Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  I was pulling up beside field walls, stopping in the middle of bridges and old railroad crossings, still trying to call Madison while I pieced my thoughts together again. I found myself in the village before I realized how far I’d gone.

  I finally stopped at the bed-and-breakfast; even that early, the Starr sisters would be up supervising breakfast. By then I had stopped trembling. Any other signs of disturbance, I knew, could be laid at Grandpa Liam’s door.

  A couple of young guys whose bicycles were chained to the porch railing were already checking out when I opened the door. Lacey Starr gave me a narrow, speculative stare as she ran a charge plate over a card. Her light blue-gray eyes widened. Her sister Miranda blinked at me, then pitched her deep, throaty voice to bring their sister-in-law Penelope out of the kitchen.

  “Sylvia! Is that you under that hair?” They both came out from behind the desk to give me twin, lavender-scented hugs.

  “We’re so glad you were able to come out to be with Iris,” Lacey murmured. She had the gentler voice, and only wore pearls for jewelry. Miranda wore only gold; they were like sisters in a fairy tale.

  “Well, at least we found out what it takes to get you home,” Miranda grumbled, but without bite, so I could ignore it. “What are you doing up so early?”

  “Trying to make a phone call,” I said tersely, and had to jerk my wayward memories out of the wood again. I turned to hug Penelope, who came up from the kitchen drying her hands on the dish towel tucked into her jeans.

  “You look so grown-up,” she said, amazed. “I wouldn’t have recognized you.” Plump and freckled, she changed her own hair color, it was said, more often than some changed their socks. She was honey-haired and pink-cheeked that day, like a Golden Delicious apple.

  The two young men, in beards and microfibers, watched patiently, smiling. Miranda finally rescued their slip from the plate.

  She inquired innocently as the owner signed, “Iris’s phone out of order?”

  “No,” I answered, remembering then how gossip hitched a ride through the village on any aimless breeze. “I just wondered if there was any hope at all of getting a call out on my cell phone.”

  “I found a great spot near the bank,” one of the guys told me. “The back of the parking lot where those big flower bushes are.”

  “Hydrangeas,” Lacey murmured.

  He nodded. “Clearest reception around.”

  “That’s what it was,” Penelope exclaimed. “Angie stopped by in her patrol car the other night to chat and got a dispatch about a suspicious stranger in the bank lot, sitting under a bush and yelling to himself.”

  “Tourist with a cell phone,” the other bicyclist guessed. They were grinning, proud of sharing a local detail the locals didn’t know. I sighed noiselessly. The bank. I might as well make my private call standing under the only traffic light at noon.

  The sisters waited until the strangers left before bringing up family matters. Lacey took one of my hands, held it in her long, ringed fingers, while Miranda said, “Of course we’ll be in to say good-bye to Liam today, between lunch and check-in. And we’ll have a chance to visit with you tomorrow, after the funeral. If there’s anything Iris needs—besides you, that is—you let us know.”

  Penelope patted my shoulder; Lacey hugged me again. Surrounded by sisters, sympathy, and scent, I remembered the bizarre image of menacing roses in my dream.

  “I will,” I promised, and eased my way out of there.

  I parked in the far corner of the bank lot and hunkered down behind a huge hydrangea. The river ran below, shallow and quick; across it woodland opened into farmland. I dialed Madison’s number. While the phone rang, I watched a tractor lumbering along the river road, trailing a line of cars behind it. One lost patience, darted out on a curve. I held my breath, seeing the truck it didn’t rounding the hill toward it in the same lane. The car ducked back into safety; the truck passed with a grumble of air brakes, and Madison picked up the phone.

  ‘“Lo?” he said sleepily. I looked at my watch.

  “Oops. Sorry.”

  “Syl!” I heard bed noises as he struggled up. “Where are you?”

  “Under a hydrangea.”

  “Country living,” he commented through a yawn. “Did you have a good trip? Everything okay there?”

