Windfalls

  WHEN CERISE WOKE, IT WAS AS THOUGH SHE HAD BEEN SUBMERGED IN dark water, and were now rising toward a small circle of light. At first she only knew that she was cold, and she reached instinctively for Travis, for the solace of his breath and flesh. But instead of his body, she felt the prickle of wild grass, the grit of poor soil. Groping again, she felt the pain burned deep in her palms, and tried desperately to descend back into sleep.

  But there was no more sleep.

  Sickened that she had ever slept at all, she opened her aching eyes, looked out at the foggy world. Through the blur of new tears, she saw that she was lying against the snag of an old tree. Its lichen-spotted trunk had been split almost in two, and one half was angled along the ground, its branches making a crude curtain that had sheltered her from the worst of the night wind. Using her forearms, she pushed herself to sitting and choked as memory descended like another toxic smoke.

  She buried her face in her blistered hands and cried, the rough sobs tearing her chest, the new tears stinging her palms. It was like a sickness, like a fever rising. For whole seconds the horror seemed almost bearable, but in the next moment some new thought or realization would spike, and it seemed she could stand it no longer.

  When she finally raised her head from the darkness of her hands, she caught a whiff of past-ripe fruit. Hunger cramped her stomach, although it was followed a moment later by a sweep of revulsion. Spread across the ground was a coarse crop of fallen apples. Most were discolored and swollen almost to bursting. But a few, though bruised and bee-stung, still looked firm. She watched dully as a line of ants swarmed one of them. Finally, filled with self-loathing, she took an apple in her unblistered fingertips, blew the ants away, and ate it in ravenous bites, oblivious to bruises, worms, and fibrous core. She ate another, and then one more.

  The fog was growing brighter when she stood. She steadied herself for a moment against the tree, and then set off. It was a relief, almost, to walk, a relief to submit to the mindless conviction that action would accomplish something, though when she tried to think what she was walking away from and what she was approaching, her footsteps slowed in dread.

  The fog lifted in shreds and rags. When she gained the crest of the hill, she caught a glimpse of sea, wide and blue and rimmed with a silent white line of surf. In the bottom of the next valley, she saw a green band of willows and weeds. When she reached it, she smelled moist air and heard the murmur of water. Pushing her way through the cattails and sedges, she found a sluggish stream. She knelt in the muck and lapped the algae-thickened water from her cupped hands, its coolness first shocking and then soothing her stinging palms.

  Then, oblivious to the hot smell of sage that rose beneath her feet, oblivious to the liquid call of red-winged blackbirds and the tender breeze, she pressed on down the valley. Her body was stiff, and her hands throbbed. Her clothes were scratchy with the seed casings of the million grasses she’d passed through, and her swollen face itched with unwashed tears. Her T-shirt clung to her chest, and her breasts were hard as fists, the nipples chafed raw from the rub of wet fabric. But all those pains were nothing, such tiny hurts compared to what she’d lost.

  There had to be a way to get back home, to return to the trailer and her life before the fire. There had to be a way to fix things so the fire never started, or so they both got out in time. If you want it badly enough, you can make it happen, her program counselor had promised, her eyes melting with conviction as she showed Cerise how to apply for yet another loan. You can do anything you put your mind to, her welfare eligibility worker had snapped when Cerise mentioned how hard it was to try to study with a toddler. Now it seemed impossible that need alone would not make Travis come alive—if she only knew how, if she only tried harder. It seemed it was her fault, yet again, that she could not bend time and save her son.

  One step. And then another. A snake slithered beneath her feet, a quick, cool rustle across the dirt. Lizards, their heads as erect and grinning as Travis’s plastic dinosaurs, watched her approach and then scurried out of her way. Once she heard a hum, smelled the sweet, thick scent of rot, and looked down to see a fawn’s carcass swirling with flies. She screamed and vomited a hot broth of creek water and apple. Three vultures passed above her, their shadows braiding a pattern on the ground.

