The Forest's Son (5 page)

Donovan opens her mouth, an automatic reflex. She will argue, and fight, as she has always done for him. She's his best friend, his companion, and no matter how difficult things may get, she'll never leave him.

Only this time — maybe because she has seen a side of his mother she didn't know existed, or maybe because of the evidence that he doesn't have a psychological problem, but rather, a self-administered problem that causes him to forget everything about her, that he does it intentionally each time — she stands and gathers her things.

Her gait is a stutter and he wonders if it’s her brain and her heart fighting for control of her body. But before she leaves, she stops in front of his mother. Without looking at him, she bows to Grace, an apparent instinctual response, before clattering down the stairs, out the door, and maybe out of his life.

He can't move, can't think, can't breathe. In just one day, he has come to understand that he depends on her utterly. In not one of his classes did anyone else speak to him. If she doesn't return in the morning to drive him back to campus, he fears he will be left alone, only his mother for companionship.

“You should put that away,
”
she says, nodding her head toward the box, “and think if you are ready yet. I think you have a bit more time to rest, but maybe you rather would get right to it? I will let you think as well.”

She ruffles his hair before she leaves the room, the gesture one of a mother to a small boy. It's something she's probably done hundreds of times, and it bothers him that he can't call up even a glimmer of a memory of that, when other, more trivial things have already seeped back into his memory.

He wants to remember a time when he could crawl into her arms and find comfort and safety. He must have felt that way when he was young, but with his Swiss cheese memory, all he has to go on are the two juxtaposed images today: ethereal earth mother and fierce warrior mother. Which is real? Which has raised him?

He pauses before he picks up the box, listening for his mother's footsteps on the stairs, and he swears she’s speaking in another language, so quietly he can barely hear her. She whispers something that sounds almost like a name, and sounds so familiar he can almost  — almost — place it, but that feeling of connection slips just out of his reach when she finally starts down the stairs.

8: Alone

Donovan has driven nearly halfway home before she lets the tears fall. Things have admittedly been weird since she became friends with Vance, but this is beyond anything anyone could ever have expected. She can't even absorb the scene that took place at his house just now. Could she have been hallucinating?

Until now, life as his friend has consisted of a routine. It’s been strange and uncomfortable, but at least it’s been routine. She’s woken every day hoping to find that one tiny clue that would lead her to a solution to bump the routine off the track and make it stop.

This isn’t exactly what she meant.

Driving becomes impossible, and she pulls over to the side of the road, noting that she's next to one of the cow pastures Vance always jokes about. She sees a few cows grazing, but the usually overpowering smell barely registers because her brain is focused so much on everything else.

Is his name even Vance?

There are no more truths she can still count on. Vance's not-all-there mother may spend most of her time on another plane of existence, but apparently, when it matters, she's more there than may be safe for most human beings, and she's
scary
. And Vance himself isn't some poor kid with a really terrible seizure disorder or psychological issue, like she's thought — or at least contemplated — all these years. Instead, he’s zapping the living hell out of his brain to make himself forget, and his mother has known about it the whole time. And not only has his mother known about it; she’s encouraged it. She’s been part of it. She’s used it to protect their secrets, whatever they may be.

It's going to be impossible to process everything overnight, much less make any kind of decision about what she should do now. A smart person would call in some kind of help, but whom would she call? The police? Is it illegal to administer your own electroshock therapy with some ancient machine? She has so many questions, and none of them are going be answered in the timeframe she needs them answered.

So only one question is left: Can she see herself leaving Vance? When she’s let everything else fall by the wayside, and allowed everyone else to drift out of her life like so much flotsam and jetsam, can she cast him away as well and try to reassemble the broken shards of what she thinks she once had?

There are probably friends who’d be willing to take her back, and she'd been asked out a couple of times before all the guys on campus determined she was “the weird girl
”
who hung out with “the ghost boy
”
who never talked to anyone or seemed to know what was going on. The possibility of a normal life might still be out there for her somewhere.

