Girlwood (18 page)

They sat in silence as Polly's mom gathered the extra pancakes on a plate.

"We'll leave her more food and blankets," her mother said. "I never told you this, Polly, but that shelter you and the girls made was amazing."

Polly smiled proudly and was about to tell her mom how they'd built it when the doorbell rang. Four months had passed since Bree left, but her mother still raced for the door. There were probably a thousand disappointments coming, but Polly couldn't see any way around that. She'd found Girlwood only after Bree disappeared, and she'd seen Bree only after that horrible party. Maybe the good stuff didn't even register without the bad.

But it wasn't Bree or even Baba at the door. It was Joe Meyer.

"Um," he said. "Can I talk to Polly?"

Polly stood in the dining room in her yellow happy-face pajamas, her hair not as wild as it would have been if she'd left it long, but still a short frizzy nest. She couldn't believe Joe Meyer was standing there, that he even knew where she lived. When he looked around her mother to smile at Polly, it felt like her skin caught fire.

"Of course," her mother said. She raised an eyebrow as she walked to the kitchen, and Polly blushed even redder.

Joe wore a green sweater slightly darker than his eyes and looked so far out of her league it wasn't even funny. "Hey," he said.

"Hey."

He stepped into the entry and closed the door. Joe Meyer was in her house! Polly wished she could call Olivia and tell her.

"Yesterday," he said, then her eyes seemed to freeze him in place. They both stood awkwardly, leaning one way and then the other. She was surprised at his uncertainty. She'd had him pegged as one of those people who always know what to say.

"I'm sorry about the party," he went on at last. "I know that's a special place to you. Carly was all into that swimming pool thing, but on the way back she didn't seem so excited anymore. She was real quiet—spooked or something."

Polly stared at him.

"About this thing with me and Carly," Joe went on, shifting his weight again. "I was amazed when she first went out with me. I wasn't part of that group, you know? I wasn't anybody. I'll admit it was great for a while, being so popular, but then ... You wouldn't believe some of the stuff they do, the things they say about people. Maybe I should have done something sooner, but last night was the last straw. Carly and I broke up. I wanted you to know."

His words produced the strangest sensation in Polly's chest, as if there were a sparrow inside her flapping its wings.
She was breathing so hard she turned away so he wouldn't think she was having a heart attack.

He cleared his throat. "I thought maybe, you know ... the mall's open. If you're not busy."

Was he asking her out? Polly expected Carly to burst in laughing at any moment. This had to be a joke. Everyone knew she was the forest freak. Swamp Girl.

"You're not making this easy," Joe said, laughing uncomfortably.

She widened her eyes in surprise. She'd figured her thoughts were as obvious as the happy faces on her pajamas, but maybe Bree had been right when she'd said guys were clueless. Joe might have no idea that right this second she was imagining what it would be like if he kissed her. He might think she was totally indifferent to him, and even though that was a kind of power too, it didn't seem worthy of a girl from Girlwood.

Polly stepped forward, her stomach doing somersaults. "I'm not busy," she said, and smiled.

***

Polly could have debated endlessly over what clothes Joe might like, but instead she took ten seconds and put on her favorite brown track pants and a cream-colored fleece. Brushing her hair was pointless. Even her short curls were impervious to combs.

Polly's mother offered to drive them the half mile to the mall, but they decided to walk. It was a cold, cloudless morning. The roads had been plowed and the snow piled on the curb like long white hedges. Polly didn't tell him that she hated the mall, all the rock 'n' roll clothes stores and embarrassing Victoria's Secret displays, not to mention the teenagers who shrieked at one another across the atrium as if nobody else existed.

"You need to buy something?" she asked.

"Nah," Joe said, his breath steaming as he spoke. "We'll just hang out. There's nothing else to do. Everybody goes to the Galleria on Saturdays."

Everybody but Polly.

They went quickly through Mervyns and out into the crowded mall. After a loop around the upper floor, all the displays began to look identical to Polly, nothing but headless mannequins in washed-out blue jeans and skimpy shirts.

