Wonderland

by Zoje Stage

  He looked uncertain. “I lived for a long time, in my home…my time is different from yours. I had forgotten who I was. How to speak. Where I came from. And when I started to realize my home was dying…I found myself able to do things I hadn’t…I hadn’t even tried before. I realized, after all my years of becoming one with the life force around me, I had become more. Maybe it was triggered by the memory of death. So I started…reaching out. Exploring. Drawing from the planes of my world, trying to understand more urgently who I was, what I should do.” He took in a deep breath, but instead of releasing it, he began coughing—a terrible, body-shaking hack that spewed droplets of blood.

  Horrified as the blood splattered her, Orla inched back farther. “Who are you? What are you?”

  “This man, who I appear as, sensed me. And through him I tried…I wanted him to understand, and be my new…I didn’t realize then how frightening it would be for him. I’ve tried to adjust, for the young one, so she won’t be afraid.” He coughed again, spraying a mist of blood.

  “Please leave her alone. Tell me what you want. We don’t want to all die here—that can’t be what you want!”

  “It isn’t! I was dying before, long ago. I found the memory. And now, as then, I want my life to continue on and…I thought I would be alone forever. Now that I understand—I know what I did, all those years ago. I can do it again. Move into a new home.”

  “So move! There are trees all around—” Her exasperation rose in tandem with her anger.

  “I don’t want another tree. I wanted this.” He gestured to his physical body. “And when he made it clear he wouldn’t offer it, I panicked. I didn’t understand his…his choice. I…lashed out, I felt betrayed. I remembered a night…a solstice night—”

  “That was us! We were trying to help!”

  “No, longer ago. I was dying. I looked”—he reached a ghostly finger toward her, and his arm extended, growing like a tree limb—“like you. Like the young girl queen. I needed something that would outlive me. I said…I don’t know, I don’t remember words as they are to you. But I believed in something, believed in what was bigger than who I was, the glorious roots and leaves that connect the world. I said…a prayer—you call it a prayer. And then I moved—the tree accepted me, and I moved so I wouldn’t die.”

  Tectonic plates shifted again, but this time they were in Orla’s mind. Her skin tingled, tightened as its glacial surfaces crashed together. “Were you the girl? Who died here? You were the girl with the penta—”

  “Was I a girl? I think I was. I was dying.” He coughed again, and Orla, instinctively afraid of the deadly contagion that was tuberculosis, covered her face with her arm so it wouldn’t infect her. “When I asked the man—I can’t just…take. Steal. There has to be an agreement. If I’d been able to explain it to him better…he didn’t have to be afraid. I am more than I was—not a girl, much…bigger. More layers. I grew powerful…but he and I could have lived together.”

  Orla shook her head, appalled as crimson phlegm dribbled from the edges of his mouth, down his chin. The words he spoke were commonplace, but the meaning was more foreign than anything she’d ever heard—as was the strange, off-kilter way he spoke. Shaw had been right about the cure cottage, the photo, the tubercular women. No, not all the women. One particular dying girl. But they hadn’t had enough dots to connect. And none of it made sense; she felt skeletal with fear, about to collapse into a useless puzzle of bones.

  He stood, towering over her, elongating like the tree in which he—She—lived, and Orla gazed up at him in horror.

  “I hope you understand now. My efforts—to show you things of wonder, and explore my own untapped powers—they diminish the time I have left. I didn’t know you would see the beautiful world and react with such fear, when all I meant was for you to stop and listen. Please listen; we’re running out of time. It is the young one now—how I love her! You, the mother, made me see and remember! And she is open to me, more open than the man, than you. She is not afraid of new possibilities. If she offers herself to me, we will be together and she will be like herself still, but also like me, the immense presence I have become—”

  Orla shook her head, an emphatic refusal. “No!”

  “—and when she lets me in, I think there’s one last thing I can try…”

  He succumbed to coughing, and faded into nothing. It reminded her of the transporter from an old Star Trek episode, dissolving a traveler into specks of light.

