Winterwood

by Shea Ernshaw

  Drink this. Eat that. Alice down the rabbit hole. Is that where I’ve returned from? Wonderland or Neverland? Or a place much worse? Filled with more monsters than sweet lemon cake and song-filled happy endings?

  “You’re still at risk of hypothermia,” she adds, her lips pressed flat. “But you’re in better shape than I thought you’d be.”

  I don’t feel like I’m in good shape. I feel like I’ll never be warm again. Like I can feel tree roots growing up the inside of my bones, and soon they’ll break me apart. Tear through my skin and push thorns from my eyes.

  I feel cavernous. A husk of who I used to be.

  I hold the mug of fragrant tea in my hands—craving something stronger. A stiff cup of black coffee, something with grit in it, thick like tar. But I take a sip of the tea without protest, wincing against the bitter taste. She watches me finish it, little freckles pinching together along the bridge of her nose—they aren’t year-round freckles, they’re scattered reminders of warmer seasons and days spent in the sun. She takes the empty mug from me, her gaze still cautious, rueful even, her fingers grazing mine. Pale white fingertips.

  There is something stark about her, a wildness. That look you sometimes see when you’re driving down a back road at night and an animal crosses your path, its startled eyes caught in your headlights. That unbroken look, a creature who is more free than you could ever truly understand.

  Again, a knot of fear begins to tighten inside me. She is the girl who lives across the lake. A girl to steer clear of, to avoid. She will hex you, charm you, toss you into the fire just to watch the skin peel away from your bones. But she doesn’t look at me with wickedness in her eyes, with a feral need to kill. She saved me and brought me back.

  She holds the empty cup in her hand, and her mouth falls open, her gaze fixed on the floor beneath me.

  I hear the odd splat of water hitting wood.

  One after another.

  She touches the sleeve of my coat and feels that it’s soaked through, as if I were made of ice and am now melting, making a puddle at my feet.

  “We need to get you out of these wet clothes,” she tells me, a hint of urgency in her eyes. In her breathing.

  I nod, my brain clicking forward on autopilot, the cold sapping any ability to protest.

  I shrug out of my coat, my long-sleeve-shirt, and my jeans, right beside the fire. If it were any other day, if my mind were clear and sharp, I might feel strange standing bare chested in only my boxers, my body shivering, jaw clenching, in front of a girl I don’t know. But the cold is all I feel. All that’s left.

  Her eyes sway over me, catching for a half second before she turns away. Pretending she wasn’t staring. Pretending her cheeks aren’t flushed.

  I sit back on the chair and she drapes a heavy wool blanket from the couch over my shoulders, then hangs my wet clothes above the woodstove to dry. They have the scent of pine and wind and wilderness, a scent that’s hard to describe—unless you’ve trekked into the forest and returned with it clinging to your hair and the fibers of your clothes. It’s as if the woods followed me back, trailing me like campfire smoke.

  “In the morning, I’ll take you back to the camp,” she says, facing the fire now, rubbing her own palms together. “They’ve been searching for you.”

  “How long have I been gone?” I ask bluntly.

  She chews on her lower lip, revealing a row of white teeth, and it feels like I’m seeing too much of her. Like I’m staring too closely, watching every shiver and shift of her dark eyes. “Since the storm,” she says at last, lowering her hands from the fire. “Two weeks.”

  The room slips out of focus, wobbles briefly, then snaps back into place. Two weeks, two whole weeks. I shake my head. “That can’t be right,” I mutter, blinking to keep from tipping out of the chair. “I would have died out there if I’d been gone that long.”

  “But you didn’t,” she answers, and she moves to the window, her reflection staring back: dark hair and dark moonless eyes. “Maybe the woods kept you safe.” I don’t understand what she means, and a gust of wind rattles the house, sending dust down from the overhead beams. “Everyone at camp thinks you tried to run away.”

  I didn’t run away. But I don’t say this, because I can’t explain how I ended up in that dark forest. Where only bursts of light reached me through the never-ending dark, where trees swayed like long skeleton arms moving to some macabre ballet, the wind the only music that filled my ears. Always the wind. Cold and biting and cruel.

