Heiresses of Russ 2013 Page 7

  Gilda was at first startled that Samuel’s death was a relief more than a burden. She’d watched the muscles of his face soften and his eyes lose their hardness, finally understanding he’d locked himself inside a torment that had only this release. She fell into sleep planning to clean Marci’s rooms before awakening him, wondering where she’d find him a new silk blouse. They were all at rest before the sun’s rays tapped at the shuttered windows.

  •

  Elm

  Jamie Killen

  Alice was seven when she met Elm for the first time. She had wandered into the woods where her house’s back yard ended; her mother always told her not to go too far, but she had never said exactly what that meant and Alice had never asked. Today she went all the way to the little gully with the stream running along the bottom, well beyond the view of the house. She found a puddle and squatted down to watch tadpoles swarming through the murky water. Scooping some of it up in her hands, she closed her eyes and tried to hold perfectly still as the tadpoles’ soft bodies brushed against her palms. When her eyes opened again, she saw the woman.

  She stood across the stream, calmly watching Alice. Her hair hung long and dark down her back. She was naked, but seemed unaware of it, slim body held tall and poised. Alice stared, fascinated, at the woman’s skin; at first glance it was a light brown, but there was also a green tinge to it. It was hairless, and slightly shiny, and covered with pale lines like the veins of leaves. That’s what it looked like, Alice realized. Leaves.

  “Why aren’t you wearing clothes?” Alice asked.

  The woman glanced down at herself before returning her gaze to Alice. “Because I don’t need them.”

  Alice let the water and the tadpoles trickle through her fingers. “What about when it snows? Don’t you get cold?”

  She shook her head. “I sleep when it snows.”

  Alice stood and wiped her wet hands on her dress, remembering too late that her mother would be angry when she returned with muddy clothes. “My name’s Alice.”

  “I know,” the woman replied.

  Alice waited. “Well,” she said at last, “what’s your name?”

  The woman smiled for the first time. “We don’t have names people can say. They’re more like…smells, and tastes.”

  Alice studied her for a moment. “Are you a fairy?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “We live in the trees.” The woman frowned and shook her head, as if that wasn’t quite right.

  “Is that why your skin looks like that?”

  “Yes.” The woman stepped across the stream and held out a hand to Alice. “Go on.”

  Alice reached out timidly and stroked the woman’s palm. It felt smooth like a leaf, but stronger and warmer. Now that she was closer, Alice could smell sap and earth. “What kind of tree do you live in?”

  The woman turned and pointed to the tall, stately tree across the stream. “That’s it. You’d call it an elm.”

  “Elm.” Alice tasted the word. “Okay, that’s what I’ll call you. Elm.”

  Elm’s smile broadened. “That’s fine.”

  Alice looked back toward the house. “I have to go, or Mama’s gonna yell. But I can come back and play some more tomorrow.”

  “I’d like that.”

  Alice set off for the house. “Bye, Elm,” she called over her shoulder.

  “Goodbye, Alice.”

  •

  Alice returned the next day. She stood in the same spot next to the stream and turned a complete circle. “Elm?” she called.

  “I’m here.” The voice drifted down from above.

  Alice looked up and smiled with relief. “Hi.” Elm sat on one of her tree’s wide branches, feet dangling in the air. “I didn’t tell Mama you were here. I thought maybe…”

  Elm cocked her head. “Maybe I wasn’t really here? Maybe you’re a little girl with a big imagination?”

  Alice felt her cheeks redden. “I guess.”

  Elm dropped from the branch; she seemed to fall slower than she should have, landing easily on her feet. “Well, I am here. Still, it’s wise not to mention me. They wouldn’t believe you, and even if you brought them here I wouldn’t show myself.”

  “Why not?”

  Elm lifted one shoulder in a tiny shrug. “I choose my friends carefully. Come.” She held out a hand to Alice.

  “Where are we going?” Alice asked, taking Elm’s hand.

