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June 18, 1997
THE TREES COULD FEEL IT COMING. Even the dead snags still standing on the forest floor, the decaying nurse logs sprouting redwood shoots, even they knew.
There had been nothing unusual about the man when he’d shown up half an hour earlier. Luce had already begun the preparations, which, by now, she could do while reading a book, chewing gum, and instructing her brother to hide his weird animal projects. She went through the motions: clicked off the lamps, lit a few candles, all the while listening.
It was midafternoon, stippled light filtered through the windows. There was never a full bright wash of sun inside because of the surrounding spires of redwoods, their tops two and three hundred feet in the air. When she was outside, Luce was careful not to break off saplings as she passed. Each of them might live to be three thousand years old, as long as no idiot human killed them.
Luce Shelley, Luce the goose, Luce, meaning light, with a preference for the dark. Olive-skinned, chestnut-haired, in her uniform of cutoff jean shorts and a T-shirt, this one gray-and-blue striped with the neckline stretched into a lopsided oval, but who cared, that was the whole point, to show how little she cared. Low-top purple Converse, which did the most to minimize her giant feet. Up her wrist, coils of friendship bracelets she’d made herself. Luce, preparing for the seeker.
And then, ah-ha, the old wooden steps groaned, the house signaling the man’s arrival. She slid her book under an armchair, the glossy face of the man who kept severed heads as trophies pressed against the rug.
“Hello,” she said, opening the front door. She wore a mask of solemnity that she’d never had to practice. “We’re so glad you’ve made it to the Red Grove.”
“Not as creepy as I thought it’d be here,” the seeker said, gesturing vaguely back toward the road he’d taken. He was breathing hard, had gray wisps of hair combed over a bald patch and a face like half-kneaded bread dough. “My son swore this whole valley would be guarded by chicks with machine guns.” When she didn’t laugh, he stopped smiling.
She said, “There’s no need.”
He followed her inside, started to tell her his name, but she held up her hand to stop him. Not her place to know any of his particulars. Her mother didn’t want even a sliver of doubt that something someone said in passing was used later on; seekers should come to her as fresh as a fiddlehead.
“Sit,” Luce said. He was still breathing heavily, his mouth hanging open to show his plump tongue. “You okay?” she asked. He nodded, said he was fine, just out of shape, and thudded onto the futon. “It’ll be a minute. She’s preparing.”
He was taking it all in, she knew, glancing around at the batiks and piles of stone cairns and dried grasses, the piano missing a few keys, the worn, overlapping oriental rugs. She’d been embarrassed about their house for a long time. When she was thirteen and fourteen, realizing that they had no matching dinner plates or coordinated side tables, she had started ordering home furnishing catalogs to get a glimpse of life on the outside. The four of them in this house did not match the families in those pictures, with oafish men whose arms corralled their brood while eating popcorn on plush leather sofas, who flashed their straight white teeth while they laughed around the foosball table.
She was not embarrassed anymore. Sixteen years old, burning with purpose.
From the kitchen Roo appeared—so small for eight, most people thought he was five—and gave a low bow. So theatrical, like their mom, a little much really. But they fell easily into their familiar roles. Roo asked the man if he wanted tea, ginger to ground himself or chamomile to elevate. Moose, the mutt—blond with orange speckled legs and a purple tongue that hung perpetually out the right side of his mouth—strolled over to lean against the man’s shins.
Down the hallway, the office door opened and shut, and then there she was, floral kimono billowing behind her like dry grass in the wind. Beautiful Gloria Shelley, their mother. Luce watched the man take her in, lick his lips, pupils widening, typical, though he did not stand up to go to her.
“I don’t usually do this kind of thing,” the seeker said, jiggling one knee and sounding nervous as he blinked up at Gloria with a raw hopefulness so many of the seekers radiated; no matter how bored Luce grew of this routine—day after day, year after year—she had to give her mother credit for offering that gift of hope.
Gloria bent her elbow, looking at him expectantly until he fumbled to standing. She hooked the man’s elbow with her own and led him into the office. Luce heard the lock catch. As if they didn’t know they weren’t allowed inside.
It would be an hour or two with them in the office, nothing else required of Luce. Roo trotted back into the kitchen, pulled maple syrup from the fridge, and squirted a trail along the counter, to attract ants, he explained when Luce told him to cut it out. But quickly, the office door clicked open, and Luce heard her mother’s loud voice saying, “My most powerful tool.”
Oh no, Luce thought, tearing out of the kitchen and down the hallway. She passed the open crack of the office door and hustled, freezing in the doorway of her aunt Gem’s room. She was supposed to clean in here and hadn’t. One last big breath of fresh hallway air, and then she plunged in. The dresser top and table were covered in prescription bottles, orange and translucent like goldfish, and half-empty jars of ointment, silicone feeding tubes snake-coiled in plastic, empty worms of catheter, a plate with crusted peanut butter, and scattered between it all, crumbled tissues with smears of yellowed, dried liquid and blood. The evidence of struggle killed any magic.
