In the Night Wood. Dale Bailey
We see what we want to see, her therapist had told her. As if that helped.
“Did I what?” Charles said.
“Nothing,” she said.
She was tired of seeing things.
For months after the funeral, back home in Ransom, she’d caught glimpses of Lissa everywhere, through a scrim of raindrops on the windshield as she wheeled by the kids at the bus stop or in the baleful fluorescent glare of the grocery store, just turning the far corner of an aisle. Something familiar in the set of the mouth or the flash of shoulder-length hair.
Then she’d blink and see that Lissa wasn’t there after all. The girl at the bus stop would shift the angle of her gaze and her face would fall into unfamiliar lineaments. Meeting the grocery store specter afresh among the frozen foods, Erin would see that she was younger than she had thought, that she had dark hair and a squared-off jaw, that she looked nothing like Lissa at all.
She’d mentioned it to Charles once and he’d flinched as if she’d struck him. After that she’d never brought it up to him again.
Until last night.
Last night, over dinner at the hotel, she’d seen Lissa once again.
One moment Erin had been sitting at the table, jet-lagged and silent, spooning an indifferent soup into her mouth. The next, she’d glanced up, reaching for her water glass, and the girl had been there: Lissa, a slim blonde apparition, standing silent in the dining room door. Erin gasped, and the water went over with a crash.
“Shit,” she’d said, half rising as she reached to right the glass. When she looked up again, the girl —
— Lissa —
— was gone.
“Here, let me get that,” a voice said at her shoulder. The landlady — a kindly heavyset woman, her gray hair pulled back from her round, smiling face — leaned over her, dabbing at the table with a cloth.
“What happened?” Charles was saying, but Erin ignored him.
“That girl,” she said, sinking back into her seat.
The landlady paused, the damp rag in one hand. “Girl?”
“There. She was in the doorway.”
“Did she cause this?” The landlady straightened, abruptly stern. “Sarah,” she called. “Sarah, you come in here right now. Always underfoot, that one,” she added, swiping at the spill, an expanding island of dampness in the linen cloth. “Sarah!”
“Listen —” Charles began, but Erin overrode him.
“It’s not the girl’s fault. Really. She startled me, that’s all. She looked so much like —”
Then the girl was there, eyes downcast, her hands clasped behind her back, and the words —
— my daughter —
— died on Erin’s lips.
The girl, pudgy and thick, with a fringe of dark hair veiling her eyes, looked nothing like Lissa. Nothing at all. Lissa had been airy, ethereal, like some elemental spirit that had settled inexplicably among them. This girl — Sarah — looked sullen and coarse, grossly earthbound.
“Sarah,” the landlady said, “have you been sneaking around again?”
“No, Nanna. I just walked by the door. I didn’t mean anything.”
The landlady gave the spill a final swipe. “That should do.” She snapped the rag at the serving station. “Bring me that jug, child. Quickly now.”
Charles stared at his plate, his mouth set in a thin line, while the girl complied. She moved slowly, cradling a pitcher in her small hands. She studied Erin from under her bangs as she refilled the glass.
The landlady smiled. “I’m very sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” Charles said. “Accidents happen.”
“Ever since her mother passed …” The landlady shook her head. “Can I get you anything else?”
“No,” Charles said. “Thank you.”
“You’ll let me know if you need anything, then.” The landlady turned back to the kitchen, herding the girl before her. Just before the child disappeared, she glared back at the table, and for an instant — the space of a heartbeat — she reminded Erin of Lissa once again. It was like the blink of a camera shutter: Sarah, pudgy and resentful; then Lissa. Lissa glaring back at her, her eyes reproachful and unafraid.
You let me die, those eyes said.
Then the shutter blinked again and Lissa was gone.
“Charles —”
His hands busied themselves with his silverware.
There was something wounded in his silence, something fraught and sorrowful. He looked like a little boy, scowling at his shoes lest a flash of further intimacy send pent-up tears spilling down his cheeks. Erin had wanted to touch him then, too, and in that moment of weakness, a confessional impulse seized her. A fresh start, he’d said. And why not? You didn’t start fresh with lies.
“Charles —”
His knife chattered against the rim of his plate. A dull reflection alighted trembling on the flat of the blade. He stared at the table.
“I saw her, Charles. It was her. I mean … I know …”
Then he did look up, his face pale and cold, his expression set.
“She’s gone, Erin. She’s —” He drew a breath, shook his head, sighed. “She’s … gone.” He stared at her a moment longer. “I’m sorry,” he said. He hesitated as if he wanted to say more, and then, biting his lower lip, he pushed back his chair and left the dining room.
“Madam?” The landlady stood in the kitchen door, wiping her hands on a towel. “Is there something wrong with the meal?”
“No,” Erin said. “The food was fine. Everything’s fine.”
But everything wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine. Nothing would ever be fine again. Erin leaned her head against the cool window and focused on the thrum of the tires, the hum of the engine. It would be all right, she told herself. Everything would be all right.
Yet the wood, vast and green and vigilant, still oppressed her.
Gone, Charles had said.
He was right, of course. That was the hell of it. Last night at dinner, she had seen not Lissa but another child, a dark, heavyset child with griefs and burdens of her own. If Erin’s heart had chosen to see something else, it was an illusion, nothing more.
Perhaps she’d gone mad. Sane women did not see dead children cruising the canned fruit aisle when they did their weekly shopping. Sane women did not see ghostly shapes in the shadows underneath the trees.
Charles downshifted, and the engine’s tone deepened. Tidal pressure swelled through her as the car leaned into a curve. A bulwark of ancient, moss-damp stone — ten feet at least, and maybe taller — shot up from the forest floor before them like the fossilized spine of a buried dragon. As the car hurtled toward it, Erin’s heart quickened.
Then the road dipped and a narrow aperture, hardly wider than the car, appeared in the stone. The car shot under an archway. The suffocating omnipresence of the wood, that sense of contained energies churning just beyond the range of perception, retreated. An instant of speeding darkness followed — how thick the wall must be! — and then they surfaced on the other side, into a treeless meadow, sunlight breaking across the windshield.
Charles slowed as the road dropped down into a deep, round bowl carved into the heartwood. He nosed the car up to a second wall — hand-stacked stone, perhaps waist high or a little higher.