"Let's go to Caravan," Joe said, and actually took her hand for a moment. The sparrow came back again, banging against Polly's chest. They headed into the store, past a row of crucifixes to the lava lamps and fiber-optic skulls at the back. Joe must have realized it wasn't her thing because he touched her hand again, just for a second, and asked her if she wanted a soft pretzel.

He got himself an Orange Julius and they sat on a bench
overlooking the fountain. A toddler escaped his mother and climbed into the water, grabbing coins. Polly feared Carly or Joy might come along, but no one from school had shown up yet.

Polly's head began to pound. It could have been the smell of bleach or the toddler screaming when his mother picked him up and forced him back into his stroller, but either way she wanted to go home. All of a sudden, it seemed like a test. Could she be a normal girl or not? Could she straighten her hair, get some fashionable clothes, and be likable? Joe had been talking about all the sports he played—track, basketball, karate, football—and now he paused, like she was supposed to list her activities too. Did hiking count? Foraging for food? Flying around the grove?

His smile faded as she remained silent. He looked away and sipped his Orange Julius, then suddenly he turned to face her.

"I'm going to be a research scientist," he said.

That made her sit up. She hadn't figured him for something so ambitious.

"Really?"

"My mom has lupus and I want to discover a drug to cure it. She's pretty much bedridden now."

"I didn't know that. About your mom."

He shrugged. She could see all his freckles again. The sunlight through the atrium must have brought them out.

"It's kind of a sick joke in our house," he said. "I want to make drugs, and my brother, Brad, will be first in line to take them."

Polly squeezed her soft pretzel, amazed that Joe Meyer, of all people, had gone through some of the same things she had.

"Don't get me wrong," he went on. "I love my brother. You'll think this is crazy, but I don't think the guy selling his soul for crystal meth
is
my brother. He's either asleep or in a fog. Lost somewhere, like your sister."

Polly was about to ask him if he thought there was any chance of getting them back when a sharp pain suddenly shot down her leg.

"You okay?" Joe asked.

Polly dropped her pretzel and stood, even though it felt like knife blades from her waist to her feet.

"Polly?" Joe's voice seemed to be coming from far away. "What's wrong?"

She tried to concentrate on his face, but every nerve in her body felt like it was being sliced in half. When her legs gave out, Joe caught her. He eased her back down on the bench as a young mother rushed to get her a cup of water from the drinking fountain. The throbbing eased for a moment, then started up again with a rip. There was a crowd around her now, half a dozen worried faces.

"I have to go," Polly said, struggling to get to her feet again.

"Polly, maybe you should—"

But Polly felt an overwhelming need to run. Despite the pain, she pushed past Joe and raced through the food court, grimacing with every step. She had a hand on the exit door when Joe caught up to her and held her by the shoulders.

"Wait a minute. Just wait! Tell me what's wrong."

Her eyes filled with tears. She knew what the pain meant now. Carly and her father weren't going to wait until spring to cut down the larches. The stabbing in Polly's legs was saw blades, the roaring in her ears the sound of chain saws. Every wizened old tree in Girlwood, including her grandmother's, was coming down.

"The grove," she managed to say. "They're at the grove."

He could have said anything. It was magic when he chose the right words.

"I'm coming with you."

Osha is named for the Native American word meaning "bear," and it is a sacred healing plant to many tribes. Bears are often spotted eating the plant, presumably for its healing properties. Osha has been used to treat everything from serious respiratory disorders to viral infections to coughs. The entire plant is edible and smells like strong, spicy celery.

Joe might have been a track star, but he didn't know the woods the way Polly did. She took every shortcut and easily outpaced him, but even at a dead run she was still too late.

The spiny devil's club, so effective at hiding the grove, had been no match for chain saws. The plant had been obliterated, hacked up into pieces and splayed across the snow, leaving a six-foot-wide opening into Girlwood.

The silence was total. Whoever had been there—Carly or her father or just the hired men with chain saws—was gone, yet Polly couldn't make herself look through that opening. She turned her back to it, like a little kid who thinks she can close her eyes and make the bogeyman disappear.

Joe came charging out of the pines, shattering the quiet. He took one look at the remains of the grove and said, "Maybe you shouldn't go in."

