Chapter 24

June 29, 1997 · Gone Three Days

LUCE WOKE UP BLINKING.Listened to the house. She hadn't planned on taking Gramms's advice about going to sleep, she'd planned on collecting Roo from Heartwood without interacting with anyone, getting home, checking on Gem, and then staying up all night putting the pieces together, plotting a course of action, and the last thing she remembered was lying on the floor, thinking, fuming, sure she'd never sleep again, and then.

Ferns unfurled in the early-morning fog. Purple morning glories opened their petals, wrapping a wooden stake in the garden. She listened to the house. Her mother was still gone.

And then she heard a small voice laughing from far off. Roo and Gem and I are in the house, she thought. Who is laughing?

She gripped the wall. A little voice was laughing. The little voice then—yes, she knew it. The small, tinkling laugh. It was her voice. When she was a child, laughing up into the wide-open smile of Gem, tickling her, Gem is here. And so am I, Luce thought. So am I, as a child.

"Gem," she called, pulling on her shorts, walking out of her bedroom. She could hear the sound of her own footsteps and the echo of those footsteps in conversation.

She stepped out into the hallway. "Gem?" she said. And that's when she saw the melon-headed mummy. The mummy had been in the office, and now the mummy was here, propped up on a chair beside the hallway table—she must've walked, or, no—what a crazy thing to think. She was facing the front door. Roo must have carried her into the hallway, though Luce was surprised that he could carry something so big. Someone rearranged us in the night, she thought.

Beside the mummy was a plate on which there looked to be a few pieces of dried mango and a glass of milk. The mummy's arms rested on her lap, legs crossed at the ankles, a posture Luce had seen her mother take when she was listening intently to someone talk, head a little cocked, too, like the mummy, a leftover kind of politeness, Luce thought, from Gloria's years out there, beyond the Red Grove, where a woman had to feign attention and interest as a matter of politeness, which was really a mode of survival. And what a strange thing, Luce thought, that the curve of a woman's lips or the cross of her ankles or the cock of her fine head, if it suggested interest, was enough to keep her safe, or not. But Luce caught herself—that binary of out there and in here was feeling a little fuzzy.

Luce shifted her gaze to where the mummy was looking, through the front door's window, where the trees had shadows beneath them. I will not be a person who is losing her mind, Luce thought. But she imagined herself as a balloon, her string billowing in the wind as she traveled farther and farther from home.

It was time to focus. She knew what she needed to do next, and she began moving toward the office, but then the laugh came again, her own laugh, a loose trill from far away, like a voice beside a hospital bed down the corridor. She could rescue that child. All those years as the terrified child beside Gem's swollen face, Luce hadn't thought this before—that she could rescue herself.

She began moving toward the voice, which was not laughing anymore, but deep in conversation in low, hurried whispers. What would happen when she pushed back the door to Gem's room and saw herself as a child, slumped in Gem's arms? There was a cold hand, no, breeze, on her back. She walked forward. The whispers were furious. She put one hand on the door to the room where Gem had spent years in everdream. Her palm was flat against the wood. She began to press, and there was a creak in the door and then a sharp cry of laugher coming from behind her.

She spun around. Behind her was the door to her mother's office. She went in fast.

Roo was sitting in the big velvet chair where the mummy had been. His legs were draped over one of the arms, right knee crossed over left, listening, paying attention, and in his hand, once again, was the telephone that was plugged into nothing.

He didn't glance at her. His gaze was fixed somewhere on the wall, and he was whispering, intensely, into the phone. It sounded like gibberish—like stage-whispering, fast and garbled, a string of sounds more than words. Luce reached out fast to take the phone from his hand and scold him, but he threw his shoulder into her, and though he was little, he almost knocked her backward.

He pressed the phone against his chest for a moment—"I'm talking," he hissed at her—and then put it back to his ear.

From a half-crouch on the other side of the room, Luce watched him. His concentration was complete, listening, nodding. And then another high laugh that took her breath because it was the wrong sound—it wasn't the sound that came out of his mouth when he laughed, it was her laugh. The sound he was making wasn't his own.

She couldn't move from the ground. Something was happening, and it was outside what she could understand, it was a light blinking on too far away for her to see. Roo was nodding into the phone then. "Okay," he said. "We'll learn the history."

Beneath the sound of his voice was another sound—a buzzing. Luce swung her head around, looking for the cause, and this time, this time, she found it. A clump of flies was on top of her mother's desk. They were twitching, rubbing their legs, fifteen or twenty of them together.