  She jumped to her feet, panting as if she’d been exerting herself. She wanted to run from the room but hesitated to pass through the spot where her husband had appeared. The spatters of blood remained. Clutching her head, she made quick strides back and forth, then finally leapt around the space She had occupied and fled the room, shutting the door behind her.

  Orla, too, had been right; she would never disregard her intuition again. There was no way in hell she’d let her daughter do what the entity wanted, even if Orla felt sorry for that long-ago lonely girl. But now she knew.

  Exactly what she needed to do.

  After cleaning herself off in the bathroom, scrubbing away the blood that couldn’t possibly be there, she went into her daughter’s room and snuggled in next to her on the twin bed.

  On Christmas morning she’d give Eleanor Queen the gift she most deserved: the rest of her life.

  38

  For a moment, it was like an ordinary Christmas morning. Eleanor Queen’s face lit up the instant she reached the bottom of the steps and saw the long, flat package leaning against the squat stove.

  Now she sat cross-legged in front of her mother, seemingly unaware of Orla braiding her hair, enthralled by the coveted gift. Orla and Shaw had paid a lot for it, certain that Eleanor Queen wouldn’t mind getting fewer presents than her brother. Had things turned out differently, Shaw would’ve retrieved the last secret gifts (which they’d never gotten around to buying): a pair of plastic sleds, one for each child. They hadn’t quite figured out where they’d go sledding; Shaw suggested the road, but that sounded dangerous to Orla (long before she’d experienced anything truly life-threatening). While Eleanor Queen tried out her special present, Orla had planned to pull Tycho around on his sled.

  “It’s beautiful.” Eleanor Queen looked truly happy for the first time in recent memory. Her hand followed the bow’s curve, stopped at the wooden grip. As Orla finished the first braid and wrapped the tail in a band, Eleanor Queen held the bow up, testing the elasticity of the string. While her mother worked on the second braid, the girl fit all the fiberglass arrows into her new hip quiver.

  “I’m sure you’ll be just as good as Katniss,” Orla said in her ear. Eleanor Queen flashed her a grin. “You’re a warrior now. With a special mission.”

  “I am?”

  “You are.” Orla hadn’t realized at first how violent a story The Hunger Games was, and after she read it herself, she hadn’t let Eleanor Queen get the sequels. But she’d never objected to her daughter’s interest in a badass girl who saved her sister and fought against a despotic regime. She wanted her timid daughter to be a rebel of some kind; Katniss wasn’t such a bad role model. And for what Orla had in mind, her daughter needed to be brave.

  They both got dressed in warm clothes, and Orla laid out a pathetic breakfast of ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard.

  “I was thinking I could give it my new book—that’s something special to me, so it would make a good offering—and then maybe it could learn to read. That would be helpful, if it could write messages!” Eleanor Queen gobbled up her little red and cream mounds. She hated mustard, so Orla ate that, licking it off a spoon.

  “That’s a good idea,” Orla said, withholding what had happened and what she’d learned in Shaw’s studio the previous night.

  “I’m really, really close now, Mama—I’m going to find out what it wants us to do.” She squeezed out another serving of her preferred condiments.

  Orla held the knowledge now and she couldn’t tell her daughte
r that she already knew. The spirit had appeared as her beloved husband to comfort her, to make her more trusting. But Orla desired Her diametric opposite; Eleanor Queen’s future lay elsewhere, in the human world, where she could grow up and become anything she wanted.

  “Bean?” The girl licked ketchup off her finger. “I made a decision last night. I figured out something that will work. And it’s going to take both of us—we each need to do something very important.”

  Eleanor Queen looked at her, and not with the wobbly uncertainty she’d once possessed, but genuine interest. “What?”

  “It—She likes you.” Her daughter nodded in agreement. “She won’t hurt you.”

  “No…I don’t think so.” The brightness of her eyes diminished for a moment, and Orla was certain she saw her remembering her papa, her brother. The thing out there had caused pain around her but not to her.