She knows, though, if she doesn't pick him up in the morning, she’ll spend the rest of her life pondering the what-ifs. She'll wonder what happened to him and what there might have been between them if she'd only gotten into her car and picked him up. She’ll ask herself questions she’ll never get answers to about his past, about where he's really from, about what he plans to do next. She’ll always wonder if what kept them from being
more
would have been resolved with the answers she wants.

With a deep breath, she pulls the car back onto the road and continues home, trying to imagine what her life will be like if she never gets the answers to what she's seen today, if the mystery ends for her right here. She knows this isn't the kind of thing that will turn up in papers or on national news. Whatever is going on with Vance and his mother, they are people who exist off the grid.

If she fails to show in the morning, she has no doubt they’ll simply disappear from her life as if they’d been a dream. She'll never have that odd moment of seeing something and turning to her husband in a house in the suburbs where she lives with a minivan and two cookie-cutter children and saying "Oh, how strange. I knew that family once. I was friends with the son and I drove him to classes back in college."

It can never be that normal for her.

She reaches home and makes a cursory check to make sure her cat has food and water, ignoring her growling stomach and its need for dinner. She goes straight for her bedroom, pulls back the blankets, and curls up in her bed fully dressed. She drags the covers over her head, and clutches a pillow to her chest. Even with the hallway lights still on, with the deep purple sheets, she can fool herself into believing the entire world has gone dark.

She falls asleep quickly, still not entirely decided about what she’s going to do in the morning. Maybe that will come to her in the sweet oblivion of sleep.

9: Fork

One moment's distraction brings a lifetime of ramifications. No one should know that better than Grace, and still she'd forgotten it. She'd never left Donovan and Vance alone in the house together, not entirely, and especially not right after he had forgotten, when she knew the girl would be at her most upset and inquisitive and her son would be at his most fragile and unguarded.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Or was it?

The possibility that maybe she is tired of keeping the secret alone all these years didn't escape her. No one likes to carry a burden alone, and this one is a particularly heavy one, especially for one who was raised to be one of many, not one alone. She is forever a bee cut off from her hive, cast adrift, and she is so very tired.

It makes her angry to think she may have subconsciously set them all up so she could end her loneliness. After all that she has suffered — that her son has suffered — to be so careless as to expose them is unacceptable.

She stands in the middle of the kitchen and stares at the things she has allowed them both to collect over the years they have lived here. How many of them would she want to take if they fled? She has allowed them to become tied to a place and to material objects when her foremost thought has always been to travel light, to be able to move quickly, and to leave no trace.

They will leave a huge blot when they have to flee: a stain that will show evidence of their existence. An even bigger one if Donovan decides she wants no part of this and they leave her behind. This will be one place they won't disappear from easily, because they will leave too much of themselves behind: the people she does business with, those who see her when she goes into town, her son's classmates at the high school and now at the college … but the biggest issue of all will be Donovan.

Neither Vance nor Donovan realize yet that they are in love with each other. Donovan wouldn’t even considering staying around Vance were she not in love with him. And her son — could he love Donovan back in that same way?

He has never been in his right mind long enough to let himself have feelings for her other than those of a best friend. But his heart probably knows the truth, for he does this over and over not to protect the secret, but to protect her, and to allow them to stay here far longer than they ever should have. If all things were different —

Ah, but if all things were different, he would be a girl, or he would not be alive, or Grace would never have been one of the sisters, and he and Donovan would have met and fallen in love and gone to prom and done all the things Grace sees regular people do. By now they may have even tired of each other and moved on to new partners and new feelings.

Instead, he is upstairs, most likely lying on his bed staring at the ceiling and trying to decide whether to come downstairs and ask her questions or to wait for the memories to return once more. Meanwhile, the girl has gone home to determine whether she wants to know the answers to the questions she's been asking herself for years. So much thinking. But their decisions will change everything. Nothing can go back to the way it was.

And Grace is in the kitchen staring at copper-bottom pots hanging from wrought-iron racks, and lovely bottles of vinegars infused with her herbs, and there is an aesthetically pleasing computer humming at her tiny desk in the corner where she tracks her business dealings and wonders how she got to a point where she is surrounded by all these things instead of her sisters, and what will happen when this all comes crashing down around her.