Without thinking, she reached into her jean shorts pocket and pulled out the silver locket, turned it over in her hands. The metal against her skin felt alive, electric. She stared at the flies, felt the buzzing. Yes, she was waiting for another sound, for clicks.

In a blur of movement Roo dropped the phone and leapt from the velvet chair out toward the desk. The flies scattered. "Wait," Luce tried to yell, but the sound was a whimper.

"Here," he shouted, pounding his fists where the flies had been. Roo was in a flurry, picking things up from the desk and flinging them behind him, down onto the floor where Luce still crouched. Papers fluttered into the air, catching wing for a moment, her mother's handwriting across pages of seeker notes, grocery lists, a printout of the properties of various stones, old magazine articles on gardening, instructions for home birth, a copy of the LOST MOM flyer he'd made that he must've decided wasn't good enough.

She moved around Roo's flurry and reached for the folder she'd seen the last time she was in the office, where she'd found the list of names. Inside were newspaper articles, old, brittle, yellowed. Luce, still clutching the locket in one hand, unfolded the top article gently, carefully, not allowing it to snag. The frayed top of the paper read San Francisco Herald. Red Grove's closest big city. May 14, 1870.

MAN MISSING AFTER VISIT TO SECRET COVEN

On Tuesday, May 8, Mr. Arthur Nightingale, a good Christian and farmer, went in search of his wife, who had been missing for many years. Mr. Nightingale runs a farm with Mr. Roland Scully, and Mr. Scully attests that Mr. Nightingale never returned from his search. He was last seen leaving the farm, heading to the small settlement in the valley of the red grove after the Luber Farmlands. Mr. Scully has called for a full investigation. After a trip out to the witches' purported homestead, the sheriff was not able to find any evidence of foul play and did not locate Mr. Nightingale, though he noted that there had been a major fire. Mr. Nightingale can be identified by his medium height and build, mustache, and birthmark on his left shoulder.

The locket's hinge dug into Luce's fingers where her grip had tightened as she read the article. I am supposed to figure something out, I can almost figure this out, Luce thought, though it felt like remembering the edges of a dream. If she concentrated hard enough, the edges would lose their blur.

She heard Gem's rattling cough from the other room. And then the edges sharpened. The locket in her hand was clicking, the clicking coming from up high, knowledge clicking things into place.

In the reenactment they performed of Tamsen Nightingale's story, Arthur Nightingale was long dead by the time Tamsen founded the Red Grove. He'd smashed her head, left her for dead, and then, with his brothers, eaten her sisters before dying himself, up in the Sierras. But this news article contradicted that story. Arthur had survived, though he had not seen Tamsen for years before coming to the Red Grove, and was never to be found.

Had Luce found this article a week earlier, she would have quickly assumed that the newspaper was involved in a scheme to discredit Tamsen Nightingale or harm the women of the Red Grove. But now? The world was shaded darker. What was history, and what was a story? The story they were telling in the Red Grove wasn't the truth.

Her mother had this article. Her mother had known. And her mother was going to hand over this secret to Ruby Wells.

A fly landed on her hand, another buzzed by her ear. Luce felt a shadow behind her. She clenched the locket in one hand, the papers in the other, squeezing so tight she could feel the bones of her fingers quivering. Between her fingers, the locket popped open, but she couldn't look at it. She knew the shape of the shadow behind her. What it felt like so close to her. Felt the hairs on her neck raise, as if it were the mother mountain lion come to feed, though she knew it was not. It was the elegant woman with the cow skull.

She wanted to scream, but could not make a sound, could feel only a buzzing filling her throat. She should turn and look at the shadow, she had to face it, face her. The shadow grew closer, hot, a fireball. She had to turn and look, but could not, and she squeezed her eyes shut instead.

"Luce," a voice said. It was Roo, calling her. She opened her eyes. He had knelt down beside her, reached out one tentative, sticky hand, and placed it on her knee. He was looking at her, worried. The shadow was gone. Her thumb was bleeding from the slice of the locket.

She looked down then, to the blood-smeared locket open in her palm. On one side, tucked into the frame, was a faded, dirty photograph. The face was hard to make out, but Luce brought the locket closer because somehow, impossibly, the face that seemed to be looking out at her from the locket was a face she knew. She brought it right up against her face. It didn't make sense. In the old locket there seemed to be a photograph of Roo.

"Is this yours?" she asked, "or Mom's?"

"Course not," he said, and she let a little air go, realizing that it was a trick of the light, maybe, her exhausted brain trying to tell stories. "The twins used to play with it."

"Mom and Gem?"

He sat up straighter, took his hand off her knee. "Duh, it's way older than that. Look at it. No, the first twins." She looked again. The little face was Roo. Faded, imprecise, but Roo. She closed the locket and slid the chain over her head.

