Enchanted Forests (46 page)

and go to the bathroom. Scared voices shouted her name over the

water.

She pushed herself up. She must have fallen asleep here at the

mouth of the cave. From how the sun shone, she knew it was

late afternoon. Funny. She didn't remember climbing this far.

She'd have to be careful climbing down, but she'd have to hurry,

too- Mark would be looking for her in the parking lot by the car

so they could drive home.

"Marty! Marty!" That was Mark's voice. She heard Morns'

voice too. It was deeper, furrier-sounding; and it reminded her

of...

"I'm here! I'm coming!" she shouted as loud as she could

over the water.

"Thank God, we've found her!" Grown-ups always said you

weren't supposed to say "thank God," and then they always said

it. Mark came up the rocks, two, three boulders at a time, fol-

lowed by Morris. She ran forward to meet them—why did they

look so scared?—and hug them, but they dropped back.

"It's okay, sweetheart. We'll get Sophie to come take care of

you. You don't have to be afraid."

She wasn't afraid, except they were acting strange. Strange ...

there had been a Stranger. That was right.

"Sophie!" Morris yelled. "Get up here!"

Faster than Marty would have believed a brown berry like

Sophie could move, she had clambered up the rocks and was

holding Marty. Sophie's arms were cold where the water

splashed them, but they felt good.

"Listen, sweetie, we've got you safe. We've been worried for

you, going off like that. Beth and Lisa said they saw a stranger.

Did you see him, too?"

Marty nodded. Sophie shut her eyes like she was going to cry.

"Can you tell me what happened?"

"He had a rabbit's foot, and he was waving it." Again, Sophie

shut her eyes. She pulled Marty's head against her shoulder, but

not before she saw Mark and Morris look at each other, then

look down. They growled, that was the only way to describe it.

304 Susan Snwarfz

Marty frowned. Someone else had growled, but it wasn't the

Stranger. She was sure of that. If of nothing else ...

"It's okay, Marty. Now, be brave and tell me, darling," Sophie

was having a hard time getting the words out, "did this bad man

touch you?"

Marty shook her head against Sophie. "I yelled at him. I had

this stick and I shook it, and he went away."

Sophie let Marty pull free, though she kept hands on her

shoulders as she looked her up and down. "Morris, you round up

the other kids. Don't let them see the sheriff."

"Oh, God," said Morris, and started back down the falls.

"Yes, we've got her safe!" he shouted as he went.

Oh, no. She had Wandered Away. She had been Lost.

"Am I in trouble?" she asked.

Again, Sophie hugged her. Her shoulder shook. "No," she

said. "You're a good, brave little girl, and we're going to take

you home right now."

And so Marty sat on a towel beside Sophie all the way home,

while Lisa got to ride with Mark, which wasn't fair.

For once. Mom and Daddy didn't make her change her

messed-up clothes in the back yard by the hose. She had a bath,

and Mom sat with her while she was in it, while Daddy and

Moms (whose car squealed into the drive in a way that could get

him a ticket) made phone calls.

"Doc, I know you're retired and don't make housecalls," Dad-

dy's voice sounded the way it did at three in the morning when

someone called because a big truck crashed on the highway.

"But no one knows her better and can make sure she gets

through this without permanent damage. Please? Thank God. I'll

get out the Scotch."

Why did she have to see Dr. Thomas? She wasn't sick. She

asked Mommy. Her eyes had the look that Sophie's had when

she said she'd seen the Stranger. Then Mommy cried. Marty had

only seen her mother cry once, when the radio said something

about a man named Salk. (Later, it had been Marty's turn to cry

when she saw the gleaming needles, and one pinched her arm.)

"I got through to Paul Cress at home."

"You called the chief of police," that was Morris.

"Sure. He's an old friend. Look, I know it's not your fault,

Slavin. In fact, your people probably helped her toughen up just

enough ... anyway. Cress's got his boys turning over every rock

in Mill Creek Park to see what's under them. And as soon as

Doc Thomas gets here, I'm going ..."

THE MONSTERS OF MILL CREEK PARK   305

Mom went to the door of the bathroom. "Oh, no, you're not!

Not if I have to hide that damn gun of yours myself."

Dad laughed. "You'd actually pick it up?"

There was a pause. Marty knew her mother was giving Daddy

a Look.

"Martha needs her father here with her. And I have to get back

to her now. You calm down."

Mother came and got her, and put her into bed even though it

was still daytime. Marty thought of telling her that, but she

didn't really want to get a Look either.

"I think that's Thomas' car in the drive," her father said. "Her

old pediatrician. Retired to breed Dobermans, for crying out

loud. Christ, will you look at the monster he's got with him?"

Marty was glad to see Dr. Thomas, even though he wouldn't

bring his dog—it was a dog, and not a real monster—in the

house. (Mom looked relieved.) He pulled her nightgown up,

looked over her, tickled her ribs with his stethoscope, then cov-

ered her back up.

"You're fine," he told her, then looked up at her parents and

nodded.

"Can I go back to camp tomorrow?" Marty asked.

"Honey, you wouldn't rather stay home and read? We could

go to the library and get some new books."

Marty shook her head. "I bet it's going to be nice tomorrow.

And I want to go back to the Park. I love the Park, all the trees.

You feel so safe in the forest."

"Maybe Monday," said Dr. Thomas. "I think once Marty's

over her chill—" he came down hard on the word like it was im-

portant, "—it's a very good idea for her to enjoy her friends and

camp again. But now, I think she ought to try to nap until

supper's ready."

