Orla didn’t stop Eleanor Queen as she bypassed the mattress and went upstairs, listless and subdued. Sometimes the girl liked to nap in her bedroom, but they still spent their nights camped on the living-room floor. Tonight Orla wanted to lay out a surprise; the least she could do was bring up the Christmas gifts. Maybe she’d call Eleanor Queen back down later. The thing knocked on her child’s mind at random times, and Orla couldn’t miss an opportunity to put a stop to it.
Die already. That would be the best Christmas gift of all, if Eleanor Queen awoke in the morning, eyes wide and gleeful, the entity severed from her consciousness.
She glanced around the basement as she went down the stairs; maybe there was something yet to find. The old man’s belongings hadn’t yielded any definitive clues, and if he had a special hiding place, it remained hidden. If only he had been receptive, aware of the thing on his land, maybe none of this would have happened. (If he were still alive, she would’ve killed him.) Everything in the cold cellar looked familiar; it had no more secrets to give up. Her husband’s heart—the furnace he’d loved—was still keeping them alive; its reassuring presence burned off some of her bitterness.
The Christmas gifts were concealed in a big box marked LAMP/FRAGILE. There weren’t a lot; they hadn’t finished Christmas shopping, and Shaw and Orla had decided not to exchange presents since they’d purchased so much for the house. The children’s gifts were already wrapped, one special thing for each of them and a few smaller ones. They’d learned long ago to wrap everything the moment it was brought into the house. In the apartment, sometimes they’d had nowhere better to hide things but atop the kitchen cupboards or in their one bulging closet. The sight of Tycho’s presents made her breath hitch for a moment, but she carried his things upstairs with Eleanor Queen’s, and switched off the basement light.
It hadn’t occurred to her to decorate, to hang any of the Christmas lights or the festive drawings and ornaments that the children had made. And the last thing she wanted to think about was a tree. But now, looking around the living room, arms full of presents, she saw a squatter’s mess; her daughter deserved more than that.
She plopped the gifts onto the couch and quickly tidied the room. Even though the mattress would soon be back in use, she straightened all the bedding, fluffed the pillows. Maybe she’d let Eleanor Queen open her presents at midnight. That might be a nice surprise, and different from what they’d always done together as a family.
There’s only two of us now.
Tycho’s presents, again, threatened to undo her. Would they have the same effect on Eleanor Queen? She couldn’t stop seeing herself slipping beneath the water, her baby boy trapped on the ice, calling, “Mama.” What if she had let go of Eleanor Queen? Her efforts to clamber back onto the floe might have sent Tycho tumbling into the water, and they all might have come home together. She couldn’t forgive herself; it was almost as bad as the mistake she’d made with her husband. If only she’d known the water was a conduit, she could have grabbed them both and jumped. But she hadn’t known. And at that moment, only Eleanor Queen had seemed in imminent danger.
Around and around the anguish spun.
Orla pinched Tycho’s lumpiest, softest present. A monkey with long arms and legs and Velcro on the hands and feet. Eleanor Queen had had a similar one that she used to attach around her neck and waist and wear like an appendage. He loved his stuffed animals. Orla knew what all of the reindeer wrapping paper hid and imagined her son giggling as he tore open his treasures. The special Lego kit he’d been wanting. Supersoft fleece pajamas covered with…polar bears. (She winced.) And a rocket-ship backpack on which she’d sewn an authentic NASA patch.
Could they hold a memorial of some sort for him? Make these gifts an offering to him, wherever he was? Would Eleanor Queen like that, a sense of closure, or would it break something inside her? Children’s souls, like their bones, were more pliable than adults’ and could bend a fair ways before breaking. But that didn’t mean they weren’t deeply affected. Trauma swam inside them, left bundles of eggs on swampy leaves; sometimes too many hatched. They could grow and gather and turn a person into someone else. Orla hoped that wasn’t happening to her brilliant girl.
Afraid of making things worse, she arranged only Eleanor Queen’s gifts around the wood-burning stove. It was the best centerpiece they had, and in its own way, it symbolized life. The rest she carried into Shaw’s studio to hide in his closet.
