21st Century
Some instinct inside me told me to blindfold Kayla Foster before leading her down to the woods. Maybe it wasn't an instinct, maybe it was just latent control freakery, I don't know. What I did know is that I definitely did not want her to know how to get to Caistley herself, even if I wasn't sure it would even work if she was alone.
When we got to the tree and I pulled the blindfold off over Kayla's head, she scowled at me.
"Well?"
"I just wanted to make sure you really want to do this," I said, shrugging.
"Do what?" She asked. "Stand in the woods with you while literally nothing happens?"
She was so sure of herself, so perfectly certain that I was lying, and that she was going to be the one to finally inform everyone of that fact, to great social acclaim. I, on the other hand, was doing everything I could to hide the fact that I was dying to get Kayla through the tree to Caistley, because some part of me knew that she was going to lose it and I wanted to see the look on her face when she did.
"Here," I instructed. "You have to put your hands on the tree."
Kayla rolled her eyes and leaned forward and just as she did, the sound of a pig or some other animal rustling through the undergrowth came to us. Kayla jerked up, looking around, and I saw the confusion in her eyes when she realized there was no animal. Of course, I knew we were hearing something in Caistley, but as far as Kayla was concerned she was experiencing auditory hallucinations.
"What was that?" She barked at me, irritated. "What are you doing, Paige? What was that sound?"
Behind the usual blustery bravado of her tone I sensed it – fear. Kayla was frightened, a little, and she was trying to cover it.
"It's just the wind." I told her. "We can go back to the house if you want. If you're too scared, I mean."
That did the trick. Kayla stuck her hands out again so they were touching the tree, scoffing the whole time, and I laid my own next to hers.
Even in the brief, airless blackness before Caistley, I could hear Kayla panting with terror and I realized, at the moment it was too late to turn back, that I had probably just screwed up very badly.
When we arrived she sat there, unmoving and unblinking, at the base of the tree.
"See?" I said, pleased with myself. "I told you Caistley existed. I told you –"
"Take me back! Oh my God, Paige, you – you crazy witch! WHERE ARE WE?! TAKE ME BACK!"
I watched, horrified, as Kayla's words dissolved into hysterical tears and she began to hyperventilate.
"Wait," I said a few seconds later, reaching out to touch her. She shrank away. "Wait. You said you wanted to come here, Kayla. You said –"
"TAKE ME BAAAACK!"
"But," I stammered, totally thrown off by her response. "Don't you want to see anything? Don't you want to meet Eadgar or –"
"AHHHHH!"
She was just screaming by then, and doing it loud enough that I began to worry someone from the village might hear it. To hear Willa and Eadgar talk, the woods we played in regularly were infested with outlaws – not to mention demons and evil spirits – and the sound of a child screaming her head off would certainly bring the men of Caistley to investigate.
"Shut up!" I hissed. "Kayla shut up. Someone will hear us!"
But Kayla did not shut up. She kept up her wailing and eventually closed her eyes, refusing to open them again. It soon became clear that there was not going to be any exploring on that day and I stepped forward to guide her hands back to the tree and take us both back to River Forks.
***
That little stunt with Kayla Foster nearly cost me my place at River Forks Elementary. Of course none of the grown-ups believed her when she started babbling nonsense about traveling through trees and floating in blackness but they knew one thing, and that was that Kayla was neither faking nor exaggerating her terror when she got back to her parent's house that day. Something bad had happened in the woods at the bottom of my backyard, everyone accepted that. Something I was at fault for. I told everyone I could that Kayla wanted it to happen, that she practically dared me to do it, but nobody wanted to hear it. Her parents, both lawyers, lobbied hard to have me permanently expelled from school and the only reason I wasn't is because a) there was nowhere else for me to go and b) no one could actually establish what it was, exactly, that I had 'done' to Kayla in the woods, and they therefore couldn't expel me for it.
They did manage to get my father on the hook for Kayla's therapy, though. And the way I was treated at school after the incident began to make my previous outcast status look like a walk in the park. As I said, the grown-ups didn't believe anything out of the ordinary had happened in the woods. I'd just played a trick on Kayla to scare her. But the other kids, they weren't so sure. Within days I was finding the word 'witch' scrawled across my locker and hearing loud whispers wherever I went. Even the other outcasts wanted nothing to do with me then, and I was truly alone.
It was during dinner one night soon after the incident with Kayla Foster that my dad made his way downstairs to the kitchen while I sat silently, eating a tuna sandwich. I looked up when I heard the floor creek, shocked. He hadn't been downstairs for months.
"Dad," I said, standing up. "Do you – I brought you a sandwich but I can microwave some soup for you if you want. Or – I bought some ice-cream, I can –"
My dad put his hand up. "No need, Paige, I'm not hungry."
If I showed you a photo of my father before my mother died, and another one taken that night, you would not believe they were the same person. The handsome, smiling twenty-something in all the photos was gone, replaced with a grizzled wraith who looked to be at least 50, his hair shot through with grey and his youthful strength wasted away. And he wouldn't eat. I was always trying to get him to eat, but no one had ever taught me how to cook or shop and so we lived on sandwiches, canned soup, apples, bananas, anything I could think of that was healthy-ish and easy to prepare.
