9th Century
Our childhood idyll didn't last. Not because of any one act or event, but because that's the point of childhood idylls – they don't last. They slip away so slowly, so almost imperceptibly that sometimes it's years later before you even realize that they've ended and that your memories are tinged with a kind of golden light, making you wonder if they ever happened at all, if you were ever truly that content, that at ease in the world.
Not that childhood is a time of pure contentment or ease – only the luckiest can say that and neither myself nor Willa or Eadgar would describe the early parts of our lives as 'easy.' But we had each other – and that's no small thing – and we had the forest and the beach and the sunshine and the games we invented and then forgot about as the days and years passed.
I was twelve when Willa had her first baby. There was pressure, after her father's death, to marry and have a child as soon as possible. Children were mouths to feed in Caistley, just like they were in River Forks, but not for as long. By 3 or 4 the little ones in Caistley were helping out and by 6 or 7 a lot of them were doing as much work as the adults. If anything, Willa and Eadgar turned out to have been a bit of an exception to the rule, born to parents who didn't believe in working them to the bone as early as possible.
Even before Willa's marriage, I was seeing a lot less of both her and Eadgar. They were busy doing the things their father had done before them. It didn't stop me going to Caistley, but it did mean I spent a lot more time there on my own. I started to take books with me, reading them in a little clearing close to the beach where none of the villagers ever came. The villagers – some of them – seemed to know about me. Or, to know that Willa and Eadgar had a little friend who wasn't from the village itself and that we used to play together in the woods, anyway. I was wary of them – and they, I think, of me.
It was Willa herself who announced her marriage to me, after it had happened. I was hurt at first, and asked her why she hadn't mentioned it.
She shrugged. "I didn't think you approved, Paige. I thought you'd try to convince me otherwise, when the truth is I had little choice."
"Did they force you?" I asked. "Your mother, I mean – did she force you to get married?"
Willa laughed. "No one forced me, girl. Unless you can call life itself a force. My father's gone, my mother's getting old (Willa's mother was in her mid-30's when she told me this), we need people to help with the garden and the crops and the animals. This is just how it is here. I don't know how it is in River Forks or on a grand estate, but that's how it is here."
"Well who is he, then?" I asked, curious and not entirely happy.
"Aldred," Willa replied. "He's ten and seven, just like me, and he's as tall and strong as an ox. I hope our babies will be tall and strong like him."
Seventeen. Willa was married at 17, to another 17 year old. It was no scandal, either, nothing out of the ordinary. Neither was it a surprise to anyone when her belly started to grow and I saw even less of her than I already was at that point – which wasn't very much.
The day she crept into the woods with a tiny, snuffling bundle in her arms, with all of her attention focused on him, I knew it was the end of something for all of us. Her baby was tiny and beautiful and Willa was in love. I was slightly unmoored, fiercely jealous of the new person who had taken my stand-in big sister and her stern, maternal attentions away from me.
I was old enough to realize it would not be right to express any of these things, but I felt them all the same.
Dr. Whittington noticed something was wrong, too. I'd been seeing him for awhile then, talking around and around the central relationships of my life, searching the chambers of my heart where River Forks and my father and my long-lost mother lived for new material. When he asked me one afternoon after class why I was so quiet, for some reason I decided to tell him some of the truth, for once.
"I think I lost a friend," I told him, looking out that same window I always looked out of. "A good friend – my best friend."
Dr. Whittington tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to keep the surprised tone out of his voice. "Your best friend?" He asked, knitting his brows. "Who is that? I don't recall you mentioning a best friend before, Paige."
"Her name is Willa," I told him. "She doesn't live here in River Forks. Anyway, she's been looking after me for a long time. Not like a mother, really, maybe more like an older sister. It's not just her, either. There's Eadgar, he's her younger brother. They're both my best friends."
"She's been looking after you for a long time?"
I nodded and swallowed as a sudden lump formed in my throat. I couldn't speak without crying so I just nodded quickly in response.
"You're emotional," Dr. Whittington said calmly. "Willa and Edgar must be very good friends to you."
"Eadgar," I whispered.
"Why haven't you mentioned these friends to me before?"
I shrugged and wiped my nose on my sleeve. "It's complicated. I guess I haven't mentioned them because no one really believes they exist."
I didn't tell Dr. Whittington everything. I didn't tell him about Caistley itself or the tree or any of that. But I did tell him more than I ever meant to, and he was good enough at his job not to push me when I didn't want to give specifics on this or that little detail. After that, and ironically at the point that they both began to play smaller and smaller roles in my own life, I began to talk to the doctor more and more about my friends.
That's not to say that I knew whether he thought they were real or not – even as I tried to make it sound like they were friends from a few miles away, perhaps ones who attended a different school, I slipped up fairly frequently, dropping mentions of the 'demons' in the woods (demons I definitely did not believe in, but demons that were real enough to me in that my friends did) or the fact that Willa and Eadgar's father had died after a kick from an ox. No one in River Forks in the 2000s died from being kicked by an ox. But the doctor listened. When I told him how much it meant to me to have friends, as an outcast at school and someone who might as well have been an orphan at home, he nodded and I could see some human empathy in his brown eyes, some acknowledgement that even if I was making it all up, he understood what it was to need company, to need people on your side.
Dr. Whittington nodded quietly when I told him how sad I was not to be seeing Willa and Eadgar so much anymore and, as the weeks passed, almost at all. I barely ever saw Willa at that time, and Eadgar maybe once or twice a month.
"They're growing up," he said to me one day. "They have responsibilities. It sounds like they come from a different kind of family, and with their father gone Eadgar will be stepping into the role of man of the house – and Willa has her child to attend to. I wouldn't take it personally, Paige, as painful as I can see this is for you. People grow, relationships change, but love remains."
It applied to so much of my life, and not just the one that took place in Caistley. I still loved my mother, a woman whose face I could hardly remember without a photograph to remind me, and I still loved my father, too, even as he became a kind of living ghost. I went home from therapy that night and sat in my room, looking at myself in the dusty mirror and wondering what was going to become of me. My mother was gone, my father might as well have been gone, and my friends were far away, busy with their increasingly adult lives.
Love remains. I whispered the words out loud as my eyes brimmed, desperate for it to be true.