  I blink away the memory, sharp as a nail, and let my eyes stray across the living room again—the woodstove is the only light flicking up the walls, illuminating a small kitchen, a narrow hallway, and a set of stairs near the back.

  “The power’s out?” I ask.

  She nods. “Landlines too. Cell phones have never worked this high in the mountains. Our only contacts with the outside world—with the nearest town—are landlines and the road. Both of which were knocked out in the storm.”

  “So, we’re trapped?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “The road will clear eventually. We’ve had bad winters like this before.” Her gaze slips away from mine, as if remembering. “Three years back, it was two months before the road thawed and the power flickered back on. We’re used to being on our own.” She pulls in her lower lip, like maybe she’s said too much, revealed a weak spot. “We’re used to the solitude,” she clarifies, her voice dissolving away, vanishing up into the high ceiling. “You’ll get used to it too,” she says, as if I’ll never leave these mountains. As if I’m one of the residents now, stuck here until they bury me in the ground.

  A shiver rises up along my arms and I wonder: Maybe what they say about her is true—maybe I shouldn’t be here, in her home. A place of darkness and rot.

  “You found all these things?” I ask, swallowing hard and diverting my attention to the magnifying glasses, the old perfume bottles, and the belt buckles lining the windowsill. My mind is pulled back to the stories I’ve heard, the stories the boys tell about how she goes into the dark woods—a place no one else will enter—where she finds lost things. How she is the only one who can, that she is made of the forest, that if you cut her open she will bleed sap just like a tree. How her family is cursed and damned and more dangerous than a winter storm. That her hair is made of stinging nettle and she grows talons through her fingernails.

  “Yes,” she answers cautiously. “Just like I found you.”

  A strange winding silence ropes itself around us, and it feels like we might choke on it. She steps closer to me and lifts her arm, brushing her palm across my forehead, her warm fingers against my skin—gauging my temperature. I feel myself draw in a breath and hold it there, trapped inside my lungs. “You need to sleep,” she says. “You might have a fever.”

  Her dark brown eyes blink back at me, as dark as the woods, but she seems as if she’s looking into the past, a soft slant to her mouth that I can’t read. She smells like the wind, like rain on grass, and she can’t possibly be all the terrible things the boys say about her.

  She can’t possibly steal boys from their bunks and bury them beneath the floorboards. She can’t possibly turn herself into a fanged beast and crash through the forest, knocking down trees. She can’t possibly be a witch who boils toads for breakfast and ties knots in her hair to bind curses that can’t be broken. She is just a girl.

  With raven hair and crush-your-heart-in-half eyes.

  “You can sleep on the couch,” she says softly, lowering her hand and stepping away from me, and I know I’ve stared at her too long. “It’ll be close to the fire.”

  Outside, the sky is dark, not even a hint of light, and I can’t be sure of the time. Or how long it will be until the sunrise. Perhaps my memories will slip back into focus once I feel the morning sun on my face. Once the shadows are scared back into their dusty corners.

  “Thank you,” I say, sleep tugging at me.

  She places a pillow and two more blankets on the
couch, smiling once, before she turns for the stairs, the wolf trailing after her. She pauses on the bottom step, like she’s forgotten something. Tomorrow you’ll feel right as rain. Tomorrow you won’t remember the woods at all. Tomorrow you won’t even remember me.

  But she doesn’t speak, her hair falling over her eyes just before she starts up the stairs. I listen to the sound of her footsteps, small depressions in the wood, the creak of the ceiling overhead. And I feel unsettled, alone, a spike of uncertainty wedging itself into my thoughts.

  I am in the home of the girl who lives across the lake. The girl who should never be trusted. Her name rises up into my chest, the name whispered by the other boys at camp when they tell stories about her late at night in our bunks. Stories meant to scare and frighten.

  The name that rings between my ears: Nora Walker.

  The girl with moonlight in her veins.

  NORA

  I lie in bed in the loft and think of the boy.

