Burning Woods, Oregon, 1994
Lily wove the strands of light brown grass one over the other, lost for a moment in the monotony of busy fingers. Max sat near her trying to get her attention, but she was completely immersed in the emerging geometric pattern, the triangles and hexagons. Over, under, under, over. Repeat.
“Hey, you,” Max said, dipping his fingers in the grass soaking water and flicking it her way.
“What do you want?” she looked up, annoyed. “Dork.”
“Want to go for a hike tomorrow?”
“We have school, numbnuts.”
“Do we?” he asked. “What else is senior year for except to take a few days off now and then? I think your precious GPA is safe.”
“I guess we could.” She returned to her weaving. “Where did you want to go hiking?”
“I hear the first chanterelles are just coming up at the higher elevations. I thought we might go find some.”
“Huh,” Lily said. In all her years living in the valley, she had never actually looked for mushrooms. But she had heard about the hippies on Aunt Sal’s commune cooking them up with pasta and butter. Alice always tried to get her to come along when she joined the commune’s outings, but Lily had never been interested. They came back from their fall hunts with big sisal baskets overflowing with golden-trumpeted mushrooms, their gators hooked on over their hiking boots sopping wet. They posed in various silly ways with the mushrooms for pictures, with the mushrooms as horns, or beards, or eyes.
“What do you say?”
“All right then. Mr. Janowicz is getting on my nerves lately anyway. He’s all, practice your equations, learn the life cycle of the shit fly.”
“All right, grumpy dwarf,” Max said. “Seems someone needs a little relaxation anyhow.”
◆
The next day the two loaded up the truck with mushroom baskets, knives, rain gear, snacks, and water. They drove up the ridge through a rain so fine it might more properly be categorized as a mist. There had been a strong rain a few days earlier, but the day promised to hold back its autumnal tears. They pulled off the road and onto a dirt, logging road and wound their way among the Doug fir, vine maple, and ash up toward the low pass of the coast range. Max pulled over on the side of the road.
“I think this is the spot, if I remember,” he said. “Top secret. Don’t tell all the white hippie folk.”
“But I guess technically I am said white hippie folk,” she said. “Plus or minus the hippie part. Jury’s out on that one.”
“It’s nice to see a girl who has such a strong sense of identity,” Max said, creaking open the heavy driver’s side door and hopping down.
“You’re really making me so glad I came today,” she said, jumping from up high and skittering into the ditch. She could hardly believe she had ever had a crush on him.
The two walked along single file not talking for a while, letting the narrow trail provide a buffer for their irritation toward one another. They walked along a little creek filled mostly with ash and alder, the moody gray bark mottled with spots of black. Lily saw all manner of little mushrooms poking their umbrellas up from the ground. Some were smooth and some ridged and pointed. Little white shelf mushrooms with clear edges grew out from a downed alder log.
“Angel Wings,” Max said, pointing. “Some people might think those were oyster mushrooms. But those people would be wrong.”
“Hmm,” Lily said. “I wouldn’t know anoyster from an angel’s ass.”
“This one,” Max bent down to put his finger on a bright red mushroom with white spots, “is the first one you teach a toddler not to eat.”
“Oh yeah?”
“So don’t eat them.” He smiled up at her mischievously.
“Asshole.” She rolled her eyes.
The trail turned up away from the creek and into a stand of Doug firs. They headed straight up in a steep curve toward the top of the hill where Max stopped.
“If you want we can split up on this aspect and look for the golden trumpets here. Good vine maple and Dougie action.”
“Trying to get rid of me, huh?”
“Nah.” He punched her on the arm. “Let’s just stay within earshot of one another. Cr-r-ruuk,” he drew a very convincing raven call out from his throat. “That will be our signal.”
“Crraw Crraw,” she said with a cowgirl twang. “Roger that.”
They made their way ducking under the vine maple and trudging through thick Oregon grape groundcover. Lily wondered how on earth anyone could ever find anything under all the prickly undergrowth. As she walked along she flashed back to her day in the forest when she’d first left home months before. She jumped over a mossy nurse log and landed hard on the other side, her boot breaking through the loamy soil and her leg falling up to her thigh into some sort of cavern below. Shit, she hissed. She remembered how she’d gotten hung up in the vine maple after running away, and how in that moment she had wished she could go back home and sit sullenly across from her mom and eat bread and eggs and sip hot coffee. She had almost turned back for the comforts of home, but something in her urged her forward and so she had made it out of that forest and finally to the ocean. Whether the outcome of her decision was positive or negative was still up for deliberation. Of late she had been feeling pretty cruddy about the whole thing.