I sat back down. "Are you sure? There's some apples in the –"
"No, Paige, I'm really not hungry. I just came down here to talk to you."
"Oh," I said, very quietly. "I'm sorry, Dad. I'm sorry about what happened with Kayla Foster and –"
My dad waved his hand in front of his face, a gesture of dismissal I was very familiar with by that time. It was as if someone had drained all the energy right out of him, as if even speaking left him as exhausted as a person who has just run a marathon. I know now that it was depression, of the deepest and blackest kind, but at 9 – how could I have understood?
"I want you to go and talk to someone," he said, and I leaned forward because his voice was so low I could barely hear it. "Like you did before, after your mother died. You can't talk to me, we both know that – I'm useless. So you need to talk to someone else. A professional."
I didn't want to talk to a professional. I most certainly did not want to waste any effort trying to come up with a way to talk about Caistley and Eadgar and Willa in such a way as to honestly portray my experiences without getting myself locked into some kind of institution for delusional little girls. But I did want my dad to be happy, and so far I seemed to be doing very badly at that. Maybe talking to someone would help him? Maybe if I did as he asked he would see that I cared, that I wanted him to approve of me and be proud of me?
"Ok," I said, taking another bite of tuna sandwich. "I'll go talk to someone."
So that's what I did, to try to make my dad happy. River Forks was a half hour drive from a larger town, and the school nurse found a doctor who worked with children in that town. Once a week I would take a taxi to talk to this person – Dr. Whittington – and to try to leave out anything to do with Caistley.
***
Dr. Whittington was younger than Dr. Hansen and I liked him better, although I was obviously very suspicious. He didn't make me talk about anything in particular, though. Sometimes we talked about how I was doing at school and other times about how I felt about my dad, or how I missed my mom, what I might say to her if she was there with me. Mostly, Dr. Whittington asked me questions. And one day, after I'd been seeing him for a couple of months, he asked me if I was holding anything back.
I shook my head and looked out the window, eager to avoid eye contact lest it give away the fact that I was lying through my teeth.
So once again, therapy became more of a social hour than anything psychologically constructive. I kept going, because Dr. Whittington was one of the few people on earth who seemed interested in me or how my life was going – and also to stop my father from worrying. Which didn't work, because he knew even better than I did that he wasn't up to the task of raising me.
It was around that time that my friendship with Eadgar and Willa deepened, the way friendships do at that age, ripening from shared activities and play into deeper connections, real knowledge of another person, real concern for their wellbeing. Their father died that summer, kicked in the gut by an ox. Eadgar relayed the story to me, and neither of them shed a single tear as they described the way their dad's belly had swollen up and turned a deep purple and how he had spent days in agony, unable to sleep or find any relief from the pain.
"Are you sad?" I asked tentatively when the story had been told and Willa had matter-of-factly informed me that they had buried him in the field just north of the village. It was, admittedly, a stupid question. And when Willa turned on me, her eyes aflame, I knew it.
"What?" She shouted. "Our father is dead and you ask if we're sad!?"
"I didn't mean that you didn't seem sad," I replied awkwardly, and in spite of the fact that that was exactly what I'd meant. "You just, um, you don't – you two don't really seem as, uh, you don't seem –"
I was trying to express that although I knew they experienced emotions as strongly as I did, they seemed less willing to show them. I'd never seen Willa cry, for instance, and she had seen me cry countless times by then, usually as I told them some story or another of being bullied at school, or fearing that what my dad was actually doing up there in his dark, airless bedroom, apart from being very sad, was dying.
"Because we're not spilling tears, you mean? What use are tears, Paige? Will they bring my father back? Will they plough the land and plant the seeds and harvest the grain?"
Willa's tone was harsh and unfamiliar. I sat back, chastised and guilty. "I didn't mean it like that," I whispered, looking down. "I meant to insult myself, not you or Eadgar. I cry all the time, but the two of you seem so strong. Nothing ever seems to leave you in your beds, unable to get up."
"She doesn't mean to be cruel," Eadgar said, putting one arm around my shoulder. "But you're different to us. You live in a big estate with servants and a big garden to grow all your food in. We don't stay in our beds because we can't – we'll starve if we do. My mother is outside this afternoon, cutting the wheat with the others, because if she doesn't do that we won't have any bread this winter."
I never really told Willa and Eadgar I lived on a big estate with servants and a garden, apart from that initial meeting when I had confirmed that yes, I lived in a 'big house.' They came to the natural conclusion that I did, based rationally on the fact that I always appeared healthy, never underweight, that my fingernails were always clean, my hands un-roughened by manual labor. I didn't see any point in telling them otherwise, either, because it helped all three of us put the larger mystery – of what exactly it was that a girl from a big estate was doing showing up in the woods outside Caistley day after day, and then year after year – aside.
As I sat on the old fallen tree in the woods, with the dappled sunlight falling on my head, Willa suddenly collapsed in on herself and began to weep. Shocked, and terrified that I was probably responsible, I wrapped my arms around her as her brother did the same, from the other side.