  Oliver Huntsman.

  The way his eyes twitched to mine when I spoke, and hung there, a ripe green that reminded me of the grass that pushes up from the soil in spring. A kindness in them. The way his wet hair dried in soft little waves around his ears. The way he held his breath just before he spoke, considering each word—each syllable. The way my heart swung up into my throat and made me dizzy. A feeling I tried to tamp down, to ignore. But couldn’t.

  I think of the woods, the moment I found him in the snow: how his eyes snapped open, the whites like cracked eggshells. Fear trembling across his lips. What did he see in those woods? Why did the forest let him live? I wish I could peel him open, cut away his hard exterior, and see what he hides inside.

  Now he sleeps downstairs, and I know that even the heat from the woodstove won’t warm the chill from his flesh, won’t cure what haunts him.

  He needs medicine. Not the kind from a white room in a sterile white building prescribed by people in white coats. He needs forest medicine.

  The only way to cure a chill caused by the forest is to use a remedy grown inside it. My grandmother’s words are always buzzing along my skull, always close.

  I tiptoe back down the stairs, past the kitchen, to the rear of the house. Quiet as a winter mouse. Quiet as the seeds that fall to the ground in late spring.

  I push open the door to my mother’s room and step inside. It smells like her: vanilla bean and honey. Always the scent of honey. It sticks to her, in her wavy auburn hair, honeycomb under her fingernails. It can never be properly washed off. Not completely. Three weeks ago, she left on a delivery to the coastal town of Sparrow with four crates of her wild clover honey placed safely in the back of her truck. During a full moon, she collects the sticky comb from the wild hives inside the Wicker Woods, then funnels it into glass jars and delivers them to small boutiques and organic food markets along the west coast. Stores pay a premium for her Wicker Wood Honey, said to be sweeter than real cane sugar and able to cure all manner of skin ailments—including hives and poison oak and sunburns.

  I haven’t spoken to her since she left, since the phones have been down and the road blocked. But we’re used to winter storms. To being cut off. And although maybe I should feel alone, isolated and afraid without her, I don’t. She and I have always been more opposite than alike. I am the daughter who wants to be a Walker, and she is the mother who pretends she isn’t: a Walker or a mother. She feels betrayed by my curiosity, my need to know our past—to know who I am.

  To understand the darkness that lives in my veins.

  And I feel betrayed by her: her silence when she’s home, her refusal to talk about Grandma or about the Walkers who came before us.

  I prefer it when she’s away, when I can be alone in the old house.

  Mom has never been one to worry about me anyway—she knows I can take care of myself until the road thaws. I could take care of myself even if she never came back.

  Inside her room, I kneel down on the floor and reach my arms beneath the bed, past a discarded, half-burnt candle; past dust bunnies that skitter away; and past a pale-yellow sock missing its mate, until I find the wooden box she keeps hidden.

  I slide it out, resting the box on the floor in front of me, then quietly open the lid.

  Inside rest an assortment of keepsakes: old photographs and family letters kept safely inside their envelopes, my grandmother’s pearl necklace, an old music box once owned by Henrietta Walker. Family heirlooms tucked away beneath a bed where they will eventually be forgotten. Things that remind me of who I am—that make me feel less alone.

  And under it all, I find the book.

  I touch the faded words handwritten on the front: Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine. And sketched below it is a compass with the four cardinal directions: north, south, east, west.

  But I don’t open the book—not here in my mother’s room, where I fear she might sense it once she returns, sense that I sat on her floor with the book fanned open in front of me. So I tuck it under my arm, the weight of my family history inside its pages, and leave the honey-scented room before I leave too many clues that I was here.

  With the fire roaring downstairs, my own room is sweltering when I return, and I push open one of the windows—letting the snow spiral inside and settle on the floor. I grew up in this room, in this loft overlooking the lake. I was born here too, seventeen years ago under a watery full moon while a rainstorm flooded the banks of the lake and turned the shore to mud. All Walkers are coaxed into the world when the moon is brightest. As if our birthright were calling to us.

