The Radiant Road by Katherine Catmull Read Free Book Online Page B

make.”
    â€œWell, it’s . . . incredibly beautiful,” she said, flushing at the weakness of the words. Lame .
    He smiled down at the colored rings rippling away from his feet. Clare broke the silence, speaking in a rush. “I don’t know you. Only I do.”
    â€œYou do,” the boy agreed. His voice was low for a boy; not like a man’s, but deeper and richer than a boy’s should be. “You know me, Clare. You’ve only forgotten. Girl,” he said. “Un-forget.”
    And saying that, he reached out as if to touch her. He was too far away to touch her—he at the center of the hundred colored rings, she at the edge—but then he wasn’t, suddenly, he was quite near, and Clare stumbled back.
    But he caught her, he steadied her, and into her hand, he placed her own silver chain.
    With the boy’s touch, with the green, woody scent of him, Clare’s heart startled, as wild as a bird. She did remember. She saw two babies, once, and then two toddlers, and now the same two in this meadow, nearly grown, and all of them superimposed, all layered against each other. That’s me , thought Clare. That’s me, once, then, now, all orange-red and warm and autumn. That’s him, now, once, then, all cold and winter branches and eyes like a sky holding snow. That’s us, facing each other on this path. I know this boy, oh, I know him.
    And she knew with certainty that this boy was winter to her autumn, and that as winter and autumn go hand in hand together, she and this boy had always gone. She knew that, she knew that, how could she have forgotten? “But what—” she began.
    â€œTonight,” he said. “For greater talk we’ll meet tonight, in the in-between. Tonight I’ll begin to tell you all your mother should have told, except she died. You’re home, ah, you’re home at last. Clare, come tonight.”
    â€œWait, in between what? Where do I go?” Clare asked.
    â€œYou know. Come just as you always did.” He was somehow back in the center of the mushroom circle now. The flute hung from one hand. “I thought you’d come the day you came, and you almost did, until you didn’t.”
    In the center of a wheel of ravishing color, he was a shadow or a rain cloud, and then he was gone.
    Clare sat down hard on the forest floor. Meet him in between? “You almost did the day you came”—she ran over yesterday in her mind: how she brought her suitcase in, saw the stars on the ceiling, touched the spiral on the wall, and wrote, and slept, and slipped downstairs to put her hand in the—oh.
    â€œIs it the tree?” she called into the empty air. But she knew it was. As she asked the question aloud, her mind was flooded by memory.
    When I was a baby, he was.
    When they were babies, their fists closed together. Her head against his head. Their comfortable sighs in the night, breathing together the smell of living wood, and earth, and herbs. Their small, square, bare feet, tangled together, dark and pale.
    And didn’t she miss him when they were apart, and cry?
    And didn’t she cry and cry, and then stop and go silent, once they left for good?
    They had lain inside that tree as babies, then as tiny children, tangled, playing. She remembered the taste of the wood in her mouth, chewing it for comfort as her small hard teeth came through.
    ( But that wood is poison , came the passing thought, though she didn’t stay to question it.)
    Red hair, black hair, pale hand, dark hand, brown eye, gray eye.
    Inside the tree.
    Inside the tree is full of lights, she remembered: a Christmas tree inside out.
    Inside the tree it smells of resin and licorice herbs, and wood under it all, she remembered: the smell of living wood and stone.
    Clare sat on the forest floor, slowly fastening the chain around her neck. The trees towered and breathed above her, coiled and knotted beneath her, a speaking