“Sara,” she said. “Did you want to freshen up, or maybe have something to eat, before we get into this?”
“Is there any coffee?” Sara asked.
“I can get some,” Ohn replied.
“Then let’s get to it,” Sara said.
8
Julianne, Blue, the House, her past... everything fell by the wayside as Emma stepped under the trees. There was just the forest. Trunks like immense spires so that she felt she was walking on the rooftop of some ancient unimaginable city with strange wooden chimney stacks rising up high on all sides of her; boughed branches above like the domed ceiling of an enormous chapel; a reverent silence in the air that spoke not just of mysteries, but of some deep profound secret that, could she ever understand it, would irrevocably change her.
Around her there were trees felled by lightning and disease, but wherever she walked, the way was clear. The ground was springy underfoot, thick with mulch. She thought she heard a flute playing and paused to listen. At first it seemed to come from deeper in the forest, but then she realized that its source lay behind her—back by Tamson House.
She remembered turning to look at the House when she first reached the edge of the forest. By the bright moonlight she saw that its roofs were covered with birds.
Owls.
Birds and House were forgotten once she entered the wood, but the memory of them came back when she heard the flute. And that made her think of Blue and Esmeralda....
She drew in a deep breath, let it slowly out.
For once she felt in control. The forest had called to her, it was true, but answering that call had been her choice. It wasn’t like Blue convincing her to get back into her artwork—more by making her feel guilty because she wasn’t doing anything with her life, than through his support, though that, she knew, was her problem, not his. He was genuinely supportive. It was just that he always had so much on the go that she couldn’t help but feel guilty around him because she never seemed to do anything.
And Esmeralda.
She supposed what bothered her the most was how Blue and Esmeralda were able to invest a sense of importance in whatever they did—whether it was fixing a bike, making dinner, or looking up some obscure reference in an even more obscure book. Everything had meaning for them—some things more than others, naturally, but they managed to go through life never having to question the validity of what they were doing. Or at least that was the impression they gave.
Emma questioned everything. But the worst thing, to her way of thinking, was the way she seemed to automatically adjust her personality depending on who she was with and what kind of mood they were in. She’d be contemplative with Esmeralda. With Blue it was split between jockish things like tossing around a football with him and Judy and some of their buddies, or watching movies on the VCR that she wasn’t even sure she liked, and going to art galleries or classical concerts at the National Arts Centre. She’d talk to some of the Pagan Party and want to join them in their rituals. When she was with Tim there seemed to be nothing more fulfilling than working in the gardens....
But deep down inside she was never satisfied. She never knew who she was. Never really believed that anything had meaning, little say what she did and never mind this “Autumn Gift” she had.
It didn’t make her feel special the way Esmeralda seemed to think it should. It just made her feel confused.
When she was a teenager she’d have given anything to step into a fantasy world. The odd correspondence relationship in which she and Esmeralda had participated then, with its poems and drawings and shared mythologies, had been as perfect a substitute as she thought either of them would ever get. A kind of foil against the real world that had, at times, seemed more real. But, unlike Esmeralda, she’d left that world behind. She’d grown up. Matured, she thought, when she reread some of those old letters.
Only to find that the fantasy world was real.
Only to find that there really was something inside her that could reach out to anthropomorphized elements of nature and actually communicate with them. A kind of... power that carried with it responsibilities she wasn’t ready, or able, to accept; a power for which others were willing to kill.
It scared her so much that all she could do was shut it away and tell herself that it didn’t exist. She couldn’t talk to trees. She didn’t have some healing ability that could make good the wrongs of the world, no matter how small she started.
But while in the real world she could pretend all she wanted that it wasn’t real, that it didn’t exist and so she certainly had no part in it, it wasn’t so easy to do that here. Because here she could lay her hand against the rough bark of a tree’s trunk and feel it talk to her. A slow, sleepy conversation that wasn’t so much communicated by words as directly from the spirit of the tree into her own.
The flute-playing had died away, returning the earlier stillness to the forest, and with that stillness, she found her worries fading just as the music had. She walked on, feeling as though a great weight had been lifted from her heart. Things weren’t any clearer—she wasn’t that changed—but they were no longer so frightening.
Ahead of her the trees opened into a small glen. As she first stepped out onto its thick matted grass she thought there was a dog or a wolf sitting on its haunches at the far side of the glade. She hesitated, her pulse quickening, but then she realized it had just been a trick of the light—her eyes confusing her as she stepped from the shadows under the trees into the brighter moonlight.
There was no dog sitting there. Just a man.
She moved forward again, curious now, caution forgotten.
The man looked up at her approach and she felt a nag of familiarity at his features. There was something about his thinning hair and full beard, coupled with the intensity of his gaze, that had her casting back though her memory trying to remember where she’d met him before. And then she realized that she hadn’t. He only looked familiar because of the pictures she’d seen of him on the walls of the Firecat’s Room that she shared with Blue.
“You’re Jamie Tams,” she said.
The man smiled. “So it would seem.”