  It was late afternoon by the time she neared the woods. She had been walking for miles along the top of a high ridge. On her left the hills sloped down to the far-off sea, and on her right they rose up toward the forested mountain. Ahead of her was a dark line of trees that for hours had seemed to come no nearer. She had long since abandoned her fight with the wind and sun, and now she was simply moving in an endless dream of breeze blown grass and thirst.

  Once, much earlier in the day, she had been walking along the gravel shoulder of a road when a car slowed to a crawl beside her. Remembering the man at the information kiosk, she’d kept her head down, continued to trudge while the car crept next to her. Suddenly an arm had reached out the rolled-down window, thrusting at her a can of soda so cold it stung her blistered hands like fire. The car sped off, leaving Cerise to pry at the pull tab with swollen fingers. She’d drunk in a daze, grateful not to the people in the car so much as to the soda itself for allowing her its infusion of liquid and sugar. But that had been hours ago, and now her tongue filled her mouth so thickly she could hardly swallow.

  She had become so used to the constant wind that when she finally reached the forest, its stillness was like entering a closed room. After the openness of the hills, the air smelled heavy and cloyingly sweet, and already the woods were filling with shadows. She heard the creak of branches rubbing together like old doors being opened.

  Being in the woods reminded her of the campground, and of Melody. As she walked along the road that curved between the trees, she tried to plan how she would tell Melody about Travis and the fire. At the hospital, when the fire chief talked with her in the hall outside Travis’s room, his first question was if she had ever inspected the battery in the trailer’s smoke detector. For a moment it had been hard to even understand what he was talking about, and then, startled, she’d had to admit she’d thought the landlord would have taken care of that before she moved in.

  “It was empty,” the fire chief said, his voice carefully flat. “There was no battery.”

  “Melody!” Cerise gasped, clapping her bandaged hands to her mouth.

  “What’s that?” the fire chief asked, his pen poised above his clipboard. But Cerise could only clutch her mouth and shake her head, and when he’d asked her the number of people residing in the trailer, she’d answered, “Just two.”

  But all day her need to see Melody had been increasing beneath her shock and grief until it was a sensation even greater than her thirst, a longing as physical as lust for her daughter’s breath and flesh and living bones. A baby, she’d said, I wish to see a baby, and now she knew the baby she longed for was her own. She wanted to gather Melody in her arms for safekeeping, wanted to press Melody to her aching breasts and never let her go. She wanted to lose herself again in loving her little girl.

  But along with that need Cerise also felt a growing desire to make Melody suffer. She could not bear to be so alone inside her anguish. She wanted someone to share her torment, wanted to bludgeon Melody with the truth of what had happened. The parenting magazines always said that children must be held accountable for their actions. Melody needed to know—and to acknowledge—the monstrous consequences of what she’d done. Now, as Cerise stumbled on through the hushed and fragrant forest, the only respite she could imagine for herself was the little relief that would come when she confronted Melody with what the fire chief had said.

  It was nearly dusk by the time she reached the campground. She had never been in a campground before, and it seemed she had arrived in a foreign land, as she walked the road that circled the campsites and saw people clustered around picnic tables, saw tents glowing like paper lanterns. Someone was playing a guitar. She heard soft ta
lk, the laughter of families, the happy shrieks of children. But she found no tribe of kids, no painted school bus, no black puppy.

  At the far end of the campground a narrow path led off into the trees. Cerise took it only because if she didn’t, she would have to retrace her steps, and she couldn’t fathom leaving the campground without finding Melody. She followed the path for a hundred yards or so until it intersected a weedy road that led through the woods like a green tunnel to a final campsite hidden in a thick circle of shrubbery.

  There was no tent at this site, and no campfire. But a dusty Nissan was parked beside the picnic table, its trunk open. On its bumper, stickers announced “The Old Ways Are Not Forgotten,” and “Magick Is Afoot.” Moving closer, Cerise saw that a woman sat cross-legged on the bench in front of the picnic table, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, her back to Cerise. A blue cloth was spread on the table, and arranged across it was a puzzling array of objects—crystals and wildflowers, a silver cup, a votive candle, a figurine of a bare-breasted woman holding two snakes out at arms’ length. A little cone of incense sent a fragile trail of smoke into the forest air.

