The Forest's Son

by Aleo, Cyndy

  He should be dead.

  He turns up the radio, and she hears the unfamiliar sounds of pop music. She remembers when the radios first appeared in cars, then the transition from traditional music to things that sounded more angielskie played on the radios. She looks back at him, watching his deft hands flip a cigarette free of its pack then light it. In the flare of the lighter, she sees his pale blue eyes, his black hair, the telltale pink flush on his pale skin that tells her he is as aroused as she is.

  If her sisters knew she’d seen where he lived at all, they’d view her in the same light as Grażyna: a traitor. But he is an addiction she can’t seem to break herself of, and she must be the same for him, because he asks no questions. If he wonders why he picks her up on the edge of the forest instead of at a flat or workplace, he never voices the questions. He prearranges times and dates when he comes to pick her up, and they drive back to his flat.

  Sometimes they go to a restaurant first, but nights like tonight, when he’s practically vibrating with need, it’s all about one thing.

  The car stops suddenly, before she even realizes they’ve arrived. He opens her door with a flourish and takes her hand to help her from the car. She smiles, knowing what will come next, and he does not disappoint. He presses her against the car and kisses his way from her jaw to her collarbone. She writhes against him, wishing humans weren’t so predictable. She’d love for him to take her on the floor of the parking garage, as if they were home in her forest. Instead, their foreplay will begin here, then pause, continue in the elevator, and pause again while they make their way down the corridor to his apartment.

  His teeth graze her neck, while his hands grope at the back of her dress. They won’t make it past his front door, she knows — not tonight.

  And then she’s naked and he’s holding her up against his front door. She sighs and moans a name she is afraid to so much as think, lest her sisters hear even a whisper of what she does.

  “Tadeusz.”

  7: Chaos

  Vance needs to check his mother's invoicing. No matter how many times he's shown her how the system works, she does something to it every time, and he goes in at least weekly to fix things. Any less often and it takes him hours to straighten things out instead of a few minutes.

  He asks Donovan if she wants to keep him company at his mother's tiny desk in the room that would have been a formal living room for anyone else living here, but she declines, saying she has some reading she wants to start on, and would he mind if she reads in his room in case he needs to talk to his mother when she comes back in.

  He's laughing under his breath at his mother's usual mess of the invoicing — again, why he remembers this when he can’t remember other things — when the front door slams open. Running. His mother is running. She doesn't run. She saunters. She floats. She strolls. She's never even gotten up to a fast walk that he can remember.

  Or can he?

  His heart pounds as a dull ache moves in behind his eyes.

  “No time! Just run. Run!”

  Is the moment real or imagined? A dream? It's a snippet of something that feels all too familiar. His mother? They are running? But where from? Where to? And why? He has no time to wonder though, because she’s already giving him orders:

  “Upstairs,” she says, and he follows her up the wooden stairs, his long legs taking them two at a time, realizing his mother’s strides are exactly in sync with his. They reach his bedroom door at almost the same moment, and find Donovan, not on his bed reading, but sitting in the middle of his floor in front of a large cardboard box.

  “Would either of you mind telling me exactly what the hell this is?” Donovan asks. “It looks like some kind of medieval torture device.”

  She pushes the box along the floor toward the two of them, and Vance takes a few hesitant steps forward. His mother doesn’t move from the doorway. Inside the cardboard box Donovan had been looking at is another one: strange and wooden and connected to two handle-type objects that look almost like martial arts weapons. Nunchuku, he thinks they are called. Along with them are two strange little pads, a mess of wires, and a few unopened packs of nine-volt batteries.

  Alongside the box and strange equipment is a faux-velvet bag in a bright shade of violet. It appears to be newer than the rest of the items in the box, and there’s embroidery that suggests it may have once held a bottle of alcohol.

  None of it looks familiar.

  Without waiting for him, Donovan takes hold of the purple bag, loosening the gold drawstring and dumping the contents onto the floor. Zipper-locked plastic baggies fall out, each containing blister packs of white tablets.

  “Drugs? I guess that explains a lot. What about the rest of this?” Donovan asks.

  He shrugs, but his mother takes a step forward.

  “Maybe this is something you should leave alone,” she says to Donovan.

  "Leave alone?" Donovan asks. “Leave alone? This is a 100-year-old electroshock machine. The original instructions are still in here, Grace. And there are batteries. This is in your son's closet, and that doesn't concern you?”

  She turns to Vance. “Is this what makes you forget everything? Are you actually doing this to yourself?”

  Her eyes are round and brimming with tears, the anger in her voice diminished by the all-too-obvious hurt.

  “Did you know about this?” She turns her attention back to his mother. “Is that why you aren't at all concerned? Why you tell me to 'leave it alone' without so much as batting an eye?”

  Grace narrows her eyes. “That medication isn't natural. It comes with side effects of respiratory depression. Did you think I would let things happen in my own house that would risk his life and not keep watch over him? He is more important than my own life.”

