A Voice in the Woods

“Come join me.” 

For two nights in a row, Adam resisted her call. 

It was a Sunday in August, and he stood by the open window in his second-floor bedroom, overlooking the forest behind his house. The past eight months, a FOR SALE sign had been staked in front of the forest. Now the sign was gone. The forest sold to one of the city’s largest developers, Rex Wrend, whom Adam and the other members of the Green Club at his high school nicknamed Rex Wrecks.  

“Come join me.”

He hadn’t told his parents about the voice. He was sixteen, closer to adulthood than childhood. They didn’t need to know everything about his life. Besides, they would think he’d gone crazy again.

“Come join me.” 

He dressed, tiptoed downstairs, and, quiet as a summer breeze, left his house by the back door.

He stared into the dark woods. He hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight or his cell phone. It didn’t matter; the moon lit the path in front of him. “Where are you?” he asked.

“In the middle of the forest, by the pond.”

In all his walks in the forest, he’d never seen a pond. Either she was lying, or she was somewhere he’d never been. 

Although the narrow trail wove around the forest like a musical staff, Adam knew its every twist. Or he thought he did. Minutes into his walk, the path became unfamiliar. “How do I know you aren’t tricking me?”

“You’ll have to trust me.” 

“I don’t trust anyone.”

Despite his declaration, he proceeded down the path. A rabbit jumped from behind a tree and dashed in front of him. An owl whoo whoooo’d somewhere above him. He listened for traffic on the thoroughfare near his house, but, as usual, the forest blocked all human sound. The path dropped, and he crossed a creek, his boots splashing in the shallow water. He couldn’t find the trail on the other side. “I’m lost,” he said. 

“No one is ever lost in the woods.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re only lost without the woods.”

She spoke in riddles. But as if the trail had been playing hide and seek, he found it again, behind a sugar maple. He climbed and descended and climbed again until he came to a clearing. In his thousand visits to the forest’s hundred acres, he’d never been here. The moonlight illuminated the clearing’s wildflowers. The air smelled of honeysuckle and apples. 

“Welcome.”

The girl stood thirty feet from him, surrounded by hydrangeas. She was as tall and thin as a young poplar. Her hair was darker than the night, and her face was gold. Beyond her was a pond, sprinkled with water lilies. 

He walked toward her, his nervousness increasing with each step. What if he was sick again and she was an illusion? He stopped a few feet from her. “I don’t believe you’re real.”

“I guess that makes me really unbelievable,” she said, smiling. “Thank you for the compliment.”

She spoke in riddles again. Sweat coated his forehead, and he feared his pimples were as large as rocks, his belly as big as a bowling ball. None of this seemed to matter to her. Smiling, she slipped her hand into his and led him to the edge of the pond, where they sat side-by-side on a rectangle of grass. 

He said, “Are you some kind of fairy princess?” 

If she detected his sarcasm, she didn’t acknowledge it. “Nice of you to think so! I’m only one of the forest’s thousands of creatures, no higher or mightier—and no better or worse—than any of the others.” 

“No better than a squirrel or a bat or a chipmunk?” he teased.

She answered sincerely: “No better than a tick!” She laughed. “Don’t worry. If I see one on you, I’ll pluck it off.” 

She asked him questions, and he told her everything about himself—everything except his time in the hospital. After he finished, he said, “You didn’t tell me your name.” 

“Sylvia.” 

To his other questions, she answered: 

“I don’t go to school, but I read the night sky and study the stars.”

“I love the music of frogs and birds.”

“I’m never alone in the forest.”

Fireflies lit up the darkness. A pair of deer bounded across the meadow, dipping in and out of the flowers like dolphins rising and falling in the sea. Three frogs hopped out of the pond and disappeared into the underbrush around it.

“I know you feel alone,” she said.

He pulled in a deep breath. “Sometimes,” he said. This was only half true. But he didn’t want to sound pathetic. 

“You’ve been less alone here,” she said, indicating the woods.

“You’re right,” he said, “but maybe only because I used to invent imaginary friends. We’d have picnics and parties. We’d have United Nations assemblies and solve all the world’s problems—or at least mine.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh before scrutinizing her. “Maybe you aren’t real either.”

