by Ellen Datlow
I looked to the woods. I hadn’t been in them since I’d followed her.
Was that why she’d shown herself to me in the IGA? Was that why she’d left those dark marks on the trees, for me to follow?
Back in the house, I poured four fingers scotch into a different coffee cup. A whole hand. A whole trembling, unsteady hand.
If Kay had only been there to steady me, right?
I would have spilled it all to her, then. But she was in Haverly, at her mother’s bedside, being the obedient daughter.
I sat at the kitchen table breathing hard, as if I’d been cutting wood or carrying furniture. I was just thinking. And thinking.
And finally I had to see.
I rinsed my cup in the sink, left it on the drying rack. The idea was that, if I didn’t return, then Kay wouldn’t have to clean up any mess I’d left.
I booted up, collected my jacket, forged out into the trees.
It doesn’t snow around here generally, so the beer cans I hadn’t bothered to pick up, they were still there, showing me the way. I didn’t collect them this time either, which I translated in my head to hope: I was going to need to find my way out again, wasn’t I?
Yes, yes, I was.
This was just me being stupid, me being weak, me letting my thoughts get the better of me. I’d been too alone the last couple days. Or maybe—maybe Kay’s shiny new pots and pans, maybe the copper wasn’t copper, but something insidious, poisoning us, making us see things, think things.
I didn’t want Jeanie Silber to be real, I mean.
The twelve shiny cans delivered me to the tree she’d been hiding her treasures in.
From a distance, I could see it was still alive.
Good, good.
From closer, I could see something else.
It was covered in something, now.
I slowed my walk, circled a bit to make my approach even slower.
Burls.
The trunk was knotted with burls, those knotty, tumorous outgrowths I knew were kind of like layer on layer of impacted buds. Like cancer.
I leaned over without telling myself to, splashed my scotch and coffee onto the ground. At the end I was coughing, and stringing the thin strands of vomit away with my fingers. But it was stretchy, wouldn’t let go. I was getting tangled in my own stomach contents.
I ran, I don’t know how long.
I wasn’t following the pathway of beer cans.
A single burl, it takes years and years to happen.
A whole trunk of burls, it meant the tree was diseased, didn’t it?
From what?
From a rubber band, and a tooth, and that other little junk?
Was that what was Jeanie was doing? Not collecting stuff she found interesting, but stuff that was necessary for this, like a recipe?
She needed just the right stuff.
Finally I fell over a fallen tree, cut my hand on a broken beer bottle, and then just lay there, holding myself.
I still wasn’t crying.
I didn’t know what I was doing.
• • •
The next day, the day after Christmas, fortified with a night of rational thinking, I returned to what I was calling the Black Tree.
I had a two-bit ax.
If a dead girl wanted this sick tree to bloom in the spring, let its rotten pollen drift up into the air, then it had to be my duty to stop that from happening, I told myself. I was the one who’d delivered that last vital ingredient, right? That made this my problem.
I’d brought a flask of vodka, to keep my mind from wandering.
I didn’t give myself time to talk myself out of it, just walked right up to the tree, hauled the ax back like you do, and slashed it forward, into the most prominent burl. It’s not how you angle to cut a tree down, I realized the moment the bit cut into the wood. It’s the way you hit something you want to kill.
The ax stuck. I worked it free, struck again.
Of course the wood of the burl was dense, thick, hard. I’ve seen woodworkers go far out of their way to collect burls off fallen trees, to make bowls and newels from. Something about the swirly grain in there, how it polishes up.
I’d also heard tell a burl was like what an oyster does with a speck of dust: licks it into a pearl.
Hunting, every missed shot, you can imagine it slapping into a young tree, and that sapling caring for that slug of lead, layering it in knot after knot of its best, richest wood.
Would I find a blue rubber band at the center of this biggest burl?
I slashed again, using all of my weight, and the tree splashed back at me, so I had to close my eyes.
Not sap, not water, but not quite blood either. It was too thick, too dark.
Poison.
I spit, coughed, wiped furiously at my face, and then, mad now—madder—I swung and swung and swung, until I carved into the heart of this tumor.
It was meaty, and pale.
This angered me even more, a tree keeping something wrong like that inside itself.
I probed it with the head of my ax and the viscous, gutlike meat, it writhed around the metal.
“Don’t like that, huh?” I said, and smiled.
This wasn’t work for an ax anymore.
I took up the flask, poured it onto the burls, then, before the pungent alcohol could evaporate, I struck a match, held it to the spill until the fire flashed awake.
Trees don’t burn as easy as we think, but this one did.
It went up like tissue.
I backed up, watched for hours, until it creaked, splitting down the middle, halving itself two directions at once.
When the flames threatened the underbrush, the other trees, I stomped them out. And then I waded into the smoke, chopped at the burls on the tree until they collapsed into the embers.
It was nighttime by now, but, the same as I’d brought matches and a flask, I’d also brought a flashlight.
I nodded a final good-bye to the tree and started back, using the light to pick out the shine of the cans. A few trees back from the one I’d killed, there was a darker smudge on a pale trunk, as if someone had been leaning there, watching.
