There’s a forest in Alice Weintraub’s room at the rehabilitation facility. Other than the forest, her room is standard, with hospital beige walls, a TV and dresser, and a motorized bed to help her upright and then reclined again. A window overlooks the parking lot, but the real view is inside.
Reaching out her right hand, Alice can touch the papery bark on the tree closest to her bed. There are different kinds of trees in the forest, but this one has a thin trunk with spindly branches higher up, and the leaves are too high for her to reach. The floor of her room is both tile and dirt. The place smells equally of bleach and mulch.
She is the only one who sees the forest. She hasn’t yet walked far beyond the first line of trees, but she’s wandered the edges, when no one is in the room to pepper her with questions like how she’s feeling and does she know what day it is? Who is the President?
If she wants to get around the rehabilitation facility, Alice needs a wheelchair, though the only place she goes is her physical therapy appointment down the hall. A few days ago–maybe it was longer, it’s hard to track time in here–she tried explaining to her mother how she’s able to walk in the forest. She thought her mother would find this news promising; Alice was on the road to recovery. But her mom replied, “We could watch the facility’s security camera footage. Then you’d see you’ve only been here, in the bed, all the time. You haven’t walked anywhere.”
Alice tried to tell her daughter Mary about the Limbo Forest. Alice calls it this because the English language lacks better words to explain it; limbo is the one she keeps coming back to. But Mary, who’s away right now, two months into her first semester at college, said, “Think about it, Mom. How can that be?”
“Maybe it’s where I belong.”
“You’re alive,” Mary said. “You’re not dead.”
But Alice died–for two minutes and thirteen seconds. And then there was a coma. They tell her it lasted six days.
The white light wasn’t what she expected. Before, whenever she heard an account of “the white light” by someone on the news or in a documentary or another source that trucks in that kind of story, she always pictured something like the Ted Williams Tunnel in Boston, the tiled, low-ceilinged one on the way to the airport. But this tunnel was made of earth, all the way around. It was cool and quiet, but claustrophobic; she recalls a desperate breathlessness. There wasn’t enough air, and the light far, far in the distance was the promise of pure oxygen. But the damp, subterranean clay where she walked made her progress slow-going. She wasn’t going to make it to the light in time, which felt intentional, somehow. Like the light itself meant to stay out of reach.
The next thing she remembered was waking up in a hospital room–a different room from this one now, even a different hospital. She opened her eyes to her mother by the bed while an incongruous forest of trees loomed in the background. The forest travelled with her to the rehabilitation facility, which was an interesting thing to note.
“What do you think happens when you die?” Alice asks her mother, who had just arrived, which meant the doctor will come check on her soon. He doesn’t talk to Alice, always to her mother.
“That’s a morbid hello,” her mother replies.
“Like, really die. For good. Do you think there are trees in heaven?”
Her mother shakes her head and makes a fuss about sorting through all the medical forms.
All this started with a stomachache, which Alice ignored because what kind of grown woman complains of stomachaches? She had the store to run, and Mary, who was only recently off to college, would call Alice and stay on the phone for over an hour, which was nice, since Alice didn’t stay in touch with many friends after the divorce. It was good to talk to someone who wasn’t a customer wanting to pore over one more catalog of crystal patterns, but Alice worried it wasn’t good for her daughter to be spending so much time with her mother and not out there in college, making friends. They were talking on the phone about sororities, which Alice felt mixed about, as did Mary but in different ways, when Alice’s appendix burst. Alice yelled, “Fuck!” and doubled over. Mary hung up and called her grandmother, Alice’s mom, who called 911. Meanwhile, Alice was in a ball on the floor, doing all she could to breathe.
Normally, appendicitis is something easily rectified, but since Alice ignored all the warning signs, her blood went septic as her own life force commenced to poison the rest of her. She’d been told that, after that, it was just one unfortunate development after another, until they wheeled her from her initial hospital room to the Intensive Care Unit. That’s where she died, which she doesn’t remember except for the not-Ted-Williams-tunnel. Right after they revived her, the doctors put her into a medically-induced coma.
Mary keeps offering to come home from college, but Alice’s mother says no. There’s nothing Mary can do; it’s better to focus on school. Alice wonders if her daughter is truly concerned, or if this illness simply offers a great excuse to bail on her first semester.
“Does it feel like you’re being tortured?” the nurse asked Alice once. The nurse is Catholic and believes in Purgatory––a place of purification and repentance until the soul is ready for heaven. It’s like a mini-Hell, she told Alice, just a taste so you know what you’re missing. Thankfully, this description doesn’t fit the forest.
