And just like that, she remembered.
“Go get dressed,” she said. “I want to show you something.”
They stepped down from the back of the deck and onto the trail of flat stones that would have taken them over the edge of the slope and down to the dock. But halfway along the path, Kris abandoned the stones altogether, directing Sadie into that barely recognizable break in the billowing tallgrass. The budding tops of knee-high bluestem brushed against their legs as they cut a trail between the old garden and the swing set.
Kris glanced over at the rectangle of railroad ties to her left and the mountain of weeds that called it home.
Hey, Mom, she thought as she gave a little nod to the girl following closely behind her. This is your granddaughter. This is Sadie.
They left the garden and swing set behind them. The weeds and tallgrass gave way to an uneven length of brown earth that crumbled beneath their feet. The beginning of the forest was only a few yards away. The breeze rustled the leaves around them. To Kris, it sounded like overlapping voices whispering. It was too low to make out the words, yet she understood it, in her heart, in her soul. It was a spell, an incantation, and if they allowed it to be cast on them, everything—the lake house, the town, Black Ridge, Jonah—all of it would be gone. They would belong to the forest.
Kris stopped and pressed the knuckle of a bent finger against her lips as she scanned the trees.
“I think … it’s somewhere around …”
“What?” Sadie asked. The sun was a quarter of the way into the cloud-littered blue sky. Tiny beads of sweat dotted her forehead.
There.
Kris reached into a tangle of kudzu and low-hanging branches at the edge of the forest and swept it back as though she were parting a green velvet curtain. Before them, like magic, was a tunnel of Osage trees, their long, skinny branches bending to the ground like the lowered heads of petrified swans.
Sadie gasped, and the sound made Kris smile.
“Let’s go,” she said as she led her daughter into the woods.
It was all coming back to her.
Passing through the tunnel of trees was like stepping back in time. Kris emerged on the other side with the scent of honeysuckle in her nose and the sound of rustling branches in her ears. She was ten years old again, walking the same path she had wandered down that bittersweet summer when love and darkness became one.
Twigs snapped under their shoes as Sadie followed her deeper into the forest. There was no discernable trail, but Kris remembered the landmarks from her youth: the massive, moss-covered boulder that used to paint her palms green as she scrambled to its top; the ring of saplings that had once been a circle of children listening to Miss Krissy, their teacher, during story time, now a crowded cluster of towering sycamore trees; the sloping hillside dotted with wild berry bushes where she once fed a friendly box turtle; the deep ravine where a patch of earth had slid free, her secret tunnel through the forest. Just as one natural marker fell behind them, another would appear. Many had changed in size over the thirty years since Krissy walked the woods—some larger from decades of growth, others chiseled away by wind and rain—but she recognized them all.
Finally. She was home.
The descent of the ravine carried them down into a twisting chasm of sandstone. It was much cooler there. What sun was able to penetrate the canopy of leaves was blocked by twenty-foot rock walls. They passed through shadow, the chasm narrowing until the overlapping armor plates of sandstone were within arm’s reach.
“I remember …” Kris began before she even knew what she was going to say. “I remember pretending this little canyon was alive and …” The words trailed off as she glanced at the ground, looking for something. She bent down and picked up a fallen branch from one of the trees above. She tested it, gripping it at either end and bending it slightly. The wood creaked but the stick did not snap.
“What’s that for?” Sadie asked. Her soft, sweet voice bounced about the chasm.
“I’ll show you,” Kris said, holding the stick in one hand and taking Sadie’s hand with the other. “Careful.”
The dirt floor of the chasm became rockier until stones the size of watermelons began jutting up from the earth. Their edges were jagged and rose to points like sharks teeth. At the same time, the space between the sandstone walls grew tighter. It nearly brushed their shoulders as they passed.
Kris helped Sadie maneuver between the sharp stones. When she reached the canyon’s narrowest point, Kris told Sadie, “Stay there,” and she lifted the stick horizontally above her head. The sides of the stick screeched as Kris wedged it between the rock walls. Flakes of sandstone dusted the air.
She gave the stick a little tug. It held.
Kris turned back to Sadie, and the confusion on her daughter’s face amused her. “That’s so the rocks can’t eat us.”
Sadie frowned and glanced away, not allowing herself to fully believe what her mother had just said. But there was something tugging at her expression, a desire to give in, to go with it, to be an eight-year-old kid. Without raising her head, she looked up, her eyes finding the stick Kris had left between the canyon walls.
“Can I do one?”
Kris nodded. Together, they searched among the stones until they found another stick of appropriate length. Sadie stepped into the narrowing chasm and, just as her mother had done before her, raised her stick into the air.
Kris waited patiently as she watched her daughter work the branch into place.
Stepping back, Sadie admired her work. The stick was crooked and much lower than the one Kris had placed. There was a good chance it wouldn’t stay put for more than a few minutes. But seeing the two branches together—one tall and secure, the other short and delicate—filled Kris with a sensation that she could only describe as a “glow,” a light she knew was growing stronger within her every hour they were there.
“It’s perfect,” she said.
About fifty yards past the narrowest section of the canyon, the sandstone walls began to descend until they slid beneath the surface of the forest floor. With little warning, the woods expanded infinitely around them in all directions, and Kris and Sadie found themselves at the center of a grove of towering oak trees. High above them, sunlight filtered in through the thick canopy of rippling leaves. Morning glory bloomed along stretches of ivy that twisted through the wild grass and around rough, sturdy tree trunks. A swallowtail butterfly fluttered from flower to flower, its yellow and black markings brilliant against the blue of the morning glories like a drop of sunshine dancing through the air.
The ground cover was thick. Green, leafy fronds created a soft padding that occasionally snagged the toes of their shoes or tugged at the loops of Kris’s shoelaces. Kris let her hands lift at her sides so that the tips of her fingers grazed the serrated edges of leaves sprouting up from low plants. She breathed in the morning air through her nose. Her nostrils filled with the scent of earth still wet with dew. She imagined she could hear the narrow shafts of sunlight vibrating like harp strings as she moved through them.
Her right hand knocked the top of a dogwood shrub, and hundreds of unseen leafhoppers hiding within erupted into a green mist around her. The miniscule insects clung to her clothes, leaping about in a frenzy. Kris laughed, both out of surprise and giddiness, as the leafhoppers went bounding wildly away into the open air, disappearing into the moss-colored shadows below.