In Green's Dominion
by Dale Bailey

I found me in a gloomy wood, astray 
Gone from the path direct.
-Dante, Inferno
1
Come to me- 
The voice arose unbidden, coaxing, earth-succored, barely a voice at all: a whisper of wind and trees, a rustle of greenery driving up through rich loam. She saw a dim figure, a shadow moving in the recess of a tangled wood. 
Come to me- 
More than fifty years had passed. Sylvia slept restlessly and woke with no memory of what had passed in the night. 
Even now, it was the voice she heard in dreams. 

· · · · · 

2
She fooled herself into believing it had started with the incident in the garden, but of course it began before that. With the want of a word, maybe, and maybe before that, all the way back- 
-in England, it began in England- 
-on the day when she walked out of a classroom for the last time. The incident in the garden marked a turning point, perhaps the turning point-yet even then it was the word that concerned her. She had been a connoisseur of words her entire life, reserving for them an appetite usually lavished on more sensual pleasures. It disturbed her that now, here, in this late stage of her decline, she could find no word to describe the state of her soul. 
About her physical state, Sylvia had no illusions. She could think of a plethora of words to describe that, ranging from the innocuous (elderly and superannuated) to the hateful (desiccated and obsolete, among others). In the parlance of the day, she was a senior citizen; in the secret language of her heart, she was old. 
Just old. 
But she had no ready language for her soul. 
On a narrow shelf in her study stood two slim volumes, her life's work-her corpus, she called it in her grimmer moments. A book of poems published when she was twenty-four, hardly more than a girl back from her post-graduate tour of England; a work of negligible scholarship published much later, during her years at Holman, when the ardor of youth had hardened into austerity and the failure of her muse became intolerable. Yet this was not much consolation after all: her past expressiveness haunted her present, coloring these last days with a sour tincture of desperation that only grew more oppressive. 
She fidgeted. She could not concentrate. Words seemed to swarm the very air around her, ghostly, insubstantial. And so it went, until at last her discontent entered a more desperate season. 
Afterwards, she remembered the moment only in fragments, bright razor-edged shards of perception. The garden behind the house, where the wood encroached in a wild tangle. The April air bright and dense with moisture. A single lonely birdcall. 
Crouching there, her fingers knotted around the spade, Sylvia saw how the flesh of her hands had shrunk from the marbled ridges of her veins. Dizziness overwhelmed her. And then the world blossomed with fierce beauty. A fecund vapor breathed from the ripe soil, root woven and strewn with the regenerative fragments of spade-torn worms. Sunlight bathed her in fragrant waves. Her heart lurched. Involuntarily, half-uncertain how to account for her sudden panic, Sylvia cried out, lifted her hands to her face, and saw that the sharp edge of the spade had slit her ring finger. A single ruby droplet fell away. The thirsty earth drank it in. 

· · · · · 

3
"Horny," said Daphne the next day at lunch. 
"Excuse me?" Sylvia placed her sandwich atop a stack of exam booklets and stared at the woman behind the desk. 
Thirty-seven, unmarried, dressed in lime-green pants and a baggy cream sweater, Daphne wore her weight like armor, her beauty-which was genuine if unfashionable, the voluptuous generosity of a Renoir-sheathed in smooth protective fat. "Horny," she said once again. "Maybe that's the word you're looking for." She swallowed a spoonful of yogurt and grinned. 
"I'm seventy-four years old." 
"You want something fancier? Ennui, maybe? Malaise?" 
"All I'm saying- 
"All I'm saying is, you're human, you've got needs." 
"It's more complicated than that." 
"Oh?" 
"Something happened yesterday." Sylvia shifted on her chair. Daphne's office smelled of books and chalk dust, but Sylvia found it disconcerting all the same. The books had odd titles: Geographies of Female Desire, Text(SEX)uality: Eros in Post-Modern Fiction, others. Sex, that rude biological imperative, glistening and organic, thrusting its way even into this sacrosanct retreat. 
"What happened?" 
Sylvia sighed and looked out the window. Two stories below, students clustered in groups or strolled across the quad toward the library. "Nothing. I was in the garden. I felt a little dizzy is all." 
Daphne pursed her lips. She stirred her yogurt for a moment in silence. Then: "You miss teaching, don't you?" 
"My life is very full." 
"Are you working on anything? Are you writing?" 
"Trying," Sylvia lied. And then, an impulse she could not quite define compelled her to elaborate: "I'm trying to write poetry again, but it's not easy. It's been so long." 
"I really think you need someone." 
"You don't have anyone." 
"In case you haven't noticed, I'm not conventionally beautiful," Daphne said breezily. "And anyway, I'm not the issue here." 
"Am I? Is that what I've become? An issue?" 
In the succeeding silence, they stared across the desk at one another. Daphne skated her spoon around the rim of the yogurt cup. "I have this," she said, waving the spoon in a gesture that took in the office, the campus, everything-the entire life Sylvia had surrendered. "Besides, I don't mean a lover, not really. God save us both from lovers. I was just having some fun with you." 
"Then what do you mean?" 
"You're not getting any younger, Sylvia. At your age, you have to look at life a little differently." 
"I suppose you mean I should stop living altogether." 
"Don't be ridiculous. All I'm saying is you should slow down a little. You don't need a garden, for example, and certainly not such a big one." 
"And if I want one?" 
"Of course you want one. But it's not wise. Anything could happen out there." 
The wall clock ticked, dividing the silence into discrete segments of discomfort. A chorus of laughter drifted up from the quad. Sylvia began to pack the remains of her lunch. 
"Sylvia, what are you doing?" 
A spoon clattered to the floor. Sylvia snatched it up with shaking fingers. "What does it look like I'm doing?" 
"That's no way to behave-" 
"I'm not a child. I'm capable of deciding when my behavior is inappropriate." 
"I'm just concerned, Sylvia. I think it might be a good idea for you to hire someone to stay with you, that's all." 
Sylvia picked up her lunch. 
Daphne stood, looking stricken; her earrings dazzled the room with bright reflective coins. "Sylvia-" 
"You were my student once, Daphne. I won't have you speak to me this way." 
"Sylvia, please-" 
"Please what? We have been friends for years-friends! I am an adult, I have a Ph.D., I have written two books. I am not ready to be packed off to the old folk's home, and I certainly don't need a babysitter. I need a friend, but I'm not sure I have any." Standing there, clasping her lunch bag to her fallen breasts, Sylvia felt tears start up- 
-but no- 
-she would not allow herself that weakness. She drew herself erect. "I will not be patronized," she said, and she let herself out of the office, shutting the door quietly behind her. 

· · · · · 

Half-blinded by tears, she turned toward the elevators, and ran headlong into a wiry young man in faded blue jeans and a tweed sport coat. "Dr. Woodbine," he said, blinking owlishly at her from under a thicket of unruly brown hair, and for a moment she clutched desperately for his name. Robin something, her replacement. He'd called one day to talk about a syllabus he'd been having some trouble with, but otherwise they'd never spoken. Sylvia had never wanted to be one of those hapless emeriti profs who continued to orbit Holman like the cinders of burnt out stars-hopeless, pitiful creatures-and so she'd broken with the college-Daphne excepted, of course, but Daphne had always been an exception, from the day Sylvia read her first in-class essay and realized what a bright, bright girl she was, this fat unhappy child at the back of her class. 
What was his name? And then she had it. "Professor Green. I didn't see you." 
"I know. You had a real head of steam up there. Say-" He looked at her closely. "You all right?" 
"I'm fine," she said. She waited for him to step aside and let her pass, but he only stood there, fidgeting, his mouth screwed into a thoughtful grimace. After a moment, she said, "Are you settling in here at Holman, then?" 
He rubbed his face. "Oh, yeah, yeah I am." He laughed nervously. 
"Is your semester going well?" 
"Great. I meant to thank you for your notes by the way. The ones on Capellanus?" 
She wasn't sure why he had phrased this as a question. 
"Daphne-Dr. Maclean-said they'd help," he went on, "and she was right. Dr. Maclean, I mean." 
"Yes. Well. Always glad to help. If there's anything else I can do-" She lifted her eyebrows. 
"Right. You bet." 
He ran a hand through his thatch of hair, started to speak, reconsidered. 
"I'll just be going then." 
She stepped past him and moved toward the elevators, conscious of his eyes upon her back, conscious also of Daphne's closed door. She was obscurely hurt that Daphne hadn't- 
"Dr. Woodbine." 
She turned. 
"There is one thing actually. You could do to help, I mean." He touched her elbow, drawing her into the alcove by the stairwell. He stood there, bouncing uncertainly on his heels. 
"What's that?" 
"It's about Daphne? Dr. Maclean?" 
"Yes." 
"I-Well, I couldn't help noticing that you're friends, the way you come up and have lunch with her every Thursday?" 
"Yes. Daphne was my student, here at Holman actually, years and years ago." 
"Right, well, what I was wondering, see, was, is she … you know, seeing anyone?" 
"Daphne?" 
"Yeah." 
She hesitated, a wave of obscure emotion welling up within her. The alcove seemed oppressive suddenly, crowded with Green's nervous energy. She could smell him, a faint woodsy scent of coffee and something else, something earthy and organic, as if he'd broken a light sweat beneath his clothes. Not unpleasant, but too much somehow. Somehow overpowering. 
"No," she said. "Not that I know of." 
"Oh great, that's great. You don't think she'd be … you know-" 
"Really, Professor Green, I can't speak for her." 
"Yeah, I know, right." He paused. "Well, if you wouldn't mention this to her-" 
"Of course not." 
"Thanks, then," he said. He nodded, lifted his arm as though he wanted to shake hands, and then drew it back. A moment later, he was gone. She stood there a moment longer, catching her breath, and then, hearing a door- 
-Daphne's door?- 
-open in the hall, she ducked into the stairwell and started home. 

· · · · · 

Which was a mistake. 
In the dank cigarette-smelling stairwell, memory hit her dead on, like a truck. Sylvia stumbled, her heart racing. Her lunch-sack slipped away, and she clutched at the iron rail as if it could anchor her in the present. A dizzying bank of vertigo rolled over her. 
Then, one hand clenched at her breast, Sylvia settled back into the present. Blood throbbed at her temples. The door eased shut behind her with a pneumatic hiss. She gasped when it clamped into its metal frame with a boom that scaled the risers. 
It might have been a prison door. 
In the silence that followed, she felt her dry lips-unwilled, unwilling-shape his name. "John." It was the name of a stranger. "John." 
Forty-three years. Had it been so long? 

· · · · · 

4
She had known him before they became friends-she'd met him when she interviewed at Holman, they'd exchanged pleasantries in the mailroom. Once they'd spoken at a party, but only once; Sylvia usually came to parties late and left early, and John Thistle-she noticed-rarely came at all. He was pleasant but aloof, a bit forbidding. An air of old catastrophe clung to him, something too terrible for words. 
Their first memorable encounter-unforgettable to her, anyway-had come her second year at Holman, on a Friday night. Returning to campus late to collect a forgotten book, Sylvia had come upon him unawares. He hadn't seen her, and afterwards she'd been grateful, for there had been about him an aura of privacy she was loathe to disturb. 
She had been striding down the darkened corridor with the stealthy haste of a woman at night, alone and apprehensive, when she came around a corner into a wedge of golden light. She stopped abruptly, and without pausing to wonder why, stepped back into the shadows. 
The light radiated from John Thistle's half-open office door, and that in itself-even on a Friday night-was not entirely unusual. Pulling into the gravel lot, Sylvia had noticed two or three lighted offices in the dark facade of Ayers Hall. What was unusual-so unusual that she could not forget it-was that John Thistle wasn't doing anything. Not reading or making notes, not staring pensively into the dark well beyond the window, not even sneaking a flask from an open drawer. 
Just nothing. Nothing at all. 
Through the open door, Sylvia could see a wall of books, a length of checkered tile, a desk, barren in the glow of the reading lamp. Thistle sat stiffly, his hands splayed on the desk, his tie loosened. His rough-hewn face, thrown half into shadow, was utterly still, but it was the stillness of becalmed waters, where dangerous currents churn the depths. His hair tumbled in untutored rings over his collar, but there was nothing of vanity in it-a want of female attention maybe, or the riotous vitality that radiated from the man even in repose, but nothing of vanity. 
From the corridor, Sylvia watched for an instant, afraid to breathe. Still he did not move. He merely sat there, patient and enduring as an oak, with something of an oak's weathered dignity. 
A terrible certainty possessed her: he would look up, he would see her standing there in her white dress, ghostly in the shadowy corridor. And though she could not imagine why the idea of such a confrontation might disturb her, it did. It disturbed her very much. She spun silently and fled, her traitorous shoes ringing down the tiled corridor, and then the stairwell, these same torturous stairs, and out, out into an October night chill with rumors of winter. 

· · · · · 

Now, standing in the same stairwell, breathing in the same odors of smoke and damp concrete, her hand curled about the same cool railing-all things being the same, feeling the same-now, this incident flew back to her, palpable as a pressed rose- 
-a leaf- 
-between the pages of a dusty book. 
Forty-three years. 
Sylvia knelt to retrieve her lunch-sack, but she could not shake the feeling that she had somehow stepped into the past. The recollection had a brittle clarity, a disquieting immediacy she associated with senility. She thought of her grandmother in her dotage, chatting tranquilly to people decades lost. 
Shaking her head briskly, Sylvia descended the stairs with a swollen-legged old woman's gait. And though she believed she had quite overcome her confusion by the time she emerged from the stairwell and stepped outside, she was distressed to discover there not the crisp October night she had half-expected, but only April. 

