The Boxfield Elm

by Cinda Swans

  "Hah," she said, the noise echoing hollowly in her throat. "Yeah."

  Mike shrugged. "You be back later?"

  "Nah," she said. "Tomorrow, I think."

  He raised an eyebrow, glancing toward Aeyr's form.

  Bri shook her head. "To visit my dad," she explained.

  Mike shrugged, and opened the glass door for her to step outside.

  The air was cool outside, it was very windy.

  Aeyr turned to look at her, and his eyes glinted. "I thought we could just…go for a walk?”

  Bri nodded, feeling nervous about telling him the complications in her plan. “I –“ she started. “I have to take a train in a little while?”

  “To Boxfield?” he asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “A guess,” he said. “Shall I walk you to the train, then?" He stretched out his arm, for her to hook her elbow around, as if they were an old fashioned couple. Bri hesitated, feeling her neck prickle, then slipped her arm into his.

  They walked in silence for a few moments. Then Aeyr said, "So, Bri, what do you know about me?"

  Bri took a deep breath, concentrating on the physical sensation of their arms touching, looking down at their feet moving over the sidewalk. "Well," she said, looking for that confidence she'd felt when she'd first introduced herself to him at the bar - only a few nights ago! "Well, um, not a whole lot, other than that you seem to think I know something important about you, and that weird things have been happening ever since the afternoon of the day I met you, and that you seem to know a lot about me. Or you seem to be able to guess things really quickly."

  He laughed. "Weird things?" he said.

  His laugh sounded more and more familiar, like she knew it from somewhere else. Where did she know it from?

  "Weird things. Coincidences. This creepy feeling that you all are in on some big secret that involves me, but I don't understand how."

  Aeyr stopped walking, and put his hand on hers. His hand was warm and gentle. He looked her in the eye. "Bri, I don't want to make you feel afraid. But look back into your heart, your mind, and you'll start finding that you already know a lot more than you think you do." He let go of her hand, and dropped his arm to free hers, and then they began walking alongside each other again.

  "I'm going to tell you a story," he said, "- a long story. This might only be the beginning we get to today. I think you'll find out that . . . well, I'll just tell you the story. Okay?"

  Bri nodded, setting her feet to walk in an even rhythm, setting her mind to listen, to listen hard, to listen without judging or questioning what Aeyr was saying - yet.

  Chapter 7

  So, the main character of this story will be a boy, but before that, it starts with a young woman . . .

  The young woman is very beautiful - she has long dark hair and bright, intelligent eyes. She lives in a place where there is always plenty, where people take good care of each other, where people live in harmony with the natural world around them.

  In fact, people in this place live in the trees. The trees they live in aren't like the trees you know in this day and age - they are the trees like before settlers came here and ripped the land apart with their logging and farming. They are trees that are bigger than ten men, trees with big strong branches and hollow insides. The young woman in this story lives in a little house high up in a big, lovely elm tree, and her family lives all around her.

  The young woman - with her intelligent eyes - is very curious about her world. She studies - there are very good schools in her home - and she reads, and she learns about plants and how they breathe and make food from the sun and the water and the soil. She becomes a botanist. She, in fact, becomes a very important botanist, and because her curiosity is so great and her mind is so sharp, she makes discoveries about plants that no one in her world has ever discovered before.

  Then her discoveries lead her to even greater secrets. She reads farther and farther back in her city's oldest books and papers, and she discovers a special kind of flower full of mysteries. Only a few people in her world have ever succeeded in finding this flower, because it only grows in very hard-to-find places, and it only blooms two days in a whole year.

  The flower is so secret, so mysterious, and so hard to find, because when it blooms, it opens something, something like a door, a door into other worlds, other times. Or this is what the old books say....

  The young woman, stricken with insatiable curiosity, decides that she has to find this flower for herself.

  She studies the little information she can find about it, and she waits for many weeks until she finds that it is just the right time to set out looking for the flower. She packs her things and tells her family she is going on a long trip to conduct some studies and gather some research from far away landscapes. They aren't surprised, because she's done this many times before, but her heart feels heavy.

  Her journey takes her a long time. She travels on foot - because in her world, that is the only way to travel. She studies the plants as she goes, keeping lots of notes in her book. She walks and walks and walks, until the trees get smaller and smaller and the land becomes dry and totally unfamiliar to her.

  It becomes harder to find food and water, and she has to be very careful. She finds a ridge of land, right between where the ground is dirt on one side and sand on the other. She studies the maps she copied from the books she found back in her home. She walks and walks and walks.

  Then she finds from her calculations that she has reached the time and place where the flower - if she is going to find it - should appear. She is very tired, and she lays down to rest...

  Aeyr's sentence trailed off, and Bri found herself sitting next to him on a bench. She looked at him very hard, as if she were seeing him for the first time. He looked as beautiful as ever, but she was starting to feel as if he were much less strange - as if she knew him somehow.

  He giggled. "Bri, when you look at me like that, it reminds me of the game we used to play with the pebbles - how I'd always win, but you'd start adding pebbles from outside the game."

