Two
AUGUST 14, THE PRESENT
UPSTATE CONNECTICUT, USA
Since she’d left Paris six weeks ago, every day when she woke up, Jac L’Etoile vowed she was going to heed her brother Robbie’s parting advice and be present. When they’d said good-bye, he’d kissed her on the forehead, brushed her curls back off her face and said, “If you can do that one thing, Jac, you will begin to heal.”
Now, as she trekked through the woods with Malachai Samuels, she tried to pay attention, as Robbie would say, to this moment, right now, and not allow her mind to drift and sink into grief.
Be present.
There was much to be present for. The air was fresh with the smell of grass and apples. She was with a trusted mentor, who had something important to show her.
Be present.
She noticed a fence of No Trespassing signs up ahead. As they approached, the lovely summer day clouded over. The electric scent of a coming storm blew in and Jac felt a chill. A foreboding that they should turn back. Then chided herself for her childish reaction. This was no Grimm’s fairy tale. She wasn’t Gretel. And Malachai certainly wasn’t Hansel. The Oxford-educated psychoanalyst was the codirector of the prestigious Phoenix Foundation in New York City, a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old institution dedicated to the scientific study of reincarnation. He owned this land. These woods had been in his family for nearly two centuries. There was nothing bad that could happen to her here.
Earlier, after finishing lunch, Malachai had suggested she get ready, that they were going to take a walk.
“Where?” she’d asked.
“To see my secret garden,” was all he’d offered.
Malachai was unapologetically secretive in a way that was both old-fashioned and refreshingly avant-garde. He performed sleight of hand without revealing his tricks. Cured children of their nightmares while refusing to explain what spells he used. He was a magician. Perhaps the only true one Jac had ever known. Hadn’t he made her own mental illness-hallucinations that had plagued her as a child-disappear and vanish into the Swiss Alps’ crisp mountain air when she was fourteen?
Dressed for their hike, she and Malachai exited the turreted and gargoyled manor house through the great room’s French doors. Stone terrace steps led down to a well-tended formal garden nearing the end of its summer glory. They followed a pebbled path that bordered organized-chaos beds of blue hydrangea, late-blooming sedum, pink roses and lavender Russian sage.
The floral bouquet scented the air and stayed with them as they passed through ornate iron gates. By the time they reached the Victorian gazebo the smell of fresh-mown grass joined the mix.
From there it was a few dozen yards to an apple orchard. The trees were old and gnarled but the branches were laden with hard green fruit, still weeks away from ripening.
Coming out the other side, they climbed a small hill and arrived at the wood’s apron.
Here the cultivated grounds gave way to unbridled nature. Gone were all signs of civilization save the handmade notices that hung at odd angles off naked tree-trunk poles tamped into the ground at six-foot intervals. The warnings were written out in uneven letters painted in black on rough wooden planks.
Private Property.
Intruders will be prosecuted to the fullest extent.
Pilgrims and tourists alike.
Pilgrims?
Jac wanted to ask Malachai to explain, but he was already yards ahead, waiting for her on the other side of the implied border.
She met him at the edge of a grove of hemlocks and pines and they stepped inside the forest.
The blue-green darkness and its scent assaulted her. Usually she loved the smell of tree resins, but its intensity here was overwhelming. It stung. As if the sharp tips of the evergreen needles were pricking her olfactory sensors.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Malachai asked as he opened his arms, embracing the woods.
“Yes,” she said, but she was thinking that there was violence here as well as beauty. The primeval forest that rose up around her seemed threatening. She felt slight beside the trees. These pines had outlived her mother. Many were older than her grandmother. They inhabited this land. She was the interloper.
Jac and Malachai were completely inside shadows now. Submerged in them. The canopy of trees so thick it filtered out whatever sunlight broke through the clouds. Jac felt enveloped in a pervasive gloom.
As someone who produced and wrote a cable TV show exploring the origins of myths, Jac knew all too well the deep significance shadows held in ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology.
Of all the classics she’d read, the most frightening-the one that she often visited in nightmares-was the tale of Agave, Pentheus’ mother. Under Dionysus’ spell, Agave lost her shadow and with it her identity as a mother and a woman. Assuming masculine attributes, she became dark, brutal and less emotional. As her rational impulses yielded to irrational ones, her passions trumped her intellect. Wild rage consumed her. More and more often her unconscious overwhelmed her conscious mind. Until in one final furious frenzy, she did the unthinkable. Agave murdered her own son.
It was then, after the filicide, that she suffered the fate that haunted Jac. The fate said to be the most difficult to bear of all. Agave buried her own child and lived long past him, evermore mourning her loss.
Jac had read what Jung wrote about our shadow selves being the negative, unresolved aspects of personality. The part of the psyche we must confront and come to terms with if we ever hope to become whole. Jac knew she hadn’t yet confronted all her shadows. And that one day she’d need to.
Malachai knew it too. He’d been the Jungian therapist assigned to her case at the Blixer Rath clinic in Switzerland seventeen years ago. They’d been talking about her shadows for a long time.
“Are you all right?” Malachai called from up ahead.
“Fine,” was all she trusted herself to say. How to explain her inexplicable overreaction to this place without making him nervous? He watched her too carefully since her trip to Paris in May when she’d gone home for the first time in years to help her brother look for a lost book of fragrances that was part of a family legend. She’d wound up helping save Robbie’s life, but the danger they’d been in and the memories that had been stirred up had taken a toll on her equilibrium. And so now Malachai took her emotional temperature too often. Seemed almost constantly checking to make sure she was all right. He hadn’t been this concerned about her well-being since she was fourteen years old.
No, Jac didn’t want to ruin this excursion by worrying him. Malachai had made it clear it mattered to him that she see this special place. For all he had done for her, the least she could do was to soldier on. But before she took the next step, she did turn and look back. The path they’d taken to get here was no longer visible. Even if she wanted to escape, the way out was lost. They’d left no trace of their route.
Escape?
They were not venturing into danger but taking a walk on the grounds of his estate. Her imagination was spiraling.
Be present.
Following Malachai’s footsteps, she trod the next stretch of forest as the route wove through monstrous pines. A thick carpet of needles and leaves camouflaged aboveground roots and fallen twigs and made the trail treacherous. She tripped, but Malachai was ahead of her and didn’t notice. Only the birds bore witness to her clumsiness. Righting herself, she continued on.
Suddenly, from somewhere in the distance, she heard a new sound and smelled a new combination of scents. Both were hard to identify until she and Malachai rounded a bend and came upon a waterfall cascading over boulders. The spray on her face smelled of iron. The air, of petrichor, the oil produced by plants when they’re wet. The aroma intensified as the path followed the resulting rushing stream down a slight incline.