She looked up to see if Max was nearby and able to help her out of the hole. She did a poor, sick raven call but heard nothing in response. She managed to lift her leg out from the hole and fished for her boot down in the blackness. The memory of the spider bite tingled in the scar on her chest as she wondered what else might be down there in the depths besides her shoe. Her hand felt something and she grabbed ahold and pulled it out. It was a lichen-covered stick, the smooth plane of the lichen mimicking leather to the touch. She flung the stick away and put her hand back in and kept fishing around. Finally, she grabbed a lace and retrieved the boot full of loam and moss. She sat up on the nurse log and put her shoe back on and cawed one more time. This time she heard Max’s perfect raven response, gathered her basket, and headed downhill toward the call.
She was looking down as she followed the slight ravine downhill when she saw the first seductive yellow curve sticking out from under some leaves like the petticoat of a can-can girl starting the show. She squatted down and lifted the green undergrowth covering the rest of the mushroom. The thrill of finding her first chanterelle filled her with the kind of adrenaline rush she hadn’t felt in a while. She let a little whoop out and fished in her pocket for her knife. She flicked open the blade and pulled it across her skin, thinking briefly of her mom. This was just the kind of thing Alice would love. She cut the mushroom at the base and held it up to the light to see it better. The gills ran in jagged paths, uneven lines down the stalk of the fruit. She sniffed the cap and it reminded her of dried apricots and dirt. She put it in her basket and looked around to see if there were any more mushrooms, as Max had said they often grew in groups. She looked down and out of the shadows began to notice, one by one, a long golden trail leading as far as she could see downhill.
She was overtaken by a sort of hunter mind, the desire to collect more and more. With each fruit plucked from the fragrant earth she filled some great void she’d been feeling in her life, stuffing it full with little yellow mushrooms. The process of collecting felt like a small success. Her voluminous basket almost halfway full, she lifted herself out from the hunt. Some people stuff mushrooms, but I mushroom stuff, she thought. Max would like that. Feeling like she had eyes on her, she called out for Max one more time. Surely he was close. She’d heard his call not five minutes ago down this very hill. Just as she was looking around for Max, a raven lifted off from the branch above her and the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. She’d followed the call of an actual raven. She was lost. Yet again.
She tried using human language, yelling for Max in every way she knew how, but there was no response. Maaax. Nothing. Maximus Asshooooleum. Her voice rang out pinched and small. Helloooooo. The curious raven called again and landed in a tree to watch her. At least someone was concerned about her whereabouts. Trying to retrace her steps in her mind she looked up the hill and realized she had sort of blindly zigzagged down the hill toward the sound of the raven call and then further lost herself with the line of mushrooms. Max could be anywhere at that point. She wandered for another fifteen minutes looking and calling but heard nothing but the babbling of the creek. She finally decided the only way to go was up. She started scaling the steep hill, holding on to the sword fern for support as she pulled herself ridge-ward.
Her heart was racing and she was covered in a thin film of sweat as she raised herself up onto a flat, mossy area with little ferns growing from the cracks. There was a cut stump at least ten feet across, a long ago felled giant. She set down her half-full basket of chanterelles and lay down on the mossy, eternally moist top, and listened hard to see if she could hear Max shuffling through the underbrush. She listened for his whistle and imagined he must have been a bit frantic to find her at that point. It had been over an hour since she’d seen him.
The sound of her heart reverberated in her ears was backed up with a chorus of branches and leaves moving with the wind. A sound like a tiny helicopter taking off rang out somewhere close by. If it was hunters, their guns didn’t sound like any she’d ever heard. Then came the boom. She heard her own heartbeat meld with another louder, stronger booming. It wasn’t exactly alarming as much as it was foreign. She wondered if it wasn’t the giant mycelium under ground, the curling networks of michorhizal fibers twined in and among every other plant rooted there. Boom. As she lay and listened her nerve pathways were wide open and she could feel a sort of soft electricity coming off her fingertips and toes, out the top of her head like a beacon. Her vision grew blurred, like it did each time before she fainted. But she stayed conscious this time, one foot out of the dark tunnel. It felt as though she were being protected by some life force against falling down into the dark tunnel that had taken her away from living into blackness so many times before. She heard the ocean and the sky and the wind in the beating drone of the sound booming out from below the earth. It wasn’t an earthquake, but more like the earth waking after a long slumber. Lily felt herself falling, passing into some recombinant realm where beings merged. There were giant nerves made entirely of light coursing unseen underground in an intricate pattern of pathways, and they welcomed her to taste from the fountain. Landscapes flitted through her brain; images of sea cliffs, sagebrush, desert mesas, and forests melted into each other in a blur. The blind harrier’s face loomed large as Lily felt herself growing closer and closer to the cavern of the bird’s sightless eyes, until she finally disappeared into the cave and the visions went dark. She heard a sound like a huge wave crashing onto shore and her eyes opened and slowly focused on the shadow hanging over her. Standing above her breathing hard as a horse after a race, Max smiled. A drop of sweat dripped off his nose onto her forehead and he leaned down and kissed her square on the mouth.
