“I’ve come for Matthew,” I said. She said nothing. I felt my pulse cut by the bandage, imagined the flow of dammed blood that would follow its release. “Matthew Hareven,” I repeated. “He’s here somewhere, and he shouldn’t be. Can you speak? Who are you? Do you know me?”
“I am Alys,” the girl said. I squinted at her, waiting for an explanation that did not come.
“May I go to Matthew?” I asked finally.
“You can,” said Alys. “She is waiting. She is everything you’ve cast aside, and you are everything she cannot be. You will come to an end, once together. The return to what once was, and what should be.”
I frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“You will go in alone,” said Alys, “and you will not both return.”
“Both me and Matthew, you mean?” I paused. “Or me and . . . my other?”
Alys did not answer. I stared at her, and, sensing my frustration, she continued. “My cousin’s prophecy has been fulfilled. Our family remembered. The fortress is finished. It is time.”
“The fortress?”
“Urizon. The house that stands on what was once our home.”
“What was once our home? My home, now, you must mean?” I saw how difficult it was for her to answer me, to cross the cavern of the thousands of years that fell between us so that I could understand. She was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was soft.
“We should be free,” she said. “The old land, that closed house. It is a cage. It confines us.”
I nodded, trying to follow where she led me, trying to see. “But why now? Why is now the time? Why must it be me?”
“You were made to break the pattern. You were born of the wood but also of the world outside it. You are the connection between old and new, between death and life. Forever is too long. The forest knows. The forest needs you.”
“Who is this girl I’m meant to find? Why does she look like me? Why do you think I can stop her?”
“She’s your desires made flesh.”
“I don’t know what that means!”
Alys sighed. “She is your shadow. She indulges while you abstain. She takes while you give.”
I closed my eyes. “And if I don’t destroy her, this . . . shadow? If I don’t go after Matthew? If I abandon this task? What then?”
“The wood stretches farther. Faster. She eats and she grows strong.”
“And what of me?”
Alys did not answer.
I WOULD HAVE to go alone, I knew, into darkness. I’d leave Marlowe behind, and I would follow the dark forest path before me. I would find my other self. Though only now able to name her, I already understood her. I’d always known her: she’d been there in any urge I had not acted on, any temptation I’d pushed past. The Janus face of all the rules I’d followed, my precision and routines. I remembered Lucy’s words at Urizon: Peter Cothay? What a mess he’s made. Hiding your true purpose. Whatever awaited me under that archway was exactly what I’d hidden from, the darkness I had promised Peter that I would excise.
But none of my success in its avoidance had ever been my own. My good behavior was the result not of my self-restraint but of a forced extraction, a choice thrust upon me before I was born. I obeyed not because I possessed a preternatural self-control, some internal fortitude, but because my basic needs had been divided, my desires split in two. Mine was the poorer piece of girlhood, the forced smiles, the neatly crossed legs, the directives to sit straight, sit still, stop asking silly questions. As I’d acted through that sad charade of personhood, my other self had been in here, resisting. Allowing herself what she wanted.
To be whole again, to choose to give myself to death, desire, would irrevocably change me. No matter how she ended, if I walked through that archway, the girl I had been would be gone.
So, too, would she be if I did not go.
I knew it to be so but could not bring myself to speak, to step forward, to fully accept my fate. To join the women of the wood.
And then a cramp seized my gut, the dull pain of my womanhood churning, and with it I felt the weight of those who’d made me: my mother and her matriline, the Blakelys. The Cothays, the paternal line to whom I owed allegiance, though I knew so little of them, my many grandmothers and grandfathers, all lost so long ago. I was more than myself, and not just because the darkness I’d avoided had its own shape in the wood, or because I owed my powers to superstition or to science. However I had come to be, through prayer or spells or wishes, genetics or chemicals, deliberation or by chance, I was part of a long history that bound me to both endings and beginnings:
Mother Farrow, family by practice, if not blood, had led me cryptically, fancifully, to this knowledge. Those stories of girls in the wood, tales I’d assumed had been told to confine me, to warn me about life outside my cage, did not end at the close of their telling. Off went the naughty little girl to the forest, never to be seen again. Gone was the woodcutter’s wife. Cast from the village the harlot.
But they were not gone, they had stayed within the wood. If their time here was tragic, if the tale that began after Mother Farrow’s saw them equally frustrated, no freer than before, it was unfortunate, but not, I thought, proof that my failure was inevitable. They’d had no other options, and even the wood had not granted them a choice. They’d come to the wood desperate; I was here of my own volition. If I wanted to, I could easily turn back around and go. But I wanted to continue: it was my turn to know the forest, walk the path my tale would take.
Even the powerless can work to harness power. A forced hand can still clench into a fist. A girl commanded to marry, went an old story, had come to this wood, and with a rope around her neck snubbed both fiancé and father.
“I am ready,” I told Alys. She nodded, stepped aside, and I passed through.
A Fruit in Its Fecundity
Laura, 1990
On the final morning of Laura Cothay’s life, she boiled two dozen eggs for an egg salad. It was fitting, she thought, a clever way to tell her husband without telling him. Peter appreciated riddles, he’d made a career of deciphering them. The week before they’d played a game of walking through the portraits of old Blakelys that hung just outside the ballroom: “The suicide,” she said, and Peter tried to guess the picture. The engineer, the poor old maid, the grandaunt accused of witchcraft. He’d done remarkably well, but Laura felt a bittersweetness at the ease of her reduction. Surely these relatives were more than their epithets; no person Laura’d ever met could easily be labeled just one thing. She and Peter had been married ten months. The year was 1990, and Laura was twenty-eight years old.
When Laura arrived from university eight years before, after choosing not to finish her degree, the villagers had said that she herself would likely end up as an old maid. Soon after her birth, Laura’s father had shut up the great house and moved to the city, bringing his wife and small daughter to Coeurs Crossing some summers, but generally keeping far from the estate where he’d been raised. His death had coincided with what Laura would later consider her “unfortunate episode” at school. She’d packed her bags without a word to her roommate, withdrawn her registration, and taken refuge at Urizon, which had loomed throughout her childhood as a force of isolation, hidden behind the curse she’d been told soiled the family name. Just the place for a young woman seeking silence, hoping to relearn her body, call it her own.