Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Dorian reached down for the fertilizer; Leith got it first. She smiled at him and hugged me again. “Let her tell you.” she whispered, sounding oddly fierce about a sewing circle. “If she doesn’t, I will.” She let me go. “I’ll see you soon.”

  Over her shoulder, Leith gave me a slight, barely perceptible nod.

  “So will I.”

  I saw those Rowan eyes at the edge of my thoughts as though they watched me drive back to the hall.

  There, I found Gram at the kitchen table, chopping vegetables. A bone simmered in a pot on the stove. Aunt Kathryn sat at the table in her bathrobe, clutching a mug of coffee, her face still smudgy with sleep. Gram, fully dressed, gave me one of her crow-glances, black and expressionless, as I came in.

  “You were out early!” Aunt Kathryn exclaimed.

  “I couldn’t sleep. I took a drive to the village.” Being among people had blurred the memory of the disturbing vision in the wood; I had caught my balance again in the human world. I cut a slice of oatmeal bread, dropped it into the toaster, and raised a brow at her.

  She shook her head. “I can’t eat breakfast. I woke up early, too, so I called Patrick before he went to work.”

  “I saw Dorian in the hardware store,” I told Gram. “She said something about a Fiber Guild meeting here the day after tomorrow.”

  “What’s a Fiber Guild?” Aunt Kathryn asked, yawning. So Gram had never told her either. I wondered if even my mother, who lived here all her life, had known about the guild.

  “Just a fancy name for a sewing circle,” Gram said vaguely, lifting the bone out of her pot and letting it fall into the lid.

  “What are you making?”

  “Vegetable soup for lunch.”

  Aunt Kathryn took a swallow of coffee, looking more awake. “The day after the funeral you’re going to throw a quilting bee?”

  “I don’t know,” Gram said firmly. “I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”

  “You’ll be exhausted!”

  “Then I’ll cancel it.” She inspected the bone, let it slide off the pot lid into the garbage; then she carried the cutting board to the stove, pushed chunks of carrot, onion, potato, celery, into the broth. We watched her wordlessly: the old woman with her knife and her bone, transforming things. She gave me another, more human glance. “If I’d known you were going to the village, I would have given you a grocery list.”

  “I don’t mind going back.” My toast popped up; I rummaged for a plate. “It’s such a short drive.”

  “That would be a help. Oh, when you’re finished with your breakfast, will you check on Hurley? I heard him climb up to the attic earlier.”

  “Sure, Gram.” The phone rang. I was closest, so I dropped the toast on my plate and picked up. “Lynn Hall,” I said efficiently. “Sylvia Lynn speaking. How can I help you?”

  “Sylvia!” a sharp, dour voice exclaimed. “It’s about time! Seven years without a visit, and it takes your grandfather dying—”

  I placed the voice and held the receiver out to Gram, while it was still scolding me. “Jane Sloan.” She was the only woman around who knew more local history than Gram and who might be able to take her in a shouting match.

  I took toast and coffee to the table and sat down next to Aunt Kathryn. She patted my hand while she sipped coffee; I ate with my other one. Gram was saying adamantly, “I’m not going, Jane. I don’t see the point of seeing Liam all dressed up with rouge on his cheeks, or whatever they do—Yes, Kathryn took his suit down yesterday. Of course we remembered a tie. He hasn’t worn a tie since Kathryn got married the first time.” Kathryn’s hand clamped down suddenly on mine; it sounded like the telephone barked. Gram, evidently feeling vibes, covered the lower end of the receiver and hissed at Kathryn, “Well, she was bound to know sooner or later. Nothing stays secret long around here.”

  “Evidently,” Kathryn said tightly. “Jane will have it spread around the county by dusk, how I barely got one husband buried before I married the next.”

  I had a sudden image of Jane Sloan in her suit and gloves, standing next to the body at the mortuary and transfixing each mourner like the Ancient Mariner with her glittering eye and the news of Aunt Kathryn’s latest marriage. I swallowed most of my toast in a bite and took my coffee with me to the attic.