  “You’re going to go to the road,” Orla said. Several inches of new snow had fallen overnight, but she’d already set one of the smaller pairs of snowshoes by the front door. Along with Eleanor Queen’s bow and quiver. She’d zipped Shaw’s driver’s license and her state ID into the pocket of Eleanor Queen’s coat so she could show someone who her parents were. A bottle only partially filled with water so it wouldn’t weigh her down as she walked. Shaw’s charged phone (her own was too waterlogged after her fall into the frozen sea to ever work again). The last stale granola bar she’d found in the pocket of a lighter-weight coat—one of the snacks she always had on hand when she went anywhere with the children.

  Eleanor Queen gazed at her with round, curious eyes. “I am?”

  “Yes. Down the driveway. Make a right onto the road. Then a right onto the bigger road when you get to it. Cars will go by. Don’t get in any—wave someone down and ask them to call 911.”

  The wary girl within Eleanor Queen returned. “What about you?”

  “We can’t both go. But She won’t hurt you. And I’ll be at the tree the whole time, talking to Her.” Offering up her own life. “She’s getting better at understanding me. I’ll put my hands on the tree and tell Her more about us, me. I think She’ll understand this time, how I’m going to help Her. And She won’t mind then if you leave—you can find someone…”

  Orla stopped speaking as the knot of tears bulged in her throat. She couldn’t let her daughter see any sadness. Couldn’t tell her—even though she wanted to—that her Lola and Lolo would raise her and be wonderful parents. Orla didn’t believe, regardless of how reassuring the entity had tried to be—in the guise of her husband and with the memory of the human girl She had once been—that the offering she was about to make was anything but a death sentence.

  She read the hesitation in her daughter’s frozen posture, the returning terror in her unblinking eyes. Eleanor Queen had never been left alone or gone anywhere by herself. Unlike her brother, she was happy enough on her own with family in another room. But what Orla was asking—telling—her to do was far beyond her life experience.

  “You’ll have your bow for protection.” Eleanor Queen followed her mother into the living room. “See, everything you need. We’ll leave at the same time, and you should get to the end of the driveway about the same time I get to the tree. You won’t be alone for long.” Though Orla wasn’t sure that was true. How busy would a North Country road be on Christmas morning? “I put Papa’s phone in your coat, and if that doesn’t get a signal or no one comes by, you just keep walking until you reach St. Armand. There will be lots of people there. Okay?”

  Orla needed her daughter to have faith in the plan, faith that her mother, without a translator, could help the entity within the tree. She didn’t want Eleanor Queen to turn back and witness her mother’s last living moments. And Eleanor Queen needed to complete her own task and bear the burden of walking alone on unfamiliar roads. She watched the scenario play out across the girl’s face.

  Finally, Eleanor Queen nodded. “Okay. But you have to help her—she’s counting on us.”

  “I’m going to.”

  “And when I find people, we’ll come back for you.”

  “Of course you will.” Her child would be brokenhearted, but she would survive. “You’re going to get away this time, Eleanor Queen. She won’t hurt you, and I’ll give Her…what She needs.”

  “I wish we could go together.”

  “I know.”

  They bundled up in their gear and stepped out onto the porch. Eleanor Queen turned her gaze toward the snow-covered driveway.

  “You can do this, it’s a safe walk,” Orla said. “I think everyone around here will be friendly—a girl on her own. Christmas. And you ask them to call 911.”

  “I have my bow.” In the snowshoes, with the bow worn across her body, her daughter looked every part the warrior, the Arctic survivor.

  “Just like Katniss. I’ll stay with the tree until the police come back for me—you tell them where I am.”

  Orla wasn’t sure if the police would ever find her or if—like her baby boy—something inexplicable would disappear her from the earth. But she didn’t care. As long as Eleanor Queen lived, got away. Fulfilled her destiny. She didn’t want her daughter to see her cry, didn’t want her to think for a second that this was a final goodbye.

  It took the bulk of Orla’s self-discipline not to turn around and watch her go, recede against the white backdrop. But the girl had her own role to play, and Orla willed herself to walk away. She hoped Eleanor Queen didn’t stop and look back, expecting a wave or some last words of encouragement. They needed to go in their opposite directions.