9
Julianne liked the way that Esmeralda could just take control of a situation. While everybody else was milling about, some dazed and confused, others caught by the wonder of the forest but no less perplexed, Esmeralda knew that the first priority was to get them all doing something and then they could figure out what was going on. After Sara, sitting close to Blue, had had a chance to tell her story and they’d spent some time discussing how it fit with their own situation, Esmeralda organized work parties, sending them all off in groups of threes and fours to take inventory of their provisions, clean up the areas where the forest had intruded on the House, patrol the halls and the like.
Julianne tried to get paired up with Cal, but he was studiously avoiding her, the shame plain in his face whenever he did glance her way. She wanted to tell him that it was no big deal, but couldn’t, because his attitude toward her had been a big deal. It might not seem like much on the surface, but it underlay the whole problem she perceived to lie between the sexes and just enforced people’s perceptions of each other’s roles.
She believed that an awareness of that was the simple truth that had come to Cal in his moment of epiphany. What she didn’t understand was how he couldn’t see that she’d be willing to forgive and start over again. All his self-recrimination was going to do was embitter him.
She wanted to confront him, to just shake some sense into him so that what he’d learned wouldn’t be wasted, but she knew she couldn’t do that here. Laying his problems out in front of everyone the way that Blue had stripped his heart bare earlier would only aggravate the situation.
So she let him go, watching him trail after Tim and a couple of the Irish students to inventory Brach’s larder in the Penwith Kitchen, then turned to Blue and Judy, with whom she was supposed to check out the garages to see if there’d been any damage don
e to the House’s vehicles, particularly Blue’s collection of trail bikes. Growing up with three brothers who were all dirt bike enthusiasts, Julianne knew almost as much about the machines as did either of her companions.
Much of Blue’s tension seemed to drop away as he entered what was, for him, familiar territory. But instead of starting on the bikes, he dropped onto the car seat that was bolted to the floor across from his workbench, and laid his head against its back to stare at the ceiling.
“You okay?” Judy asked.
Blue sighed. “I feel like a fool, going on in front of everybody like I did.”
Judy pulled up a wooden crate and sat down in front of him.
“Hey, you were worried,” she said.
“Blind’s more like it. Man, I should have known things weren’t going well between us.” He looked from her to Julianne and shook his head. “Who am I kidding? I did know. I just didn’t want to admit it. I mean, I really wanted this to work out—for both of us. So I was trying hard. Being myself instead of trying to fit somebody else’s perceptions, supporting what I thought she wanted to do, but giving her space....”
His voice trailed off and he stared at the toes of black cowboy boots.
“Uh, maybe I should go,” Julianne said. “Give you guys a chance to talk and everything.”
Blue looked up, his gaze locking onto hers.
“A time like this,” he said, “I appreciate having my friends around me.”
He got hold of a smile from somewhere; it didn’t quite reach his eyes, but it was there. Julianne found herself smiling back, trying to keep the wistful way she was feeling out of her own features.
“Okay,” she said.
She dragged a battered old wooden chair over to sit beside Judy, turning it so that she could rest her arms on its back. There was a moment’s awkward silence.
“You guys are both women,” Blue said finally. “You know what you want from a man, right? So tell me, what was I doing wrong?”
Judy laughed. “Jesus,” she said. “How’re we supposed to know?”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
Blue sighed again. “Okay, so that came out wrong—but you know what I mean.”
“Maybe you were trying too hard,” Julianne said.
A small voice was nagging in the back of her mind, asking her what she was doing. If Emma was out of the picture, then that just left things open for her, didn’t it?
But Julianne ignored the voice. She’d rather Blue was happy, period, with Emma or whoever he wanted to be with. The one thing she wasn’t interested in doing was taking advantage of an unfortunate situation.
“What do you mean?” Blue asked.
“You know—what you were saying. Giving her space, being supportive—it’s like you were handling her with kid gloves, or maybe always standing back to check out that you were doing the right thing.”
“She’s been through some weird shit.”
“I know. But we all go through it, don’t we?”
“Not like she went through.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Julianne said. “Say your best friend gets hurt in a car crash and you were driving. That kind of thing just stays with you. Is the way you hold on to that going to be any less than how Emma’s dealing with what she went through, or just different?”
“Okay. I see what you mean.”
“But the thing of it is,” Julianne went on, “is that you’ve been shielding Emma, protecting her from any kind of a bad scene, right?”
“Well, sure. But what’s that got—”
“I get it,” Judy said. “It doesn’t give her a chance to be strong on her own.”
“I was giving her space.” Blue leaned forward and flipped his hair back over his shoulder. “Man, if I gave her any more space we wouldn’t be living together anymore.”
“I know,” Julianne said. “That’s not the answer. It’s just that you’ve got so much presence, Blue—”
Judy nodded in agreement.
“—that it might have been hard for her to ever feel like she actually had any space of her own.” She smiled to take the sting out of what she was saying. “When you’re in the House, I always know where you are.”
“What—I’m too loud or something?”