"It's me in there because they knew we'd have this moment," Roo said. He sounded a hundred years old. "And you'd need to believe me in order for us to unbury what was covered."

The room tilted, a click somewhere close by. "They knew that you wouldn't be a good listener. That's why they talk to me. I listen. You have to learn how to listen."

"Roo, this is so important. Who was on the phone?"

He was looking at her sleepily, dreamily, and then he shook his head. "Did you know it isn't just all the plant roots that are connected in the dirt? That it's all the animals and bugs and people in the Red Grove too? Even the dead ones."

It happened all at once, everything between her and the dirt—chair and rug and wooden floor and concrete foundation—disappearing. She was part of the system of webs, the threads merging and reaching in every direction, tan and green and pink and brown, tingling in her fingers, and she understood she was being passed nutrients and water and then also, if she could just listen, yes, voices, so many faint voices all speaking at the same time. She lost the barrier of her skin, her whole body plugged in and prickling and swollen with revelation. All the voices were here, all the stories, all of it surrounding her for one second, two, and then it was gone.

Back inside her skin, the fibers of her T-shirt. The profound loneliness of being a separate thing.

She thought she knew what it meant to live here, but she suddenly felt that she knew nothing. Roo's picture in the locket, the history and story, what was buried must be uncovered, the roots and threads underground that connected—how was it possible?—everything. Everyone. "Something beneath the dreamer," Roo said, and that stopped her cold.

"Dreamer, Roo? You heard beneath the dreamer?" He closed his eyes, yawned, shrugged.

She tore out of the office and into Gem's room. Gem, the everdreamer. Finally, one thing that made sense. She crouched down and looked beneath the bed, but there was nothing. Scratched wooden floor that needed cleaning. Plastic wrappers from medical tubes and an empty vial. This had seemed so right. Beneath the dreamer. She sat down on the chair, defeated, and reached her arm over to Gem, who, gray-faced, labored breathing, oh god, shifted slightly beneath Luce's hand, rustling the fitted sheet. Luce brought her eye down to where the sheet was sliding off, and there, tucked between the mattress and frame, was a pad of paper. Luce jimmied it out. On the first page, in her mother's handwriting, it read:

The Red Grove: The Story of the Sisters

so that we may always remember and never repeat.

She flipped through the pages. It was completely full. On the very last page, her mother had written:

As told by Gem Shelley

Tamsen and Ines and the women and children sheltered in the great red grove, hidden from below through the dense trees, with nothing but the empty, wild hills above, protected by Hank Monk, close to fish, to game. New rooms adjoined the original cabin, their walls plastered when the materials could be afforded, roofs woven and patched. In the shadows of the giant red spires, the women did not fear being discovered. All, except for Tamsen.

One day a new woman arrived, with cuts on her cheek and a split lip. They took her in, as they had the women before her. But late that night, as the forest's nighttime hunters scurried back to their dens, there was a rattling at the door. The rattling turned into a pounding, one hard fist against the wood. The women rose from their sleep, some shaking, some taut with anger, and gathered together as the pounding continued. A man's voice, shouting to be let in.

Tamsen told the women to hush, not to listen. That she needed to think.

He slammed his fist against the window. Their home was sacred and needed protecting, and one of the women said that they would not turn out this newest arrival, shivering among them, even though she said she did not recognize this man's voice. They believed, of course they did, that the man was there for her. Without discussing it, the women arranged their bodies into concentric rings around the new arrival.

Tamsen knew the voice. She ran through everything that had happened on the mountains during their crossing, coming away only with rage for what her husband and his brothers had done. She felt no guilt, and so tried to swallow the worry that rose from the warnings the twins had given her.

The man shouted from outside. He thrashed the woodpile. He threw rocks against the windows, ripping through the greased paper coverings. His voice infected the cabin. "Tamsen Nightingale," he was calling. "You have been found. Come outside and face what you have done."

A few of the women, confused, were looking to Tamsen. She knew something else was needed here, something bigger and deeper than what they were doing to scare him away. Drawing deeply from each of the moments when she'd been hurt, or the most afraid, from whatever it was that kept this land dangerous, she opened her mouth. What emerged was not quite human. She screamed, high and throaty, but inside that scream was also a kind of roar, the sound of the earth cracking open, of two sails being torn in half—it was the sound she'd learned from the mountain lion.

She peered out through the hole in the window covering into the darkness. Even after all these years she recognized his silhouette in the darkness, the stoop of his neck, the thick trunks of his legs. Her husband. Stilled and silent, he'd stopped throwing rocks, and so Tamsen let out the roar again. Let him think they had a beast in here, a lion, yes, let him find fear.