“I was so worried,” he said, straightening up. “I’ve been running all over trying to find you. Thought the forest hobgoblins had made you one of their own.”
“Not totally sure they didn’t,” Lily said, rising up slowly and sitting with wide eyes. “I just had the weirdest dream, or, vision, or something.”
“Ha! Another sex dream about a—”
“No.”
Something in the seriousness of Lily’s face made Max cut his teasing short. She looked sallow and pale, like she’d just experienced the paranormal, or vomited. She put her hand on her chest, feeling for the same huge beat she’d felt earlier, the enormous, yearning sound of mycorrhizal fibers clinging and roots growing, of fern fronds unfurling toward the light. It had all been right there, under her hand—inside her. But all she felt under her hand was the gentle pum-pum, pum-pum, of a single little organ pumping nutrients, hormones, cells, and oxygen along their merry way. The community within whistled while it worked as though nothing had happened.
“Did you faint?” Max asked.
“Not exactly. No.”
“Good haul,” Max said as he peeked in her basket. “You found a vein, I see.”
“I did,” she said, getting up slowly and putting her arms around her friend. “I really, really did.”
The two walked back to the trail together, sticking close and chatting about the science of mushrooms. Lily tried to shake the strangeness of what she’d experienced—the out-of-body feeling of floating into and out of other living objects—as she listened to Max. Her mom had mentioned astral projection once. Maybe that was it. Max talked about mushrooms as they walked and mentioned that one of the largest known living organism was an underground micorrhizal structure over a mile squared that weighed over a hundred tons and was over 1,500 years old. He said Jancowicz had told him they were finding new and even larger species of these massive creatures all the time. Max talked about the filaments all matting together and fruiting little mushrooms up through the forest floor. As she stepped along the narrow trail, Lily countenanced the idea that she’d somehow been part of the mushroom as she laid there on the log, as though the wild beast of her soul had been unleashed to run around underground before returning to her body. She’d hitched a ride with the mushroom for one wild, crashing wave.
“Makes you think twice about the human definition of ‘community’ now,” Max said, interrupting her thoughts.
“Like,” Lily finished, returning to the conversation, “if a fungus can figure out how to make it work with all the other living creatures around them, why can’t we?”
“Exactly,” Max said. “You’re the only person who gets me.” He turned around to give her a high five.
They found the trail and walked back down the hill out of the chanterelle zone and back toward the slender rocky pathway flanked by creek alders. Lily felt a sadness leaving the giant fungus under the soil and thought about her mom for the first time with a sort of longing. She could almost sense her all the way across the coast range sitting like an old mushroom in her library, her nose in a book, hand on an overfilled glass of wine. It occurred to her that she and her mom were just two parts of the same huge organism, fruits from the same tree. The forest closed behind Max and Lily in a dappled tunnel of quaking ash as they walked the last half-mile single file. The subsonic booms had shaken something loose in her. Under the protected canopy, among the living, breathing world, Lily left behind something dark that had been clinging to her, letting it slide off her and return to the earth, to mingle and settle with the ages. Let it be taken up by the forest floor and allowed to bloom however it could find a way.
In the truck waiting to turn onto the highway Max turned to Lily.
“You know what I just realized? Lily of the Valley. Your mom must have named you after the flower, right?”
“Hmm. Not exactly.” Her face grew dark.
“But she must have, like, on some level. She’s such a nature girl.” He poked Lily. “Like you. Birds of a feather.” There was a long pause.
“Would you mind taking me home?” she asked.
“You mean to the orchard?”
“Yeah. I think I’m ready.”
“Sure. I think that’s a great idea.” He gave her the smug smile of someone who had just gotten his way.
As the truck pulled up the driveway to her mom’s house, Lily sensed that something was different about the place. The harvest workers were just leaving for the day but her mom’s truck was not there. She waved at the men in their dirty coveralls as they pulled the big orange harvester to the side of the barn for the night and covered it with the old tarp. They waved back exhausted, polite waves. Lily and Max went to the front door and she was almost surprised to find that her key still worked. Calling for her mom she ducked in the library, the kitchen, and the bathroom on the main floor, but they were all empty. Dishes sat on the table with what looked like at least two-day-old food crusted to them. Gross, Mom, she muttered to herself as she climbed the stairs. All the bedrooms were empty, so she ducked into the upstairs bathroom because the light was on. No one was in the room, but she glanced around at the disarray. Clothes lay strewn pell-mell like someone packing for a trip in ten minutes. Shorn leg hair clung to the sink in little clumps, her mom’s toiletries basket upturned and rifled through. Sitting on the edge of the counter was a used pregnancy test. Lily picked it up and in a state of disbelief saw two pink lines running parallel like train tracks into the unknown. She checked the box to confirm the pink lines meant exactly what she thought they did.
