A Single Eye (37 page)

“You're worried about the woods, aren't you?” she asked more solicitously than any time before.

I nodded, suddenly terrified that she would read my thoughts about her brother. I turned toward the woods. The knot clogged my throat. My stomach went oily. The terror that had clutched me Tuesday grabbed again, only it was worse now because of Tuesday. I'd spent an entire hour here then and couldn't force myself into these woods. Why did I think today would be different? If dealing with the woods was just a matter of stepping into it, I wouldn't have avoided it for thirty-five years. I wouldn't have abandoned Kelly Rustin in the crevasse. Nothing had changed. My head felt light, floaty. I—

I jumped. A horn, I realized an instant later, had beeped, maybe more than once. Amber was waving in big sweeping arcs like a kid in a car window. I turned. The truck was right behind me. I had to grab the fender to stop my spin. Barry was waving back at Amber but he looked like the adult giving the obligatory wave to the wound-up child.

He motioned me to him.

“Everything's okay.” He nodded toward the monastery. “Rob knows how to take care of Roshi.”

Before I could mutter
That's what I'm afraid of
, he said, “He's running the show now. He doesn't have time to be offing the roshi, too. Trust me, Darcy.”

Grudgingly, I nodded. I'd already made my decision. It didn't matter what I thought now.

“Go!”

“She's afraid of the woods,” Amber announced, in case there was one person in the monastery she hadn't already informed.

“I know. So I'm going to sit here in my truck until you're out of sight. If that makes me late for the contest, it's on your head.”

I smiled and said what Roshi hadn't.

“Good luck, Barry. Come back with the . . . what? What's the prize? A silver, uh, stomach?”

I could tell he was forcing his smile, and that he was using all his control to cover his nerves.

“A bowl. Porcelain.”

“Well bring it back here,” I said, giving him time to recover.

“Okay, off you go. Now! I'm watching. Don't make me start beeping the horn again.”

I reached in, took his face in both hands, and gave him a quick kiss. Then I turned, and before I had time to focus on anything, Amber had grabbed my hand and pulled me forward.

“Keep your eyes down,” she said, emphasizing each word with a pull on my hand. “Concentrate on the path.”

“Okay, okay. But let go. At this rate you're going to yank me into the river.”

“Hurry up. Barry's still back there.”

“He's not really going to wait.”

“The truck's not moving. No, don't turn around, keep going.”

Despite myself, I had to stop and laugh.

The horn beeped.

“Okay, okay,” I grumbled, and placed foot before foot on the muddy path, watching for tree roots and stepping over rocks.

“See, there was nothing to be afraid of.”

I didn't reply. I knew the truth, that this was a fake situation, with Barry behind us, with me looking down, walking like I was a neophyte gymnast on a balance beam six inches off the ground, and with Amber there to distract me. It didn't mean anything about my fear of the woods, but I supposed it did mean something.

We were still on the flat path before it forked to the upward tine Roshi had joked about. I glanced down at the stream. The bed wasn't wide, but surprisingly deep. The flow ran fast but still low in the rocky bed as it headed back under the bridge and around the monastery knoll. If I had the Cacao Royale bowl, if I dropped it in the stream, would it float back past Aeneas? Or would it get stuck in the dark under the bridge, under the red maple to catch the seepage—I shook off the gruesome thought and said the first thing that came into my mind.

“On the last set I worked on, the director had an entire wall of waterfall in his trailer.”

“Jeez, you really are a city girl.”

“Yeah, I guess. If you'd call me a cab now I'd be a happy city girl.” I glanced up at her, saw the green waving behind her, leaves. I swallowed and looked back down at my safe brown path. “Amber, talk to me.”

“What about?”

“Anything. Uh . . . Aeneas. What did you expect to find here?”

Slick dead leaves covered the path as if a river of leaves had flowed down the hill. They were dark, maybe from desiccation, maybe from dusk. I didn't dare look up and see how quickly night was closing in here in this deep, narrow canyon. I stepped gingerly, moving before my feet had time to slide. The flood of leaves ended abruptly and the footing, no better than it was ten minutes earlier, now seemed like pavement.

“Amber, what did you think you'd find out at the monastery?”

“No. You talk. What are you afraid of?”

Oh, God, that was what I was trying to forget about. “This isn't the place for—”

“Uh-
huh
, it is.”

“It's all I can do to get through this without talking about the past.”

“Well, you talk, or we're quiet. I'm sick of being the one to spill. You spill for achange. I mean, I'm doing you a favor, a big favor here. The least you can do is talk about what I want for a change.”

“You're not doing me a favor; you're getting yourself out of sitting cross-legged facing the wall.”

“Yeah, well. You don't want to talk, I'm outta here.”

“Just what the fuck do you need to know, Amber?” I was braced, listening for a rewarding little gasp, but Amber merely slowed her step, said, “It's a long walk. Gimme everything.”

“Don't you . . .”

But there was no point lecturing about privacy or manners. She
didn't
have any sense of privacy, not out here. I stomped after her, feeling the breeze on the heat of my face. A branch slapped my shoulder. Leaves began to crowd in from both sides. My throat tightened. I focused blinder-like on Amber's back, but the trees still pushed in, squeezing out my breath. I could have tried to face my fear, feel the sensations that comprised my panic; it would have been the Zen way. The hard way. I took the other.

“You win, Amber. I was the youngest kid, a toddler when my sibs were teenagers. We kids went to Muir Woods, or maybe Tilden Park in the Berkeley Hills, I don't know. We went to woods. I must have wandered off and they forgot about me.”