She listened again, heard his footsteps moving away from the house. Tamsen turned back to her sisters, though she could only make out theirdark shapes. Someone whispered, "Perhaps he's given up," but that's when they smelled the first of the smoke.

Outside, flames grew from the rows of their garden. Arthur was burning the crops. Fire crackled quickly through the corn and beans and tomatoes.

Tamsen Nightingale looked around to the faces of the women and children. They had come to her for respite. They were not her blood sisters, but they were as close as she would find, Ines her co-mother to these sisters, Emilia's trembling shoulders, Vee's braying laugh, Florence, Mary, Spoony and Jorgette and Speck and the twins, Minnie and Margaret, now four and clutching each other in the corner, more and more women, and none of them would've been safe if they'd stayed where they'd come from.

Tamsen flung open the door, revealing the flames as they spread quickly across the dry grass, grew toward the massive, towering trees at the edge of the clearing. She ran out toward her husband. The women did, too. It hadn't taken much time in the red grove for them to understand. The circular patterns in which the trees grew, the roots wound round one another, the interlaced network of fine filaments in the dirt, pulsing, sparking just past the corner of your eye, with stories they were sure they could almost hear of how to keep each other alive, it all made one truth self-evident: there would be no burning of this grove.

The women knew what to do. They'd been talking about this, practicing this. They knew what was worth protecting.

Tamsen came to face her husband, the women flanking her on each side, surrounding the man. "Just as I have not known peace since our crossing," she said, "you will never know peace again."

He began to shout at the women, saying, "You would not stand beside this witch if you knew what she has done," and Tamsen, for a moment, faltered. Would these sisters understand what she'd done? Was it a just act? The fires he'd started glowed behind him, crackling closer to their cabin, their trees, and then the women began to move toward the man. They did not ask what Tamsen had done. In their pockets were herbs,teeth, seeds. In their hands were knives and bricks. They pummeled the man by the haze of fire and on into the darkness.

But Ines, on the edge of the women, in the light of the flames, screamed for them to stop. It appeared that her heart was aflame, the fire's reflection sparking in her silver locket. "Do not harm this man," Ines yelled. "You cannot, or we will be no better than him."

But the women did not stop. Tamsen was amazed—it was as if the collective anger of all that had come before washed through them in a tidal swell.

"Stop it!" Ines screamed, trying to peel away one of the women's arms as it punched at Arthur. "This is not who we are!" A limb knocked Ines down. Arthur was in the center, kicking and flailing, but the women had many hands and feet to do their work on him.

From the ground, Ines screamed that they could not live with this kind of sin, that she herself was going to run right to the sheriff, but the women knew what they needed to protect, and what that was worth. They kept on. Ines clawed at Tamsen, begging her to make it stop. Tamsen turned slowly to face the pleading Ines, appearing twice as big as she usually was, her teeth looking longer, pointed, the fire reflecting in her eyes as it grew bigger around them, as the women's words grew louder. Arthur's blood pooled on the ground, fists and rocks and feet and sticks, and then his body was limp.

Ines finally understood that this thing could not be stopped. It was too late. She scrambled away from the women, running into the hills. Tamsen ran after her. The fire at their back grew, but did not chase them, and as they went higher into the hills, the light grew dimmer and dimmer until it was just the black wilderness. Ines stumbled, her foot catching on a root. She went down to the ground, but Tamsen was not close enough to grab her before she righted herself and kept moving. Tamsen tripped, twisting her ankle, but on she ran too. Their breath was heavy and dry. The trees didn't interfere. The owls stayed high on their branches. The women ran and ran, sisters chasing and being chased.

Farther up, near the edge of the tree line, was a redwood that the women sometimes visited because of its extraordinary wound, bigger than any other they'd yet found, capacious enough for a dozen children to hide inside. Though Tamsen was a little way back, she could tell that Ines was headed to the wound. What a fool.

Tamsen came slowly.

Ines was inside the tree, in the dark, pressed all the way back against the farthest wall. Around her, the charred interior was smooth, oiled by humans and animals rubbing themselves against the wood, like touching the sac around the beating heart of the world.

"This isn't right," Ines said, knees up by her chest, rocking. "I can't stand for it. I thought you were different, that we could be different here, but I see that you are no better than my husband's father."

Tamsen heard Ines's words clearly: Ines was no longer one of them. She would go right to the sheriff and tell them about what they were doing to Arthur, about all these women and their animals and spells, about who was living out here and who had run from where they should have been. She would betray them.

