5

Can a childhood memory be misconstrued as starting over? I don’t think so. Not if I tell it this way:

The forests outside Stockton remain as real to me as the humid, fungi-laden streets of Ambergris, maybe more so. The dark leaves, the mottled trunks, the deep green shadows reflected on the windows of our house, as of some preternatural presence. All sorts of trees grew in Stockton, but the difference between the staid oaks that lined our street and the misshapen, twisted, coiled welter of tree limbs in the forest seemed profound. It both reassured us and menaced us in our youth: limitless adventure, fear of the unknown.

Our house lay on the forest’s edge. The trees stretched on for hundreds of miles, over hills and curving down through valleys. Various were the forest’s names, from the Western Forest to the Forest of Owls to Farely’s Forest, after the man who had first explored the area. Stockton had been nestled comfortably on its eastern flank for centuries, feeding off the timber, the sap, the animals that took shelter there.

By the time I had turned thirteen and Duncan was nine, we had made the forest our own. We had colonized our tiny corner of it—cleared paths through it, made shelters from fallen branches, even started a tree house. Dad never enjoyed the outdoors, but sometimes we could persuade him to enter the forest to see our latest building project. Mom had a real fear of the forest—of any dark place, which may have come from growing up in Ambergris. (I never had the sense that growing up in Ambergris had been a trauma for her—she lived there during very calm times—but it is true she never talked about it.)

One day, Duncan decided we should be more ambitious. We had made a crude map of what we knew of the forest, and the great expanse labeled “Unknown” irked him. The forest was one thing that could genuinely be thought of as his, the one area where he did not mimic me, where I followed his lead.

We stood at the end of our most ambitious path. It petered out into bushes and pine needles and the thick trunks of trees, the bark scaly and dark. I breathed in the fresh-stale air, listened to the distant cry of a hawk, and tried to hear the rustlings of mice and rabbits in the underbrush. We were already more than half a mile from our house.

Duncan peered into the forest’s depths.

“We need to go farther,” he said.

Back then, he was a mischievous sprout, small for his age, with bright green eyes that sometimes seemed too large for his face. And yet he could effortlessly transform into a little thug just by crossing his arms and giving you an exasperated look. Sometimes he’d even sigh melodramatically, as if fed up with the unfairness of the world. His shocking blond hair had begun to turn brown. He liked to wear long green shirts with brown shorts and sandals. He said it served as a kind of camouflage. (Camouflage or comfort—I don’t remember.) I used to wear the same thing, although, oddly enough, it scandalized Mom when I did it. Dad couldn’t have cared less.