She lingered in his room. It smelled of him; he was everywhere. She’d kept his door closed, afraid of the reminders. But now she realized she needed the reminders, just as she needed not to forget the fierce women who had made her stronger. His paintings were like kisses, freely given, so much a part of him. Here he was on display, on his two easels and on the floor leaning against the walls.
Maybe there was something of Shaw’s that she could give to Eleanor Queen as an extra-special gift. She squatted down and examined the paintings, turning each over to see if Shaw had scribbled a title anywhere. Some, she knew, had names, and maybe there was one in particular that spoke of daughters or of love.
The paintings were beautiful, but the prominence of trees…even if the thing wasn’t a tree but some essence that lived inside it, it still didn’t seem like an appropriate gift. She considered finding the paintings he’d done in the city before they left; maybe one of those would work. But she couldn’t quite sever herself from the mysterious woodland images and the cabin that Shaw had…channeled? He’d mistaken It for his muse; Orla understood why, based on the depth and detail of his work. Once again, the camouflaged forms captured her.
“What were you trying to say?” she asked aloud, spotting an assemblage of leaves that, viewed sideways, revealed the contemplative look of a human face. “Did you sense something out there? A consciousness? Did you know it was in the tree?” She sighed, letting herself fall into a sitting position on the floor. “Do you have the answers—are they here somewhere? I need to know what It wants. Why It won’t let us go.”
“I’ve been trying to tell you.”
The voice startled her so much that she scampered backward, knocking into one of Shaw’s easels. The painting toppled onto her head, and only after she tossed it aside—as if a rattlesnake had fallen on her—did she get an unobstructed view of the speaker.
Orla opened her mouth to scream, but the scream wouldn’t come.
She whimpered, pushing herself along the floor to get away from the figure who stood in the doorway.
He stepped toward her to close the distance, but recognizing her fear, he held out his hands and made the same two gestures she’d once made to the snow rollers: Stop. Innocent.
Her features aghast, her heart a revving semi on a collision course, Orla shook her head and gaped at her husband.
Shaw took another step forward. “I can’t stay for long—”
“How are you doing this? How can you do any of this?” She wasn’t fooled. This was an illusion or a trick. Or maybe the final avalanche of her sanity making its riotous descent toward the void.
He knelt down a few feet in front of her, so similar in mannerisms to her husband that Orla felt herself inching forward, wanting to embrace him. To apologize. To hold him and never let go. But she kept her distance even as her eyes scrutinized him, expecting to find a flaw, a glitch in his appearance that would expose the sham of his identity. But he looked in every way, from his crooked teeth to his messy hair, like the husband she needed—
“I can’t stay like this for long,” he said again. His voice had a robotic quality, as if he were trying too hard to make each word clear, and the tempo and pitch were a bit askew. “It’s the most difficult thing, more taxing than conjuring beauty in nature, to communicate like you do. But you need answers—”
“Yes. Please!” She rose to her knees.
“You shouldn’t have stopped the young one when we were making so much progress.”
He—It—was talking about Eleanor Queen. A moment ago Orla had wanted to touch him to verify his solidity—was he warm with life?—but now she wanted to slap his face, knock the mention of her child from his traitorous mouth.
“I didn’t do this to hurt any of you, and I’m sorry for what’s happened. I know I’ve made mistakes. I thought the little boy would follow you into the water. I had to make a quick choice—channel the two of you to safety, or try to maintain the ice where he floated. I needed a lot of power to do either; I couldn’t do both.”
Orla wept. Hearing the acknowledgment of Tycho’s death from her husband (even if he wasn’t)…raucous sobs threatened to crack her open. Shaw slipped forward and embraced her, which only made her cry harder. It felt like the man she knew. She clung to him. He didn’t stroke her hair or whisper in her ear the way a lover would, but just to have him for a moment…she wanted more, but he pulled back.
“Listen,” he said. Orla obeyed the command. She smeared away her tears and snot with the back of her hand and gave the thing her rapt attention. “I need you to understand—”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
He looked uncertain. “I lived for a long time, in my home…my time is different from yours. I had forgotten who I was. How to speak. Where I came from. And when I started to realize my home was dying…I found myself able to do things I hadn’t…I hadn’t even tried before. I realized, after all my years of becoming one with the life force around me, I had become more. Maybe it was triggered by the memory of death. So I started…reaching out. Exploring. Drawing from the planes of my world, trying to understand more urgently who I was, what I should do.” He took in a deep breath, but instead of releasing it, he began coughing—a terrible, body-shaking hack that spewed droplets of blood.