· · · · · 

5
A hawk circling far overhead, a distant speck against the blue spring sky, might have observed her: an old woman fleeing from the little cluster of buildings where she had passed her working life (what kind of life? at what price?); an old woman threading the currents of young people who flowed down the shaded walks, their chatter rising to these rare altitudes as a faint faraway cacophony, mere human noise; an old woman passing now the brick clocktower where the hawk had lately roosted, slipping now beneath the vast canopies of the centuries-old oaks, where lovers lazed this bright April noon, careless of their studies; an old woman moving at last into the town itself, Holman, like the college, with its quaint brick sidewalks, its tiny business district (a grocery market and a book store and a strip of bars just below Fraternity Row), its winding streets, and (had the hawk known to look) the old woman's rambling Victorian farmhouse, swathed in spring finery at the very edge of the deep wood. Higher still, the hawk might have seen the town entire: a small place fast in its bowl of hills, tethered to the bustling world beyond by a few narrow strands of gray concrete, cracked and weather pitted, rent by the deep-thirsting roots of the great trees, the wild wood, the ancient forest rising up to hem the town in, to surround it, to envelop it with the threat and promise of an older world, the powers and dominions of a world that could be beaten back, cut down, that could be paved over and driven into submission with enough vigilance and determination, but that would ever and again reassert its presence, in the shriek of the hawk itself maybe- 
-come to me- 
-drifting down the wind, or in the first blade of grass to thrust through the frost-heaved macadam of some abandoned parking lot; and, yet higher, reaching now to the very limits of its great wings and peering down through shreds of thin high vapor, might have seen even this disappear, might have seen the very curve of the earth, might have seen all this and more and still not seen the lie in the old woman's heart. 
Lie? 
Oh yes, she had lied to Daphne. 
Nearly twenty years of friendship in which Sylvia had never been anything less than honest and now, today, she had lied to her twice. She had promised herself all those years ago never to lie to her students-promised to show them the beauty in the world, yes, but to show them the steely truth of it as well, that beauty did not last, and the earth to its very core was made of iron. 
Yet she had lied. 
Now, hurrying home, Sylvia passed students lunching under trees or drifting classward, all of them talking, talking, talking. The air swarmed with their prattle and everywhere she looked Sylvia saw girls with careful eyes and voices brassy with false confidence. Girls like Daphne all those years ago-Daphne, alone in the back row, overweight and armored with sarcasm, but bursting with shrewd intellect. Sylvia had vowed to reach her then, had succeeded, and ten years later, when Daphne returned to teach at Holman, Sylvia had vowed to befriend her. She had succeeded there, too. And she had never lied to her. 
Until now. 
Lie number one: it was just a dizzy spell. 
In truth, she could not remember what had happened in the garden, could recall only the smell of the air and the slant of sunshine and that strange light which had blossomed in every surface of leaf and earth. And her heart, her heart hurling itself at the cage of her breast like a maddened bird. 
Perspiring, suddenly afraid, Sylvia paused in the shadow of an enormous oak arching above the sidewalk. A car slipped by. She swallowed. There were other things she might have said if the conversation with Daphne had gone differently. 
The incident in the car, for example. Coming home from the supermarket, at an intersection not two blocks from her house, she had forgotten which way to turn. She had hesitated, frozen with alarm, until the driver behind her touched her horn. Pulling to the curb, Sylvia had watched the other car move past, a station wagon full of kids with a bright red sticker pasted to the bumper: Choose life. 
Funny how the mind worked. You could forget the most basic facts of your existence, you could forget how to find your way home, but the most insignificant things imprinted themselves on your mind forever. She didn't think she'd ever forget that ridiculous bumper sticker; it seemed in its blind certainty to epitomize the absurdity of her predicament, and she had still been staring at it when she burst into tears. That's when it came to her. A left. A left turn. And just as suddenly the tears had turned to laughter, glassy laughter edged with hysteria, and somehow that had frightened her even more. She might have said that to Daphne-but how could she? 
So she had hinted only-just a little dizziness-and in the end she had lied. 
"I'm writing poetry again," she had said, another lie, except- 
-and here, at the very edge of town, Sylvia turned the corner and saw her house, her familiar, orderly house, with flowers, everywhere flowers, tumbling like waterfalls from window-boxes, nodding like drowsy old men in planters, bowing in neat rows in bed after glistening bed- 
-except maybe that wasn't a lie. 
Sylvia paused, mindful of the nagging pain in her joints, and surveyed the house, a hundred years old or older, standing there at the end of its street, encircled on three sides by the forbidding wall of the forest, which she had fought so hard all these years to subjugate, beating it back and back, waging a relentless campaign to establish and preserve the wholesome order of the grounds, their harmony. Her house. The yard had caught fire with flowers, the house burned with color. 
It was a revelation. 
I am still writing poetry, she thought. This house, this garden is my poem. 
And once again she thought of Daphne-fat, shy, frightened Daphne who under her guiding hand had blossomed into a woman. 
Daphne is my poem. 

· · · · · 

6
A weed had sprung up in the back garden, there where the wood spilled over into lawn. Had it been there yesterday, when she had knelt in that very spot, turning up the rich earth with her spade? 
Sylvia stood in her gardening clothes, rubbing the scab on her ring finger, frightened not so much by the plant itself, though it had a poisonous beauty (she thought of Rappaccini's fabled garden), as by the implications of the memory lapse. Surely she'd have noted the thing if it had been there; surely she'd have uprooted it. She shuddered, recalling the incident in the car, recalling Daphne's words- 
-maybe you should hire someone to stay with you- 
-bright and hurtful as broken glass. 
And if it hadn't been there, well, that raised an entirely different issue: how on earth had it grown so large? 
Sylvia stared down at it, erupting from a bed of annuals like a tumor, a thorny hateful thing anchored by medusa coils of encircling runners. Each serrated leaf shimmered blackly, iridescent as the carapace of a fly. A single blossom glistened at its heart: broad petals of midnight purple cradling a greenish black bud already swollen to the size of a man's fist. She could smell it from here, sweet and pervasive as compost, rotting to pulp beneath a humid sky. 

· · · · · 

7
She dreamed that night of John Thistle. 
In the dream, she sat alone in a lecture hall while Thistle stood at the lectern, expounding on Andrew Marvell. She couldn't follow it-something about Marvell's fame as a politician, something about- 
But who cared? 
There were other things to think about-the sweet breath of wind that blew in through the wide-flung windows (was it a forest that grew out there?); or John Thistle's craggy face (was there another face behind that face?), that wide mouth, those knowing eyes. He leaned forward, gripping the lectern, and she saw the strength rooted in those fingers. Just for a moment she imagined how it might feel to let him touch her, those strong fingers sliding across her flesh … 
(She felt the forest press close.) 
"Miss Woodbine!" 
She stretched languorously, knowing how the sweater would cling to her breasts. 
"The quotation," he said. "Identify the quotation." 
"I don't know. I didn't hear it." 
And so he repeated it: 
How could such sweet and wholesome hours, 
Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers?
Sylvia said, "I don't know. It doesn't matter." 
He circled the lectern and paused before her, leaning close. She could taste his breath, a deep woodsy scent, still waters and the shade under old trees. She lifted her fingers to his cheeks (that face, was there another face?) and drew him near, tilting her head to be kissed- 
(A green frond brushed the windowsill, listening.) 

· · · · · 

She woke blushing, and glanced at the clock. It was after four, that dead hour just before dawn. 
She threw back the covers and crossed the room. There, in the armchair by her window, wrapped in an afghan, she gazed out over her garden, toward the thick forest rising beyond it. After a minute, she lifted the sash an inch, just enough to taste the night air, the scent of the wood, a wild earthy odor of leaf rot and hidden pools scummed green with algae. 
Memory stirred inside her. She closed her eyes. 

· · · · · 

She stood at his door as she had stood speechless that October night not so many weeks ago, watching John Thistle as she watched him now, making notes on a legal pad, his face cast in shadow by the reading lamp at his shoulder. At four on Friday afternoon, Ayers Hall stood vacant, redolent of the pine-scented cleanser the janitors used. 
She did not know how to begin. 
But he saved her the trouble, for abruptly he looked up, sensing her there maybe, poised on the knife-edge of uncertainty. He blanched, his hand trembling as he placed his pen on the blotter. 
"Sylvia, you frightened me. For a moment there you reminded me-" He broke off. "Come in, please. How can I help you?" 
She sat, smoothing her white dress across her knees. "If you have a minute-" 
"Reading for Monday. It can wait." 
He closed the book and folded his hands on the desk. She studied them for a moment-the long powerful fingers and the clean nails, the tiny hairs that curled just below the knuckles-and then she looked up. The intensity of his green eyes was ferocious, unnerving. She suddenly understood his reputation: why students notorious for disrespect held him in awe, why colleagues infamous for gossip held their tongues on the subject of John Thistle. Simply put, there was no hiding from those eyes. As he gazed across the desk at her, she felt that for the first time in her life she was being truly and fully seen, as though he could pierce right through whatever disguise she might fling up to protect herself. 
"Sylvia?" 
"I'm sorry. It's-there was a boy in my office just now, he's not doing well. His papers are-he's practically illiterate-" 
"What happened?" 
"He cried. He wept like a baby, and I tried, I tried to show him how he could do better and-" And suddenly she found that she was crying, that she was weeping like a baby. "I couldn't help him. I don't know how to help any of them." 
She cradled her head in her arms, right there on the desk. Thistle said nothing. He simply touched her, a single hand across her forearm, and not as other men had tried to touch her. It asked nothing of her, that hand. Expected nothing. I'm here, it said. Simple human contact, nothing more. 
After a moment, he stood and closed the door. When he sat down again, the hand came back. 
"They laugh," she said. "When I turn my back, I can hear them snickering. When I ask a question, all I get is this sullen silence-or something smart. And then they'll laugh again." 
He said nothing. The hand went away to peck on the desk. Her skin burned in its absence. Then: 
"How long have you been teaching, Sylvia?" 
"Two years. I started here." 
"Well that's the secret, then. Everybody is bad when they start." 
"You?" 
"I was the worst. When I started, I prepared for hours. Wrote lectures, rehearsed jokes-rehearsed them, can you imagine-and every day I went in and fell flat on my face. I thought about quitting, would have, probably, except one day I said, to hell with it. I went into the classroom, I said, 'Are there any questions?' and a moment of shocked silence passed. Then someone-a girl, bless her, I remember her to this day-she raised her hand. From then on it got better. I had bad days, I still have bad days, but it got better." 
And somehow she found herself laughing-an unpleasant, mocking laugh. "So that's it-I'm supposed to walk in without an ounce of preparation and just wing it?" 
He barely raised an eyebrow. "Of course not." He leaned forward, steepling his long hands. "But you do have to surrender some control-let the class follow its own course, and learn that it's okay if a question arises and you don't have the answer. It's okay to say, 'I don't know.'" 
He was silent for a moment and then he turned in his chair to gaze out the window into the barren November quad. When he turned to face her, Sylvia had the sense that his thoughts had drifted away from her, that when he spoke again he wasn't talking entirely about teaching anymore. 
He said, "The secret is not to be afraid." 

· · · · · 

Not to be afraid. 
Yet she had been, hadn't she? Afraid when that first talk led to another ("How are things going, Sylvia?" he'd said in the hall the following Tuesday) and then another, and then, somehow, to lunch, once, twice, three times a week. Afraid when one Friday afternoon he took her walking down the paths that dipped into the deep wood beyond the campus, afraid when somehow, as they dallied beneath the sun-dappled canopy of the forest, her small hand found its way into his large one, his long fingers every bit as strong as she had imagined. Afraid of the way her colleagues wouldn't meet her eyes after they glimpsed the two of them together in the halls. Afraid of what her parents would say (he's old enough to be your father, they would say). 
She had come to Holman to get away from all that, just as she had fled to England the summer after she had finished her undergraduate degree-three summers waiting tables and she had blown it all on that vast romantic gesture of defiance. A child's gesture, her father had called it (it's time to put aside this literary nonsense, he'd said, time to take that position in policy adjustment, he'd been holding for her). And she supposed he had been right. But it had been necessary all the same. Necessary if she were ever to shrug off the woolen shroud of their expectations. But her parents had followed her even to England, and now she discovered that they had followed her here as well. They were in her head. She knew what they would say without ever having to ask. And in that thirty-first year of her life, her second at Holman, she had feared that, too: feared that she wouldn't ever stop hearing their voices in her head. 
Most of all, she was afraid of John Thistle. She feared the feelings he engendered within her. She hadn't wanted him to relinquish her hand that day in the wood. She hadn't wanted him to stop at the hand. And one day-this was at the end of the semester, during the waning days of the year, with Christmas on the horizon and the threat of snow perpetually in the sky-one day he didn't. 
She hadn't known he was on campus, hadn't expected him to be. Exams were over. Most of her colleagues had already finished up. But Sylvia took her time about grades, she always did. She relished the process, following the neat lines of numbers as they trundled across the ruled pages of her record book, toting up the passes and failures, the triumphs and the disappointments; most of all, the fact that here, finally, at the close of the year, the turmoil of another semester resolved itself into a kind of order. So there she was, summing it all up, when a shadow fell across her. 
John Thistle leaned in her doorway, his great thicket of hair in its usual disarray. 
She stood, smoothing her dress. 
"Nearly done?" he said. 
"Almost," she said, flustered, the memory of their walk in the woods rising up inside her, the memory of her small hand in his. 
He came all the way in, brushing the door half closed behind him. "So you're going away for the holidays?" 
"I'm not sure yet actually. And you?" 
"No, I'll be here. I'll be right here in Holman." 
An uncomfortable silence stretched between them. 
"Well, I just wanted to say good-bye," he told her. "Happy holidays and all that." 
"Yes. Merry Christmas." 
He turned to go, his hand gripping the door knob. And then, without really intending to move, she found herself on the other side of the desk, an arm's length away, the pile of final exams forgotten behind her. She could smell him, a faint smoky odor of tobacco, and beyond that, or under it, his own smell: the smell of his flesh, an earthy virile scent, unwashed, but not unclean. 
"John?" Her face felt heated. 
"Yes?" 
"Will you be spending the holidays with family?" 
He hesitated. He always hesitated when she made some personal inquiry, and in that moment of hesitation, her courage always failed her; she always waded in with some other statement. The truth was, she didn't want to know about his family, didn't want to know if he even had one, and to forestall his response, she said, "The holidays can be so hard, can't they?" 
"Yes, they can be difficult." 
"I just wanted you to know how much I appreciate your help this semester. It's made all the difference." 
"Yes. I've enjoyed it. In fact-" He hesitated, looking down at her, and she had once again that odd sense that another face, a true face, lay concealed beyond the familiar lineaments of this visage which had lately grown so familiar to her: those startling green eyes, that remote and slightly self-mocking smile. "In fact," he said, "you've become quite important to me." 
She swallowed, at a loss for words. 
Thistle moved toward her, hesitated, and then his hands came to her cheeks. No, she started to say, but the word died on her lips. She didn't in that moment need words, didn't for once in her life want them. What she wanted, what she needed, was this, only this: John Thistle's intense green eyes, his weathered face, his hands against her skin. No, she did not say, and lifted her face to kiss him, gently at first, and then with growing hunger, a kind of fierce gnawing privation she hadn't known was in her. She let him embrace her, there in her office with the door half open at his back, let him kiss her, let him bear her back until her hips crashed into the edge of the desk. A stack of exams slid to the floor, and still he kissed her. Unbidden, her arms drew him closer. She could feel the length of his body, sinewy and hard, she could feel one strong hand kneading her breast, the other sliding down across her stomach- 
"No," she whispered. 
A bright wire drew tight within her. She tilted her hips to meet his touch. 
And now, stronger, she said, "No. No, John, no-" 
He stepped away, breathing hard. In the next moment she heard it, they both heard it: the clatter of footsteps receding down the hall. 
He drew the back of his hand across his mouth. "I'm sorry," he said, but there was nothing sorry in his green eyes. 
"Did someone-" 
"No." 
"Someone did, I heard them, you heard them-" 
"Listen-" 
"You listen." A fit of trembling possessed her. "You've got nothing to lose here, you've got tenure-" 
He stepped forward, enfolding her in his arms again. She didn't know how long they stood like that. Her heart pounded. Her lips felt bruised. She hated him. She wanted him to kiss her again. The trembling passed. 
He stepped away. "I'll go." 
She nodded. She didn't trust herself to speak. 
At the door, he turned back. "Sylvia," he said, "there's nothing to be afraid of." He held her gaze a moment longer. Then he was gone. 
And yet she was afraid. 
Now, remembering, Sylvia thought, perhaps that's the word. Afraid. 
She leaned closer to the window and gazed past her ghostly reflection into the night. The garden was a well of shadows, the trees black against the opalescent sky. In the distance, Holman's clocktower sounded out the hour-five musical chimes borne to her through the still April air. Dawn was breaking, and it was easy enough to imagine the town bestirring itself for the day, kids waking and dogs pawing at back doors while their owners sat yawning in sleep-soured sheets. Soon newspapers would be thumping against porches; soon the first birds would test the dew-sodden air. 
But nothing stirred here, not in this narrow crepuscular bedroom. 
Sylvia leaned her head against the glass as dawn poured slowly across the lawn, drenching in nacreous gray the ranks of flowers, the careful symmetry of the garden paths, the sundial in the grotto where she sat most evenings, there on the moss-grown bench, where the little fountain chattered and danced. The garden comforted her somehow, its harmony, its simple human order. 
But this too would pass. That was the bitter truth of the thing: everything passed, even this simple garden. She could see how it would happen, how the forest would creep in, gradually at first-here a questing vine, there a stray sapling-and then faster, until it reasserted its dominion at last. A season, that's all it would take. Weeds would crowd out the delicate annuals. Vines would shatter the stone pedestal of the bird bath. In the end it would swallow even the house. Maybe some wanderer would stumble across the site centuries hence. Catching a flash of sunlight in the weeds, he would hunker down and fish from the tangled undergrowth the brass compass of the sundial. He would scrape away the crusted residue of years and hold the tarnished face to the sky, wondering how such a relic had come to be here, in this wild place. 
It had begun already, she saw. There at the back of the lot, where the woods had encroached upon her handiwork, where the vile weed lifted its face to the morning sun. She could see it. She could see the thing from here, visibly larger, impossibly larger, squatting like a toad amid her drowsy banks of annuals: the bowl of midnight purple petals and the great greenish-black bud at its heart, a strangely beautiful seedpod the size of a severed head. 
Her heart stuttered as she stared out at the thing, transfixed by horror. A scrap of some old nursery rhyme lodged in her mind- 
-Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow- 
-and in short, she was afraid. 

