The Forest Read online

  There is a strange sound. A tearing, ripping, banging. Daddy’s door opens. Hands – they must belong to the person who was in the road – reach in. Something clicks and Daddy suddenly falls to the floor/roof of the car. The hands drag him out.

  Sammy is happy. It is getting hot. The car is on fire. On fire, but Daddy is safe.

  “Mommy,” he whispers. His voice is low. He feels spinny. Has he finally started moving himself? Is he no longer the center of the universe? No matter. “Get Mommy.”

  He cannot tell anymore if the voice he makes is inside his head or outside. But the stranger’s hands clunk-thunk-tunk the door open on Mommy’s side as well. They reach in. They make her fall to the roof/floor. They drag her out.

  During it all, dark foggy things gather at Sammy’s eyes. They float at the sides of what he sees, then they reach into the center of what he sees. Everything gets darker. But at the same time, everything gets brighter. Hotter.

  Is the car going to blow up?

  Before he can answer himself, he hears someone – Daddy? Mommy? – shrieking. “No, no, NOOOOOOO!”

  6

  (When Tricia Had Grown)

  Tricia knew she had been selfish. She knew they both had. That was one of the worst parts of grief: it shrank your world. It took people that had once thought of themselves as part of everyone around them, and made them hurt so bad that they couldn’t think of anyone else.

  Grief isolated you. It cut you off, then cut you apart, and if you weren’t careful, the most important parts of you just died.

  She didn’t know if that had happened yet. Certainly it had started. It started when Sammy died.

  Maybe even before that. Maybe in the forest. Yes. That was it. The grief started with the forest. It ebbed and flowed, and for a while it was so small and silent she thought it was gone. Then Sammy…

  Tricia looked at Alex. He was holding the steering wheel of the car, but hadn’t moved since he got in. The keys weren’t even in the ignition, but she wondered if he was driving just the same. Driving down that road beside the forest, the last place they ever saw –

  No. Don’t.

  She wanted to do something. Her world was so small. How could she do anything in a place so tiny she felt like she couldn’t even move a finger?

  But she did. Somehow she moved her hand, and her arm. Somehow she laid her hand on Alex’s shoulder, and her world got a little bigger. Somehow she spoke. She said, “It wasn’t your fault,” and the world got bigger still. Hardly large, but at least she felt like she could take a breath.

  That was the secret: to include someone else. Not to cut them off in your grief, but to hold them close. To let them share the grief with you, and make a small, isolated world of sorrow into something bigger and less lonely.

  Easy to think. Harder to do.

  Alex blinked. He didn’t look away from the invisible road Tricia was sure he still traveled even a decade after he was last there.

  Why did Sammy’s little friend have to have a birthday party? Why did we have to go? Why did we have to drive past the forest to get there?

  She thought all of these things, and her world contracted again. Her jaw tightened, then she forced herself to relax as she said again, “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Alex shook his head. The movement was slow, taking forever to move from side to side and back again while his eyes remained fixed ever forward. Forward, but looking back just the same.

  “He just appeared,” Alex said. “There wasn’t anything, I swear, and then there was this fog and…” His breath hitched. “He wasn’t there, Trish.”

  Trish.

  Alex was the only one who had ever called her by that diminutive. To everyone else she was Tricia. She realized this was an exclusive club to which only her husband belonged – The Official Trish Fan Club. No whiners allowed.

  Her world got a bit bigger again.

  “I couldn’t get to him, Trish. I couldn’t stop what happened.”

  She suddenly felt tired. Her hand dropped from his shoulder. Her world was small again. “Are we over?” she said. Strange words. Most people would have asked about a divorce. But over was the only way to describe what was happening to her world. How could that world – a world that had always been “we” and “us” – have disappeared?

  “I don’t want us to be over,” Alex said. Tears glinted at the corners of his eyes.

  After a moment, Tricia sensed he would say no more and said, “We should get moving.”

  “Home?” Alex asked. “Or do you want me to take you back to your apartment?”

  She blanched. The separation was new, and though her world was so small breathing was near impossible, she had discovered that grief had a strange power over time and space. No one had told her about it in grad school, when she was learning about the individual bits of matter floating in a void. Fermions, bosons, gluons. Charginos, neutralinos. Tachyons and mirror particles.

  No one ever talked about “grief.” But that was perhaps the strongest power she had ever encountered, and it could compress space and rend time with the best of them.

  “Trish?” said Alex. He was looking at her now.

  “It will all be all right in the end.” She didn’t know where the words came from. Some movie, perhaps, or one of the dumb songs the grad students blasted at tailgate parties. She laughed a bit. The world got a bit bigger.

  Laughter did that, even when it was the painful kind of laughter. The pain remained, but it wasn’t all that existed.

  She shook her head. “Do you think it could be true? Can this – can we – be all right in the end?”

  Alex’s eyes went forward again. Grief had the power to shift time, space, even vision – basic photonic paths. She knew, because the light particles hitting his eyes weren’t reflected off the parking lot outside Coleman’s office. He was seeing the road in the past. The day they lost their child.