  One toward life.

  One toward something unfathomable.

  39

  Orla tramped along the path they’d made through the trees, familiar with the way now, even though the new snow had covered their prints. Her once-muscular legs needed more protein; her body was withering. Her heart throbbed large and crooked. It had been dissected, neat lines drawn down and across, pinned at the corners: one black and sunken quadrant for Tycho, one for Shaw. The lower left quadrant bore an older wound, dry and shriveled, from the loss of Otto. The last quadrant pumped bubbly red while Eleanor Queen still breathed. If Orla lost her daughter, there would be no reason for her heart to continue circulating blood. (How she hoped her parents didn’t share similar thoughts, but she couldn’t worry on that.)

  I will give Her myself.

  She prayed that the strange, powerful spirit would accept her final gift, and leave her daughter alone.

  It was only a few days ago they’d hung the paper chain around the tree. The sight of it made her wistful. Tycho’s fingerprints were preserved in the glue.

  “I’m here,” she announced. “I’m here, and willing.” Her body wasn’t as strong as it once was, but she felt real pride for the vessel she could be. She’d worked hard, physically, for most of her life. She barely had the stamina for it, but it was the best way to show the spirit who she was—that she was worthy, tough, a suitable replacement for the magnificent tree: Orla danced.

  It was time. The entity knew about her daughter; now She needed to approve of Orla. Toes pointed within her boots, she swept around the tree, a winter waltz in clumsy turns, her arms fluid and exaggerated. Clumps of snow had collected on the paper chain, and she lifted and dropped the chain as part of her dance, releasing the snow.

  Sometimes she brushed an ungloved hand along the bark, seeking to strengthen the connection between herself and the strange being within the tree. The word hybrid suddenly came to her; like the fused fox-hare she’d seen in the snow, somehow a nineteenth-century girl had fused her soul with an unlikely but sentient ally. Would Orla become all of them when the spirit took her body?

  Her thoughts became images. Orla showed Her the most difficult choreography she had ever mastered, and the passion she’d shared with Shaw. She showed Her how they’d made love—tenderly, then ferociously—and how she’d pushed out her daughter, her son. I created life. How she fed them at her breast. The unearthly radianc
e she saw in their questioning infant eyes. How, because of her, they grew and thrived.

  Around and around she went. The movements came from within. They sped up and slowed down. And once she leaned forward until her chest was parallel to the ground, raising her right leg behind her—through the arabesque and into a penché until her toe pointed toward the sky. She held it there until her muscles started to shake, wanting to impress with her flexibility, her power. Her life force. All the while she played movies in her mind: Tycho’s tottering first steps. The evolution of his musical babbling into actual songs. Orla wished she could show Her how it felt to snuggle him in her arms while he giggled or drifted toward sleep.

  The air around her smelled of Christmas mornings. A Fraser fir in an enclosed space. Freshly brewed coffee. Peppermint candy canes licked by red tongues. Chocolate candies chewed by small teeth. The scent of new items as they were released from their boxes. These imaginary smells hid the truth: a wild wood, relentless snow, their empty house. Distant wood smoke lingered and Orla wished the other remote families a better Christmas than she was having. Maybe one of them would stumble on her daughter, and she’d finally reconnect with the outside world.

  She pressed her hands hard into the tree, so hard the edged bark seared her tender palms.

  “But even after everything You’ve taken from me…I’ll give You myself. You need a home? You need a volunteer? Well, take my body. Do with it what You need.”

  She expected a flash, an internal pop of light that indicated the spirit’s awareness. Or a vibration. A small earthquake. Or tiny floating flames in the branches above her. There was nothing. And without Eleanor Queen, she had no one to ask if the presence had registered her at all. Her movement, her images—had Orla gotten through on any level?

  “I’m here! I want to help You! You can’t have…the young one, she’s too young to make such a promise of her own free will. But You can have me—I understand the sacrifice I’m making. I accept it. Please.”