In the Heart of the Dark Wood

by Billy Coffey

  “He’s blamed God,” Juliet finished. “Trust me, Grace. I understand. That’s a feeling I know well.”

  Grace blinked. The line went quiet with an awkward pause she couldn’t understand. She adjusted the receiver against her neck. Was Juliet waiting for her to say something, or was it that the pastor had just shamed herself by admitting something she shouldn’t? Grace couldn’t decide which, couldn’t understand, just as she couldn’t understand why her hand refused to lay down that highlighter. Her entire thumb was as yellow as the sun now, the ink so wet it shimmered in the tree lights, and her thought was that it would take a gallon of soap to get it all off.

  Juliet cleared her throat and said, “Doubt is the most natural thing in the world. Do you know what religion is, Grace? It’s the worship of mystery. It’s getting close to Something we can never comprehend, because that Something is so much bigger and so fundamentally different from us. It’s like the world’s just a piece of paper, Grace, and we’re all just squiggles on the page drawn by some unseen hand. How can we understand the Being behind that hand? Someone with dimensions we cannot fathom? Someone who exists so far outside of us? Come tomorrow night, Grace. Please. Tell Marshall it’ll be good for him.”

  A noise worked its way up the hall, something like crying. Grace wanted to go there. She wanted to knock on that closed bedroom door and tell Marshall to open it, tell Marshall he didn’t have to suffer alone, but in the end Grace didn’t because that wasn’t her door. It was Mary’s, and even if it wasn’t she was too afraid she would once more say the name Hank instead. Yes, going would be good for Marshall. Grace thought it would be good for her too.

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  Juliet said she would pray. Grace set the phone down and studied the map across her legs. Those streets crisscrossing in red lines. The river winding its way from the mountains. Those squiggles that represented her entire world. Grace was somewhere on that page, along with Marshall and Jake and Kate. Along with Allie and Zach. That was their life, laid out in two dimensions. Their everything. Maybe Marshall and Juliet were right. How could anyone know beyond doubt there was some unseen hand beyond it all, looking down even now? How could faith be had in a God so separate, so different from themselves?

  Her left hand crept over the map. Grace watched with a passive detachment, vaguely aware that some part of her mind must be telling those muscles and tendons to move, yet convinced it wasn’t her mind at all. Her palm moved from left to right, over the very neighborhood where she currently sat, over the town, on past roads and fields searched and searched again. When it reached the green oblongs of forest and wood (Miles, Grace thought, out there are just miles and endless miles), her fingers curled inward as her thumb remained out. And in a spot high in the hill country where the river flowed and a frightened little girl now stood, that thumb pressed down onto the page. When Grace moved her finger back, she found a perfect print of yellowed squiggles. An image of her three-dimensional self, shrunk down to fit into a world of only length and width.

  It was that answer Grace Howard settled on, that hope by which she finally found sleep. Wherever Allie and Zach were, they could not go to God. God would have to come to them.

  19

  The wind swirled, whipping the flames into a dance that beat back the darkness. Night thickened in the heart of the far trees—from where the light was coming. Allie reached into the fire and pulled one of the logs free. The heat against her arm was so intense it felt cold. Everything felt cold. Had she the sense to try and understand why, Allie would have noticed she was nearly naked from top to bottom. Only her underwear and T-shirt covered her, and those were nothing more than thin layers of sopping cotton.

  The light no longer flickered but held a steady glow, telling her it had weaved its way through the trees and was now upon the bank itself. Growing as it came for her once more. The fire’s arc stretched out front, casting moving shadows of the windbreak and Allie’s thin body. The river shimmered like uncountable millions of gray snakes that hissed and lunged. The darkwood stood to her right—a single, impenetrable wall. Allie would not run this time, could not, and so held the flaming log up and out with both hands like a sword.

  “Wish you’d wake from your nap, Samwise,” she said.

  The words came out in a stuttering jumble that sounded coherent only in Allie’s mind. Sam remained still and lifeless under Allie’s scarf, warmed by the heat of the flames reflecting off the wall of stones at his back.

  The light eased its way closer.

