Winterwood

I lie in bed in the loft and think of the boy.

Oliver Huntsman.

The way his eyes twitched to mine when I spoke, and hung there, a ripe green that reminded me of the grass that pushes up from the soil in spring. A kindness in them. The way his wet hair dried in soft little waves around his ears. The way he held his breath just before he spoke, considering each word—each syllable. The way my heart swung up into my throat and made me dizzy. A feeling I tried to tamp down, to ignore. But couldn’t.

I think of the woods, the moment I found him in the snow: how his eyes snapped open, the whites like cracked eggshells. Fear trembling across his lips. What did he see in those woods? Why did the forest let him live? I wish I could peel him open, cut away his hard exterior, and see what he hides inside.

Now he sleeps downstairs, and I know that even the heat from the woodstove won’t warm the chill from his flesh, won’t cure what haunts him.

He needs medicine. Not the kind from a white room in a sterile white building prescribed by people in white coats. He needs forest medicine.

The only way to cure a chill caused by the forest is to use a remedy grown inside it. My grandmother’s words are always buzzing along my skull, always close.

I tiptoe back down the stairs, past the kitchen, to the rear of the house. Quiet as a winter mouse. Quiet as the seeds that fall to the ground in late spring.

I push open the door to my mother’s room and step inside. It smells like her: vanilla bean and honey. Always the scent of honey. It sticks to her, in her wavy auburn hair, honeycomb under her fingernails. It can never be properly washed off. Not completely. Three weeks ago, she left on a delivery to the coastal town of Sparrow with four crates of her wild clover honey placed safely in the back of her truck. During a full moon, she collects the sticky comb from the wild hives inside the Wicker Woods, then funnels it into glass jars and delivers them to small boutiques and organic food markets along the west coast. Stores pay a premium for her Wicker Wood Honey, said to be sweeter than real cane sugar and able to cure all manner of skin ailments—including hives and poison oak and sunburns.

I haven’t spoken to her since she left, since the phones have been down and the road blocked. But we’re used to winter storms. To being cut off. And although maybe I should feel alone, isolated and afraid without her, I don’t. She and I have always been more opposite than alike. I am the daughter who wants to be a Walker, and she is the mother who pretends she isn’t: a Walker or a mother. She feels betrayed by my curiosity, my need to know our past—to know who I am.

To understand the darkness that lives in my veins.

And I feel betrayed by her: her silence when she’s home, her refusal to talk about Grandma or about the Walkers who came before us.

I prefer it when she’s away, when I can be alone in the old house.

Mom has never been one to worry about me anyway—she knows I can take care of myself until the road thaws. I could take care of myself even if she never came back.

Inside her room, I kneel down on the floor and reach my arms beneath the bed, past a discarded, half-burnt candle; past dust bunnies that skitter away; and past a pale-yellow sock missing its mate, until I find the wooden box she keeps hidden.

I slide it out, resting the box on the floor in front of me, then quietly open the lid.

Inside rest an assortment of keepsakes: old photographs and family letters kept safely inside their envelopes, my grandmother’s pearl necklace, an old music box once owned by Henrietta Walker. Family heirlooms tucked away beneath a bed where they will eventually be forgotten. Things that remind me of who I am—that make me feel less alone.

And under it all, I find the book.

I touch the faded words handwritten on the front: Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine. And sketched below it is a compass with the four cardinal directions: north, south, east, west.

But I don’t open the book—not here in my mother’s room, where I fear she might sense it once she returns, sense that I sat on her floor with the book fanned open in front of me. So I tuck it under my arm, the weight of my family history inside its pages, and leave the honey-scented room before I leave too many clues that I was here.

With the fire roaring downstairs, my own room is sweltering when I return, and I push open one of the windows—letting the snow spiral inside and settle on the floor. I grew up in this room, in this loft overlooking the lake. I was born here too, seventeen years ago under a watery full moon while a rainstorm flooded the banks of the lake and turned the shore to mud. All Walkers are coaxed into the world when the moon is brightest. As if our birthright were calling to us.

I place the book on the bed, feeling like a thief.