21st Century
My mother died on February 15th, 2001, when I was 5 years old. Her illness was brief and I was told very little of it, although I later came to understand it was cancer, that it had been caught late, and that she hadn't wanted me to see her in the hospital. She didn't want me to be scared.
And I wasn't scared, not at first. At first I was just shocked, as silent and blinking as a person who has just been hit – but not killed – by the sound-wave of a bomb as it cracks over their head and leaves a ringing in their ears. Years later, and the ringing still hasn't stopped.
And, like a survivor of a bomb blast, I've had to deal with the bodies. My father, for one. I suppose you could say he's still alive. He breathes, he eats – every now and again he speaks to me. But his life ended that day as surely as my mother's did. I was the sole real witness to my handsome, funny, playful dad's shrinking into himself over the course of the next few years, until the drapes were no longer opened and I learned how to prepare my own meals – and his.
Every therapist I've ever had has tried to get me to admit that I am angry at my father, but I don't think I am. It seems to me that my father is no different than one of those people you see in a video clip from a warzone – bloodied, broken, literally incapable of getting up and walking away from the wreckage. My father couldn't walk away from it, because he was it. Human wreckage.
I might have been human wreckage too, if not for the fact of being 5 years old and possessed of the inborn resilience of a person young enough to bend and twist with the fates, like a slender green branch in a high wind.
There was also Caistley. I had Caistley. My father did not.
Within a month of my mother's funeral, the visits from neighbors and friends lessened considerably in frequency. They had their own lives to get on with, and my dad had already begun to withdraw. The first thing I noticed was his face. He began to grow a beard, and I can remember sitting on his lap, running my fingers over the stubble, marveling at how sharp it felt as his eyes stared blankly ahead.
Our property was large and I was almost entirely unsupervised. The spring came early that year, taunting my father and I with its warm breezes and promises of life and renewal as our psychic landscapes remained bleak and dark. I began to wander further from the house than I ever had before. We had a farm, over five-hundred acres, but my mother had always cautioned me to stay in the yard. As well as cautioning me she had watched me, though, and now there was no longer anyone watching. I put my rubber boots on one day and headed out after finding my dad fast asleep in his darkened room at one o'clock in the afternoon.
The sound of water was everywhere that day, dripping from branches as ice melted and flowing in rivulets down to the little creek that ran dry every summer. There was warmth, too, of the kind only people who have known a cold winter can fully appreciate. I stood in the woods and turned my face up to the weak sunshine, drinking it in like a flower taken out of the shade.
And then I turned, suddenly, as someone whispered behind me – but there was no one there. It was mid-afternoon and the whisper had sounded friendly, almost like a stifled giggle. I wasn't afraid, but I was curious. I wandered over to the big tree that grew along the bank of the creek, where the voice seemed to come from. To my surprise, I heard it again – not a whisper this time but a distinct laugh. A child's laugh, like my own. I clambered up the hill – the tree's trunk was very large, and the roots spread over a large area – but there was no one on the other side, either. Was someone playing a trick on me? Was one of my classmates from school hiding in one of the hollows beneath the tree's massive roots?
I was getting overheated in my winter parka so I shucked it off and continued exploring, pausing every now and again to cock my head slightly and try to pick up the voice once more. And it was there, still – two voices, maybe. More giggling, more whispering. I looked briefly back through the woods towards the house, aware on some level that I shouldn't have wandered so far, but too curious to leave by then. And then I climbed over one of the thick, gnarled roots and in doing so put my palms flat against the tree.
In an instant the trees were gone, the light was gone, the warm spring air was gone. I clutched at my throat, gasping for air as it suddenly became difficult to breath and then, just as quickly as it had happened, I was once again in the woods. Not the same woods I had been playing in mere seconds before, though. No, these new woods were thicker and much darker and I couldn't understand how I'd gotten to where I was. Had there been a tornado? I knew what tornados were. I knew that sometimes they picked people up and carried them miles away. I knew that sometimes these people even lived. But there were no tornados in New York state – I knew that because my mother told me as much, when I had asked her what we were to do if one blew over our farm. So how had I gotten from the little stand of trees at the bottom of my yard to this other, darker and – now that I realized it – quite badly smelling place?