· · · · 
8
Work was the thing for it. She had that much from her parents anyway, the old Puritan legacy of labor. Idle hands are the devil's tools, her father had been fond of saying, and Sylvia had never escaped that principle, not even during her wild flight to England, when she had vowed in defiance to do no work at all and had instead found herself scratching her first poems in a dog-eared notebook, laboring to order and define the rugged Yorkshire landscape, the stone fences hemming in the sheep-mown hills, the stark green line where the heath met the English sky. 
It had paid off, that work-paid off when she first held in her hands the slim published volume, and paid off again by landing her the position at Holman when otherwise she might have been forced to declare it all a failure and take a job in her father's agency. And it would pay off, now, too. She could lose herself in gardening and forget everything else-forget John Thistle and the trouble with Daphne and this strange sense she had of being ill at ease in her own skin, at a loss for any word to describe her lot here in this late day, when she should have been well content with the life she had chosen. Work was the answer for it. Through work she would escape it all, even the strange vile weed growing there at the edge of the lot, where the forest began. 
Over breakfast she had decided to destroy the thing, to uproot it and hurl it back under the trees, where it couldn't do any damage if it went to seed. But when she stepped out on the back porch just after eight, she saw that the weed had, impossibly, grown larger still. The great purple blossom had turned black, the petals slowly deliquescing. The seed pod glistened in its bed of serrated green-black leaves, a bulging cocoon the size of a watermelon, covered with faint shiny down. She would have to get the shovel from the garage. She'd have to dig the thing up, she'd do it first thing- 
But the strength seemed to have gone from her legs. Sylvia lowered herself heavily to the porch step and sat there a long time, staring at the thing. A fly buzzed in the morning stillness. In the dim reaches of the wood a bird whistled tentatively. The sun crept imperceptibly higher. It must be nearly nine by now, she realized with a sudden pang of longing. She had given it up, she had given it all up: the desks in their sensible rows, the busy hum outside her office door, the security of her nine o'clock Chaucer, predictable as clockwork for more than four decades. Daphne was right: she missed it. How she missed it- 
Inside, the phone rang. Sylvia climbed to her feet, gripping the baluster for support, and slipped back through the screen to lift the receiver. The phone brayed once again as she searched for the right button. It had been a gift from Daphne, one of those sleek ultra-modern devices with a rubberized antenna (so you can carry it in the garden, Daphne had said), and Sylvia had never really gotten accustomed to the thing- 
There. She punched the button, silencing it mid-ring. 
"Sylvia?" Daphne said. 
"Shouldn't you be in class?" 
"I've got a minute, I just wanted to call. Listen, about yesterday-" 
"I don't have anything to say about yesterday." 
"We have to talk about it-" 
"I said I don't have anything to say." 
"Sylvia-" 
Sylvia broke the connection. Sliding the phone into the pocket of her gardening apron, she stepped back out onto the porch. The weed awaited her, but she suddenly didn't have the heart to deal with it. 
Besides, there was plenty else to do. The bed on the north end of the house needed weeding and she'd been meaning to stake the tomato plants she'd planted in the little vegetable garden at the end of March. Work was the thing for it. And when the phone rang again, just after ten, spilling shrill vibrations through her, she was fertilizing the forsythia that bordered the porch. She jumped, reaching toward her pocket to silence the thing, but then, mindful of Daphne's Friday schedule (Shakespeare at nine, World Lit at eleven), she drew her hand away. She simply stood there, her knuckles white on her clippers, counting the rings. Eleven, twelve, thirteen- 
And then it was still. 
She sighed, gathered her strength, and went back to her trimming. 
She wouldn't think about it. Not Daphne, not John Thistle. Not the bizarre weed. She focused on the tasks at hand, the simple rhythm of trimming and weeding and crushing underfoot the black slugs which feasted on the flowers. At ten-thirty, the phone rang again. Twelve rings. She wouldn't think of that either. 
It rang again at ten-forty-five. Again she ignored it. 
Yet perhaps they had upset her, all those phone calls. Normally, she'd have taken a break around eleven-a glass of iced tea on the porch, a slice of cantaloupe. But today, despite a faint unsteadiness in her legs, she continued to work, obstinately lugging the tomato stakes to the vegetable patch at the south end of the lawn. She dumped them at the garden's edge and began driving them one by one, using the flat of her hammer to pound them deep into the soft earth. Each blow throbbed in the taut muscles of her arm, the tense column of her spine. She paused, panting, and glanced back down the row, each plant bound neatly upright with ribbons of white cloth. The black soil glistened, weedless and moist. Sweat stung her eyes. The sun beat down upon her. 
When had it gotten so hot? 
She knelt for another stake. A wave of dizziness rolled through her. She levered herself erect, using the stake as a crutch. The world reeled around her, the air suddenly ablaze. The earthy fragrance of the vegetable patch flooded her nostrils: the scent of rich soil and bagged manure, of sun-stroked greenery ripening inexorably toward decay. Her heart slammed against her ribs. The woods loomed against the sky, a green hieroglyph- 
-come to me- 
-pulsing with enigmatic significance. The hammer slipped from her nerveless fingers. She watched it tumble away in slow motion, end over end, and then, somehow, she too was falling, the stake slipping away as the ground lifted itself to meet her. She tried to cry out, but there was no sound, only the rustle of her own body settling painlessly to earth, and then a deep pervasive stillness. 
Damp soil buoyed her up. She lay still, staring through a tangle of greenery at one outflung hand. The telephone had tumbled from her apron, a slim white lozenge half hidden by drooping fronds. She would just lie here for a moment, and then she would reach out and pick it up. She would climb to her feet and go inside and pour herself a glass of iced tea. She would make herself a cucumber sandwich, and eat it in the cool shadows of the back porch … 
An ant trundled up the curving slope of her ring finger, pausing to investigate the scabbed-over wound. 
Sylvia took a deep breath. She just needed a minute to gather her strength. 
Any time now. 
The telephone started to ring. Sylvia closed her eyes. 

· · · · · 

9
Words had been her true passion, her Avalon, her axis mundi. 
In her wildest flights of fancy, it was words that snatched her home and centered her, words her compass and her core, her ballast and her anchor (it was words that weighed her down). In the midst of tempests, it was words she clung to; in the whirlwind, it was words; it was always words, ordering, imposing, and clarifying words, first orison of creation- 
-in the beginning was the word- 
-and final supplication, the world (the word) itself a kind of poem maybe, endlessly dying, endlessly renewed. Now, groping blindly in the dark, she sought the solace of a word, and they enveloped her, a pathless wood of words, a wild thicket of them, a briar-patch, a thorny labyrinth of thistle and bramble- 
-bramble?- 
-where a clutch of sweet berries grew. 
Earth welled up between her toes. She opened her eyes. 
She stood before the book shelf in her study. She stood in an abandoned lecture hall, gazing through an open window. (Was it a forest that grew out there?) She stood in the nave of a vast cathedral, in a green and silent space, a canopy of interwoven branches (branches?) arching high above her. A carven figure leered down from a high cornice, a daemonic man with fierce eyes and a face made all of leaves. The thing's mouth opened- 
-come to me- 
-and a plume of greenery spewed forth to wind around her, to enfold and penetrate her. A wild hunger blossomed in her as the branches swept her up, and she cried aloud in ecstasy and terror. The cathedral fell. Roots plunged deep, stone cracked and shattered, the altar fell to ruin. A shaft of moted sunlight pierced the green shade and all the world was forest. 
Sylvia pulled down a book and let it fall open in her hands. 
(A leaf eddied slowly to the earth.) 
She plucked the berries and crushed them to her lips. 

· · · · · 

10
She woke to flowers, green jacketed and headily aromatic. For a moment the dream-had it been a dream?-lingered: a leaf drifting slowly earthward, the taste of berries on her lips, wild and sweet as wine. A fragment of some old poem- 
-insnared with flowers, I fall on grass- 
-spilled through her thoughts, and then the illusion dissolved. 
The flowers stood in a cut crystal vase. When she moved, an IV needle tugged at her arm. Her last moments in the garden came back to her: the cool soil against her cheek, the ant trundling up the curving thoroughfare of her index finger. 
She took in the room at a glance, a silent white room with the dead eye of a television peering down from one wall. A faint antiseptic odor hung in the air. It was the kind of room where they brought old people to die, Sylvia thought, and the presence of a roommate-another old woman, shrunken and still beneath her covers-seemed to confirm the notion. 
She swallowed and turned her head. Daphne stood at the window, gazing out into a dusk-shrouded parking lot. A hard rain slanted past the glass, a root-stretching, flower-budding rain. 
She closed her eyes, opened them, and spoke, her voice a dry croak. "Daphne?" 
Daphne turned. Her cheeks were flushed, her mascara smeared. "You're awake." 
Sylvia swallowed. "Something to drink." 
Daphne poured water from a plastic pitcher and held the cup to her lips. Sylvia sipped at it for a moment, and then, feeling stronger, tilted it sharply, drinking greedily. When she finished, she said, "What happened?" 
"I found you in the garden. I got worried. You hadn't answered the phone." 
"Yes, but-What happened? What caused it?" 
"Well, that's kind of a mystery right now." 
The breathing of the old woman in the next bed filled the silence. Rain ticked against the window. 
Daphne swiped at her eyes angrily. She reached down to take Sylvia's hand. "You scared me, Sylvia. You scared the hell out of me." 
"I'm sorry." 
"Why did you have to hang up like that?" 
"I'm sorry. I was angry." 
Daphne squeezed her hand. 
They said nothing for a long time. 
"That goddamn garden," Daphne said. She said, "Don't you know you're all I have?" 

· · · · · 

Sylvia couldn't sleep. 
The IV line tangled. Rain hammered the window with the steady cadence of a metronome. When at last she dozed, a nurse jarred her awake. Sylvia endured in silence the awkward business of the blood-pressure cuff, the icy disk of the stethoscope in the fold of her elbow. 
"The woman in the next bed," she said when the nurse finished. "She hasn't moved." 
"I shouldn't think so." 
"What's the matter with her?" 
"Alzheimer's. It's end stage now. She won't be much company to you, I'm afraid." 
"I won't be here long." 
The nurse smiled over her clipboard. She made a note on Sylvia's chart. 
"Do you know her name?" 
"Philbrick, I think. Louise Philbrick." The nurse hung the chart over the foot of the bed. "She won't disturb you, anyway." 
"No, I suppose not." 
"Can I get you anything?" 
"No." 
The nurse nodded and stepped out. When the door swung closed, a forest of shadows sprang up. Sylvia adjusted her pillow. The noises of the hospital weighed upon her: the drumming rain and the cool hum of monitors, the moist, steady clamor of her roommate's respiration. Turning, Sylvia gazed at the next bed. The woman lay still, her mouth slack. She won't disturb you anyway, the nurse had said, but in fact she disturbed Sylvia plenty, the name most of all. 
Louise Philbrick. 
Not because she recognized it, either. No, it disturbed her simply for the human face it cast over the shriveled husk beneath the sheets. Louise Philbrick's first kiss, the taste of wine against her parched lips: these things had happened in some irretrievable past. There might have been a Mr. Philbrick once-lovers, children, the thousand trivial events of a human life. And now the name alone survived-Louise Philbrick-sole relic of a history otherwise forgotten, erased as surely as Sylvia had herself erased her chalked notes after a lecture, restoring the slate to a blank and perfect void. Tabula rasa. In the end as in the beginning. 
Everything perished. 
Sylvia closed her eyes. She summoned the steady pulse at her temples, the rhythm of her heart still beating in her chest; she let them lull her into uneasy sleep. She dreamed of the green nave, of John Thistle at her back, his hands upon her breasts. She cried aloud, she turned to embrace him, to pierce the veil at last, to see the face behind his face- 
Don't you know you're all I have? Daphne said. 
What kind of life? What kind of life? 
A leaf drifted from the pages of an open book. 
In the shadows, a foliate face peered down at her. 
She dreamed of England. 

· · · · · 

"I want to go home," she told the doctor, Schaper, the next morning. 
Schaper was a thin woman, small, aging gracefully into handsome middle age. She gazed steadily at Sylvia, her gray eyes piercing and attentive. 
"One thing at a time," she said. "Why don't you try telling me what happened in the garden?" 
"I got dizzy, that's all. I woke up here." 
"What did you feel beforehand? Do you remember?" 
"I remember thinking how hot it was. The heat made me dizzy." 
"Nothing like this has happened before? Episodes of vertigo? Forgetfulness?" 
Had Schaper been talking to Daphne? 
Sylvia hesitated, thankful she'd said nothing about the incident in the car. Her gaze fell on the shrunken frame of Louise Philbrick. "Nothing I can think of," she said. 
"What about after you fell? Do you remember anything at all about that?" 
"No." 
"Paralysis? Aphasia?" 
Sylvia pictured the ant ascending the crook of her index finger. She could feel the moist earth against her face. "Are you suggesting I had a stroke?" 
"Nothing quite so serious, I hope. Maybe a mini-stroke. Or something called TIA-transient ischemic attacks. The blood vessels spasm in the brain, producing temporary stroke-like symptoms. Or maybe you're right. Maybe it was just the heat. We'll have to look into it." 
"I want to go home." 
"Let's do some tests first. Four or five days, that's all." 
Sylvia crossed her arms sullenly. "I want to go home." 
Schaper merely smiled. 