  The flames ate their way down the wood toward her knuckles. Allie strengthened her grip on the log. She didn’t know how much longer she could hold it, thought about heaving it out as far as she could toward the light, then reconsidered. Not because heaving it would do any good (even in her short-circuiting mind, Allie knew God wouldn’t be afraid of fire), but because she realized that glow was not the same as what had driven her into the darkwood. What approached was only one light, not two. And it was neither white nor red, but golden.

  It was as if that understanding alone made the light ahead brighten. What came over Allie was a peace so pure and deep that she felt herself drowning all over again. The night ceded enough for her to see that the pulsing came from the center of a shadow that held a different shape from what had marked her. Allie stepped out from behind the windbreak. The log fell from her hands, nearly singeing her bare legs. She let it drop back into the fire as the figure approached. The glow throbbed again, this time as fast as a bolt of lightning, revealing a pair of faded jeans and a white sweater.

  A wave of pain rushed through Allie that was not her heart breaking but swelling, pushing against her lungs so that her breaths came in quick gulps. Gooseflesh broke out on her arms and behind her neck. Her knees buckled. And as that figure approached, everything that had happened to Allie, not just in the last three days but in the last five hundred and forty-seven, came gushing forth in a feeling that was purer than love and stronger than joy. That emotion fit inside the single word she spoke:

  “Momma?”

  The glow grew to a sun that covered the entire riverbank, bathing the slope of darkwood to Allie’s right in the clear light of a summer’s day that turned the gray waters to crystal. Mary Granderson took the last steps to her daughter from the center of a shine that poured as a fountain from the gold cross around her neck. She stopped when that light was enough to nearly drown Allie in ecstasy. In her smile Allie saw Christmas and home and all of their tomorrows, stretched out in a far line to an endless horizon.

  “Is it you, Momma?” she asked, so overcome that her body felt floating.

  That smile again, like a blanket. “Look at you, Allie. You’ve grown so.”

  Allie rocked forward on her heels. So many questions flooded her. So many thoughts. So much feeling. She thought this must be what it felt like to be born. “You sent word.”

  Mary grinned and dipped her eyes, nodding her head. “I did. And you were brave enough to follow. And now we’re almost done, Allie. You’re almost to the end.”

  “Can we go home?” Allie asked. “I’m so tired, Momma. We came all this way, me and Zach and Sam. Sam’s my dog and I said I didn’t love him but I do, and now he’s hurt. He helped me build a fire, but he’s hurt. There’s so much blood on his blanket. And Zach’s dead, Momma.” A tear threaded its way into Allie’s eyes. Her smile dulled. If Allie ever doubted that there could be no happiness in this world that was still not tinged with ache, those doubts were now settled. Even there, standing in front of her lost mother, Allie found cause to mourn. “There’s something in the woods.”

  “I know there is, Allie, but He’s gone. He’s gone, but Zach isn’t. Zach has something to find yet, something wonderful and true.”

  Allie stepped forward. The light around her mother grew from a sun to something like heaven. “Can we go home?” she asked again. “Daddy’s waiting, Momma. He’s awful sad.”

  “Soon,” Mary said. “We’ll all go home soon, A
llie—you and me and Sam and Zach. We’re almost there. There’s just a little more, and then we’ll all go home together.”

  Allie said, “I don’t know what to do” as a voice called somewhere close, shouting her name. “I don’t understand, Momma.”

  “You’re not supposed to understand, sweetheart. There’s so much you can know and so much more you can’t, and that’s why God has sharp edges. Hug Him anyway. A life with pain means more than a life without it. Will you do that for me?”

  Allie nodded, telling her momma she would do that, would do anything. “I haven’t cried,” she said, and the voice behind Mary called again. “Not once, even though I was close some. Because I believed, Momma. I wouldn’t let it be over.”

  “Because it isn’t,” Mary said. “It isn’t the end. I’m waiting where the trees are red. You aren’t lost, Allie, but you must be brave now. Be brave always. Do you understand?”

  “I will.” That tear held in place and would have spilled had Allie nodded again. She held her chin high instead, keeping that single drop there even if everything in her wanted it to fall, because it wasn’t over. The end was close but it wasn’t there, not yet. “I do.”

