And the Trees Crept In(67)

At last, he says, “To help you.” His eyes fall, and I see his hopelessness. “To love you.”

His words. His face. His voice. I remember him. I remember my love for him, and I feel a new love for him, one that grew all over again when I didn’t know who he was.

And I fall into him. His arms come around me right away, and my lips meet his. Perfect fit, something inside me says. I kiss him and I hug him and I never want to let go. This feels urgent and desperate. Completely vital.

“Help me,” I whisper.

“I’m trying,” he says.

I allow him to lead me back through the Python manor, away from the hole—far away from it—but I can’t stop my mind from thinking about everything I’ve seen. Especially… that…

My little Nori, reduced to that. It can’t be real. It just… can’t.





Not again. I can’t take this anymore.

La Baume. The kitchen. I watch myself mash up peanuts, like I’ve done a million times before. The other me adds sugar and a little butter. She mixes it up, fiercely. I can see she is trying not to cry. When she’s done, she turns, revealing Nori standing behind her, and hands the mess over.

I step forward without thinking. But something is wrong.

Nori eats the peanut butter slowly

something is wrong

and it looks

like the effort is gigantic.

She swallows it down and smiles at the other me something is wrong

trying to reassure the other me—I’m okay, Silla, I really am, her eyes say—but then she vomits it all back up, curling over and heaving like her body won’t take the food it is offered. So familiar. I know this feeling well.

And now I see it.

Nori is sick. She’s very, very sick.

The other me says, “Don’t worry,” because Nori looks so ashamed of herself, but then Nori sits down very suddenly, looking dazed and thirsty, so the other me gathers her up and carries her upstairs.

I don’t want to follow.

I follow.


I stay.


I watch.


It’s like some sick kind of stop-motion film, sped up. I watch myself as the days pass, caring for Nori, who wastes away in her bed. She is so thin, so pale, so thirsty. The other me tries to feed her the peanuts, but Nori rejects it all. The other Silla wishes she had fresh apples. Gowan always brought the apples from the apple tree.

The other Silla wanders from the chair by the window, peering out into the woods, to the chair by the bed, sitting beside Nori and reading to her, feeding her, cleaning her, crying for her.

Day passes day passes day. She visits the window often, but the view doesn’t change. No one comes.

One day, another long day of suffering, Silla finds a journal. It is old, so old, that it has calcified somehow, the cover turning hard as stone. It is cracked down the middle. She finds a pen, opens the broken book, and begins to write.

I peer over her shoulder.

They say I’m crazy, she writes.

Days, nights, days.

No Gowan. No sign.

Nori grows thinner, sicker, thinner. She stops taking water, too, after a little while. The other me looks better, but not much.

The food is gone now. Only one dried apple left, which she was hoping to avoid because it has some mold on the side.

I watch as Silla feeds it to Nori, instead of taking it herself, even though she knows Nori won’t keep it down. But she must try. She has to try. I watch the slow painful bites, the excruciating swallows.

And then—

And then I am in the other Silla. I am her, and she is me, and there is ink on my fingers, which are curled around a broken book. I am so hungry. The pain is constant, inevitable, wholly distracting.

I try to feed Nori, but she is no longer awake or responding. Terror like a blinding flash hits me, and I check—she’s breathing. Shallow. So shallow. I begin to cry, but there is no water in my body.

I try to say Nori’s name, but there is not enough strength even for that.

I climb into the bed next to my sister, clutching her to me, and I fall asleep.

Please… I think. Please, Gowan. We need you.





When I wake, Nori is ice cold in the bed beside me.





“It gets bad after this.” Gowan is standing in the shadows of the room.

“I know.”

I stay in bed for a long time. The smells get pretty bad, but I won’t let go of her, and it soon passes. There’s something wet in the bed with us, but that passes, too. I can’t… I can’t do this.…

And I’m out. Watching. Once more a spectator. The other Silla is in the bed, and I am standing at the foot of it.

I watch myself linger on, staring with yearning, desperate eyes at the window.

I watch myself write, sicken, suffer, and very slowly… die.





“This is what happened,” I say.

Gowan, beside me now, nods.

“This is how I died. How we died.”

He nods again.

“I’m to blame.”

He faces me, takes my shoulders. “No. You can’t think that. It was so hard back then, all that talk of war, people running scared.… People died. So many people died. Cath was weak and sick, and she went mad and killed herself. That’s not your fault. Nori died from some kind of wasting sickness and that was not your fault.” He pauses. “You couldn’t have saved her, Silla.” He pauses. “You starved to death, and, yes, that was your choice. But… you have to forgive yourself, Silla.”