  “To meet someone.”

  Elm led her through the trees. They didn’t follow the little trail next to the stream, moving instead through the dense brush. Elm found small gaps in the branches just big enough for Alice to pass through. As they moved farther from the stream, the shadows became darker and cooler. Alice smelled moss and blackberry bushes, and underneath that the clear green scent of Elm’s skin. Around her she heard quick movements in the brush, birds and squirrels darting into hiding.

  They stopped next to a fallen tree. The bark was silver with age and half-covered with creeping vines. Elm knelt and held a hand out to a hollow under the log. Alice crouched beside her. “Be still,” Elm murmured.

  As Alice watched, a sharp nose poked out of the hollow, sniffing Elm’s hand. It was followed by a fox. He emerged cautiously from his burrow, freezing and baring his teeth when he saw Alice. She held her breath, willing herself into complete stillness. Elm let out a little hiss and ran her fingertips over the fox’s head; his body relaxed and he came farther into the light.

  “This is another of my friends,” Elm said.

  “Can he talk, too?”

  “Of course. But you wouldn’t be able to understand him, nor he you. Here,” she took Alice’s hand in her own and ran it gently down the fox’s spine. Alice let out a little gasp as the fox arched his back into her palm like a cat.

  After a few minutes the fox turned and scurried back into his burrow. “Come,” Elm said again. “I have other friends for you to meet.”

  •

  “Careful, now. Show her you’re not to be feared.”

  Alice took a deep breath and slowly extended her hand to the little cardinal perched on the branch before her. A small pile of seeds rested on her palm; wild seeds, gathered with Elm, not the uniform little ones her mother bought for their bird feeders. In the year since she had befriended Elm, Alice had learned to call some animals. Foxes and badgers were simple enough, but birds remained skittish. This one cocked his head and watched her, but didn’t fly away. She got close enough that her fingertips just grazed his chest feathers. He hesitated for a moment, finally stepping onto her hand and pecking at the seed.

  “Good.” Elm swung onto a higher branch and stretched out on her side.

  “Elm, did you ever have parents?” Alice asked, still watching the bird.

  Elm’s lips curved up in a little smile. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

  Alice shrugged. “Well…. You’re a tree. You’re from a tree.”

  “I wasn’t always.” The smile remained, but her eyes turned distant.

  The cardinal took one last bite of seed and flew away. Alice turned and looked up at Elm. “So what happened?”

  Elm stared at her for a long time. Just as Alice was beginning to wonder if she’d made her angry, Elm spoke. “My family came from somewhere else. I remember being in a ship. Not much about it, just the smell. My father brought us into the forest, saying we’d make a living out of the land, but then he and my mother died of some sickness. I ran into the woods, and my tree….” Elm frowned, her arm reaching out as though to pluck the right words from the air. “Recognized me. Opened for me. It changed me into what I am now.”

  “So people can turn into one of you?”

  “Some people.”

  Alice tipped her head back and watched the patches of blue sky visible through the tree’s leaves. She thought about what it would be like if Mama and Daddy died and left her alone in the forest. “So there’s more like you?” she asked after a while.

 
“Yes,” Elm replied. “I’ve met some. But they aren’t near here and we don’t like to be away from our trees for long.”

  Alice nodded, realizing she had somehow already known this. “Do you miss your Mama and Daddy?”

  Elm hooked one knee over a branch and slid off the side, letting herself dangle upside down. “Not anymore. I don’t remember them well enough. My father was a big man, strong. He always sang while he worked.”

  Alice laughed. “That’s weird.”

  “Why?”

  “My daddy never sings while he’s working.”

  Elm flipped backwards and landed softly on Alice’s branch, as always not fully subject to gravity. She crouched and took one of Alice’s hands in her own. “Is he happy?”

  “Who?” Alice frowned.

  “Your father. Is he happy?”

  Alice started to answer, but something in Elm’s eyes stopped her, something sad.

