The way his eyes twitched to mine when I spoke, and hung there, a ripe green that reminded me of the grass that pushes up from the soil in spring. A kindness in them. The way his wet hair dried in soft little waves around his ears. The way he held his breath just before he spoke, considering each word—each syllable. The way my heart swung up into my throat and made me dizzy. A feeling I tried to tamp down, to ignore. But couldn’t.

I think of the woods, the moment I found him in the snow: how his eyes snapped open, the whites like cracked eggshells. Fear trembling across his lips. What did he see in those woods? Why did the forest let him live? I wish I could peel him open, cut away his hard exterior, and see what he hides inside.

Now he sleeps downstairs, and I know that even the heat from the woodstove won’t warm the chill from his flesh, won’t cure what haunts him.

He needs medicine. Not the kind from a white room in a sterile white building prescribed by people in white coats. He needs forest medicine.

The only way to cure a chill caused by the forest is to use a remedy grown inside it. My grandmother’s words are always buzzing along my skull, always close.

I tiptoe back down the stairs, past the kitchen, to the rear of the house. Quiet as a winter mouse. Quiet as the seeds that fall to the ground in late spring.

I push open the door to my mother’s room and step inside. It smells like her: vanilla bean and honey. Always the scent of honey. It sticks to her, in her wavy auburn hair, honeycomb under her fingernails. It can never be properly washed off. Not completely. Three weeks ago, she left on a delivery to the coastal town of Sparrow with four crates of her wild clover honey placed safely in the back of her truck. During a full moon, she collects the sticky comb from the wild hives inside the Wicker Woods, then funnels it into glass jars and delivers them to small boutiques and organic food markets along the west coast. Stores pay a premium for her Wicker Wood Honey, said to be sweeter than real cane sugar and able to cure all manner of skin ailments—including hives and poison oak and sunburns.