The Guardian (Continued)
by Christopher Barzak
We left for the park later that night. In the darkest hours, our town was silent except for the sounds of crickets whirring, night birds cooing, and the strum of frogs in their secret places. Hester's geese flew our route before us, then circled around to report that the way was clear. An unmarked white van was parked several houses down from ours, but the driver was slumped against the window, asleep from too much waiting for Hester. We followed the geese through the vine–covered streets until we arrived at the park, where Hester slipped into a dark sliver of space between two towering elms. As soon as she passed between them, she disappeared. I couldn't even hear her rustling in the branches. A moment later her long pale arm stretched forth from the dark place and her fingers curled inward, motioning for me to follow. I took hold of her pinky and Hester pulled me inside her realm.
The quiet of the suburbs I'd heard as we slipped through the streets of our town would have sounded like a parade in that forest. I heard nothing there but wind in the trees and the gurgle of a nearby creek. Hester loomed large above me. Her breath came heavily, as if she were anxious. Suddenly she started walking at a fast pace, pushing through the treetops, which swayed and snapped back into place behind her. The ground beneath my feet trembled at her step. I clasped the hem of her orange dress to my chest and followed as close as possible so I wouldn’t get caught in the backlash of branches. And in this way, crashing through the forest, we found our way to the grove at its center.
Tiny lights awaited us in the grove. They shimmered in the dark, floating through the night like miniature Japanese lanterns. As one passed by me, I heard a slight buzzing sound, a hum like a bee as it skims your ear in summer. I looked at Hester, who stood in the center of the grove already. The glowing creatures circled her, lit upon her face, her hair, her shoulders, upon the weeping willow growing out of her head. She held her arms out at both sides and turned in a slow circle, a smile of pure pleasure washing over her.
The trees in the grove towered over Hester, unlike some of the smaller ones at the border. If I squinted here among these giant elms and maples, she looked to be the right size again. For a moment, she looked like the old Hester, the girl who was once so awkward and quiet, books clasped to her chest protectively, ready to bump into anything if it meant avoiding other people. Hester still avoided people, but now it was for different reasons: now Hester shrank from the burdens of civilization in order to accomplish a task so mysterious even I didn't know all the reasons for her secrecy.
"Here," she murmured, talking to herself really. She stood upon a small hill, and I saw that she held the egg in her hands once again. A pale stream of silver moonlight spilled over her, illuminating the trees ringing the hillside. She slipped the egg into one of the pockets of her orange dress, then bent down and forced her fingers into the earth. She groaned, struggling, flexing her muscles. The wheat of her hair rustled over her shoulders, against the small of her back. The weeping willow tree growing out of her head swayed with her exertion. Finally she pulled up a tab of earth and continued pulling until she’d pulled up the grass and sod of the hillside in one long strip.
"It's up to you now, Stephen," she said, wiping the sweat from her pale brow. The glowing creatures circled her as if they were planets orbiting a sun.
"Don't worry, Hester," I told her. I trotted up to her and she bent down and lifted me into her arms. "You're so big!" I said, truly realizing it for the first time. Since she'd started changing, I never actually allowed myself to touch her. I was happy to touch her now. She was still my sister. She was still Hester underneath all of that flora and fauna. I wished I'd hugged her more often when she was still five foot seven, and I could reach my arms all the way around.
Hester placed me gently back on the ground, then laid herself down in the hole she'd created. She pulled the strip of grassy sod under her chin like a blanket. She was getting comfortable in the hillside, wiggling her toes at one end, shrugging her shoulders at the other to make more room. She retrieved the egg from her pocket a moment later. Then, holding it between her forefinger and thumb, she placed it inside her mouth. She swallowed, and the egg traveled down the column of her throat and disappeared from my sight forever.
"Take care, Stephen," she said, blinking soberly. Then she pulled the quilted earth over herself entirely and disappeared as well.
* * * * *
I maintained a defensive position in the days that followed. Hester's geese helped to guard the perimeter of the grove where Hester had buried herself in the hillside. The geese patrolled the outer borders, reporting to me at varying scheduled hours during the mornings, evenings, and in the night. I didn't understand their bluster, but I sensed that their posts were well watched. Only once did I feel an impending threat to the grove, and that came on the fourth night of our vigil, just when I thought things were going to be okay.
Brunhilda, the Viking goose, suddenly appeared in the grove at sunset, her wings fluttering anxiously, her bill filled with an alarming honk. She led me through the forest until we reached a blind of brush that she'd selected as her vantage point. I kneeled beside her in silence and waited, and then all at once I heard the sound of men moving through the forest, snapping branches beneath their feet, grunting, sometimes cursing. More than one voice. Perhaps three, maybe four. All male, deep and rough.
