Stanley slumped into a chair, pressing his palms against his eyes. Lilah tensed, waiting for the explosion she knew he had been holding in until the moment they had the room to themselves. But several minutes passed in tense silence, and Stanley still hadn’t moved or uttered a single word.
“Dad?” Lilah asked, propping herself up on her good elbow. “Come on. Would you please say something?”
Stanley didn’t answer her; he sat, unmoving, with his face buried in the heels of his palms.
“Dad, look, I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have lied to you. I shouldn’t have gone to that concert without telling you. And I’m sorry I didn’t take my medication. I was being stupid. If you have to ground me till spring, I get it. And… And I really am sorry for taking whatever it was that made me hallucinate like a crazy person,” she chuckled nervously. “I, uh – I learned my lesson. No more psychedelic drugs for me.”
She glanced at her father hopefully; he still didn’t reply.
Lilah took a deep breath, guilt and shame and remorse twisting her stomach into knots. “Most of all, Dad, I’m really sorry that I made you come back here, where, um, you know… where Mom died.”
When Stanley finally lifted his head from his hands, Lilah stifled a gasp. His blue eyes were red-rimmed, as though he had been crying. But she had never seen him cry a day in her life – not even after the blaze at City Hall.
“Li… what happened tonight. It wasn’t a hallucination.”
“But Dr. Kreuter said—”
“Dr. Kreuter doesn’t know the truth.”
“The truth?” Lilah asked, frowning. “What are you talking about?”
Her father’s tear-filled eyes finally met hers. “Kid… I think you and me… we’re long-overdue for a long talk.”
Chapter 10
Choices
Stanley stared at the small, glass bottle in his hand, turning it over and over along with his thoughts. The milky liquid swilled along the inside of the vial, leaving viscous dregs of medicine oozing against the tinted glass before sloshing back to the other side. The clock on the fireplace mantle ticked loudly, reminding him of the hour. He’d put Lilah down for her nap over an hour ago; she would be waking shortly and looking for her usual afternoon snack of apple juice and graham crackers. That was ready and waiting for her on the kitchen table, along with her favorite stuffed bunny. The only thing missing from her placemat was the little dropper of medicine, which she took every morning at breakfast and every afternoon at three-fifteen on the nose.
Except for today.
Her father had been grappling with his decision for nearly two years – ever since Lilah’s last seizure transformed their living room into a forest. Since then, he had spent every waking moment of his extended sabbatical trying to figure out why that happened. And how. But after months and months of searching, he wasn’t any closer to finding a concrete answer.
The time he spent poring over the history of the house and the land upon which it was built provided Stanley the simple comfort of knowing that their living room was not built upon any ancient burial grounds – nor was it the site of any gruesome historical events that may have resulted in a resident, forest-conjuring poltergeist. Since the house didn’t appear to be haunted, and Stanley himself didn’t display any other symptoms of insanity – he researched that particular subject at length – he had to conclude that the strange incidents that had occurred in the house were, in fact, a direct result of Lilah’s seizures. So, Stanley’s next mission was learning everything he could on the subject of epilepsy. He pulled every medical text he could find regarding epilepsy and pediatric seizures from the library, most of which remained piled on the coffee table to that day, months past their due date. Not one study cited preternatural cancer predictions or woodland summoning. In fact, Dr. Kreuter himself gave Stanley a long, concerned look when he casually asked the doctor whether he had heard of any seizure-induced paranormal events.
Clearly, Lilah’s condition wasn’t something that had ever been seen or studied before.
Since his esoteric quest appeared to be unearthing more questions than answers, Stanley tried a more straightforward task: figuring out who left Lilah at the fire station, and why. He combed through every newspaper article published within the last three years that mentioned missing babies from that time period – a topic that made Stanley hug Lilah tightly at the end of each and every library visit. Still, none of the missing children fit the timeline of events or Lilah’s physical description. There was one article about a woman and her teenage daughter who disappeared the same night that Lilah was found on the steps of the fire station; their abandoned van was discovered about twenty-five miles away from town the next morning. The story piqued Stanley’s interest, and he spent a full week delving into the details. The women had apparently moved to Montana a month before their disappearance, but lived as recluses inside the house they rented. After they disappeared, no one ever saw them again. Nevertheless, there was no mention of a baby anywhere in that article or in subsequent citations. Even Sheriff Reid confirmed that the women’s cold case file revealed nothing whatsoever about a missing newborn. It would seem that the date of their disappearance was just a sad coincidence.
Though the failed searches left Stanley with more questions than answers, his own common sense provided him with this much: Lilah was almost certainly abandoned – not kidnapped – probably because her parents were frightened of whatever it was that she made them see. From that perspective, it made sense that they never reported her as missing. The fact of the matter was, her family members – whoever they were – didn’t want her back.
Stanley scratched his head tiredly. He’d been pacing the house for the better part of the afternoon, turning the most pressing question over and over in his head, as he had done countless afternoons before: what happened, exactly, when Lilah had a seizure? Who was affected, and why? And how? For the hundredth time since Marie’s diagnosis, Stanley tried to boil everything down to just the basic facts: Lilah had epilepsy and suffered from seizures that were considered somewhere between petit and grand mal in nature. The first one he witnessed, which exposed Marie’s illness and the end of her life, was perhaps forty-five seconds long. The second one, which conjured a forest into their home, may have lasted as long as a minute. The medication Dr. Kreuter prescribed for Lilah kept her seizures well under control – so long as she didn’t skip any doses. But Lilah’s seizures weren’t just seizures. They were… something else. Something powerful and inexplicable, yet seemingly confined to a limited radius. A radius in which Lilah herself appeared to be the epicenter.
Stanley glanced at the dendrology textbook that was draped across the arm of the sofa. He was certain that the trees that had momentarily appeared in place of his living room were Lodgepole pines. And while it was true that his house hadn’t been built upon any cemeteries, his research confirmed that a Lodgepole pine forest had once existed where their lot now stood. That meant that Lilah’s seizure might have shown what had been. Furthermore, Marie had insisted that she had physical symptoms relating to her diagnosis well before they brought Lilah into the home. Which meant that Lilah’s seizure was, in fact, a preview of what was to come.