The Yellow Wood Read online

  ChiZine Publications

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Also Available from ChiZine Publications

  DEDICATION

  For John Kubachko, my father, who knew what should be done in the world but couldn’t do it himself, so gave it to me to do. Now, I’m grateful.

  And, always, for Steve.

  Prologue

  Through the yellow wood where she has not been for thirty years, my daughter Alexandra is coming to me. From the yellow-grey stillness of my house, the house she grew up in and fled to live her own life—as if there ever has been such a thing—I hear her at the junction of the path she took to escape from me and the path I took a long time ago to protect myself. Neither of us made the wrong choice. Neither of our choices was entirely effective.

  My heart beats in my throat, pulse a bit thready, rhythm slightly irregular. I cannot claim that the unreliability of the pumping of blood through my body is a result of either her absence or her imminence. I have been aware of it to one degree or another most of my life, and in old age it has become increasingly noticeable. But now, waiting for the daughter who could be thought of as both scion and prodigal, I indulge myself in a brief fancy that her hands are choking me, her wilfulness breaking my heart.

  There was a time when she hated me. She thought she hid that from me. There was a time when she adored me, and we both revelled. Of all my children, this one has always stirred me most, with love, with rage and fear, with envy and disappointment. With hope.

  I can’t believe I’m doing this. At forty-fucking-nine years old, you’d think I’d be able to say no to my father. I don’t have time for this. It’s busy at work. Martin and the kids need me at home. I have better things to do than tramp through these woods. My knees and ankles hurt, and I’m short of breath; just being here makes me feel physically vulnerable, let alone all the emotional crap.

  A branch slaps me across the neck and I break it off savagely. Cobwebs make my arms and lips sticky. Imagining the spiders, imagining the snakes and who knows what other creepy and, to one degree or another, dangerous animals I know must live in here, I’m afraid, and that pisses me off.

  My sister and brothers and I spent many an hour playing in these woods, forts and stick horses and hide-and-seek and just wandering, just absorbing. I’d never let my kids be gone all day like that with no adult supervision, and I don’t subscribe to the easy popular wisdom that the world is any more dangerous for kids now than it used to be. The dangers change with the times, that’s all. Because nobody ever got seriously hurt in the woods, or in the creek where we swam every day in the summer with no thought of a lifeguard, those are happy and expansive childhood memories. They could just as easily be traumatic. We were lucky.

  I’m not feeling especially lucky now. I’m also not feeling safe. Saying no to my father meant emancipation for me, meant I wouldn’t be swallowed up by him after all. I would have a life of my own. My adolescence was verbally turbulent—we had some shouting matches, and more than a few mutual days-long pouts—but the stakes were too high for me to openly rebel. That’s why I cut off all contact for most of my adult life.

  All those years, I got his messages. Most of the time it was through my siblings, but sometimes guilt or an infuriating longing would just explode in my mind, for no good reason. I trained myself not to respond, which wasn’t easy, which cost me, but was necessary for my own survival. So, here and now, will I survive this?

  He’s old, and not well. I’m told he needs me. And I need something from him, though I hate to admit it. Approval, still? Release? A message of some sort, a gift? It makes me crazy to need anything from him.

  My sister and brothers keep telling me he won’t live much longer. Bullshit. Alexander Kove will live for fucking ever.

  Rustling off to my right draws my attention to a zigzag uplifting of the leaf mulch, a tiny, purposeful, energetic motion of which only the effect is visible. A vole, no doubt. Nothing sinister. Nothing especially meaningful. It wouldn’t take much to chase it down and squash it under the pitiable layers of decomposing organic matter it probably thinks are protecting it. I wouldn’t ever have to acknowledge what it had been. I won’t do that, of course, but it wouldn’t take much. It wouldn’t take much on the part of the victim, either. I can see myself in either role.

  My father wants to see me. Like a good little girl, I’m obeying. Yes, Daddy. I’m coming, Daddy. Jump, you say? Sure, Daddy, how high? The son of a bitch is back inside my head, pulling at me, guiding me through this thin little forest that, in my memory at least, is always one shade or another of yellow. Now it’s chartreuse, one of the colours of my dance costume when I was five. Cerise and chartreuse. I loved the words, proof that Daddy was already influencing me, or I was born with a nature like his. Chartreuse, a Day-Glo yellow-green, especially where the sun pops through.

  I remember these woods in my skin. I remember this path, the path I took, in the blood coursing through my body, forking and forking into ever-smaller vessels that all serve the same aortal core, the same four chambers, the same pulse. I grew up with my father’s voice in my head, my father’s will on me in one form or another. Now, though I vowed I never would, I’m going back. Does that mean I’m stronger now, or succumbing? I’ve never loved or hated anybody the way I’ve loved and hated him.

  What if I die here? It could happen. Death can come anywhere, at any time. What if I never see Martin and the kids again? What if I never leave these woods?

