“Thank you,” I mumbled, about five minutes too late.
“Good lord, you stink,” she said. “Have you been kidnapped? Did you just escape? Should I be taking you to the police?”
“What year is it?” I burst out.
Her eyes widened. “You poor child. You really don’t know?”
She told me, and I closed my eyes against her words. Two years. Two years had passed since I walked into the Hazel Wood. It was better and worse than it could’ve been; relief and terror warred in my chest and made me shake. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. The panic folded over me like a hand, and I gave in.
When I was little I tried to walk across one of the parallel bars on the playground like it was a tightrope, till I slipped and fell onto it stomach first. The wind was knocked out of me, and all I could do was keen, a horrible sound that sent the other kids scattering.
That was what I sounded like now. I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t stop. Next to the messy specter of my coming undone, the woman’s driving peaked to frantic. She pressed her body toward her window and called someone on her phone. An eternity passed before the car screeched into a diner parking lot, where an ambulance was waiting.
When the paramedics opened my door and laid their hands on me, I went silent. They startled back before grabbing me again, helping me out onto the gravel.
“Can you tell me your name?” one of them asked kindly. He looked like a skinny Harold.
“Ella Proserpine,” I said desperately.
“Okay, Ella, can you walk with me, please? Try to unlock your knees.”
“No, Ella is my mother. I’m Alice,” I said. “Alice Crewe. Alice Proserpine. I’m Alice-Three-Times.”
The paramedics exchanged a glance over my head and half-carried me into the ambulance.
Somehow, I fell asleep on the way. When I woke up I was wearing a clean blue hospital gown. I flinched away from a terrible smell, woke up the rest of the way, and realized it was me. I was fully convinced another two years had passed since I’d last been awake.
I filled my lungs, ready to scream out fresh panic, then saw her sitting in a hospital chair. Her head was flopped onto her chest, a fresh starburst of gray running through the dark strands of her hair. She wore a black hoodie, black jeans, and the cracked red cowboy boots she’d had since forever.
My mother. Ella Proserpine.
31
I sat up, let a wave of dizziness pass, swung my feet to the floor. I could feel my muscles running over each other in funny, fucked-up ways, but the cool of the linoleum took the worst of the hot throb out of my soles.
“Ella,” I whispered. “Mom.”
She lifted her head suddenly, breathing in hard through her nose. She smiled when she saw me, then gasped, her eyes spilling over with tears. She stood and wrapped her arms around me, and held me till it hurt.
When we’d cried enough, and studied each other’s faces, and I’d counted her new crow’s-feet and gray hairs and decided I could live with losing two years, she asked me. “You know, don’t you?” Her eyes were nervous, scanning my face.
“Know what?”
“Who I am—what I did. How I’m not really your, not your…”
“You are.” I said it like a vow. I repeated it till she believed me.
A long time after that, once the doctors had come in to examine me, and Ella chased off a policeman who wanted to take a statement, and I ripped like a wild dog through the contents of a hospital tray and half a vending machine, she told me her side of the story.
The Hinterland had taken her from Harold’s and put her in a dingy, empty studio apartment in the Bronx. No phone, no fire escape, no neighbors, no way to pry open the windows or door. After three days she was nearly starved and all screamed out when she tried the front door for the thousandth time.
It opened. Nobody was guarding it, and nobody stopped her as she walked down four flights of stairs and emerged, trembling, onto the sidewalk. She made her way back to Harold’s, but the doorman called the cops on her. A friend from her old catering job gave her some clothes and some cash—her credit card was canceled, and the old card she’d used before Harold was attached to an almost empty account. She sold the jewelry she was wearing and followed the same path as Finch and me: renting a car and heading to the Hazel Wood.
But the Halfway Wood wouldn’t let her in. She lived in a motel at first, before finding a place above a hairdresser’s in Birch, of all places. She worked at a diner, hiking the woods looking for an entrance on her days off. Months passed without luck or hope, until the day I walked out of the woods and gave the paramedics her name before I told them mine.
She never saw any sign of the Hinterland, in the woods or out of them. Her bad luck days had ended after I disappeared—not that she’d put it that way. But she mourned being locked out of the Halfway Wood, I could tell. “Maybe I’m too old now,” she said. “Maybe that’s how it works.”
“It’s not Peter Pan,” I said firmly. “It’s freedom.”
She looked at my eyes and smiled. “All the ice is out of you,” she said. “Even that little bit I could see way down at the bottom. My angry girl.”
She never made me feel like she missed it, but I could tell she did, a little. I was slower to anger now, more circumspect. I didn’t live like each day was a fuse to burn through and forget.
We cooked up a paper-thin amnesia story for the police, my face was in the news for a while, and I was told the county would be in touch when they had a lead on what, exactly, had happened to me.
I was home for a couple of weeks when Ella told me the rest of her story: She hadn’t found the Hinterland in her wanderings, but she’d found the Hazel Wood. Not the dreamlike place I’d walked through, but a tumbledown mansion full of cat shit and broken windows. She’d let herself in and found Althea in her writing room, a few days’ dead.
Her hands shook only a little when she told me. “When I thought she was dead the first time, I thought it was over—the bad luck. I thought it was her all that time, sending the Hinterland to bring you back. I didn’t think it was…”
Me. She didn’t think it was me, the dark magic in me tugging it along behind us like a fish on a hook.
“I’ve learned my lesson,” she’d continued. “Don’t take a letter’s word for it when it comes to death. And don’t run away from your inheritance.”
It turned out the Hazel Wood was ours, as I’d once wished it to be. Ella sold it to a woman looking to start a writers’ retreat, and bought us a condo in our old neighborhood in Brooklyn.
She got another job waiting tables, and I stocked shelves for a food co-op when I wasn’t floating around pretending to think about going back to school. On paper I was nineteen, and Ella didn’t want to push me.
But the empty days, all in one place—they made me restless. I walked for hours, from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back again, or down to Coney Island. I started rereading the books I’d loved when I was younger, all those paperbacks picked up in musty shops, off stoops, from library shelves, then shed like leaves on the road.
When I reread Boy, Snow, Bird I remembered Iowa City, living with Ella in a cramped prefab a few blocks from a frat house. Howl’s Moving Castle was the converted barn in Madison where we camped out for three lonely months after the terrifying end to our time in Chicago. As I read the words I felt memories reasserting themselves like letters drawn onto misted glass. On a frozen day in February I carried a pair of tallboys onto the Long Island Ferry and read Wise Child as we chugged through the water. I closed my eyes and remembered the red flowers that grew around our guesthouse in LA when I was ten. Then I opened them and put my tongue out to catch New York snowflakes. They tasted sick and gritty, like chemical rain.