Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

“I’m just tired,” I told her. “Tired and on edge.”

“So, sit here and listen to the sea. It’s good for you, Sarah. Even better than Valium,” and she laughed as a giggling gray gull sailed by low overhead. I’m not exactly sure what happened next. I remember the shadow cast by the low-flying gull, and her laughing, and then she was kissing me. And Jesus, it was a fucking good kiss. I don’t know how long it lasted, only that it wasn’t long enough. Still, I’m the one who pulled away, the one who ended it. Then we sat there on the rocks, just staring at each other, and I didn’t even realize that I was crying until she started wiping at my face.

“It’s okay,” she said, and her red-brown eyes sparkled in the sunlight like polished agate, and she said it again, “It’s okay.” I think I hate her for that.

I don’t want to write any more about this shit, not now, not tomorrow, not ever. I want to burn what I have written and then never write any more. It doesn’t matter how much there is left to be said, all the things that happened next. If you keep going, there’s always something that happens next. Always something more, if you lack the courage to type THE END at the bottom of the page. I want to take up Dr. Harvey’s goddamn 1941 Royal typewriter and fling it out the back door into the darkness. Let the grasshoppers and skunks and deer have it. Let it rust away to nothing. But I’m a coward, and I’m no more capable of getting rid of this typewriter than I am of taking my own life.

Constance has borrowed my car to drive into Foster for groceries and some things she needed, art supplies, and so I have a little time alone to try to set this down before she returns. I don’t believe that I could ever manage to write it with her here in the house with me. Hell, I’m not sure that I can write it with her out of the house.

It was almost two a.m. before I was finished at the typewriter last night — this morning — and so much has happened since then that I suspect I’m never going to get back around to writing about that part of yesterday after the kiss on the rocks. Maybe it all follows from that kiss, or maybe these events were set in motion the day we got lost trying to find the tree, or the day she arrived here. Maybe it all began with Amanda’s death. It’s a losing proposition, a futile game of infinite regression, trying to guess at the particulars of cause and effect that led to my waking up this morning in the attic on Constance Hopkins’ futon.

And, of course, there’s the problem of the “new story” I am supposed to have written, the one that she brought up yesterday in the market in Jamestown. It’s lying here on the table, right next to the box with Dr. Harvey’s unfinished manuscript. Seventeen typed, double-spaced pages, apparently composed on this machine, using the same onionskin paper I’ve been using for these journal entries. It is titled simply “Pony.” I’ve read all the way through the thing five or six times now, and if it wasn’t written by me, then someone’s done a damn fine job of forgery. There are numerous corrections on the pages in what I cannot possibly deny is my own hand. That is, I cannot deny these things, unless I am willing to suggest the perpetration by Constance of an elaborate hoax or practical joke, and unless I am also to assume that she possesses the skills required to actually pull the hoax off successfully. That she could perfectly ape my voice and forge my handwriting, and that she could have managed it on this noisy fucking type writer without my knowledge, when I hardly ever leave the house. And then, with these assumptions in mind, I must try to conceive some motive for the hoax, what she might possibly have to gain by gaslighting me. Of course, here I may be falling prey to the assumption that she needed anything like a rational motive. And, somehow, I’ve already gotten ahead of myself. I’ll clip the seventeen pages of the story to the end of this entry, though it’s another thing I know I’d be better off simply destroying.

Last night, after I made the entry, and immediately after I’d put those pages with all the others, in that hiding place I will not name here, I went to check the front door before brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed. I found it open, the porch light burning and swathed in a swooping, fluttering halo of moths and nocturnal beetles. And Constance was standing just a few yards from the steps, dressed only in a T-shirt and her panties, staring up at the night sky.

“What are you doing out there?” I asked, and she didn’t answer right away. In fact, a couple of minutes probably went by, and so I asked, “Constance, are you okay? Is something wrong?”

She turned around then, and she was smiling. “I’m fine,” she said. “I just wanted to look at the stars, that’s all. Sometimes, I need to look at the stars. To get my bearings, to remember where I am.”

I squinted at the lightbulb again, at all those bugs, a few of which had managed to get inside, what with me standing there holding the front door open.

“Well,” I told her, swatting at a beetle, “I’m going to bed now. I’m exhausted. I think I got much too much sun today.”

She nodded, turning away from me again, looking back to the sky. “But it was good for you,” she said. “It was good for both of us, to be away from here. To be there, at the sea. To talk.”

There was an instant pang, then. Disappointment, mostly, that there had only been the one kiss, and perhaps embarrassment that there had been any kiss at all. But she was right, it had been good, as had the conversation that followed. And we both knew, and had openly acknowledged, that we never would have been able to talk as freely as we did, to find that level of intimacy, if there had not first been the kiss. It had broken down something inside us both. Or so it seemed. Unless, of course, it was only another part of the hoax. Right now, I don’t know what’s true and what’s a lie. This morning, I awoke in the cool of Constance’s attic, in her arms, thinking that, just maybe, I’d stumbled ass-backwards into a goddamn glimmer of hope, that maybe I was finding my bearings. I’m getting ahead of myself again.

“I saw a shooting star,” she said. “Just before you opened the door,” and she pointed at the sky.

“Only one?” I asked.

“Only one,” she answered. “I’ve never been very good at spotting them, even during meteor showers.”

“Maybe you just try too hard,” I said, and she shrugged and lowered her arm to her side again. “Did you make a wish?” I asked.

“I saw a comet once,” she said, as if she had either not heard my question or had chosen to ignore it. “Back in 1997. I was nineteen, I think. Eighteen or nineteen. But that’s not at all like seeing a falling star.”

I batted away a huge brown moth, then asked her what the difference was, between seeing a falling star and seeing a comet. She looked at me again, and I had the impression that it was only with considerable reluctance that she took her eyes off the eastern sky.

“Comets have often been considered harbingers of doom,” she said. “But you’d know that, I suspect.” And while I continued my struggle to keep Mothra and all her flitting companions out of the house, Constance slowly walked back to the porch. Her bare feet were damp from the heavy dew, and a few blades of grass stuck to her skin.

“1997,” I said. “So, that would have been Comet Hale-Bopp. Yeah, I saw that one myself. Lots of people did. Probably anyone in the Northern Hemisphere who bothered to look.”

“See?” Constance laughed, picking some of the grass out from between her toes. “Nothing special.”