The Forest's Son by Cyndy Aleo Read Free Book Online

the room, the gesture one of a mother to a small boy. It's something she's probably done hundreds of times, and it bothers him that he can't call up even a glimmer of a memory of that, when other, more trivial things have already seeped back into his memory.
    He wants to remember a time when he could crawl into her arms and find comfort and safety. He must have felt that way when he was young, but with his Swiss cheese memory, all he has to go on are the two juxtaposed images today: ethereal earth mother and fierce warrior mother. Which is real? Which has raised him?
    He pauses before he picks up the box, listening for his mother's footsteps on the stairs, and he swears she’s speaking in another language, so quietly he can barely hear her. She whispers something that sounds almost like a name, and sounds so familiar he can almost  — almost — place it, but that feeling of connection slips just out of his reach when she finally starts down the stairs.

 
    8: Alone
     
    Donovan has driven nearly halfway home before she lets the tears fall. Things have admittedly been weird since she became friends with Vance, but this is beyond anything anyone could ever have expected. She can't even absorb the scene that took place at his house just now. Could she have been hallucinating?
    Until now, life as his friend has consisted of a routine. It’s been strange and uncomfortable, but at least it’s been routine. She’s woken every day hoping to find that one tiny clue that would lead her to a solution to bump the routine off the track and make it stop.
    This isn’t exactly what she meant.
    Driving becomes impossible, and she pulls over to the side of the road, noting that she's next to one of the cow pastures Vance always jokes about. She sees a few cows grazing, but the usually overpowering smell barely registers because her brain is focused so much on everything else.
    Is his name even Vance?
    There are no more truths she can still count on. Vance's not-all-there mother may spend most of her time on another plane of existence, but apparently, when it matters, she's more there than may be safe for most human beings, and she's scary . And Vance himself isn't some poor kid with a really terrible seizure disorder or psychological issue, like she's thought — or at least contemplated — all these years. Instead, he’s zapping the living hell out of his brain to make himself forget, and his mother has known about it the whole time. And not only has his mother known about it; she’s encouraged it. She’s been part of it. She’s used it to protect their secrets, whatever they may be.
    It's going to be impossible to process everything overnight, much less make any kind of decision about what she should do now. A smart person would call in some kind of help, but whom would she call? The police? Is it illegal to administer your own electroshock therapy with some ancient machine? She has so many questions, and none of them are going be answered in the timeframe she needs them answered.
    So only one question is left: Can she see herself leaving Vance? When she’s let everything else fall by the wayside, and allowed everyone else to drift out of her life like so much flotsam and jetsam, can she cast him away as well and try to reassemble the broken shards of what she thinks she once had?
    There are probably friends who’d be willing to take her back, and she'd been asked out a couple of times before all the guys on campus determined she was “the weird girl ” who hung out with “the ghost boy ” who never talked to anyone or seemed to know what was going on. The possibility of a normal life might still be out there for her somewhere.
    She knows, though, if she doesn't pick him up in the morning, she’ll spend the rest of her life pondering the what-ifs. She'll wonder what happened to him and what there might have been between them if she'd only gotten into her car and picked him up. She’ll ask herself questions she’ll never