"It's OK," I whispered. "I'm sorry, Willa. I didn't mean to upset –"
"Oh Paige!" She cried, turning to me. "The reason I don't cry is because if I started, I would never stop! You never talk about any of the things that happen to us. You never say oh, my aunt's baby died for lack of food, your belly never growls, and I never ask about any of it because in truth I don't understand but life is hard for us, Paige. It's hard for us in a way I'm not sure you know. We haven't eaten a proper meal since my father left this world, we're hungry and scared but most of all we miss him and we don't know what to do without him. My mother has a look in her eye like she's half gone to the next world, too. I fear we will all be dead by this time next year."
Willa wasn't joking. About being dead by the same time next year. I could see in her expression that she was entirely serious. I opened my mouth to speak, to try to provide some comfort, but my throat was tight and no words came out.
Were my friends going to die?
The death of Willa and Eadgar's father was a turning point for them – and for me, for us. I'd always known their lives were hard, but it didn't quite make sense to me until I saw the real fear of death, of starvation, on their pale faces. I started to bring food after that, and there was no pretense at turning it down on their part, no protestations, no reassurances that they would be fine.
I tried to bring food that made sense, too, searching the kitchen at my house fruitlessly the first time. What would they have made of sugary, colorful breakfast cereal? I didn't know, and I didn't want to find out. Cheese slices? No, they wouldn't recognize those as food, either. Cheese was a good idea, though. They ate cheese. They ate cheese and bread. So before my next visit to Caistley I went to the store and bought an unsliced loaf of bread and a package of cheddar cheese, both of which I carefully took out of their plastic packaging and wrapped in a plain white kitchen towel before giving it to them.
Watching them devour the food made me feel terrible. I began to cry when they both set aside some of their bread and cheese, which I could see from their sunken cheeks they clearly needed to eat, for their mother.
"I should have brought you food before," I said, sniffling. "I'm sorry – I'm so sorry. I didn't realize it was so bad! I thought you had enough and you were just so skinny from working all the time. I didn't think –"
"No matter," said Eadgar, panting from the effort and speed with which he had consumed what I brought him. Willa joined in, patting my head. "No matter, Paige. No matter. It's not your job to keep us fed."
'No matter.' They always said that, usually at the same point I would have said 'it's OK.' Sometimes, in River Forks, I would use some of the phrases or words I learned in Caistley, and people would look at me oddly.
As to it not being my job to keep Eadgar, Willa and their mother fed, they were technically right – it wasn't. But I took it on anyway, using my dad's credit card to shop (I had long since set up an automatic payment process for all our bills every month, a system my father approved of, and I knew he wouldn't even notice the extra outlay) and then arriving in Caistley with my arms full of apples, bread, cheese, cream (which I had to transfer into a wooden bucket I found in the garage) and everything I could think of that would keep them fed. At one point, Willa brought me a little sample of something she called 'porridge' and, tasting it, I thought it mostly tasted like pea soup. It was what they mostly ate, she said, sometimes with pig bones from the landowner mixed in if he or his wife had seen fit to part with any. After that I brought sacks of dried peas and pork knuckles I bought at the butcher in River Forks.
It's no self-congratulation to say that nothing had ever made me happier than seeing Willa and Eadgar – my truest, best and only friends in the world(s), go from almost too weak to play in the woods with me after the loss of their father to, if not exactly glowing with health, at least substantially more robust than they had been. I actually had to scale back on my food deliveries at one point, because some of the other people in the village had grown suspicious, started to suspect them and their mother of somehow stealing or procuring food that wasn't theirs.
The three of us were as close as triplets, chattering and laughing and playing almost every day. Even Willa, always the more aloof of the two, seemed to warm to me greatly. It was unspoken, the way these things often are between children, but they understood what was driving my food deliveries – my care for them, my concern. And I in turn felt theirs for me, as they listened with serious expressions on their faces to my tales of loneliness and torment at school, and to my detailing of my father's inability to leave his bed, or even to shave off the beard that now made him look like some kind of crazed mountain man.
"I'll kill her," Willa said one day, when I told them that the bruise on my arm was from Jessica McAllen – Kayla Foster's second in command – punching me out of the blue as I walked past her in the hallway. "Why did no one punish her? Are her parents dead?"
I shook my head and explained that it just didn't work that way where I was from. And Willa and Eadgar's fury on my behalf did more for me than countless hours of talking to Dr. Whittington did, I have to say. I could have talked and talked and talked until the mountains turned to dust and nothing would have put the feeling in my heart that my friends and the fierceness of their affection – their love – did.
"Thank you," I said, after both had sworn they would help me take revenge on Jessica McAllen, and just before I left to go back home. It was dusk, and even Willa and Eadgar – the only kids in the village who were brave enough to spend time in the woods during the daytime – had never stayed there past nightfall, not for as long as I'd known them. Evil spirits, they said. Demons. Witches. Outlaws.
"You're one of us, Paige," Eadgar said simply, as if it was obvious. "So anyone who hurts you hurts us, too. What happens to you happens to us."