The Witch Elm

by Tana French

I’ve never got the self-flagellating middle-class belief that being poor and having a petty crime habit magically makes you more worthy, more deeply connected to some wellspring of artistic truth, even more real.

Worrying had always seemed to me like a laughable waste of time and energy; so much simpler to go happily about your business and deal with the problem when it arose, if it did, which it mostly didn’t.

At the time I took the whole scenario for granted as a happy near-necessity of life, something everyone should have and what a shame that my friends had somehow missed out, but at least they could share mine. It’s only now, much too late, that I can’t help wondering if it was ever really so simple.

“The counselor at the hospital—poor woman, what a job—did a lot of talking about denial, but I don’t think it’s that: I’m well aware that I’m dying. It’s that everything seems altered, in fundamental ways, everything from eating breakfast to my own home. It’s very dislocating.”

Zach had struck me as a little shit before. One Christmas Susanna had had to take him away from the dinner table for spitting in his sister’s turkey because it looked better than his. “My mum said you got hit in the head. Are you special needs now?” “No,” I said. “Are you?”

your whole life was an exercise in missing out.

‘Just let them run wild, they’ll turn out fine in the end’—which was great when it was us, but it’s not as much fun from the other side.”

What you’re supposed to do after someone dies, that’s all mapped out, wakes and funerals and wreaths and the month’s-mind mass. But the part where you’re waiting for them to die is at least as bad, and there’s fuck-all to tell you how to do that.”

family was the best thing in the world but also the most tiring,

much of her childhood had been made up of isolation and damage control.

They’re unsettled and they’re frightened, and what they want from me isn’t the lovely presents, any more; it goes much deeper. They’re afraid that they’re not who they always thought they were, and they want me to find them reassurance. And we both know it might not turn out that way. I’m not the fairy godfather any more; now I’m some dark arbiter, probing through their hidden places to decide their fate. And I’m not nearly as comfortable in that role.”

“I worried that maybe you spent too much time being the center of the world,”

Only child

“They did. It sprang up where Orpheus stopped to play a lament after he’d failed to rescue Eurydice. ‘In the midst,’ Virgil says, ‘an elm, shadowy and vast, spreads its aged branches: the seat, men say, that false Dreams hold, clinging beneath every leaf.’”

But it’s the fact of it. I never thought much about my, my personality before, but when I did, I took it for granted that it was mine, you know? That it was me?

I suppose the truth is that I’ve never been a man of action.” That quirk of a smile again, eyebrow lifting. “A man of inertia, more like. Don’t rock the boat; everything will come right in the end, if you just let it . . . And every year, of course, it got harder to make any changes.

“The thing is, I suppose,” he said, “that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.”

“I’m petrified I’m going to say something awful. It’s like being in church when you’re a kid, you know, you start wondering what would happen if you yelled ‘Ballsack!’ right at the most solemn moment, and then you can’t stop thinking about it and you’re getting more and more terrified that you’ll actually do it?

His absence was enormous and tangible, as if a part of the house was gone, and yet on an emotional level his death didn’t seem to exist.

I had never had fantasies of being a badass dangerous outlaw; basically, all I had ever wanted to be was normal and happy. But with that off the table, and once the initial shock had worn off, badass outlaw at least felt better than contemptible useless fucked-up victim.

All I could feel was, absurdly, devastated. I had got attached, more than I had realized, to the idea of myself as the dragon-slayer. With that gone, I was right back to useless victim.

“Same for having the kids: not that it felt more important than getting a PhD or whatever else I could have done; it just felt more solid. A difference I could see, right there in front of me. We made two whole new people. It doesn’t get more concrete than that.”

It had been because of that tiny ludicrous spark, somewhere deep in the core of my mind, that had still believed things could turn around. Somewhere on the other side of that sheet of trick glass, my own life was waiting for me, warm and bright as summer, beckoning.

The last thing I remember thinking is how terribly sad it was that it should be so easy, in the end, to go to sleep.

fuckedupitude

I’ve realized this: I used to believe that luck was a thing outside me, a thing that governed only what did and didn’t happen to me; the speeding car that swerved just in time, the perfect apartment that came on the market the same week I went looking. I believed that if I were to lose my luck I would be losing a thing separate from myself, fancy phone, expensive watch, something valuable but in the end far from indispensable; I took for granted that without it I would still be me, just with a broken arm and no south-facing windows. Now I think I was wrong. I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said. And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I?