The Hickories

The Hickories

A tragic but frequent phenomenon in the world is a disappearance — tragic because it is worse than death; it is death without closure, without a just goodbye — and frequent because the sun never sets without a person vanishing from public record and private memory.

No one knew this better than Julia, whose brother, four years her junior, had last been seen prodding and turning over insects in a wood on a gray, chilly September evening two decades prior.

Julia herself was who saw him last, glancing at him through her bedroom window overlooking their backyard, just as he, in curious pursuit of all the tiny creatures quitting their subsurface dwellings flooded by the late rain, strayed deeper into the wood adjacent.

She was zealously completing a watercolor drawing, and didn’t think too much of where he was going. A teenager doesn’t know what precautions are and doesn’t know what to make of prudence.

Although proud of it at first, she would ultimately throw the drawing of this day away.

But she did continue to watercolor. In fact, even as she grew older — as she left her town for university, and as she stayed away from her childhood home to practice law and arraign kidnappers as a federal prosecutor, settling down in a major city — she never gave up the watercolors. They brought her peace amid the hassles of being an effective professional. In her mid-thirties now, she was executing a still life of a flower-vase at her kitchen island when she received an alarming phone call.

It was about her mother. She had terribly fallen and shattered her right ankle. Luckily, their old neighbor was within hearing when Julia’s mother yelled out in pain as a result of her accident. “Your mother’s okay. We’ve just come back from the hospital. She will just now be in a boot for some time,” Julia heard a feminine voice say in the most reassuring tone.

“Thank you for everything, Ms. Mary. Thank goodness you were nearby when she fell! Imagine if she had had to lie on the floor all day! I don’t even want to think—”

“Don’t worry, Julia, dear, she will be okay. She just went to her room to take a nap.”

“I’ll be there tonight. Thank you again, Ms Mary.”

The phone call ended, Julia let out a sigh of immense relief. Within minutes, she had sent out messages to her colleagues indicating she would be gone for a few days to look after her mother, packed a small suitcase and a backpack, and drove home. Her hometown being four hours away, she arrived that night and had a chance to eat dinner with her mother. “Are you sure you want to stay here, mom?” Julia asked right after it was clear both were done eating. “We can sell, and I can get you a place—”

“I am okay here. I don’t want to live anywhere else. The house is paid off. I know where everything is, and—”

“But mom, what if you fall again? What if—”

“I’m staying, end of discussion. I know I’m by myself. Would I not want to be, and have your father still around? Of course, but this is home. And your father, and your brother for that matter, God rest both their souls, come alive for me through these walls. I’m staying, period.”

Julia, albeit a trained and experienced lawyer, refused to produce the smallest counterargument, and crossed her arms with an air of complete resignation. Looking up from the morsel of meatloaf remaining on her plate, she informed her mother that she, in that case, would visit at least once a month from now on, and would stay that week with her.

Her mother was delighted at this news, scolded her daughter for waiting for an accident to happen before she offered to visit more often, and instructed her to bake two dozen cookies at a minimum for Ms Mary, who had so graciously and kindly helped her up and taken her to the hospital.

Julia only nodded in agreement with all her mom said, feeling too sharply a sense of guilt to protest one syllable.

“And Julia,” her mom added gently, “I’m happy you’re going to be here as well because it’s the twentieth anniversary of — of your brother’s passing. We’re in September.”

She had remembered on the drive there but had not wanted to bring up the subject, given that her mom was recovering from the fall and possibly feeling frail. In reply, Julia only nodded and reached for her mom’s hand. Her mom responded in kind, and they held their hands in silence some moments before clearing the table.

The rest of the week then passed by peacefully, mother and daughter having every meal together and both endeavoring to catch up on each other’s lives. Although Julia had put in for time off, she could not help reading the files of pending cases and checking her correspondence in the afternoons when her mother napped. To that end, she set up her laptop and laid out her notes on the desk in her childhood bedroom.

When her eyes tired of legalese and blue light, they would drift off onto the items her mother still retained from her formative years. There was a blue stuffed rabbit sewn back together around the arms, pictures of her as a teenager surrounded by people she had long ago lost track of, and her Bachelor’s diploma, framed, hanging on the wall, among many other things of a foregone time.

