flowers, a small flower press, and piles of pine-cones and other items that Lilah did not recognize. There were various tools around. Knives, a cheese grater, carving tools, sewing stuff, wire, and cutters.
“If you need to use the bathroom,” said the Greenman without looking up, “there’s an outhouse behind that row of pines.”
Lilah drifted away and came back in a few minutes. When she did, she found a fresh cup of tea at the far end of the table. The Greenman was shelling nuts into a small wooden bowl. He paused and pushed a bowl of water, a bunch of flowers, and a pair of tweezers to within her reach, always careful not to move quickly or get too close.
“If you want to help,” he said, “I’ll tell you how.”
Lilah looked at the flowers and then at him. She nodded.
“Use the tweezers to remove each petal and place it in the water. Let it float. Be careful not to get your skin oil on the petals. We want them pure. Once you fill the bowl, we’ll cover it with cheesecloth and set it out in the sunshine for four hours. We have that much sun left. After that, we’ll strain the water through a coffee filter into some jars. I’ll add a little brandy, and we’ll set it in my root cellar.”
“Why?” It was the first word she had spoken in hours.
“We’re making flower essences. We’ll add walnut and
“What is it for?”
The Greenman smiled. His face was heavily lined, but when he smiled, all those creases conspired to make him seem much both younger and timeless. “For courage, Lilah,” he said.
Lilah tensed. “You know my name?”
“Everyone in these hills knows your name,” he said. “Lilah, the Lost Girl. You’re famous. The fearsome zombie hunter. The girl who helped bring down Charlie Pinkeye and the Hammer.”
She shook her head.
“I know, I know,” said the Greenman with a gentle laugh. “No one is really who people think they are. It’s unfair. When they give us nicknames and create a story for us, everyone expects us to be that person and to live up to that legend.” He went back to shelling walnuts. “Tom knows something about that. Out here, people see him as either a hero or a villain. Never anything in between, not for Tom. He hates it too. Do you know that? He doesn’t want to be anyone’s hero any more than he wants to be a villain.”
“Tom isn’t a villain.”
“Not to you or me, no. Not to the people in town. But to a lot of the people out here-people like Charlie and his lot-Tom’s the boogeyman.”
“That’s stupid. They’re the villains.”
“No doubt.” He nodded to the flowers. “Those petals won’t jump into the bowl by themselves.”
Lilah stared at the purple petals for a moment, then picked up the tweezers and began pulling them off. She tore a few before she got the knack. The Greenman watched, nodded, and picked up another walnut. “Who are you?” she asked. “I mean really.”
“Most of the time I’m nobody,” said the Greenman. “When you live alone, you don’t need a name. I don’t need to tell you that.” She said nothing, but she gave a tiny nod. “I used to be Arthur Mensch-Ranger Artie to the tourists in Yosemite. That was before First Night.”
“When the world changed and everything went bad,” she said.
“A lot of folks see it that way,” said the Greenman, “but it was death that changed. People are still people. Some good, some bad. Death changed, and we don’t know what death really means anymore. Maybe that was the point. Maybe this is an object lesson about the arrogance of our assumptions. Hard to say. But the world? She didn’t change. She healed. We stopped hurting her and she began to heal. You can see it all around. The whole world is a forest now. The air is fresher. More trees, more oxygen. Even in Yosemite the air was never this fresh.”
“The dead-,” she began.
“Are part of nature,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Because they exist.”
She thought about that. “You don’t think they’re evil?”
“Do you?”
She shook her head. “People are evil.”
“Some are,” he admitted. He set the walnut shells aside and began shaving the walnut meat with the cheese grater. “People are all sorts of things. Some people are evil and good at the same time. At least according to their own view of the world.”
“How can people be good and bad?”
His dark eyes sought hers. “In the same way that people can be very brave and very, very afraid. They can be heroes and cowards from one breath to the next. And heroes again.”
Her eyes slid away. “I did something bad,” she said in a tiny voice. “I ran away.”
“I know.” It was acceptance of information but in no way a judgment.
“I-I haven’t been afraid of…” Lilah swallowed. “I haven’t been afraid of the dead for years. Not since I was little. They just… are. Do you understand?”
“Sure.”
“Last night, though… there were so many.”
“Was that it? Was it just that there were a lot of them? From what Tom told me, you used to play in the Hungry Forest. What was different about last night?”
The cat came out of the woods, jumped up on the table, and settled down with its legs tucked under its fur. Lilah began plucking more petals. “I left Benny and Nix behind at the way station. I just… ran.”
“Were you running from the dead? Because there were so many?”
“I-I don’t know.”
“Yeah,” he said gently. “You do.”
Lilah looked at the purple flower petal caught between the iron jaws of the tweezers. “This stuff gives courage?”
“Not really.” The Greenman smiled. “It helps you find where you left the courage you had. Courage is tricky, oily. Easy to drop, easy to misplace.”
“I thought that if you had courage you always had it.”
The Greenman laughed out loud. The cat, who had been dozing, opened one eye and glared at him for a moment, then went back to sleep. “Lilah, nothing is always there. Not courage, not joy, not hate or hope or anything else. We find courage, lose it, sometimes misplace it for years, and sometimes live in its grace for a while.”
She digested this as she worked. “What about love? Is that elusive too?”
“I have two answers for that,” he said, “though there are probably more. One answer is the big answer. Love is always there. It lives in us. In all of us. Even Charlie Pink-eye, bad as he was, loved something. He loved his friend Marion Hammer. He had a family. He had a wife, once. Before First Night. Everyone loves. But that’s not what you meant and I know it. The other answer, the smaller answer, is that when we love something we don’t always love it. It comes and goes. Like breath in the lungs.”
“I don’t understand love.”
“Sure you do,” said the Greenman. “Tom told me about Annie, and about George. I met George once, a long time ago, when he was out looking for you. He was a good man. A genuine person, do you understand what I mean?”
“Yes.” Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes.
“He loved you, and I believe-I know-that you loved him. Just as you loved Annie. No, you understand love just fine, Lilah.”
She said nothing.
“Or do you mean another kind of love?” he asked, arching one eyebrow. “Boy-girl love? Is there someone you
