“So?” Kris asked. “What do you think?”
Sadie did not reply. She moved silently through the army of oaks that stood at motionless attention.
Kris followed. Around her, the huge tree trunks groaned softly, like grumbling old men, as the wind tossed their bushy, outstretched arms.
The flap of wings shot overhead. Kris glanced up just as a large black shape glided beneath the swaying branches. It swooped up into what must have been the largest, oldest oak tree in the entire forest. Unlike the others, with their perfectly bulbous crowns, this oak’s branches spun wildly off in all directions. It was as if a thousand years ago, a tentacled beast had exploded from the depths of the earth and become petrified at the first contact with open air.
From the fat, malformed ledge where a branch connected to the trunk like a deformed shoulder, the black shape danced excitedly from foot to foot. It clacked its obsidian beak and shrieked in a voice that cut to the bone.
A blackbird.
It hopped a few inches farther down the branch and into a shaft of sunlight. The tightly packed feathers around its neck glistened with a deep purple hue that stretched like an executioner’s hood over the top of its head. It stared down at her with a single glowing golden eye pricked at the center with a black pupil. Even from that distance, she could see that its other eye was pinched shut.
It cried again, tilting its purple head to get a better look at something below.
Kris followed its gaze, down to the base of the treelike beast, down to where something pink and fleshy was being devoured by its trunk. A smiling, freckled face peered out from within the shadows of its open maw.
Sadie was standing in a large hollow that cut deeply into the pulpy flesh of the gargantuan oak. The cavity was as deep and wide as the trunk itself, large enough for Sadie to easily stand inside it.
The doorway, Kris thought, and the words plucked a string far in the dim recesses of her mind.
“Mommy, look,” Sadie called. Her voice reverberated inside the tree.
Kris trudged through the foliage toward the unruly oak.
“Come in with me,” Sadie said.
Kris touched the rough hide at the edge of the hole. “I don’t know if I’ll fit.”
Sadie said nothing, but she scooted over to one side of the hollow to show that there was plenty of room.
“Okay.”
Taking a breath of warm, summer air, Kris slipped into the oak’s gaping mouth.
The hollow was much larger than Kris had assumed. She barely brushed shoulders with her daughter as they stood side by side.
“What was this place, Mommy?” Sadie asked.
A doorway, Kris thought again. A doorway to …
And then that single note vibrating from that distant memory became a chord that rose, louder and louder, until it enveloped her, like the sustained blast of a pipe organ in the sanctuary of a church.
Her eyes scanned the dark chamber within the tree.
“This tree …” she said. “I remember playing in here. I …”
She heard the words escape her lips, but she was not entirely convinced she had spoken them.
“I thought … I thought I had to guard this place.”
Sadie cocked her head, confused. “Why?”
“Because it’s a doorway. That’s what I used to believe. It’s a doorway.” She turned to face the back wall of the hollow. The memory was controlling her now. She was ten years old and standing inside a tree that reached all the way up to heaven. It was the first tree to ever sprout from the earth. Before humans, before dinosaurs, before that first slimy beast pulled itself by its flippers onto solid ground, this tree had twisted like a green finger from the dirt. Its roots reached too deeply, their tips had slipped into other places—other worlds—and that’s when its trunk had yawned open for someone, a ten-year-old girl named Krissy perhaps, to step inside and become the temporary owner of its power.
“If you close your eyes and think of a place,” Kris explained to her daughter, “the back of the tree will open and when you step through, you’ll be in that place.”
“Any place?”
Kris reached out and touched the craggy back wall of the tree. She gave a small, embarrassed laugh.
“Well, I mean, that’s what I used to pretend.”
She watched as Sadie mimicked her action, hesitantly reaching out to trace the folds in the tree’s husk.
“Do you want to try it?” Kris asked.
Sadie thought for a moment, and then her eyes narrowed as if she felt a sudden sharp pain. She shook her head, letting her hand drop down to her side.
“All right,” Kris said. “Another time, maybe.”
The Wishing Tree, as Sadie began to call it, marked the far edge of the oak grove. Another hundred feet and the forest opened up to a sea of wildflowers. Their tops blew in the wind, undulating waves of yellow and red.
Just as it had done to the mist on the lake, the blinding sun had burned off most of the clouds in the sky, although the coolness of early morning had not entirely been chased away.
Around them, the tops of flowers buzzed with honeybees, legs fat with powdery yellow pollen. They hovered around, their stingers quivering excitedly as they investigated each bloom.
Sadie tightened her grip on Kris’s hand.
“Don’t worry,” Kris assured her. “They won’t bother you if you don’t bother them.”
Sadie nodded. She made sure to keep hold of her mother’s fingers, but her grip loosened ever so slightly as they cut a path through the wildflowers.
Just like the area behind the lake house, the land began to slope down as they neared the clear, lapping water of the shore. The overgrown vegetation thinned, and the dry ground transitioned to wet clay and water-smoothed stones. Kris held Sadie’s hand as they stepped from rock to rock to keep the black mud from smudging their shoes. They stopped at the edge of the water and stood in silence. Lost Lake was before them, its crystalline surface sparking in the midmorning sun.
Without a word, Sadie raised a hand and pointed a single slender finger out toward the center of the lake.
Kris looked. At first she saw only the skeletal branches of submerged trees reaching up in jagged black lines from below the surface. But … there was something beyond this.
The tiled peak of a rooftop.
“A house,” Kris said aloud, the words unlocking yet another door in her memory.
Sadie’s brow furrowed. “In the lake?”
Kris swept a hand from one side of the lake to the other. “My daddy, he told me. He said a long time ago, this used to be a river. A few people lived out here, along the banks. But when the lake was made, the houses got flooded.”
“Their houses?” Such a possibility was unimaginable to the little girl. “Why didn’t they move?”
“Well, it happened fast. The lake sort of made itself. The water came out of the ground and the river turned into this, into a lake, the way it is now. That right there …” She pointed to the rooftop sprouting from the water like a wooden iceberg. “That’s one of the houses. There are a lot more down there. A general store, too, I think. It’s what they called Lower Basin Road. It’s all under the water.”
Kris watched as Sadie poked her head forward, her eyes narrowing to see those other phantom homes beneath the lake’s surface. Kris knelt down so that she was cheek to cheek with her daughter, their gaze at the same level, staring out at the roof that stood like a monument to the lost community.