Quick quick quick, Luce thought, gathering trash, breathing through her mouth as she kept an ear toward her mother’s office. A tapestry thrown over the dresser top, a spritz of lavender water for the smell, the room transformed into a portal.
She scanned to see what she missed, realizing she had not actually looked at Gem. Thin, dry lines around Gem’s mouth like parentheses. Her dreamy, half-lidded eyes rested somewhere by her feet. Luce rubbed a crust of dried skin from the corner of Gem’s mouth, this mouth that, she knew, had pre-chewed food and fed it to her when she was a baby, mama-birding you, she explained to Luce later, laughing. The face Luce couldn’t look at longer than a few seconds before the stinging in her chest grew too sharp.
“She will help me find the answers you seek,” Gloria said over her shoulder, striding into the room. She gestured at the bed like she was unveiling a prize. “My twin sister, Gem.”
The seeker stared. They always did. Luce stepped back against the wall, willing herself invisible. “Sit,” Gloria said, pointing to a chair beside Gem’s bed. Bare summer branches peeked into the window frame behind Gem, poison oak clinging to the lattice up the side of the house. Gem’s pinky twitched, but otherwise, she was still.
Gloria bent close to her sister’s face, then made a series of clicks with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Gem did nothing. Gloria made the sound again, clicking, stroking the side of her sister’s face with the back of her hand. The gesture brought a little stab of jealousy to Luce’s gut.
“I’d like you to concentrate on the reason you came to see me today,” Gloria said to the seeker.
“What happened to her?” he said.
Gloria kept her face over her sister’s. “In Delphi, in Ancient Greece, an oracle spoke for the god Apollo. People traveled hundreds of miles to ask her questions and seek her wisdom, wars were fought or peace was declared based on the few sentences she spoke. The oracle was always a woman. A direct channel to another world.”
There were hidden dimensions, Luce knew. Outside, in the canopy of the redwood trees, an entire hidden world: dense mats of soil atop the branches; from the soil, fuzzy grass-green moss, whips of lichen, small sprouts of hemlock, huckleberry, a flowering rhododendron bush. Hanging forests of ferns. Salamanders who live their whole lives in the sky. Worlds that existed beyond what anyone could see.
Gloria brought her face low, right up against Gem’s ear, and whispered something. She tilted her head toward Gem’s mouth, listening. Luce held her breath. She wasn’t usually allowed to stay in the room during the sessions, but Gloria must be distracted, thrown off by Luce’s blunder. “You’re here about your wife,” Gloria said, not looking at the man. She didn’t check for confirmation but, after a moment, said she was sorry his wife had experienced a difficult transition.
He wanted to know if she was still in any pain, and Gloria told him, quickly, that she was not. She felt, in fact, and wasn’t this beautiful to think about, the kind of allover peace and warmth they’d felt together that winter day when they were newly married and went to the beach for sunset and lay back in their jackets, holding hands, and let the last wash of sun warm their skin. “She feels like that all the time now,” Gloria explained. The man made a faint gasping sound, a sort of sob.
“She’s worried about your health,” Gloria said. Luce was standing back against the wall, and why was her mother starting out with that, why not be a little gentler. “She’s funny, your wife, she’s telling me—” but the man made the gasping sound again, and god, Gloria was giving him too much too fast. Luce would go get him a glass of water. But when she looked over at his face, she was surprised to see that he wasn’t looking at Gem in bed. And he wasn’t looking at Gloria either. Instead, he faced the window, sweating, his cheeks pinking, like that salmon Luce had once seen throw itself onto the bank of the creek that ran through the Red Grove. It had been part of the mass fighting upstream that year to lay eggs and then die, and Luce had been shocked by how gnarled the fish was, flaps of thin gray flesh peeling away, scales no longer shimmery but dull, milky-eyed, which was also what the man’s eyes suddenly looked like.
“She’s telling me the joke about the whale,” Gloria said. Luce looked over at her mother, still bent low near her twin. Gloria had no idea what was happening.
“Okay, okay, so a whale walks into a bar,” Gloria said, chuckling, but Luce cut her off, repeating Gloria’s name low and urgently, pointing to the man.
“Oh shit,” Gloria said. She took a few fast steps toward him, and Luce did the same. He’d staggered to his feet, was bent over the table of Gem’s supplies, one arm grabbing at his neck while the other flailed for purchase, knocking empty pill bottles and boxes of tissues off the table. His arms went rigid, pushing something away, and then his legs buckled and he fell to the ground.
“Luce, call 911,” Gloria said. Luce stood up fast, spun toward the door to run to the kitchen phone, but then froze. Gloria said, Go, go, 911 wasn’t only for the police, it was for the paramedics too, Jesus, go. But Luce had never called that number before. Never needed to, but more importantly, knew she never should. He wasn’t one of them. Was this a dire enough emergency? Did they know what was even happening with him really?
“Go,” Gloria yelled, looking up at Luce. The man’s head was in her lap, his eyes flashing wildly around. Roo’s small head peeked into the doorway. Luce told him to get out, shooing him, but he darted into a corner of the room.
