A ballad, told quietly

for the one who was left in the forest

This is a story I will tell badly,
because the people in it told it badly to themselves,
and I have only what they remembered.

There was a woman.
There was a child.
That is almost all of it.

A room above a street. A window with no curtain.
The woman at the mirror. The child in the doorway, not yet old enough to know she is in the way.

The woman was beautiful, the way a thing left out in the rain is beautiful —
softened, ruined, still recognizable as what it had been.
She painted her mouth red in the evenings.
She wiped it off in the mornings.
The cloth she used was always the same cloth.
She never washed it.
I have my guesses.

The child watched this from the doorway
and learned, before she learned any word for it,
that some red is for going out
and some red is for coming back.

Evening. A knock. The child is moved, gently, into the second room.
The door closes. The child sits on the floor and waits.

She is good at waiting. She has been, since before she knew the word for it.

The woman had been hurt before the child existed.
You have to start there,
or the rest will look like cruelty for its own sake,
and it was never that.
It was something handed down,
something with nowhere left to go,
that had been waiting for a small enough place to fit.
The child, in time, was small enough.

She loved her mother
the way small things love the weather —
without permission, without return.
When the mother's mood turned, the child believed she had turned it.

A small kitchen. Morning. The child reaches for something she should not have reached for. The woman's hand moves before she does.

The hands had been gentle, before.
This is the part that is hardest to put plainly.
The same hands that fed her,
that washed her face,
that wiped the red from the woman's own mouth in the mornings —
those hands were the hands that learned to strike.
She never managed to separate them.
For the rest of her short life,
every hand reaching toward her
would feel like both things at once.

She was three the first time.
She remembered only the floor,
and the sound of her own breath catching in a way it had not caught before,
and the woman standing above her,
looking at her own hand as if it had moved without her.

After, the woman was quiet for a long time.
The child waited for an explanation.
None came.
She decided, because children must decide something, that she had caused it.
She was three. There was nothing to decide.

I think the woman was struck, somewhere inside herself,
by the simple, unbearable fact of the child's face —
soft, expectant, looking up —
and her hand answered before she did.

The marks came in places that could be covered.
The back of the arm. The ribs. The small of the back.
The face was for being seen.
The body was for being a body.
She understood this distinction
before she understood most things,
and she kept answers ready for the bruises,
in case anyone asked.
No one asked.

She loved her still.
There was no other way she had been taught to love.

The mother is brushing the child's hair. She stops. She is looking at the mirror, not the child. She sets the brush down. She leaves the room.

Someone, once, told the child she had her mother's hair.
That night the woman slept with her face to the wall.
The child lay awake and tried to think of a way to have different hair.
She was four. She could not think of one.

There is a thing I should say plainly here, and I will not.
That the mother did not hate the child.
That she hated the mirror the child had become.
The child never heard this, and a truth she never heard
is not part of her life.
It is only part of mine, telling it.

What she heard was:
you are too loud. you are too much. why won't you stop looking at me.
Her mother said these things.
Her mother also did not say them —
said them with her back,
with her silence,
with the way she would not eat across from her own daughter.
Both versions reached her equally.
She made one truth out of all of it:
I am the thing that hurts her.
It is not a complicated truth.
Children are good at making them.

She learned to be quiet so well
that even when she cried, she cried quietly.
Her mother noticed once, and did not come.
She understood this as an answer,
and stopped asking the question,
though she had never asked it aloud.

A tear in the sky. A red that does not wipe off. The world begins to end. The woman and the child go on living, because the alternative has not yet been arranged.

The end of the world did not change them.
People think catastrophe softens.
It does not. It only removes the small distractions
that were keeping the cruelty in shape.
The woman drank what she could find.
The hands came faster, and with less reason,
because there was less reason for anything.
The child grew quieter.
There was, by then, almost nothing of her left to grow.

One grey morning. The woman takes the child's hand. They walk into the forest.

The hand was warm.
The child was happy.
You have to understand that —
she was happy, in what would be her last hour with her mother,
because the hand was warm and the hand was offered,
and she could not remember the last time
it had been offered without something following it.

They walked a long way.
The woman did not speak.
The child did not ask her to.
She had learned long ago that asking was a way of being left.

A clearing. The woman kneels. She looks at the child — really looks, perhaps for the first time.

She said only: wait here.
The child said: yes.
She walked back the way they had come.

I do not know if she turned at the treeline.
I wanted to give her that — one look back, one moment of seeing what she was doing.
I do not think she did.
I do not think she could have made it home if she had.
So I will not give it to her.
It would be a lie, and I said I would not lie to you.

The child waited.
She waited because she had been told to,
because she did not believe she deserved to be found,
because waiting was the only thing she had ever been good at,
and she wanted, more than anything,
to be good at something her mother had asked of her.

She called, after a while.
Mother.
Mother.
The word fell on the ground like a thing that belonged to no one.
She called again.
The voice did not come back.
Not her mother's. Not any.
For a long time, no voice at all.

The sky above the forest was red.
It had been red for years.
She had stopped noticing,
the way one stops noticing the color of a room one has lived in too long.

Night came.

She did not cry.
She had forgotten how, or had never learned the use of it.
She simply waited.
She had been waiting all her life.
The forest, this once, was only the shape the waiting had taken.

And then — a voice.

Not her mother's.
Something else.
Something that said child.
Something that said you are not nothing.
Something that said it gently.
Something that said it as if it meant it.

No one had ever said it as if they meant it.

I will not tell you what the voice was.
I will not tell you whether it was kind.
I will tell you only that the child,
who had been waiting all her life to be spoken to like that,
opened her small hands and answered.

Yes.

And the red above the forest
found, at last, a place to settle.