The Forest's Son (2 page)
Authors: Cyndy Aleo
In less than a second, he evaluates his choices and comes to the conclusion that he has only one. It seems he has only one friend in the world, and that's Donovan. If he loses her, he'll have nothing, at least according to the version of the story she's given him. That doesn't sound like the wisest move, and right now, he needs at least one person on his side.
He may not be quick about it, but he manages to make his way out of the car, unfolding his long legs and steadying himself on the side of the car like it's his first day walking. Donovan's impatience vibrates off her in waves, but he drags his feet, walking slower than anyone his height has a right to.
She locks her car repeatedly with the key fob pointing over her shoulder; the series of paranoia-fueled beeps for such a beat-up old car would be funny if the situation were different.
“Follow the schedule,
”
she says. “No one should bother you. If it's like all the other times, your homework is all neatly organized in your backpack — oh, god, please tell me you grabbed your backpack before you left the house. I forgot to ask yo
u
— and you'll have a bunch of notes about what's going on in each of your classes.”
He pulls the black backpack off his shoulder and holds it out to her, hoping it’s the one she's talking about. She nods quickly, and he looks at her more closely. She isn't supermodel-gorgeous, but she's very attractive. Hot, even, in that Suicide Girls sort of way. She could have any guy on this campus, in all likelihood. Why would she bother with him?
“Good luck, dude. I'll meet you for lunch, then back here after your last class. We'll go back to your house and see if there's a new video or just the same old thing.”
Something flickers across her face before she walks away from him, and he can't help but stare after her, bereft. There's a strange feeling in his stomach, and he thinks it must be like what baby animals experience when their mothers send them out on their own. That thought leads to another, wondering if he's always been such a whiny crybaby on these days without memory, and how he can remember all this useless trivial knowledge like baby animals being sent off from the safety of their mothers and Suicide Girls, but not a beautiful girl who's apparently his best — and only — friend.
2: Forgotten
Once upon a time, Vance had been the new kid in school: the unknown quantity everyone wanted to solve for. There's a reason new kids in school are always the subject of books: They have a mysterious quality. They’re new and scary creatures in a sea of the familiar. They contain the possibility of changing the status quo.
He arrived sophomore year, she thinks. He and his single mother had moved to the tiny rural town, an event in itself, and into the odd house of glass and stone plopped right in the middle of the woods.
The first time Donovan ever picked him up for school to spare him the horror of the high school bus was maybe a month after he'd appeared, when she still thought maybe they could end up as more than friends. Vance had told her his house was easy to find: Pass three trailer parks, two cow pastures, a grand total of 15 shot-up signs; turn right onto the dirt road; drive a mile into the woods; and there you were.
He hadn't been joking about how to get there, or his house being smack dab in the center of the woods. Anyone visiting would be able to tell where Vance's property line is: It’s where the dense line of trees began.
The house looks like it belongs to witches, or the fae, as her great-gran used to call them. Just enough trees had been carved out of the dense woods to fit the house in, and it’s so dark inside, even on the sunniest days, that Vance and his mother have lights on all the time. Parts of the house are sided with wood, blending easily with the forest, and the copper roof has a patina that adds to the house's other-worldliness. Donovan finds it depressing to be in the house very long with the darkness of the forest seeming to close it in, but Vance and his mother seem comfortable out there — Grace, especially.
Donovan isn't sure exactly where the money for the house and their cars comes from. She has a vague idea of what Ms. Welburn
seems
to do for a living; there's a greenhouse with a lot of plants, and Ms. W brings them into town and sells them to some of the hippie natural healing stores.
Occasionally, Donovan helps her with some of the inventory and bookkeeping for extra money. Once or twice, she and Vance have run into his mother when she’s out, and Grace always seems out of sorts out when they do. It’s as if she's uncomfortable in public, even in the small college town. Out of the house, Ms. W seems afraid of everything including her own shadow, which seems ludicrous to Donovan when you consider the woman has to be at least six-foot-five. She’s crazy tall, with tan skin and long black hair she wears to her waist. Around the house, she never wears shoes and moves as gracefully as a dancer.
In town, however, Donovan always thinks she looks like she doesn't know where to put her feet. Or her long arms or legs, for that matter. Vance gets his height from her; that’s for sure. At 21, he's six-six, and Donovan isn't quite sure he's done growing.
With one ear barely tuned into the class discussion and her making a half-hearted effort at taking notes, Donovan goes over everything she knows about Vance and his mother. One: They showed up halfway through high school and moved in, knowing no one in town, and with no apparent reason for moving here. It wasn't like they moved for a job or to be closer to family in the area. Two: They’re almost unnaturally close. Not in any sort of disturbing or — god forbid — sexual way, but Donovan often wonders about the two of them living out in the woods like that. Even in high school, Vance and his mother got along when most of their peers were at a point when they hated their parents, Donovan included. Three: There are no pictures of his father in the house, or of any other family, for that matter, and no cards or packages ever arrive on holidays or birthdays. Come to think of it, Donovan isn't sure which holidays — if any — Vance and his mother celebrate. She's never seen a Christmas tree or menorah in their house, or anything seasonal at all. Four: Ms. W has a weird sort of accent Donovan can never quite place. Five: Vance somehow manages to fry the ever-loving hell out of his brain fairly regularly, and his mother either doesn't notice or doesn't care. Even though a lot of the time, Vance's amnesia extends even to his mother at first, Ms. W never bats an eye. For someone who watches over her legally-an-adult son like he's a baby hawk made of spun gold, she seems awfully unobservant about something so huge going on right under her nose.