“We’ve had this conversation. If I’m not not real, it’s because I’m unreal.” Her smile was a flash of starlight. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“I’m not sure what to say.”

“You’re speechless! Which is the goal of any girl who wants to dazzle a boy.” She laughed. “Less metaphorically,” she said, “do you feel this?” She placed her hand on his ankle. Her touch was as soft as a leaf.

“Yes.”

With her fingers, she walked her hand up his thigh and chest. Swiftly, she dipped her hand into his armpit and tickled him. He tried to resist laughing; he ended up squealing. “Stop!” he said, giggling.

“When you’re back home,” she said, “you’ll probably think it was only a spider who crawled up your body.”

He was about to contradict her, but he yawned instead. 

The scented air was soporific.

“It’s time to go to sleep,” she said. “I’ll walk you to the edge of the woods.”

Hand in hand, they walked until they reached his lawn. She turned her face to his. When she leaned toward him, he leaned toward her. As their lips were about to meet, a sound like a chainsaw cut the night. Startled, they both pulled back. He looked up and saw a helicopter soaring over them like an unnatural insect. It was headed to the hospital. 

When he’d been hospitalized, helicopters left and landed on its roof at all hours of the night. 

After its thrumming quieted into silence, she stepped toward him and kissed him, her lips tender and honeysweet. “Will I see you tomorrow night?” 

“And the night after,” he said. “And the night after the night after.” He could make such promises. His sophomore year in high school wouldn’t begin for two weeks. Until it did, he could stay up as late as he wanted.

Birds announced the dawn, and they said goodbye. 

He returned to his house by the back door. His father, a nurse, had left for his 6 a.m. shift at the hospital. His mother, a doctor at the same hospital, was asleep. Her shift wouldn’t start until 4 in the afternoon.

After climbing the stairs to his room, Adam slipped into his bed. When he woke up, he wondered if he’d dreamed Sylvia. But he smelled of wildflowers, and his lips tasted like honey. 

𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼

The next night by the pond, as he and Sylvia held hands and gazed at the stars, she pointed to constellations. He wasn’t an expert, but he suspected she invented the names: the Silent Sparrow, the Laughing Frog, the Soaring Squirrel. 

She said, “Tell me something secret about yourself.” 

He’d never told anyone about his time in the hospital, but he shared his story with her. 

“I know what it’s like to feel trapped,” she said.

“Here, in the woods?” 

“This forest used to be a mansion. Now it’s a closet. We’re afraid of the day it will become nothing at all.”

He thought of the vanished FOR SALE sign. At dinner, his parents had discussed moving to a different neighborhood. They worried about what Rex Wrecks would do to the forest. Adam wanted to warn Sylvia, but what could she do with the news except hate its bearer?

She pulled him to his feet and led him to the edge of the pond. She told him to take off his boots and socks and roll up his pants. His feet sank into the cool mud. He stepped into the water. It was as warm as the most desirable bath.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “bring your suit.”

𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼

When Adam arrived at the pond the next night, he realized he forgot his swimsuit. “Don’t worry,” Sylvia said. “I won’t wear anything either.” She removed her gown. A bold light glowed within her. Even if he could see only the outlines of her breasts and hips and legs, he felt giddy with desire. He pivoted away from her, afraid she would see his excitement. When he heard a splash, he turned back and saw Sylvia’s feet complete her dive into the pond. 

“Come join me!” 

He removed his boots, socks, and shirt. He hesitated with his jeans but eventually pulled them off. In his underwear, he looked, he was sure, like a baby in a diaper.  

“Don’t be shy.” Sylvia floated on her back, bathing in starlight. “It’s only the two of us and the universe.”

In the warm water, they dogpaddled, talking and laughing, before she challenged him to a race. She pointed to a streak of moonlight across the water. “The finish line.”

They finished side by side. “A tie,” she said, “is supposed to be like kissing your sister.” She kissed him. “Is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t have a sister.”

“We’re all related. We’re even related to trees and bees and fleas.” She splashed him, smiling. “You,” she said, “are clearly part of the frog family. You taste like tadpoles.”