I raised my arm, wiped it off with my sleeve.
• • •
I know now I should have been more suspicious.
Walking out of the woods that night, I’d assumed the beer cans were where I’d left them. That I was walking back out into the same world I’d left.
Jeanie Silber had been out there with me, though.
She very well could have rearranged the cans, led me out into a completely different place. One that looks just the same on the surface.
That’s what I have to assume happened.
There’s no other explanation for . . . for what I’ve become.
A dutiful husband is what I appear to be. A respectable landowner. A good enough son-in-law.
None of those are me anymore.
What Jeanie Silber came back for, I think, it was to pull off my mask, show me my true self, the one I’ve kept coiled up inside for my whole life, I guess. The dead know more about life than the living. And they want to show it to you. They want to make you see.
I still contend it was happenstance that I was the one to see her in the IGA that Thursday, though. That, really, every person there on a last-minute errand might have seen her the same as I did. Even the girl with the piercings. But it was me who recognized her. Who knew she didn’t belong. Not anymore.
Me either.
The poison or whatever that splashed on my face from the tree, it washed off easy enough, and the smoke I inhaled from its tumors didn’t leave me coughing up blood or seeing things that weren’t there, but the act, the fact of me messing up whatever Jeanie was doing out there in the woods where nobody was watching, that clung to me. At least as far as she was concerned.
She came back, yes.
That’s what the dead do.
Kay too. She crunched into the driveway just before the year was over, nev
er knew to ask if anything dark and momentous had happened out in the trees while she was gone. She had news about her mother, though. A blood clot had shown up in her leg, so it was looking like she still had two or three more weeks in the hospital. Meaning Kay was going to be burning up the road between Milford and Haverly.
It was about to be the busy season for me at the dealership anyway, so I just shrugged that that was too bad. Inside, though, the new me felt relief, I think. Relief at the bad news.
I was a different person.
And then, like I’d probably been expecting—like I was due—I woke one morning to find a seed head under my back, scratching at me.
When you live in a field of wheat you don’t harvest, the seeds can find their way into most every place. Even the bed. This was a whole seed head, though. I sat on the edge of the bed and studied the stalk.
It wasn’t torn. The sever point was flat and even, anyway.
What I saw without meaning to, it was a thin, pale girl lowering her mouth over that stalk, only biting down when the sharp seed points scratched the back of her throat.
Then she spit it down into her hand.
At the same time, it could have caught on my shirt, on my sleeve, and gotten into bed with me that way.
I didn’t tell Kay, just deposited it into my nightstand drawer.
Three days later I woke thinking of paperwork from my last two sales.
On my chest was a half-rusted washer.
I flinched back, flicked it away, pushed up into the headboard.
“What?” Kay asked sleepily.
“Bug,” I said, even though it was winter, and then, after she was gone to Haverly again, I pored over the carpet until I found that washer.
It was happening.
I shook my head no, no, that it wasn’t fair. But then neither had it been fair for Jeanie, that tractor waiting in the ditch for her.
The very next morning, I found a little oval sticker stuck to the inside of my forearm when I woke. Like you peel off a banana.
Neither me nor Kay can tolerate bananas.
I stood in the shower until all the hot water was gone, and then I stepped out with resolve, walked naked to my nightstand drawer.
So far there was only the sticker, the washer, the seed head.
Had I missed something else?
I went to the utility room, dug though the lint trap—we’d washed the bed linens just a few days ago—and found the most damning ingredient of all: a dime. Probably the same one I’d fake-fumbled onto the floor of the IGA, in order to have an excuse to dig under the dog collar display.
I leaned over the dryer and I tried to cry, couldn’t find any fluid or heat in my eyes at all.
I wouldn’t grow a burl, I knew—a man isn’t a tree—but maybe I’d get a . . . what had my dad called it? A bezoar. Those calcifications or whatever an animal can get in its stomach, that are also prized by people. Not for woodcutting, but for remedies.
A bezoar, a growth, a tumor, it didn’t matter what it was called.
All because I’d messed up whatever Jeanie was doing.
All because I’d done my duty.
It wasn’t fair.
I slammed the side of my fist into the top of the dryer until it dented in, and then I walked away.
Two hours later, dressed in my work clothes—slacks, a golf shirt—I stepped into the doorway of Kay’s mom’s hospital room in Haverly. The whole way over, there’d been chance after chance to ram my truck into this pole, into that abutment. There’d even been a tractor in the ditch, calling my name.
I hadn’t answered.
I wasn’t that person anymore.
I wanted to live.
“Mama Jenk,” I said to Kay’s mother, and she reached her hand out to me palm-down, and I took it, hugged her lightly, as you do the infirm, and then Kay was going on about what a surprise this had been, and her father was back with three lunches, which they insisted we split four ways, and all was well.
Close enough.
On the far side of Kay’s mother, nestled between the sheets and her frail, blood-clotted self, there was now a seedhead, a washer, a penny, and a little sticker with tiny meaningless words on it.
