She'd ordered three quick shots of bar Scotch as a sedative, stared into the bottom of the second, and froze with it half-way to her lips. Her sister was a drunk. Her father was a drunk. Her grandfather had died from drink, and there'd been others. Odds were, if she went on and drank that second and third shot, she'd follow her family down the neck of a whisky bottle and drown there.
Heredity or environment, nature or nurture, she was screwed either way. Hand shaking, she'd set the shot glass down on the bar and backed away from it, then climbed into Maureen's car.
That didn't erase the reason why she'd wanted a drink. Three cheers for modern medicine. Bastards couldn't even tell the difference between a stroke or faint followed by a fall down the front stairs, and good old fashioned wife-beating. They couldn't do anything about the results, either way, so let's clear the bed out and move the goddamn empty husk off to a warehouse for long-term storage.
And Dad wouldn't pay the extra for a private room that his insurance wouldn't cover. So now Mom was in a double with a fat blind diabetic Indian who could really have used a roommate she could talk to.
She relaxed her hands, took a deep breath, and shut off the engine. She climbed out, slammed the car door because if you didn't slam it hard enough to shake rust loose from the body, it wouldn't latch, and locked it before she sobered up. Or sanity intervened. Or something.
The city plowed out this parking lot, chewing up the gravel surface and piling mud in the corners, but did nothing about the paths winding through the woods. Jo climbed over the heaps of old snow and followed snowshoe tracks that led between two birches, her boots sinking ankle-deep into the gray surface of Maine "spring." Snow rarely hung on so late, but this year looked like a record.
Maureen had dragged her out here a few times, sharing her world and trying to explain the differences between this tree and that. Birches were easy, the white papery bark peeling and curling loose to show pale orange underneath. Jo had also figured out the smooth-trunked gray beeches and could tell an oak if it dropped an acorn on her head, but that was about it. All the evergreens were pines to her.
The old snow was filthy, heavy, wet, shifting almost like loose gravel under her feet. Tracks had turned into grotesque negatives with the thaw so that the hard-packed trail was actually higher than the sides, with reversed ski and snowshoe prints made of ice that resisted the sun and rain. She closed her eyes, matching up the trail turns and branches with her memory. There was a certain tree that Maureen loved above all others; she called it Father Oak. She'd claimed it talked to her. She'd claimed it gave her strength.
Well, Jo had always been the strong one, protecting her little sister. Maybe it was time to tap into Maureen's support network for a refill.
Jo's memories led her down trails to the right and then left, until she found an old beech by the beaten path. A hole showed dark against the gray; Maureen said it was the daytime roost of some kind of owl. Jo couldn't tell, but she remembered that shape and smooth bark and the hole about twenty feet above the ground. Except that it was lower now, with something like five feet of drifted snow paring down the height.
Okay. Now it got tricky, moving off the trail and into unmarked snow. Second step, she sank up to her knees, above her boot-tops, and the wet cold washed right through her jeans. Bad choice for clothing, but she hadn't planned to go for a hike in the woods when she'd dressed that morning. She ignored the chill and pushed on.
She barely remembered the way to Father Oak. Maureen had brought her out in summer, with leaves all over and bugs whining in her ears. Winter gave the woods a very different look. Did she want to go right, now, or left, climb that rise or go downhill? There'd been a small creek, but it must lie buried underneath the ice and the winter's accumulated litter of small twigs and drifted grit. So maybe she wanted to go down and then up again.
At least she couldn't get lost. Her tracks made sure of that, leaving a trail like a moose floundering through the woods. She wiped sweat off her forehead and unzipped her jacket. Hiking through deep snow was perilously close to work. She waded on, once or twice almost swimming through the endless waves of sodden off-white crap.
Jo stopped and stood still, panting, up to her waist in a thawing snowdrift and with ice-water running into her boots. Another hundred yards through the drifts and she might not be able to get back to the car, even if she wasn't lost.
And the chilled sweat on her back reminded her of that panicked afternoon in Dougal's forest when she'd accidentally followed Maureen into the Summer Country.
Panic fear. Maureen always said that was the most dangerous animal in the woods. Forget about the lions and tigers and bears, oh my -- if you gave in to panic, you were dead. All the other stuff, ranging from poison ivy up to running flat out off a cliff, was just choosing the way you died.
And Jo had already tried that last route once. It sucked. She took a deep breath. She closed her eyes. Maureen had said you could feel the power of her sacred tree. That was how she'd found it.
{Come.}
The hair rose on her arms