· · · · · 

In the end, it was six days, six interminable days. Orderlies hurried her down echoing corridors and abandoned her to hateful anterooms, with vast engines thundering in the wings. She navigated a bewildering maze of acronyms and medical jargon (CTs and MRIs and carotid sonograms). She endured a battery of psychological and neurological tests-word analogies, at her age! Good God, she wanted to scream at the hapless proctor, I've written books! She stared blindly into the pages of a monograph on the Gawain poet (Daphne had brought it). She chafed in the prickly hospital linen. 
There was something subtly infantilizing about the experience, as if the entire hospital staff had pooled their resources in a covert campaign of diminishment, a vast, well-intentioned conspiracy to strip her of every token of maturity. One nurse scolded her for getting up to empty her bladder without assistance. Another prodded her to eat her vegetables. And everyone called her by her first name. You must be Sylvia, they would say, or, barging cheerily into her room without knocking, Good morning, Sylvia!, thus neatly divesting her of two graduate degrees, more than forty years in the classroom, her very status as an adult-of, in short, everything. 
Daphne was her consolation. She came every night, lingering until visiting hours closed and the nurses harried her to the elevators. Even then her words seemed to hang in the air, somehow disquieting. Don't you know you're all I have? 
"I don't want to be a burden," Sylvia told her. 
It was evening. Clouds hung like smoke in the square of sky beyond the window, and a gray drizzle gauzed the air. It had rained for five days running, one shower after another interspersed with heartbreaking intervals of sunshine. It would be good for the garden, anyway, Sylvia told herself. At least it had saved Daphne the trouble of watering-Daphne, who looked up from the set of quizzes she'd been marking, her soft features puzzled. 
"A burden? Whatever gave you that idea?" 
"Well, you're here every night, like clockwork." 
"I want to be here, I like being here." 
"Don't you have something else to do?" 
There was a brittle edge to Daphne's laugh. She waved the sheaf of quizzes. "I'm doing it here," she said. "This is what I do." 
Sylvia said nothing. She stared at the rain, pattering softly against the glass, in counterpoint to Louise Philbrick's sonorous breathing. Sylvia had tried pulling the privacy curtains around her bed, but that was worse somehow. They obstructed any view of the corridor, entombing her in diaphanous white-and they did nothing to stop the sound. So she endured the other woman instead: the steady cadence of her respiration, the faint moans she emitted when white-jacketed orderlies came to turn her in her bed. The turning didn't stop the bedsores. Sylvia could smell them: a faint rotten odor lurking just beneath the omnipresent scent of antiseptics and industrial detergent. She had glimpsed them once, oozing pits in the woman's untoned flesh-glimpsed them, and turned away. 
When she judged a decent interval had passed, Sylvia said, "I saw Robin Green the other day." 
"Thursday?" Daphne chewed her pen. 
"After lunch." 
Daphne arched one eyebrow. "Umm." 
"Is he settling in at Holman all right?" 
"I guess. Students seem to like him okay." She looked up. "He said your notes were a lifesaver." 
Sylvia smiled. 
"He's kind of …" Daphne hesitated. "Bothersome. He's harmless enough-he's actually kind of nice-but he's always hanging around. He pokes his head inside my office half a dozen times a day." 
"Maybe he's interested." 
"Yeah, I get that a lot," Daphne said drily. "Interest, you know. From men." 
"You needn't be sarcastic." 
"Well, come on, Sylvia. He's not a bad-looking man." 
"I never said he was." 
"He can do better. Trust me. He wants me to be his girl Friday or something, that's all. Or his best friend. You know, the cheerful fat chick who helps him win the movie-star blonde." 
"Don't be so hard on yourself." 
"I'm not being hard on myself. I'm being realistic." 
"You don't have to be alone." 
"Do we have to talk about this right now?" 
"We don't have to talk about it at all." 
Daphne capped her pen and stuffed the quizzes into her briefcase. "Maybe I choose to be alone," she said abruptly. "You did." She held Sylvia's gaze for a moment, and then turned away, biting her lip. 
A minute passed in silence. Sylvia looked out the window. Night spilled through the sky, an inky backdrop to the clouds. She should have known better. It wasn't her place. "Daphne-" she said. And when the other woman turned to look at her, her eyes bright: "I'm sorry, really I am." 
Daphne sighed. "No, I am." She stood, adjusting the strap of her briefcase. "Look, we're both a little stir crazy. Let's start fresh tomorrow, what do you say?" 
"I'd like that." 
Daphne bent to embrace her, and for a moment it was enough: this simple human contact. Sylvia hadn't known how much she'd missed it. And then Daphne withdrew, letting her lips brush Sylvia's cheek before she strode resolutely into the corridor. Her words seemed to echo inside the room. 
Maybe I choose to be alone. You did. 
Sylvia touched a button, lowering the bed, and turned out the light. She stared into the shadows until patterns began to coalesce before her, faces, enigmatic constellations of meaning, a print of leaves against a harvest moon. 
Did I? she wondered. Is that what I chose? 

· · · · · 

11
Christmas had been hard that year. Her father had called, entreating her to come home. "We're not getting any younger, Sylvia," he'd said, and she could picture him in her mind as he said it, cradling the phone against his shoulder as he paced the length of its cord, the desk at his back covered with reports, half-written policies, the actuarial tables he had stared at for so many years he hardly needed them anymore. Thirty-five, male, a smoker? He didn't have to look it up, he knew your odds in his bones. He knew plenty about mortality, her father did, and she knew that he was right-none of them were getting any younger. She was thirty-one years old, unmarried, alone. She knew everything she ever wanted to know about not getting any younger. 
But all she said was, "Not this year, Dad." 
She stayed in Holman and worked-or tried to. She was still trying to write poetry then, knowing with a kind of inarticulate certainty that her muse had died, hopeful that praying over the corpse might somehow resurrect it. She hunched over her desk for hours at a time, tore pages from her notebook by the handful, paced the still unfurnished floors of her old farmhouse until the dark behind the windows deepened to black, when the only sounds were the university clocktower measuring out the hours and the occasional shriek of some small hunted thing as an owl swooped down from the surrounding wood. 
One night, desperate to discover the source of that one great flood of words, she plucked her slim volume of verse from the shelf. When she opened the book, a leaf had slipped from between the pages. (It had! She remembered; an old woman in a narrow hospital bed, she remembered at last.) She picked up the leaf-she hardly glanced at it-and tucked it back in place, staring with incomprehension at the poems. She read until the print blurred before her eyes, until the words dissolved into green chaos. And then she closed the book and collapsed into her spinster's bed, where she dreamed a long involved dream. In the dream, a green shade pursued her through emerald depths of forest. She fled before him until the breath burned in her lungs, until her legs ached, until she could taste her own sweat, salty against her lips-until finally she collapsed, exhausted, in a sunshot glade at the very center of the world, in the heartwood itself. Her pursuer appeared beneath the trees, clad all in green, and she stood to embrace him. The face he wore was John Thistle's face, but as she tilted her head to meet his kiss, she saw that there was another face behind his face- 
The dream haunted her all the next day-the day the letter came, an unassuming envelope without return address, tucked among the Christmas cards and catalogs. It had been postmarked at the college, and her name and address had been typed neatly, anonymously, on the outside. Curious, she unfolded the single page of white paper within. Two words had been typed at the center of the page: He's married. Nothing more. Yet the two words shook her to very core. Married? In a kind of horror she recalled that moment in her office: the exam booklets sliding unheeded to the floor, his mouth hot against her own, the clatter of footsteps in the hall. 
Married? 
She crumpled the letter and threw it away-nasty thing (you're the nasty thing, she heard her father say)-only to find herself standing over the trash basket not ten minutes later, drawn back to the thing as inexorably as the needle of a compass, spinning and spinning until it settled at last on its own true north, this lodestone lodged like a weight in the center of her breast. She fished it out and unfolded it, smoothing the wrinkles in the paper. She had misread it, surely she had misread it. But the same words- 
-he's married- 
-stared up at her, stark and accusatory. Married. Married. Married. How long did she stand there, clutching the letter, listening to the funereal toll of that word inside her mind? For of course she had known it, hadn't she? She had suspected it all along. She had seen it in the averted eyes of her colleagues. Wasn't that why she'd avoided asking him any personal questions? Wasn't it? 
Anger boiled up inside her-at herself, at John Thistle. Anger drove her out of the house, and into the twilit streets, coatless and bareheaded, clutching the letter before her like a talisman, impervious to the cold and the strange hard beauty of the night as a horned moon climbed the rungs of heaven. A few crystal flakes of snow began to spin down out of the dark, and as she hurled herself along the empty sidewalks, the street lamps flickered alight before her, like so many penny candles. Later, how long she didn't know, the same anger drew her up short and breathless on the stoop of the house-his house, the house she had driven by just once, weeks ago, when her curiosity about his life away from the university became for a moment unbearable. Anger punched the doorbell, and anger held her stiffly as she listened to his footsteps approach the door. 
"Sylvia," he said. "What-" 
And then he must have seen her, truly seen her-slumped beneath the lintel, her face streaked with tears, the single sheet of paper crumpled against her breasts-for he broke off abruptly. "You're not even wearing a coat," he said. "Are you crazy?" 
He seized her by the shoulders and pulled her inside, the gesture unaccountably, inevitably, becoming an embrace. They had stepped across some kind of threshold in her office that day, and now there was no going back. "You're freezing," he said, and she felt her traitorous body warming itself in the circle of his heat. She lifted her face and kissed him hard for a moment, helpless to stop herself. Then, with a wrenching effort of will, she pulled away. That's when she saw the woman standing at the end of the hall: a stout, severe woman clad in loose blue clothes. 
Sylvia met her eyes and took a long despairing breath. "I'm sorry," she whispered. 
Thistle stepped back, his face darkening. "For God's sake," he snapped to the woman, "put some tea on! Can't you see she's half dead with cold?" 
The woman turned, disappearing silently into the kitchen. 
"What's wrong?" Thistle asked. "Is it this?" He reached for the letter. 
"No." She drew it away, a question rising unbidden to her lips. "That first day, you said I startled you-" 
"Sylvia-" 
"Why?" 
He said nothing. He stood two feet away, breathing heavily. Crockery rattled in the kitchen. His hand lashed out, snatching the letter. He blanched as he read it, livid with anger, shock-something else maybe, she didn't know what, another facet of that dangerous and brooding intensity she had sensed that first night, spying on him from just outside the circle of light. He crushed the letter into a ball and hurled it away. 
"So?" he said. 
"Why? What did I remind you of?" 
"You reminded me of my wife! Is that what you want to hear? You reminded me of her, standing there in your white dress!" He paused, his hands in fists at his sides. In the kitchen, a kettle began to whistle. Someone set it off the eye, and in the ensuing silence, John Thistle said: "You looked just like her, all those years ago." 
"I'm not her-I don't want to be-" 
"No, Sylvia." He touched her arm. "Sylvia, you've become more than that to me, infinitely more." 
Something twisted inside her. Sylvia lifted her hands. She didn't know what she wanted to do with them. A shadow fell across her face. The woman stood framed in the doorway. "The tea's ready," she said. 
Sylvia stepped forward. She could hear her father's voice inside her head, telling her she had to apologize, there were lines one did not cross, the man was married. "I'm sorry," she found herself saying, and she could hear her father saying it: "Mrs. Thistle, I just want to say how very, very sor-" 
"You bloody fool," Thistle said. "She's not my wife. You want to see my wife?" 
He didn't wait to hear her answer. Grasping her by the shoulders, he propelled her down the hall, past darkened apertures where furniture stood in shadowy clumps, past the woman in blue- 
-scrubs, they were surgical scrubs- 
-and through the bright kitchen. Another hall, a darkened stairwell. She stumbled, his hands bearing her up. A light glowed on the landing. 
"No," she whispered. "John, please-" 
An open door beckoned. A faint unpleasant odor flowed out: a floral mask of disinfectant, and below that, permeating the air and carpet, the furniture itself, the ineradicable stench of human waste. Half-revealed in the dim yellow oval of a bedside lamp lay a woman, wasted, shrunken, unformed as a fetus in her nest of yellowing sheets, whatever beauty she had possessed long ago used up. Staring across the room at her, Sylvia realized she could smell something else, too, an odor she would not encounter again for more than forty years, and which even then, in the sickroom she would share with Louise Philbrick, she would not allow herself to recognize. Yet her undermind would know it, for the stench was unforgettable: it was the ripe pustulant stench of bedsores, of a human body churning mindlessly on, year after year, consuming itself by infinitesimal degrees, no longer truly alive but powerless to die. 
"No," she whispered. "No-" 
Thistle's hand had gone limp on her shoulder. His face sagged. His mouth hung open. 
The nurse appeared at the doorway. "I don't think-" 
Sylvia lurched past her. She wasn't strong enough, not for this. She stumbled down the stairs and through the kitchen. The house was hot, unbearably hot. She threw open the door and plunged into the night. The moon hung far above, remote, and wreathed in cloud. The snow was falling steadily now, mantling in silver the empty sidewalk, the uplifted arms of trees, the winter-ravaged world. Sylvia hurried toward the street, leaving footprints in the enameled perfection of John Thistle's stoop. 
He caught her by the sidewalk, one thick hand clutching at her elbow. "Sylvia!" 
She spun to face him, slipping in the snow. "What?" 
Snow dusted his shoulders, his unruly thatch of hair. His breath plumed in the cold. "Come inside. You'll catch your death." 
"I'm going home." 
"Let me drive you then-" 
"I'll walk." 
She wanted to shake herself free of him, wanted to back away, to flee. She could feel the pull of her own house through the wintry streets, the laundry waiting by the ironing board, the dishes stacked in the drainer, the books neatly alphabetized on the shelves her father had built-the pull of everything safe and familiar. Yet something held her there-the desperation in John Thistle's eyes, the memory of his lips against her own-and for a moment she thought the torsion would wrench her apart. 
Thistle must have sensed her conflict, for he stepped closer, pitching his voice low. "You've got to listen to me, Sylvia. You've got to talk to me." 
"What's there to talk about?" 
"I thought you knew. Everybody knows." 
"It doesn't matter. You're married. Can't you see that? You're married." 
"Married?" He flung his hands out in frustration. "It's a word, that's all. The woman I married-she's gone. Don't misunderstand me. I loved her, I still love her-but she's been gone for years. That woman you saw upstairs, that's just meat, Sylvia, a shell. The woman I married would've hated everything about this-what she's become, what I've become. She was so alive, and when, when-" He closed his eyes, he took a long breath. "A part of me died with her," he said, "and now, now for the first time in a decade, I feel alive again. It's like … it's like spring, Sylvia. And you feel it, too, I can see that you do. She would have liked that. She would have liked you. She would have wanted us to be together." 
"It doesn't matter," she said. "What you want, what I want, even what she might have wanted-none of that matters. What am I supposed to be, John? Your comfort woman? Your lover? Because that's what people will say, isn't it, people like the one who wrote that letter. That's what they're saying already. That I'm your mistress, your-your whore-" She broke off abruptly, the word- 
-her father's word- 
-hanging between them, irrevocable. 
Thistle laughed. "So that's what you're afraid of, what the sniveling Philistines will call you-" 
"I'm not afraid!" 
"-marriage, mistress, whore-those precious words of yours-they're names, that's all. They're only names, Sylvia. Just words, just … human noise. For God's sake, it doesn't matter what people think. Don't you understand that? There's nothing to be afraid of-" 
Yet she was afraid. Afraid of the vast accumulated weight of decorum, the whispered judgments in the hall, the unblinkered regard of her colleagues, her students, the town itself, Holman, narrow and parochial in its deep-cleft bowl of hills; afraid of these strange feelings flaring up inside her; afraid most of all of John Thistle. He stepped toward her, seizing her by the shoulders as if to shake her- 
-as if to kiss her- 
-and this time she did wrench herself away. She stumbled back a step, and then turned, fleeing, slipping and scrambling to her feet with the same clumsy haste. She stole a glance over her shoulder when she reached the end of the street. He was still standing there, a lone figure in the snow-torn radiance of a streetlight, his hands outstretched. She hesitated a moment, and then the wind picked up, hurling a billowing veil of white between them. When it cleared, John Thistle was gone. 
She would see him again when the spring semester got underway-they would nod in the halls or speak if chance threw them together in the elevator-but that was professional cordiality, nothing more. Thistle's wife passed away a year later, and from the departmental talk that followed, Sylvia pieced together the rest of his story: a pitted ribbon of asphalt plunging through the wood, a car veering across the yellow line, a cataclysm of shrieking tires and metal. John Thistle had stepped from the smoking wreckage unscathed. The other two victims hadn't been so lucky. The drunken undergrad behind the wheel of the other car had died instantly; and John Thistle's wife (her name was Anne, Sylvia learned) would never regain consciousness. So began the long twilit hiatus of John Thistle's life-the endless negotiations with insurance companies, the grim procession of hired nurses, his wife's slow, irreversible decline. And then, twelve years later, on a bright March morning that found Sylvia spading under a patch of weedy back lawn, commencing the garden that would become her life's substitute for the words she had lost, Anne Thistle died. 
The day after the funeral, Sylvia stepped into John Thistle's office for the first time in more than a year. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry," she said. 
"Yes, I'm sorry, too," he responded, and that was the end of it. 
He didn't return in the fall. In the months that followed, Sylvia heard conflicting rumors-a tenured position at another school, a long-delayed European tour-but she never learned what became of him. In the end, it didn't matter. John Thistle had given her permission to fail as a teacher, and that was all she needed to succeed. In lieu of the life she might had led in his company, she found fulfillment in the classroom. She began to write again; not poetry, but a study of English folklore, the Grail quest, the Fisher King, the vegetation myth of the dying and resurrected god. She cultivated her garden. 
A time came when she rarely thought of that December night, of John Thistle standing bereft in that diminishing circle of light or her homeward odyssey through the frozen dark. On those few occasions when she did find herself recalling it, she thought mainly of the utter desolation of the journey, the townsfolk enbosomed in their orderly rows of houses as she made her way alone through streets faërie-struck with snow. And of course she recalled the cold. By the time she reached her house, Sylvia's feet were numb. Her ice-stiffened fingers fumbled the door knob; once inside, enveloped in the womb-like heat, she burst into tears. 
She woke sick the next morning, fuzzy-headed and full of ill humors. The illness lasted into the new year, and then one January morning she woke with the bright, hard-edged clarity that comes in the wake of fever. She put aside her abortive attempts at verse and sat down to draw up syllabi for the spring. 
She would never be the same again. 

