A Dark and Starless Forest

by Sarah Hollowell

  I slow once I reach the little twins’ room. I try not to breathe too loudly even though my lungs burn from the run. London and Olivia can’t wake up until we have Jane back.

  It’s the lack of light that catches my eye as I make the turn to go up the stairs. The flowers on the shelf are a little dimmer than they used to be. I don’t understand why until I get closer.

  Only eight of the nine are glowing. Jane’s has turned into clear glass without a trace of pink.

  I’ve never seen this before. I don’t know what could cause it. Dread pools in my stomach as the idea forms, then grows, then spreads through me like shadows through the forest. If the flower isn’t reflecting Jane’s magic anymore, then the connection is severed. If the connection is severed, then Jane . . .

  My knees buckle, my feet slip out from under me. I forget about finding Irene. I barely register the sound of footsteps behind me, heavy, surely Frank’s. I’m breathing too hard and too fast, hyperventilating until the corners of my vision go dark.

  I’m too late.

  Jane is gone.

  3

  It’s quiet now in the living room. The remaining eight of us are huddled together on and around one of the two couches. We don’t say it, but no one wants to spread out too much. No one wants to risk another sibling slipping away.

  Only Winnie is standing. She paces in front of the flower shelf, looking from the camellia to me and back. Occasionally the flowers tremble as she passes.

  ‘Derry, again.’ Winnie signs this in ASL instead of speaking it, both for Brooke’s sake and because none of us want to call Frank with our voices. Winnie’s fingers move again, then her face scrunches up. She waves her hands, starting over. ‘Describe what happened again.’

  ‘I woke up, and Jane was gone.’ I’ve already told this to Frank and to my siblings, but Winnie isn’t satisfied. I feel flat. I feel numb. ‘I went outside. Followed her into the forest. I couldn’t find her. I thought Irene might have better . . .’ I can’t remember the sign, so I fingerspell. ‘L-U-C-K. I came back, and when I saw her flower . . .’

  Winnie’s little pet poltergeist ruffles her hair. ‘She’s not dead.’

  ‘What else could she be? What’s another reason for her flower to be like that?’

  ‘Maybe she got too far away.’ Brooke’s hands seesaw in front of her. ‘We don’t know how far the magic can stretch before it breaks.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Winnie signs emphatically.

  I shake my head. Jane and I went farther into the forest on that day two weeks ago.

  Can’t say that, though. No one knows we were in the forest at all.

  The tears are coming back. I snake my fingers under my glasses to rub at my eyes.

  ‘Frank will find her,’ Elle signs, her lips set in a hard line. She sits on the arm of one of the couches, with Irene at her side. Her blue eyes are red-rimmed and her pale cheeks are blotchy from crying, but still she tries to sit straight with her shoulders back.

  ‘He’s been out there for hours,’ Irene signs. It was around one a.m. when I got back, and now it’s nearly four. ‘Either she doesn’t want to be found, or . . .’

  Elle’s eyes go wide and wounded. She shakes her head, and sets her expression into something wholly determined. ‘He’ll find her.’

  ‘She’s probably hiding.’ Desperation shows in every twitch of Winnie’s fingers. ‘Waiting until Frank gives up so she can run.’

  ‘No,’ Olivia signs, her face screwed up in that stubborn way only eight-year-olds can muster. London is curled against her twin, silent and crying, while Olivia is all certainty that her eldest sister has to be okay. ‘Jane wouldn’t leave us.’

  Winnie shrugs. Her pacing increases, bare feet slapping against the hardwood.

  ‘We’ll only hurt ourselves guessing,’ Brooke signs. Her left side is to me, the side with a constellation of freckles and moles traveling from cheek to neck to shoulder. ‘Let’s wait for Frank to come back.’

  ‘Why can’t we go out and look for ourselves?’ Violet asks, their gestures precise, careful.

  “It’s too dangerous to send you out,” Frank says. He stands in the doorway.

  Frank is lean, but so tall and with limbs so long that he seems to take up the whole space. He always stands in doorways like that, filling them. None of us would be able to get past him if we tried.

