Eternal Question

I hadn’t been into the pine swamps in years. Under the humid summer sun, they seemed smaller than before. It seemed they’d shrunk in the time that I had spent away, first in New Orleans then in New York City. Now I, jobless and alone, had returned, and the pine groves had been cut down and replaced with deep green lawns and boxy McMansions.

Bits and pieces remained. It wasn’t long before I found the old logging trail I sought. A little further along, an offshoot, a narrow gap between pine saplings no taller than I. It was a deer trail. It might distract me from the endless odyssey of job searching, at least.

Shaking my head, I broke from the old trail and followed the new, ducking under cracked branches and stumbling through brush and briars. Nearby, I could hear the murmur of the river as it lazed its final miles toward the ocean, not ten miles southeast of where I presently stood. The deer trail continued ahead of me, a surprisingly long path which spun up and unwound behind me. I had nowhere to be under the shade of the green summer trees, so I continued to follow.

I knew my rough bearings, and knew that I should reach old lady Forster’s house at any moment. It wasn’t her house any longer, of course, but to me it would always be hers. A little house and a little backyard. A boulder just at the treeline, around which she had planted daffodils that bloomed every spring.

To my surprise I came across a similar boulder, not two-hundred feet down the trail. Confused, I looked down at the boulder. It was old lady Forster’s boulder. I knew it like the back of my hand; the crevices worn down by years of freezing ice and summer rains. This boulder should be the boundary between swaying pines and green lawn. Instead, a network of trees spread out endlessly in front of me.

Surely I was just confused. I was just about to turn back down the trail when movement in the trees caught my eye.

Through an arch between the branches of two swaying pines, I saw a lone figure, sitting on a bed. In the middle of a forest. Not just a bed. An entire room. I could see the walls from here, and I could see a familiar-looking painting. I was hallucinating visions of my old bedroom.

Our old bedroom, to be technically precise.

The figure could be only one person. I would never forget Alice’s face, not in a million years. That straight nose, the gold halo of frizz-roughened curls, that face I’d kissed a thousand times. Her eyes, forest-green and captivating.

Six years had brought me nothing more than a passing thought of better times. Now, every night for the past six months I’d dreamt of her. Dreamt of us.

Drawing air now became difficult. I thought of bruising words in Central Park, bruising kisses amongst ruins along the San Antonio River. Murmured vows followed by shouted curses.

I could see her, and our bedroom, I realized, only through the rough arch of the pine branches. Anywhere else I found only the quiet forest floor. When I rushed forward to where she should be, I found only pine needles and moss. From the safety on my side of the archway, I watched Alice stretch her legs on the bed and settle down. Surely I had lost my mind entirely. Was this a symptom of a mental breakdown? I wasn’t sure. My hands felt clammy, my breathing tight and restricted.

The old folks told tall tales of these woods when I was young. I’d always dismissed it. I’d been out here thousands of times as a kid, knew the young forest as well as I knew my own backyard.

The old folks had been raised in the swamps, worked in it all their lives, in a way I never would, never could. They’d been here when the water sat still between the old hardwoods. They had loved to talk about the ghosts they’d seen. Where native chiefs still haunted the places they’d fallen. Where the spectres of madmen still roamed, where the sound of saws felling hardwoods still echoed.

As I thought it, Dream-Alice looked up and around. Her brilliant eyes passed through me without seeing me. “Beth, where are you?”

My knee jerked automatically at the sound of her voice. “I’m here!” I called.

“They can’t hear you,” said a voice behind me. The shock of it, combined with everything else, sent me screeching backward.

A woman of about my age stood behind me, watching me with curious dark eyes. Old lady Forster, I thought. Was it her? It was, but then it wasn’t. She was nearly unrecognizable from the kindly old woman who’d invited me in to watch television in a living room that smelled of lavender and lemon-scented cleaner. And yet I knew it was her. She too, appeared as an illusion, flesh melting into the air at the edges of her outline, not entirely solid. Still she was a layer more real than those at the fire, somehow more on the side of reality. My reality, at least.