~

Bożena creeps out of Tadeusz’s flat in the early hours before dawn, when even the birds have yet to begin chirping their morning greetings. She takes money from his wallet for a cab which will leave her a mile or so from the forest. The cab ride will be her one chance to clear her mind of the events of the past few hours, so her sisters won't sense her transgressions.

It's times like these she wonders if Edyta is right, if Grażyna's sin has tainted them all. Mostly, she wonders if Grażyna isn't the smartest one of them all: break free, throw off all the laws and conventions of the
Dziwozony
and have a different sort of life. Some nights it's harder for her to sneak away from Tadeusz's bed, the temptation is so strong to stay and be there when he wakes. What would it be like to play human? To be a wife? Has Grażyna done that? Settled down with her son and a man somewhere? How does she hide what she is if she has? How has she hidden what she is even if she hasn't taken a man? Eventually, humans must notice she doesn't age anywhere near as quickly as they do.

Bożena sighs. This isn't helping to clear her mind. It’s adding too many complications, and she already has enough of them. Hiding the clothing and clearing her mind are enough for now. And while Tadeusz is sweet and tempting, she isn't sure he's enough to risk everything for. It's been nearly 200 years, and Edyta still asks almost every day when they can hunt down Grażyna and her child. Trying to stay here, or even in Kraków, with a Polish man? Suicide.

Still, as she sheds the human clothing and hides it again in the tree, she allows herself just a few more moments of dreaming before she clears any thoughts from her mind that don’t concern the tribe. Living with Tadeusz, even waking with him a few mornings a week, cooking for him, having a human job, having any kind of baby that came to her without having to worry about killing the male children: all dreams. Human lives sound so much simpler, even in their complications. Maybe Grażyna has had a whole tribe of children on her own by now. Maybe there are even more males out there besides the one she fled with.

She stuffs all her wondering into a tiny space in her mind and closes it off. She fills her mind with worrying about the tribe, about those who may be carrying children, about Edyta's vengeful thoughts about Grażyna, about the gathering they need to do in order to put stores back before winter. Waking to sky blue eyes gazing at her never even flits through her thoughts.

10: Filling

Vance is exactly where his mother pictured him, on his back, on top of the gold-and-white striped chenille bedspread, staring at his ceiling. He can sense his mother's presence downstairs, like she's waiting for him to walk down there and ask her all the things he wants to know, but he can't bring himself to leave the bed.

He isn't sure he wants her answers.

While he can't say things were fine before today, they had a rhythm to them that everyone was used to. There were expectations and roles and even he, as an empty space at the moment, had his spot. This morning had seemed fairly seamless, even with the rushing. There were instructions to be followed and everyone showed up at the appointed time and did what they were supposed to do.

With one wrong mov
e
— on his part? on his mother’s? on Donovan’s?
—
one decision, everyone is different, and he doesn't know how to get it back. He doesn't have enough information.

He sits up suddenly. More places do have information, though, that he can access if he wants to. The computer. His mother. Hidden pieces of his life are stored all over the place and tell a whole story he isn't sure he wants to know. With the information in all those places he would be able to change things, if he wants to. He can take them back to where they were before, or maybe make them better. He'll know why Donovan is so angry all the time, and maybe why his mother has the ability to change personalities right before his eyes and what makes her that way.

The video he watched this morning gave him clues to finding the encrypted information on his hard drive, and he knows he can search for those clues, or maybe remember them on his own, but it will be wasting time. His mother has known all this time, and it makes no sense that he has all these computer files and boxes in his closet when all the answers have been with her. Unless he thinks he has been protecting her as well.

His eyes shift between the computer and the door. Neither option for getting the information he wants makes more sense to him; neither seems safer, or riskier, for that matter. Ignoring the computer, he pulls on his boots, grabs a sweatshirt in case he needs it later and walks downstairs.

His mother is waiting expectantly.

“You have questions?”

“Yes,
”
he says. “We have a car, right? Am I allowed to use it?”

Something pings in the back of his mind about the car: that he never leaves his mother without a way of escape, which is why Donovan drives him to campus, but he ignores the anxiety that errant thought causes. He needs to escape. It feels … important that he do this right now, and his mother must agree with him, because she hands him the keys.