  “I want to,” he finally said. “I want to go back there.”

  She didn’t have to ask where “there” was. Cold dread twisted its way up her spine.

  But also, perhaps, something warmer. Something that wasn’t hope… but might grow to be hope someday. A hope for hope, if nothing else.

  “Do you want to try it?” Alex asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. We won’t find Sam, and we’ll probably come back with nothing new to remember. Just the same gap, around the same forest. The same place –” She cut off what she would have said.

  But grief, which could bend time and space, had no trouble at all twisting sound and minds. So she heard the words unsaid, and knew Alex did, too.

  “We won’t find Sammy there, either.”

  7

  Revelation

  (When All Has Become)

  They drove. Neither had a plan, really. Just to drive, and maybe – maybe – to see.

  Both of them were smart. They had both learned about things so difficult and profound that they left the average person openmouthed and incredulous. Most people they talked to about their jobs said, “Are those words even real? Or are you making stuff up?”

  So yes, those two people driving that one road were very smart.

  But smart people can be incredibly stupid, you see. Smart people think they are smart enough to know and to understand a great deal of their world. But it is only the extraordinarily smart, the rarest of geniuses, who grow smart enough to know how unalterably stupid they still are.

  The man and the woman who drove to the place they had been counseled to go were very smart. So they were very stupid. They thought they knew much, and so were blind not only to what they didn’t know, but all the things they didn’t even know that they didn’t know.

  (If you’re smart enough, you’ll understand that last. Temporal lobe to tips of toes, brain to balls. If not, nothing I can do will help you get it. Just leave it alone and hope you wise up someday.)

  They drove into the town. They drove past the sign they had seen thousands or tens of thousands
of times. It still said, “Welcome to Sunrise: Where Every Day Begins!” And below it, in smaller letters: “Pop. 2067.”

  The man in the car wondered, as he always did, how they could put the population count in there, given that it had to change constantly. Especially since the paint had read “Pop. 2067” every day of his life. According to the sign, not only did Every Day Begin in Sunrise, but every day would have to be exactly the same, and in that event it should have said, “Welcome to Sunrise: No Births No Deaths No Nothing.”

  (Maybe the sign was stupid. Which would make the sign very smart, wouldn’t it?)

  The woman didn’t notice the number. She just noticed the bits of dust on the dashboard of the car, which she had been staring at since they left Coleman’s office. It wasn’t too far a drive – just a few hours – but they hadn’t been back to this spot since they lost Sammy. They stayed in the general area, because neither of them wanted to leave this place where they had lost so much of themselves. But they didn’t want to see it, either.

  They hoped for healing. They hoped for a long time. Then hope died, in bits and pieces. And now Dr. Coleman (even saying that name confuses me sometimes, for reasons I may choose to explain later, or maybe not, or maybe I’ll choose to do it after I don’t choose to do it because so much is changeable) had found an ember of hope. He fanned it just a bit, even if it was still so small that neither the man nor the woman could see or sense it in their hearts.

  But it was there. It made Alex (if that’s the right name; sometimes it’s hard to remember) drive to Sunrise. It made Tricia (if that’s her name; memory can be a funny thing) not object, even though most of her wished they were anywhere but here.

  Hope: a powerful, invisible force. Enough to fight off ghosts and wraiths and monsters and even (worst of all!) people?

  Perhaps.

  So hope pushed them through their hometown of Sunrise (“Where Every Day Begins!”) and made them continue on to the strange sister town of Sundown, which had its own sign, its own unchanging number, and its own stupid-smart slogan.

  Thinking about it, I revise my earlier statement. They may have driven past that sign more than tens of thousands of times. Perhaps it was millions or even billions of times. Maybe more – memory twists numbers as easily as anything else.

  And there’s another reason I can’t be sure of the number: because I am that smart. I have learned so much that I am no longer sure of anything at all, which means I can learn everything I wish and it will all be new.

  I’m bragging, I know. And rambling to boot. But as the storyteller, I can tell the story how I wish. And here are the most important things to remember from here on in.

  First: I am very smart.

  Maybe the smartest ever.

  Second: the story is mine.

  I will tell it how I wish, even though it spins out of my control whenever it wishes.

  Third: neither of the people in the car believed in ghosts.

  Because they were just smart enough to be stupid.

  TWO:

  WELCOME TO SUNDOWN

  8

  (When Tricia Was Young)

  Tricia used to pretend to pay attention to the teacher. She’d prop up the class textbook in front of whatever other textbook she was actually reading and pretend to follow along.

  The teacher knew, of course. But after calling on Tricia for a solid week – when he wasn’t calling on Alex for the same reasons – and hearing nothing but correct answers given in the offhanded way that both she and Alex used when they thought their time was being wasted, the teacher gave up.

  After awhile, Tricia abandoned even the fiction of following along. She would sit down, get whatever book she was devouring that day out of her bag, and tune out the world. She did continue to listen with about two percent of her brain, of course. She had learned early that every so often an uppity teacher would try to catch her with her guard down. Those who didn’t hear the right answer immediately after whatever random question they asked were the most likely to take her book away.

