The Forest's Son (4 page)

And then there are the moves. Vance sometimes talks about one of the places they’ve lived: a tiny house in New York, he said, where it snowed a lot in the winter and his mother cried all the time because she couldn't grow things for long periods because of the short growing season. But it didn’t seem like they’d lived there long, and they’d left when he was a teenager. He had no more memories of the place than if it were a mere blip in his life. How many other places had they lived? How much had they moved around?

Too many pieces, and nowhere to put them. Donovan has always been the kind of girl who works off the picture on the box: find the pieces of the pink flower or the yellow butterfly, and the background will fill in as you work. Here, there's no picture, nothing to work from, and no hope of filling in the rest when nothing is coming clear.

Still, she keeps pushing the pieces around and around in her head. She needs the box, both figuratively and literally. She needs to find out what's in Vance's closet.

6: Inertia

Grace moves past Donovan, one task ticked off in her mind. Donovan will have money to fix her car, and Grace won't have to worry about her son and Donovan’s safety when they’re driving around in it. She wants to talk to the girl more, but she can feel the noise surrounding her. Too many times he has forgotten her. Too many questions are left unanswered, and the noise grows bigger until it takes up the whole room.

There's no space for Grace in the room at all, so she keeps walking until she is in the room beyond and then out the front door. Once outside, she can hear the voices of the trees, and surrounded by her mother, she feels like she can breathe again.

All this time, and she's still not used to being inside houses, especially not with people other than Jakub. Their thoughts and emotions fill up the space so quickly and then everything gets trapped inside. No wonder they hurry from place to place, from box to box. They must always feel crowded no matter which box they go into. They have forgotten all about the mother with their boxes and their errands and their jobs, doing so much of not much at all.

Even her skills are considered “strange
”
and “alternative.” They allow people to put poisons into themselves in attempts to cure diseases they cause in the first place with other poisons and pass to each other because they're too close to each other in the tiny boxes. Using what the mother provides for good health and easing pain and healing injuries and illnesses is “odd
”
and left to “crazies” and “hippies.”

She wonders what most of them who laugh at what she knows and does for a “living
”
would say if they knew her true age, or knew the full extent of what she can do. Run, most likely. Everything has to be explained by science here: pictures and proofs and tubes and things you can touch and see and smell. Yet they argue about gods and ignore the presence of the mother that's evident every time they walk outside: in the warmth of the sun on their skin or the coolness of the rain dripping down the open neck of a jacket. They drive in cars and mow grass with machines and ignore what's right in front of them the whole time.

Even thinking about it makes her want to yank the dress off again and head into the woods, to imagine for even a few minutes that she is back with her sisters and not pretending to be one of the box dwellers with their machines and their poisons. Were it not for her son, she would leave here now and beg them to forgive her, to accept her back, to promise she'd never do it again.

Oh, but she would.

She would do it a thousand — a thousand thousand — times again to save her son. It was worth everything, even living in these boxes, to keep him. And soon, he will be fully mature and he will be able to make decisions with her, including what to do about the girl.

Logic says they should leave now, before Donovan can ask any more questions. Find another place to live, somewhere no one will know them. Maybe somewhere even more remote where they could live off the land and not interact with as many people. She lets her mind wander, forgetting her son is inside. That Donovan has so many questions.

Until she feels it. She looks around, seeing how far she has wandered from the house and begins running. She knows it's too late. What's been seen cannot be unseen, and she cannot ask the girl to do things against her will. Without a stronger desire to protect than to seek answers, she will never allow it. She has seen, and she will remember.

Grace runs back to the house anyway.

~

Bożena slips out after dark has fallen. She keeps her mind carefully full: woods, darkness, trees, the sounds of the animals native to the forest, her full bladder. She thinks these same thoughts constantly until she is out of their range, until she is at the edges of the forest and pulling on clothing and getting into a car.

Grażyna isn’t the only sister who can break rules.

The car is dark blue, and she smells the leather of the seats, the tang of the tobacco of his cigarettes, the spicy scent of his cologne. She runs her fingers through his hair when he leans forward to kiss her once she’s in the car, and she can smell the sharp bite of alcohol from the things he puts in his hair.

He should be dead.

He turns up the radio, and she hears the unfamiliar sounds of pop music. She remembers when the radios first appeared in cars, then the transition from traditional music to things that sounded more
angielskie
played on the radios. She looks back at him, watching his deft hands flip a cigarette free of its pack then light it. In the flare of the lighter, she sees his pale blue eyes, his black hair, the telltale pink flush on his pale skin that tells her he is as aroused as she is.

If her sisters knew she’d seen where he lived at all, they’d view her in the same light as Grażyna: a traitor. But he is an addiction she can’t seem to break herself of, and she must be the same for him, because he asks no questions. If he wonders why he picks her up on the edge of the forest instead of at a flat or workplace, he never voices the questions. He prearranges times and dates when he comes to pick her up, and they drive back to his flat.

Sometimes they go to a restaurant first, but nights like tonight, when he’s practically vibrating with need, it’s all about one thing.

The car stops suddenly, before she even realizes they’ve arrived. He opens her door with a flourish and takes her hand to help her from the car. She smiles, knowing what will come next, and he does not disappoint. He presses her against the car and kisses his way from her jaw to her collarbone. She writhes against him, wishing humans weren’t so predictable. She’d love for him to take her on the floor of the parking garage, as if they were home in her forest. Instead, their foreplay will begin here, then pause, continue in the elevator, and pause again while they make their way down the corridor to his apartment.

