Girlwood (4 page)

"No need for that," Baba said, but she rubbed his belly. "Best to run for the trees this time, Bronco. Head for the deep woods. That's what I'd do."

As if the dog understood her, he jumped to his feet and took off at a great gallop. Polly watched him until he disappeared in the woods.

"Aren't you afraid you'll get in trouble?" Polly asked.

Baba laughed. "Of course I'll get in trouble! Let me tell you something, Polly. If no one's upset with you, you're doing something wrong."

Polly's skin prickled. Whenever she was with her grandmother, stuff happened: dogs got away, people were healed, or Pastor Bentley showed up to try to cure Baba of her evil ways and her grandmother countered by offering him a glass of elderberry wine. Baba was blamed for everything that went wrong in their town, from the loss of all those logging jobs
forty years ago to the local girls turning to Wicca. She was the common enemy, the one thing most people could all agree to hate.

And none of this bothered Baba one whit. She ignored the insults and went about her business. She knew just by looking at someone what hurt them and what they needed. She had a plant for every ailment, or so it seemed.

"What color am I today?" she asked suddenly, waving a hand above her head as if she could touch the light Polly saw. Polly smiled. "Green," she said.

Her grandmother was always green. Green as the meadows, green as the woods. The color of compassion and strength.

Baba tilted her head, as if the answer surprised her. And just then Polly saw a flicker of orange in all that green. Then another of lavender. Beautiful colors, but Polly didn't like them. Her grandmother was
green.

They crossed the street and put the steel cutters back in the shed.

"Now," Baba said, "I assume you're here for Bree."

***

Polly imagined that after she found Bree huddling in some crude shelter in the forest, she would not only save her, she'd transform her. She'd wave her wand and make Bree someone
everyone could love again. She'd give them all a second chance.

"Do you know where she is?" Polly asked her grandmother. The sky seemed to have drawn down closer, like a velvet scarf above their heads. Polly expected a quick, nonsense reply, but Baba stayed quiet.

"Baba?" Polly said. "Do you?"

Baba walked out of the yard and into the woods. She was getting older, but she still walked more in a day than most people walked in a month. She'd never owned a car and so she walked to the market for the few supplies she needed and through the woods, sometimes staying out all night. A few times she was gone for nearly a week, and the townspeople began to hope that she'd disappeared for good. Then she showed up in her garden again, a little dirtier maybe, but with her medicine bag full.

The woods behind Baba's house were relatively flat for fifty yards, then met the slope of Battlecreek Peak. Most people took the long five-mile trail around the mountain, but even in the growing darkness, Baba started straight up. Polly hurried after her, grabbing clump grasses and the trunks of white pines to keep her balance. By the time they reached the first forested summit, the velvet sky had become a vast black sea, and Baba was the only light around.

Baba leaned against a tree to catch her breath.

"Baba?" Polly said. "Are you all right?"

With every ragged breath, her grandmother's color changed—the green giving way to gold, then to red and blue.

"Listen," Baba said. "Can you hear that?"

Polly tilted her head. She heard chirping and gurgling and buzzing—the supposed silence of the forest.

"That's the sound of a million living creatures around you," Baba went on. "You're never alone, Polly. Don't think for a minute that you are."

They headed down another hill, then up again, past hundreds of trees tagged for logging. Only the light around Baba kept Polly from tripping over the survey stakes that stuck out of the ground like thorns. Polly felt a strange mix of horror and anticipation as they passed each marker; Baba wouldn't have come this way, where everything was going to change, unless she was leading Polly straight to her sister.

Finally, Baba slowed her pace, walking along a dangerous drop-off because there was a dense thicket of devil's club everywhere else. Baba used devil's club to treat lung ailments and bronchitis, though the plant looked more like a weapon than a cure. The shrub was eight feet high and armored, every foot-long leaf edged in spikes, each stem equipped with sharp yellow spines.

Yet her grandmother brushed her fingers along the serrated plant, and then suddenly dropped to her knees. In a
flash she was gone, disappearing beneath the barbed-wire shrubbery through an opening Polly hadn't even noticed.