  She always got it back, eventually, and went right back to reading. But losing the book – and inevitably dealing with angry looks from students who were already pissed about what she and Alex did to the grading curve – was a pain.

  Alex was nicer. He kept up the pretense. Even now, he was nodding every once in a while even though his tatty copy of Peter Pan was occupying twenty times more of his brain than the teacher’s ramblings.

  Alex was never caught off guard, any more than Tricia was. He knew the answers, and was the only one who understood her when she complained about how dumb the teachers could be.

  They never complained about how dumb the other students were. That was an unwritten rule. Sometimes the best way to get things done was to speak up and speak loud. Other times, the best way to get what you wanted, more or less, was to shut up and pretend as best you could that you were just like everyone else.

  High school belonged firmly in the latter category.

  High school itself was a strange thing into which she and Alex had been shoved. Neither belonged here – they should have been taking classes at the local community college, at the very least – but their parents had both come independently to the conclusion that high school was a necessary experience. It was one of the only things Tricia could think that they had ever agreed on, other than that their children should have as little contact with each other as possible.

  Tricia lived with her father, Alex with his mother. Something had happened between their parents years ago, so even though she and Alex lived next door to each other, their parents never spoke; couldn’t stand each other.

  She asked her dad about it once and got a look that was set to -274 degrees Celsius and falling fast.

  When Tricia asked her dad why she (and, implicitly, Alex) had to go to high school rather than just do stuff that would actually teach them something, she had been favored with a look that was only -273 degrees Celsius. Positively balmy compared to that other question about why Dad and Alex’s mom refused to even look at each other when they crossed paths at the corner store.

  But no answer other than that.

  Once, on one of the nights he screamed in his sleep, Dad got drunk. He slurred, “I wish I’d never done what I did,” and that was the closest she ever got to an answer to any of the Big Questions. Alex reported the same results when they compared notes periodically.

  So… the state of enforced ignorance known as “high school.” Talking about the teachers’ stupidity. Not talking about the stupidity of the other students. Always knowing the right answers, and never being taken by surprise.

  “… what do you think, Alex?”

  The math teacher – whose name, uproariously, was Mr. Angle – looked at Alex, who dutifully looked up, unfazed, and said, “Depends.”

  Mr. Angle smirked. “Caught ya!” that look said. Tricia paid closer attention now, because the guy was kind of a tool and his pants were far too small to house such an epic butt, so seeing him fall on that butt might be amusing.

  “Are you talking about rotational speed, or linear?” said Alex.

  “Well, of course –”

  “Because the rotational speed is easy to figure out based on the circumference of the wheel, but the linear speed ranges from the speed of the car at the topmost point to zero at the point it touches the ground. At least in theory. Though the way some people drive, the linear speed on the bottom –”

  A hand shot up and another student yelled, “How can the wheel be going zero when the car is going a hundred miles per hour?”

  A bunch of other students started talking. None of them liked math, but apparently they all liked being confused and then arguing about it.

  Mr. Angle turned to address what had become the bigger problem – a class suddenly too interested in his lesson, or at least in the weeds around the edges of it – and so left Alex alone. Tricia had to respect what Alex had done. It was elegant, fairly kind (all things considered), a
nd had certainly livened up a class where the most exciting thing most of the kids did was count the Gummi Bears some enterprising student had cut in half and managed to stick to the ceiling panels.

  “Good for you,” said a voice. “Though it doesn’t account for the linear speed of the land masses, the earth’s rotation, the turning of the universe, or even whether those things can actually be calculated in reference to singularity points.”

  All voices halted. All eyes turned. Even Tricia looked, and saw Alex looking, too. Something interesting had just been said, which meant something interesting might actually be happening.

  Nope. Not in Sunrise. Pop. 2067 and never counting. “Interesting” has never lived here.

  But she did look, and something interesting did happen.

  The kid who had opened the door was nothing special to look at. He had the color hair that could be either light brown or dark blonde depending on the sunlight, and even at a distance she could tell his physique was similarly blah. A bit shorter than Alex and her, a bit skinnier; but nothing really noteworthy. The embodiment of average.

  Only his eyes were arresting. The color was just as any-color-every-color-no-color boring as the rest of him, but there was no hiding how quick they moved around, searching faces, then corners, then shadows, and then back to the faces. They were the eyes of an animal that was often hunted, but had learned confidence as much as fear. They were the eyes of a survivor, and Tricia knew it, temporal lobe to tips of toes as her dad always said. (Alex said “brain to balls,” which she pretended to be horrified at but secretly thought was hysterical.)

  Either way, the thought behind it was the same, and she knew that Alex would be taking in the details of the new kid, and coming to the same conclusions she had.

  Mr. Angle was walking over to the guy. “Are you –”

  “Sam,” interrupted the newcomer.

  “All right, Mr. Jones,” said Mr. Angle. He gestured for the new kid to follow him, then started walking across the classroom. He was headed toward Tricia and Alex – situated in the back corner so that hopefully (for Mr. Angle) no one would ever notice they were there or how easily they flouted his authority.