Alice has some Catholic in her blood, too. In fact, she has a little bit of everything. When people ask, because they often do, she says she comes from a long line of lovers. She prefers to think this way–that love is the reason her ancestors ignored all the manmade boundaries and classifications; it wasn’t war or trauma or even practicality that led to all the cross-cultural matches. She has no way of knowing for sure. She has little information about any of them, except where they’re from. Sometimes, if she’s in the mood, she offers a rough list to the nosy person still insisting, No really, what are you? Her blood flows backward to, among other places, Indonesia, French Antigua, Poland, Israel, Namibia, Pakistan, Japan, and a wiped-out indigenous tribe in northern Canada.
She’s not an expert in any of these cultures. She’s never felt enough of any of them to authentically align herself, though she wonders if her present, unique situation grants her entry to an assortment of limbos. In those moments when her head feels clear enough, she’s begun looking some of them up. She uses her laptop that her mother picked up from work. Alice knows there’s a list of other things she’s supposed to be doing with the computer–double-checking inventory, emailing vendors, paying bills–but she wants to find out about tribal African spiritual practices first.
When the doctor comes in, Alice’s mother tells him, “She’s still going on about her forest.”
Is it her forest? Just hers? She angles herself left and right, trying to peer deeper beyond the tree line. The trees are everywhere, yet they don’t touch her mother or the doctor.
“Delusions are common for our ICU patients that have gone septic,” her doctor says. “I’m most concerned about the cognitive problems that might follow.”
“Cognitive problems?” asks her mother.
“Some patients suffer from distractions. Day-to-day living gets complicated. There can be trouble balancing a checkbook. Remembering names. Staying on track in a conversation.”
“Does anyone know what kind of tree this is?” Alice asks about the one closest to the bed, but then she corrects herself. “The kind that’s this big around” –she makes a circle with her hands, but it’s still too small a circumference– “and the spindly leaves don’t really start until higher up?”
Her mother gives the doctor a long look. He says, “Medication can help. Brain training exercises.”
Later, when she’s alone, she manages to hang her legs from the side of the bed and stand. Resting a hand on the closest trunk, and then the next, and the next, she leans against each as she inches past the tree line.
She walks farther back than she’s been before, and the variety surprises her. She wishes she knew more about trees, horticulture in general, because some of these don’t look like they’d normally grow together. She places her palm on the smooth, light brown bark of a tree with branches that go wide and leafy. Like the tree by her bed, the leaves are too high up for her to touch, but this tree offers several low, thick trunks she could climb later, when she feels stronger. If she manages to get high enough, she might gain a good vantage point to see in all directions.
She expected it to be darker in here, but plenty of sunshine dapples down through the canopy. The trees thicken as she goes, but it gets easier to walk and she doesn’t have to lean on trunks as much for support. After ten minutes or so, when she looks behind her, she can barely see her bed. Overhead, a portion of the light flickers as if coming from fluorescents, and there’s still a slight buzzing, but for the most part it feels very forest-y in here. Scraping her bare foot back and forth in the dirt, she finds no tile. The smell of bleach has mostly faded, too; the scent is earthy and rich. Somewhere deeper within the trees comes the faint call of birds.
Spotting a fallen trunk, Alice sits. A cluster of Christmas-type trees surround her, and the air smells crisp and clean. Beyond them are the most enormous trunks she’s ever seen. They remind her of those massive California redwoods, but these are different, with trunks that fan out wide at the base. Alice is dwarfed by the full assortment. Take a photograph of this spot, with the trees as the focus, and she would hardly be noticed.
As she’s been sitting, the light has begun to fade, but she’s not frightened. She can still see her room, which generates plenty of light to guide her back. But what it must feel like to sit within the thicker, darker area from where the birds are calling! She thinks of a cave. A tunnel. A womb.
Later, when she’s back in bed and the Catholic nurse fetches her for physical therapy, Alice tells her about some of the limbos she’s been researching online.
“I don’t think it’s Yomi,” Alice says, as the nurse wheels her down the hallway. “That’s the Shinto river where souls unworthy for heaven wait indefinitely.”
“What’s that other river?” the nurse asks. “They taught us about it in grade school.”
“Do you mean Styx? That was just to get across.” She didn’t look into it much. She doesn’t have any Greek, at least that she knows of.
Alice tells the nurse, “She’ol is supposed to be pure darkness, so that’s out. The Buddhists have Bardo. The Hindus, Naraka. Both are states of existence between death and rebirth.”
“States of existence, huh?”
The forest isn’t a state of anything. It’s even crept into the hallway. She can smell the peat of it, and a furry moss grows along the walls. Light comes from both overhead fluorescents and dappled sunshine.
