The Forest's Son

by Aleo, Cyndy

  She stops for a moment in the kitchen when she doesn't hear the sound again. It's funny how she’s back to thinking of him as Vance now that she's back in the house. Here, she’s able to remember him as the same best friend she's had for years. It's easier to think of him that way, instead of the powerful something-or-other he is in the forest.

  She can separate them this way in her mind: Jakub sent her away. Vance cares for her. Jakub doesn't want her around, but Vance and his mother would make sure she was protected and cared for before they took off to a foreign country to do battle with Grace’s past.

  Donovan walks up the stairs and listens for the phone sound again. It seems to get louder as she climbs, and she turns toward Grace's bedroom first. Of the three rooms upstairs, Grace's is the one she's least familiar with, and probably the one most likely to harbor a phone she wouldn't know about.

  It's dark in there, and she creeps in, afraid to enter. It seems wrong to go into Grace's room, though it's not like Grace is still alive to feel offended at a breach of privacy. She avoids looking at the bed and focuses on a desk to her left. It's fairly easy to see in the dim light that manages to make it through the trees to the window at the far side of the room, and Donovan spots the dim glow of a phone screen as well.

  Since it's probably one of the shops in town looking for herbs that are weeks overdue, she doesn't feel wrong in picking up the phone to look at the messages. She probably knows just enough to be able to fill the order, and hopefully, Grace has kept careful enough notes that she'll be able to hobble along running the business until she can learn things on her own, or until Vance — Jakub — sells it, whichever comes first.

  She swipes the screen, expecting to see any one of the shopkeepers with a series of exasperated messages, but instead, finds message after message, all written in Polish. They all come from an overseas number associated with a single name:

  Jakub.

  Donovan drops the phone with a cry of pain, which rouses the sleeping Regina. The unexpected body moving in the bed scares Donovan, and she screams, running for the stairs. Regina is faster than she is, however, and grabs Donovan before she can fall.

  “Please, wait. I'm sorry. You weren't supposed to see me.”

  “I wasn't supposed to what?”

  Donovan is hysterical: sobbing and out of breath. Adrenaline is still rushing through her, but seeing Regina and the messages from Jakub have reopened a wound, only it’s twice as wide and ten times as deep. She sinks to the floor in the upstairs hallway, unable to contain the sobs that overtake her.

  Regina drops to her knees next to her and gathers Donovan in her arms, pressing the girl's head to her chest.

  “Shh,” she croons. “It will be fine. Let me reply to the messages and then we’ll talk.”

  With one hand, Regina replies to the texts, assuring Jakub that things are fine, that it took her a little while to find Donovan because she had gone back to his house and not her own apartment, and that she would be returning to Poland later that night or early the next day.

  She encourages Donovan to stand and coaxes her downstairs, where she leaves her on the couch she'd slept on the night before. Donovan sits on the couch and stares while Regina brings things to her: tissues, then herbal tea she brews out of Grace's stores.

  Donovan blows her nose several times and takes sips of the tea, trying to get herself back together. When she thinks she can speak without vomiting or breaking down again, she asks Regina the question she's dying for the answer to.

  “Did he send you?”

  51: Exit

  Regina tells the girl that Jakub has sent her to make sure she gets back safely, but instead of offering comfort, it only seems to upset her more. She offers Donovan hugs, then more tea and tissues, and finally just holds her until she cries herself back to sleep.

  Regina has to repack and get back to her forest, where Jakub may kill her if he finds out she let the girl discover her in the house. She debates staying until Donovan wakes up, but she’s already done enough damage, and will have enough to explain to Jakub when she returns.

  A note will have to suffice. Regina feels guilt that the girl will be abandoned by one more person, but she needs to get back, and staying longer will only prolong the leaving; she can’t stay forever.

  Once outside, she calls for a cab so her voice won't wake the girl, and she takes the extra time to ask the trees to watch over Donovan, to continue the protection Grace would have wanted for her.

  She walks to the end of the road, not wanting the noise of a car engine to wake Donovan, knowing the goodbye would be too awkward.

  The ride to the airport is tense, as if she’s waiting for the girl to appear at any moment, begging her to stay, to escort her back to Poland, to the forest, at any moment. It isn't until she’s once again exiting a cab and making her way back into her own forest that she begins to relax, feeling like she’s escaped some form of torture. Janina meets her on the edge of the forest.

  “Was it terrible?”

  “Yes and no,” Regina says. “I saw her, and spoke with her.”

  “You were only supposed to observe.”

  “Yes, but she found me. It is complicated, and I will make my apologies to Jakub personally for my mistake. But she’s broken without him. Grażyna provided everything for her, but she lacks the only thing she truly needs. I’m not convinced she will survive.”

  “It’s no better here with him.”

  Janina watches as Regina strips off the human clothes once they are deep enough in the forest and shoves them into the backpack she's been carrying the entire trip.

  “Don't get too comfortable without your human clothes,” she says. “Jakub wants your help again. He wants to buy a house in the city.”

  “A house? What does he need a house for?”

