And then he's gone. Tasha stares at the door of the bedroom through which he's fled. She's sitting up in the bed, has the bedclothes pulled up to her chin, but they don't do anything for the shivering chill he's left behind, the blank spot that seems to have lodged in the middle of her chest. It's hard to breathe, hard to think straight. Harder still when she starts to cry and she can't stop, she just can't stop.
7
The thing is, I don't ever have to come back if I don't want to. I could stay forever the way Nim does and never grow any older. What brings me back? It used to be my puppy— Topy. I'd come back for Topy, but then one day I let her stay and she's lived in the hundred-acre wood with Nim ever since. Nobody could understand why I wasn't sad that she'd run away, but they didn't understand that she hadn't run away from me. I could see her any time I wanted to. I still can.
What brought me back after that? I don't know. Different things. I like this world, but sometimes everything gets to be too much for me in it. Like it's hard just having simple conversations when you have to be constantly separating the meanings of what's being said from its colors. I can't argue with people. By the time I've worked out what we're fighting about, everything's usually gotten way more complicated, gotten so tangled up and knotted that it'll never make sense again. At least not for me. The hundred-acre wood gives me a break from that. Gives me a chance to catch my breath so that when I come back to this world I fit in a little easier.
Nim knows what I mean. She's never going back, she says. She wants to become a forever tree herself and sometimes, when I look at her, all twig-thin with that wild bird'snest of hair on top, I think she's halfway there.
8
Tasha makes her way home, crawls into her own bed, pulls the covers over her head, but can't stop the chill, can't stop the tears. It hurts too much— not because Joe redefined the relationship and then, after she tentatively embraced its new parameters, he went and backed off. She enjoyed necking with him last night, but she wasn't exactly making a lifetime commitment herself. No, it's that he didn't stay to talk. To explain. She hasn't been betrayed by a lover she's just met; she's been betrayed by one of her oldest friends.
She waits for him to call, but the phone stays silent by her bed. Saturday night. All day Sunday. Maybe it's better that way. She's never been good on the phone. Without a face to concentrate on, without being able to watch the lips move, or absorb the subtext that resonates in eyes and facial tics and twitches, conversation too often turns into nothing more than a confusing porridge of color.
So Sunday evening she gets out of bed, dresses, tries to fix her face so that it doesn't look as though she's been crying for most of the weekend, sets off for Joe's apartment. Dreading it. Already knowing it'll be a disaster when she attempts to filter word-sense from the color flood of what they'll say to each other. But they've been friends too long for her not to try.
Friends, she thinks. Friends don't treat each other this way. Her ability to trust is undergoing a test of faith. Once the masks drop, anything could be waiting there. That's something she's always known. The shock is finding a mask where she didn't expect one to be. She'd never realized that Joe could have been wearing a mask all this time.
But friends make mistakes, she told herself, and she clung to those words, spoke them aloud. Saw yellow ochre veined with madder and blues. The grey underbelly of a summer cloud, winging across it, a flock of magenta and yellow-gold flowers.
But the colors couldn't disguise the fear that no matter what happened tonight, she was never going to be sure if Joe was wearing a mask or not. There was just no way to know.
9
I guess the hardest thing to explain is how the hundred-acre wood is a real place, that I really go there, that when I'm walking under the forever trees, I'm not here anymore. It's not like I've shut my eyes and gone to some place inside my head. That's what I thought it was at first. Well, not at first. When I first went, I was too young even to wonder about that kind of thing.
My parents knew there was something wrong with me, but no one could figure out what it was. It wasn't until years later that anyone even came up with a name for my condition: synaesthesia. Everyone just thought I was a slow learner, that the connections in my head weren't all wired the right way, which is true I guess, or I'd be like everybody else, right?
I didn't talk until I was five because it took me that long to realize that it was words people used to communicate with each other— not colors. Because I was communicating, you see. Right from the first. But it was with crayons and watercolor paints, and nobody could understand what I was saying. When I finally started to use words it was like having to translate everything from a foreign language.
That's what so seductive about the hundred-acre wood.
When I talk with Nim, I'm communicating directly with her. I don't feel like I'm muddling around with translations. I never get the feeling that she's impatient with the long pauses in our conversations, because she hears and sees everything the same as me. When I show her one of my paintings she knows exactly what I'm saying with it— the same way that somebody else can read a page from a book.
I guess one day I'll go and I won't come back. I'll become a raggedy wild girl like Nim with twigs and burrs in my hair. Maybe we'll both end up as forever trees. Maybe that's where they came from. Maybe we're both dryads and we just haven't matured from tree spirits into proper trees yet.
The idea of it makes me smile. If we were forever trees, we'd have really slow conversations, wouldn't we?
10
Joe is not a bad guy. Like Tasha said, even friends make mistakes. He never wore a mask around her, and that was part of the problem that night when he told her he thought they should be lovers and friends. Maybe he should have waited, kept it to himself a little longer until he'd really worked it out in his own head, dealt with it in a way that wouldn't have hurt Tasha before sharing his feelings with her. But maybe it took his sharing those feelings for him to work it out.
He knew it hadn't been fair to her, but he hadn't meant to hurt her. Not that night. Not when he fled the next morning. He'd just gotten confused, couldn't think straight, but he meant to make it right. He meant to call her and apologize for screwing up the way he had, screwing up big time, and he hoped she'd forgive him because maybe they weren't supposed to be lovers, but nothing in his life meant more to him than Tasha's friendship.
So he phones her, Sunday night, lets the phone ring and ring, but there's no answer. He keeps trying up until midnight, then he finally goes over to her apartment, lets himself in with the key she gave him so long ago, but she really isn't there, she wasn't just ignoring the phone, she really isn't home. But she isn't anywhere else either.
Days go by and she's never home, never at her studio, nobody has seen her, nobody ever sees her again.
Joe's sitting in his apartment, cradling one of Tasha's paintings on his lap, and he's remembering holding her one night when she's having a stress attack, when all the words turned into too many colors and everything inside her just shut down for a while so that she didn't even know who or where she was; he's remembering what she told him that night, about a ghost place she can visit, a hundred-acre wood of forever trees. He believed she could go there, didn't ask for proof. That's what friends do— they accept each other's secrets and marvels and hold them in trust.
So Joe knows where Tasha has gone, running up a long meadowed slope with a wild girl and a puppy, vanishing into the embrace of a forest of forever trees, and he misses her, more than anything, he misses her, and what he regrets, what he regrets the most, is that he never asked her how to get there himself, so that he could see her again.