  I found Hurley near the top of the stairs, aiming his telescope out a skylight inset in the lower part of the slanted roof. The attic ran the length of the hall, brick and fieldstone chimneys thrusting through it and out the roof from the rooms below. I wondered how many old swallows’ nests were clinging to the stones. Half the attic had once been servants’ quarters. The rest of it, a huge open space interrupted here and there by the chimneys on their way up, was full of what looked like the shipwrecked salvage of centuries: traveling trunks, heavy, cobwebby furniture, boxes of fabric, antique clothes, vast portraits of dusty ancestors, dishes, knickknacks, whatnots, and what-have-yous. I closed my eyes, opened them again; it was all still there. It made me think of those fairy tales where the princess, trapped in the tower by her husband, the evil retainer, or her mother-in-law, has to move a mountain of something by dawn to get free.

  Hurley murmured something. His telescope was slanted down toward the wood.

  “Anything exciting?” I asked.

  “Come and see.”

  I waded through boxes of old crockery to squint into his eyepiece. I saw a very pretty young face among the trees, masses of pale, curly hair, wide-set eyes sliding toward some sound. I blinked; the face turned into a foot in a rubber flip-flop. In the next moment even that was gone.

  “The great horned owl,” Hurley intoned solemnly. “Asleep on its roost.”

  “Looked like a girl to me.”

  “Really?” He swung the telescope toward the sky. “Where?”

  “Well, she’s not on the moon.”

  “No?”

  “Look down,” I suggested. “In the wood.”

  He did, letting the telescope roam for a bit. He said lucidly, “Ah. That would be Judith Coyle.”

  “What’s she doing in Gram’s wood?”

  “She likes it.”

  I grunted, hoping she didn’t smoke in there and set the trees on fire. My cup was empty; I went back downstairs, detouring along the way to my bedroom to hang some clothes to wear later to the funeral home. The box of papers sat where I had left it, papers facedown now, endpaper on top. I looked at it, not wanting to think about it, then nudged it under the bed with my foot. All gone.

  Passing Tyler’s room on the way to the kitchen, I saw him sitting cross-legged on his bed in a vortex of sheets and blankets, tapping at a laptop. His room smelled dank, like old socks. He had apparently slept in his jeans; his hair stuck up and his eyes were still rheumy with sleep. I could have counted the ribs in his bare, skinny torso. His green eyes swam toward me behind his glasses; he grinned sleepily.

  “Hi, cuz.”

  I wended my way through an archipelago of clothes flung out of his backpack, CDs, and empty Pepsi cans, to push his window up. “Making ourself at home, are we?”

  He nodded absently, still typing, then studied the screen. I looked over his shoulder, but light from the window washed over the screen, and I couldn’t see what he was doing. He made an impatient noise and hit a key; whatever it was vanished.

  “What are you doing?”

  He mumbled, then made an effort. “Trying to find something.” He hesitated. “You know water?”

  “What?”

  “Water. You drink it, you wash in it—”

  “Yeah,” I said, bemused. “It’s coming back to me.”

  “I ran a search and got three hundred and seventy-one million different things I could look up about it, and I can’t find a single one that tells me what I want to know.”

  “What do you want to know? Are you looking up where your parents are going for the honeymoon?”

  He waved that away; nothing so fatuous. But he couldn’t just say it, either. He took a breath and st
uck, his eyes going wide and still behind his glasses. I waited; he tried again, his skinny, fingers twitching. I glimpsed something then, a vision in my great-great-great-grandmother’s strange manuscript: secret waters running deeply into shadows and earth, and then out again. Out the other side. Into another world. I felt a word fill my mouth; Tyler turned his head slowly, stared at me out of his elongated eyes.

  The word came out of me. “Poetry.”

  He blinked; his lips echoed the word soundlessly. I put my hand on his shoulder, felt the narrow bones, light and vulnerable as bird-bones, where in a universe next door he might have wings. He tensed suddenly under my hand, peering at something out the window.

  “There’s Undine.” He slithered his long bones out of bed, trailing sheets, and shouted out the window, “Hey, Undine!”

  I joined him, and saw again the tangled ivory hair, the small, wary face looking up at us from the edge of the wood. I glanced, amused, at Tyler: he’d just gotten there and already young nymphs were emerging from the trees.

  “Uncle Hurley says her name is Judith,” I told him. “Judith Coyle.”