Lily pocketed the pregnancy test on instinct, like an investigator, or judge. It was proof. But who, exactly, besides her mother, linked to the proof was still in question. She went back downstairs and found Max on tiptoe in the library reaching for an old tin half hidden behind some books. He took it down and handed it over to Lily when he saw her in the doorway.
“I’ve always been good at snooping,” he said, a little embarrassed.
Lily opened the tin and laid out the contents on the coffee table. A little notebook caught her eye, a small, worn blue-leather bound thing with an elastic closure. She flipped through the pages. It was some sort of calendar of days, lots of things scratched out beyond recognition or legibility. She flipped back and forth until she started to make some sense of what was inside. There were a few entries on days that hadn’t been scratched out. No drinking today was underlined on February 3 and then again on March 20 through 25. Only one drink today was crossed out several times on March 26. Smoked a little green today was written on April 1. And under that, thought a lot about the significance of rain. The little notebook struck her as funny at first, all the details laid out about drinking or abstaining. She looked up at Max with a laugh and then as quickly as it had made her laugh the smile drained off her face.
“It’s a vice notebook,” she said. “Like a diary of all the drinking and smoking my mom did.”
“Well,” Max said, letting his full weight flop down on the old couch beside Lily, “at least she’s aware of her vices. That’s a lot more than I could say for a lot of people.”
“Don’t defend her, please,” Lily said. “Not right now.” She put her hand on the outside of her pocket, the secret evidence of the pregnancy test inside.
“Hey, look,” Max said as he sifted through the other items in the tin. “There’s a letter for you here.”
The envelope had been folded several times and the penned Lily on the front had a stained mark where a drop of water, or perhaps a tear, had fallen on the ink. Lily turned the envelope over several times in her hand before opening it up and unfolding the one-page letter inside.
Dear Lily,
My dear, inquisitive daughter. Let me just start by saying I am so incredibly proud of who you are—a bright, funny, independent spirit. I know you get frustrated by not knowing about your father, and I wish more than anything that I could answer all the questions you have. But the truth is that he was simply a blip on your timeline. He was not a nice man, and his contribution to your genetic self is probably the best thing he ever did in his life. Life is full of these kind of quandaries, and some of the answers we seek are truly better left undiscovered. You left me two months ago to live with Boomer and Max, and I don’t blame you for the decision. But all I can ask is that you accept me for who I am—your flawed, fiery mother who loves you unconditionally, forever. Please consider coming back to me my fawn, my deer, dear.
I love you,
Momma
Lily folded the letter back up in its envelope, stood up, and walked over to the mantle where the egg collection sat, patiently waiting, as always. She peered in through one of the portals and for the first time thought about how each of those eggs had been the promise of life at some point. They were the baby birds that never were, and they were beautiful and still and perfect in their frozen state. Their life had been drained leaving behind only the specter of possibility. She opened the lid and felt a trembling in the house, her fingers shaking like she had drunk too much coffee. She thought for a moment she might faint, and then as quickly as it began, it stopped.
“Did you feel that?” she whirled around and asked Max.
“Feel what?” he said, looking up from the contents of the box.
Just then a loud thwack rattled the old, wavy glass of the library’s picture window. The two looked up and saw a flash as if something had been thrown at the window.
“Now that, I heard,” Max said, getting up.
Outside they looked around and saw no one. Then Lily noticed a brightly colored form lying still below the window. She ran outside to get a better look. It was a robin-sized, orange and slate-blue bird lying motionless on the ground. Lily put her hand on its chest to see if she could feel its heartbeat, but felt nothing but the soft, warm feathers under her hand. Stillness. She admired the orange of its breast feathers with the black band like a broad necklace around its neck. The bird had broken its neck on impact, so when she picked up its form the head rolled to the side as though no longer connected. It occurred to Lily in that moment, as she held the still warm body of the bird, that life was here and gone as quickly as that. She or anyone she loved could be gone tomorrow and there was nothing she could do about it. She set the bird down and started digging a hole over at the base of the white oak across the driveway. As she dug, the dirt under her nails filling in under the paint, she decided that she would give her mother another chance. There were just too many uncertainties in life to not accept the imperfect, flawed love she was offered. The pregnancy test shifted in her pocket and she felt suddenly protective of her mother. Across the field she saw the blind harrier flying low along the fences, dropping into the grass for a successful kill. If that creature could make it work for so long, it seemed to Lily that both she and her mother could find their way in this new darkness of uncertainty. She wiped the dirt off on her pants and brushed the rest from her palms. The next order of business was to find out where Alice, pregnant with a stranger’s child yet again, had found herself flung off to.