  My three sons and my other daughter were easy children to raise. Even after Eva Marie left—not for parts unknown but for parts so well known as to constitute a cliché—to seek her destiny, which she did in fact find, since whatever we end up finding is by definition our destiny. They all live near enough to satisfy my fatherly and grandfatherly urges, and even if they were not family I might at times enjoy the company of most of them.

  But this, this is the one.

  My ankle turns and I catch myself on a branch that I might have known won’t hold my weight, bends and breaks, takes me down. Disproportionately enraged, I curse the two pounds a year I’ve gained since I left here, the woods and the dampness and my father and my own weakness. He’s doing it again. I’m allowing him to do it again. He’s taking over my life. He’s insinuating himself into my thoughts. It’s taken me all my life to get rid of him, and he’s back before I’m even in his physical presence.

  He’s summoning me. And here I am, Daddy’s little girl, wizard’s familiar, a snake or an eagle or a panther on a leash.

  Getting up isn’t easy. By the time it’s accomplished, I’m trembling and panting. Brushing off my jeans, I see tiny blue flowers in the crevices of roots and rocks, early summer flowers I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t fallen, if I hadn’t entered these woods in the first place. Yeah, well, fuck you.

  Here’s where the two paths split, or come together, depending on your point of view. The girl who stood at this intersection thirty years ago had already decided which way to go but needed to mark and savour and come to terms with the moment.

  The woman I am now strides past without a pause. Okay, Daddy, Alexander fucking Kove,
old man, wizard, you who gave me life and could take it away, you to whom I owe everything and nothing, you from whom long ago I could free myself only by breaking my own heart. I’m ready to take you on, once and for all. Here I come.

  She is named after me—her mother’s idea. From my other children I have heard she calls herself Sandi now, so few would guess her name is Alexandra. But it is.

  I close my eyes and see her at the place where the paths diverge—or converge, depending on one’s perspective. When she was learning the poem, she kept saying, “converge,” “two roads converged in a yellow wood,” because she recognized that word first. I would correct her. She would pout or argue or squirm to get up. I was patient, though sometimes I despaired. She finally got it right.

  Her slight hesitation would not be perceptible to anyone but me, waiting here for her. She, of course, thinks she did not pause at all, just strides past the intersection toward this long, low yellow house where she grew up and that she left behind. And in fact I do admire her stride. She is strong, massive; she has gained a great deal of weight since I saw her last, and it will not be easy for me to adjust to having a large child. She has power she knows about and power she has not yet realized. She thinks she is ready to take me on, and in my estimation she is correct, which is why I dared call her to me now.

  Feeling her approach, I force myself to stay in my chair in order to hoard my paltry energy until the last possible moment, so I can be on my feet, in the doorway, reasonably steady and clear when she gets here. I can scarcely breathe. After thirty years, my daughter Alexandra is only minutes away.

  After thirty years, I’m only minutes away. The most incredible thing is how natural it feels—like dying, like being born—to be making my way along the rough and narrow path through the yellow woods as if I’d been doing it every day of my life, roots heaved underfoot and cobwebby branches in my face, up that last hill that always was a bitch. Coming up on the long, low yellow house, I find it smaller than I remember because, in numerous ways, I’m so much larger.

  “He wants to see you, Sandi.”

  “What for?”

  “He wants to see you. The rest of us are a dime a dozen, nothing special, but you . . . you’re the one he wants to see.”

  “Well, you know what, Em? I don’t want to see him. I’ve got a life. Husband, kids, job, you know?”

  “Just get your ass back here, okay? So he’ll shut up about it. He’s not going to be able to live alone much longer, out there in the middle of nowhere. He’s not going to be with us much longer.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Sandi, for Chrissake. You can spare a few days from your busy life to visit your father. He raised us, remember? You owe him.”

  But it wasn’t Emily’s words that got me here. It was his. His words in my head, where they’ve always been. His will. His design.

  As she reaches the edge of the clearing, her heartbeat fills my ears. Branches snap. The odour of decomposing yellow-leaf mulch rises from under her feet. Voles burrow wildly underneath, making labyrinths whose purpose is utterly practical, no spiritual or magical or ecological significance at all as far as their creators are aware, only in the perception of the hyper-imaginative human observer. It distresses and gratifies me that she does not appear aware of the snake sweeping from side to side behind her, gliding alongside, sometimes blatantly leading the way.

  The time has come. I struggle up out of my chair, gasping at the pain in my back and the vertigo that almost swirls me to the floor. For just an instant I do not know why I make my way across the room, only that I must. I open the door and carefully step out onto the damp yellow porch. And there she is.

  There he is.

  A tall, heavyset woman with a long stride and a solid presence in the wood, in the world. Though fair-skinned and light-eyed, she has come to look little like either her mother or me, and for just a moment I think: this is not my daughter. Either she is an impostor or I am. Can this be my daughter?

  Grey in yellow light, small and frail and very old, but undeniably my father. My head spins from rage and pulsing love.

  “Alexandra.”

  “Daddy.”

