Page 5 of The Forest of Lost Souls

She can’t at once respond. She sips her coffee and finds it difficult to swallow. When she says, “I didn’t mean to snap at you,” her voice breaks, and she doesn’t like that.

He says, “No big deal. You didn’t draw blood. If that’s what you intended, we’ll get out my files later and sharpen your teeth.”

It’s difficult to be angry with this sweet man. In fact, she isn’t. She’s been shaken by a long-unresolved grief and by the sudden recognition of a misgiving that has grown from it.

In time, when she’s sure that she’s in control of her emotions, she continues. “Everyone said my mom was special, bright and funny, so pretty, but I never knew her. My dad was a hero, but he was with me such a short time. What I have left of him is ... fading. Fading. It doesn’t pay to be special in this world, Uncle. In fact, it’s dangerous. I just want our quiet life. Our work, the meadow, the forest—and you.”

“Then I’ll live another eighty-four years.”

“Good,” she says.

Days later, when her uncle continues this conversation, Vida discovers his purpose hasn’t been just to encourage her with loving praise, but also to warn her that a girl with special qualities should live fully, yet with caution in this world of envy, bestial desire, and cruel deceit. The misgiving she’s felt since she was orphaned isn’t irrational; Ogden shares it, and it’s common sense.

She has been keeping a diary since she was ten. In addition to much else, she records in it these conversations with her uncle as accurately as she is able.

By the time Vida has finished showering, dried her hair, and dressed, Lupo has not arrived. She cranks the casement window shut and covers the panes with the embroidered curtain.

In the library, she makes a selection from the collection of vinyl recordings and puts the platter on the turntable. Speakers in all rooms give forth Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4 in G Major, opus 58; Glenn Gould on piano is backed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Above the turntable hangs a pencil portrait of her uncle as a young man, rendered in marvelous detail. In the lower right-hand corner, instead of the artist’s signature, there’s a small, stylized image of a deer, specifically a fawn. Although Vida has lived with it all these years, sometimes when she looks at it, she thinks about what she found on the back of the portrait, after Ogden’s death, and she is moved by the memory.

Before beginning to prepare dinner, she cranks open a kitchen window. No curtain hangs here, and the pleated shade is raised.

If Lupo fails to come this evening, she won’t worry about him. He lives in two worlds with consummate grace, and sometimes she is half convinced that he’s immortal.

9

LYING IN THE DARK

After clearing the table, Vida sits in the library to readMoby-Dick. In the comfort of the ship, having killed a leviathan, Stubb eats a slab of the flesh by the light of a whale-oil lamp. Meanwhile outside, frenzied sharks attack the carcass and are in turn attacked by harpooners. The whale is hoisted for the salvage of its blubber, while its rotting head, which is one-third of its length, hangs over the side of the ship until its valuable contents can be hauled out by the bucketful. These events are so vividly portrayed that the author’s horror—inspired by the arrogance, avarice, and cruelty of human beings—can be endured only for thirty pages in one sitting. Vida doesn’t enjoy the novel, but it offers a warning alike to the one that her uncle delivered. To compensate for the darkness of the prose, she plays Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, K. 622, for the golden light of its ecstatic sound.

Before going to bed, she cranks shut the window in the kitchen and puts down the pleated shade. Lupo never comes while she sleeps.

Perhaps her intuitive expectation of a visitor was inspired not by him but by the watcher in the woods.

Lying in the dark, head pillowed, she ends her day by speaking the same words with which she has ended every day for years. “My life passes like a shadow. Yet a little while, and all will be consummated.”

She falls asleep as the last word issues through her lips.

10

NATURE’S BOUNTY

Tuesday morning, Vida rises in a bright spirit of expectation and preparation. This is a fine day for preliminary gem evaluation and for seeking the bounty of field and forest. In summer, there will be blackberries and wild strawberries and many varieties of mushrooms. Here in the spring, she is limited to a mushroom hunt.

After breakfast, she spends an hour in her workshop, using a loupe to examine the gemstones found the previous day. Of eighteen sapphires, fifteen are in shades of green or yellow, so small that they allow minimal or no cutting. They are best used to enhance decorative items or for inexpensive multistring necklaces called rivières; she has a client who buys them by the pound. The remaining three are blue and promising, in need of study prior to being cut.

After she puts all the sapphires in the tumbler-polisher, the pleasant silence of the room gives way to the equally comforting hum and slosh and muffled rattling from the small machine.

In addition to the sizable butterscotch-yellow stone, there are three smaller chrysoberyls that might be called canary yellow. In rough form, they give her no reason to expect they contain either the oriented inclusions that will produce a cat’s-eye effect or the angled fibers of an asterism that will result in a highly desirable star cabochon. She puts them aside for further consideration.

When she sets out on the mushroom hunt, she takes the can of bear spray in her belt holster, though not in expectation of a bear.

She never carries a gun of any kind, for there is nothing in this world that she can imagine shooting. Her uncle owned a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol. He insisted that she learn to use all those weapons, and out of respect for him, she took instruction. Since his death, they have been in their latched cases, stored on a high shelf above the food supply, in the cellar. She takes the guns down only rarely and always because of the good memories of Ogden that they evoke.

She makes no effort to survey the eastern woods in which the watcher has thus far remained. Until he reveals himself, her interest in him is for the most part exhausted.

She crosses the meadow to the northern flank of the forest and enters the trees. The lowbruu-oooof rock doves gives way to the humming whistle of their wings as flocks take off at her approach, effortlessly threading their way through the maze of boughs and branches, through layered shadows and intrusions of sunlight.

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