I sat up, trying to figure out whether or not it was time to be afraid, and two figures appeared out of the gloom.
They stood there, the two of them – a girl who looked to be about my age and a smaller boy – staring at me, while I sat and stared right back. They were both filthy, dressed in rags, and they made me think of Halloween. Did they think it was Halloween? Is that why they were dressed so strangely? Had their mothers marked their faces with stage make-up the way my own had last year, when I wanted to be a scary, green-skinned witch to go trick-or-treating?
"Why are you dressed like that?" I asked eventually, when it became clear that the two strangers weren't going to speak first.
The girl looked down at her clothes, confused, and the boy just kept staring at me. "Dressed like what?" The girl asked. "It's our clothing, isn't it?"
She sounded strange. The words came out of her mouth in an odd rhythm, almost like she was half singing them. And why was she asking me if her clothing was her clothing? Who was this weird girl?
"Was that you?" I asked, making a second attempt. "I heard someone laughing. Was it you?"
"Probably," she replied. "There's no one else in these woods but us. Maybe some pigs, but pigs don't laugh."
I laughed at that, at the idea of a pig laughing. And then the girl laughed and so did the little boy. I liked that.
"My names Eadgar," the boy announced, not making any move to shake my hand.
"I'm Paige," I responded before turning to the girl. "What's yours?"
"Willa. Are you from the big house?"
I didn't know what Willa was talking about, but I knew my house was close by and that it was quite big, so it seemed reasonable to assume that was the 'big house' she was speaking of.
"Yes," I told her. "I'm 5."
There was a pause while Willa stared at me suspiciously and then she threw her head back, giggling. "Half-ten? You? You're not half-ten! I reckon you're older than me!"
"How old are you?"
"Ten even."
Ten? There was no way. I laughed right back at her and told her it was a good joke. She was scarcely bigger than me, and much paler and skinnier. Her collarbones jutted out against her bone-white flesh and her wrists looked so thin and delicate that I imaged they would snap like twigs if she fell over and tried to catch herself.
"You're not ten," I told her, a little annoyed that she thought I was stupid enough to fall for such an obvious lie. If she'd said 6 or 7 then maybe, maybe I would have believed her. But not 10. "What grade are you in?"
Willa looked at me, confused. "What?"
"What grade are you in?" I repeated, grinning because I knew I'd caught her now. And sure enough, she pretended she didn't know what I was talking about. Not that it mattered too much, because I was happy to meet Willa and Eadgar and they seemed happy to meet me, too. There were no other kids who lived close to me, so if two had moved in nearby, I was pleased to have them.
"We're playing pig-and-acorns!" Eadgar announced and, when he saw that I didn't know what he meant, he explained. "I'm the pig and Willa is the acorn. She has to hide and then I try to find her. Or Willa is the pig and I'm the acorn – we take turns."
Hide-and-seek. That's what they were talking about. I was definitely up for a game of hide-and-seek.
"I'll be the pig!" I told them, excited, before Willa shut me down in her kind but firm way.
"No I'm the pig. You two go hide, you can be the pig later."
So we played in the woods for who knows how long – hours, I think. Eventually the two of them seemed to trust me enough to allow me to take on the status-heavy role of 'pig' in the game of pig-and-acorns and I did as I always did during hide-and-seek and crouched down to cover my eyes while they hid. But in doing this I toppled over sideways and had to catch myself by putting my hands against the tree I had first emerged into this place next to.
At once the airless darkness sucked me back in and I opened my eyes in the waning sunshine of afternoon in the woods at the bottom of my yard. Willa and Eadgar were nowhere to be found. I looked around, half-wondering if I'd been dreaming. But I hadn't been, I knew that. I looked down at my hands, smeared with the dirt of that other, darker forest, and couldn't figure out what had happened.
But I was 5 years old then, and I was also hungry from the adventures of the afternoon, so I headed back to the house with my parka under one arm and a thought to making myself a honey and peanut butter sandwich if my dad wasn't up yet.