  Mary opened her arms. The glow of her necklace called Allie forward. Allie stumbled there with her hands outstretched, saying, “I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too, Allie. More than you’ll ever know.”

  Allie closed her eyes as radiance enveloped her. That small bubble felt like a world hidden just beyond the woods and town—just beyond everything—another place where every hope is fulfilled and every pain is kissed away and every wrong is made forever and irrevocably right. The embrace came like a wall that knocked her backward before holding her tight.

  She opened her eyes to find the light gone. Night had returned to the riverbank just as thick and suffocating as before. The arms around Allie were not her momma’s. There was only the smell of mud and wood and blood against a filthy canvas sleeve, and the soft voice of Zach saying, “I love you too.”

  20

  Zach felt Allie’s body go rigid in his arms. She pried herself away and leaned back, looking over his shoulder. Only the night lay behind him. Afterimages of swirling gold filled her vision. And in the middle, a blackened figure with her arms still outstretched.

  “No,” she said.

  Her eyes wide, trying to breach the darkness, Allie backed off and nearly stumbled into the fire. Zach reached and pulled her back. She pried herself away again, as though she couldn’t bear to touch him. Zach understood. Why would Allie even want to, after what he’d done?

  “I’m sorry, Allie. I’m so sor—”

  Allie screamed, “Momma” into the wind. She turned on her ankles, one of which had swollen to at least twice its size now that her brace had gone missing, and screamed in the other direction. “Momma, where are you?” She turned back, facing him, and asked, “Where’d my momma go, Zach?”

  That question was Zach’s first clue that something sad and awful had happened (the second, now that he’d noticed it, was the fact that Allie was as close to bare as he’d ever seen a girl). Her skin was dry, yet in the firelight he saw wet patches covering the neck and left side of her T-shirt, fed by the drops of water falling from her pigtails. He looked away and found Sam huddled by the rocks. A trail of Allie’s clothes led from there to the river’s edge.

  “Momma!” she screamed into the night, but there was only the wind and the water and the cracking fire. “She was here, Zach. My momma was right here.”

  “No one was here, Allie,” Zach said. He kept his voice soft and his boots quiet, even if all he wanted was to go to her and hold her again. “I was back in the trees, and I heard you call. I saw the light. That’s when I ran.”

  “My momma was the light.”

  “No, Allie. It was the fire. No one was here.”

  No, Allie thought. No, it couldn’t be. That just wasn’t true.

  “What happened, Allie? Did It come after you? I saw It. The eyes. The eyes came after me, Allie, and I”—yelled out to save you, he wanted to say, but Zach knew that was wrong and couldn’t lie by saying otherwise, not anymore—“I ran off. Did It see you? Didja fall in the river?” He looked around, searching the bank.

  Once more—“Momma.” So low and soft that Zach knew the word wasn’t meant for him. “She was here, Zach. My momma came. I heard you call out and I saw the eyes. I saw God, Zach. He came for me and I didn’t know what to do, so I laid Sam down and ran. I just wanted to save Sam and I thought you were dead.”

  He coughed, not bothering to cover his mouth with a sleeve, and said, “I thought I was too.”

  “I was in the river,” she said. “I climbed out. I got all wet.”

  Allie looked down and found horror staring up. She pulled her shirt down to cover as much of herself as she could and told Zach not to look. He hadn’t (not much, anyway, and wouldn’t dare more), but jerked his eyes away just to be sure. He unzipped his coat and handed it to her, keeping his eyes on the flames.

  “How’d you build a fire?” he asked.

  Allie pulled the coat over her. “Sam told me.”

  They looked at the dog together. Sam had not moved from his place by the rocks, nor did it appear as though he’d be moving anytime soon. The tip of his tongue poked from his mouth, landing on the brown-and-white stones that had become his pillow. Blood still covered the scarf. Most of it had gone brittle, like dried paint.

  “Sam told you?” Zach asked.

