Summit Avenue
Exerpt

Prologue—Through a Dark Forest

How can you weave a life from fairy tales? This is what I do each night after the chores are done, the gardening and the canning. After the supper dishes are washed, dried, and put away. I put my little girl in her nightgown and hold her in my lap in the rockingchair by the window. Waxy yellow light from the kerosene lantern casts shadows on the walls as I move my hands to narrate my stories. Outside, the wind passes through the spruce trees like an invisible hand, branches scraping and clawing the tin roof overhead. The calendar over the sideboard shows a young woman clothed in an American flag, waving a Liberty Bond. Underneath, the month and year are printed in proud bold red: July, 1918. I have no idea when it will be over, this war that rages like a bloody phantom, like the ghostly shadows that dance on the walls as I tell my daughter the tale of the girl who walked all the way through the dark forest to the sorceress’ house.

I am twenty-two but dress like a crone, all in black. My neighbors call me the Black Widow. I live alone with my little girl in a cabin in the woods like a witch in a fairy tale. Last month, when I first came to this place looking for cheap accommodation, I was nearly turned away. The farmer who rents out these cabins had raised an almighty fuss when he heard my German accent. I told him I was a pacifist, but these days pacifists are suspect, too. I told him, "I hate the Kaiser. I am an American now. I love this country." This made him soften slightly around the edges without really relenting. The next thing I told him was a story so fanciful, it could have come from one of my tales. Twisting the plain silver band on my left hand, I told him of losing my American husband in the war. "He died in the trenches of Montdidier." It was this that finally moved the old farmer. He let me and my daughter move into the most secluded of his three cabins, even let me plant a garden.

I don’t think he regrets his decision. I am a good tenant, quiet and sober. I receive no callers and pay my rent promptly. I only go to town to buy supplies at the general store. On Sunday I go to the church up the road, but I leave right after mass without speaking to anyone. I will live alone in the forest with my daughter until my savings run out. Then I’ll have to find employment of some sort. Cleaning other people’s houses, taking in other people’s laundry. But for now I wrap myself in my fairy tales and nurse the wound that no one can see. I let them call me the Black Widow, but it’s not a man I’m grieving.

"And the girl walked through the forest for seven days and seven nights," I whisper to my daughter. "On the eighth day she came to Baba Yaga’s house." I tell Russian tales, for they are the most beautiful. "Her house was like a castle. It was golden. It danced on hen’s feet. Round and round, never stopping. So hard to find the door. How do you find the door of a house that’s always moving?"

My little girl is drowsy now, her bright cornsilk head nodding off against my black blouse. Rocking her to sleep, I close my eyes. At moments like this, when the gibbous moon is rising and the kerosene lamp sputtering low, I can step out of this world, erase the past four years, erase the war. It’s like looking in a mirror in a dream. Tracing my way back up the long road that led me to this cabin, this loss. Gathering the scattered threads and weaving them together, as if on a magic loom. Weaving them into a tale, my tale. This is how I mend what was broken, how I summon back the radiant thing I have lost.