Old lady Forster’s – for how could I call her anything but – eyes shifted to the scene in front of us. She regarded the scene as eagerly as I, a kind of furious, excited longing in her features.

“You can see it too?”

“The vision? Yes.”

“What…is it?”

“Not sure,” she said again. “What do you see?” Her steadiness, her serenity in the face of this phenomenon, raised goosebumps along my arms. I reflexively took a step back from her.

I couldn’t answer. Instead, I sank down next to her, my knees too weak to hold me up for the moment. I found myself seated at her feet, taking in the scent of the warm summer earth. Whatever this was, whatever illusion we were both seeing, it knew the deepest parts of us. She watched me, looking sorrowful.

“What do you see?” I finally asked.

“My family,” she replied.

I rubbed my arms again, warding against the curious persistent chill. “Have other people seen this?”

“Some show up and see it, then run away,” she said. “Some walk right in.”

“You keep coming back, then.”

Her face tightened. “It keeps inviting me back,” she said shortly, peering at the vision. “‘Course I’m not going to refuse it either.”

I couldn’t stop myself from staring at dream-Alice. I wanted to be beside her, to feel warm and happy again. “What happens if we walk through, do you think?”

Old lady Forster’s face tightened again. Something about my question had upset her. “It’s tempting. I don’t think it’s anything good, though.”

“You think it’s a…”

“What kind of force tempts you with your passed loved ones?” she murmured, more to herself than to me.

“Is that why you haven’t gone through? You think it’s some kind of evil?”

I looked back at the arch. I still saw dream-Alice there.

Old lady Forster considered the question a good while. “Thought about it. Ain’t never seen anyone come back from it, that’s for sure. Plus, there’s a whole lot of life left on this side.”

For this version of her, there was a lot of time left in the hourglass. Horrified, I realized that I knew exactly when it would run out.

“I don’t know,” I murmured, looking at dream-Alice once more. “Could be something wonderful on the other side.”

“Nobody’s come back to confirm either way,” old lady Forster said, playing with one of the rings she wore.

I swallowed. “You know someone who went in? You said you knew someone else who was here.”

“Just one I knew. Dora Lafitte.”

I remembered the story, now that she said the name. Dora Lafitte had been, according to my grandmother, a young mother who’d lost her husband in one of the wars. She’d gone out in the woods one autumn day to pick berries. Nobody in town had seen anything of her again. Except–

“She was spotted somewhere once. My grandmother told me,” I said. “Her sister saw her.”

“Your grandmother knew Dorie?” A look of knowing came over old lady Forster’s face. “Ah. You’re from later on. Well I knew Dorie, and I saw Dorie walk through,” she said stoutly. “Whoever that was her sister saw, it wasn’t Dorie.”

“How would you know?” I asked.

“Grief like that will mess with your head. And Dorie’s sister, well Ellen was never all there anyway. She’s in one of those hospitals now.”

“But still, it could’ve been Dora.”

Old lady Forster shot me a look that made her opinion of my mental faculties clear. “Dorie disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” I asked slowly. I felt a shiver roll down my back, despite the damp heat around us.

“‘S what happens when people go through,” she said, her voice flat. “One moment they’re there…”

In the corner of my eye, dream-Alice perused a book, her head leaned up against the stacked pillows. Her arm was unscarred. This was Alice before, I realized.

“Oh Alice,” I breathed, looking at the vision. “I miss you.”

Dream-Alice leaned back against the pillows, legs crossed at the knees, one foot waving idly. Those translucent eyes caught mine directly; my heart thumped in surprise. Then it spoke, in a voice that perfectly mimicked her own. “I miss you too. So come over here,” it said with a smile.

It could hear me. I wanted to do as it said. I wanted to run to her side. My heart thumped wildly in my chest. “You can hear me?”