  Cerise reached the car and then paused, uncertain how to proceed. Swaying with the odd sensation of not-walking, she waited until she heard the low growl of a dog coming from the shadows beneath the table. The woman shook herself as though she’d been napping and cast a startled glance over her shoulder. Then she bent and murmured something to the dog before she turned around a little defiantly to face Cerise.

  She had bright blue eyes and a skin that had seen too much sun, though it was impossible to say if she was old or young. She was upright and trim, dressed in a gauzy purple dress and leather sandals. Encompassing her head was a slender circlet of silver from which a pendant hung, its green stone tapping against her forehead when she moved.

  “How can I help you?” the woman asked, rising to stand in front of the table as if she might somehow shield its contents from Cerise’s view. Her words made Cerise think of a salesperson in a store, though something about her demeanor reminded her of Sylvia at the LifeRight center all those years ago.

  Bewildered, Cerise peered past the woman to the picnic table. The quiet flicker of the candle at the foot of the little statue caught her eye, and the sight of even that tiny fire caused the tears to resume their path down her stiff face.

  “Do you share my reverence for the Great Mother?” the woman asked, her tone suddenly warming as she noticed Cerise’s tears and the focus of her gaze.

  “I’m looking for my girl,” Cerise answered. It had been so long since she had spoken that she could taste the bitter taint of her breath on her words, and her tongue felt thick and sticky in her mouth. “Is that water?” she croaked, pointing to the cup next to the candle while the tears rolled unheeded down her face.

  “It’s moon water,” the woman answered. She sounded affronted, but when she saw how intently Cerise gazed at the cup, something in her expression shifted, and a second later she lifted the cup from the table. Holding it toward Cerise with both hands, she gave her a formal little bow. “May you never thirst,” she said. Clumsily, Cerise accepted the cup, drained it in huge, rough swallows. The water tasted stale, as if it had been stored in a plastic jug for a long time.

  “Who did you say you were looking for?” the woman asked when Cerise handed her the empty cup.

  “My girl,” Cerise answered. “My daughter.”

  The woman frowned. “Is your daughter little?”

  “Yes. No. Not really. She’s—I guess she’s turned seventeen. She was supposed to be—she said—at this camp.”

  “There was a group of young people, camped down at the other end.” The woman gestured back the way Cerise had come. “I spoke with them last night.”

  “Was there a girl with them?” Cerise asked hungrily. “Long hair? As tall as me?”

  “Blond? With a tattoo on her cheek?”

  “That’s her!”

  The woman said, “Her puppy tried to eat my candles. She’s your daughter?”

  “They’ve gone?” Cerise asked incredulously.

  “They left this morning.”

  “You’re sure? Where did they go?”

  “Your daughter told me they were headed north. To Arcadia, she said.”

  “Where’s that?”

  The woman gave a quiet laugh. “Near Elysium, I think.”

  “Where?” Cerise choked.

  “I think she meant Arcata,” the woman answered. “Young people like to go there. There’s a university they can make a point of not attending, and lots of other similarly souled people to meet. Your daughter said they were going to build tree houses, and live in the woods.”

  “How far is it from here?” Cerise managed to ask, though the words came out a broken whisper.

  The woman studied Cerise for a long moment. “It’s a ways,” she answered finally. “Three or four hundred miles. Are you okay? I’ve never seen an aura darker than yours is right now. It’s really quite astonishing.”

  Helplessly, Cerise shrugged and shook her head.

  The woman asked, “Where’s your baby?”

  Cerise started as though she’d been slapped. “What—”

  “I can tell these things,” the woman answered almost smugly, though she added, “Besides, that’s milk, isn’t it? On your shirt.”

  Beyond the curtain of bushes someone was building a campfire. Cerise smelled the first tentative wisp of smoke, and her gut clenched. She said, “My baby—” But the next word was too huge to be spoken.