  His mother's words should shock him, but they don't. There’s a familiarity to them. He knows he's heard them before, in another version. Another life. The rest of the scene — with Donovan, with his mother — has taken on a completely surreal aspect. He's no more than an observer now, watching them as if through frosted glass.

  “So you know he’s been doing this? What do the drugs do?” Donovan asks.

  "They are a combination of things. You'd call them a 'downer' I think, with added benefits of amnesia."

  His mother is so matter-of-fact. She isn't surprised about the contents of the box, and it sounds like she's been prepared for Donovan's questions for a long time.

  “And then he shocks himself with this, this … contraption?”

  “Yes.”

  “That's barbaric.”

  “Yes, but necessary.”

  They discuss him, their words floating over and around him. He's no longer all the way here. He’s a stone in the stream of unfolding events that may have even been predestined from the moment he befriended the strange Goth girl back in high school.

  His mother's eyes are more clear and focused than he’s ever seen them. The ethereal image has been replaced by that of a warrior — no, a mother bear protecting her cub. There is more to her than he thinks anyone has ever seen.

  “The question is, Donovan, why do you seek these answers now? You have been friends with my son for years. You have tolerated more than many would, and indeed, have. You have suffered greatly for your trouble, and I do not underestimate the reasons behind that.”

  He blinks, listening for a hidden meaning tangled in the words, but she continues on.

  :You now have to decide how much more you can live with. You have seen this much, but it is time for you to leave. Go home. Go to sleep. And decide whether you can tolerate knowing more. Because I can assure you, it gets much, much worse from here.

  “I will not fault you if you choose to run. If I were in your shoes and had the option, that might be my choice as well. And I promise you, once my son remembers all, I do not think he will fault you either, if that is your choice.”

  Donovan opens her mouth, an automatic reflex. She will argue, and fight, as she has always done
for him. She's his best friend, his companion, and no matter how difficult things may get, she'll never leave him.

  Only this time — maybe because she has seen a side of his mother she didn't know existed, or maybe because of the evidence that he doesn't have a psychological problem, but rather, a self-administered problem that causes him to forget everything about her, that he does it intentionally each time — she stands and gathers her things.

  Her gait is a stutter and he wonders if it’s her brain and her heart fighting for control of her body. But before she leaves, she stops in front of his mother. Without looking at him, she bows to Grace, an apparent instinctual response, before clattering down the stairs, out the door, and maybe out of his life.

  He can't move, can't think, can't breathe. In just one day, he has come to understand that he depends on her utterly. In not one of his classes did anyone else speak to him. If she doesn't return in the morning to drive him back to campus, he fears he will be left alone, only his mother for companionship.

  “You should put that away,” she says, nodding her head toward the box, “and think if you are ready yet. I think you have a bit more time to rest, but maybe you rather would get right to it? I will let you think as well.”

  She ruffles his hair before she leaves the room, the gesture one of a mother to a small boy. It's something she's probably done hundreds of times, and it bothers him that he can't call up even a glimmer of a memory of that, when other, more trivial things have already seeped back into his memory.

  He wants to remember a time when he could crawl into her arms and find comfort and safety. He must have felt that way when he was young, but with his Swiss cheese memory, all he has to go on are the two juxtaposed images today: ethereal earth mother and fierce warrior mother. Which is real? Which has raised him?

  He pauses before he picks up the box, listening for his mother's footsteps on the stairs, and he swears she’s speaking in another language, so quietly he can barely hear her. She whispers something that sounds almost like a name, and sounds so familiar he can almost — almost — place it, but that feeling of connection slips just out of his reach when she finally starts down the stairs.

  8: Alone

  Donovan has driven nearly halfway home before she lets the tears fall. Things have admittedly been weird since she became friends with Vance, but this is beyond anything anyone could ever have expected. She can't even absorb the scene that took place at his house just now. Could she have been hallucinating?

  Until now, life as his friend has consisted of a routine. It’s been strange and uncomfortable, but at least it’s been routine. She’s woken every day hoping to find that one tiny clue that would lead her to a solution to bump the routine off the track and make it stop.

  This isn’t exactly what she meant.

  Driving becomes impossible, and she pulls over to the side of the road, noting that she's next to one of the cow pastures Vance always jokes about. She sees a few cows grazing, but the usually overpowering smell barely registers because her brain is focused so much on everything else.

  Is his name even Vance?

  There are no more truths she can still count on. Vance's not-all-there mother may spend most of her time on another plane of existence, but apparently, when it matters, she's more there than may be safe for most human beings, and she's scary. And Vance himself isn't some poor kid with a really terrible seizure disorder or psychological issue, like she's thought — or at least contemplated — all these years. Instead, he’s zapping the living hell out of his brain to make himself forget, and his mother has known about it the whole time. And not only has his mother known about it; she’s encouraged it. She’s been part of it. She’s used it to protect their secrets, whatever they may be.