  “He talked to me,” Allie said. “He showed me how to make it. You had the tinder wrong, Zach. You’re not supposed to put the fireboard in the tinder, you’re supposed to use something else first. That’s what he said. And it worked. But then I saw the light again, and I got scared because I thought God was coming and Sam went to sleep again because I guess he was so tired but it wasn’t the same light, Zach; this one was different because this one was my momma. The light was coming from her cross.”

  For his part, Zach understood none of this. Allie was shaking like a leaf in a gale and was talking so fast without saying anything that he couldn’t separate what had happened in her mind from what had happened in reality, so he tossed it all into a bin in his mind that read Crazy. Crazy from shock and fear and cold. Crazy because Zach hadn’t been there for her. He’d run away because he didn’t want Allie to see him cry and think him a coward, and then he’d run away again because he’d been a coward all along.

  “We gotta get warm,” he said. “It won’t bother us no more, not with a fire. We just gotta hunker down, Allie. We gotta get you better.”

  He gathered Allie’s clothes and laid them by the fire to dry. The flames were strong enough for Zach to gather wood from the scrub. He saw no eyes. Allie remained close to Sam, crouched between the windbreak and the fire. Zach’s coat lay wrapped around her. Only once did Allie’s words betray her thoughts, and that was when Zach left to claim one last armful of wood to see them to the last sunrise they would meet in the woods.

  “Can you say more stuff, Sam?” she asked.

  Sam never did.

  They huddled close, keeping themselves between the rocks and the fire. Zach said something about the rocks maybe exploding if they got too hot because of all the water in them. Allie paid that warning no mind. She was going to be brave now. She’d promised it.

  “I’ll stay awake,” Zach told her. “You sleep. Someone’s gotta feed the fire in case It comes back.”

  “He’s gone now,” Allie stuttered, “least for a while. Momma said. And it ain’t an It, it’s a He.”

  “That weren’t God,” Zach said.

  “Yes it was. He’s just playin’ with us like two toys, Zach. That’s all we are to Him. All everybody is. And when God finally breaks His toys, He just throws them away.”

  “What happens if It comes again?”

  “We have to be brave is all,” Allie said.

  Zach watched the flames. “I got no spine, Allie. I’m too scared to be brave.�
��

  “I don’t think brave means not being afraid. I think it just means being afraid of doing a thing but going ahead and doing it anyway.”

  Allie hoped so, at any rate. She looked down at Sam and wondered if he had really shown her how to make the fire. Her mind had yet to thaw and her heart lay as tangled as the darkwood just beyond their light, but she wanted to believe yes, however impossible it was. She had to. Because if her dog hadn’t really spoken, then maybe her momma had never been there at all.

  December 24

  1

  She dreamed not of the funeral but of flying, high above the river where God’s sharp edges couldn’t reach, and when she landed it was on top of a narrow, jagged cliff. Sam waited there. The scarf around him had become a noose that he struggled against, yelping for aid. Allie called for Zach. Only the wind replied. It was cold there and hard and the wind blew in her face, as though trying to silence her. She yelled for Zach again. Panic built at the back of her throat. And when Allie turned to where the cliffs ended, she saw a tiny coffin standing upright between two stunted pines. The river churned far below. With it came a grunt followed by a growl. Darkwood exploded behind her.

  Allie jerked her eyes open and saw the world on its side. Her body had formed a tight ball beneath Zach’s coat. Sometime during the night, she (or had it been he?) had pulled the coat down to cover her feet, leaving her arms exposed. The skin there wasn’t cold, not with the fire still blazing mere feet away and the piled rocks warm behind her. The windbreak hadn’t exploded in the night, as Zach feared it maybe would. Allie knew it wouldn’t. She had closed her eyes to the same promise that had greeted her come that next morning.

  We’re almost done, Allie. You’re almost to the end. We’ll all go home together.

  A smell filled her nose that brought Allie all the way alive. Not the loamy scent of the forest or the brackish odor rising from the river. This was fragrance. Her neck creaked as she lifted her head. Sam lay still and had not moved all night except to put his tongue back in his mouth. Only the tip showed now, leaking out between the gaps in his white teeth. His breaths came shallow but faint against her scarf.