  Janina rolls her eyes, a human gesture she learned from Donovan that expresses only a small portion of the tribe's frustration with Jakub's rapidly fluctuating emotions since he sent the girl away.

  “He says he needs human things like electricity and computers so he can check in on the girl from time to time. The computer network will allow this, he says. And he has money to pay.”

  Regina sighs. She’s best at dealing in the human world, but she doesn’t enjoy it.

  “I still don't understand,” she says. “If he’s so unhappy without her, and she is so unhappy without him, why did he send her away? If humans are so unlike us, and are happier when they mate for long periods, or for life, why did he not keep her?”

  Janina shrugs. “You spend more time with them than I do, sister. If you do not understand them, I cannot hope to do so myself. I am glad you are back, though. Maybe after he hears from you how Donovan is doing he will go and fetch her and bring her back here. Everyone will be happier then, and he will stop letting his emotions run wild once he does.”

  Regina shakes her head doubtfully and breaks into a run. She wants to spend as much time in the forest as she can before he sends her back out into the human world again.

  Dom: Donovan

  Donovan knows which Tuesday it is, and she also knows she was extremely sloppy about taking her birth control pills when she was in Poland. After Regina's surprise visit, it’s much easier to move into Grace's room, and she makes her way from the bed to the bathroom slowly, hoping to delay the inevitable.

  She's usually as regular as clockwork, and the longer she puts off her morning routine, the longer she has to hope that if Vance/Jakub is lost to her forever, at least she might have something of him to keep with her. She’s being stupid, and she knows it. She’s too young. She doesn’t have a real job other than this craziness Grace left her. Her parents would go nuts. She hasn’t even checked on her cat since she’s been back. She’s worried about her lip piercing after everything that happened in Poland. What the hell would she do with a baby?

  The bathroom is dark but for the nightlight she keeps plugged in, and she leaves it as the only form of light. While she never lets the h
ouse go completely dark now, she also doesn't want to face this in the bright fluorescent bathroom lights either. She's scared of either answer. One leaves her alone and frightened; the other leaves her completely alone.

  She sits on the toilet longer than is really necessary — more stalling. Not for the first time since she woke up to Regina's note, she wishes she'd made more friends before. It would be nice to have a girlfriend or two right now: someone she could call on the phone to have as moral support. Cringing, she finally looks a the toilet paper, and breaks down in tears.

  Streaks of red: She’s not pregnant. That single time with Jakub was not enough to impregnate her, no matter how many times the Dziwozony had told her how fertile their people are.

  The answer to her question is that she’s alone now, and will be from now on. She’ll have no piece of him to keep her company, no excuse to fly back to Poland to beg him to take her back.

  Donovan would like to sit here and cry. To grieve for everything that’s changed, everything she’s lost. But wallowing isn't going to solve anything. Maybe she’d have been better off if she’d cried less when she was with him and been a little bit more proactive.

  She scrubs her hands with soap until they’re raw, then pulls on clothes and goes downstairs. Her time for grieving is over. She has work to do.

  V: Ending

  52: Home

  Jakub buys a house in town, one he calls a “cute little cottage” and the sisters gape at the size of. Bożena asks him what he plans to do with a giant box costing a million zlotys, and he shrugs. He keeps repeating that the sisters are welcome to use the house as well, and it's the one he liked best. He wanted a standalone house where they could come and go freely without attracting too much attention, and enough room to move around. Being so large, small houses are out of the question, and if he has the money, why not spend it?

  Bożena walks away from him and goes back to the forest.

  He's afraid to tell her the truth: that he’d been able to picture Donovan in this house, and once that happened, he had to have it, even though it's far larger than anything he'd need for infrequent visits to town.

  He buys furniture he thinks Donovan would like and decorates it in the same quirky way her apartment had been decorated — metallics and bright contrasting colors against pastels and swirling abstract patterns.

  When it's finished, he wants to burn it to the ground; it looks like a shrine to something he never had in the first place, or to something he had and threw away. He spends more time obsessing about something he discarded than he did appreciating it while he had it, and if that doesn't make him an idiot, he doesn't know what does.

  Every few months, the sisters tell him to leave and go stay at the house. It's easy for him to get lost in his melancholia, and when he does, they appreciate his strange human house all the more, because they send him to live there, and it gives them peace.

  If his neighbors ever wonder why they have sudden-onset depression every so often, he and the sisters never hear about it, but at least sending him to the house keeps the Dziwozony from suffering along with him. He hopes the higher population in the city means the effects are weaker, more dispersed. Sometimes, Bożena goes with him, and if she meets with her young man, it's no one's business but her own.

  They all fall into a steady routine, and while the tribe grows used to having a male around, no decisions are made about any future males being allowed to live, or even staying with the women for a while. Jakub asks Bożena every month or so if the sisters have voted, and she puts him off every time.

  While they’re still trying to find out everything Jakub is capable of, and they accept that he would never do them harm, they aren't sure if his nature is like that because he’s innately Dziwozona or because he was raised by Grażyna, among humans, believing he was a human for so long. With Grażyna dead, the sisters are unwilling to commit to anything, although they often discuss things amongst themselves when they think Jakub or Bożena aren't listening.