I felt old lady Forster shift next to me. “That’s impossible,” she said. Her voice sounded far away.

I smelled Alice’s perfume now, heady and sharp, clean and refreshing. I hadn’t smelled her perfume in years. Once, I’d randomly smelled it again stepping off the train into Boston. I’d followed the wearer blindly, so drawn to the scent that I forgot I should be walking toward Atlantic Avenue, and not into South Station.

I shook my head, trying to clear it.

“What’s going on?” I asked, unsure to whom I was directing the question.

“Don’t let it in,” old lady Forster said, her voice wild now.

A cold breeze blew in through the trees unexpectedly, violently enough to blow my hair back and make me shiver. The sunlight had dimmed, I realized, as I looked up briefly at the sky. What had been sunshine a moment ago now shone iron-gray. The realization roused my brain slightly from its stupor. I looked at dream-Alice, this vision of Alice, once more. She smiled at me, imploring me to join her. Her crooked smile caught at my heartstrings. I returned it.

I wavered on my feet, looking behind me again. The haze of the path frightened me. With every step closer I took, the air felt cooler and Alice became clearer.

“Do you remember May 17th?” she whispered.

I blanched. How could I forget it? Her perfume wafted over me, nearly overpowering now. Dream-Alice walked closer to the archway. She was solid now, opaque. Those green eyes gazed at me accusingly.

“You know how sorry I am for it. I can’t fix it, I know I can’t–” I began.

The vision cut me off. “I still have the scars.”

They were visible now, raised against her skin. Jagged white lines across her forearm. A slender line that spiderwebbed across her cheek. She’d begun making it invisible with makeup. But still, it was there.

You only think of yourself, I had yelled at her, the glass decanter in my hand. I’d thrown it then. It hit the wall near her. Twelve stitches across her arm, three along her cheekbone. She’d had the option to press charges. She hadn’t taken it. The physical wounds healed in time, but the others only ripped wider.

“I forgive you,” the vision said.

I stared up at dream-Alice. The malice in its eyes had disappeared. “You forgive me?”

“I forgive you.”

“This isn’t real,” I said. “You’d never forgive me. You moved to Australia to get away from me.”

“I’ve had a long time to consider, lovelight” Alice – the vision – said.

Lovelight. Her nickname for me. Only she and I knew of it. She laughed, an oddly breathy sound for such a deep-throated voice, but one that I had always adored.

I fell to my knees in front of her. How often had I wished for this very chance, without any expectations that it would materialize. Now, as I knelt in front of her, Alice surprised me by apologizing.

“I’m so sorry, love,” she murmured. “I shouldn’t have said the things I did about your life.”

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. She wasn’t the one who needed to apologize. I stared at her for a moment, trying and failing to hold my tears back. “I should never have done it,” I said, trying to speak around the sobs wracking my chest.

“Where are you?” I heard faintly. The mist around me cleared slightly, as did the haze in my head. A strong hand closed over my wrist. “Where did you go?”

“I’m still here,” I murmured. Old lady Forster shook me, hard enough for my head to loll backward and forward. I let her, unable and unwilling to fight back.

“You’re going to do it,” she said, as if it was fact. Despite the fact that I remained crumbled on my knees.

“She’s forgiven me,” I said.

Alice stood at the archway and held out her hand to me. “Come on, love,” she murmured. “I don’t want to be without you any longer.”

I looked back. The light in the forest had dimmed.

“Don’t do this,” old lady Forster said. Her voice sounded far away again. “You don’t know what it is!”

“Neither do you,” I said. “There’s only one way to find out.”

“What do you see? What could be worth the risk?”

Only one thing. The most important thing.

“My life,” I said.

Again, I smelled Alice’s perfume. Her laughter drew closer.

Around us, the forest darkened.

Alice’s icy fingers found mine, closing tightly. I looked back; the path was gone. She smiled at me. “I’ve finally got you back.”

“I’ve always been yours,” I said, and stepped through the archway.