I had given this explanation before, said it just as matter-of-factly, but now, here I felt nowhere near blasé. The thick woody air pressed in on me. The brook gurgled beside me, but it was as if its sound no longer entered my realm.

“There must have been some reason you were so scared. I mean, lots of kids get lost.”

“In the woods? In the dark?”

“The dark? Were you lost overnight?”

“No, of course not.”

We were moving again. Beside us the stream crashed and gurgled. The damp smell of leaves and bark and mud thickened the already heavy air. A glimmer of sun broke the clouds to sparkle off Amber's blond hair and then die away.

“I don't remember it being really dark in Muir Woods or Tilden,” Amber called back to me over the splash of the brook. “More like dappled. Did your family go somewhere dark in there?”

I had to think. Of course I hadn't been back to either place.

“I doubt it.”

“But you remember it as being dark.”

I did. I had always remembered the dark. Nothing more, just dark. Branches hung over us, turning the muted afternoon light to dim stripes. Dead, wet leaves covered the mud. I had to plan each step, watch for leaves, for roots, for hidden roots, things that can grab you, smack you down. The air was so thick I was breathing through my mouth.

“So, either,” Amber said, shoving past a fat shrub, “either it was night, or you fell in some deep hole or steep canyon or something, right? Not like the kids down the well stuff, probably, right? But deep, under lots of trees, you know, like here, once the sun drops beyond the hills and—”

“Amber! I don't know! I was four years old.”

She muttered something, but the blood was surging in my head, my ears ringing and I was about to break into a sweat and I had no idea what she was saying now. I just walked, focusing on her legs, one lifting, swinging forward after the other. After a bit I heard the river gurgling and sometime later I felt the breeze on my face. I didn't look up.

“So, who are your siblings?”

Amber had taken pity on me; I grabbed.

“Gary and Janice and Grace would have been—let's see—fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. And John'd been nineteen. Kathleen's older but she was away at school then. And Mike must have been about eight, so he was just another nuisance to be watched.”

“Who watched over him?”

“Janice, my middle sister. She was always the nice one, the one who could deal with an eight-year-old all day.”

I flashed on them, walking ahead of me somewhere in the city, sunlight turning Mike's red curls pale next to her long coal black hair. I don't know why I even remembered that insignificant moment, but now I clung to it, with its safe, citified background, and the memory eased my panic.

“And you? Who watched out for you?”

“John. John was in charge, always. He was careful, a good planner. A rock climber . . . knew how important it is to plan.”

“There's a rock climbing wall in Tilden, right?”

I tried to inhale, but couldn't, not enough. The air was too thick. I knew what she was thinking and she was wrong. Wrong.

“Yeah, there's a wall, but John wouldn't have been going climbing that day, not with all of us there.”

“But he could have gotten distracted, spotted the wall, seen it was empty, grabbed the chance—”

“No he wouldn't!” My breath came fast, my shoulders were jammed tight against my neck.

“Okay, okay!” Amber picked up the pace.

The light was fading and I had to watch the ground for roots and rocks. Maybe silence was better than dumb questions. John was a police officer; he'd always been a future police officer. He would never have abandoned his sister on a whim.

“What about your other brother and sister? What did they do on these trips?”

I hesitated; I didn't trust Amber anymore, but I didn't dare not answer. I felt too much like a four-year-old here, desperate to hold the hand of someone bigger. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself.

“Grace. Grace was into herbs even then. The joke was she'd never notice if it rained because she never took her eyes off the ground. And Gary was, you know, the second son.”

“The funny one? The one who sneaks beers underaged?”

“Exactly. Gary had a million friends.”

“So neither of them would have noticed if you wandered off.”

“Not if I wasn't their responsibility. But if John had told them to watch me, they wouldn't have—”

“Darcy, they were kids! Maybe they ran into friends? Maybe your sister saw a cute guy the family didn't like? Maybe your funny brother ran off to meet friends and you followed him without him realizing. Maybe—”

“No! They left me, and the trees closed in on me, and there was no way out!” Sweat coated my face and back. Bile gushed into my throat. I stood shaking in that dark, dark place with no way out.

“Don't tell, Darce.”

“What?”

Amber had said something, but
Don't tell, Darce
had been whispered in my head, in my memory, in a tone too hushed to recognize, too scared to ignore. I saw the dark woods as I had back then, felt my four-year-old scaredness, and my relief, my head bobbing as I promised not to tell, and a hand wrapped all the way around mine to lead me out of the dark place as if there had been a way out all along.

I breathed in, deeply, more easily, oddly proud of myself for not telling all these years. For blocking out the memory so completely I could never tell. “Mom would have killed anyone who let me wander off.”

“Huh?”

Amber must have been talking about something else. Relief washed over me. It was so simple, so small a thing to cause all my panic all these years. In a wave of bravado, I looked up at the trees . . . and almost puked.

“You okay?” For the first time Amber sounded panicked.

“Yeah, as long as I don't see the trees. This fear thing is too engrained in my body to disappear by thought alone.”

“So much for shrinks, huh?” She laughed. “Listen, we gotta move.

I moved along behind her, squinting to make out the vagaries of the path. The chill breeze cooled my face. Tension flowed out of my shoulders. I felt ridiculously relieved, as if everything was back in its rightful place again.

Amber stopped, turned.

“What now?” I demanded.

“Hey, don't take my head off. I'm the one leading you! Here's the path to the fire tower. It's steep here. You're going to need to grab onto these saplings here. See? If I hadn't stopped you, you'd have missed it altogether. You'd have gone on walking in the woods to who knows where.”