I think of my sister the way I think of marsh-mud wedged under overgrown fingernails.
It was a game we played after Daisy killed Mama by being born. I buried something for ya. We raked the forest floor with scuttling fingers, took turns hiding treasures for the other to find. It was up to the burier to leave clues: strips of bark arranged like pointed arrows, a pebbled path. She never buried much worthwhile: chickadee eggs, creeper-tied bracelets, pinecones. Once, we managed to string a spiderweb leading to Daddy’s steel dibber in a tree hollow.
When he realized it was missing, Daddy smacked me for recklessness.
When she said she’d taken it, he hugged her for honesty.
That was how it went with freckled, fawnish Daisy. Smilin’ herself to sleep while I tossed and turned, ‘till the year I started working at Short Stop and she got knocked up.
Over the years I’ve imagined scraping out the clumps of her with my scalpel. But I always end up wedging her further down, where I just can’t reach.
#
The forest has drowned.
I pull my Lexus onto the gravelly shoulder only five minutes from Daddy’s cornland, hollering over Aster’s scream-cries that we’re stopping. The kid kicked my shins and whined for the whole of Daddy’s funeral, grousin’ to get outta dodge, back to Raleigh. His tears dry quick enough when I unbuckle his carseat; the exhaustion seeping through my eyelids doesn’t. He bolts down the hill, past the pallid tree line of forest.
I rub the dregs of last night’s ER shift out of my eyes as Aster’s toddler-sized Oxfords clomp under the big yellow sign. WARNING: SALTWATER ENCROACHMENT.
“Stick around, Aster!” Kid grins like the devil and slinks behind a graying tree trunk.
Daddy always said the ghost forest happened ‘cause of Daisy, that if we’d found her body, the sea wouldn’t have choked the trees of our girlhood or swallowed the marsh with his corncrops. Easier for simple old Daddy to blame God than to read a bit of evidence for climate change. Like I tell my residents: treat the horses, not zebras.
He actually thought I’d stay here. Wiping his dinner plates, his stinking feet, his fat tears while he stared at the forest, willing Daisy’s suntanned shoulders, or even her washed-up baby daddy, to materialize. Maybe they would’ve stuck around and been the ones to find him slumped over on the porch steps.
Never me.
“Aster!”
He rounds a felled log, and his auburn kiss-curls disappear between trees. There’s a familiar twinge beneath my nails; I dig them into my arm as I give chase.
Aster’s a city kid. He doesn’t know about the forest, how life and death brush against your elbows, how memories germinate with teeth and limbs. This cluster of trees had mothered Daisy; its roots sprawled through her veins and blossomed.
But everything’s different now.
The pines are bone-white, naked, shivering in the heat. Spiked trunks and petrified branches prod the soupy air. Without needles they look wretched, like the splintered radius I cast on the operating table last night. Even the marsh frogs have gone silent. Everything in the godforsaken forest is strangled by saltwater.
I’m glad for it. Even as the swamp air curdles and my next breath is hard to find.
“Aster!” I’ve got to get that kid out of here.
I clamber onto the gnarled log after Aster, and my pump sinks into the rotting pulp of the tree. The wood has a maggoty bite; I jerk my leg but it clamps down, writhing and chewing.
I buried something for ya.
With a grunt, I rip my calf free, drawing two crooked, bloody gashes down to my anklebone. The log-carcass traps my pump but I leave it, rushing now, deeper into the woods where the trees run ragged and soggy duff’s overtaken by water. It used to be marsh; wild but familiar. But the ocean’s extended her prowl, drowning everything she touches, and the only thing I recognize is the pump of blood through my right ventricle, screaming Aster can’t swim.
I strain my ears for a giggle, a sigh. Sounds a mother feels in her bones. My panic’s buoyant over fatigue, and I charge hollering into the water.
The humidity plummets. Pine-tar sweat drips into the corner of my eye; a mosquito-swarm buzzing starts in my head.
I reach for the horse, the logical, the rational explanation: I’m panicking. My sympathetic nervous system’s screwin’ with my head. I shudder, turn around, and Aster is there, asleep.
His round cheek resting against a tree—
Not a tree. A woman.
Her ivory bark-skin shucked, peeling as she cradles him.
There are red-speckled eggs nestled into her skull.
Creeper-tied bracelets on limp-branch arms.
Steel dibber jutting from her neck.
The dried grime under my nails twinges, screaming to be excised.
“I’m a trauma doctor now,” I stammer. “I help people.”
A weeping honeysuckle bloom droops from her womb. I drag a reluctant foot through the water toward her.
“Daddy—” My voice slopes on my accent, like a plea. “He woulda made me—”
She lifts a branch-bone, caressing Aster’s curls.
My question. Her words were a tickle of wind, a chime of a wren through the years. You got an answer?
What had Daisy expected when I told her I buried something for her in the forest all those years ago? Another game? Another gift? She wandered into the pines that day like a horsefly to a sundew. Entitled. Naive. Daddy threatened to oust me if I didn’t surrender my savings for Daisy to have a “proper hospital visit.” But Daisy knew; she had to have known, I dug up Daddy’s dibber because of her. Her smarmy, salt-tinged smile. The way she lolloped around like happiness was treasure you happened uncover, not something you squeezed drops from after you worked and sacrificed like I did; even how she bled like a brook, streaming over my knuckles, under my nails, chapped lips puckered around the why—
Defenses slide cold and dead down my throat. I lunge for Aster, but my legs don’t budge.
The muck sucks me down into the stinging saltwater, onto my hands and knees. Daisy rolls her neck—slender still, like a doe’s—and the dibber winks. Wind purrs sweet and low through barren trees. Aster’s cheek bobs on her timbered shoulder, his tiny fingers swaying gentle, peaceful. Mire gnaws my knees and wrists, pulling me under, wedging me into mud.
I do not cry. My chin shoots up, over the surface of the water. The apex of a snapped limb dangles off a dead pine over my head. It forms an arrow, pointing at me.
