Page 9 of The Forest of Lost Souls

Battered about the chest and head, José is startled. He loses his balance. The speakers’ platform is a mere seven feet above the pavement. The portable steps, which have been rolled against the stage and locked in place, feature metal treads and handrails. He stumbles and drops to his knees and pitches off the stage, headfirst down the stairs, unable to arrest his fall.

From her position, Vida isn’t able to see what has happened to him. However, judging by the reactions of the other speakers and by the cries from those at the front of the crowd, she’s afraid that José might have suffered a serious injury even in that short plunge. As the truck horn falls silent, she tries to press forward. The shock of the incident seems to have congealed the multitudes into one creature with thousands of incoordinate limbs that resist her passage.

As at any large public event, EMTs are present to respond to any emergency. By the time Vida reaches the stage, José has been transferred into an ambulance. A siren shrills.

Kettleton Memorial is eight blocks away. Her pickup is parked behind the library, in the opposite direction from the hospital. The streets will be clogged with traffic if the milling crowd disperses. In the clutches of anguish-anxiety-dread, Vida doesn’t fully realize she’s set out on foot, running on a sidewalk, until the courthouse is a full block behind her.

Time and distance are distorted as in a nightmare. Eight small-town blocks seem to stretch into eight miles. Although she’s young and fit, with the stamina to endure a marathon, she feels as though she’s run so far that she’ll collapse in breathless exhaustion, for her heartbeat is accelerated by both effort and foreboding.

When she arrives at the hospital and hurries under the roof of the portico at the emergency room entrance, no ambulance is present, and she realizes that she hasn’t heard a siren for several blocks.

Pneumatic doors whisk out of her way. An auburn-haired and freckled woman with emerald eyes sits behind the reception desk.

Vida says, “My fiancé,” even though she has not accepted José’s proposal, says it because it’s an incantation to ward off evil, a petition and prayer. “José Nochelobo, my fiancé, something happened at the courthouse.”

The receptionist is compassionate and gracious, but kindness can pierce with a unique pain when it conveys news that cannot be endured. “Oh, dear girl,” she says as she rises from her chair. “Oh, God, honey, I’m so sorry. Here, come here, sit down.” But Vida does not want to sit down, and though she can read the message that those emerald eyes convey as surely as she can read the inclusions in a gemstone, she says, “I need to be with him, he’ll be okay if I’m with him, take me to him.” But she can’t be taken to him because he is not here. The receptionist holds her,and although Vida doesn’t want to be held because of what being held in these circumstances must mean, she nevertheless finds herself holding fast to the woman much as a shipwrecked sailor holds fast to whatever debris will keep him afloat. José’s neck was broken, and he died either at the site of the incident or in transit. He’s been taken to the coroner, who will perform an autopsy, and that is it, that is all, that is the end. That is the official story.

14

THE COMFORT OF THE MOON

The January night when Vida’s police-officer father dies, the moon is not where it should be in the sky.

From early childhood, Vida has been fascinated by the moon in its eight phases, though she delights most of all in its fullness. She has dreams in which she lives in a castle in a lunar crater. Other dreams are ornamented with scores of luminous moons the size of baseballs that hang in the air in her humble home, as weightless as Earth’s ancient satellite floating in space; they rotate away from her, this mistress of the moon, to grant her unobstructed passage as she moves room to room. Sometimes she wades through a dream river, reaching down to pull small moons out of the water as if they were fish. There is a dream of a meadow where, while sheep graze and wolves watch without violent intention, the mother who died in childbirth reaches up to pull down the moon, which fits her hand as if its great size and far position have been an illusion, and Mother throws the moon to Vida, and Vida throws it back to her mother, and with each exchange of that sphere, the two of them grow closer, until they are in each other’s arms.

The night that Vida becomes an orphan, the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Valenski, as sweet and wrinkled as a raisin, is babysitting until Father comes home from a tour of duty ending at midnight.At 10:07, according to the bedside clock, Vida is awakened when a hand smooths her hair off her brow. She startles up from her pillow, but she is alone. As she swings her legs out of bed and sits on the edge of the mattress, she hears her father speak her name five times, his voice softer with each repetition. Although usually deep in darkness at this hour, the bedroom is in part revealed by soft, silver light, and the remaining shadows are not black but midnight blue—or so she will remember them in years to come—for the moon is huge and framed within her window. That uncurtained pane faces due north, and never before has the moon been captured in it.