And on occasion, they too would veer through her window, over the backyard, and onto the very spot where her brother had caught her attention before he went further into the wood and disappeared. On the day before she meant to leave for the city, she thought she would go outside and inspect it once again. She had stood there in the past many times before, always struck with an unsettling mixture of remorse, anger, and curiosity.

Even today, twenty years and countless difficult conversations later, she questioned why she, as a fifteen-year-old, had not gone out to interact or play with her brother. Had she done that, he would arguably not have gone deeper into the wood and become prey to whatever perverse individual snatched him.

She stood right where her memory placed him, and looked straight ahead. There is a gentle declivity right after their backyard, with a few trees spaced out evenly. After a few yards, however, as the ground gains elevation, the Hickories begin to clump together so close that sunlight itself struggles to get through.

Julia walked onward, transported by the vivid recollection of the scenes following her brother’s disappearance: her parents panicking, the police arriving and fanning out with trained hounds to search the entire forest, and the neighborhood soon joining in in the effort to locate the young boy. Her breathing intensifiying, she continued going foward until she was face-to-face with a seeming wall of trees. “How did they take you, Marco?” she asked herself. Nothing replied but the brush of leaves by a soft breeze.

Julia was just about to return home, however, when she heard something, a sort of pit-a-pat upon twigs and leaves to the far right of her. It was quick, as if someone was running past her. Stuck in disbelief, she squinted in that direction but could not make out anything save branches and bark.

Then — somehow, suddenly, much to her shock — she perceived a boy. He wasn’t looking at her, but behind him. Yes, a boy, an uncertain distance away, on the other end of a thick stretch of Hickories.

Unsure whether her imagination was running perfectly wild or she was dreaming, she yelled out: “Marco!”

The boy didn’t seem to hear her; he was fixated on something behind him, and given the frantic energy he exhibited, it was as if he were being chased. “Marco!” she yelled again, adrenaline beginning to course her veins.

He bore an uncanny resemblance to her brother. Not a small child but not yet a full-blown teenager. Long hazel-colored hair, thin, and large-eyed.

“Wait, Marco, I’m coming!”

So immediate and clear to her was the boy’s sighting that she was fifteen years old again; she was re-living that fateful day, and, despite the impossibility of it, supposed, with complete belief, that if she rescued the boy from whatever pursued him, she would be rescuing her brother. She would regain him, and the sadness and frustration that have pervaded the last twenty years of her life would vanish, like early morning fog — her reality would then be a happier one, one in which her brother had graduated, gone to college, started working, and was taking care of their mom alongside her.

“Marco!”

Julia began to forcibly thread the trees even though they scraped and scratched her. She only wore a t-shirt, jeans, and a pair of well-used running shoes, which she wore without socks; but she was persistent. She was willing to endure a thousand small, stinging cuts if it meant that she would embrace her brother again.

“Marco!” she said again, pushing through the tight rampart of Hickory trees and bushes. Julia also sensed to be going uphill, although the slope was imperceptibly gentle, so she began using her arms to gain momentum and sweep off hindrances. Before she knew it, she seemed to have gotten herself on the other side of this apparent woody net because there was much more room to move around. The forestry was significantly sparser.

Julia didn’t think too much about it though, dying to catch up to the boy that now had his back towards her on her left. Then, without warning, a thunderous, four-legged gallop caught her ears and then her eyes. Looking up to the far right, she found out what was giving chase: an angry man upon a mule. And he was catching up to the boy!

In fact, within seconds, the mule was upon the boy’s heels, and given that the priority in her heart was saving the boy, she didn’t stop to question her observations; she dashed towards both without the least hesitation, alternating between calls of “Marco!” and “Hey, stop!”

The boy tripped and fell, and that’s how his pursuers finally reached him. The man, quite middle-aged and gray-haired, jumped off his animal, and began shaking his catch furiously, saying things that Julia could not for the life of her understand.

The fleeting idea that she was invisible to either was instantly extinguished when both turned towards her as she caught up to them. Much to her surprise, boy and man were perfectly spooked by her sudden appearance.

Although not frightened by them, she was likewise struck by their appearance. The two individuals were not wearing clothing like hers — not remotely like hers. The boy and the man wore tunics, woolen apparently, and loose leggings, the like of which she had never seen before. If she had to trust what she had seen in works of art and cinema, she would dare say they pretended to be from the Middle Ages.