  I inch closer to Brooke, who’s stiffened in her seat next to me. Winnie freezes, her head down, her poltergeist silenced. London’s sobs stop with a small gasp. She’s holding her breath.

  Elle brightens as she looks at Frank, turning her whole body toward him and waiting for confirmation that Jane is okay—that Frank, as always, has kept us safe.

  “You know why it’s dangerous, don’t you, Violet?” he asks, coming around the couch to look directly at them. He doesn’t sign. He knows enough to watch us talk, to catch most of what we’re saying, but never uses it himself.

  Violet shrinks. So do I, and he’s not even looking at me. I’m just close enough to feel the energy of him staring Violet down. Frank doesn’t have magic, but his presence takes up all the air in the room. Brooke calls it his aura.

  Frank continues talking. I watch Irene signing translations for Brooke behind his back. That aura is so suffocating I can barely breathe. Irene’s pale hands blur in my vision. “What if you got lost in the forest? What if you ran into someone other than Jane?”

  Violet grabs for my hand and I take it. We squeeze, hard, trying to prevent tears from coming.

  “What would happen if you ran into someone else, Violet?”

  “They’d kill me,” they whisper.

  “If you were lucky.”

  Bile rises in my throat but I swallow it down. Violet’s fingernails dig into my hand and I welcome the sting.

  The world outside doesn’t understand magic. They fear it so much their fear has turned to fury. They call us witches and they hurt us. Torture us. Kill us. It’s why, no matter what, we’re safer with Frank than we are without him. Frank may be strict, but he doesn’t hurt us. He doesn’t take pieces of us as trophies.

  It’s better here.

  It has to be better here.

  “Did someone find Jane?” Olivia asks.

  “I pray they didn’t. She might be scared and hiding. But I’ll find her. You know that, right?” Frank puts on his Fatherly Face. A firm but gentle smile. A voice like honey and morning coffee and late summer afternoons with the grill going in the backyard while big hands guide me through shucking cob after cob of corn.

  Even abandoned by my parents, I still miss them. I still miss my dad.

  It’s not just me. We all lean in. We’re drawn toward him. Inexorably. There’s a good word. We wait for the pat on the head, for him to tell us he’s proud of us.

  “But Derry, I’m curious,” Frank says. His brow furrows in apparent confusion. “The alarms are all still armed, and I can’t find a record of you leaving or returning. How did you get outside?”

  I flinch away from him. “Just through the door,” I say. Is my voice shaking? I can’t let it shake. I can’t show too much weakness. Or should I be showing more? Crying might lead to pity and leniency, or it might lead to accusations of manipulation and being thrown into time-out. I can’t know. The rules change too often. “I wasn’t thinking, and the front door was open.”

  “So you went through it?”

  “Yeah, to follow her.”

  “Why didn’t you come get me?”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” I say again. “I was worried about Jane.”

  He’s nodding but I don’t think he fully believes me. He just hasn’t figured out where the lies are yet. He’s missing the tunnel-shaped piece of the puzzle.

  I hate the way I have to lie to him. He’s trying to protect us, and we betray him by sneaking out any chance we get.

  “You’ve been doing well, haven’t you, Derry? You haven’t had a time-out in—what, four months?”

  “Five.” The word comes out in a
cracked whisper. Olivia, already sitting beside me, puts a small hand on my back. I feel her magic flow around me, forming an invisible, impenetrable shield, run on her own energy.

  “I would hate for you to break that streak.” Frank crouches in front of me, bringing the father-smile back to his face. “You’re not hiding anything, are you, Derry?” he asks. Olivia’s shield flares. Frank can’t see it, but I can feel it. She can’t protect me from his words, but she’s trying so hard.

  “No.” His eyes flick over me, examining my face, body language. Looking for lies. Looking for truth.

  Frank straightens back up. Olivia moves her hand away and the shield falls. “All right. Listen up. I had a trip planned for tomorrow. Over the past couple hours, I’ve considered rescheduling, but . . . well, perhaps you can all use it as a chance to reflect. Think about what you’ve lost, what you still have. What you could still lose.”