Vida knows she’s awake, even though the moment is infused with the strangeness of a dream. She gets out of bed and steps to the window and gazes at the immense moon that seems to be plunging from its orbit, at the world washed in its eerie radiance. Although she knows she should be afraid, she isn’t. She curls up in the big chair and draws around her a knitted afghan that’s draped across the arm. She feels safe in the glow of the misplaced moon, and soon she falls asleep again.

Shortly after midnight, she is awakened by Mrs. Valenski, who enters the room in a yellow fan of hallway light, talking to God, asking the Lord for help, her voice quaking with emotion. The old woman sees the bed empty and Vida rising out of sleep by the window. The chair is large enough for woman and child. Mrs. Valenski slides into it and enfolds the girl in her arms. The full moon is now in another quarter of the sky where it belongs, invisible from this north window. The moon is gone, and so is Vida’s father.

15

A WHITE FEDORA

Although eleven months have passed since José Nochelobo died, the visit by Deputy Nash Deacon is connected to that tragedy. Vida is not surprised by this. Since that horrific afternoon in front of the courthouse,everythingthat happens in her life is intimately related to that cruel event. The consequences of José’s death arrive in little ripples and big waves, and she expects a long time will pass before the last of them washes over her, allowing something good and clean to come her way. Life always eventually offers us a lamp to press back the darkness humanity brought into it so very long ago, a lamp if we are able to see it and seize it; so said her uncle, who had seined her from the sediment of the city.

As the last light of day fades beyond the open kitchen window, she enjoys Parmesan-dusted fettuccini and peas in butter sauce, with a mound of the morels that are among the tastiest of all mushrooms.

In her current mood, Mozart’s G Minor Symphony no. 40 is the ideal accompaniment to dinner. She wonders what Lupo thinks of the music if he is nearby in the night and contemplating a visit.

After dinner, she retreats to the library. She wants no more ofMoby-Dickright now. She returns it to the shelves, perhaps forever, and takes down Emily Brontë’sWuthering Heights, whichshe’s read twice, though she has no illusions that the character of Heathcliff can prepare her for the likes of Nash Deacon. She understands the deputy and is well prepared for him.

During chapter 13, she falls asleep in the armchair and dreams of Lupo. She is in Kettleton, where fog has invaded like a portent of a sea that will rise here following a cataclysmic change in the contours of the planet’s crust. But for the pale candescence of a full moon, which the fog veils but also transmits faintly into every street and dismal alley, no light burns in the town. All is quiet, as if the residents have been washed away from here and to a mass grave in some terrible abyss. She wants desperately to be in the warmth and safety of her stone house, but the layout of the town isn’t as she remembers, and in fact this Kettleton is an inconstant maze that’s being continuously reconfigured. She almost cries out for her uncle to help her, to guide her, but she is stricken by the idea that if he answers her and appears, this will prove that she is as dead as he is and can never escape this place. Instead, she hears herself whisper,“Lupo.”Before she can repeat his name at greater volume, he manifests out of the fog, his lantern eyes aglow with the warmest light she has ever seen.

Wuthering Heightsslips off her lap and falls to the floor of the library as she wakes and sits forward in the armchair. He’s nearby. She knows, without knowing how she knows, that he’s nearby.

She steps into the kitchen, where she has left the window open, but Lupo is not there. She waits. She speaks his name. Still he does not appear.

When he visits, he seems to seek only companionship. He likes to listen to her voice. He will submit to her touch. Sometimes he accepts food, but not always. There have been nights when hesleeps at the foot of her bed for a while, though he’s always gone in the morning, as if he was never there.

He seems to know when she is lonely and is aware of those rare moments when anxiety afflicts her, as it does now. Some would say that she anthropomorphizes his behavior, attributing to him human emotions and intentions that he doesn’t possess. Those are people who see only the surface of the infinite layers of our laminated reality.

In the hallway, convinced that Lupo waits on the porch, Vida hesitates with her hand on the knob of the front door. If he’s out there, she has a special and timely task for him.

She turns to the closet to the left of the door and plucks the white fedora off the shelf above the rod on which her coats hang. She had found it after the fact, when she’d disposed of everything else. She should have thrown it out or burned it. However, there’s nothing about the hat that obviously connects it to Belden Bead; it’s stylish, yes, in his signature way, but it’s not the only one of its kind in the world. No doubt there’s DNA on it—loose hairs, sweat, skin oils—that might be damning in a courtroom. Until now, Vida has thought she kept it as a kind of totem, a symbol of her triumph, here to remind her, in times of anxiety, that she is brave and competent in a crisis. Now she wonders if she kept it because she had an unconscious, prescient recognition that a time would come when she would need it as she needs it now. Experience has taught her signs and portents are to be taken seriously.

When she opens the front door, Lupo is on the porch.

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