Out of The Woods (18 page)

She was smiling when she woke up. Her body seemed to be smiling as well, with a sense of being filled to perfection, a perfectly-stretched-brand-new-helium-balloon feel. Something heavy was gone from her, something that had been pulling her shoulders up towards her ears for a long time, making her frown with her forehead all night long. She knew what it was. The anger she had healed in Gail had also resided in her – and it was finally gone.

Still lying on her back, Halley stretched her arms overhead, lengthening her body, listening to the crack-crack-crack of her vertebrae releasing, arching her lower back away from the ground. When she sat up, she was facing the earthy hill they had cleared the night before, the hill which had held the “bones and skulls”. It was already coated in a fine hair of grass shoots, each hair tipped by a pinhead of dew. Life came back quickly when the soil was freed of encumbrances. She longed to linger here, to let the healing sink deeper into her bones.

But she couldn’t: there was more to be done. With pleasure and great relief she noted the pulse had returned to her forehead; the baby was making itself felt again. Waiting for her. Was okay. For now. But she had to get to it. The way was the mountains.

But the dawn made things very clear; it told the truth about the height of the mountains, about their granite-hardness. They would be unforgiving. Hugging her knees into her chest, Halley felt fear insert a probing finger between her seventh and eighth ribs, as if it were looking for a soft spot.

They got moving quickly, as if by hurrying Halley could contain her fear. But it was too late. It was as if she had sprung a leak, punctured by the first sight of the sharp teeth of the mountains; she was gradually deflating. Her feet became harder to lift as they approached the mountains and her stomach felt full of small, rough pebbles.

The ground too was becoming harder to navigate, rockier underfoot and stumble-provoking. The yellow grass had been supplanted by taller shrubs, and in the distance, small trees had begun to appear.

As they approached the trees, Halley’s eyes were drawn to an unusual grouping of them. These looked newly-planted and they formed a straight line, perpendicular to the path, as if they had been laid out this way with a purpose in mind. The trees were all the same height, the same width. She stopped, feeling her feet throb from the distance they had already covered.

The row of trees had come into leaf. They were planted in soil from the same plain, were apparently the same age. Yet their foliage revealed marked differences in their vitality. On some, large green leaves filled the branches, exuberant with life. On others, the leaves were small and stingy. On a few there was no growth at all; these particular trees looked wasted and sad. These ones would not survive.

The differences in their growth captivated her. She stared longer, and Eden watched in silence.

Gradually, Halley saw that though they lived in much the same place, there were subtle differences in the environment of each tree. Some of the trees bore the brunt of the wind, while others were sheltered. Some stood close to their neighbors, gaining strength, while others kept their distance. There would be variations in the way water flowed from the mountains and differences in soil drainage; this would cause other divergences. There might be slight disparities in the nutrients in the surrounding soil.

Where they fell as seeds, where they had to grow makes such a difference to their lives.

The leaves on the smallest, least vital tree seemed to nod at her sadly in the light breeze, to imply, “Yes. And you’re just like me”.

Halley shook her head. The sorrowful tree was wrong – she was nothing like it at all. Not anymore. The trees were fixed in their positions. They couldn’t move.
But me, I’m free. I’m searching for more nutritious places.

The trees provided the inspiration Halley had needed. She no longer felt punctured; she felt ready to deal with whatever came next. The morning sun suddenly felt hot and delicious on her shoulders.

She had just begun to walk again when she heard the unmistakable sound of hoof beats. The ground trembled underfoot, making her look around in alarm. Quickly, Eden moved to Halley’s side, and reached for her hand. The hoof beats became louder, almost deafening, and a moment later the animal slid to a stop near them, snorting and breathing hard. Halley eyes widened in fear and she stumbled backwards. Staring down at her was a very tall, very white, very wild-eyed horse.

The horse stood pawing the ground with its forefoot, nostrils flaring in and out. Its warm breath blew out with force, hitting Halley on top of her head, and causing her throat to constrict.

“What’s wrong? You’re not afraid of horses, are you?” Eden asked. The small girl reached up to try to stroke the broad expanse of its face. At first, the horse shook its big white head,
No
, it said,
No
. Eden waited patiently until it lowered its face shyly, and gave her a well-meaning nudge in the belly that nearly knocked her off her feet. She giggled. The horse’s breathing began to quiet.

“Be careful! It could kick you…or bite…” She motioned to Eden. “Keep away from it.”

“Don’t be silly. She looks big, but she’s really a pony at heart.” Eden stroked the horse’s neck, scratched the always-itchy spot behind its ears. The horse turned into the scratch, rubbing into Eden’s fingers,
More, More
, it said. It blew air through its nostrils in pleasure.

Halley took a reluctant step forward – she didn’t want to act like a coward – but the horse threw its head high in the air and snorted.

“She knows you’re scared. It makes her scared too.”

Halley stayed still.

Eden smoothed the mare’s mane, combing her fingers through the thick, wiry hair. “You’re okay, Athena, don’t be afraid.” The animal calmed, dropping its head still lower to the ground. “Let’s see if she’ll follow us,” Eden said.