"Baba!" Polly shouted, but heard only silence. "Bree?"

The devil's club had its own aura, a dark green swirling mist. Polly crouched down and tried to follow her grandmother through the thin gap between plant and earth, but within seconds the leaves closed in around her. Something tugged at her scalp, and Polly realized her hair had snagged on the spiny leaves.

She tried not to panic. She wasn't trapped, she told herself; she'd crawled into a gleaming green cocoon. She couldn't move a hand to free her hair, so she took a chance and lunged forward, leaving a few curls like earrings on the lobes of the leaves.

Scalp stinging, she had just room enough to squirm forward on the ground, caterpillar-like. The tunnel seemed to go on forever, but eventually she saw light flickering between the leaves. A few more feet and she had to blink to adjust to the oddly bright sky.

At the end of the tunnel, Polly slowly got to her feet. In front of her stood her grandmother, surrounded by a grove of giant, glowing larches. Even without their auras, the larches were dazzling in their fall colors—every needle like a dagger of spun gold. The tree beside Baba was nearly 200 feet high, yet its most spectacular feature was what most people
didn't see: a white, pulsing light around it in the shape of wings—thousands of them fluttering along the trunk and branches—as if the larch could lift off into the sky at any moment. There was no way Polly could have missed a dazzling spirit like that, yet she hadn't seen it from the other side of the devil's club.

"What is this place?" Polly asked. "Is Bree here?"

The grove was lit up like midday, and Polly could see every tree trunk; not a single one had been tagged. Baba looked delighted. The larches were her favorites—a feathery conifer that was green in spring, light and airy all summer, and blinding gold in fall. Unlike pines and firs, a larch changed color and dropped its needles every winter, revealing a tangle of bare black rigging that allowed the plants beneath it to thrive. Larches looked delicate, yet they grew at lightning speed, producing the strongest wood.

"I showed Bree this grove once," Baba said. "A long time ago."

Polly pretended to dust the dirt from her jeans, but she really wanted time to chase back the moisture in her eyes. She'd thought the woods were something only she and her grandma shared. She had never considered that Baba and Bree might have their secrets too.

Finally, she looked up. "I thought you were bringing me to her."

"Well," Baba said, "this would be a good place to stay, wouldn't it? The hares are always plentiful, the bearberries grow like mad, and water's not far away."

Baba gently tapped the trunk of the great tree. "You know why people say 'Knock on wood,' don't you?" she asked. "It's not superstition. It calls the spirit of the tree for help and guidance. Knock lightly and you won't be alone."

But Polly felt alone, even with Baba there. She might have hated her sister these last few months, but she still hadn't thought that Bree would leave her.

"This is where I first met your grandfather," Baba went on. "Forty-five years ago, he was out here cutting down everything in sight. He nearly took a saw to me, he was that intent on getting his lumber. Couldn't tell a woman from a tree! Imagine that."

She laughed, not like an old woman, but like a girl so beautiful and bewitching a man gave up his fortune to please her. Polly wished she'd met her grandfather and seen the way he looked at Baba, but he had died before she was born.

Baba wandered through the grove, lightly tapping every trunk, greeting each knot and branch as if they were old friends. But Polly felt exhausted now, disappointed even though the sight of the glowing larches was reason enough to have come.

"We'd better go," Polly said. "Mom'll be worried."

She turned to go and almost tripped over a ring of stones. Polly had been so dazzled by the trees, she'd missed the campfire still glowing and giving off heat. Her heart raced when she noticed a lock of charred blond hair on top of the red coals, as if the vainest girl in the world had cut it off for fuel.

Polly looked up at her grandmother, who stood by her favorite tree and smiled.

"Hmmm," Baba said.

Burdock abounds across North America, thanks to its hitchhiking Velcro-like seed burrs, which catch on clothes and animal fur Rich in vitamins and iron, the whole plant, from roots to stems to leaves, is edible. The plant has been used as a powerful blood purifier for thousands of years, while its oils are a popular scalp treatment.