  “He doesn’t sing,” Alice began carefully, “and sometimes he and Mama don’t talk to each other. They don’t yell or anything, but I can tell they’re mad. They think I don’t know, but I do.”

  “Do you know what they’re angry about?”

  “No.” Alice thought about her parents’ downcast eyes at the dinner table. She thought about the times she heard their low voices in the kitchen, and then the back door closing just a little too loud, the clatter of pots on the stove a bit too heavy. She wondered why she hadn’t stopped to think about these things before, why it worried her now.

  Elm’s hands stayed wrapped around Alice’s, but her gaze turned away. “So is he never happy?”

  “He is! He’s happy lots of times. Like whenever he’s working on machines in the garage, and I go to keep him company. He always wants to hear about my day. He smiles a lot then.”

  Elm stayed silent for a moment. “Well, there’s that at least.” She stood and quickly turned away. “I think I’ll rest now.”

  “Oh. Okay. Um…. Bye.”

  “Goodbye, Alice.”

  Alice walked home slowly, running through the conversation in her head. Something had been revealed, something she’d never been quite aware of even while seeing it every day, and even now couldn’t quite articulate.

  She didn’t want to go home.

  •

  Alice kicked her shoes off next to the stream and began climbing Elm’s tree. She was eleven now, so adept at climbing that it took no conscious effort. She swung her legs over a low branch, arranging herself with her back to the trunk. Elm dropped from nowhere to a nearby bough; it was a trick that had startled Alice the first few times but now didn’t even make her blink. “I came to see you yesterday, but you weren’t here.”

  Elm sat on her perch. “I was. But you were followed, so I hid myself.”

  “Followed?” Alice frowned.

  “A boy. One about your age.”

  Alice kicked at the air and scowled. “That must have been Davey Jensen. He’s always following me around.”

  Elm smiled. “He’s smitten with you.”

  “Ewww. No. I don’t like Davey.”

  “Why not?”

  Alice shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s nice, I guess. I just don’t like how he’s always staring at me.”

  “You might, one day.”

  “No,” Alice replied with careless certainty. “He doesn’t like the woods. I mean, he’s scared of them. How could I like a boy who’s scared of the woods?”

  Elm’s laughter rang out through the trees; when Alice asked why, she only grinned and ran into a stand of birches, daring Alice to chase her.

  •

  Alice wrapped her coat more tightly around herself and shivered as she made her way through the trees. The moon hung bright and full in the sky, but the blue light only seemed to intensify the cold. There was no snow yet, just a layer of frost crunching under Alice’s boots. It would come soon, though. Alice never bothered with weather reports; she had learned to taste the air, to smell the first snow coming a week or more before it arrived. That taste was there now, and she felt a little pang at the thought of Elm disappearing into her tree until the snow melted. Each winter seemed longer than the last, and Alice knew this one would seem longest of all.

  She found Elm by the stream, now just a trickle of icy slush. “You’ve come to say goodbye for the winter,” she said with a sad smile.

  Alice swallowed. “Yeah.” She busied herself with unpacking the small bag she had snuck out of the house, willing herself not to remember last night’s dream.

  It hadn’t been the first time she’d dreamt about Elm, but it was the most vivid. The first had been two or three months earlier, just days before her fourteenth birthday. That one had been just indistinct images, impressions: Elm’s breath on her face, leaflike skin under her hands, the weight of her body. Alice had woken flushed and shaken, but had managed to quickly push the memory aside. She had been able to avoid thinking of it too much. But last night’s…

  She cleared her throat. “I brought that chocolate you like. Oh, and I stole some gin from my folks’ liquor cabinet,” she said.

  Elm snatched up the chocolate and climbed her tree. “They won’t notice it’s gone? The gin?”

  Alice shrugged. “My parents both drink it, but not together. I think each one will think the other finished it off.” She followed Elm up the tree, gin bottle tucked into her coat pocket. “Does alcohol even work on trees?”