· · · · · 
12
Now, an old woman alone in her hospital bed, Sylvia woke with the same adamantine clarity. A handful of images bubbled up from the cauldron of memory and sleep-that dried leaf slipping from the pages of her single book of verse, John Thistle standing alone in the snow-enchanted street-and for the first time Sylvia found herself examining them critically. Where had that leaf come from? Had such a thing truly happened or had she only imagined it, manufacturing it from the private, inarticulate yearnings of her heart-and if she had, why should she have done so? For that matter, why had she turned away from John Thistle all those years ago? What had she been running from? 
But it was an image of Daphne that most haunted Sylvia that morning. She couldn't help recalling the look in Daphne's eyes-that brittle veneer of defiance, of perverse pride in isolation-as she stuffed the quizzes into her briefcase. Maybe I choose to be alone. What kind of life was that? Sylvia asked herself, and another voice- 
-her father's voice- 
-answered that it wasn't her place to interfere. Live and let live, her father had been fond of saying. Cultivate your own garden. And for the bulk of the morning, Sylvia found herself torn between these opposing impulses, certain only that somehow (how?) she had to make things right between them. As it turned out, however, even that simple resolution had to be delayed. Schaper had decided to send her home. 
"Home?" Sylvia asked. 
"Home." 
"But what happened to me?" 
"Syncope, etiology undetermined," Schaper said, and it was these words which Sylvia repeated as she slid into Daphne's car that afternoon. 
"Syncope whatsis?" Daphne said. 
"Syncope, etiology undetermined." 
"And what's that mean?" 
"It means that doctors are like literary critics," Sylvia said. "Whenever they run into something they don't understand, they give it a fancy name. It means I fainted and they have no clue why." 
"I don't like the sound of that," Daphne said. 
Sylvia didn't like the sound of it either, but she had resolved not to worry over it. She rolled down the window as they slipped through the quiet streets. It was another windy April day, bringing storm clouds from the east. The rain-drenched odor of spring swept through the car, the scent of sap rising to warm cold limbs, of buds swelling into blossom, the forgotten powers of earth reasserting themselves as the planet swung round once more into a season of warmth and plenty. A season of life. Yes, life. Sylvia drew the scent deep into her lungs, banishing the taste of the hospital, the bland food, the unvaried rhythm of Louise Philbrick's clotted lungs. Of everything. 
For now, this was enough. 
Daphne insisted on helping her into the house, on unpacking her little overnight bag and turning back her bed. "Let me warm you some soup," she said. "You must be tired." 
But Sylvia wanted to be alone. The house had a dusty, airless quality. It felt worse than uninhabited, it felt dead, and she found herself abruptly anxious to reanimate it, to re-establish her presence among the empty rooms. "I'm fine," she said, ushering Daphne toward the door. 
"Are you sure you don't want me to stay?" 
"I'm fine, really. Go home, Daphne, you have your own life." 
"Right," Daphne said drily, and shut the door. 
Right. 
Sylvia listened to the word echo in the foyer, recalling too late her resolution to mend fences with Daphne, to talk through once and for all this friction which had arisen between them. Now, before she could reconsider the impulse, she flung open the door. Halfway down the sidewalk, Daphne turned, her face puzzled. 
"Come to dinner," Sylvia said. 
"What?" 
"We need to talk." 
"So talk." 
"A real talk," Sylvia said. "Come to dinner tomorrow. Seven o'clock. We'll talk." 
"You just got out of the hos-" 
"They didn't find a thing." 
"Sylvia-" 
"I won't take no for an answer," Sylvia said, and smiling to take the sting out of it, she shut the door in Daphne's face. 

· · · · · 

13
Alone, Sylvia moved through the familiar rooms. She opened windows and tested chairs. She fondled the personal talismans on her desk as if she had never seen them before-a brooch Daphne had given her for Christmas; the plaque the college had awarded her for excellence in teaching; a reproduction foliate face cast in gray plaster. Sylvia had brought it home from England all those years ago, a primitive ugly thing, yet she had felt its power even as a girl in the gift shop of some otherwise forgotten cathedral; now, lifting the small gray tile to gaze into the thing's daemonic face, a mask of leaves with feline eyes and an obscenely curling foliate tongue, she felt it once again: the power of the green man, that pagan symbol of seasonal rebirth, itself endlessly renewed in the ornate stonework of cathedrals, in altar screens and gargoyles, looming up in the imaginations of those anonymous Briton artisans long after Roman Christianity had laid official claim to their souls. 
Sylvia shivered to think of it. 
Setting the thing aside, she plucked a book off the shelf: her second book, the study of fertility motifs in English verse, in which the green man had played a small part. Was that where her interest in the thing had started, all the way back in England? She flipped the pages idly and slid the book back into its slot, her fingers moving already, without her conscious volition, to the book's shelf-mate, the little volume of poetry she had published before she came to Holman. She traced the foil title on the spine. In Green's Dominion. How long since she had recalled those words? 
Thinking now of her dream, the leaf eddying slowly to the floor from between the yellowing pages, Sylvia started to tug the book from the shelf- 
And stopped abruptly. 
She didn't know why she stopped. 
Her heart hammered in her breast. Her mouth was dry. 
She was wasting time, that was all. Fussing over things that had happened a lifetime ago, like a senile old woman. She snorted. Dreams and omens at her age, when she had so much to do. She had meant to assess the damage in the garden before dark, and look!-she glanced out the window-already the light was going out of the sky. 
Sylvia tapped the spine of the book decisively, edging it back into the company of its shelf-mates. She shrugged on a sweater, and went out onto the back porch. The clouds had closed in overhead, and the breeze had sharpened, combing through the surrounding woods with a sound like rushing water. She could smell rain coming, a looming premonition of earth and wind, wild and untutored. 
A week of neglect. How much damage then? 
Moving to the edge of the porch, she surveyed the garden. The clematis slumped where the wind had dislodged it from its trellis, and the verbena, untended, had dispatched green scouts to reconnoiter the river-smoothed stones lining the garden path. The rain had nourished everything. A lid of algae floated atop the birdbath, and weeds crowded the impatiens surrounding the sundial. Still-unstaked tomatoes drooped in flourishing heaps by their more disciplined siblings. Looking at them, Sylvia felt a twinge of anxiety. What had happened to her out there? 
Syncope, etiology undetermined. 
What did that mean? 
That the fainting was a mystery, yes. But that merely begged the question. The fainting, the dizzy spells, the memory lapses which she had withheld from Schaper-were they elements of a still larger mystery? Sylvia felt her thoughts swirling into contemplation of that bleak prospect, like water in the mouth of an open drain. 
She wouldn't let herself think of it. She wouldn't. 
She turned her mind to more mundane questions. The hammer, for instance. Daphne had retrieved the telephone-Sylvia had seen it, secure on its cradle in the kitchen. Had she also retrieved the hammer Sylvia had been using to drive the tomato stakes? It was worth checking, wasn't it? 
Pleased with the practicality of this mission, Sylvia went down the steps and strode purposefully into the gloom. Except she wasn't really heading toward the tomato patch after all, was she? She was already steering toward the back of the lot, toward the bed of annuals where the unearthly weed had lifted its face to the sky. She hadn't allowed herself to look at the thing when she stepped out on the porch, but at some mute inarticulate level, she had known she would wind up there from the moment she had climbed out of Daphne's car. She felt suddenly as if her entire existence, the thousand decisions and indecisions of her days, had been nothing more than a long inevitable arc toward this moment in space and time: the garden windy with storm presentiment and the vile weed that grew there, the great malodorous purple-black blossom, the enormous seed pod in its bed of serrated leaves. 
She felt its lure like gravity. 
Blood thundered in her veins. She paused, lifting her gaze to the thing at last. It was gone-the weed, the bed of flowers, everything. The wood had overrun them. A great thicket of trees loomed against the storm-tossed sky. 
Six days, she thought. Six days. 
It was impossible, yet it had happened: the wood had flung out an arm, seizing the flower bed and devouring it. As she stood there peering through the gloom at the black line of trees, Sylvia felt a hinge tear loose inside her, the known world fall away. She must have gone mad. What force could impress the wood itself, what power bid the trees unfix their earth-bound roots? 
Thunder purred in the middle distance. 
Sylvia lurched forward a hesitant step, then another. And then she was moving as fast as her arthritic legs would let her, nearly running. She stooped beneath a low-hanging bough and moved deeper into the stand of trees, sweeping aside drooping veils of damp greenery. The flower bed. It was there after all, in the sheltering dusk beneath the overarching branches: the soft black earth she had worked with her own hands, the red and white blossoms of her impatiens wanly aglisten in the murk. She gasped, staggering forward another step, and then she saw the weed. It loomed before her in all its grotesque beauty, twisted and huge, impossibly huge, a vast sprawling thicket of growth. Lightning flared in the distance, illuminating the thing in bewildering strobic flashes: a hedge of curving thorns, a tangle of stems as thick as her wrist, a rattling symphony of serrated leaves. She paused, breathless. Around her, the trees stood black and straight against the sky, like sentinel giants. 
My God, Sylvia thought. My God- 
The tiny cut on her index finger throbbed in time with her heart. She felt the strength go out of her legs. She went to her knees, one hand cupped before her mouth. And there, concealed in the snarled network of vines, she saw the remnants of the great seed-pod. Easily the size of a man now, the thing had split asunder, spilling its broken halves across the rich loam of her ruined flower bed. An amniotic ichor, glutinous and clear, webbed the shattered remnants. At this level, the glade stank powerfully of decay, a teeming compost of putrid vegetation and new growth. 
A drop of moisture slipped through the leaves to kiss Sylvia's seamed cheek, and then the rain began in earnest, pattering steadily against the forest canopy. Still she did not move. She just knelt there, the moist earth cushioning her knees, gazing up at the thing, an incoherent rill of thoughts spilling through her mind. Something had been growing inside the seed pod, something which had at last achieved some awful maturity and which had clawed its way free into the light and air, into the commonplace everyday world, and for God's sake, for God's sake, what could it have been- 
What could it have been? 
She hung breathless on the question, the night quiring around her. Distant thunder clamored in the heavens. Wind sang through the tree tops. The rain whispered down around her, steady and light, spattering against leaf and bark and stone. And now Sylvia wondered if she didn't hear something else too, an almost subliminal rustle of undergrowth- 
-come to me- 
-that seemed charged with meaning, with purpose. She pushed herself to her feet, wiping her palms on the thighs of her slacks. 
"Is somebody out there?" she whispered hoarsely. 
Nothing. Just the wind and rain. Just weather. 
"Is somebody out there?" she said again, pivoting, and this time, as if in response, the sky split apart, unleashing a deluge that pummeled leaves from branches and churned the soil into mud at her feet. Disoriented, Sylvia turned to flee, but the house had disappeared. Trees loomed everywhere around her, greenish-black masses against the sky. 
Sylvia hesitated. The downpour pasted her hair to her skull. Her sodden clothes hung heavily upon her. She fought to quell a rising tide of panic, but it was already too late: it flooded through her, a frothing cataract of terror that shattered her intricate network of dams and channels, her lifetime of painstaking contingencies. And then she was running, blindly, heedlessly. Rain lashed at her. Limbs whipped out of the darkness to draw lacerating stripes across her outthrust arms. Roots clutched at her ankles. She tripped and went down, her breath labored and distorted. 
A cataclysmic streak of lightning unseamed the sky as she clambered to her knees. For a single timeless instant, the world hung in perfect equipoise: the rain, the wind, the whole bruised welter of the night. And there, in the print of leaves against the pewter lid of cloud, Sylvia saw it: a face- 
-was there a face- 
-peering down at her. She saw it. She saw it in the moist shimmering arc of foliage (oh, the curve of that jaw), in the rigid black cicatrix of a branch (that mouth, how like a mouth), in the flickering interstices where two boughs crossed against the sky (ah, the quicksilver gleam of those eyes). She saw it. And as she rose to her feet and gazed into that enigmatic face, she sensed the weight of its body as well, its sheer physical reality, invisible but undeniably present beyond the obsidian wall of undergrowth before her. Once again that odd foreboding possessed her: that strange certainty that her life had been nothing more than a long preordained arc angling irrevocably to this moment, this storm-tossed confrontation in the night wood, this now. 
Now. 
The word chimed in her like a bell, silvery and true, the one true bell she had been waiting all her life to hear and she had never even known it. 
The world reeled around her. She could hardly stand upright. Her heart slammed against her ribs. She thought it would tear itself free of her breast. 
The storm snapped a leaf off a high branch. She watched it eddy gently to the earth, whipsawed by a twisting vagary of wind. 
Sylvia lifted her arms, she stepped toward the thing- 
And then the lightning died out of the sky. A peal of thunder smashed the heavens into shards. Stark terror seized her. Turning, she fled wildly into the night. 

· · · · · 

14
She woke to thunder, a vast cannonade that rattled the window in its frame. Lightning licked at the edges of the room, anointing the beveled frame of her bed, the corner of the chest. Her heart slowed. 
A dream. That's all it was. A dream. 
And yet, if that were true, why did she find herself slipping from between her sheets into that strange flickering gloom? What caused her to snap on the bedside lamp and snatch up the clothes she'd worn home from the hospital? 
Her eye found the stain before her hands did, yet she confirmed it all the same, lifting a single dirty finger to her face in dumb amazement, as if she meant to taste it: mud. Mud on the thighs of the slacks, mud on the knees where she had fallen. 
What had happened in the interval between the woods and this moment? What? She closed her eyes, she saw it all again. The ruined flower bed, the colossal seed pod, that face peering down at her from the leaves. That face. My God, that face. 
Lightning glimmered beyond the window, and against the illuminated screens of her closed eyes, Sylvia watched a leaf drift slowly to earth. In green's dominion. Oh yes, she'd been in green's dominion. 
Downstairs then, huddled inside her threadbare robe, she plucked the thin volume of poetry from the shelf at last and let it fall open in her hands. An ancient leaf lay within, a dried shrunken thing, long brittle, long brown. 
(In England, it began in England.) 
When she touched it, it crumbled into dust. 