  Chapter 1

  “Daddy’s a bastard!”

  Vaughn and Will hooted in surprise and admiration. Galen, the firstborn, couldn’t completely suppress a grin, but mostly he was horrified. I don’t know where Emily was. She doesn’t figure in this flashback. I wasn’t much more than seven or eight, so maybe she wasn’t old enough yet to be out playing in the woods with us.

  If I was seven, Eva Marie—our mother—had been gone about a year. One yellow Saturday morning she’d gathered us all together—no mean feat in itself—to tell us through sincere and utterly self-referential sobs that she wasn’t a good enough mommy for such wonderful children so she was going away.

  “Away?” I don’t know who said that. It could have been any of us, except Galen, who wouldn’t have asked. “Away where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does Daddy know?”

  “He doesn’t know where I’m going, no.”

  “Does he know you’re leaving us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say it was all right?”

  She did leave us, and not for any reason we could figure out. As far as we’ve ever known, there was no other man, or woman. When we saw her over the years, there were never any other kids, putting the lie to our various theories as to which of us had been so rotten she couldn’t stand it; I have always more or less secretly harboured the conviction that it was Vaughn. Or me.

  She didn’t die, though she may be dead by now, for all I know, may have died before she got away, her car rolling off a cliff (there were no cliffs anywhere nearby, but there should have been) and bursting into flames, her blood and burned flesh coursing through the woods—only one of my many fantasies. She didn’t leave us because she died; she left of what could be called her own free will, though that’s a slippery term. You’d think we’d all be neurotic about people leaving, and maybe my siblings are; my little sister had her share of anxiety for a while. What I’m neurotic about is death. The very illogic of it makes it harder to face, impossible to come to terms with. Maybe I thought I would die when she left.

  Or maybe she’s not responsible for this at all. Practically everybody’s afraid of death. Maybe it’s not her fault that there are times when I’m nearly incapacitated by it, nearly overcome. But pinning it on her has helped, and I see no reason to stop now.

  She didn’t seem crazy. She didn’t seem like a bad person. She also didn’t seem like a mother. She just left. Nobody else ever did, except me, and even doing that didn’t tell me why she did. She had five kids. She just left us and never came back. That’s pretty close to unforgivable. For the ones left, it’s pretty close to dying.

  It’s also a clear event, one whose dimensions I’ve been able to get my mind around. I understand why I’ve always felt betrayed by her—because, in fact, she betrayed us. Why I’ve felt betrayed by our father—who was responsible, who raised us, who gave us more than any other parent I’ve ever heard of and yet harmed us in some mysterious and precious and vital way—has been harder to grasp and therefore harder to forgive.

  “Daddy’s a son of a bitch!” I was hollering, but the woods absorbed it all, allowing no echoes. If somebody had been far enough away to hear only the singsong without the words, I might have been calling, “Olly olly oxen free!”

  Galen snorted. “You in trouble again?”

  Our games were often elaborate, ongoing constructs, but that day I think we were just wandering in the woods, my big brothers and I. “No TV for a week. And I have to do extra chores.”

  “What’d you do this time?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Little Miss Innocent.”

  “Didn’t do her homework,” Will or Vaughn was happy to supply.


  The real reason I was in trouble was that I wouldn’t accept what he’d decided it was time for him to give me. The gift. One of his cursed gifts.

  I should never have told him about the girl in school everybody made fun of. Not that he wouldn’t have known anyway; a lot of seven-year-olds believe their parents know everything, but Daddy really did. Still does. He might not have fixated on her though, if I hadn’t brought her to his attention. The only way I was ever able to stop doing that, and then not completely, was, eleven years later, to go away and stay away.

  “There’s this girl in school. She talks funny.”

  “Penny Wyckoff.”

  “You know her?”

  “You know her, Alexandra.”

  I must have mentioned her at some time or other. “She talks funny. She walks funny, too.” I demonstrated Penny’s lurching gait and mush-mouthed diction, making myself laugh.

  “Alexandra, pay attention. You are not to mock her.”

  “Huh?”

  “You may not make fun of her. Do you understand me?”

  “Everybody makes fun of her. She doesn’t mind.”

  “You will be the one who does not. You will be her friend.”

  “No, Daddy! Then they’ll make fun of me.”

  “Alexandra. Tomorrow I want you to ask Penny to play with you. The Kove family will bring good into this world.”

  “No, I don’t want to!”

  “From now on, you will play with her at recess and eat lunch with her and sit with her on the bus.”

  Desperately: “I won’t laugh at her anymore, okay? I just won’t laugh at her!”

  “Not adding to the bad things in the world is not enough for us. We will add to the good.”

  The “we” stirred me, even as I was infuriated by it. Daddy never reached out to anybody. Loving us was his limit, and even with us his love was fierce, inward, smouldering, about as far as you could get from expansive; I’d never seen him go out of his way to be actively kind. He was asking—ordering; compelling—me to do something he wouldn’t do himself.