  He hears them every time.

  Being among them eases the grief he feels after his mother’s death; her sisters had so many years with her before his birth, and they swap stories. He gets so much of her back, and is able to share his recollections of most of the time she was gone with her sisters. It’s like he gets pieces of his own life — and a family - that he hadn't know he was missing.

  He does not, however, get any pieces of Donovan back.

  The worst times are when the sisters send him away and he’s alone in the house in Niepołomice. He has nothing to distract him there, no one to share stories with. Alone with his thoughts, he often stays up all night, scouring the Internet for any mention of Donovan. He combs search pages for pictures or brief mentions, but there’s never enough information, and no pictures of her ever turn up.

  Several times, he keys her number into his phone, or types her email address into the box and begins to write to her, but each time, he stops himself. Even if he were to beg her to come back now, he doubts she'd want to hear from him. Months have passed. By now, she must hate him, or worse, not care at all.

  He thinks he'd prefer that she hate him.

  When enough days pass after his most recent “episode” (as the Dziwozony refer to them) that he thinks he can be around the sisters and not overwhelm them with his emotions, he slips out of the house, taking care to turn everything off and lock up. He brings his phone with him even though he knows it will only hold a charge for a few days with very judicious usage, simply because he likes the extended ability to check in on Donovan from the forest on the rare days he can actually get a signal.

  He closes his mind to the sister's incessant chatter, not wanting to invade their thoughts, especially when they don't know when he’s on his way back. A few times he’s caught things he shouldn’t — especially when one of the women has taken a male to have sex with — to the embarrassment of them all, and he tries not to make a habit of it.

  His reluctance to overhear things is the reason he's so shocked to enter the main clearing and see her there, naked as any of the Dziwozony, hugging Janina. Bożena is facing him, and her eyes are seeing directly into his soul. It can't be possible. There’s no way Donovan could have made it here on her own.

  Unable to take even the handful of steps that would bring him to her, he drops his bag and stands completely still. Donovan turns, faces him, and then retreats into Bożena's hut.

  53: Shifting

  Months of planning vanish into thin air once he appears. Donovan isn't sure what she’d expected: maybe some sign of joy would have been nice, though. Instead, he freezes like he's seen something horrible that he wishes he could unsee and doesn't acknowledge her in any other way.

  It's not exactly the reception you hope for when you show up thousands of miles from home, buck-naked in the middle of the woods.

  She's mortified, and can't think of anywhere else to go other than Bożena's hut, which will at least hide her nakedness. She goes right for her backpack to dig out some clothes to cover herself with and maybe enough cash to get her back home.

  In all her planning, she never allowed for the idea that she might be making a mistake, never thought of what she'd do if he sent her away again. She’s watched the traffic on the web site for Grace's business, seen the frequent, though sporadic, hits from Niepołomice. She’s known all along it's him, and she assumed — incorrectly it seems — that if he keeps checking up on her, he must have been missing her as much as she’s been missing him.

  So she’d packed her things, found all the travel arrangements Grace made months ago, copied them, and found her own way back here. She figured out where the Dziwozony lived in the forest, and after several attempts, made her way in there on her own, only to find him n the city.

  So she’d been forced to wait for him.

  Determination goes a long way.

  So her grand gesture would be delayed, but the Dziwozony explained about the house and how they send him away when he gets too sa
d. While the temptation was there to go find him, and maybe comfort him, it also made her feel more confident.

  If he’s sad often enough that they send him away with any regularity, he must miss her a fair amount. She assumed he’d return and want her just as much as she wants him. The build-up has been overwhelming, but now that he's here, there’s no big romantic reunion, only awkwardness.

  Bożena comes into the hut just as Donovan is shoving her feet into her boots. She's already managed to pull her jeans and t-shirt on, and her jacket has to be around here somewhere. She only hopes finding her way back out of the forest is easier than finding her way in had been.

  “What are you doing?” Bożena asks.

  “Leaving. This was a mistake.”

  “Why do you think this was a mistake? Did you not see him?”

  “That's exactly why I know this was all a mistake. He couldn't even look at me.”

  Bożena takes Donovan's hands in hers to stop her frenzied movements.

  “No, he couldn't stop looking at you long enough to decide what to do. Everything he’s been afraid to wish for was suddenly at his feet and he didn’t know why or how. Don’t run. Stay here. Give him a little time to compose himself. See what happens when he gets over his shock. After that, if you still wish to leave ,we’ll help you leave the forest."

  Donovan is mortified that her feelings about his rejection and subsequent plan to flee are so obvious, but not so mortified she welcomes the idea of wandering aimlessly for days. She sits down on the bed and lets Bożena leave her alone with her thoughts. She isn't sure how long she's supposed to wait for Jakub to get his shit together, but it feels like hours.

  She unpacks and repacks her backpack. Changes her shirt. Brushes her hair. Applies make-up, which is ridiculous considering where they are. He finally walks through the door after she’s pretty much given up and is singing to herself in a horribly off-key voice.