· · · · · 

15
She didn't remember the name of the town, and besides, it didn't matter, did it? It was hardly a real town anyway, just a cluster of weathered buildings perched high among the Yorkshire crags: a news agent, a pub, a handful of mute narrow houses hunched close above the single winding lane. She didn't know why she bothered to stop there at all, except it was late when the coach rumbled into town and she was young enough still to succumb to the incoherent urges of her heart. For her heart had spoken, hadn't it? 
Yes, she remembered. 
Just there, as the coach slowed at the edge of the town, it had spoken. A row of stately yews, the stone facade of a Norman church, and beyond it, rising up in an enveloping wave of foliage, a tract of primeval woodland, ancient oak and ash with the promise of shaded green avenues, the earth fragrant underfoot-this juxtaposition of elements struck some chord within her, and when the coach heaved up before the pub, she had stepped out, that's all. 
The coach farted diesel-smelling smoke and pulled away. The street was empty, the first lights winking on as the sun dropped in the west. Sylvia shouldered her pack and went inside. 
The pub was dim and narrow. A fire roared in the wide hearth, banishing the chill spring air. Three men huddled over pints at a nearby table, and an old couple ate silently at the bar, watching her ruminatively over their plates. The landlord, middle-aged and running to fat, with a single black tooth in the center of an otherwise flawless smile, leaned on the bar as she swung her pack onto a stool. "What can I get you, then?" 
"A room if you have it." 
"That shouldn't be a problem. Not exactly hopping here, are we?" Reaching under the counter with one thick arm, he produced a key. "Keep an eye on the tap for me, John," he said to the old man. 
Snatching her bag off the stool, he led her up a steep stairwell to a small room with a view of the church and the wood beyond. "Nothing fancy, I'm afraid," he said, "but the sheets are clean. The w.c.'s in the hall here. Come down and have a bite when you've freshened up, why don't you?" 
Instead, Sylvia sat on the bed and opened the notebook in which she had begun inscribing her poems. She held a pen, but for a long time she didn't write anything. She gazed at the church and its mantle of woods-was that a prickle of unease she felt?-and let the silence fill her. She wasn't conscious that she had started writing-she didn't know where the poems came from, only that they came, somehow summoned by this green and foreign land where myth loomed palpable as stone behind the comforting tapestry of modernity-but when at last she set the notebook aside, she felt better. She had written it out for now anyway, that faint tickle of anxiety. 
Sylvia stood and smoothed the counterpane. Time had slipped away on her. It was full dark, the woods lost in the black well beyond the window. She went downstairs to the common room, empty now but for the landlord polishing glasses behind the bar and the old man nursing a pint of bitter. 
She ordered a lager and something to eat. 
"You're a Yank, then?" the landlord said when he brought her the food. 
"That's right." 
"We don't get many Yanks here, eh, John?" 
The old man stared fixedly at the mirrored wall. 
Undiscouraged, the landlord leaned his elbows on the bar. "Not many Yanks at all," he said. "What brings you here, you'll pardon my asking." 
Sylvia shrugged. She didn't think an explanation involving her heart's true summons would fly, but she didn't know what else to say. She sipped her lager and thought about it. "Just seeing the countryside," she said finally. 
"You hear that, John? Seeing the countryside, she is." The landlord laughed. "I shouldn't think there's much else to see here, but we've got our lot of countryside." He wiped one massive hand on his apron and thrust it over the bar at her. "Graham Massingham." 
They shook solemnly. 
"Sylvia Woodbine." 
"Woodbine, is it? We used to have Woodbines hereabouts, didn't we, John?" 
John took a meditative pull on his pint. He licked his lips. "Nah, I shouldn't think," he said. 
"Why sure we did. Down the churchyard," Massingham said. He turned to look at her. "Not anymore, mind. I should say the last Woodbine left here two hundred years ago if it were a day. Went to America, maybe." Chuckling, he filled a pint and took a long drink. "What do you have planned for the morning, then?" 
"Perhaps I'll have a look at this churchyard." 
"The churchyard!" Massingham said. He laughed again. "You hear that, John? The girl says she'll have a look at the churchyard." 
But John never said anything at all. 

· · · · · 

Massingham had been right about the Woodbines. In the churchyard the next morning, under a porcelain spring sky, Sylvia counted six or seven of them mixed among the Slaters, Aldersons, and Worleys. There might have been more; it was hard to tell. The church had fallen into disrepair-crumbling stone drains, broken shingles on the lawn-and the cemetery had not escaped the general neglect. Knee-high weeds brushed her trousers as she moved between the graves and more than one of the stones had toppled over. On those still standing, some names had simply disappeared, so worn that even fingertips could no longer decipher them. 
Sylvia worked her way deeper into the churchyard, back toward the broken stone wall and the shaded avenues of woodland beyond. It was like moving backwards in time, the graves older, the inscriptions more often obliterated, the stones themselves crumbling to earth. 
Halfway along the back row, a stone's throw from a gap in the wall where a gate might once have stood, she found a trio of Woodbines. Geoffrey and Diana, Rose, the names overgrown with lichen, barely discernible. Massingham's joke came back to her. Maybe he was right, maybe these were her centuries-lost ancestors, maybe that was what had summoned her through the coach window-not the yews or the slope of forest beyond the church, but the ethereal behest of some long-forgotten forebear. Maybe she knew this place in her blood. A daft notion, but once you admitted the possibility … well, it made for a more interesting morning. 
Take Geoffrey. A blacksmith, perhaps. Or a woodcutter. Yes, she liked that better, a touch right out of the Brothers Grimm. Tiny Rose and her father Geoffrey the woodcutter and her mother-no, her wicked step-mother, Diana-who one day led the ungrateful little wretch- 
Ah, but she wasn't really ungrateful, was she, little Rose? Just lonely and misunderstood. She missed her mother. And of course, she was the apple of her father's eye. That was the crux of the problem. That was why spiteful Diana took her by the hand one morning, led her through the fallen cemetery gate and far into the pathless wood, and there abandoned her. The villagers scoured the forest for days, but the child never returned. And so this stone had come to be here … 
But that was wrong, wasn't it? Not a proper fairy tale ending at all. 
Sylvia paused. Biting her lip, she stared across the wall at the wood, where an occasional beech rose lithe and graceful as a girl among the grandfatherly oaks. Some of them, the oaks anyway, might have stood so five hundred years or more, she thought-might have stood so when the first stone of the church itself had been laid. She shivered. There was something looming and mysterious in the cathedral gloom beneath those outstretched limbs, something imminent, as if some faërie prince, Auberon himself perhaps, might any moment coalesce from the moted, moss-grown dark. And that was it, of course. Rose had not died. She had been taken for a forest bride, to live happily ever after as the queen of some hidden woodland realm. 
Warming to the game, Sylvia threaded her way slowly among the graves, pausing now and again to chip away a patch of lichen with her fingernail, furrowing her brow as she puzzled out the names: here a Gardener, a March, a sole Woodbine amid a row of Dowsons, and there-she paused, a bit perplexed-there, standing oddly alone in a circle of weed-grown lawn, an assembly of identical stones. Two or three of them-there might have been a dozen in all, a little cemetery inside the cemetery-had fallen, ensnared in the ivy that cascaded over the stone wall from the forest. The rest had weathered to anonymity; she could see faint impressions that must have been letters and a raised circular mass that might once have been a sigil, but they were otherwise featureless planes of smooth stone. 
Why set them apart like this, though? 
Maybe the fallen ones had been better preserved. Sylvia knelt and began to clear the nearest stone, tearing at the flourishing hummock of ivy. Wedging her fingertips under the near edge, she tried to flip it over. It resisted for a moment and then came up abruptly, nearly spilling her into the grass as the clinging verdure at its edges surrendered with a moist tearing sound. She took a deep breath and heaved it onto its back. Insects scurried for cover across the barren earth where it had lain. 
Sylvia straightened, panting. 
Now then. 
This stone too had been badly eroded, but if she brushed away the dirt … Her lips pursed as she worked. Slowly, symbols surfaced in the gray stone, black furrows where damp earth packed the weathered incisions. A date- 
-fourteen something, could it really be that old?- 
-and above that a line of letters, most of them illegible. An l, a v, and further on, unmistakably, b-i-n-e. 
Something tightened within her breast, making it hard to breathe. The cool spring air felt suddenly clammy. She had started to perspire. 
Sylvia dragged her muddy hand across her forehead. A commanding internal voice- 
-her father's voice- 
-told her to get up, to walk away, to catch the next coach for York. There was nothing for her here. She'd seen enough. Surely she'd seen enough. 
But she was done listening to Daddy. That's why she'd come abroad in the first place. To get away from all that. 
Besides, it was a coincidence, nothing more. It wasn't even that. It was some other name, meaningless except that she assigned it meaning. It was a poem waiting to happen, that's all, a random oddity awaiting the ordering miracle of language. 
The thought calmed her. Rocking on her heels, Sylvia studied the other stones. Maybe it was a trick of the eye, but their inscriptions seemed clearer now. Here and there she could detect discrete letters-an S, a pair of o's, a v-i-a all in a row-in the once-illegible grooves. 
Unbidden, her lips shaped the name. 
Sylvia swallowed. No. On all of them? She could countenance the first coincidence, perhaps, but this-this had to be wrong. 
You see what you expect to see, a soothing internal voice counseled. The imagination schools the eye. 
Sylvia let her gaze drop back to the monument she had pried up from the earth. She ran her fingers lightly over the raised emblem: some kind of foliate rose, she decided. Except that wasn't right, was it? She bent closer, so close that she could feel a slight chill radiating from the granite. It was leaves, a mask of oak leaves carved in the shape of a human face. The eyes had a faintly feline cast. There was something phallic about the tongue. It lolled obscenely from between the grinning lips, curling upward at the tip. 
A ripple of heat passed through her. 
Branches rustled at the edge of the woods. 
Startled, Sylvia looked up. A man stood on the other side of the wall, half-hidden in the shadows under the trees. "Tis a green man," he said in a thick Yorkshire accent. 
"A what?" 
He came a step closer. Sylvia stood, shading her eyes, and peered harder at him, but the emerald woodland murk defeated her. He was lean and tall, she could see that much, and his hair fell in untutored rings around his shoulders, but she couldn't make out any details. She could smell him, though, she realized abruptly: a not unpleasant scent of perspiration and freshly turned earth, the smell of someone who had been working with his hands under a morning sun. 
Maybe he was the caretaker. She frowned, glancing at the weed-grown churchyard and the crumbling building beyond. A right shoddy job he was doing of it, then. Someone ought to see about him. 
Only then did she register the fact that he had answered her question. "A green man," he'd said. "They all have them." 
It was true. Surveying the little cluster of graves, she caught glimpses of that odd, somehow frightening face peering out at her from the weathered sigil atop each stone. Those oddly slanted eyes. That curling tongue. 
She looked back at the stranger. "Like in the poem?" 
He shrugged. "I wouldn't know about that." 
"I studied it in school," she said. 
"Aye?" 
Now she took a step closer to the wall, still peering at him. "Gawain and the Green Knight," she said. "The Green Knight rides into Arthur's Court and challenges someone to strike off his head. The catch is, whoever does it has to let the Green Knight strike his head off in a year's time." 
"And then what?" 
"Well-" Sylvia hesitated, abruptly aware that she was alone here, that she knew nothing about this man. Anything could happen, anything at all, as her father had been fond of saying. Yet the tension she felt wasn't exactly fearful, was it? There was something oddly pleasant about it, actually. She found herself taking another step forward, so close she could feel the pressure of the wall against her thighs. 
"Go on." 
"So Gawain does it. But the Green Knight just picks up his head, reminds Gawain of the challenge, and rides away." 
"So he won't stay dead, aye?" 
"I guess." 
"Ah, well, that's appropriate, isn't it?" 
"Is it?" 
"The old gods never die," he said. 
Sylvia had the sudden urge to step through the fallen gate, just to get a better look at his face. She leaned forward, resting her hands flat atop the wall. "I'm not sure I follow." 
"Twas the Romans, wasn't it?" he said. "Some nights I can still hear their bloody feet marching up yonder road." He made a sound deep in his throat and spat into the trees. "So the old gods died, that's what the Romans thought." 
"The old gods." 
"Aye, the gods of wood and spring. The forest gods." 
She glanced at the grave stone. "The green man?" 
"Aye, he's one, he is. But the old gods never really die. They sleep, but sleepers waken, don't they? And people don't forget, not deep in their hearts, they don't. So there he is, the green man, on the stones. Look close, you'll find him on yonder church there, too." 
Sylvia cleared her throat, suddenly uneasy with this talk of green men, of old gods waking. She recalled that sense of something impending, something striving to be born in the verdant gloom beneath the trees. A faërie prince, some awful forest king. A deep spring of emotion welled up within her, she had no words to describe it, no words to dam it up. Instead, she knelt and drank of it, the taste rich and strange as wine, a dark bittersweet draught ripe with terror and desire. She was abruptly conscious of the hard ridge of wall against her thighs, at the joining of her legs. 
"Come into the light," she said. "I want a look at you." 
For a moment, she thought he would deny her request. But instead he did as she had asked, stepping forward out of the shadows, neither faërie prince nor forest king, but only a human being after all, dressed in the practical clothes-the faded trousers and open shirt-of a man who worked out of doors, a man who worked with his hands. She couldn't say how old he was; his long hair, the plain angles of his face, possessed that timeless quality only men seemed blessed with. He might have been twenty, he might have been fifty. She lifted her gaze to meet his eyes, struck by their color, a piercing and fathomless green, like the first bright shout of spring. 
"Nothing to fear," he said. "I won't bite." 
She turned away, laughing uncertainly. "You looked so strange there under the trees." 
He smiled, a flash of white teeth in flesh the color of oak. "You're likely looking enough yourself, aren't you?" 
He kept coming as he talked, striding toward her until nothing but the wall separated them. Still she felt that strange tension in the air. She wondered if he sensed it, too. She steadied her hands upon the wall. 
He touched her chin with the knuckle of his index finger, lifting it so she had to look him right in the face. "Do you have a name, then?" 
"Sylvia." She forced a smile of her own. "Sylvia Woodbine. And you?" 
"Jack Bramble." 
"Do you live close by, Jack Bramble?" 
"Aye, we Brambles have lived along these woods for centuries." And now, unaccountably-had she invited it, somehow?-his hands closed over hers atop the wall. His skin was cool and dry, tough as old hickory. "I know them well, if you'd care to walk a bit with me." 
Anything could happen. Anything at all. 
Her father's voice. 
Sylvia flushed. "I'm expected, I'm afraid. I'm already late, actually." 
For the space of a single heartbeat, she feared- 
-hoped- 
-he wasn't going to release her. Then he did, stepping back and lifting his hands, palms out. He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows, as if he saw right through the lie. "Mustn't be late, then." 
"No," she said. "Thanks, though. It was interesting, I'm sure. The green man and all that." 
Nodding, she turned away. 
"I often walk in this place come evening," he said to her back. "Round midnight, when the moon is high." 
Sylvia hesitated. Was that some kind of proposition? "Yes. Well. It was nice meeting you." She nodded again, curtly, and moved away, hurrying past the little cluster of graves and into the broader expanse of the cemetery proper, acutely aware of his gaze upon her. She found herself wishing her trousers weren't so snug across the seat. Except she needn't have worried after all, because-and she found this even more disquieting than his bizarre overture-because when she nerved herself to steal a glance over her shoulder, Bramble was gone. Just gone. As if he had somehow glided soundlessly back into the trees, as if- 
-stop it just stop it- 
-he had simply dissolved into his constituent atoms, that celadon murk beneath the forest canopy. 
Then her feet struck the sensible macadam of the road, and the glamour that had possessed her seemed to fall away. 
But Sylvia remained unsettled the rest of the afternoon. Too restless to write, she leafed idly through her notebook, her mind still entangled in the matter of Jack Bramble, his fathomless green eyes and the feel of his strong hands and most of all the odd melange of emotion he had set off within her, that somehow intoxicating cocktail of apprehension and attraction. There was something else, too, some final enigma that continued to elude her, something he'd said. 
What was it? 
It was not until she came down for dinner, late, after full darkness had enveloped the village, that Sylvia finally recalled it: We Brambles have lived along these woods for centuries. Yet she had not seen a single Bramble among the graves. Not a single solitary Bramble. 
She took a seat at the bar, with only the landlord and ancient John for company. "Do you know anyone named Bramble hereabouts?" she asked Massingham when he brought her food. 
The landlord shook his head gravely. "There are no Brambles here," he said. 
It was after nine by then. 
Outside, a silver rind of moon scaled the wall of heaven. 