Eventually, the stars withdrew behind the dawn sky, and he climbed out of the pond, conscious again of his nakedness and his weight, of all his body’s imperfections and burdens. He turned to Sylvia, who was still in the water. He expected her to frown or otherwise show disapproval—horror, even—but, with a serene smile, she rose out of the water and approached him. His excitement grew in proportion to her nearness. She stepped into his arms, as tender as a flower, as warm as a sunrise, as desirable as anything in the world. 

An ecstatic feeling spread over his body, thundered inside him, and released itself into the night. Surrendering to his sudden, sweet exhaustion, he drifted into a dream. 

When he woke up, in his bed, he smelled like tadpoles. 

𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼

On the fourth night, as he was about to step into the woods, he heard his father’s voice behind him: “What are you doing, Adam?” His father stepped from the shadows at the side of the house. “Well?”

Adam didn’t want to tell him the truth. But he could think of nothing else to say besides “Nothing.” 

“Nothing? You’re headed into the forest for no reason?”

“I’m meeting a friend.” 

“At midnight?” His father looked him over before giving him a sly smile. “A girlfriend?” 

Adam’s parents hoped he would find a girlfriend or a boyfriend, someone who would not only love him but ground him, someone who would keep him rooted to a world from which he seemed incapable of feeling anything but disconnected. 

Unwilling to extinguish the hope in his father’s eyes, he nodded.

“Who is she?” his father asked, his smile undiminished. “Does she go to your school?”

“No, but she’s my age, and we have a lot in common.” He told his father about their shared love of the woods. “She’s funny, and she’s smart, and we like to go swimming together.”

“Swimming? Where?”

Adam saw doubt in his father’s face. He knew if he said, “The Y,” his father would ask for dates and times. Adam said, “There’s a pond in the forest. I never knew about it. Sylvia showed me.”

“How did you meet her?” Clearly clinging to the hope of his son’s flesh-and-blood romance, his father offered him a possible explanation: “On a teenage dating app?”

Adam was sure that his father knew nothing about dating apps, teenage or otherwise. But neither did Adam. 

When the silence between them became too long, Adam said, “I met her in the forest.”

It was as good as a confession.

His father’s face collapsed. “It’s time to go to bed, Adam. In the morning, we’ll call Dr. Carver.”

“Do you think I’m having another episode? I’ll show you the pond. I’ll introduce you to Sylvia.”

“You need to speak to Dr. Carver.”

Adam followed his father inside, climbed the steps to his room, and slid into bed. He waited until he thought his father was asleep before he left his bed to stand in front of his window. His father patrolled the backyard like a prison guard. 

In bed, softly, Adam cried. Afraid Sylvia would think he’d abandoned her.

𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼

Dr. Carver was in her mid-thirties, had photographs of Yosemite National Park on her office walls, and a tattoo of a blue jay on her left forearm. Adam trusted her because of her Yosemite photos and her tattoo. “Tell me what happened,” she said. 

Adam knew his father had told her the story. After Adam repeated it, her expression filled with pity. “I’ll prescribe a stronger antipsychotic for you.”

“But she’s real,” he said.

She offered him her pitiful smile.

He ached with loneliness. 

𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼

His mother insisted on watching him swallow his pills every morning. She’d gone gray in the past several months. Adam worried he was to blame. 

One Saturday morning in the previous summer, he and two other members of the Green Club had been kicked out of the county fair because they’d stood at the entrance to the auto show with signs urging fairgoers to stop climate change (Delay = Death). Afterward, his friends snuck back onto the midway, but Adam didn’t want to spin in a teacup or stagger around the Mirror Maze. He sat against the chain-link fence surrounding the fairgrounds, listening to the cows, goats, and chickens from the 4-H barn. 

“I’m sorry you didn’t have a chance to share your message.”

Adam looked up to see a blond boy his age. His name was Lars. He was a classmate of the most famous climate protester in the world, he said, and he’d participated in her Fridays for Future demonstrations at their school in Sweden. He’d come to the U.S. as an exchange student at Adam’s high school. 

“You can join the Green Club!” Adam said. 

They talked about what the club could do in the upcoming school year. 

“What can we do right now?” Adam asked. 

Lars suggested they could stand by the railroad crossing downtown. 

“Why the crossing?” Adam asked.

“Because it’s where all the coal trains pass.”

