Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

  “I don’t know,” Liz said. “I think I let her convince me. I didn’t want to get in trouble.”

  “Afterwards, when I got home, I wanted to tell, but I saw how my mother was and I knew how my father loved St. Margaret’s . . . and then time went by and it was one of those things; the longer I waited the harder it was to explain why I didn’t tell right away.” Hannah gathered the hair off the back of her neck and reset the combs. “Sometimes I wish Mario’s uncles had found my underpants; the whole story would have come out then.”

  “Then you do think about it.”

  “Not really.” A spark of aggravation must have shown in Liz’s eyes because Hannah said, “Don’t look at me like that. There just isn’t that much to think about. Not for me. The whole experience was such a nightmare, I think I repressed it. The details anyway. But if you’re asking does it cross my mind sometimes, well, of course, it does. Jesus, Liz, I’m not one of Mindy’s basket cases. What happened to me . . . to us . . . it’s not the kind of thing a functioning brain forgets. Not completely anyway.” After a moment of silence, her voice had a flat eerie calm. “Jeanne must have taken my panties. Before we went back that night.”

  “Have you asked her?”

  “She’d never tell me the truth.”

  “You’re her best friend. She loves you.”

  “Once, when Ingrid was a newborn, I had this little thing that went around her head, a little pink and yellow bow thing so people would know she was a girl even though she was bald. Jeanne took it.”

  “No way. She stole it?”

  Hannah nodded.

  “Why would she do that?”

  Hannah shrugged. “I’ve always thought she blamed me for Billy Phillips’s death, as if it didn’t have to happen, like I should have handled it better, like she would have.”

  “God, Hannah, it’s not as if you had time to plan. The boy—”

  “I think she took the panties so I’d always wonder and be a little afraid. That way she holds one extra card and it’s always the trump. Keeps her feeling like she’s the strong one.”

  Sunday

  Early Sunday morning Hannah dreamed of walking through pungent fog, a familiar scent she could not identify. Something waits in the fog, something she fears and she wants to run; but her body moves forward, dragged or shoved or by its own volition. A figure emerges from the mist. She sees eyes and chin and mouth. She runs but she is barefoot and sharp rocks and tree roots pave the floor of a vast dark wood. There is a path somewhere but she cannot find it or when she does it disappears and she is back where she started and where are her shoes? She has lost her shoes. Has someone taken her shoes? Her mother will be so angry. She must go back to look for them. She can’t go home until she finds them.

  She woke drenched in sweat. She touched her face and her palms were hot. She kicked off the blanket and sat on the edge of the bed pulling in deep breaths, feeling her heart beat like a prisoner beating on the bars of her prison. Her nightgown clung to her back and the sweat beneath her breasts steamed. She ripped off the gown and stood a moment to cool herself before the open bedroom window.

  In the back garden the bed of white stock she had kept alive with recycled bathwater glowed in the darkness. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, hoping to catch a bit of their fragrance. She remembered the dream, the smell of the creek.

  Damndamndamn. She did not want this, not any of it.

  She took a fresh cotton nightie from the dresser and slipped it over her head. She covered the clammy sheet with a towel and got back into bed. Now she was cold, practically shivering. God, she hated menopause, hated the knowledge that her body was breaking down like an obsolete machine. Dan could say it was normal, but it felt like malfunction to her. Moldering ovaries, rust on the uterus.

  Down the hall Eddie got up to use the bathroom. Asleep on his feet, he wrestled the doorknob into obedience.

  Mindy Ryder and her daughter, Balthazara, were big into dream interpretation. It would take them about sixty seconds to conjure an analysis of Hannah’s dream, but she didn’t need voodoo. Her hormones might be wacko, but her brain still worked.

  The toilet flushed and in a second she heard Eddie hit the wall as he staggered back to his bed.