  "The game we'd draw in the dirt, and play grey pebbles against brown? It was like chess, kind of, but way simpler."

  "Right, but you'd get mad about losing, and you'd change the rules on me by adding extra pebbles, even after I captured yours."

  "Aeron! Are you — ? I remember… "

  Let me keep going with the story, okay?

  The young woman lays down to rest, and she sleeps for what might be a long time or a short amount of time, but when she opens her eyes, she is laying in a field of these flowers. She can't believe her eyes - she was expecting to see one, or two, if she were extremely lucky, but she is immersed in a sea of them. They - have you ever seen on an old TV set, when there's no signal, and it’s just fuzzy grey mess, moving very quickly and not at all? All the flowers have giant red blossoms, just like the pictures she'd seen illustrating them, but at the center of each flower is that - that static. The empty space.

  Being the well-trained field observer that she is, she takes out her botanist notes and begins recording everything she sees. She tries to classify the flowers based on their leaf patterns and their geometry and make-up, but she can't pin down anything about them - they are the most unclassifiable flower she has ever encountered - they are unlike anything, so purely themselves.

  Then she peaks into a flower, and when the static clears away, what she sees is a forest - but the forest is different than the one she knows. The trees are smaller and skinnier - they grow to be the size of her arm, instead of the size of her city. The earth below them is brown with dead leaves.

  She longs to get a closer look. She reaches her hand toward the center of this flower, and she touches a finger to the center. She is surprised to find the flower responding by opening wider - large enough for her to reach through. She takes her arm out, then she tries sticking her head through. She wants to climb all the way through to look - but then she realizes that she's not sure
how she'll come back to her world.

  This is where things get really complicated.

  What she does is she digs up one flower - roots and all, and takes it with her, and then she steps through, from her world into this one, thinking she'll be safe and be able to get back.

  But, there’s a catch. Once she steps through, the flower loses its bloom, and she's stuck in a strange forest, far from home.

  Aeyr stopped talking again, and Bri remembered that she was supposed to be getting on a train. She and Aeyr were close to the train station, but she felt conflicted about what to do next. He looked at her.

  "You have to go soon, don't you?"

  "Yeah."

  "Did my story...well, what do you make of it?"

  "I don't know, it sounds like a book I read when I was a child."

  "Ah ha."

  "So, we knew each other as children, then, didn't we? You lived on my street when we were really young. That's what it is, right?" Bri squeezed her eyes shut, and tried to picture what she remembered about it, tried to put all of it together.

  "Well, yeah. You remember me now? I lived in the brown house—"

  "My aunt Claire was friends with your mom, wasn't she?"

  "Exactly. And that is, well, that's the thing I need your help with, kind of." He put his hand on her knee for a second, and it made her flinch, suddenly, remembering the power his touch seemed to have. A warmth spread from his hand through all of her skin. She remembered the garden behind his mother's house, the neat rows of strange plants and geraniums with bright red flowers growing from pots of all shapes and sizes and colors, and she could see the shape of Aeyr's mother, humming from under a big straw hat while she gathered up the weeds in her basket, singing a song about thistles...

  "My help?"

  He took his hand off her knee, and she missed it. "Well, my mother passed away, about twelve years ago. Or, well. I don’t know. She left. I don’t know where she went. I always just guessed that she must have passed away, but I don’t even know that much. And I grew up never knowing my father. But—"

  Bri remembered the sense of seriousness that seemed to surround Aeyr, and she realized that it was the seriousness of someone who had lost loved ones early on. Perhaps that was part of the cloud of intensity that seemed to buzz around him. The picture in her mind of Aeyr's mother grew sharper - the smell of violets, her laughing eyes, her slim, weathered hands. Bri hadn't remembered anything about Aeyr's house or his mother's garden in at least a dozen years, if not more. And now this woman who was being remembered to had passed on, was gone from the earth. So strange to think about.

  "But," he continued, his face growing determined, "that botanists' notebook, I think she gave it to your aunt Claire to hang on to. And—"

  "And you want to try to find it."

  "Right."

  "Well, I'm going to miss my train."

  "See you soon?"

  "Okay."

  "Think about everything I said?"

  "Okay."

  They stood up, and looked at each other. Aeyr's eyes were on her, and Bri felt them so deeply that it hurt her insides. She knew that she would sacrifice her grip on everyday reality to help this strange creature - she was willing to let go of what she knew, of how things were supposed to be, if it meant that she could be near him.

  "Are you afraid of me?" he asked.

  She gazed into his eyes, his pale lips, his face so vulnerable and earnest. "Yes," she said.

  He nodded softly, sadly, and then he looked down the street, and then he looked back at her. "I'll see you soon, Bri," he said, and then he stepped away and walked down the street.

  Bri gazed after him for what felt like a long time. Then she realized that if she didn't run, she'd miss her train.

  Her train! Her train to see Mark...if he remembered, if he knew to come find her...

  Chapter 8

  The Boxfield train station was hardly anything – an old fashioned building, locked shut for years, and a convenience store on the corner, that was all. It grew chilly, and the air smelled like springtime. Bri climbed the concrete steps down to the street, and looked around.