Polly squared her shoulders and turned around. Even before she saw the damage, she noticed the sky—a wide expanse of blue where there had been only green before. She squinted into the empty brightness, then slowly lowered her gaze. No tree had been spared. Every last larch had been sliced off at the stump and dropped unceremoniously in a tangled heap. Bridget's shelter had been crushed, and the boulder where they'd left food for Bree was buried six trunks deep. The air smelled of gasoline.

"Oh" was all Polly could say.

She didn't realize Joe was beside her until he squeezed her arm. Time stopped, and she couldn't get it going again. She was stuck in the worst moment, replaying it over and over, the way her mother had been stuck in the day Bree left.

"I don't think Carly wanted
this,
" Joe said quietly.

Polly squeezed her eyes shut. It didn't matter what Carly wanted. The damage was done. Polly tried to picture the grove the way it had been, but even her imagination had been hacked up. She couldn't see Girlwood any way but ruined.

She opened her eyes, willing back tears. She clambered over the mounds of trunks, wanting to identify each fallen tree individually—the sapling that had always been a bit of a rebel, standing alone near the devil's club; the ones that used to hog the sunlight; the shadow lovers with their coats of furry moss. She wouldn't stop until she found them all.

Joe didn't ask what she was doing. He merely helped her drag away debris. After nearly an hour of digging through the wreckage, Polly finally came to the massive trunk of Baba's tree.

She touched the wood and used every bit of imagination she had to see it still standing—its trunk ramrod straight and unyielding, its branches laden with feathery needles, its canopy so wide it blocked the sun. Instead of shocked silence, she pretended there was a whistle of wind still blowing through the tree's branches and the scrabbling of squirrels up the weathered bark.

She smiled a little, imagining what those tiny feet and claws would feel like on her own skin, the weight of a crow on her shoulder, a robin coiling her hair into a nest. She closed her eyes and pictured her feet as roots and the comforting feel of cool earth around her ankles. As the skin on her arms turned brown and crinkly, her fingers curled upward, straining for the sky.

She imagined the cycles of snow and rain, heat and fire, cooling winds and winter's chill once again. She told time in seasons, in the moon's three faces, in the hawks born in her branches and the bears who died at her feet.

Polly stroked Baba's tree and pictured even stranger things. A grizzled man's face—one she'd seen only in a photograph on Baba's dresser—and a wild garden. A daughter, then the daughter's children. Herself and Bree, scampering through the woods.

Polly opened her eyes, one word tearing at her throat. "Baba," she said.

***

She left Joe and ran, but once again, she was not quick enough.

Baba sat in her garden, her back against the trunk of the purple ash. Baba had once told Polly that an ash in the garden is like a larch in the woods. Both trees of life, passageways between worlds.

"Baba!" Polly cried.

Polly fell to her knees in the snow beside her grandmother. Baba's eyes were half closed, her breathing labored. The rainbow now streamed from her body up the trunk of the ash, staining the brown bark violet and yellow and green.

Baba moistened her lips, trying to speak. "Don't ... be scared."

But Polly was terrified. She'd proven she could live without a lot of things: without popularity and her dad, without Olivia and Bree, even without the grove. But she could not live without her grandmother, the one person who looked at her, always, as if she was exactly as she should be. And worse than that, Polly knew Bree couldn't survive without Baba either.

Her grandmother's breathing turned raspier, more like a gurgle than a breath.

"Baba?" Polly cried. "Have you tried the osha? Remember that sick bear who ate it and got better?"

As Baba's eyes began to close, Polly squeezed her hand. "Tell me what to do," Polly pleaded. "Please! Even with the snow, I can find any plant you need. I can do it now. Just tell me what you need."

Her grandma opened her eyes. It seemed to take all her energy to do it, as if she were lifting a hundred-pound weight.

"I ... loved to walk," Baba said.

A wail escaped Polly's lips. There had to be something in her grandmother's kitchen that would help; if not osha, then heal-all or lichen. A magic plant, a spell. It was unbearable to think that some things were beyond fixing. Beyond magic. Beyond what even Baba could do.