  I place the book on the bed, feeling like a thief.

  The spellbook will belong to me one day, passed down from one Walker woman to the next. But for now, it belongs to my mother, and she never opens it, never pulls it out to sift through its pages. It’s a burden to her. Our family history like a disease she can’t be rid of.

  When I was younger, when my grandmother was still alive, she’d bring the book into my room when my mother was away on a delivery. Your mom wants to forget the old ways, she’d say. Who we really are. Grandma Ida would settle onto my bed and turn through the pages of the book like she was sifting through dust, revealing artifacts from the past. Her wrinkled, unsteady fingers knew the pages by heart.

  The memory causes an ache in my chest, recalling the kindness in her graying eyes. The soft, knowing tenor of her words.

  She’d read me passages in a hush, as if the walls might tell on us. Pages and pages of notations and recipes and hand-drawn sketches. There were instructions on how to decipher the spiderwebs built by peppercorn spiders to predict the weather. How to locate the precious thimbleberries that were used during pregnancy to know if it was a boy or girl stirring inside the belly. Grandma would read to me old recipes written down by Scarlett Walker and Florence Walker and Henrietta Walker, women who seemed more like characters from folklore than real women who lived in this house and strode through the forest gathering primrose and hemlock. Who had more power, I fear, than I may ever have.

  Some recipes were innocuous enough: instructions for baking spiced prickly pear pie or a particularly tricky recipe for rutabaga-and-parsley stew. The best method for steeping juniper berry tea, and how to harvest yarrow root in the fall. But others were for conjuring up things that were more witchcraft than forest medicine. How to trick a bat into hunting a common house mouse. How to grow wild strawberries and sword ferns and wax myrtle for protection and divination. How to see the dead wandering among gravestones.

  There was no index in the back of the book, no rhyme or reason to the order of recipes and spells. Things were merely written down in succession, from one Walker to another. The book is tea-stained and chocolate-smeared, and the first few pages are completely unreadable, the ink having faded to nothing with time. And every few pages, a brief history has been written down—the story of a Walker who once lived, and how she died—recorded like a family ledger, so each tale, each woman, would never be forgotten.

  But after my g
randmother passed away, only a week before my fifteenth birthday, my mother took the book and shoved it inside the wooden box beneath her bed. Like she didn’t trust me with it, like she was trying to blot out the memory of my grandmother and all the Walkers along with it. But she can’t erase our past, can’t scrub clean the moonlight in our veins. Mom only ever wanted to be normal. To leave the past where it belonged. To no longer be called witches or weird or be forced to avoid sidelong glances when we went into town, catching the last of a muttered word about how spiders lived in our hair and beetles under our toenails.

  We are Walkers. And our ancestors have lived in these woods since long before the first miners set up camp along the Black River. We came from this forest. From the roots and brine and weather-worn stones.

  We are the daughters of the wood.

  One cannot survive without the other.

  I sit cross-legged on the white bedspread. Snow floats into the room, catching in my hair, landing on Fin where he’s curled up on the floor, nose tucked beneath his tail.

  I flip open the front cover of the book and am met with the musty scent of burnt amber and jasmine. Just like the nights with my grandmother. A thrumming begins in my chest—a peculiar sort of ache. The thrill and also the fear leaping through me. If Mom found out I took it from beneath her bed, she would be angry. She’d hide it where I wouldn’t be able to find it ever again. Maybe she’d even destroy it.

  Still, I bend over the pages and my hair falls loose from its braid—fine and inky-black, just like my grandmother’s. Even the sturdy slope of my nose, the dark storm resting behind my eyes, the melancholy curve of my lips—it’s all her. The reminder of my grandma always hidden in my own face.

  The weight of the moonstone slides the gold ring around my finger as I skim over recipes and drawings outlined in charcoal, until I find what I’m looking for. A simple concoction—a crease folded down the page where the book has been fanned open countless times. The recipe isn’t true witchery. But Grandma used to make it during the cold months of January, to warm chilled bones, to calm a cough, to bring circulation back into numb fingers and toes.