“Go, someone, now,” Gloria said, trying to loosen the buttons on the man’s shirt and then shouting, “And don’t call Una.”
In the kitchen, Luce’s fingers froze over the numbers. Trembling. Take a breath, she told herself. You are fine. She heard her mother’s voice down the hall asking the man if he could hear her, telling him to take some deep breaths. A wasp flew up and down the length of the cupboards in front of her, its elegant legs dangling. This is life, which is also always death, you’ve known that forever. Handle it.
“Una?” Luce said into the phone. “Come right away.”
And then, once she’d explained what was happening and heard the rustling pages of Una’s folk medicine handbook still, Una told her to call the paramedics.
It would not be fast. It was twenty-seven minutes to the closest hospital. Down the big hill, through the redwoods, along the single road that ran through the Red Grove, out of the valley and up over the next hills that closed their borders, then into the bigger town past that for the hospital. The wait for the ambulance was long.
Una was there in six minutes.
Gloria was cradling the man’s head, murmuring for him to hold on. His breathing was fast, thick with strain. Roo was sucking his thumb in the corner, Luce pressed back against the wall, looking out to the hallway every few seconds, when the front door crashed open and Una came barreling into the room. She held still for a moment in the doorframe, surveying the scene, like a backlit angel in her white linen shift, a tangle of necklaces—silver amulets, turquoise, amber beads—clinking together from her hustle.
“You’re shitting me,” Gloria said, but Una moved swiftly, kneeling beside the man.
“He can’t die here,” Una said, sliding her lean fingers around his wrist to check the pulse. “Ambulance is on its way. Is he breathing?” She didn’t wait for an answer, brought her face down to the man’s to check for breath, a movement so closely parallel to what Luce’s mother had been doing just minutes before with Gem, the warmth of shared inhales and exhales, and it was so strange, Luce thought, how much could be learned from pressing your face against another’s.
Una turned to Roo. “You know ‘Stayin’ Alive’?” He nodded, obviously he did. “I need you to sing it, baby. Sing it loud. And Luce, you count.” Gloria started to protest but Roo didn’t hesitate. “Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.”
“For the beat,” Luce said to her mother, who’d started to tell them to be fucking serious. “It’s the right rhythm for CPR.” It was the only thing she remembered from their medical unit in school that year. She started to count.
“I’ll breathe, you compress,” Una said to Gloria, and Luce, still pressed against the wall, let a little air out of her lungs, grateful for the way Una took charge.
Una put her mouth over the man’s, breathing into him, and when she took a break, Gloria started chest compressions. “Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive,” Roo sang, fluttering his fingers during the chorus even though his little worried face seemed to know it was not appropriate. Ten chest pumps and then blow, Luce counted. It was hard to look at the man. The rest of him started looking like the salmon, too, gray in the face, eyes clouded. She could already imagine the flesh that would peel off his body. Floppy, reeking, enveloped by flies.
Under her breath Gloria said, “I was handling it.” Luce wasn’t sure if it was meant for her or Una.
“More hands are better than fewer,” Una said, stroking the man’s forehead with surprising tenderness given that she was touching an outsider, a man, but Luce tried to open her heart wider—he was a human too, he didn’t need to suffer alone, he had done no wrong to them, to women, as far as they knew, but then again, statistically, it was very possible that he had—but he gasped again. Luce pressed herself further against the wall. Her fingers twitched, what should she be doing to help, what could she do? The wall pressed into her bare shoulder blades. Think. “Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.” The room got cold. Luce was not helping. She chewed the inside of her cheek. Una and Gloria kept breathing, pumping. Roo, tired, stopped singing. He curled into a little ball in the corner. Scared, probably. They’d never had someone—well, what was this—have a medical emergency? Die? Sisters, she hoped not, but that’s what it seemed like was happening. She should comfort Roo, reassure him. This was a traumatic thing for a little kid to witness. She bit her nail, leaning back against the wall in the shadow, but didn’t go to him.
Instead she slipped across the hall into her bedroom and ripped off a scrap of paper. On her bedside table was eyeliner. She would help. Back in Gem’s room, her mother compressed and Una breathed and her brother started up his song again from the floor, and they waited for outsiders to come barreling in, for the fact that they had to be called at all to ripple out however it would.
Luce knelt nearer to Una when the sirens came close. She needed the note to get to his family. The front door slammed open, and everyone looked up, waiting to be saved. Heavy shoes stomping through the house, her mother’s voice calling the outsiders right to them, all focus on this next thing. Luce slipped the note into his pocket without anyone seeing.
Just below them, beneath the old wooden floorboards and dirt and crumbs and droppings and webs and hairs and spit and blood, under the foundation, in the dirt alongside the worms were the roots of redwood trees reaching as wide as the trees were tall, passing sugars and water back and forth, feeding the weak, holding the tallest of them upright, flashing memories to one another along the mycorrhizal network of a time before this time, when something had been set in motion. Gathering what was needed because it seemed it was beginning again.
Copyright © 2024 by Tessa Fontaine
