“I dunno.” I’d picked it up in some conversation held above my head when I was too young to recall the specifics. It was one of those things I’d heard in passing, not really understanding either the meaning or the context. I had only a dim impression that you got sent to the pine trees if you did bad, crazy things. And if you were especially bad and crazy, you never came back from the pine trees. They swallowed you whole.

Lu snuggled her chin down against the top of my head and kissed me there, where the hair parts. “Okay,” she said. “So you’ve heard just enough to be afraid. I’m sorry for that, and that’s just one more thing that I’ll have to tell you more about someday. But don’t worry about that for now, either. There’s no such place anymore. Not the pine trees you’re thinking of. No one will ever send you there, or anyplace like it. And any time you find yourself frightened of the pine trees, you remember what I said about those three sisters and you can stop being afraid. They won’t let anyone take you off to the pine trees, and neither will I.”

“Never?”

“Not so long as I live.”

3
Branches

I

I took Lulu’s words to heart. I envisioned the ghosts as visitors, not malicious boogies, and I began to look for them, though I’d not seen them outside my dreams since that time in the woods. I even started to wander the mountainside seeking them.

Occasionally I’d feel the eyes on me and I’d stop my play to look around. I might have invited them to come out to me if I’d known how. But no, the women kept their distance. I could have forgotten them altogether except for their passing smell of old clothes, drifting sometimes by. Mothballs and cedar. I felt nothing of them except ephemeral words of curiosity, and once of caution. Only one other time in my childhood did they raise their voices, and then they saved my life.

I was alone under the trees that day. It was the year I turned ten, or maybe eleven. The bottom and fringes of my jeans were wet. It had been raining for several days on the mountain, as it often does in early summer.

Bored to death with cabin fever, I’d watched eagerly as the clouds began to crack and steamy beams of light fell through. Then I grabbed my rubber shoes and dashed out of the house before Lulu or Dave could stop me. I took my bicycle and rode over to the neighborhood playground, which was old but in a good state of repair. If any of my friends had managed to escape their own houses, they’d surely join me soon.