  Elle nods like he’s preaching. Winnie’s hair is ruffling like she’s in a storm, and I know what she’s thinking. We haven’t lost Jane, she’s alive, she’s just hiding. I feel like my insides are rotting. I desperately want to believe Jane’s alive, but every time I look at her drained camellia, I can only fear the worst.

  But I felt her in the forest. Even if it was that weird “she’s here but she’s not” feeling, the “she’s here” has to mean something, doesn’t it?

  “I’ll resume the search for Jane at dawn, then again when I return,” Frank says. “Elle, you’re in charge while I’m gone.” Winnie and Brooke are older, but no one argues the chain of succession. Frank would never leave Winnie or Brooke in charge, not when there’s Elle. Not when there’s someone less willful. “For now, I think it’s time everyone gets back to bed.”

  It’s not a suggestion. Frank watches us until, together, we stand. He’s still watching as we walk out of the room. That walk becomes a scurry just past the doorway, like when you turn off the bedroom lights then try to jump in bed before the monsters get you.

  We split up, and once Winnie, Brooke, and I reach the top landing, I realize I’m the only one who will be sleeping alone tonight.

  I haven’t slept alone in seven years.

  Brooke nudges me and signs, ‘Do you want to stay with us tonight?’

  I shake my head. ‘Nah. I’m a big girl.’

  I regret saying that almost as soon as I close the bedroom door behind me. Jane’s bed is still unmade. The first thing she does on any morning is make her bed, so seeing it with the blankets thrown back adds to the sense that she could be just down the hall. She got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, but she’ll be back.

  Any minute now.

  I curl up on top of Jane’s unmade bed, and I wait.

  4

  She doesn’t come back, of course. It’s not a fairy tale. Jane won’t return if I clap my hands and believe.

  I still stay up until dawn waiting, and when that fails, I go downstairs to beg Frank to let me search for Jane with him. Naturally, he refuses. The forest is too dangerous. All I can do is pull the smaller couch up in front of the living room windows, which face the lake, and squint across to the forest.

  At some point Brooke finds me lying on the couch. She nudges me into enough of an upright position that she can sit, and I can rest my head in her lap. She’s fat like me, her thighs generous and cushy pillows that nearly put me to sleep.

  Maybe they do put me to sleep. It’s that weird liminal space where you’re dozing so lightly that you think you’re awake, until something actually wakes you up and for the space of a heartbeat, your entire concept of reality is a jumble. One moment, Brooke is stroking my hair, and the next, Frank is back.

  “Anything?” Elle asks. How long has Elle been hovering nearby? For that matter, when did Olivia and London join us? They’ve curled up against me and Brooke and fallen asleep.

  Frank shakes his head. “I found a few tracks, but I’m not sure if they were Jane or Derry.” His voice is tight in a way I’ve never heard before. Even when he gets angry at us, his voice usually stays calm and level, almost disinterested.

  Did losing Jane shake him that much? He takes care of us, and I think that’s the same as caring about us, but . . .

  Maybe I imagine it. Maybe it’s just me. But . . . sometimes when he looks at us, there’s nothing behind his eyes. No love, no pride. Barely even recognition. All these little moments when he looks at us as if we’re not really here.

  If Jane going missing has affected him like this, then I have to be wrong.

  I sit up, untangling myself from Brooke and the little twins. London takes my place in Brooke’s lap and rests against her.

  Brooke and London have a bond no one else can understand. All magic can be dangerous, if it’s twisted and prodded and pushed the right way, but some magic is dangerous unless you twist it the right way. You have to work at not letting it hurt someone.

  Brooke’s magic is nature-based, like mine, but with fire and air. She didn’t always know how to control them or how they feed off each other. She’s never told us exactly what happened before she came here, what prompted her to be left on Frank’s doorstep, but I can imagine.

  The trigger that brought the little twins to us was an incident with London. She had a tantrum and their babysitter grabbed her by the arms. She yelled at her and shook her. London was only six. She was scared. Who can blame her for lashing out? London’s magic mangled the babysitter’s hands, twisted her elbows back the wrong way and too far.

  Like Jane, London can manipulate matter. But for London, it’s anything with a pulse.