Fifteen minutes later, Adam and Lars stood in front of the crossing signal. With the Sharpie he had in his pocket, Adam had written a second message on his sign: Coal Train = Earth’s Pain. Stop Denying Climate Change.

Some of the drivers who passed by tapped their horns in support. Some rolled down their windows and shouted angry, insulting words at them.

Forty minutes after they arrived, they heard a ding-ding-ding. The arm of the crossing signal lowered. Wanting to impress Lars with his courage, he slipped under the arm and stood on the tracks, his sign held high. As the train barreled toward him, its whistle became louder and more insistent, and its brakes shrieked like a witch. Adam was about to jump off the tracks when he felt arms grab him around the waist.

Minutes later, the same police officer who’d pulled him from the tracks drove him to the hospital. When his parents came to see him in the psych ward, they didn’t believe him when he told them he wasn’t trying to kill himself. 

He spent seven days in the locked ward until Dr. Carver decided he wasn’t a danger to himself. 

No one named Lars was scheduled to become an exchange student at Adam’s school. “I’m sorry, Adam,” Dr. Carver told him. “He exists only in your mind.” 

𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼

To prevent him from seeing Sylvia—or, in his father’s words, “to stop you from risking your life in the woods”—Adam’s parents installed a security system in the house. If Adam so much as lifted a window or cracked open any of the house’s doors, an alarm would sound. 

The school year started. Fall turned the woods orange, yellow, and red. At bedtime, he paced his bedroom like a caged wildcat. He didn’t sleep well. Sometimes he didn’t sleep at all. He wondered if Sylvia had called another boy into the woods. He wondered if she’d sat with him by the pond, their hands clasped, their laughter flying toward the stars. He wondered if she’d kissed him.

Winter came. At the first snowfall, he imagined Sylvia and the new boy opening their mouths to catch snow on their tongues.

𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼

In early February, his parents put their house up for sale. Rex Works, they said, planned to raze the forest to build a 144-unit condominium complex. “I don’t anticipate it being a work of architectural genius,” his father said. 

“The forest,” Adam said, “is a work of architectural genius.”

“Of course it is,” his mother said. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. We’ll move to a nice place. We promise.”

𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼

His parents made sure he swallowed his pills. They made sure he didn’t escape from the house at night. They tracked him by his cell phone, their oversight so precise they knew which classroom he was in at any given moment during the school day. 

At the beginning of March, he thought of a plan to see Sylvia. He would go to the spring dance at his school and leave his cell phone in his locker. His parents would notice he was missing only at midnight, when the dance ended. 

On the night of the dance, he did as he’d planned, ditching his phone in his locker and racing to the north side of the woods—or what used to be the north side of the woods. Where maple, cherry, buckeye, black walnut, and oak trees once stood, there was an immense field of mud. The moon was thin, but he didn’t need more than its weak light to see the emptiness. It had rained during the day, and mud gripped his shoes as he slogged toward the remaining trees. 

In the wide-open space, he felt exposed and vulnerable, like a baby rabbit who leaves its den. A pair of bulldozers loomed in front of him like immense sentries. Eventually, he reached the end of the cleared land and slipped into the reduced section of woods.

He didn’t know where he was. The expanse of mud disoriented him. But as if he was hearing Sylvia’s instructions, he navigated winding paths until he stood in the familiar field, its flowers waiting on spring to rise. When he didn’t see her, he called her name. His voice was lost in the noises from the city, which penetrated the forest because its buffering trees were gone. 

Again, he called her. Again.

As he was about to howl with rage and despair, he felt her breath in his ear and her arms around his waist. “I’m here.” Her voice was somber and sad. 

He thought of the destruction he’d walked across to reach her. “I’m going to stop them from doing anything else to the forest,” he declared. Being with Sylvia made him feel strong and courageous. 

“How?” 

“I’ll chain myself to a tree. I’ll blow up their machines. I’ll go on a hunger strike.”

Hand in hand, they walked toward the pond. A moment later, she stopped, shuddering. 

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Footsteps.”

A sound like a distant stampede disturbed the night. It quickly grew louder. Before long, light from flashlights flickered on tree trunks. His father called his name, his voice piercing the night like an alarm invading a dream.