It was a recipe, for whatever the next round of tests were going to find in her, since her bad luck of a fall. Whatever it wouldn’t be a surprise for someone of her age to have.
I sighed to have the awful, necessary deed done, to be rid of the burden—I’d carried the ingredients here in a cigar box wrapped in a plastic bag—and then I leaned back, to stand among the living.
Except.
Kay, the good daughter, vigilant as ever, was already at the other side of her mother’s bed.
“What is—?” she said, and then grubbed her hand into the covers, came out with, I’m certain, everything I’d left. Every single last thing.
She shoved it into the chest pocket of her blouse.
Breast cancer, then, I said to myself, and looked away, out the window, to the idea of Jeanie Silber standing in the tall yellow grass at the side of the road, Clint Berkot pulling his Grand Prix up alongside her.
She steps in and down, yes, but not before looking back to me to smile and wave.
The dead don’t do anything randomly, do they?
The whole time since Thanksgiving, she’d been capering me to this hospital room, this moment.
I lift my hand to tell her bye but Kay crinkles her nose in confusion, thinks I’m waving to her, from point-blank range.
And I guess, sort of, I am.
The Other Woman
Alice Hoffman
She came to me on the first of May, on the anniversary of the occurrence. This often happens. People have strong regrets at such times. They are reminded by the weather or by a tree in bloom. We live in the same town, although I’m in the outskirts, near the cemetery. Everyone knows where. They know what I do. There were flowering azaleas on my lawn, so perhaps she didn’t notice the brambles or the weeds. I was at the window when she pulled up. I was there before my dog began to bark. Frankly, I’d been expecting her. I was surprised it had taken a full year for her to come to me, but people have their own timetables.
She wore a blue spring coat and a plaid dress and black pumps. Her hair was dark and plain and I could tell she had been crying even though she was wearing sunglasses. Her face was puffy. I didn’t listen to gossip, but in a town as small as ours it would have been impossible not to know, plus it was in the newspaper. Not just the Monitor, but the Boston Globe as well. It was an event. A personal catastrophe, the kind people talk about long after it’s over.
When I invited her in, she hesitated. I could tell she didn’t completely believe in what I did, and had come here as a last attempt, even if she didn’t trust me. Her friends had likely pulled her aside and suggested she call me. It was a town full of old houses, and old houses had past lives. Occasionally those lives continued, even when the new occupants wanted them gone. They had to be helped along. I’d learned the cleansing method from my grandmother when I was a child. I went house to house with her until I was ten, when my mother put a stop to it. Still, I remembered. It’s not something you forget.
I’d made tea to ease the conversation, which can be difficult at the beginning, but she didn’t touch hers. I understood why. Her hands were shaking. She was rattled, I could see that. But then, I’d seen it before. People driven to the brink by something they couldn’t quite see or believe, and yet it was ruining their lives. She said she had tried everything to rid herself of the ghost. Sage, salt, holy water, closed windows, white candles. What could I do for her that she hadn’t already done herself? My method was Russian, I explained, and involved catching the unwelcome spirit in a jar. I couldn’t tell her more, it was a family secret, but I led her to my pantry to show her what I kept on the shelves. I had thirty jars filled with light; some were blue, others green, one looked like a splotch of ink.
“What do you do with them?” she asked. She had a little girl’s vo
ice, which was disconcerting, considering what she’d done.
“That’s my business,” I said. Surely her friends had told her I was prickly and had a mind of my own.
She wrote me a check for a thousand dollars. I knew she had married into money, which is the reason I raised my usual price. Truthfully, I tend not to charge at all, especially in desperate situations. After she handed over the check, I felt a draft of cold air. Then I saw something on the floor that interested me. There, beside my client’s purse, was a photograph of the apple tree where the woman in question had hanged herself. My client seemed quite oblivious. That’s when I knew. I was hearing both sides of the story.
• • •
I went out on Sunday, the day her husband played golf. She didn’t want him to know, which I understood. She was the sort of woman who always acted as if everything was in place, even when it wasn’t. I could tell that from her shoes. Highly polished. New heels. As if she hadn’t a care in the world.
I parked on the street, carrying my grandmother’s bag. The jars I’d brought clanked against each other, sounding like bells. I stopped to observe the tree where it had happened. It was in bloom, white as a cloud. I had read that the previous tenant had dragged the ladder from the garage in order to climb up. When I walked up the driveway white flowers floated down. My client was waiting for me on the porch, wearing a sweater even though the day was fine. Ghosts do that, they drop the temperature, and when I walked inside I felt the chill in the air.
All the furniture was different now, my client told me. They’d donated everything that had been here before. They’d even changed the yard, pulling up the old brick patio and replacing it with stone. I said I had to walk through the house on my own to see what the rooms revealed. She nodded and said of course, but she looked nervous. She blurted out that she hadn’t wanted to live here, but her husband had said it wouldn’t be cost effective to move. No one wanted to buy a house where someone had hung herself. Now they were stuck. When I set my bag down, I noticed that the knives were set out in a row on the countertop.
