As the fields and forests outside grow sparser and interspersed with more neon-lit buildings and parking lots, the buzzing in my skull subsides, and I let my shoulders fall and my eyelids droop.
I have secrets, too, Mama. I know how they nourish and how they nip. Help me understand yours.
Just don’t make me go back there.
BOY
Live Video—THAÏS 12 months ago—Oh My G*d I Found a Stökéwood Home Video!!!
[Video starts]
Mireille and the girls are running, running, running through the moss garden, past the spitting carp, around the two giant hunchbacked chestnut trees, down the gravel road, and into the forest, painted emerald and gold by the afternoon sun.
They run over a moldy log, under a broken branch, through a spiderweb thin as a ghost bride’s veil. In the distance, the corner of the cabin’s roof appears. The chimney spits out thin whorls of smoke.
Tai takes a leap, landing on a rotted mess of roots, and her foot slips through.
She shrieks and falls to her knees. The camera rushes toward her, while still capturing another figure in the distance, reaching the cabin: Manon. She swirls around to track the shriek and doesn’t slap her hand against the splintery wooden exterior wall.
“Hello?” Manon calls into the woods.
“OW OW OW OW,” Tai shouts, still flopped on the ground with her foot trapped.
“Tai?” Manon says, squinting through the branches. “Is that you?” She steps away from the cabin, but in the wrong direction.
“Mama, help meeeeee,” Tai shouts, even though the cameraman is right next to her. “Mama! Help!”
The normal chatter quiets as a cloud passes overhead, darkening the leaves. Somewhere a dove calls—its cooing low and mournful.
There is rustling in the branches. The camera spins around, ragged breathing audible.
“Mama?” Tai calls, hesitant.
The rustling continues. “It’s probably just one of those mangy foxes that scampers across the lawn,” the cameraman says. His voice is low, but he sounds like just a boy.
That’s when Mireille runs out of the darkness, dropping to her knees. “Shut that off,” she snaps at the camera, but he doesn’t. She loosens Tai’s foot with a surgeon’s precision, frowning at the weakened roots, and kisses her ankle all over, until Tai breaks out in giggles.
“My poor lamb!” she says, kissing Tai across the forehead, the cheeks, and the shoulders as Tai squirms.
Tai smears the lipstick off, still laughing.
Manon comes trudging up behind them. They exchange a look. Mireille reaches for one of her hands, which she grants her, tentatively—then the other. She pulls Manon into her arms, too.
“My girls.” She leads them toward the cabin, and Tai makes a point of slapping the outside wall hard, with a minxish grin at Manon.
Inside, a small stove burns. Somebody has laid out little painted cakes and miniature cups of tea.
Mireille pours tea into bone cups, so fragile.
“Chípí chípí,” they say, clinking.
“What about my prize?” Tai says, without looking at Manon.
Mireille smiles and pulls a wrapped package from her pocket. “For you, Thaïs. An incredible display of agility,” she says, bestowing it upon Tai with both hands.
Tai gives it a shake; it sounds full.
But then Mireille pulls out a second box and extends it to Manon. “And for Manon, whose caution in the forest—whose effort to protect us all—never goes unnoticed.”
Manon smiles with tight lips and cuddles the box in her lap.
“But that’s not fair,” Tai says. “Only the winner should get the prize.”
“My little one.” Mireille ruffles Tai’s hair. “Just as your sister looks to you for your great sense of adventure, for your open delight in the world, so must you look to her for her caution and awareness,” she says, placing a hand on Tai’s shoulder. Her eyes are dark. “These woods can be treacherous. You never know which trees will curl their roots around your ankles, which foxes will prance right down a foxhole with you in tow,” she whispers. Her voice takes on a goofy pitch as she reaches for their necks with little fingers. “And which forest vines will grasp for your necks!”
The girls burst out into laughter, clutching their necks, contorting themselves to escape her tickles. The chocolates fall to the floor, and the camera takes a step back.
“We give up!” Tai shouts. “Leave us alone! We give up!”
They fall onto her in a pile, hysterical. Smiling.
Mireille, stroking their black hair, stiffens.
Mireille goes still then, her arms holding the girls close. “Let’s be quiet, my loves,” she says, looking out the scratched window into the thick black-green tangle of the woods. “Your father’s friends won’t like that we’re here.”
She watches the shadows outside as they thicken and multiply. As they turn the forest into something ominous and lush—dusky and replete with melancholy.
“But the forest is so lovely, isn’t it?” Mireille continues. “Beauty isn’t that which is beautiful, it is that which pleases us.”
The cameraman steps back, then turns, the camera zooming into the meaty dark of the woods. He softly clears his throat.
“Your mother is so special,” he whispers. “Are you special, too, girls?”
[Video ends]
TAI
This won’t be super bubbly and fresh like I want it to be, but life’s only like champagne in that it can be not-so-easy to digest sometimes, right?
Here’s the truth: My parents each gave me a secret from the world, one beautiful egg of a secret each that I’ve carried with me since I was a snot-nosed kid, very, very carefully, so they would never crack.
Dad told me I was born with the mark of luck on me. It came in the form of this gross little fatty deposit at my temple—Mama had it removed by a plastic surgeon when I was a year old so I wouldn’t be teased, thank God—but Dad told me the luck itself would never leave me, and … it hasn’t.
And Mama: She used to take me up the ladder to the tower hidden in her bathroom, to the nest with the view of the forest that was only ours.
I was her special baby girl, and this was our special place.
She would wrap me in a cozy blanket, and cuddle me, and read to me from books like The Twenty-One Balloons, which she stored in a metal box, covered in foil animal stickers I had insisted we buy from this airport kiosk in Frankfurt.
The secret grew when she left. I knew she might have left a message for me there, but the room was locked and closed so that no one could enter. I couldn’t tell Dad or Nons, because it was our secret place. Ours alone, and telling them would ruin it.
And I wanted to be the one who found her message, anyway.
I planned a lot in secret, in the days after she left. I was so goddamn industrious. I planned how to break into her bathroom (a set of master keys from Dad’s Stökéwood office, where he slept most nights). I planned how to reach the rope coiling down from the ceiling (a step stool), and I planned how to pull and hold the attached ladder down (a hand weight from the creepy old home gym).
I put my plan into action, one rainy night, when Noni was curled on her side in bed, refusing to speak to me, and Dad was talking to Uncle Teddy downstairs.