Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

“Not room enough in one house for two reclusive mad-women?” I asked, and she didn’t laugh.

“Is that what you think, Sarah? That we’re insane?”

“Don’t you? I mean, isn’t it preferable to the alternative?” And I stopped staring at the window, then, and stared at her, instead. “Oh, wait. You’re the one who opened a wormhole to 1901 and reached through space and time to stop that woman from shooting herself. I nearly forgot that part. So, for you, I guess this isn’t so strange at all, is it?”

Constance stared back at me for a second or two, then let her eyes stray to the floorboards. She laid both her paint-stained hands palms down on the varnished wood and took a very deep breath. The paranoid woman smiled with my mouth, no doubt quite entirely pleased with herself.

“We can be cunts about this,” Constance said, and it sounded as though she were choosing her words now with great deliberation. “If it’s what you want, we can each retreat to our respective corners of the cage, and cower there in our own private misery and fear. We can be alone while we wait to see what happens next, if that’s how you think it ought to be. But it’s not what I want, and you need to know that.”

“What do you want?” I asked, crushing my cigarette out on the floor. “What do you expect me to do? I’ve already told you I don’t have the money to leave this place, to find somewhere else to live. So, will it really be so much better if we cower in the same corner? Is that what you want, Constance, someone to hold your hand while we wait for whatever came for Charles Harvey, and all those other people, to come for us? Or is it just the sex? Is the fear starting to make you horny?”

Constance shook her head very slowly and licked anxiously at her lips, which I noticed were very raw, chapped, like she’d been gnawing at them.

“You won’t even try to listen,” she said. “I can leave here, Sarah. If I’m willing to leave you alone with that. .” and she glanced towards the north wall, but I understood that she was really glancing towards the red tree. “All I have to do is pack my shit and make a phone call or two, and I could be somewhere else.”

“Then that’s what you should do,” I told her, and used an index finger to wipe at the ashy gray-black smear I’d left on the floor. “In fact, that would probably be for the best, don’t you think?” And I said those things. I know perfectly well I said those things, or something similar. There seemed no possibility of reaching all the way down to the solid bottom of my anger, the bedrock bottom of the well of spite and bitterness and resignation that’s opened up in me after my last visit to the oak. It just goes on and on, that great invisible wound, like the cavern below this house goes on and on. It didn’t matter one iota that what I wanted was to put my arms around Constance, to beg her not to leave, to tell her how much it terrified me even to think of being alone. The paranoid woman spoke from the wound the tree has left in me, and I simply could not summon the will to silence her and deny her and permit the day to take some other, less self-destructive, route.

“Yes, you should go,” I said.

“Sarah, I’ve told you already that I’d never leave you here. I couldn’t do that. I won’t.” I glanced at Constance from the corners of my eyes, and she looked like she was about to start crying. Seeing that pleased the paranoid woman no end, and the wound in me grew wider by some terrible, immeasurable increment.

“Don’t you dare start crying,” I sneered. I could say “the paranoid woman” sneered, but I’m not letting myself off the hook so easily. I sneered, and I balled one hand tightly into a fist. “It makes me sick to my fucking stomach, the sound of a woman crying.”

“Is this how you talked to Amanda?” Constance asked, covering the lower half of her face and turning away from me. “When she needed you, is this the way you treated her?”

“We’re not talking about Amanda,” I said, and clenched my hand so tightly that my short nails dug bloody half-moon grooves into the flesh of my hand.

“No,” Constance replied. “No, I don’t guess we are.”

“It’s only a tree,” I said through gritted teeth, full in the knowledge that I’d never told so great a lie in all my life, and would never find one to top it. “And if you think differently, I believe there’s an ax in the basement. Or Blanchard would probably loan you a chain saw, if you think you’re up to it.”

Constance wiped at her nose, and quickly stood up. It wasn’t hard to see that I’d frightened her, or, to be more precise, that I’d added another dimension to her fear. At the time, it seemed like I’d only evened the score.

“I’ll be in the attic,” she said, and left me in the bedroom, easing the door shut behind her. When the lock clicked, I went back to staring at the window, at the rainy day outside, and tried not to think about the tree. Later, though, I took the piece of human jawbone I found in my jeans pocket yesterday and tossed it out the back door, into the high grass and weeds.

I’m going to stop typing now. I don’t think I can bring myself to say anything more.

“The images produced in dreams are much more picturesque and vivid than the concepts and experiences of their waking counterparts. One of the reasons for this is that, in a dream, such concepts can express their unconscious meaning. In our conscious thoughts, we restrain ourselves within the limits of rational statements — statements that are much less colorful because we have stripped them of most of their psychic associations.

”Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (1964)

The house is so awfully quiet this morning. Maybe Constance took my advice and left in the night. I would almost believe this, the house is so quiet. There is no sound of her footsteps from upstairs. I am dressed, but have spent most of the last hour sitting on my bed, watching the south-facing window, and the trees, and the sky. Occasionally, I have heard a bird or an insect, but these noises seem to be reaching me from someplace far, far away, and are muffled by distance. I am unaccustomed to there being such a profound silence in this house. You can always hear the birds, the cicadas, the wind, the creaking of venerable timbers still settling after hundreds of years, whatever. This is a new sort of quiet.

So, yes, I would think that Constance Hopkins has gone, and I am alone; that she left in the night, only I hardly slept. My body seems to have found some way around the meds. The Ambien has ceased to work. I don’t know. But I was awake, save maybe half an hour between three and four, and then an hour (at most) between about seven-thirty and eight-thirty. Both these intervals are plainly far too brief to have accommodated her departure. I feel certain of this. She couldn’t have gotten out of here that quickly. Constance wouldn’t have dared to go on foot, not after her talk of coyotes or wild dogs on the property, and a car or truck would surely have awakened me.

Am I alone? It should be a simple enough question to resolve. Leave my room, and learn whether or not I am alone in the house. I did leave once already, but only long enough to go to the bathroom. I didn’t try to find Constance, because, honestly, the possibility that she’s gone had not yet occurred to me. The profundity of this silence had not yet occurred to me. I figured she was sleeping, and then I realized that I couldn’t hear her window unit chugging away up there. That’s not so unusual, early in the day, but it started me thinking, I suppose. It would serve me right, after what I said to her yesterday. I am well enough aware of that. It’s nothing I wouldn’t have coming.