His teeth graze her neck, while his hands grope at the back of her dress. They won’t make it past his front door, she knows — not tonight.

And then she’s naked and he’s holding her up against his front door. She sighs and moans a name she is afraid to so much as think, lest her sisters hear even a whisper of what she does.

“Tadeusz.”

7: Chaos

Vance needs to check his mother's invoicing. No matter how many times he's shown her how the system works, she does something to it every time, and he goes in at least weekly to fix things. Any less often and it takes him hours to straighten things out instead of a few minutes.

He asks Donovan if she wants to keep him company at his mother's tiny desk in the room that would have been a formal living room for anyone else living here, but she declines, saying she has some reading she wants to start on, and would he mind if she reads in his room in case he needs to talk to his mother when she comes back in.

He's laughing under his breath at his mother's usual mess of the invoicing — again, why he remembers this when he can’t remember other things
—
when the front door slams open. Running. His mother is running. She doesn't run. She saunters. She floats. She strolls. She's never even gotten up to a fast walk that he can remember.

Or can he?

His heart pounds as a dull ache moves in behind his eyes.

“No time! Just run. Run!”

Is the moment real or imagined? A dream? It's a snippet of something that feels all too familiar. His mother? They are running? But where from? Where to? And why? He has no time to wonder though, because she’s already giving him orders:

“Upstairs,
”
she says, and he follows her up the wooden stairs, his long legs taking them two at a time, realizing his mother’s strides are exactly in sync with his. They reach his bedroom door at almost the same moment, and find Donovan, not on his bed reading, but sitting in the middle of his floor in front of a large cardboard box.

“Would either of you mind telling me exactly what the hell this is?
”
Donovan asks. “It looks like some kind of medieval torture device.”

She pushes the box along the floor toward the two of them, and Vance takes a few hesitant steps forward. His mother doesn’t move from the doorway. Inside the cardboard box Donovan had been looking at is another one: strange and wooden and connected to two handle-type objects that look almost like martial arts weapons. Nunchuku, he thinks they are called. Along with them are two strange little pads, a mess of wires, and a few unopened packs of nine-volt batteries.

Alongside the box and strange equipment is a faux-velvet bag in a bright shade of violet. It appears to be newer than the rest of the items in the box, and there’s embroidery that suggests it may have once held a bottle of alcohol.

None of it looks familiar.

Without waiting for him, Donovan takes hold of the purple bag, loosening the gold drawstring and dumping the contents onto the floor. Zipper-locked plastic baggies fall out, each containing blister packs of white tablets.

“Drugs? I guess that explains a lot. What about the rest of this?
”
Donovan asks.

He shrugs, but his mother takes a step forward.

“Maybe this is something you should leave alone,
”
she says to Donovan.

"Leave alone?" Donovan asks. “Leave alone? This is a 100-year-old
electroshock
machine. The original instructions are still in here, Grace. And there are batteries. This is in your son's closet, and that doesn't concern you?”

She turns to Vance. “Is this what makes you forget everything? Are you actually doing this to yourself?
”

Her eyes are round and brimming with tears, the anger in her voice diminished by the all-too-obvious hurt.

“Did you know about this?
”
She turns her attention back to his mother. “Is that why you aren't at all concerned? Why you tell me to 'leave it alone' without so much as batting an eye?”

Grace narrows her eyes. “That medication isn't natural. It comes with side effects of respiratory depression. Did you think I would let things happen in my own house that would risk his life and not keep watch over him? He is more important than my own life.”

His mother's words should shock him, but they don't. There’s a familiarity to them. He knows he's heard them before, in another version. Another life. The rest of the scene — with Donovan, with his mother — has taken on a completely surreal aspect. He's no more than an observer now, watching them as if through frosted glass.

“So you know he’s been doing this? What do the drugs do?
”
Donovan asks.

"They are a combination of things. You'd call them a 'downer' I think, with added benefits of amnesia."

His mother is so matter-of-fact. She isn't surprised about the contents of the box, and it sounds like she's been prepared for Donovan's questions for a long time.

“And then he shocks himself with this, this … contraption?”

“Yes.”

“That's barbaric.”

“Yes, but necessary.”

They discuss him, their words floating over and around him. He's no longer all the way here. He’s a stone in the stream of unfolding events that may have even been predestined from the moment he befriended the strange Goth girl back in high school.

His mother's eyes are more clear and focused than he’s ever seen them. The ethereal image has been replaced by that of a warrior — no, a mother bear protecting her cub. There is more to her than he thinks anyone has ever seen.

“The question is, Donovan, why do you seek these answers now? You have been friends with my son for years. You have tolerated more than many would, and indeed, have. You have suffered greatly for your trouble, and I do not underestimate the reasons behind that.”

He blinks, listening for a hidden meaning tangled in the words, but she continues on.

:You now have to decide how much more you can live with. You have seen this much, but it is time for you to leave. Go home. Go to sleep. And decide whether you can tolerate knowing more. Because I can assure you, it gets much, much worse from here.

“I will not fault you if you choose to run. If I were in your shoes and had the option, that might be my choice as well. And I promise you, once my son remembers all, I do not think he will fault you either, if that is your choice.”