  “Yes,” I said steadily. “The flight was fine and Gram is okay. My aunt Kathryn was with her when I got there; they pretty much had everything arranged. The funeral is tomorrow. I’ll be home as soon as possible afterward. One minor detail is I can’t call you unless I happen to be squatting in the bank lot.”

  “Syl—”

  “Under a bush.”

  He was silent a moment, breathing at me over the phone. “You sound funny.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Except for Grandpa Liam, of course. I just called to tell you I’m here, and I’ll be back before you miss me.”

  “I do already,” he said. “Syl, let me call you at your grandmother’s house.”

  “No.”

  “That way you won’t have to sit in a parking lot.”

  “No.” I heard him draw breath, hold it. I added, trying to ease the tension out of my voice, “I’ll be back so soon you won’t need to call.”

  “What if you’re not? What if she wants you to stay?”

  “She can’t. I’m a working girl. She’ll have to bear up without me. Anyway, she has half the county to look after her. And anyway, it’s no use you calling me there. She’s too deaf to hear the phone ring, and Uncle Hurley always answers the door instead.”

  “Liar,” he said. “Listen. If you don’t come back right away—”

  “I will. I have to.”

  “You sound scared.”

  My lips pinched together. I opened them finally, said stubbornly, “Sad. I’m just sad.”

  “I’m sorry, Syl. I wish I were there with you.” I pushed the phone closer to my ear, wishing he were, too, but enormously relieved that he wasn’t. “I miss you,” he said again. “I was thinking, if you end up staying out there longer, I could join you for a long weekend, do some hiking—”

  “I’m flying home after the funeral,” I said adamantly. “Bye, Madison.”

  “I love you.”

  I tried to say it; I didn’t know suddenly what it meant to someone like me. “See you soon,” I murmured finally. “Bye.”

  I sat gazing thoughtlessly across the tranquil fields to where the wood began again, trees covering the gentle mountains so thickly you couldn’t separate one shadow from another; you’d never see what was going on among them until you were already there. What had happened to my mother in the wood? I couldn’t imagine, judging from Rois Melior’s tale, that love had anything to do with it. Passion? Maybe. For a moment. Her fairy lover might have caught her eye, come and gone as quickly as sunlight on a cloudy day. What she felt about it, she never said. All I knew for certain was that she had loved her halfling child, but I had no idea why.

  A throat cleared itself above my head, and I jumped. I looked up through the hydrangea heads and found a human face.

  I started again, recognizing it.

  “Owen.” I stared at him, horrified, wondering if he’d read my thoughts and would tell Gram. Then I scrambled out from behind the bush, feeling briefly like a kid again, vaguely guilty of something, while an adult waited, exuding a dampening cloud of patience and gloom.

  “It’s the community phone bush,” he explained in the even, sinewy voice I remembered. His dark gaze remained politely blank while I got myself upright, and I breathed more easily. He didn’t recognize me, I realized, his daughter’s best friend through twelve years in the village school. Owen Avery had been one of those adults who always seemed to be around Lynn Hall, waiting at the door for Dorian to find her jacket, in the den talking to Grandpa Liam, at the kitchen table with Gram, sipping something out of a teacup that didn’t smell like tea. He had been remote and ageless t
o me while Dorian and I were growing up: an alien being of incomprehensible whims who barely spoke our language. Now, in my adult eyes, he became suddenly human: timeworn, a bit silvery, but still lean and dark, and younger than he had seemed during all those years when I had no idea what old was.

  I heard the odd silence between us; he was gazing at me curiously from some distant place. Then he blinked and gave a faint laugh. I smiled, relieved.

  “Sylvia.”

  “Hey, Mr. Avery.”

  “You look so much like one of them, I couldn’t imagine how you knew my name.”

  “One of—Oh.” Tourist, he meant. Outsider. “My hair.”

  “It’s more than your hair,” he murmured, giving me another bleak, disconcerting gaze. “You’ve been away for years, and then you magically pop up from under a hydrangea bush.” His comments, I remembered, thrown at random like stones pitched in water, could come eerily close to smacking whatever lurked beneath the surface. “Gram told me to come as soon as I could,” I said evasively.