They continued their walk towards the mountains. Athena walked quietly behind them, as if tethered to them by a long, thin cord. As the day wore on, the muscles in Halley’s neck grew tight. She kept flinching at nothing, imagining the horse to be darting forward to take a bite of her back.

When they grew hungry, they took time to eat, and to refill their meager stock of food from the surrounding trees. Bananas, mangoes, coconuts. The country was becoming greener as they approached the mountains, the runoff from the ice-laden peaks leaving fertility in its wake. The sound of rushing water trickled into her awareness. The first of the streams they were to ford rushed by at their feet.

Eden pulled out Gail’s large canteen.

Halley looked at her in surprise.

“I thought we’d left that with Gail.”

“She said we should keep it.”

“What’s she going to do without a canteen?”

“She said something about going home.”

They looked at each other, and Eden shrugged one shoulder. They filled and drained the canteen twice each, and then left it full. Halley strapped the full canteen over her shoulder. Having water again was reassuring.

Once they were ready, they faced the stream again. The crossing would be simple; there were dry stones laid in an almost straight path. Halley and Eden were able to step across without even getting their feet wet. Athena seemed happy to cross the stream too – but only after first stopping for a long drink and then shaking the water from her muzzle. She stepped casually into the shallow water and splashed her way across.

It was a minor crossing, but like all crossings, it triggered thoughts of what was being left behind. Halley stopped and looked back, staring across the small trees and the yellow tundra. Eden scampered up to perch on a thick tree branch. Athena waited.

So much had happened since they left the woods, Halley reflected: the final goodbye to Fernando; losing and finding Eden; healing Gail of her burning anger; meeting Athena the horse. But – the thought struck her forcefully, because it hadn’t occurred to her in a while – what had become of Trance? Halley became aware that he was back there somewhere. She could feel his presence, could
smell
him. She would have to face him again eventually.

The tall white horse stood nearby, its face hidden in the deep green grass, chewing with small grunts of pleasure. Occasionally, it lifted its head to reveal green lips covered with a foamy mixture of saliva and fresh grass, or to nip at the horseflies which teased its flanks.

Athena, that’s what Eden called her.

The mare lifted its large white head and stared at Halley with a questioning look, jaw still working, lips opening and closing to reveal long yellowing teeth and bits of half-eaten grass.

The mare didn’t do anything threatening. It just looked at her with those large, grey, wet eyes.
Horses don’t usually have grey eyes
, Halley thought. The mare’s eyes were wise, and their wisdom made Halley frown.

Something was building in Halley, and it wouldn’t go away.

Staring at the horse, at the way its mane curved over the edge of its neck, she could almost feel the dry coarse texture of the hair.

It was as if both her hands were gripping it tightly from above, as if her face was pressed down close to it and they were at a gallop. But she was seeing a black mane in her imagining, and the horse itself was brown. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about the day she was suddenly seeing in her mind in years.

Halley was young, twenty-one or twenty-two, galloping recklessly through the woods on Sampson. This had always been their path through the woods, ever since she was a little girl. They had ridden it so often that she and Sampson both knew every bump and rise, every fallen tree. He didn’t need her to guide him with the reins – he knew the way. Usually, she rode there for pleasure.

Today was different. Today she was flying from the fact that she didn’t know what to do. For the first time in her life, she didn’t know what to do…

Her memory moved away from her with a darting motion like a silverfish; she couldn’t remember anything else. Suddenly, her throat felt gob-stopped, like she’d swallowed something too large and it had gotten stuck in her windpipe. It hurt, this sensation, this fullness in her throat that stopped her speaking. She took a hand reflexively to her neck and massaged gently up and down the rings of cartilage, but it didn’t help. Her ears felt full, like she’d been swimming underwater, making the sounds of the forest seem dull and unrelated to her. Even her eyes were glazed, seven-mile-stare-like.

From her perch in the tall tree, Eden watched Halley thoughtfully. One of her hands rested on the furry shoulder of the golden-maned lion-monkey, who watched Halley with equal attentiveness. At the end of the branch, hidden by some foliage, Halley’s movements were also followed by the piercing eyes of the eagle.

Eden whispered to the lion-monkey, “I wish she weren’t so afraid of poor Athena. They used to be such good friends. Halley was there when Athena was born, and Sampson was such a proud daddy, especially for a horse. I wish I knew what was wrong.”

Neither Halley nor Eden could remember. But the moonlight remembered. The tree roots and their shaken leaves remembered. The hard earth held the memory too, carefully sandwiched between bits of rock and soil; even a mudslide wouldn’t wash it away. The eagle had been there as well, a witness to what had happened. The eagle had seen it all, from on high.

Now, hearing Eden’s wish, the eagle turned to look at her with quick yellow eyes. It glanced back at Halley and seemed to contemplate and quickly decide something, because it began to walk along the branch sideways, towards them, gripping the branch tightly with long talons. As it moved, it turned its head sharply from time to time, monitoring the woods, taking care.