· · · · · 

16
No more. 
Sylvia lowered herself into a chair. She felt old. She felt so old. She didn't want to remember anymore. 
She closed her eyes, she gripped the arms of the chair with palsied fingers, she worried her lip until she tasted blood—anything, anything to anchor herself in this moment. This book-lined room with the pallid light of dawn beyond the windows. This barren house where she had passed her life. This now. 
But it was too late for that, wasn't it? She should have known better. Open Pandora's box and anything could fly out. Anything at all. 

· · · · · 

17
She remembered pushing her plate away and climbing the stairs. The moon peered through the window on the landing, and she paused a moment to look at it, feeling the pull of some ancient, inescapable tide. 
Up then, to her chaste maiden's bed, to her thrashing, sleep-tossed sheets. She slept or dreamed she slept, and woke to a hum of shrill expectancy, a silence like a shroud. The moon looked in upon her, and in the breath of wind among the trees she could almost hear a whispered summons. Even before she swung her legs from underneath the covers, even before she threw on her clothes and unlocked her door, she knew with a stark and unremorseful certainty what she was going to do. Anticipation sang in her blood like the sea. 
Down the stairs, then, and barefoot into the night. She remembered that, too, didn't she? The moon-frosted street and a gossamer veil of mist in the air and the old man, John, looming up before her from a shadowed crevice in the inn's facade. 
She clapped a hand across her mouth to stifle a scream, the sound breaking into muted hilarity when she recognized her assailant. 
"You scared me—" 
"Go back to your room," he entreated her. 
"What?" 
"Go back!" He closed upon her, his hands clutching at her shoulders. His breath gusted in her face, rank with beer and cigarettes. "For your own good, I'm telling you. You should leave here. You should take the next coach to York." 
How lean he was! How dreary and familiar—his face the cratered desolation of some airless moon, his voice the voice of Sinai, gravid with its prohibitions. Why Father! she might have said. An effervescent blurt of laughter escaped her at the thought. She felt giddy as a schoolgirl, apprehended in some harmless prank. 
His fingers dug into her. "Listen to me, you don't understand what you're meddling in—" 
Sylvia wrenched herself free of him—how strong she had become!—and fled giggling up the street, past the church with its stately hedge of yews and into the neighboring churchyard. She had never felt so alive, so deeply immersed in the world's rich pageant. The fragrant grass caressed her feet, the starry void wheeled above her, the wind bearing down upon her wept with the scent of new-leaved trees. Goosebumps erupted on her arms. Her nipples tightened into hard knots. She lifted her hands to the sky and sighed for the pleasure of the air against her face. 
The tombstones in their ordered rows, the ring of grass, the cemetery inside the cemetery—she passed them by all unawares, hesitating at last and for a moment only in that gap that might once have been a gate, when there were gates and borders and passages between, that gap that was now only a gap, a broken place in a bastion that few cared anymore to cross. Yes. She had hesitated. She had hesitated as at the edge of a precipice, encountered unexpectedly in some wild and hidden place. She had hesitated, with the church at her back and the wood before her, her hands outstretched to the stone pillars at either side, drinking in that line of cold demarcation, that wall. 
An owl called softly among the trees. 
"Yes," she whispered to the sky, and the grass curling at her ankles, and the beckoning line of trees standing dark against the sky. "Yes. I'm coming." 
She let go the wall. 
She stepped into the wood, the ground beneath her feet buoyant and lush as though someone, expecting company, had unrolled a carpet to receive her. She stepped into the wood, the twilight sanctity beneath the trees. With his name upon her lips— 
"Are you here, Jack Bramble?" 
—she stepped into the wood. 
"Aye, I'm here," he said, and for a moment—surely it must have been an illusion—it seemed that his voice came not from one place, but from many places: the dark ranks of oak and the moss between her toes and the perfumed earth itself. 
But no, he was here, here, an emerald shadow moving to embrace her, and she lifted her arms to receive him as she had known she would. There were no words, nothing to say, only the feel of him, this lean strength and the play of muscle under his flesh and his lips upon her lips. Her shirt came open beneath his fingers. Her trousers pooled at her ankles. For the first time in her life she stood naked in the outer air, with only Jack Bramble and the incurious moon to gaze upon her. 
"Jack, no—" 
"Shhh. There's nothing to be afraid of." 
That done, her protest duly noted in whatever celestial almanac such things were recorded, Sylvia abandoned herself to the moment at last. She let him lower her upon a bower of moss—how soft and welcoming it was, the softest bed she had ever known—and then even that awareness evaporated, there was nothing in the world but his mouth at her breasts, his hand between her thighs. 
Yes. She remembered. She felt a single flaring instant of pain as he entered her—such pain that she had by reflex torn free a lock of his hair—and then a slow-rising swell of pleasure, world-girdling, tidal, until at last it overwhelmed her, crested, broke. 
She remembered. 
And then, only then, with his seed still drying on her thighs and her legs flung open like a common whore's, only then did she understand what she had surrendered, the sole and only gift that was hers alone to bestow, and that to some common stranger. 
Sylvia closed her eyes and began quietly to weep. 
"Ah, now, lass," Jack Bramble said. 
He touched her face, but she would not be consoled. She could not find the heart even to stand and dress herself. She just lay there, clutching his bloody lock of hair in her fist and staring blindly into the trees until at last the character of the darkness overhead changed and she realized she had slept. 
A stone was gouging her back. 
It was morning. She was alone. 
She stood to dress herself, tucking Bramble's lock of hair unexamined into the pocket of her trousers. As she slowly buttoned her shirt, only half-awake and shivering in the cold gray air, she remembered a dream that had come to her in the night. 
In the dream, she had flown, panicked, through a thick and perilous wood. Her muscles screamed. Her breath clawed in her lungs. At last, exhausted, she had stumbled, fallen. Jack Bramble knelt beside her. Jack Bramble extended his hand. "Come away with me," he said. "Come away and be my wife." 
And even then—even in the dream—Sylvia had understood that this moment, this single instant in her whole long span of years, was the pivot upon which her life would turn. 
A wild longing had risen up within her—to hold his face between her hands, to taste the fragrant verdure of his breath, to feel once and always those enormous swells of pleasure crest and break within her. 
But the world she had known beckoned her home. The wood was wild and desolate. 
In short, she was afraid. 
"I can't," she'd said. 
The words had echoed inside her head as she made her way through the broken gate and the cemetery beyond. They seemed to boom through the thin mist clinging to the church spire, to radiate from the slick pavement of the road as she trudged barefoot back to the inn. I can't. Two solid, declamatory syllables of renunciation, prideful and afraid. Yes, afraid. Why not face it after all these years? 
Sylvia glanced at the book, still open in her lap. A few powdery remnants of the leaf clung to the pages. Staring at them, she felt a final memory dredge itself from the muddy river bottom of her mind. She had been slumped inside the coach to York, dozing, her head tilted against the chill pane of the window, the big diesel motor throbbing in her bones. Scant hours had passed, but already the memory— 
—no the enchantment it was an enchant— 
—the memory of the previous night had taken on such a hazy, dream-like quality that, in that strange hypnagogic state between sleep and full waking, Sylvia had more than half-convinced herself she had dreamed it. Bottomless relief welled up inside her. That's how the forgetting must have begun. Her father had been right. She'd been playing at rebellion, that's all, and finally, there in that nameless cemetery, it had all become too real. So she had fled. From York, she had caught the next train to London, from London the next plane home. It was safer that way. Safer to run, safer to forget, safer to bind it all into orderly measures of verse. Language could contain it. 
And events had conspired with her. The coach had lurched, jolting her half-awake. As she sought once again the oblivion of sleep, she had screwed her hands into her trouser pockets, where her questing fingers brushed something unexpected. Opening her eyes, Sylvia had retrieved not the bloody hank of hair she had for some reason— 
—why?— 
—anticipated, but only a leaf, an oak leaf, bruised and bleeding sap. 
She remembered gazing at the thing in dull curiosity. It seemed to pulse with some enigmatic significance, but she couldn't say why. She tucked the leaf into her pack—she must have kept it for some reason, after all—and closed her eyes. When she woke again, she was in York. 
So that's all it had come to in the end, an old woman alone with her memories, one slim volume of verse, a handful of dust. 
I can't. 
She could hear those words even now, in the creak of an attic joist expanding or the solemn cadence of the hall clock, measuring out the morning tick by tick. All the empty sounds a house makes when there is no human noise to fill it up. 
She thought of Daphne— 
—maybe I choose to be alone— 
—and felt a circuit close inside her, illuminating a single sustaining idea. 
What kind of choice was it, after all? 
The clock chimed ten o'clock. It was Friday. Daphne was coming for dinner. She had too much to do to sit here woolgathering. Sylvia stood and began digging through her desk. When she found the faculty directory, she picked up the telephone and punched in a number. 
"Professor Green," she said. 

· · · · · 

18
The evening started badly. 
Daphne had been right about overdoing it. The household chores alone wearied Sylvia. By the time she returned from the market, lugging three swollen sacks of groceries, she felt dizzy. Her heart was beating in a strange swift rhythm and the air shimmered with a glaring, over-illuminated brilliance. She had intended to start dinner immediately. Instead, she went upstairs to nap, woke late, and spent the afternoon trying to catch up. 
To top it off, Robin Green arrived early—only ten minutes or so, but enough to catch her putting the final hasty touches on dessert. Clad in jeans and a white shirt, his sleeves rolled back to the elbow, he stood by the sink and gazed distractedly into the lengthening shadows while she iced the cake. 
She was obscurely relieved when the doorbell rang. 
"That'll be her, I suppose," Robin said, drumming his fingers on the countertop. 
"Relax. Dinner among colleagues, what could be more pleasant?" Sylvia smiled. "I'll get the door. Why don't you find something for us to listen to? The stereo's just in here." 
Sylvia left him looking at CDs in the living room, and went along the corridor to the front of the house. 
"Jeez, I thought you'd never come," Daphne said as soon as Sylvia opened the door. She brushed by in a hurry, a bustling whirlwind of energy that seemed to have touched down in a shop somewhere, snatching half a dozen packages into the maelstrom. She nudged the door closed with her heel, and looked at Sylvia over her laden arms. "I picked up some wine. The doctor didn't say anything about wine, did he?" 
"She." 
"What?" 
"The doctor's a woman. And no, she didn't say anything about wine." 
"Well, good, cause I brought some. Can you give me a hand with these? My arm's about to break." Daphne shoved a bag at her. "I got red and white both. I can never remember which one goes with fish." 
"We're not having fish." 
"Well, that's why I got both. And some of the bread you like. And videos. I thought you might want to see a movie." 
"We'll see. Let me get that, too," Sylvia said, snatching a video tape that was slipping out of Daphne's hand. "You brought your briefcase? You were planning to work?" 
"I'm always planning to work, but in this case, I got a couple things from the library I thought you might enjoy. Hang on a sec—" She dug into the leather satchel swinging from her shoulder. "How are you feeling, anyway? I meant to call, but students were in and out of my office all day. And Robin Green, I don't know what's gotten into—" 
"Why don't you get the books later, we need to talk—" 
Daphne looked up. "You aren't feeling well, are you? I knew dinner was a bad idea." 
"I feel fine, I took a nap. Look—" Sylvia nodded at the briefcase. "—put that down. Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Rob—" 
Music started up in the living room, something complex and refined, with lots of strings. Daphne dumped her briefcase and purse unceremoniously on the floor. "Who's here?" 
"That's what I wanted—" 
But Daphne, still clutching the loaf of bread like a football, was already moving down the hall. Sylvia couldn't see the expression on her face when she came into the living room, but the tension in her shoulders was unmistakable. So was her tone: unimpeachably polite and cold all the way to bone. "Why, Robin," she said. "Sylvia didn't mention you were coming." 
Robin Green, standing by the stereo, looked stricken. "Hi, Daphne," he said uncertainly. 
Sylvia dropped the videos atop a stack of books she hadn't gotten around to shelving. Robin turned a CD case nervously in his hands. Daphne pursed her lips in a way that indicated a witticism was in the offing, something bright and cutting. "Well—" she began, raising her eyebrows, but Sylvia cleared her throat. 
Daphne and Robin regarded her expectantly. 
"So you're interested in the baroque composers, Robin?" she found herself saying. 
"Oh, that." Robin glanced at the CD case he'd been holding. "Boccherini, is it? It's all right, I guess." 
"I think Robin's more post-modern," Daphne said. 
"No, no, classical's fine." And then, when no one said anything: "I've always preferred jazz, actually." 
Sylvia hesitated, uncertain how to respond. 
"Charles Mingus?" Robin added hopefully. "And Sonny Rollins, especially the stuff he did in the fifties. The later stuff …" The sentence died on his lips. He shrugged, as if his opinions on the later stuff were a matter of well-established record. 
"I'm afraid Sylvia's interests tend to wane after the Renaissance," Daphne said dryly. 
They contemplated Sylvia's antiquated tastes for a moment. Robin coughed. He closed the CD case and placed it on the end table. 
"Well, dinner smells terrific," he said. 
"Yes, Sylvia, what is for dinner?" 
"We're having a roast," Sylvia said. "But it won't be ready for a bit. Why don't I get us all a glass of wine?" 
"I think I'll help," Daphne said. "If you'll excuse us just a minute," she added, looking at Robin. 
"Sure—" Robin began, but the door swung shut on his words. 
In the kitchen, fluorescent light leapt from the linoleum and the freshly polished countertops. The clock over the sink chimed the quarter hour. 
Daphne thunked the bread down on the kitchen table. "How could you? What on earth were you thinking?" 
"I was thinking he might be lonely, he hardly knows anyone here." 
"He has friends. He's been at Holman nearly—" 
"Well, he can always use another friend, can't he?" 
Sylvia held Daphne's gaze for a moment, and then she turned away. She took a bottle of wine out of the bag and nearly dropped it. She was shaking. She couldn't seem to get the corkscrew properly aligned. Daphne loomed in her peripheral vision, but she couldn't bring herself to look up. She didn't want Daphne to see the weakness in her eyes. She didn't want pity, she didn't want anything more to do with hospitals or doctors. "If you're going to help, help," she said. "Don't just stand there looking at me." 
"I can't believe you," Daphne said, turning away to collect the glasses. 
Sylvia steadied herself against the counter, and took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and swallowed. There. She opened her eyes and positioned the cork screw. This time, it went in perfectly. 
Daphne put the glasses down beside her. "You could have told me. You didn't have to spring him on me like that." 
"You're really angry, aren't you?" 
"Well, wouldn't you be?" 
"What if I had told you? Would you have come?" 
Daphne grimaced. 
"Well, would you have?" 
"I already told you I didn't want any part of him." 
"You can't even have dinner with him?" 
"It's not just dinner, Sylvia." 
"Sure it is. Like you said, he's not a bad looking man, he wouldn't have any interest in you." 
The words, hurtful and cruel, slipped out before she could stop them. They found their mark, too. Daphne's mouth dropped open. Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly. She turned her back to the counter and crossed her arms over her breasts. 
"That's it, isn't it?" Sylvia said. "You're not afraid he's interested. You're afraid he isn't." 
"That's not it." 
"Then what is it?" 
Daphne didn't answer. Sylvia started pouring the wine, the bottle chattering against the rims of the glasses. 
"Well?" 
"We work together. It could get awkward." 
"And so it's not worth the risk?" 
"It wasn't to you!" 
Sylvia plunked the bottle down hard. 
"Yes, and what has that brought me? You envy me? You want to have to hire someone to stay with you when you get old, just so you can live at home? Is that what you want, Daphne?" 
"So I should marry myself off to the first man that shows any interest?" 
"Has anyone suggested matrimony?" 
Daphne rolled her eyes. 
"All I'm saying is, it doesn't hurt to talk to him." 
"Oh, come on, Sylvia." 
"What?" 
"Have you looked at me?" Daphne said in a whisper, her voice cracking. "How could he be interested in me?" 
Sylvia turned, taking Daphne's hands in her own, and peered into the other woman's wide, untrusting face. Daphne had beautiful eyes, cobalt blue—Sylvia had always known that—but she had never noticed the pain in them, the fear and sorrow. How could she have missed it? 
It was like looking in a mirror. 
"How could he not be?" Sylvia said. She found her fingers, unbidden, rising to Daphne's cheek. "I'm not saying this is the right thing. All I'm saying is, give him a chance. Don't be so afraid all the time. There's nothing to be afraid of." 
Daphne bit her lower lip. She stood rigidly as Sylvia embraced her. And then, abruptly, she sagged, snugging her face into the crook of Sylvia's neck. In that fleeting instant, holding this fragile young woman who could have been her daughter—who would have been, in another, better life—Sylvia understood what she had missed, what she had denied herself. 
"You only get so many chances," she whispered. "I know. And when they come—" She touched Daphne's chin. "Look at me. When the chances come, you have to seize them. Do you understand me? Seize them." 
The words came out with a fury she hadn't expected, and in the aftermath there didn't seem to be anything else to say. She clutched Daphne fiercely for a moment, and then she pushed her away. She held her at arm's length, drinking her in, trying to imprint this moment, this one human face— 
—this poem— 
—on every cell in her mind. Daphne. There was no sound in the kitchen but the steady tick of the clock hanging above the sink. 
Daphne shook her head. "Come on," she said. "He's going to think we've forgotten him." 