He pulled the ruffly curtains and took her parents out of her

room with him. She watched the sun try to sneak through cracks

in the blinds while Dr. Thomas's voice made kind of happy

growls about "resilient" (she would look that up tomorrow) and

"amnesia" (she knew that one already) and "I can't tel! for sure

until I do an internal, but ..."

"Hasn't she been through enough?" Her mother cried out at

uiat. "As long as she's all right now ,.."

"That's your decision. Just don't make it worse by keeping her

inside. All she needs is people thinking she's some sort of mon-

ster. She's not. She's a beautiful, brave, little girl, and she was

very lucky."

306 Susan Shwartz

She heard the glug-glug-glug of Scotch. "Here, you drink this

too," Daddy said. Mommy hated Scotch.

On Monday, the kids at camp looked at Marty tunny, but that

was the day they went to Zedakers to ride, and they forgot. Ex-

cept for one thing. They didn't go back to the forest for weeks

and weeks. And Mark didn't tell any stories the rest of the sum-

mer.

Something did change that summer. By fall, Marty was Mar-

tha once again. If anything, she was being brought up even more

carefully than before. After all, Pushing her might make her a

brain, but it would keep her safe indoors. Marty/Martha the girl

was different. She had gone all quiet again. Granted, she wasn't

so quiet that she didn't lead her class when she didn't have better

things to do. But those things never again included summer

camp.

And she grew up into Martha Chamey, Ph.D. in psychology.

Dimly, she remembered that Mark had studied to be a psychol-

ogist so long ago. She wondered if he ever made it all the way

through. He enjoyed just living too much, and it had been Dr.

Chamey's experience that students like that tended to avoid the

really demanding programs. She, of course, had sought them out

and mastered them. Distinction was what she'd gotten instead of

the sunlit world in which Mark swung a bat while all the camp-

ers cheered. He was back there in those memories Martha

thought of as being walled off from her emotions by a kind of

psychic plexiglass (now, that was bad terminology). And her

emotions were walled off from the rest of her. She had her com-

pensations, of course: but the thing about compensations was that

they never quite succeeded.

At least, she had them. She had her sanity. And she had her

life. Her parents had been so afraid and taken such pains after

that season of summer camp to keep her safe.

Dr. Martha Chamey steered the rented car down the twisting

narrow road into the green well of Mill Creek Park. Budget cuts

in the Rust Belt town had deferred maintenance on the park. The

road was cracked, and faded by summers of baking, winters of

freezing, until it crumbled into as much a part of the woods as

the leaf-mold that half-covered it.

She had been away for so long; it surprised her that she could

be grieved by the neglect she saw. After all, she had seen a mon-

ster in the Park.

THE MONSTERS OF MILL CREEK PARK   307

Old growth the Park definitely was: maybe even first-growth

forest. It was old; it was peaceful; but it was not quiet. She had

turned off the air conditioner and rolled down the window so she

could hear the leaves rustle, the song of birds way up in the can-

opy, the distant rush of water, the occasional crack of a stick as

some hiker or deer moved before it thought.

Light slanted through the arching trees just as it had when she

was a girl, and if leaves and moss covered the split-oak rails of

the tiny bridges over which her car rattled, that only made the

park quieter, wilder-seeming. The tension ache that had ridden

her shoulders since college had already subsided. She was home.

Something stirred behind the barriers she had set up between her

and memory. Oh, she had been right as a child to love this forest.

Maybe she could recapture even a crumb of the old love, the old

freedom from before she started to push herself.

Because she had been right about a lot of things, she had come

home to see if she had been right about the main things, too. The

serious, sturdy, and curious girl had become a serious, sturdy,

and curious woman—and a shadowed one. In recent months,

though, she had grown weary of shadows. She had been troubled

by dreams, fragments of memories—the "Stranger" who had ex-

posed himself to her and whom she had driven off by a combi-

nation of luck and guts that made Martha, fully grown, break

into a cold sweat; the cave by the water; even flashes of some-

thing large, something furry. A Jungian could have published a

book on that.

Fragmentary memories returning—had she really been abused,

and were the memories only now coming back to her? They

came back when you were strong enough to face them. That

would mean she had even a greater fear to face: had the people

who loved her most tied to her?

She knew the child Marty's promise for joy had not been ful-

filled in the woman she had become. But all her life, at least, she

had prided herself on her honesty. What if everything she had

grown up to accomplish had been based upon a lie?

That was enough to wake her at 4:00 a.m. But the student and

the psychologist in her knew she had to find out—and there was

still that damnable honesty of hers.

It was not, and had never been, a particularly popular trait. Her

old neighbors here? "You turned out good; leave well enough

alone, not that you ever could." Or "that silly mess? I'm sur-

prised you still remember. Oh, well, I suppose you would."

That kindly fog might be adequate for them, but not for her.

308 Sue an Snwartz

She didn't remember, at least not clearly enough. That was the

problem. They didn't understand. But then, they never had.

As she drove deeper into the park, the reassurance she had al-

ways felt in the ancient wood reached out to her. A rabbit dashed

across the road, and she slowed, just in case.

Another turn. Even thirty years later, Slippery Rock was famil-

iar to her: the blackened wood of the old pavilion, the musty fire-

place, even the reek of sulfur water from the pump.

Beyond shone the pool, serene at the shore, but sparkling

higher up, where water still poured over the tumbled rocks,

where, please God, it would pour forever. She parked and locked

the car and headed for the rocks. Her eyes traced their shapes,

trying to recall the cave in which, thirty years ago, she had hid-

den from what, even now, she called the Stranger.

Was she really going to climb the waterfall again? She was

older now, much older. Her tolerance for the squishy and slimy

was way down; and if she didn't get tetanus from something on

the rocks, she'd probably get hepatitis from the water. And what

if another Stranger had made the cave his lair?