  “Huh,” Tyler grunted. “She calls herself Undine.” He waved; she beckoned, and he glanced around hastily, pulled a T-shirt off the floor, and sniffed it. “Guess this’ll do. Tell my mom—” He caught my eye then, and amended sheepishly, “I’ll tell her.”

  “Why does she call herself Undine?”

  “She says it’s magic.” His face vanished into the shirt; he pulled and popped out again, glasses askew. “She’s trying to be a witch.”

  “How do you—”

  But he had picked up his shoes and vanished out the door, the gangling troll trailing after the beguiling Undine.

  I went back downstairs, met Tyler again, talking with his mouth full of buttered oatmeal bread while he bumped backward out the kitchen doorway.

  “We’ll just be in the wood.”

  “Please stay close to the house,” Aunt Kathryn said. “We’re going to the funeral home after lunch. And after that I want you to help us straighten the house for company.”

  “I will—Bye—”

  “Be back for—”

  “Lunch, okay, Mom, bye.”

  He danced around me and out the door through the rose trees. Aunt Kathryn got up, rubbing her eyes.

  “Hormones,” she murmured. Gram shot her a glance but refrained from comment. “I’m going to shower.”

  Gram was mixing dried cherries and toasted walnuts into a chocolate dough. I scooped a fmgerful and nibbled it, wanting to stay close to her, wanting to hide from her, challenging her to see me truly, terrified she might.

  “What are you making now?”

  “I hardly know. Something for the funeral. It helps to keep busy.”

  “Are you really not going to the mortuary?”

  “Funeral home,” she amended dourly. “Around here, it’s a home. As though you just left your own and passed through into somebody else’s. I haven’t made up my mind, yet.”

  I picked another cherry out of her bowl and changed the subject. “Why would Judith Coyle call herself Undine?”

  “Undine is a water nymph.”

  I nearly bit my finger. “And you let him go?”

  “Not all of them are dangerous. Anyway, Judith isn’t.”

  “Isn’t dangerous?”

  “I don’t know about that. But she isn’t a water nymph.”

  “Tyler says she wants to be a witch. Why is she doing that in your wood?”

  She gave the dough in the bowl a hefty swirl with her spoon. “Did you read Rois Melior’s story?”

  “Yes,” I said tersely.

  “All of it?”

  “All.”

  She was silent a moment, studying me, hearing the uneasiness in my voice, I was sure. What frightened me was not knowing why she had given it to me to read in the first place.

  “What did you see in it?”

  “Imaginary worlds,” I answered carefully. “A lot of maybe—maybe nots.” I paused, drawn into the tale again, feeling hot summer light, hearing secret water. I smelled roses fully opened, hanging heavily under the sun, and started as though the scent had wafted out of the tale. Then I realized the back door was open; I was smelling real roses from the garden. Or was I? What was past? What was present? What was true? A young woman fell in love on a summer’s day with a man who had returned home to put his estate in order. My great-great-great-grandmother had looked at my great-great-great-grandfather in the wood behind the hall and seen the fairy blood in him. Or had she?

  What was true?

  I drew breath; better to know than not, I thought.

  “Gram. What did you want me to see in her story?”

  She was silent again, stirring, stirring, like an old witch in a tale. Then she lifted her head and gave me that black, still gaze that saw into my bones, and made thoughts in my head scurry for cover.

  “From the sound of it,” she answered finally, “what you saw. Not yes, not no, but maybe—maybe not.” She stirred again, holding me with unspoken words, the endless turn of her spoon. “You might as well know now, so you can think about it: your grandfather left Lynn Hall to you in his will. I want you to have it, too.” My mouth opened; she raised the spoon between us, stopped me. “There are other things you must know, but they can wait until the Fiber Guild meeting.”

  “Gram,” I whispered. “Don’t do this.”

  “It’s done,” she said, and put down the spoon. “Hand me that pan.”

  I drove to the village for the second time that morning, with Gram’s grocery list and my cell phone. I sat under the hydrangea bush again, before I went to the store. It was mid-morning by then; the harrowed fields were awash with gold, and the pale green stubble of whatever was coming up. The drone of machinery rumbled from across the river, where they were mowing the long early-summer grasses for the cows. The river glittered like fake money, like a fairy-tale river, winding gently through the fields. Along a curve, tiny figures cannonballed into it off the high bank; their shouts, faint as hawk-cries, twined into the mowers.