  The woman leaned forward. “You’ve lost your baby somehow?” she suggested. Her voice was tender but insistent.

  Cerise nodded, still grappling with the word that was too large to fit inside her, too big to be gotten out.

  “Did it die? He? Or she?”

  “He.” Cerise stared at the scatter of twigs and redwood fronds littering the forest floor.

  The woman asked, “How does that make you feel?” It was the question Cerise recognized from the news shows, the question that harvested others’ emotions, but it was irresistible. She said, “I want to be with him.”

  The woman nodded. “It’s not as hard as we sometimes think. This society,” she scoffed, “with its dependence on technology—guns and pills and plastic bags. The woods have better gifts.”

  “What?” Cerise croaked, struggling to understand what the woman was talking about.

  “Hemlock’s probably best. Though there’s oleander and nightshade, too. And of course the amanitas.” She paused and peered more closely at Cerise. “Do you mind me talking like this?” she asked. “The ascendant culture is so squeamish and suicide is the last taboo. Too few people understand that it’s okay to be the mistress of your own destruction, as long as you’re clear on what you’re doing, and why.”

  The woman waited until Cerise gave an uncertain shrug, and then she asked, “Why do you want to die?”

  “I just—I want to be with him.”

  “You already are, you know,” the woman said kindly.

  “I’m dead?”

  “No, though it might feel that way right now. I mean, he’s still with us.”

  “Where is he?” Cerise asked urgently.

  The woman gave a smile that was both sad and serene. “His energy hasn’t left the universe. His life force is still with us, as are all the atoms he borrowed to incarnate. He’s closer to us than ever, really, entering every breath, each drink of water. And of course you have your memories.”

  “Where is my boy?” Cerise persisted.

  “Look at these trees, look at the stars.” The woman swept her arm in a wide arc. “He’s all around you, even now. He wants you to be happy.”

  Cerise glanced where the woman pointed. But there was nothing of Travis in the looming trees, nothing of him in the sharp and distant stars.

  “Hemlock’s feathery,” the woman said. “It looks like carrot tops or parsley, a little like fennel. But it smells like mice, not lico
rice. Look for the purple splotches along the stem. It’ll kill you, but it won’t be pretty.

  “But then you already have the knowledge of Our Lady,” she went on, the pendant on her forehead swaying as she spoke. “The Mother-Destroyer—Kali with her necklace of skulls. Demeter’s rotting swine’s flesh and sprouting wheat. Birth and death, that’s the whole story. Now you just have to find a way to hold it. But we women are containers. It’s our work.

  “Let me see your hand,” she commanded.

  Dazed by her own exhaustion and by all the woman’s talk, Cerise could hardly recognize the hand she held out, palm down, in front of her. Taking Cerise’s hand between her own, the woman turned it over, gently easing the fingers flat, tilting it toward the light that lingered in the sky above them.

  When she saw the oozing blisters and shreds of dirty skin, she gave a little gasp. “Is the other one like that, too?”

  Cerise nodded.

  “Just a minute,” the woman said, crossing the campsite to her car. “All things were meant to be,” she called back as she rummaged in her trunk. “My coven meets tonight, and I packed before I came up here.” A minute later she returned with a basket and a bowl of water.

  “Lavender and aloe,” she announced, pulling a towel, a tiny bottle, and a jar from her basket. “I wish I had my Saint-John’s-wort with me, too,” she added, swirling a few drops from the bottle into the bowl, and then submerging Cerise’s hands in the pungent liquid. “You’ll want to pick up some Saint-John’s-wort as soon as you can.” She lifted Cerise’s dripping hands, daubed them on the towel, and then opened the jar and smeared them with a colorless gel. “There,” she said once she had finished. “Now, before I cover them, let’s see what they have to tell me.”

  Cerise watched as the woman studied her burned palms. She felt the stir of the woman’s breath and the movement of evening air stinging in the chill gel on her hands. She heard the sound of an ax, more laughter, a barking dog. She had walked so far to reach this place, and now Melody was gone. Her tears returned, warm and almost soothing to her eyes.