  She didn’t want to think about her dream or Eddie, but the waters of memory rose and there he was splashing around in them: his pudgy babyness, the pointy chin and chapped cheeks, the pink pearl of his lower lip. She missed her little son; she ached for her small boy as if he had died. One morning when Eddie was not quite thirteen she had, without thinking, walked in on him in the bathroom and saw him standing at the sink in his Jockey shorts. He turned around and his outraged gaze met hers on the same level. “Ma, you’re supposed to knock!” It was after that she began to think about what forever really meant.

  When her parents died the finality had not struck her deeply, perhaps because she had always expected them to die before her. But now she knew that her baby, her little boy, had died too. She could spend a decade on her knees at St. Margaret’s, she could bankrupt the family, she could even kill herself; no plea to God Almighty or sacrifice to a pagan goddess would return him to her. He was dead like her mother and father, vanished like a dinosaur off the face of her earth. Forever.

  She pressed her feet against the back of Dan’s legs. Perhaps in his own deep dream he encountered an icicle; if so, it didn’t trouble him. Encouraged, she squirmed closer. The man slept hot and dry and warmed his side of the bed like a copper pan full of coals.

  She remembered listening to Sepia Serenade under the covers late at night when her parents were asleep. KWBR Lucky Fourteen. Some nights she had to fiddle twenty minutes to pick up the feeble signal from Oakland. Eventually she always did find it. She longed for the past to be findable in the same way. It buzzed in the ether, invisible as a radio signal, but there, always there, if she could only find the frequency.

  She got out of bed and went down the hall to Eddie’s room. The door stood half open, the room illuminated by a Junior Seau nightlight she’d put in his Christmas stocking that year. She pressed her palm against the door and pushed it open.

  She had not been in Eddie’s bedroom for several weeks; she preferred to do no more than glance in from the hall, checking for dirty dishes. A few months earlier she had told him he would have to do his own laundry. It was good training and besides she wasn’t a servant, but the whole truth was that she couldn’t stand to touch his clothes, to be that close to the intimate smell of him.

  Tonight she crossed the threshold and stepped over to the bed where he lay. She did not look at him. She focused her eyes on the books and magazines piled on the headboard shelf and told herself there was magic afoot. She would wait an enchanted moment, look down and there would be her baby again, restored to her. But if, like poor love-besotted Orpheus, she looked at him too soon the spell would break.

  She didn’t believe any of it, of course; but she wanted it to be true and if she wanted it enough couldn’t she warp reality with the force of her wanting? In that moment she longed to have her little boy back more than she wanted Dan or Ingrid or good health or a long life. If she could see him as he once was—even if only for a few moments—she would give away years of her life. These thoughts frightened Hannah; but she couldn’t help it, she meant them.

  She counted slowly backwards from ten, let her breath out and looked down. And there he was: the half-man, half-boy she so disliked. The eyes and nose and chin of the boy in the dream. Pimples, whiskers, the smell of sweat and oily hair. In her worst scenario, she walked into his room and the bed was empty, closet and cupboards too; and she didn’t make a move to search for him. Was that what the dream meant? Eddie lost in the fog and Hannah unwilling to go after him? No. The figure had been coming toward her. At least she thought that’s the way it went. Funny how dreams evaporated like perfume.

  Hannah went back to bed and dozed a little. Next time she woke the digital clock beside the bed told her it was just after fiv
e. She dressed in Levi’s, a sweater and boots and pinned her hair back and up without combing it. When she entered the kitchen Cherokee greeted her with a thumping tail, but made no effort to rise from her pillow.

  “Lazy wretch,” Hannah said and stroked the satiny red head.

  She made a double cappuccino and sprinkled the top with grated chocolate, grabbed a jacket off the hook by the back door and walked out to get the Sunday paper where the delivery woman dropped it at the end of the driveway. Her boots scrunched on the gravel drive and the clear cold stung her nose and ears and she warmed her hands on her coffee mug. Mist smoked through the scarlet leaves of the liquidambar trees lining the driveway. Each parched blade of grass shimmered, grateful for the dew. At the base of the mailbox post, she found the paper in its plastic sheath and tucked it under her arm. She was heading back when the sight of her home and garden struck her vision as if she had been away a long time.