Tamsen crawled toward Ines. Inside the wound it was even darker than the night outside, and Tamsen's silhouette was a pure black monster against the gray light of the world.

"Save me," Ines said, her hand grasping at the tree. "Help me," she whimpered to the bark. Which is exactly what Tamsen had been learning to do for these years, practicing as each new woman joined them in this red grove, helping them find a kind of sanctuary.

"You have to accept," Tamsen said to her cowering friend, "that there are sacrifices necessary to keep all the women safe."

"You are murderers," Ines sobbed, clawing at the tree. No, not murderers, Tamsen thought. "It's unnatural," Ines yelled.

"Nature is filled with violence," Tamsen said with a calm that chilled even her own arms.

"But we are better than that. We have to be better," Ines said,pleading. But Tamsen shook her head. They were not better than nature. They were not worse, either.

Protectors. That's what they were.

Tamsen had never told everyone here that it would be entirely safe. She'd tried to make it so, to build this place alongside her sisters so that their safety was primary, but nothing guaranteed it. All she had was what she could do with her hands. She looked at her friend's beautiful hair, remembered the first days when Ines arrived, how she'd laid a tiny buttercup, the size of a bee, on Tamsen's healing arm. She drew a breath and, unlike the last time, was sorry for what had to come next.

From where it had been tucked into her dress, Tamsen pulled out the carved bone, a mountain lion etched into the center. She clenched it tightly in her fist and did not think she could do what she needed to do as Ines prayed for mercy. She hesitated, but did not let the tears blur her eyesight, took a breath, thought of her sisters, and cracked down hard on Ines's skull. Just one swing of Tamsen's arm. That was all.

Tamsen sat with Ines's body a long time. Though she did not weep as she had for her sisters, as she had when she was a younger woman, she sat in the shadow of the redwood, laid her hand across her friend's heart, and thought about how in sync they'd been until the very end—until they weren't. And she thought that soon, any minute, she would begin the slow, dark trudge down the hill toward the blaze, to her sisters, who would be working to put it out, who had turned, like her, so naturally toward eliminating anything—anyone—who threatened their safety, and she understood that this would be the terrible trade of this place.

Before the women went to work rebuilding their shelter or planting new crops or rounding up the spooked animals, before any of that, they climbed the hill. The sun was just up. Six women carried a man's shrouded body. When they reached a spot toward the top of the hills, near themouth of the cave, you would soon be able to hear the cracking of bones and the slurp of blood as the mountain lions feasted. You could almost hear them licking their maws, preparing.

And then the women and children turned and walked toward the redwoods. As they walked, the children gathered wildflowers. One woman sang a slow, low song. The sound of her voice, the sound of the steps of the women and children carrying themselves up the hill, shoes on dirt, bare feet on dirt, the swish of the grasses against skirts and pants, the singing of the birds in the high branches, the creak of insects calling for mates—all of it gathered together and carried them up the hill, to the tree line, where the last big redwood stood with its gaping wound. It was empty.

Ines had decided to leave them, Tamsen told the rest of the women. It broke her heart, but the women here were free, and Ines had chosen her own future. Nobody need worry that she would tell anyone about what had been done. Ines had promised. And the women nodded and asked no further questions, perhaps because they knew, Tamsen thought, perhaps because they believed it was better not to know.

What Tamsen noticed in the wound each time she visited was something strange—a haze appearing around where Ines's body had been. A hum. A buzz. It was a mass of flies, forming almost a sheath around the wound, like a glow.

And she knew, having dragged her sweet friend's body farther into the wildness, that she would feed the animals and that eventually, her bones would find peace with the sacrifice made to keep the rest of the sisters and children safe.

After some years, the silver locket, which had fallen off inside the tree's wound, brought itself to the soil's surface, clicking open and closed until the twins, Margaret and Minnie, found it one day and slipped it on. They were young when Ines left, did not remember that the locket belonged to her. What they loved was the photo inside, a little face neither of the twins knew, but they practiced whispering secrets into the locket,the dreams they had of the cave and the hairless rabbits and the mountain covered in snow, of a creature that would come with nothing but a skull for a head. And then, one day, the locket fell while they were helping with chores in the cabin and was lost.

As the years passed, the sisters buried within themselves the night of Arthur Nightingale. Though they remembered what had been required, they decided that the story they would tell their children would be gentler. A story about the trees of the red grove and the community of women growing in their shade. And how, below these red trees and inside the red mist, their lives could be entirely safe—that it was, in fact, a miracle, some kind of magic, that in this valley alone, no woman could be harmed, can you even imagine, the kind of thing so amazing it was almost myth.

As told by Gem Shelley