘re busy, but you should get Xander and come and visit.”

“You can come here, you know.”

“I know. It’s just that I’m all tied up most of the time, especially on the weekends. Will you tell Xander to ring me, please?”

I’d tell him, but I never knew if he did.

Oliver kept up with Lance and Merlyn. We even occasionally gave Headmistress Pennyweather a ring. Everyone was fine and busy like we were. Life was moving at warp speed. I think it does for everyone when they get into their early twenties. There’s just too much going on to give anything the attention it deserves. Wasted years, those are, all action and very little meaning. At least they were to us. We thought we were living, but I think now that we were only sleep walking. We were like robots programmed to achieve goals. We focused, we toiled, we got the job done, did what was expected of us, and we took no pleasure in any of it. While we were busy succeeding at every challenge we undertook, there was not as much music, there was not as many jokes, and we didn’t laugh as much as we once had. I’d say that at twenty-one, Oliver and I were the most grown up we’d ever be in our entire lives. Thank God we eventually got over it.

When we forgot or got too busy to ring, Oliver’s mother would come looking if she hadn’t heard from us by the weekend. “Anything could happen to you out here in a place like this!” She’d tell us, “I wish you’d go get a nice flat in Cardiff!”

“We can’t afford rent in Cardiff, “Oliver would say.

“If you’d just let your dad and me help you…“

“Forget about it, Mum. We’ll do this on our own. “

As difficult as it was to live there sometimes because of its remoteness, Oliver and I had no intention of ever leaving that little cabin. I don’t think it ever would have crossed our minds if it wasn’t being constantly mentioned by her. What no one but Alexander understood was that life at the cabin was interesting. It was not long after we had moved in that I began to truly understand why Oliver swore the place was magical. There were more than a few nights we’d look over and see and a small tan and white owl perched in our kitchen window, peering at us with its huge yellow eyes as if it wanted to know us better. Oliver called him Alfie. “Hello, Alfie,” He’d say as he walked past with a bowl of something, “How are you tonight? Come in if you like.” Alfie would just watch him with his huge eyes and not make a move in either direction. “Suit yourself, Mate,” Ollie would tell him, “You know you’re always welcome.”

It wasn’t just Alfie, either, who visited. None of the animals seemed shy in the wood. Hares would hop about unbothered by the goings on of people in the lawn. Foxes would sit at the edge of the garden and clean each other’s coats. Miniature deer would come up from the wood and climb on to our front porch and linger. They’d peek inside the windows, leaving nose prints and smears on the glass. The grass along the path would dry and dull, but it was always green on the lawn. Flowers would grow in patches where there was no grass. It gave a person the sense that they were in a place that defied standard. That you were somehow straddling the divide between what was convention and all that was possible. In the wood, the lines of reality were always blurred.

What went on inside the house was something to behold as well. Things would move around when you weren’t looking. I’d leave my purse on the kitchen table and find it on the sofa five minutes later. Or Oliver would accidentally drop his keys on the floor while carrying in groceries and leave them while he set down the sacks. He’d turn to pick them up and they’d be on the counter. Or sometimes, items would magically appear, like the time I found the most beautiful pink rose lying on the porch. I ran to the bedroom and kissed Oliver for the gift. He swore he hadn’t given it to me. That rose lasted for nearly six months in a simple vase of water. One morning I came out and all the petals had fallen and were lying, still beautiful, scattered across the table. Oliver was not joking about the socks wandering off, either. His socks were constantly going missing, but he’d set out into the garden and talk to the trees or leave sweets in the faerie circle and they’d show up later sitting neatly on the table. The ones I lost the night before we married had never come back.

Sometimes I was still sure Oliver was playing with me, but usually I had my doubts. The third summer we were there, late at night, when it was very, very quiet, I began to hear a man and a woman speaking so faintly that I could hear their voices, but not understand a word that they said. It always sounded like it was coming from the front of the house, but when I went out there they would stop talking. After a while I started hearing them in the garden as well.

I mentioned it to Oliver one night. “I think I’m going mad in my old age,” I told him.

“You’re not going mad, “He looked at me very seriously, “If I told you, you won’t believe me.”

“You hear them, too?”

“It’s the Lord and the Lady of the Wood,” He mumbled as he shook his fringe out of his eyes. “They’re having a baby.”

“A baby?”

“Aye. A wee baby. They call it their boon. They have loads of them, but they get very excited every time a new one comes along.”

I took a second to consider this before I dismissed the possibility out of hand, “Who are the Lord and the Lady? Ghosts?”

“No, they’re not ghosts. They’re faerie folk. Elves. I don’t know much about them other than they live here in the wood. They have forever-like. They knew my Grandparents and theirs before them and so on.” He seemed a bit tired as he flipped the page of a textbook, “Don’t look at me like that, Sil! I’m not mad! I’ve known them my whole life. I’m actually surprised that you can hear them. Not everybody does. My parents never have. I hear them like you do mostly and can’t make anything out they say, but they’ve spoken to me twice since Grandpaddy gave me the shard.”

“The what?”

“The shard. It’s a little piece of wood, longer and thicker than a sliver. Grandpaddy’s Grandpaddy gave it to Grandpaddy when he was a boy to keep. One day he gave it to me.”

“Why?”

“Because the Lord told him to. Or so he said. Nana gave me something else, too.”

“What?”

“That ring you’re wearing.”

“My wedding ring?”

He nodded, “There’s a story behind it. The Lady gave it to Nana and told her to keep it for her grandson, the Boy from the Olive Tree, whose love would have hair the colour of autumn flames and eyes like blue ice.” He twisted his bottom lip, “When my parents called me Oliver, she figured the Lady must have meant me. Just before they died she gave it to me and told me the story.”

It was an emerald ring set high in an odd design and very old. It was a beautiful ring and probably quite expensive.

“You were very young, weren’t you?”

“Oh, aye, I was just a kid. Mind there was something in the way she explained it that made me know it was a treasure, so I put the ring up and kept it safe until I gave it to you.” He looked at me a long time, “I knew it was you the ring was meant for as soon as I laid my eyes on you. Hair the colour of autumn flames and eyes like blue ice. Nana told me the Lady had said that, those words exaxtly. Plus the second you said you were Just Silvia Cotton I knew for certain I was hopelessly in love with you.”

We smiled at each other, remembering that moment.

“What did the Lord and the Lady tell you when they spoke?”

Oliver sighed. He looked at me for a long time before he spoke, obviously deciding what information he was going to share, “The first time they told me that they’d chosen me to protect the wood. They asked me if I’d honour the promise of my forefathers and keep it safe for them and the creatures that live here. I said yes.”

“And the second time?”

“What they told me they said you wouldn’t understand until you were ready. They told me not to tell you because you have to understand it in your own time.”