  The house was built broad and low despite its two stories. The windows were square and generous and the deep, gently pitched rooflines and wide veranda across the front and sides were classic Craftsman. A few earthquake cracks marred the exterior walls and the garage roof needed fixing; the house was getting old but it was solid. It belonged where it was.

  Beautiful, she thought. I have everything in the world any woman could want including this wonderful house, but I’m not happy. Liz is right, I’m not happy.

  Shame gushed through her and she heard her father insist she be grateful because she wasn’t a displaced person or a poor Jewish child with matchstick arms and legs. Make a gratitude list, her father told her; and she told him back that she was sick of painting a generous smile on her face when she was sad clear down to her toes, sick of being agreeable when she was ticked off at the whole damn world, especially the world of Casabella Road, sick of feeling awkward as a schoolgirl sprouting hair and breasts, a puberty-ridden adolescent in a middle-aged body. The only way she was going to make another gratitude list was if her father appeared before her like the Virgin Mary at Fatima.

  The day stretched ahead, forty miles of bad road.

  She dropped the paper on the back step and headed down to the barn. As she did, Cherokee nosed her way out the pet door and hurried into step beside her. Dogs, cats, broken-down horses: Hannah liked them because she didn’t have to pretend with them or second-guess their motivations or look for hidden meanings. If a dog growled, she knew to leave it alone. If a horse laid its ears back, she got ready for trouble. She didn’t want to know about their four-footed dreams any more than they cared about hers. She knew when they were happy and when they were not, and if they had a subconscious she hoped to God no one would ever find out about it.

  She opened the paddock gate and the dogs rushed to greet her with excited leaps and yips. The cats wove in and out between her legs, tails up and quivering. Mealtime cupboard love. She put fresh water, hay and oats in Glory’s stall and promised to groom her. Soon. She fed the dogs and cats, and the one-eared burro blinded by a baseball bat.

  As she passed out of the barn, she glanced to her right in the direction of the creek. Under cover of the wildwood just beyond the fence something moved; what looked like a small human figure darted from sight so quickly she almost doubted her eyes. Last night Gail had said there were homeless people living in the caves above Bluegang.

  “Hey,” she yelled.

  Cherokee set up a racket and with a gang of orphan dogs behind her, chased to the chain link fence. Hannah yelled after her; but Cherokee had her nose to the ground, her senses keyed to the trespasser. Hannah yelled again and reluctantly the dog came back, the mutts were less cooperative. Hannah held Cherokee by her collar as she strained to be away after her prey. A streamer of fog swirled across the paddock and twined itself among the branches of the trees, obscuring Hannah’s view. She breathed in the fragrance of the creek, the smell from her dream: mud and damp and, pervasive, the spicy sour reek of decaying bay and eucalyptus leaves.

  At a little after seven Hannah pushed open the gate to the side patio of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church. Father Joe sat on a stone bench by the fountain, drinking coffee; and when he saw her, he smiled and waved her in. Over his slightly rusted black cassock he wore a bulky cable knit cardigan that was the same watery blue as his faded eyes.

  “I brought you some flowers for your room.” She held out a fistful of white stock. “I’ll put them in water.”

  “There’s coffee on the stove.”

  “Good,” she said over her shoulder. “I need it.”

  Since his retirement, Father Joe had lived in a dinky apartment adjacent to the parish hall, furnished him rent free by St. Margaret’s in exchange for his taking the early Eucharist and reading morning prayer during the week, services the current priest—a young father with twins and a disorganized wife—considered burdensome.

  When Hannah returned she sat beside him on the bench and held his hand. A little old man’s pale hand with big knuckles and spotted by age. The fog had burned off, revealing another clear morning, but it was chilly and Hannah was grateful for her heavy sweater and Levi’s. For a time they sat in silence, contemplating the bronze statue of St. Francis that presided over the garden Hannah’s mother had laid out before Father Joe came to St. Margaret’s. The bushes of yellow marguerite daisies flowered gleefully. With a little drink once or twice a week to dampen their roots, Hannah thought they would happily bloom themselves to death. Some things needed so little care to thrive while others, like Angel, could never get enough. She crouched in the dirt and nipped off the brown seed heads with her fingernails.