“Let’s dive into the pond,” Sylvia said, pulling him toward it. “They won’t find us beneath the water.” She moved swiftly, and he stumbled twice as he tried to keep up with her. Each time, she paused so he could regain his footing.

Adam heard his father call his name again. Other voices picked up the cry. Habit told him to stop and obey, but desire and desperation inspired him to follow Sylvia. A moment later, she released his hand, dove into the pond, and disappeared beneath the blue-black water. He paused at the pond’s edge. Although his hesitation lasted only a second, it was decisive. His father grabbed his shoulder and yanked him backwards. Adam crashed to the ground. Above him stood the search party: his father, a couple of neighbors, one of his high-school teachers, and the muscular, bald police officer who’d pulled him from the train tracks.

His father helped him to his feet. “You saw her, didn’t you?” Adam asked. When his father didn’t respond, he looked at the other faces around him. “Didn’t you all see her?” He gestured behind him to the pond, which had become invisible in the dark night.

“Please come with us, son,” said the police officer. “No one will hurt you.”

“What about the forest?” Adam asked. “What about the people who are hurting the forest?”

“No one is hurting the forest,” said the officer. 

“They’re killing it!” Adam shouted. He tried to scramble out of his father’s grasp, but his father was stronger than he was. The police officer clicked handcuffs over Adam’s wrists. “What are you doing?” Adam yelled.

His father answered: “He’s required to, Adam. It’s part of the commitment process. You remember.”

𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼

In the psych ward, Adam shared a bedroom with a boy who shouted in his sleep about floods and fires. Twice he heard the hospital’s helicopter leave and return. 

The next morning, he sat at a round table in a windowless room with seven other patients between the ages of fourteen and twenty. Their group leader, a red-haired social worker, invited them to share their stories. 

Adam heard about three suicide attempts. He heard from a boy who’d burned his high-school textbooks because he believed his principal had placed microscopic surveillance devices in them. Another boy said his grandmother, who’d died the previous year, had visited him three nights in a row to say, “It’s better where I am.” 

Reluctantly, Adam told the group about Sylvia.  

At the end of the session, Rachel, a girl Adam’s age with a nose ring and short hair dyed electric blue, sat next to him. Everyone else had left the room. Rachel said she believed his story about Sylvia. “She’s the forest.”

“What do you mean?”

“You love the forest, and the forest loves you back. You can’t kiss the whole forest, but you can kiss a girl whose name means forest.” 

“I invented her?”

“She’s as real as the forest.”

“I don’t know.” 

“I know. When I was fourteen, I fell in love with a mermaid.”

Thinking she was joking, Adam was about to laugh. But he saw that she was serious. He wanted to ask her about the mermaid, but a nurse interrupted them. 

Later the same day, Rachel was discharged from the ward. He never learned her last name or why she’d been in the hospital. He was afraid to ask anyone if she’d been in the hospital at all.

𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼

Five days later, when Adam returned home, he stood in his backyard and observed what remained of the forest. Only a few trees, spread far apart, like buildings in a bombed city. “Sylvia,” he whispered to the emptiness. 

His father must have seen him from the kitchen window because he bounded from the back door. He put a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “You knew what was happening to the woods.”

“Some of the trees were two hundred years old,” Adam said, gesturing toward the devastated field. “It’s a graveyard.”

“You won’t have to bear the sight for long. We received an offer on the house. It wasn’t the price we hoped to get, but it’s the best we could expect under the circumstances. We’ll be closing at the end of the month.”

“But—” Adam began. He thought of Sylvia. She might be hiding somewhere in the bleak landscape. 

“Your mother and I have our eyes on a house across town in a new subdivision.” There was excitement in his father’s voice. 

When Adam said nothing, his father added, “It has a swimming pool.”

Later, as night fell, Adam opened his bedroom window and stared at what used to be the forest. He listened for Sylvia’s voice. In its absence, he imagined it: as musical as water in a creek, as mournful as wind in an empty field. He imagined meeting her in the darkness and running away with her. But where would they go? To another forest with a FOR SALE sign in front of it? 

He closed his window. It was better, he decided, to pretend he’d made everything up. The field of flowers. The pond. Sylvia. Even the forest itself. There was, after all, nothing to prove it had existed anywhere but in his mind.

Go Deeper

〰️

Go Deeper 〰️

Read the interview here.