“What Julianne’s trying to tell you,” Judy said, “is that when you’re around, everybody’s aware of it. Not ’cause you’re loud, or pushy or any of that kind of crap. It’s because you’re you. You know what you want and you go for it. You’re not”—she smiled, then corrected herself-—you’re usually not confused about anything.”
“So I’ve got to be different?”
Julianne shook her head. “It’s Emma who’s got to work things out. But that leaves you with the hard part. You’ve got to be there for her, but you’ve also got to be patient and give her time to see it all through.”
“It’s a shitty deal,” Judy said.
Blue nodded slowly. “Tell me about it.” He turned back to Julianne. “So I should just let her do her thing in the forest?”
“She’ll be okay,” Julianne said. “Haven’t you felt those trees, their magic... their wonder?”
Blue closed his eyes for a moment and Julianne wondered if he was reaching out to the forest. Even in here, with no window to look out, she could feel its presence herself. The Mystery whispered to her, making the spark that was nestled inside her flicker and glow.
“Yeah. I can’t feel it,” he said. “But I’ve learned that there’s two kinds of wonder: the kind that heals and the kind that hurts. That forest...”
His voice trailed off. Judy looked from Blue to Julianne.
“You think it’s dangerous?” she asked.
Julianne had thought that of all of them, except perhaps for Esmeralda, Judy was handling this the best, but she heard now the anxiety underlying the smaller woman’s voice.
“I don’t sense any danger,” Julianne said.
“Well, I guess you’d know,” Blue said.
’Because I’m one of the kids in the Pagan Party?”
Blue looked embarrassed. “You’re just more in touch with this kind of thing.”
“He thinks you’re their momma,” Judy added, regaining her own humor as Blue’s neck got redder.
“I know,” Julianne said. “I’m still trying to figure out if that’s a compliment or not.”
“You know I’m not cutting you down,” Blue said.
Julianne nodded.
“It’s just,” Blue went on, “that the last time the House went on a vacation like this we didn’t exactly have a fun time.”
“Does the man have a way with words or what?” Judy asked.
Blue just shook his head. “Man.” He rubbed his face with his hands, then looked up at the pair of them. “What say we check out the bikes like we got sent here to do?”
“If we do go out scouting,” Judy said as they got up, “we can look for Emma, too. Hell, with the way you keep your engines tuned, Blue, she’ll be able to hear us coming even if she’s in the next county.” She turned to Julianne. “Do they have counties in this place, do you think?”
“Oh, sure,” Julianne said. “Counties, townships, the whole works. Everything’ll be laid out nice and orderly for us.”
Julianne glanced back to see Blue still standing by the bolted-down car seat. She could see that he was making an effort to stop worrying, but his smile still didn’t reach his eyes. Judy followed Julianne’s gaze with her own.
“What are you?” Judy asked Blue. “The supervisor?”
Blue shook his head. “No. I was just wondering why neither of you came with a mute button.”
“Cute,” Judy said as she crouched down beside the engine of the nearest bike to check its distributor cap. “Real cute. Reminds me of this guy I met in the LaFayette one night. He was just as witty as you, Blue—at least he was until I took him out back and thumped him.”
“You didn’t,” Julianne said.
“G
et this,” Judy went on. “Guy called himself the Porker....”
10
“Everybody’s looking for you,” Emma said.
Her momentary fear at coming across the man vanished now that she knew who he was. She sat down on the grass in front of him and regarded him with a frank curiosity that he didn’t seem to mind.
So this was Jamie Tams, she thought.
She’d been hearing about him from Blue and Esmeralda ever since she’d moved to the House, Now, finally, she was getting the chance to meet him.
That he had died some seven years ago didn’t seem odd. Not in this place. Not in this forest. Not after having been aware of his presence in the House for the past couple of years. What was odd was finally seeing him in the flesh, one hand stroking his beard, the intensity of his gaze lightened by a flickering twinkle that lay in the back of his gray eyes.
“People are always looking for me,” he said. “And then, when they find me, they’re not always pleased.”
Emma smiled. “I’m not scared,” she said. “Blue’s told me all about you. He said you can get spacey, but you’re certainly not dangerous.”
“It’s not that I’m a physical threat,” he said.
I guess not, Emma thought, taking in his small frame. He looked to be in his fifties and though he didn’t seem particularly frail, he wasn’t exactly Arnold Schwarzenegger either.
“Then what is it about you that bothers people?” she asked.
“I tell them things they don’t want to hear.”
“Like... ?”
He smiled. “Through what you perceive to be a quirk of fate, but which was, in fact, inevitable, you acquired a gift that allows you communion with what most would believe to be the supernatural. Though there are many who hunger desperately for such a gift, you deny it. You have been shown, not once but many times, how it can not only enrich your life, but allow you the opportunity to leave the world a better place than it was when you were born into it, yet you refuse it.”
Emma shifted uncomfortably as he spoke. The hint of humor had disappeared from his eyes. His gaze seemed to impale her with its ferocity.
“I...” she began.