  Father Joe was a deacon when her mother laid out St. Margaret’s garden, and traveled between parishes in the Santa Clara Valley, helping out where he was needed. St. Margaret’s was a thriving parish in those days with a Sunday school of more than sixty and a choir that gave concerts up and down the West Coast.

  She sat back on her heels and stared at the brown buds in her palm. “What if it never rains again? Maybe God’s giving us the reverse of a flood.”

  “More like there’s a huge high pressure system off the coast, blocking the moisture. They said on the news last night it’s like a wall keeping the rain to the north of us.”

  “Maybe it’s the Rapture.”

  “Anglicans don’t believe in the Rapture.”

  “The end of the world then.”

  “I don’t think we believe in that either. At least not the Apocalypse.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard today.”

  “You’re in a cheerful mood this morning, Hannah Tarwater.”

  She stood and arched her back to stretch it out. What would Father Joe say if she told him that more than thirty years before she had killed a boy and abandoned his body to the coyotes. The night before she had almost told Liz the whole story, but the words weren’t there. She would never be able to tell anyone what really happened that day, not the full truth.

  “Talk to me, Hannah,” Father Joe said. “What’s eating you?”

  She walked across the little garden and tossed the dead heads in a waste barrel, sat down again. “I didn’t sleep well.”

  “Worrying about the end of the world?”

  “I know I’d feel better if it rained.” She remembered the touch of the rain spray Liz brought her from Florida. It made her want to cry, the memory of rain.

  “So what’s on your mind?”

  “Do you believe in the subconscious, Father Joe?”

  “Absolutely. I’m an Anglican. It’s one of my vows.” She didn’t smile. “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I think there’s something in mine trying to get out.”

  Father Joe chuckled.

  “It’s like I’m the cage and my subconscious is the panther.”

  “I know the feeling you describe, Hannah.”

  “What do you do about it? How do you make it go away?”

  “I try not to f
ight it. Embrace it. Let whatever’s in there ease out of the cage, so to speak.” For a moment he stirred his coffee with a plastic spoon, then he shook his head irritably. “Forgive me, Hannah, that wasn’t an honest answer. The true answer to your question is that I wish I could calmly embrace the panther. I wish I could always and completely trust that whatever’s going on in my mind, it’s the Holy Spirit at work. I shouldn’t be afraid, I should let it out. I pray for that kind of faith, but I don’t always have it. Like most people, I use up a lot of energy trying to keep the panther in the cage or trying to convince myself it isn’t there at all.” He finished the last swallow of his coffee. “Even when it’s clawing at me through the bars.” He tossed the dregs into the garden. “There’s a priest I know up in Millbrae. I trust him so when it gets really bad, we meet halfway, find a church and I make my confession. Maybe that’s what you need. It cleans things out, sets things straight.”

  “That’s what my friend says.”

  “Then you have a wise friend.”

  That stopped Hannah. She thought of Liz as intelligent but never wise.

  They stowed their coffee cups behind a rock and walked toward the church. Hannah remembered Mrs. Phillips.

  “Gail Bacci says you went into her house.”

  “Oh, I’d been in there before. Once or twice a month she’d invite me for High Tea.” He laughed. “Being an Anglican, some people always assume I’m partial to crumpets and tea. I never could tell her what I really wanted at four in the afternoon was a cold Corona.” He fitted an iron key into the lock on the church door. “She couldn’t care for the house or herself anymore, but even so she didn’t want to move up to Crestwood. I never really convinced her. Just did the deed. She seems happy now, though.” He held the door for Hannah. “You must have known her, Hannie. You were neighbors. Her son was the boy—”

  “I know.” She stopped on the threshold. “Joe, did she have a happy life?” She hoped for a surprise, a little reprieve.