Polly ran into the kitchen, where her mother still sat with her hand on the phone. She stood when she saw Polly's face, her legs a bit wobbly beneath her.

"You found her?"

Polly reached for the hair in her pocket and placed it on the table.

"No, but we found this."

Her mother stared at the charred strands. Baba's drugs must have been strong, because she didn't move.

"It's Bree's, Mom," Polly went on. "I know it is."

Her mom looked up, her eyes brimming with tears again. But it was fury that was causing them this time, not despair.

"Baba said that?" her mom asked.

"Well, not ex—"

"I can't believe this! I've never denied you time with your grandmother, Polly, but this is over the line. I won't have her raising false hopes. People
die
in the woods."

"You could have it checked," Polly said. "Like in
CSI.
Have the DNA tested."

Her mom swiped angrily at her tears. "Right now, it's all I can do just to survive this."

"Can't you at least tell the searchers we found it?" Polly asked. "It was in this amazing larch grove. The trees there are nearly two hundred feet high, but you don't see them. That's the weird thing. You've got to go through this thorny patch of devil's club, and there was this fire ring. It was still warm, Mom. Bree could have been there an hour before! After that I noticed the burdock roots someone had peeled the way Bree used to. Burdock's the only wild plant she ever liked."

Her mom turned away from Polly slowly. Her gaze fell on the lock of hair whether she wanted it to or not.

"Go on up now," her mother said. "I'll handle this."

***

It was well after midnight when Polly's dad came in with the search party. Polly sprang out of bed but stopped halfway down the stairs at the sound of him weeping. The others in the group hurried their goodbyes and left.

"...everywhere," he was saying. "Covered twenty square miles at least. No sign of her."

Except for the rare sound of his sobbing, it was silent. At last her mom said, "I know it's far-fetched, but Polly and my mother found this hair..."

Polly listened to her mother's almost embarrassed voice explaining about the fire and burdock roots. Polly's dad stopped crying. "That hair could belong to anyone, Faith," he said, his voice hoarse. "Even if it is Bree's, what does that prove? That she was in the woods once?" He paused, and Polly curled up on the step, her knees to her chest. "I'll talk to the police," he went on, "but I don't know if they'll test it."

Polly's mother was the one sobbing now. "Max Wendt told me if we don't find her within the first twenty-four hours, the chances that we ever will go way down," she said.

Polly ought to have been crying too, but the cold, ugly truth was that she wasn't sad. She was as different from her mom as her mom was from her grandma. Her mom couldn't imagine the best possibility and Polly refused to imagine the worst. She'd had her vision and she was sticking with it: like Bronco, the husky, Brianna Greene had gotten away.

***

The next morning, there were six policemen in the kitchen helping themselves to coffee. They stopped their talk of foul play when Polly entered the room.

"Where's my mom?" Polly asked.

As the men stared at their shoes, Polly heard voices in the yard. She hurried to the front door and found the lawn converted into an outdoor newsroom. Lights, reporters, and television cameras dotted the yard, and her mom and dad stood on a makeshift podium, arm in arm. Her mom was crying.

"If anyone has any information on our daughter," she spoke into the camera. "Anything. We just want her back. Bree? If you're out there, we just want you back."

A newsman kept snapping photos.
Click, click, click,
like a relentless woodpecker against the house. For the first time, Polly imagined what would happen if her sister didn't come back. At a certain point, they'd lock the door to Bree's room and no one would say her name anymore. Polly's mom's friends—the ones with children—would stop coming by, and Polly would no longer be Polly, but the sole child. The one who had to be so good and perfect that she made up for everything.

She tried to be quiet, but she must have made some sound because her dad left the podium. When his arms came around her, she pressed her face into his chest. All the girls at school wished they were older, but Polly wanted to go back
in time. Back to when she was little, and her father could make everything right. But when her dad pulled back, his face straining to stay calm, she knew it was her turn to make things right for him. What he needed was a grownup—one daughter he didn't have to worry about at all. And because Polly would have given him anything, she smiled and told him she was better now. She didn't cry one drop.