  Or maybe anything that once had a pulse. We’ve never tested it on something dead. As it is, Brooke and London both avoid using their magic unless it’s for lessons and demonstrations with Frank, where Brooke keeps her fire and wind as soft as Frank will allow, and London tries not to cry when a sibling is placed in front of her as a test subject. Winnie usually volunteers. The one emotion her pet poltergeist actually lets her hide is pain, and it’s less scary for London if she’s testing her magic on someone who will smile through it.

  I join Frank and Elle. “What now?” I ask. “We can go look for her while you’re gone—”

  Frank turns on me and snarls, “NO,” with so much ferocity that I stumble back a step. His face quickly smooths back into normalcy. “No one is leaving the house until I get back,” he says.

  “But when will that be?” I demand. “She’s already been gone for hours. We can’t lose another whole day. If we stick together in groups, we’ll be fine.”

  Thinking of the shadow-creature from last night and the thundering of the cicadas, I’m not sure that’s true. Maybe it would be better if I went alone. Kept the rest safe.

  “You won’t be fine, you’ll get lost. You don’t know the forest and we don’t know what happened to Jane,” Frank says. He lowers his voice until only Elle and I can hear. “She’s probably dead. That’s the primary reason her flower would react like that. I won’t have you endangering yourself and your siblings to find a body.”

  With that, Frank retreats to his rooms. I stay rooted to the spot, digging my fingernails into my palms, shaking. He knows the forest, he knows the world outside this place, he’s the one who always knows what’s going on. If he thinks she’s dead, then she must be.

  One word echoes in my mind over and over. Primary. If it’s the primary reason her flower would be empty, it means there’s a secondary reason.

  Jane could be alive.

  Elle clearly didn’t focus on that same word, because she’s begun to cry. She looks at me with tears streaming out of her wide blue eyes and says, “Do you think he’s right?” She claps a hand over her mouth as if she’s just said something horribly offensive. “I mean—he’s always right—but—you know what I mean.”

  I nod, but that doesn’t seem to help because she just cries harder.

  Fuck.

  I desperately scan the room for reinforcements. Brooke is still covered by the little twins, who
seem to have fallen asleep. She’s not looking my way, so I can’t get her attention without Elle noticing.

  Irene—bless Irene—either has great timing or sensed her sister’s distress. Doesn’t matter. Either way, she’s here, wrapping Elle up in her arms, and I’m given a chance to escape upstairs. I need a moment alone, and in this house, there are only a few places to find that.

  The upstairs bathroom is down the hall, across from Violet and the big twins’ bedroom at the end. Brooke decorated it, to the best of her resources and abilities. Frank wouldn’t buy her anything but the basics, but she painted flowers and clouds on the walls, and Violet glamoured our towels into the teals and creams Brooke picked out.

  The toiletries we get are nice. The brushes are sturdy, the shampoo is gentle, the toilet paper is soft, and each menstruating sibling has a cup. Not my favorite, but Frank says it’s more sustainable and affordable than keeping us supplied with pads or tampons. Jane, Olivia, and London get their hair oil and silk scarves and wide-toothed combs. A few years ago, Frank finally allowed us sharp hair scissors and clippers.

  I’m one of the few who keeps my hair long. Every time I brush it, I remember how my mother would brush and braid it before bed.

  There’s a doctor that comes about four times a year. More if we need him, but we almost never do. Dr. Sam saw us from childhood. He brings our medications—hormone blocker shots for Irene, antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication for all of us. We get our vaccinations on schedule, including flu shots. He tells us to open our mouths wide and checks our teeth as if we’re horses. He takes a million little measurements, then smiles and gives us a sucker.

  He never asks too much. For the medications, he needs to know our moods, but he doesn’t ask what causes them. If we start to say something like, “My anxiety has been worse because I didn’t do well during a test, and Frank got mad,” he recommends a stronger pill and changes the subject.

  I think Frank pays him a lot. Exorbitantly. That’s a good word.

  Between Dr. Sam’s visits, there are first aid kits and Midol and Advil and vitamins, things we need.