  “Yes. It came as quite a shock when I found out. Come, there’s enough room in the nest for us both.”

  Where the trunk of the tree split into two large boughs, smaller branches had grown together to form a spherical shelter like a woven basket. Alice settled next to Elm, leaning back slowly and listening for the sound of breaking branches. “You sure it can hold us both? I’m bigger than I used to be.”

  “Of course.”

  “How do you make this thing?” Alice tried to find a place where branches had been broken and woven together, but could find none.

  “I don’t. I just tell my tree winter’s coming, and it knows what needs to be done. Now,” she said with a grin, “let’s have some of this chocolate.”

  Alice uncapped the gin. She felt the pressure of Elm’s body along her left side, the tickle of her hair where it brushed the back of Alice’s hand. Her immediate impulse was to pull away, put some distance between them, but she stopped herself. Be normal, she thought. Be like you’ve always been. Tipping back the bottle, she took a long swig.

  “Here,” she said with a grimace, passing the bottle to Elm. “Ugh, tastes awful.”

  “But it’s not about the taste, is it?” Elm took a sip of her own, not showing the slightest distaste at the flavor. Alice felt a flash of envy as she thought about how graceful the other woman was even when guzzling gin, how graceful she always was. She silently watched Elm’s body and pictured her own, comparing the two. They were both tall and thin, true, but she was all stretched out, bony angles where Elm had subtle curves. Like Elm, she had hair hanging to her waist, but hers was an unruly straw-colored mane next to the other woman’s black silk. She wondered why she suddenly felt so inadequate, and if Elm noticed these flaws as well.

  “What’s wrong?” Elm asked.

  “Nothing,” Alice said, looking hastily away. “Just…winter, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  They talked about the forest, the animals, Alice’s school. These were the things they had always talked about, but there seemed now to Alice to be a level of artifice to her words. Like she was holding herself back from something, not sure of what.

  She willed herself to relax. “What’s it like? Sleeping all winter?”

  Elm reached for the gin. “It’s not really sleep. I’m aware, but not truly conscious.” She turned and stared silently at Alice for a moment. “I just…melt into the land. I feel what the trees feel. It’s what I always do when I communicate with the ground and the plants, but more. There’s no time, there’s no thought. In a way, there’s no me. There’s
just existence.”

  Alice kissed her. It was clumsy and unplanned, a rush of need become motion. Their lips pressed together, and Alice tasted sap and earth. Elm stayed still, neither reciprocating nor pushing her away.

  Alice pulled back, pulse hammering in her throat. She tried to read Elm’s expression and couldn’t. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re still a child, Alice.”

  Even spoken in a calm murmur, the words felt like a slap. “I am not.”

  Elm turned to gaze out over the forest. “Yes, you are. You haven’t the faintest idea of what it would mean to love me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alice said again.

  “I’m not angry. But you need to go now.”

  Alice tried to think of something else to say, but couldn’t. Elm didn’t move as she climbed past her out of the nest. When she reached the ground, Alice turned back and watched Elm’s nest slowly close and disappear within the tree’s tangle of branches. She waited, hoping Elm would reemerge and tell her she had changed her mind, knowing she wouldn’t. Then she walked home with the numb shock of an injury that has not yet begun to hurt.

  •

  Alice knew the moment she woke that winter had ended. For months, it had been one achingly cold day after another. At times it had seemed as though the winter was punishing her transgression, deliberately delaying the day she would see Elm again. But now she could taste the thaw in the air. She flung aside the covers and scrambled to find her clothes.

  As Alice came down the stairs, her mother looked up from the newspaper spread out over the kitchen table. “What are you doing up so early?”

  “Going for a walk.”

  “In the woods? Thought you’d grown out of that.”

  Alice said nothing in reply, just retrieved the bread and peanut butter from the pantry. She wondered if she should bring a better peace offering than a peanut butter sandwich, but could think of nothing that would be appropriate.