  His face tightened; he looked away a moment, at a memory. “I’ll miss your grandfather more than I can say,” he breathed. “He didn’t have to ramble so far away that he couldn’t find his way back.”

  I swallowed. “That’s pretty much what Gram thinks.”

  “The Melior in him.”

  I was silent at that, wondering suddenly how much he knew of Rois Melior’s story. How much had Gram told him? He had a hand in this and that around the county—banking, real estate; he also owned a tree farm and a nursery on the hill behind Gram’s property. His wife had vanished out of his life before Dorian started school; as far as I knew, he’d never remarried. I got used to seeing him in my grandparents’ company; perhaps he was the son they never had. Or that they wanted to have, I guessed, remembering the two beautiful daughters they did have. But nothing had come of that. As far as I knew. Which wasn’t very far, I realized, when I thought about Owen Avery.

  “Is there anything I can do for Iris?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said tightly. “She’s—she always seems so strong.”

  “Yes.”

  “But she won’t—she doesn’t want to see my grandfather all laid out in a suit and a tie. She’s having trouble with that.”

  “So am I,” Owen admitted dourly.

  “Maybe you could stop by and talk to her about it. See what she wants to do; take her if she wants to go. You know her as well as anyone, I think.”

  “Of course I will. What about you?”

  I shrugged. “I can go with Tyler and Aunt Kathryn. Whatever’s lying there isn’t him, so it doesn’t matter what he’s wearing, does it? They should have just left him in his nightshirt.”

  “Spoken like your grandmother,” Owen said, making me stare at him again.

  “I’m not,” I blurted. “I’m not like her at all.”

  He only gave me a bittersweet smile that mystified me completely and didn’t argue the point.

  “How’s Dorian?” I asked quickly, to change the subject.

  “She’s fine. She’s around here somewhere, shopping. She’s been teaching kindergarten, this past year. During the summer she takes care of the nursery for me. Come and visit us, before you leave?”

  “She’s still living with you?”

  “The apple didn’t fall far…”

  “I thought she’d be married by now. It’s what people do around here. And boys have trailed after her since she was two.”

  “They still do,” her father said a trifle fretfully. “One in particular.”

  But his cell phone chose that interesting moment to ring, startling us both, before he could tell me who.

  “I’ll see her soon,” I said quickly. “Tell her that?”

  He nodded, waving the phone apologetically as he raised it, and I took myself out of earshot.

  The stores were all open by then. On impulse I went across the street to the feed and hardware store to buy a couple dozen chandelier bulbs. It would give me something to do in the stray hours before the funeral.

  The smells of the place—organic, mealy, redolent of barns mingling with the tangy whiffs of metal and leather tack—led me straight back to childhood again. I heard my mother’s voice, always on the edge of impatience or laughter, sprung taut with her effort to outrun her future. Drill bits, we searched for together, tenpenny nails, duct tape, dowels. Like Hurley, she loved to tinker with things; toward the end she was replacing drawer pulls all over the house. My eyes flooded with memories. I turned, blind, and bumped into somebody. Muttering an apology, I heard my name.

  “Syl? Is that you?”

  I blinked away the past, found Dorian’s face on the other side of them.

  She’d hardly changed in seven years, still slender, taller than I by a head, still with those straight shoulders and that nutmeg hair, a long tangle of knots and curls. She wore the uniform I remembered: faded jeans, scuffed clogs, a handkerchief of a top that clung closely around her long waist and showed off her tanned, muscular arms. She balanced a forty-pound bag of fish fertilizer against her calf and had her arms around me before I could speak.

  “I knew you’d come back! Oh, Syl, it’s so good to see you! I’ve wanted to talk to you a thousand times.” She loosed me to gaze at me reproachfully, her eyes, an odd pale gray flecked with colors, covered with a sheen of tears. “Why did it have to take something like this to bring you back?”

  “I’m sorry,” I breathed, shaken. “Maybe because it’s easier to stay away than to keep saying good-bye?”