· · · · · 

For Sylvia, the rest of the night had an enchanted air. No meal had ever tasted so delicious, no candle ever fired such lustrous depths of wine. Light burnished the table in buttery slabs, and the music swirled around her, allegreto and allegro, almost palpable in the mute and fragrant air. 
To be sure there had been a measure of awkwardness at the start. The conversation bounced from one obvious topic to another over the wine—how did Robin like Holman? what were his plans for the summer?—but things seemed to slip into a rhythm after Sylvia served the meal. Robin Green was so courtly and low key, so studiously oblivious to the tension in the air, and—yes—so attentive, that he soon dulled the edge of Daphne's anger. 
More, Sylvia thought in the glamour of the moment, he charmed it utterly away. Daphne had never been more lovely. Her eyes glistened, her hair shone, she seemed less fat than magnificent, imposing as a goddess in her stature, or a strong young tree, its arms lifted in defiance to the wind. And her mind—Sylvia had never seen it so quick or elegant. 
The evening flagged only once. 
Over the second bottle of wine, the talk turned to work. Robin mentioned his dissertation, a study of Middleton, and Daphne said she'd been working on Mary Elizabeth Braddon, which led to a debate about canon formation. Sylvia—who'd come to criticism late, and not entirely by choice—found the whole thing dry as dust. 
"But you wrote a book of criticism yourself!" Daphne protested. 
"Yes, what was your book about?" Robin asked. 
So she found herself talking about the Fisher King, the Jack in the Green, and the older underlying archetypes, the ancient vegetation myths of death and renewal that survived in the foliate heads carved on thirteenth-century cathedrals, in the Gawain poem and the annual May Day ceremonies still celebrated at Hastings and Rochester. "The pagan myths are everywhere once you know to look," she said, "even the ecumenical calendar. Easter is May Day in Christian garb, and All Saints Day falls right after Halloween, the Druid holiday of Samhain." She raised her eyebrows. "The old gods never die, they just put on new faces." 
"Jesus," Robin said, "you are a poet." He gave an exaggerated shudder. "All this talk about ancient rites of renewal gives me the willies. Didn't the Druids used to sacrifice virgins?" 
He chuckled, but the joke fell flat, too much an invocation to a guest unseen and uninvited, but always in attendance. Even the music took a funereal turn, adagio largo, a somber rolling cadence that swept back the curtain of years so that for a single exhilarating instant, Sylvia found herself at the edge of revelation, kneeling once again in that strange circle of graves, her fingers lifted to summon from the weathered stone the letters of a name so tantalizingly familiar that she could almost shape the syllables— 
"Are you all right?" Daphne said. 
And that abruptly the curtain fell back into place. 
Sylvia forced a smile. "I'm fine," she said, "I'll just get dessert." She stood, folding her napkin, and by the time she reached the door Daphne and Robin were already talking again. 
The kitchen was dim, lit only by the fluorescent bar recessed over the sink. Wind rattled the screen door as Sylvia reached for the overhead light. She paused, her hand lingering at the switch, and then she pulled it away. She crossed in darkness instead, the kitchen silent but for the faraway tinkle of music, and, once, a burst of laughter from the dining room. At the counter, she hesitated again, and then, for the first time all day, for the first time since the dream— 
—it had been a dream it must have been a dream— 
—she drew back the curtains. Her own face, greenish and wan in the glare of that one flickering light, floated disembodied atop the glass. With trembling fingers, Sylvia reached out and snapped down the fluorescent's switch. 
Her face hollowed into darkness, ghostly and strange. Beyond it, like a photo swimming up through a tray of chemicals, the night summoned itself into being, a chiaroscuro of moonlight and gusting shadow: first the rigid black pillars of the porch, and then the moonstruck eye of the birdbath, gazing blindly from the garden's center, and finally the ragged fringe of woods, the trees stark against the opalescent sky. 
Sylvia realized she'd been holding her breath. She exhaled, misting the window. As the foggy crescent evaporated, the trees materialized once again, clearer now— 
—closer— 
—and she sensed suddenly the magnitude of the forest, its weight and density, its dumb intent. It loomed there, encircling not just the house or the scant streets beyond, but the whole world: all the aggrieved forests girdling the earth, waiting to assert their dominion once again. Ah, but waiting for what, that was the question. 
Sylvia leaned closer, so close she could feel a slight chill radiating from the glass. She sensed something else out there, didn't she? A green and piercing intelligence peering back at her from the trees. She stepped back. Her finger throbbed. She could hardly draw breath. The wind kicked up again. It sounded almost like a voice crying through the trees, the words indistinguishable. If she could only get a little closer— 
The overhead light went on. 
"Sylvia?" 
She came to herself, her hand outstretched to the back door. She had no memory of crossing the room. Daphne stood on the other side of the kitchen. 
"Are you all right?" 
"I'm fine." 
"What are you doing in the dark?" 
"The screen door was blowing," she said. It was all that came to mind. 
"Oh." Daphne lifted her eyebrows. "Well. Let me help you with dessert." 
"Yes," Sylvia said. "Do." 
She cut the cake while Daphne got out plates, and then, Daphne holding the door for her, she slipped back into the dining room, the dessert tray held before her like an offering. Robin Green stood to meet her, smiling. Sylvia saw his eyes move past her to Daphne, brightening, and everything else fell away, these strange spells and the weed and the wood, all the burdens of history. The music brightened. Color flooded the room. Her feet seemed barely to touch the floor. 
The cake was buttery and rich. Light shimmered in every surface. The air buzzed through her veins like wine. And though the conversation moved on to more mundane topics—funding and faculty politics and students held in mutual disregard—Sylvia could hardly follow it she was so intent on drinking everything in, on seizing it and holding it fast, this intoxicating pageant of the senses, this abundance. Outwardly everything seemed normal—she nodded, she smiled, she put in an occasional remark—but inwardly, inwardly she sang. 
And then—too soon—it was late. 
Robin Green left first. As they stood watching his car disappear beyond a screen of trees, Daphne said she'd help with the dishes. "Forget it," Sylvia said. "I'll do it in the morning." But Daphne insisted, and Sylvia succumbed—pleased, actually, at the prospect of a little more time. And this too was a small miracle of the senses: the hot, clean fragrance of the soap, and the shining dishes stacked away still warm in their accustomed cabinets. "This was my mother's china," Sylvia said. "I want you to have it someday." 
"Don't be ridiculous," Daphne said. "You're not going anywhere." 
They didn't say much after that, not until Daphne got ready to go. But on the stoop, with her purse slung over one shoulder and her briefcase over the other, Daphne clutched Sylvia fiercely. 
"I'm sorry I was angry," she said. "This was a good night—" 
"You don't have to—" 
"I do. I felt something, a spark. I never would have given it a chance." She gave Sylvia a squeeze and stepped away. "You sure you're okay? You gave me a scare in the kitchen." 
"I'm fine. I promise." 
Daphne smiled. "Good. I'll call you tomorrow then. And thanks, Sylvia." 
She touched Sylvia's hand, smiled, and went down the stairs. At her car, she turned around. "You ever find the word, Sylvia, the one you were looking for?" 
Had she? Sylvia supposed not. But it was all too easy to imagine a world in which she might never have had to look in the first place. She looked at Daphne. "I found two of them," she said abruptly. 
"Yeah? What are they?" 
"Choose life." 
Daphne laughed. "Not exactly a description of your state of mind, that." 
"It could have been." 
Daphne opened the car door, but she didn't get in. She stood there, gazing solemnly at Sylvia while she thought it over, and then she nodded. "Good night, Sylvia." 
"Good night." 
Daphne slid into the seat and closed the door. A moment later the headlights came on, dazzling Sylvia. The car backed into the street and pulled away. 
Sylvia didn't go anywhere, though. 
She just stood there, listening as the sound of Daphne's car faded into the distance. She just stood there, listening to the wind. 

· · · · · 

19
The night was dark and rich and cool, and though Sylvia knew that she should go back inside—she wasn't well, the evening had tired her—there was this matter of the wind. It swept down from the wood in a perfumed rush, laden with the splendor of the season, the spendthrift beauty of new-budding limbs, the promised languor of some woodland bower, mattressed thick and soft with moss. Yes, and there was a voice, too, just as she had thought in the kitchen. 
Come to me, it entreated her. 
She could hear it clearly now, this summons from the night wood, coaxing, earth-succored, drawing her down the crumbling steps of the stoop, and along the path to the back garden, the path she had made with her own hands, cutting away the turf and leveling the mulch and placing each white river-smoothed stone with the care of a poet, laying down a path of words. How they shone, those bordering stones, bright against the omnipresent dark. 
The house rose above her. She glanced up, the yellow windows, foursquare and orderly, beckoning her back—back to the dishes stacked neatly in the cupboards, back to the carpets so freshly vacuumed that you could still see patterns in the nap where no human step had fallen. But she resisted. She focused her gaze on the path. She kept her feet moving until she reached the side gate. 
The garden lay on the other side, a tangle too long unattended, flanked on three sides by a forbidding wall of trees. Had they crept forward or had she only dreamed it—the woods, the vile weed, and all the rest, vanguard of some encroaching senility? It was a frightening thing either way, yet she felt no fear, not anymore. She felt … what exactly? A bottomless yearning, that's all. A loneliness so deep and wide that she could hardly plumb it. 
"Are you there?" she whispered. 
The wind touched her face. 
Sylvia lifted the latch and swung the gate open. She stepped through, thinking of that other gate, that gap that might have been a gate when such things still existed, gates and borders and travelers between, and she didn't bother closing it behind her. She didn't bother with the path either. She struck off across the garden instead, planting her feet firmly in the mulched beds and crushing flowers underfoot, so that fragrant eddies swirled around her and drew her on. The woods loomed closer, higher, deeper than she had ever known them, spilling across the lawn in bold profusion. 
Holman's clocktower began to chime when she reached the edge of the trees, and there she hesitated at last, stealing a glance back at the house as the old fear rose up inside her once again. John Thistle had been right. She'd been afraid, she'd always been afraid. And of what? Life, that's all. Just life. All this time running away. She'd wasted all this time. The thought was like stumbling across a dark pearl on some broken shore, something so unexpected, so black and revelatory that it took your breath away. What a paltry thing it was, fear. 
She turned away. 
She looked up. She squared her shoulders. 
The forest held its breath and listened. She sensed something peering out at her from the green darkness, something ancient and abiding. 
"I'm coming," she said, and now, without looking back, she moved into the wood, past the ruined flower bed and past the snarl of thorns where the great seed pod rotted into earth, inward, gliding among the trees, her feet silent on the moss-grown earth, always inward, penetrating deeper and ever deeper into the emerald shadows that awaited her (they had always awaited her), so that when at last she stole a backwards glance not even the faraway gleam of the house was any longer visible. 
She paused then (how her finger throbbed!), not knowing why but knowing that she had done her part in penetrating to this consecrated glade, knowing too that something there awaited her and drawing breath in silent expectation when it began at last, when a deliberate shadow— 
—a man she had known it would be a man— 
—but it was not a man nor had it ever been, it was a— 
—shadow, detaching itself from that cathedral gloom, began to flow slowly toward her, attended by a musk of earth and leaf and sap but newly risen. Yet it was a man, after all, and she knew him, did she not? She had caressed that curving jaw, she had gazed into those eyes. Her mouth had kissed that mouth. Yes, and hungered now to kiss it yet again. Sylvia stepped forward to embrace him, she lifted her face to his, his name— 
"John—" 
—already taking shape and departing from her lips as air even as she realized her mistake. For there was a face beyond that face (it was Jack Bramble's face) and yet another beyond that and another and another (there were always more faces, there always would be), so many ephemeral masks and only one true face, as old as time and unwived in its season, and questing always for its vernal bride. 
The old terror seized her then, words rising unbidden to her lips— 
"No, no—" 
—and she would have fled, but she did not have the strength. He was strong. He was too strong: the hands at her shoulders and the arms drawing her close and the lips pressing firmly to her own. Then she was kissing him back, eagerly, with all the pent-up yearning of a lifetime, and as she opened herself to receive him, she understood what she might have come to know all those years ago, in the green and hungry embrace of Jack Bramble, had she only permitted it: she did not want words, she had no need of them. And so she surrendered at last—life, words, everything—a green thought in a green shade, enrapt in green and leafy silence. 
The End

© 2002 by Dale Bailey and SCIFI.COM.