Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

“That day in Jamestown, on the way to Beavertail, when we stopped at McQuade’s because I had to pee,” she said and wiped at her paint-stained nose. “You acted like you didn’t remember having written that story. Why would you do that, Sarah? Why would you lie about something like that?” And it actually took me the better part of a minute to realize that she was talking about “Pony.”

“I wasn’t lying,” I said, finally, and she laughed again and shrugged.

“So. it was like some sort of a blackout? Like alcoholics have? You’re saying you did that, but you don’t remember doing that, so it was like a blackout.”

“I didn’t say that, either.”

“I know, later on, when I gave the story back to you, you pretended like you’d never said there wasn’t a new story. When I gave it back to you, in the kitchen.”

I took a deep breath, and lit a cigarette of my own. She stared at the floor instead of watching me. And it was so hot, on Monday afternoon. The mercury was somewhere in the nineties, and before she came downstairs, I’d been thinking about Constance in her garret, painting, and about an old Twilight Zone in which the Earth’s orbit had changed, bringing it nearer to the sun. There was a girl in that episode who was a painter, trapped in a deserted, doomed city that I think was meant to be New York, and, at the end of the episode, her paintings of the huge devouring sun were all melting, and someone — another woman — was screaming at her to please stop painting the sun. That’s what I’d been thinking about before Constance emerged from her garret; well, besides the mysterious underground noises in Connecticut. Oh, those were blamed on Ol’Hobbamock, too, by the way. Sometimes, the book said, they’d been felt as far away as Boston and Manhattan. Then, in the 1980s, a seismologist explained it all away. Micro-earthquakes. Something like that. Constance, where is our scientist-errant on his white steed, microscope and slide rule in hand to combat the darkness pressing in about us?

“I don’t remember writing it,” I admitted.

“And so you thought I wrote it, like maybe I was trying to make you think you were losing your mind.”

I set my book down, then, wanting so very badly to remain calm, but knowing full fucking well that there was only so long I could keep the anger at bay, only so long I could push down the things I wanted to say to her. It was so close to the surface, and had been since she’d first mentioned the story, that day out on Conanicut Island.

“Why would I do something like that to you?” she asked, sounding hurt, and I told her I had no idea, but pointed out that I’d never actually accused her of writing the story.

“No, but you thought it.”

“You don’t know what I thought.”

“Even if I could write, that doesn’t mean that I could write just like you,” she said, and tapped a fingernail against the lid of the Altoids tin.“I know that,” I replied, straining to keep my voice level, calm. I probably gritted my teeth. “Constance, no matter what I may have thought, I never said that you wrote the story. I don’t think you wrote the story. Clearly,I did. That’s pretty inescapable. I just can’t remember having done it.”

“So, you’re telling me you wrote a whole story during blackouts. Or is this missing time, like those people who say they’ve been abducted by space aliens talk about?”

“I don’t know what this is,” I said, truthfully. “But I don’t remember writing the story, and I have tried. I’ve tried hard, believe me.”

“Usually, I’m the crazy one,” she said, and pocketed her Altoids tin. “Maybe you should see a doctor, Sarah.”

“I don’t have the money to see a doctor. I don’t have insurance. Anyway, when all this started — my fits, I mean — I saw doctors then, and I spent a fortune doing it, and, in the end, they couldn’t tell me shit.”

She nodded, but it was a skeptical nod.

“I keep meaning to read the stuff Chuck Harvey wrote about the tree,” she said, changing the subject. “I suppose I’d better hurry, before you give it to that person at URI.”

And it occurred to me then that I’d forgotten all about the professor in Kingston who’d agreed to take the typescript off my hands. She’d never called back after the Fourth, and I’d never contacted her again. Maybe she was glad. Maybe she’d never wanted anything to do with it, and was only trying to be polite.

“No hurry,” I told Constance. “I don’t think I’ll be turning it over anytime soon. That woman never got back to me, and I never called her, either.”

“You found it in the basement?” Constance asked, even though I’d already told her that I had.

“Yes,” I said. “I probably mentioned that when we first talked about it.”

“People forget things,” she said, and there was no way for me to miss the fact that those three words were meant to cut me. Meant to leave a mark.

“Yes,” I replied. “Yes. People forget things.” Maybe I sounded as cool as a fucking cucumber, and maybe she could hear that I was losing the battle with my anger. I don’t know. The way things turned out, it hardly matters.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “The basement. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I mean, you haven’t been back down there since the day you found Harvey’s book, right? And me, I’ve never been down those stairs. Isn’t that odd, Sarah, that I’ve been living here for almost a month, and I’ve never gone into the basement?”

“No,” I replied. “I don’t think it’s all that odd.” The anger was changing over to panic, now, and I found myself gripped by an urgent, almost overwhelming need to keep Constance from going down to the basement of the farmhouse. I’d started sweating, and my heart was racing. “There’s nothing down there. Just a lot of junk. Junk and dirt and spiders.”

“If I went, would you go with me, Sarah?”

“I’d rather not,” I said, and forced out a laugh.

“Why?” she asked. “Are you afraid? Are you afraid of the basement?”

I sat up, and here it was, the anger bubbling to the surface at last. I heard it in my voice. I felt it leaking from me, felt the release of letting out even the smallest fraction of it. “This isn’t grammar school, Sarah. This isn’t grade school, and we’re not on the fucking playground, making dares.”

“You’re scared,” she said with an awful sort of certainty, and her eyes were still on the floor. Only, I knew then that it wasn’t the floor she was staring at. It was the basement beneath the floor that she was trying to see through the boards.

“Fine. I’m scared.”

Constance picked up the rag (she’d lain it beside her) and started wiping at her hands again.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this, too,” she said. “That’s where it all began, down there,” and she stopped wiping her palms long enough to jab an index finger towards that enormous unseen vacuity below us. “That’s where it started, in the cellar. With you finding the typewriter, and then going back—”

“It’s not even half that simple,” I said, cutting her off, and she looked up, glaring at me. Her eyes were different, intent, focused, and they reminded me of something that I am reluctant to put down here. Something, I suppose, I am loath to acknowledge having seen in her face, or in any woman’s face. Many years ago, I was at the zoo in Birmingham, and there was this area devoted to local wildlife. The cages were all out of doors, but they were still cages. Raccoons, foxes, bobcats, owls, possums, a black bear, and so forth. The animals native to northern Alabama. And almost all of them were pacing back in forth in their small enclosures, pacing restlessly, frantically even. Maybe it was nervous energy, or maybe they were stuck in a sort of in stinctual loop, looking for an escape route that must surely exist, somewhere, if only they kept looking. But there was this cougar, just lying in her cage, not pacing, but lying perfectly still. I stared in at her, and she stared back out at me. And I swear to fuck, if animals can hate, I saw hatred in her eyes. As if she understood the situation through and through — the iron bars, the futility of trying to find an exit, her captors, that I was of the same species as her captors, even that I was part of the conspiracy that had made her a prisoner. It gave me a shiver, that day, though it was a hot summer afternoon, gazing into the reddish eyes of that cat, knowing that the only thing in the world keeping the panther from tearing me apart were the bars.