Her suspicions were corroborated by the fact that when the latter began to speak, not to interact with her but to express a sense of fear or wonder, it was unintelligible at first, but then there were words, and traces of words, she figured she understood, such as “God” and “me.”

Be that as it may, she was not given leave to further tackle the language barrier between herself and the two others because they all then heard something fast approaching them — it was another galloping! except it was not four-legged, but eight-legged.

Another two men, these dressed in dark armor with swords at their belts, were speeding right in their direction. Neither was younger than the boy nor older than his pursuer; and stout and strong, visibly not an individual to be trifled about.

Therefore, when they drew up to Julia and her company, who became timid and evasive of any confrontation between themselves and against the armored men, Julia herself was now not a little scared. Being a mature and seasoned prosecutor, however, she kept calm.

Apparently, almost as much struck by her as the boy and the gray-haired man, they did not dismount, directing their horse a few steps back instead, and addressing her in the meantime with a dozen immediate questions, half curious, half alarmed.

Julia would have directly answered them, could she understand them, but she could not. Instead, she only repeated to them her name and how she arrived there. Oddly clothed and speaking in tongues in their view, it was no wonder that she was distrusted on the spot.

So, the two knights — for such Julia inferred they were, going along with the theory that everyone was pretending to be Medieval on this side of the Hickories — abandoned their intention of settling the matter between the boy and his chaser, and assumed the greater task of escorting this fantastical creature, possibly a witch or a fairy or a nymph, to their lord.

And in case Julia were really associated with malign forces, they insisted she walk evenly in front of one of them and behind the other. Increasingly afraid and confused, she accepted, and they all went through the now thin and open wood for a couple of minutes before they reached a dirt trail among fields. On this trail the three walked in silence for an hour.

We should mention here that the boy and the middle-aged man who had chased him were following the mounted knights and Julia on foot some distance behind, filled with intense curiosity, and in this curiosity, forgetful of the differences they may have had.

After this terribly tense and uneasy span of time and space, they all reached a small castle, small because only one tower adorned it, and it lacked a moat. There was, however, a large, thick gate next to the tower to pass through in order to reach the castle’s entrance a fourth of a mile away, and a handful of men posted there, just as equipped and hardy as Julia’s escorts.

Not one of these men, as they saw Julia approach, could help exclamations of dread or awe, and the one standing guard at the top of the tower even made to himself the sign of the cross with his right hand. He then said something that made all the others stop in their tracks. Julia could not understand their language but understood by all their motioning and gesturing that, to take every precaution necessary, because they feared her, she would have to wait outside and surrounded while one of them rushed inside to let their lord know.

She was right, so she waited; and as she did, underneath a clear blue sky and bright sunlight, before a heavy castle and environed by men in mail and armor, she hoped with all her heart that that day was just a bad dream, and she would wake up any moment now to her alarm in the early morning, head downstairs with her luggage, say goodbye to her mom, and drive back to her apartment to practice law the next day. Such was the frustration that this reflection evoked, that tears began to stream her cheeks.

“This is cruel if it’s a prank,” she wondered aloud to herself, and immediately regretted this statement because those that heard her grew visibly worried. It felt as though she had been there thirty minutes when the groans of heavy metal slowly moving could be heard: The gate was being raised.

The salty moisture in her eyes impeded her seeing whether she was finally allowed to make her entrance or someone was coming out to interact with her. Wiping her tears off, she looked up and beheld some feet before her a man squinting at her. He was not suited up as all the others, but richly attired, as if he were much wealthier.

Strikingly, he also appeared to be younger than her, but not by much, and his hair was shoulder-length and hazel.

“Julia, is that you?”

She was at a perfect loss of words. As she took a better look at him, it dawned on her who the subject was, slowly making sense of his features. She stepped forwards, beginning to recognize him, but when she did, the men abreast her addresser instantly unsheathed their swords.

“No!” he yelled, raising his palm. “She is harmless.”

The knights hesitated to back down, but on a stern glance from the speaker, they slid their weapons back onto their belts.

“This — this is my sister Julia,” he said calmly, looking again at her.

By the point that he said these words, Julia had begun to sob. Although she also clasped her mouth, her many emotions would not have allowed her to speak. But at last, she managed to say: “Marco! How?”

“Julia, it’s a long story. But I am so glad to see you,” he said, and went to embrace her.