In other words, things are piling up, and nothing makes sense.
At one point, a few years before, Donovan might have — okay, she definitely did — entertained the idea of herself and Vance as a couple. He's attractive, with his close-cropped blond hair and his gray-blue eyes, if you can get past the social awkwardness he shares with his mother and the near-permanent furrow in his forehead that probably results from either worrying about what he doesn't remember or worrying he's remembered too much. But then, you add in the knowledge that he'll forget your name monthly, and you can be pretty sure anniversary gifts are out of the question. If you take it out even farther, he'll probably forget his own wedding date, if he ever manages to date someone long enough to get married.
Beyond any lingering dreg
s
— okay, so maybe a little more than dregs
—
of that hopeless high school crush, however, she’s starting to get seriously concerned. How much of whatever he's doing can a human brain take? Worse, what’s he doing to himself that makes him forget everything? And why is he doing it in the first place? It has to be intentional, right?
Every time a new bout of amnesia begins, there's a reference to a video he's made in which he talks to his future, brain-wiped self. Usually, the video has instructions for getting through the next few days until things start to creep back in, and she's seen all of them, or at least she thinks she has. It's obvious there are things he's not telling her, or showing her, because how else does he know what to do when he starts remembering? Does someone tell him to do it?
Sitting in class listening to the professor drone on about the Greeks and the basic structure of a successful argument, she thinks the Greeks had it all wrong. Talking about things and writing about them only goes so far. In order to get anything done, you have to act. Sure, their culture and mythology has been studied for thousands of years, but is it still what it once was? No, she thinks. It was overtaken by cultures that quit arguing and writing and thinking and philosophizing and starting doing.
She’s done waiting for answers that never come. Tomorrow, she vows, she'll get them herself.
3: Adrift
She misses her sisters and their warmth and comfort. The plants and the soil and the warm air here are no match for her sisterhood. She misses the men, a bit. The companionship of a lover's touch has no equal, but it has been so long since she felt a man inside her she feels untouched again. Were it not for Jakub, she would almost think she'd never been with a man, never lived in that forest, never had her sisters — that it had all been nothing more than a dream. Yet her soul cries for her sisters as if the wound is fresh: a bleeding stump of a sudden amputation that happened mere hours ago instead of so many years before.
She feels the moist air brush her breasts, idly wondering how long until J— until Vance is home from class. She'll have to get dressed, especially if Donovan comes home with him. He understands her connection to the mother, even in his other state. He feels it too, even without her explaining, but Donovan— Donovan will never understand, and she will especially not understand her friend's mother being nude around their home. People already talk about them. She doesn't need to give the girl fuel to add to the gossip fire.
The girl loves her son. She can feel it. Donovan is a good soul and would have made a good sister had Vance been female. But he is male, and they are here, and nothing has been right since he came brawling into the world, all red and screaming and wrinkled and covered in white wax and red blood and that white-blond hair.
All wrong, they'd said, and yet, so perfect. All that pain and struggle, and suddenly, there he was, bright and glowing and beautiful, and he'd looked at her with the dark gray eyes of an old soul, and Grace had known she would give anything for him.
She had.
Donovan, she knew, would do the same. She could sense it in the girl, and yet, the girl has no idea what she would have to give. Could she sacrifice everything? Could she give up Vance when the time came? He was nearly a full adult. He was starting to remember things, she knew. She could hear him crying out in his sleep and then…
She shakes her head. He's not ready yet. She promised long ago that the choice would always be his. She wants him to make it for himself when the time is right, but hasn't she already made the choice for him? When they'd tried to take that perfect, squalling wrinkled boy and she'd run? When she had given him the
angielski
name and dreamed up a father who'd died instead of telling him the truth of the lovely boy she'd made love to on a bed of leaves with a canopy woven of stars and moonlight? That boy had gone back to his family, lived to a ripe, old age, and never been the wiser. She'd just been a beautiful woman on a warm summer night. But her son needed a different story, and she'd given one to him.
All these years, and it's still so difficult to think with only her own mind. If she were with her sisters, the decisions would be so much easier to make. Thinking alone makes everything so much harder for her, and there is so much to think about here: what to wear, and what to eat, and where the money should come from.
Things had seemed simpler when she left, but now she has so many things to keep track of. She is grateful Vance is such a smart boy. He picks up everything so quickly, and he stores everything, even though he doesn't realize how he comes by most of the knowledge.
Over time, he has learned to do so many of the complicated things for her. All the electronics, and when the Internet became important, he took that over, too. She tries to acclimate, but forever feels out of step with the time and place she's living in. He adapts more easily.