  It's going to be impossible to process everything overnight, much less make any kind of decision about what she should do now. A smart person would call in some kind of help, but whom would she call? The police? Is it illegal to administer your own electroshock therapy with some ancient machine? She has so many questions, and none of them are going be answered in the timeframe she needs them answered.

  So only one question is left: Can she see herself leaving Vance? When she’s let everything else fall by the wayside, and allowed everyone else to drift out of her life like so much flotsam and jetsam, can she cast him away as well and try to reassemble the broken shards of what she thinks she once had?

  There are probably friends who’d be willing to take her back, and she'd been asked out a couple of times before all the guys on campus determined she was “the weird girl” who hung out with “the ghost boy” who never talked to anyone or seemed to know what was going on. The possibility of a normal life might still be out there for her somewhere.

  She knows, though, if she doesn't pick him up in the morning, she’ll spend the rest of her life pondering the what-ifs. She'll wonder what happened to him and what there might have been between them if she'd only gotten into her car and picked him up. She’ll ask herself questions she’ll never get answers to about his past, about where he's really from, about what he plans to do next. She’ll always wonder if what kept them from being more would have been resolved with the answers she wants.

  With a deep breath, she pulls the car back onto the road and continues home, trying to imagine what her life will be like if she never gets the answers to what she's seen today, if the mystery ends for her right here. She knows this isn't the kind of thing that will turn up in papers or on national news. Whatever is going on with Vance and his mother, they are people who exist off the grid.

  If she fails to show in the morning, she has no doubt they’ll simply disappear from her life as if they’d been a dream. She'll never have that odd moment of seeing something and turning to her husband in a house in the suburbs where she lives with a minivan and two cookie-cutter children and saying "Oh, how strange. I knew that family once. I was friends with the son and I drove him to classes back in college."

  It can never be that normal for her.

  She reaches home and makes a cursory check to make sure her cat has food and water, ignoring her growling stomach and its need for dinner. She goes straight for her bedroom, pulls back the blankets, and curls up in her bed fully dressed. She drags the covers over her head, and clutches a pillow to her chest. Even with the hallway lights still on, with the deep purple sheets, she can fool herself into believing the entire world has gone dark.

  She falls asleep quickly, still not entirely decided about what she’s going to do in the morning. Maybe that will come to her in the sweet oblivion of sleep.

  9: Fork

  One moment's distraction brings a lifetime of ramifications. No one should know that better than Grace, and still she'd forgotten it. She'd never left Donovan and Vance alone in the house together, not entirely, and especially not right after he had forgotten, when she knew the girl would be at her most upset and inquisitive and her son would be at his most fragile and unguarded.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Or was it?

  The possibility that maybe she is tired of keeping the secret alone all these years didn't escape her. No one likes to carry a burden alone, and this one is a particularly heavy one, especially for one who was raised to be one of many, not one alone. She is forever a bee cut off from her hive, cast adrift, and she is so very tired.

  It makes her angry to think she may have subconsciously set them all up so she could end her loneliness. After all that she has suffered — that her son has suffered — to be so careless as to expose them is unacceptable.

  She stands in the middle of the kitchen and stares at the things she has allowed them both to collect over the years they have lived here. How many of them would she want to take if they fled? She has allowed them to become tied to a place and to material objects when her foremost thought has always been to travel light, to be able to move quickly, and to leave no trace.

  They will leave a huge blot when they have to flee: a stain that will show e
vidence of their existence. An even bigger one if Donovan decides she wants no part of this and they leave her behind. This will be one place they won't disappear from easily, because they will leave too much of themselves behind: the people she does business with, those who see her when she goes into town, her son's classmates at the high school and now at the college … but the biggest issue of all will be Donovan.

  Neither Vance nor Donovan realize yet that they are in love with each other. Donovan wouldn’t even considering staying around Vance were she not in love with him. And her son — could he love Donovan back in that same way?

  He has never been in his right mind long enough to let himself have feelings for her other than those of a best friend. But his heart probably knows the truth, for he does this over and over not to protect the secret, but to protect her, and to allow them to stay here far longer than they ever should have. If all things were different —

  Ah, but if all things were different, he would be a girl, or he would not be alive, or Grace would never have been one of the sisters, and he and Donovan would have met and fallen in love and gone to prom and done all the things Grace sees regular people do. By now they may have even tired of each other and moved on to new partners and new feelings.

  Instead, he is upstairs, most likely lying on his bed staring at the ceiling and trying to decide whether to come downstairs and ask her questions or to wait for the memories to return once more. Meanwhile, the girl has gone home to determine whether she wants to know the answers to the questions she's been asking herself for years. So much thinking. But their decisions will change everything. Nothing can go back to the way it was.

  And Grace is in the kitchen staring at copper-bottom pots hanging from wrought-iron racks, and lovely bottles of vinegars infused with her herbs, and there is an aesthetically pleasing computer humming at her tiny desk in the corner where she tracks her business dealings and wonders how she got to a point where she is surrounded by all these things instead of her sisters, and what will happen when this all comes crashing down around her.