  I had to dial twice; my fingers kept hitting wrong numbers. I wasn’t even sure why I was calling. I would know when I heard Madison’s voice; he would ask me, and I would tell him.

  But I only got his voice on the answering machine, brisk and cheerful, telling me to leave a message.

  I almost hung up. Instead, I said shakily, “Madison. I’ve changed my mind. Call me at Gram’s house if you need me. Okay?”

  I gave him the number, then held the phone to my ear until the machine clicked off, but nobody answered.

  4

  Iris

  I went with Owen to the funeral home. “Parlor”, they called it back when Milton Jenkins bought the old Ayers house in the village and turned it to a profit. Funeral parlor. That had gone the way of girdles and pillbox hats. I didn’t go to see Liam. I didn’t know him anymore; he didn’t know me. I went along to have five minutes alone with Owen.

  “Does she know?” he asked, turning the car out of the drive onto the road toward the village.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Did she read—”

  “Yes.”

  “What about—”

  “No. But there’s the Fiber Guild meeting. Kathryn will be gone by then, and for once Sylvia will be exactly where we need her. We can explain things then.”

  He didn’t have to ask what we were talking about; neither did I. So it had always been. I had known his father and his father’s father. Protectors of Lynn Hall, they’d always been, the whole line of Averys, who came from the outside world on Corbett Lynn’s wedding day, and never went back. An Avery had married Corbett and Rois’s youngest daughter; an Avery had been at every Lynn funeral since Corbett’s death. An Avery, or some relative of one, had been with the Fiber Guild since it was started over a hundred years earlier by Liam’s grandmother Sarah Lynn, who worked her knitting into knots one day and dried up a stream running through Tye Gett’s c
ow pasture.

  “I’ll stay in the car,” I added, as the passing fields gave way to houses. “I saw Liam’s face after he died. It was about as peaceful as it ever got. That’s enough for me.”

  But it wasn’t; I tasted the lie even as I said it. Nothing would be enough, except Liam’s tranquil eyes opening and his mouth under its white brush smiling at me. I felt my eyes burn. But I sent the tears back in a hot wave toward my heart, where love and grief and anger tangled so tightly you couldn’t even separate a single thread to begin to unravel them.

  Owen gave me one of those heavy, brooding glances that seemed to take a sounding of everything but words. He didn’t care; he didn’t bother to say. He only murmured succinctly, “Nothing,” which pretty much said everything. Nothing left of Liam; nothing would come of seeing him lying meekly in his satin box with a tie on; nothing would ever be the same. Even Owen wasn’t wearing a tie, just jeans and a dark linen jacket. He hadn’t shaved either. I could see the stubble coming out, silvery gray and black, along his lean jaw.

  “I saw Sylvia in the village this morning,” he said, turning around the square. Both sides of the street were lined with cars in front of the funeral home. “She asked me to bring you here if you wanted.”

  “Don’t park here,” I said, more sharply than I meant to. He didn’t comment, just drove to the other side of the square and stopped there. He sat a moment before he got out, watching Bethany Hines and her daughter go in, Rafe Hagarty holding the screen door open for them as he came out. The home, painted the color of vegetables you have to be taught to like, mushroom with eggplant trim, the dark, neatly trimmed junipers lining the porch and the walk, made me impatient again. What did all that decorousness matter to Liam? What could anything matter again?

  Owen looked at me quizzically. I shook my head. He put his hand on my shoulder gently, then got out of the car. I watched him cross the green, and realized what he had said. He had already seen my disguised granddaughter; she had recognized him for what he was; she had asked him to watch over me. That made me smile. She knew what she needed to know; she just didn’t know she knew. At least that much was going well. Then I felt the emptiness where Liam usually sat, the breeze blowing aimlessly through the open car window, sun falling on the motionless wheel. For no reason at all, I remembered our wedding day at Lynn Hall, my white lace and pearls, the great bunch of orange roses Liam had chosen for me from the garden, his mother Meredith’s wince when she saw them, as though I carried a bridal bouquet of cow parsley. Then the years slid past, swift and bright, like cards flowing between a magician’s outstretched hands, and, watching them, I took a little nap.