And the Trees Crept In(7)

“I’m… not.”

But she knew I was lying.

The bubble came again, but this time it was a sob. I couldn’t stop it any more than I could stop the laugh. Before I knew it, she was hugging me, and the tears were coming too fast, and I didn’t want to wake Nori, but her hug was so warm, and I hadn’t been hugged in so long, and I dissolved into something between the child Silla and the broken Silla, and all the while, Cath kept kissing the top of my head, rubbing my back, and saying, “I’m here. I’m here, Silla. I’m not going anywhere.”





We built forts in the dining room on a Tuesday morning. There was nothing particularly unusual about the day. Cath had mowed the lawn with her manual cutter, and I had stacked the grass into tall piles. Nori had jumped into half of them before I was done. Cath had laughed at the spectacle: Nori running back and forth in her white dress, and coming inside an hour later streaked with green, the leaves of grass poking through her curly hair.

Then Cath had decided that a magical day of grass-fort invasion deserved a special kind of lunch. We stood at the kitchen counter and watched her prepare a large silver platter with raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, and small tomatoes (all from the garden), as well as cured meats—chorizo, jamón Serrano, and turkey slices that she got at the village store. After adding some hot green peppers, sweet morello cherries, and two spoonfuls of soft sobrasada that she had ordered in from Spain, we followed her into the dining room.

Only, she didn’t sit down.

Instead, she pulled out her chair, got down onto her knees, and crawled underneath the table, one-handed.

I stared at Nori. “Okay…”

Nori threw her hand over her mouth and began to giggle silently. I raised my eyebrows—This is not okay was the meaning supposed to be conveyed, but Nori just carried on laughing.

“Where are my princesses?” Cath called from underneath us.

I rolled my eyes. “Fine.”

Underneath the plush tablecloth, which Cath had washed and placed the day after we arrived, we were in another world. Nori’s face glowed pink in the light from the lamps in the room above us, and we ate the food with our hands.

“Barbarians,” Cath said, laughing. “Today we are barbarians!” A long red stain of cherry juice ran from the corner of her mouth to her chin. She wiped it away and then burst out laughing again, looking at the juice on her inner wrist.

“My father would kill me right now if he could see this!”

“Do you want me to get some paper towels or napkins?”

“Rubbish!” Cath said, dismissing my offer with a flick of her wrist. “I can do whatever I want! La Baume is ours now.”

She grinned at me like a child with a new toy, and I laughed in return.

“In that case,” I said, popping the single cherry I was holding delicately between two fingers into my mouth and grabbing a fistful of sobrasada instead, “I’m going to take advantage!” I smeared the soft chorizo spread over some baguette and took the biggest bite I could manage.

“Well, finally!” Cath declared, throwing up her hands, adding to Nori, “She gets it! She finally gets it!”

Nori nodded furiously, grinning from ear to ear, her cheeks stuffed with one of each item on the tray combined.

“We do not follow social conventions here,” Cath said. “All that formality? Ugh! Sickening.” She threw up her pinkie finger. “La-di-da!”

I snorted through the sobrasada and bread and Nori rolled around laughing soundlessly.

Not for the first time in my life, I wished I could hear what that would sound like.





The fire was burning low now, and we sat around it on the sheepskin rugs, curled up in fleece blankets while it stormed outside. The skylight above us was the deep black of nothing, but now and again a flash of lightning revealed the raging rains and whiplash winds.

Nori, wrapped up in Cath’s lap, sat staring at the night sky, flinching with every rumble of thunder.

“It’s just God up there,” Cath said. “He’s moving his furniture around. Nothing to be scared of. It just sounds loud because we live underneath him.”

Nori’s eyes widened, and she looked up again.

A flash of lightning.

“He’s taking photos of you!” Cath cried. “How wonderful! He must think you’re beautiful.”

Nori grinned. She fumbled to get out of the blanket and then ran to stand beneath the skylight, posing and smiling and spinning as “God” took “photos” of her.

I grinned at Cath, embracing the warmth in my chest and wondering if this was what love felt like.

“Time for a story,” Cath said later, when we were all snuggled close and sleepy. I had retreated to the armchair closest to the fire, my legs dangling over the arm.

“I want to tell you a story about those woods out there. A true story.”

I glanced up from my sleepy haze.

“You must never, never go into Python Wood,” she whispered, making sure she had Nori’s full attention. “Python Wood is a bad, bad place. Long ago, something bad came out of it. A man, of sorts.”

I frowned. This wasn’t exactly my idea of a soothing bedtime fable.

“He was more of a… monster.”

“Auntie Cath—I don’t think—”