While Halley stood there looking puzzled, massaging the lock in her throat, trying to grasp something just out of her reach, Eden listened carefully as the eagle, with long curved talons gripping the tree, began to tell the story.

Children are always doing things which to adults seem impossible; the fact that the eagle could whisper the story aloud, and both the lion-monkey and Eden could understand every word was not in fact overly strange. Nor was the fact that Halley couldn’t hear them. It is simply the way of the world, when one is a child.

Partway through the eagle’s speech, Eden stopped it by raising one hand. “I don’t understand. Why didn’t I know all this?” She was frowning. “I know everything else about Halley’s life.”

The golden lion-monkey looked at Eden, and then cleared its throat. “How could you know it, if she didn’t?”

It was the first time the lion-monkey had spoken. The resonance of its voice and the certainty of its words surprised Eden. She wondered if the eagle would take offense.

But the eagle seemed to welcome the explanation. “Wise monkey,” it said. “You are right. If Halley doesn’t know something, you, Eden, won’t know it either.”

The eagle finished the story, and when it was done, Eden knew the whole truth. It made her very angry. She was furious about what had happened to Halley, but she was even madder that Halley had forgotten the truth. She clenched her small fists, and shook the tree branch in frustration. The sound of shaking leaves startled Athena and Halley, who looked up into the tree. Eden didn’t want to think about the eagle’s story anymore; she just wanted to move, to get away from it. She swung herself to the ground. When she was standing just beside Halley, she clapped her small hands together, hard, just once – this, she knew, would make Halley remember. It worked: the loud noise startled Halley, and cleared the way for a further memory.

Athena shuffled her feet. Halley felt her ears pop, as if she’d been descending fast in an airplane, and had finally remembered to swallow.

Sampson, her bay horse, stumbled. Halley didn’t care: her mind wasn’t on him, or on the ride. The woods around her might not have even existed, for all she saw of them. Her mind was stuck on this unsolvable conundrum, of how to choose between two men. The same thoughts played over and over again in her mind, like a turntable stuck on a scratch, but they didn’t contain an answer. She had locked away the key to the puzzle; she had locked away the truth.

The ride through the woods was punishing, but she felt better for the pain; she deserved it for what she’d done.

A newly fallen tree blocked the path. Sampson saw it before Halley and he did his best to protect her, leaping high and clearing it with great effort. Halley knew in this moment she could have hung on; she could’ve stayed astride his strong, safe back. But she didn’t care to. She was too angry with herself for betraying Nick, for her inability to decide which man would be the love of her life. She didn’t have it in her to protect herself.

So she didn’t grasp as tightly as she could, allowing herself to be flung from Sampson’s back, high into air, hovering for just a second before slamming hard, first into the tree above her, and then into the unkind ground. Her breath was thrown from her body, and she couldn’t get her chest to lift. She was gasping for air and panicking, and then with a start, she was breathing again. She started to sob: she hadn’t realized how badly she could be hurt. And it hurt so much. Sampson prodded her gently with his soft whiskery muzzle, worry in his brown eyes.

She could remember the rest clearly now: time in the hospital; several broken vertebra; disorienting visits from both Nick and her new lover.

Her physical recovery took six months. During this time, her new lover left her, and Nick moved away to start a new job. He called often, and after she was fully healed, he began to encourage her to move to his new town, to move in with him. She put it off; he grew angry. Though she kept saying she would come to him soon, she didn’t, and couldn’t understand herself why she didn’t. One day he told her it was over, that he couldn’t wait any more. She cried for weeks.

The white horse stared Halley straight in the eye, chewing grass, watching her. The small whiskers around its muzzle moved with the movement of the horse’s jaw, and made Halley uneasy. It did what horses do: it flicked its head in the air; it pawed at the grass by its feet to uncover fresh shoots; it twitched its long ears at the flies. These unthreatening things, these most natural of movements, all made Halley flinch.

She thought about riding Athena, and knew she couldn’t.
 I don’t want to get hurt again
. She rubbed the small of her back.
Anyway, riding for me…I did that when I was innocent, before I betrayed Nick. I’m not innocent anymore.
She could still feel the devastation of losing Nick; it had remained with her always as a dull ache behind her eyes. She stared dumbly at the white horse eating grass.
I still miss him. I miss the simplicity, the innocence. I miss his kindness. I miss myself, as I was before.

She noticed Eden. Her little friend had come down from the tree and was gently brushing the white horse’s long neck with her fingertips, looking away from Halley. She ran her small hand down its right foreleg, picked up its foot, and, with a piece of stick, gently picked it free of stones and hardened dirt. She moved with confidence.

“How do I get that confidence back? How do I get me back?” she whispered, feeling silly asking this sort of question to a little girl, but knowing Eden would understand.

Eden kept her eyes focused on Athena, and shifted herself around to lift up a back foot. She spoke quietly. “You’ve already begun. You can take down that fortress you’ve built, just like Gail did. You can simply take it down.” Eden looked up at Halley with big, bright, knowing eyes.