  “Tell me you’re staying all summer.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Oh, Syl—” She reached out, touched my unfamiliar hair lightly, swallowing. I saw in her agate eyes the shadows of worry, trouble.

  “We’ll talk,” I said abruptly. “We’ll make time. Midnight beside the creek where we used to smoke to keep the mosquitoes away and gossip about boys—you remember?”

  “Of course,” she said, half-laughing. “I remember everything.”

  “I just saw your father in line for the phone bush, speaking of boys. He told me you’re seeing someone. He had that look in his eyes.”

  The worry in her own eyes spilled into her face. She gave her hair a sudden flick, curls hiding her expression. “I have a lot to tell you,” she only said. “And a lot to ask you. Gossip from the far side of the world doesn’t travel well across these mountains.” Then she was smiling again, giving someone behind me the peaceful, trusting kind of look that love inspires before it gets broadsided by life. “And speaking of boys, here he is. Do you remember each other? Leith? Syl?”

  A young man was at her side so suddenly and quietly he seemed to have sprung up out of the floorboards. We looked at each other wordlessly. I remembered his eyes, still and very dark, until at a shift of light you saw the midnight blue in them. I hadn’t known him well; he had been a couple of grades ahead of us. But even in the schoolyard I’d been aware of that silence, that reserve in him, as though he’d been raised by foxes and language was his second language.

  “Leith Rowan,” I said slowly.

  He smiled; he’d gotten that civilized. “Hello, Syl. You’ve changed.”

  “Not really.”

  Neither had he: still tall and spare, with lank red hair and level brows the color of fire, and the mysterious scar under one cheekbone that had brought a taller tale out of him every time he was asked. A bar brawl at the age of eight, a slash from a bear, a dropped rifle that miraculously just missed blowing his head off, ditto a bow-hunter’s arrow, an owl that had mistaken him for a snack as he wandered through the hills at night: those were a few that came to mind from ancient schoolyard gossip.

  The Rowan family, old as the hills and scattered all over them, had probably named every Hardscrabble Road in the county. So Gram said of them when I mentioned Leith and his tales. Fishers, hunters, farmers, they made do with what they had, and had just enough of that to make do. Self-sufficient and solitary, they lived in h
ollows, down back roads, along the banks of creeks. Leith, Gram had told me during one of her detailed attempts to keep me connected to my roots, was the first of them to leave the hills to go to college. He owned books, she’d heard, and sat studying them on his cabin porch with his rifle across his knees.

  “I hear you own a bookstore on the other side of the world,” he said. He had a gentle, quiet voice that always caught my ear in the rowdy playground when we were growing up.

  I nodded. “I haven’t heard yet what you do.”

  “I work for Dr. Caddis,” he answered, which didn’t surprise me: Dr. Caddis was the local veterinarian.

  “When can we get together?” Dorian asked abruptly, her fingers closing around my arm. “We’ll be at the funeral, of course, along with a hundred other people who haven’t seen you for—Oh.” She paused, thinking. “And I’ll be at the guild meeting, unless Iris cancels it. But I’ve heard she hasn’t missed a meeting in fifty years.”

  “Guild meeting?”

  “The Fiber Guild. Iris called the meeting at the hall this month, on the third Friday.”

  “The day after the funeral,” I said doubtfully. Then I asked, “What’s a Fiber Guild?”

  Dorian stared at me, a disconcerting sight because I hadn’t a clue why. “Iris never told you?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder—Oh,” she said again, illumined, while I was still in the dark. “It must be your—” She glanced at Leith then, and finished delicately, “your complete lack of interest in anything to do with a needle and thread.” I was silent, mystified; Dorian had never hidden things from me before. Maybe, I realized, she was hiding them from Leith. But that only made me more uneasy: he and I in the dark together. “We sit around and sew, weave, crochet, whatever,” Dorian explained. “Darn socks and exchange yarns.”

  No wonder Gram never mentioned it to me. I could thread a needle, maybe, if my life depended on it. “It might be comforting for Gram to have all her friends around her then,” I said. “But how did she keep the guild secret all my life? And why?”