Horrified as the blood splattered her, Orla inched back farther. “Who are you? What are you?”
“This man, who I appear as, sensed me. And through him I tried…I wanted him to understand, and be my new…I didn’t realize then how frightening it would be for him. I’ve tried to adjust, for the young one, so she won’t be afraid.” He coughed again, spraying a mist of blood.
“Please leave her alone. Tell me what you want. We don’t want to all die here—that can’t be what you want!”
“It isn’t! I was dying before, long ago. I found the memory. And now, as then, I want my life to continue on and…I thought I would be alone forever. Now that I understand—I know what I did, all those years ago. I can do it again. Move into a new home.”
“So move! There are trees all around—” Her exasperation rose in tandem with her anger.
“I don’t want another tree. I wanted this.” He gestured to his physical body. “And when he made it clear he wouldn’t offer it, I panicked. I didn’t understand his…his choice. I…lashed out, I felt betrayed. I remembered a night…a solstice night—”
“That was us! We were trying to help!”
“No, longer ago. I was dying. I looked”—he reached a ghostly finger toward her, and his arm extended, growing like a tree limb—“like you. Like the young girl queen. I needed something that would outlive me. I said…I don’t know, I don’t remember words as they are to you. But I believed in something, believed in what was bigger than who I was, the glorious roots and leaves that connect the world. I said…a prayer—you call it a prayer. And then I moved—the tree accepted me, and I moved so I wouldn’t die.”
Tectonic plates shifted again, but this time they were in Orla’s mind. Her skin tingled, tightened as its glacial surfaces crashed together. “Were you the girl? Who died here? You were the girl with the penta—”
“Was I a girl? I think I was. I was dying.” He coughed again, and Orla, instinctively afraid of the deadly contagion that was tuberculosis, covered her face with her arm so it wouldn’t infect her. “When I asked the man—I can’t just…take. Steal. There has to be an agreement. If I’d been able to explain it to him better…he didn’t have to be afraid. I am more than I was—not a girl, much…bigger. More layers. I grew powerful…but he and I could have lived together.”
Orla shook her head, appalled as crimson phlegm dribbled from the edges of his mouth, down his chin. The words he spoke were commonplace, but the meaning was more foreign than anything she’d ever heard—as was the strange, off-kilter way he spoke. Shaw had been right about the cure cottage, the photo, the tubercular women. No, not all the women. One particular dying girl. But they hadn’t had enough dots to connect. And none of it made sense; she felt skeletal with fear, about to collapse into a useless puzzle of bones.
He stood, towering over her, elongating like the tree in which he—She—lived, and Orla gazed up at him in horror.
“I hope you understand now. My efforts—to show you things of wonder, and explore my own untapped powers—they diminish the time I have left. I didn’t know you would see the beautiful world and react with such fear, when all I meant was for you to stop and listen. Please listen; we’re running out of time. It is the young one now—how I love her! You, the mother, made me see and remember! And she is open to me, more open than the man, than you. She is not afraid of new possibilities. If she offers herself to me, we will be together and she will be like herself still, but also like me, the immense presence I have become—”
Orla shook her head, an emphatic refusal. “No!”
“—and when she lets me in, I think there’s one last thing I can try…”
He succumbed to coughing, and faded into nothing. It reminded her of the transporter from an old Star Trek episode, dissolving a traveler into specks of light.
She jumped to her feet, panting as if she’d been exerting herself. She wanted to run from the room but hesitated to pass through the spot where her husband had appeared. The spatters of blood remained. Clutching her head, she made quick strides back and forth, then finally leapt around the space She had occupied and fled the room, shutting the door behind her.
Orla, too, had been right; she would never disregard her intuition again. There was no way in hell she’d let her daughter do what the entity wanted, even if Orla felt sorry for that long-ago lonely girl. But now she knew.
Exactly what she needed to do.
After cleaning herself off in the bathroom, scrubbing away the blood that couldn’t possibly be there, she went into her daughter’s room and snuggled in next to her on the twin bed.
On Christmas morning she’d give Eleanor Queen the gift she most deserved: the rest of her life.