  People were getting into cars and driving away. A man in a goofy white suit, a woman with many heavy shopping bags, a mother and her child. Everyone dispersed, and it was just Bri, alone and standing in the parking lot.

  No Mark, then.

  She sat down, disappointed. She wanted to see him. She was beginning to imagine Mark as an antidote to Aeyr – to all the confusion and intensity that Aeyr caused her. She wanted Mark to be there, to set the world straight again.

  But no Mark.

  Bri wondered what to do next. She could wait and take the next train back to the city, but that seemed like giving in to defeat. And part of her had gotten excited about spending the weekend in her home town, looking for things from the past, reconnecting.

  She could call her father, ask him to pick her up.

  She peeled some paint of the old, dry bench. Bri didn’t like asking her father for favors. He was a strange, quiet, often bitter-seeming man. They got along well enough, but Bri sensed that he preferred to be alone. He had lived alone for years.

  But what could she do? He was her father after all, and she had things she wanted to ask him about. If it made him uncomfortable, then he would just have to deal with it.

  She dialed the number at his house on her cell phone. It rang for a long time, and then he picked up. He sounded a little gruff – like he had forgotten to clear his throat before answering.

  “Hullo,” he said.

  “Hi Dad, it’s me, Bri.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Um, so, I’m in Boxfield, but my plans fell through. I was wondering if you could come get me from the train station.”

  “Ah, okay. Well sure, honey. Your plans fell through. Well that’s too bad. At the train station. Well, okay. I was going to head into town here in a minute anyway. Sure I can pick you up too I guess. Sure, Brianne.”

  “Ok. Thanks dad.”

  “You’ll be on the – on the outbound side then. The side over by, oh, what’s the street.”

  “Adelaide street, Dad.”

  “Ok then. Adelaide street. I’ll be right over, then.”

  “Ok, see you soon.”

  They got off the phone. Bri picked at more paint. She didn’t want to sit alone waiting for her Dad to come – there were too many thoughts flying around in her head.

  What on earth had Aeyr’s story really been about? It reminded her of the type of books she loved to read as a child – it was the story, she realized, of a young person who lost someone and who needed some complicated, fantastical explanation to make sense of what had happened.

  If she was putting the pieces of her memories together correctly, it was likely that Aeyr’s mother had been a botanist, or at least a gardener of some kind, someone who knew a lot about plants. But of course the part about the flowers, and the journey from another world, what could all of that really mean, she wondered?

  She wondered, too, what Aeyr had done when his mom died. He would have been eleven or twelve. She didn’t remember him at that age, she didn’t remember seeing him and his mother move out of their house. Her memories remained foggy.

  He must have struggled as a kid, either way. She remembered Josie telling her that he had only recently given up drinking. Maybe he had used other substances too. Maybe he was just kind of crazy.

  Oh, but the way he looked at her, she wanted him to look at her more. She knew that she would go to great lengths to help him solve these mysteries, if it meant that he would keep looking at her like that. She tried to remember more about him as a child. Had they explored the woods together, too? She didn’t remember ever playing with Mark and Aeyr together…

  Just then, a pick-up truck pulled into the parking lot and stopped quickly. The window rolled down, and inside there was Mark.

  He leaned his head out the open window and yelled, “Bri!”

  “Oh!
” she said, standing up and waving. She hesitated before walking toward him. Plans, all her plans kept getting so messy. What was she going to do now?

  But there was Mark smiling so nicely. He had such a genuine smile, like, he really was as happy as he looked when he smiled, all the way into his insides.

  She went over to the truck and hesitated again over whether to get in, or to explain to him that her father was on his way.

  But then, as if to answer her confusion, Mark hopped out of the truck and came around front to give her a hug. He surrounded her with his arms for a moment and squeezed her, then drew away.

  “Oh Bri, boy am I glad that I ran into you the other night. I’m sorry I’m so late! You been waiting long? Man, this place is cleared out, huh? You the only one on that train, or what?”

  She laughed. “Well,” she said, “I actually wasn’t sure if you were coming, because, well, we only made plans in a noisy bar when we’d both been drinking, but I figured I’d chance it and see if you’d show up.

  “But when I got off the train and you weren’t here…I figured, you weren’t going to, so…I called my dad and asked him to come get me.”

  “Your dad!” said Mark, and then he laughed. “How is your old man, then?”

  Somehow, it gave Bri a strange sense of pleasure, to know that Mark already knew who her father was, and why she’d feel strange about calling him up the way she had. It was so nice to not have to explain things, or tell halves of stories. Mark already knew. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Same, I guess. I don’t really think about him too much, which I guess is mean to say. He’s kind of just a weird old lonely guy. I don’t really even know what he does all the time.”

  “Yeah. He still working for that – where does he work? An office somewhere or something.”

  “Yeah, he does freelance research. I never really understood it. He definitely knows about a lot of stuff.”

  “Well let’s see here. You want to call him and tell him I showed up, or what?”

  Just then, another car pulled into the lot – a sedan with chipped paint around some rust spots. It was Bri’s dad. He pulled the car up into a spot, and then sat for a moment.