I looked down at Brunhilda, gave her the signal for our agreed upon plan of action, and she nodded gruffly and waddled out into the woods, awaiting the men. Once they reached us, she flew up into their faces, landed, jogged away from them for a moment until she was sure they were following her, and then took once again to air.
I caught only a glimpse of them. They were dressed differently from each other: one in flannel and blue jeans, another in a business suit, and also the postman. Two of them had guns, a handgun and a rifle. The postman held a baseball bat, and slapped it lightly against the palm of his hand. Two shots rang out immediately. "Blast her!" the postman shouted. When the silence of the woods resumed a moment later, he ran forth like a dog to see if he could retrieve Brunhilda. He returned to the other men shaking his head. "Missed her," he said, "but she's just up ahead." On hearing this, they began to track Brunhilda once again.
It didn't take much longer to capture them. Brunhilda executed our plan brilliantly, leading them to a pit Hester had dug for us before burying herself. We'd covered it with weak branches and leaves and pieces of brush. The men ran over it, the branches broke beneath their weight, and they fell twelve feet into the earth.
What other disturbances we faced were minimal. Other geese had scared off trespassers simply by surprising them, jumping out of their hiding places and chasing them out of the park. A week passed, and no more incidents occurred, and I decided it was time to venture back to town.
This was a trickier proposition than I thought, though. The town was no longer the town I remembered. As I slipped through the two towering trees that Hester had guided me through, it became apparent that the roads were no longer drivable — trees broke through the pavement, tumbled the sidewalk slabs this way and that. Vines grew over streetlamps, filtering their light so that it felt like you were underwater, like swimming at the bottom of our pool in the back–yard.
I found home eventually. My parents cried when they saw me, circled me in their arms and held me close. "We were so worried, so worried," my mother sobbed. "Where is Hester?" my father asked. I told them she was safe, that she was in the old park, that she said to tell them she loved them, but this was a call she could no longer ignore. They nodded, but I could tell they didn't understand. "Where did I go wrong?" my mother asked no one in particular. "Was it all those years of Brownies and Girl Scouts?" my father pondered.
We toured the rest of the town, or what remained of it. Whatever Hester and her egg were up to, it had changed our home from its original refined layout into a riot of wild things. A wellspring sprung up in the electronics department of the Super-Mart, ruining the TVs and computers and stereo equipment on the shelves. Deer roamed the strip mall parking lots, which now greened over with thick grasses and wild–flowers. Our school found itself surrounded by oaks so tall they appeared hundreds of years old. Bird song filled the air. The chatter of squirrels. Overnight our town population tripled, but not one human moved in.
Soon after Hester's metamorphosis reached its final stages, many of the people of our town packed their belongings into their SUVs and minivans and drove off to other towns outside of Hester’s influence. A few people stayed, though, and some newcomers arrived. It was a small settlement, and we lived off what the land provided, and tried not to overextend it or ourselves.
My parents decided to stay in the hopes that, one day, Hester might come back to us, a regular girl again. My mother held this hope really. My father indulged it from time to time. I myself felt that Hester wasn't really gone. She was all around us, in the air and in the earth and water. I could smell her, feel her chest rise and fall as I walked the forest to visit her hillside, I could hear her voice on the wind and in the gurgle of the streams. I saw her face, just once, in the still surface of a small lake. I was fishing, and then I wasn't. I was watching my reflection in the water instead, thinking, Hester, Hester, show yourself, give them a sign. They miss you so.
Hester's face swam up at me then, floating just under the water. She smiled, tilted her head at a quizzical angle, waved, then swam to the bottom again.
The tree was no longer growing out of her head. Her body had returned to the young woman's body I remembered. I wondered if perhaps she had been showing herself occasionally to my mother and father, and that these brief visitations kept them here in the hopes that she'd return one day for good.
* * * * *
Sometimes at night, when my mother sews jackets and darns socks and mends buttons, when my father gathers firewood and guts fish for our dinner, when everyone is home and the forest seems satisfied and restful, I go out to Hester's hillside, where the glowing creatures congregate in uncountable numbers — hundreds of them swarming the grove, faster fliers than most birds, brighter than most fireflies. I go out there and sit on the hillside with a book — sometimes school textbooks, sometimes an old paperback crime novel or a fair ytale — and I read aloud to Hester and the glowing creatures. They hover over my shoulder, perch upon my head or on my legs, folded Indian style, and when they are still I can sometimes make out their faces, tiny and almost human, their eyes slightly slanted, their ears slightly pointed. They no longer hum like bees when their wings are at rest. Quiet and rapt, they listen to the adventures of detectives, or to the mishaps of children lost in the woods, abandoned by their parents. They listen to stories of terrible witches who live in Victorian houses, not in forests at all, and wonder at the utter strangeness of automobiles, airports, high–rises, factories, subways and cell phones, only to return from these visions of a world not their own, hearts eased, home again.