It’s remarkable, the difference in her ability to walk in the forest versus within the facility. In PT, the therapist has to help her up, because Alice can’t support her own weight. They tell her there’s no medical reason she can’t walk, she’s just weak from weight-loss, bedrest, and the trauma of emergency surgery, but she can barely move one foot in front of another, and only once she’s been hitched over supports. She walks on a foamy gym mat, which feels unnatural after her earlier barefooted stroll on the dirt. Plus, it’s too bright in here. Some branches have stretched overhead, as if attempting to shield Alice from the harsh glare of the orange, flickering lights, but the PT room is much more room than forest. It feels alien and wrong. She’s relieved when she’s back in bed, with the trees cocooning her.
“I’m worried about you,” her daughter says when she calls. It’s after the PT appointment, or maybe the next day, or perhaps this happens before the walk in the forest. Alice is losing interest in keeping track of that kind of time.
Mary offers to come home, which she makes often. She can take care of Alice until she’s back on her feet. She can transfer to the local college and live at home.
“Dad thinks it’s a good idea,” Mary adds. “He’s worried, too.”
Before all this happened, Alice didn’t hold much love for her ex-husband. She still felt raw and wronged from the divorce, which wasn’t even a year old. Theirs was a stereotypical ending – he had an affair with someone from work. That relationship had since fallen apart, which gave Alice smug satisfaction at the time. She could reasonably tell herself, It was him, not me. But now, all of that seemed small and unimportant. The forest doesn’t care about those old frustrations and hurt feelings.
“I’ll be fine,” she tells her daughter. “Give your father my love.”
The next time she walks in the forest, Alice knows more about trees. The skinny-trunked ones by her bed are Ocjow birch; the fat one she’ll climb later is a Whitewood; the copse of Christmas trees are deodar cedar. She identifies other ones as she goes deeper–olive, Japanese black pine. Some, like the Ushivi, don’t look like they should be in a forest at all. From its single, hefty trunk grow branches that are wide, leafy, and thick. She imagines it thriving on an open, arid plane, yet this one seems happy enough in her unlikely forest, and she’s glad it’s here.
She arrives at the massive trees, which she now knows are called Ironwood. When she hugs one, her arms don’t reach an eighth of its circumference. Standing snug against at its base and looking up, she can’t see its top, which disappears beyond the canopy of the lower tress. She imagines it to be the height of sky-scrapers.
Stepping past this Ironwood, Alice finds herself surrounded by them. It’s darker here, with the canopy overhead growing close together, but there’s enough sunlight to feed all these trees. She can still see, but the air is cool enough that she wishes she wore her bathrobe. Shed needles coat the underside of her feet, and it’s noisier here. She hears birds, maybe even the faint rush of water.
She’s never done much hiking up to now, not out of any set decision not to, it just wasn’t an activity that ever happened, so it’s curious that a forest appeared in her room and not, say, a lake or beach. Does everyone get a forest or just her? And if it is just her, what’s she supposed to make of that?
She’s more interested in these kinds of questions than in the practicalities of her life before the forest. She should probably be worried about the store, but she isn’t. Her mother assures her that the manager who’s worked there for years has everything under control, even though Alice never asked.
“You should move in with me,” her mother says, some other time that Alice is back in bed, before or after something else that already happened or hasn’t happened. “Until we’re sure you’re okay on your own.”
“I’ll be in your way,” Alice says.
“I can’t be running over to your house every day, making sure you haven’t burnt it down.”
Is Alice really that helpless? She feels more than she ever has before. She feels like she understands. Or no, she feels like she doesn’t understand, but she knows what the questions are. Or maybe she doesn’t know the questions, but she’s got a pretty good idea that they exist, out there, somewhere. The answers must exist, too. Maybe she’ll find them in the forest. She just has to walk in deep enough.
Will the forest come with her when she leaves? It came with her from the hospital, but how many times can a forest travel? There are so many trees, some of them huge. The roots must be massive. Surely moving all this elsewhere can’t be good for ecosystem.
“You never told me,” Alice says. “Do you believe in heaven?”
Her mother sighs. “I suppose.”
“Which one?” Her mother can only claim half the cultures that Alice can, but that still leaves her plenty to choose from.
“I don’t know what to call it, Alice. I certainly don’t claim to see it.”
“The forest isn’t heaven.”
“You really must stop talking like this,” her mother says. “It scares Mary.”
But everything scares her daughter, lately. She isn’t taking the transition into semi-adulthood well. Alice remembers herself at that same juncture, terrified of all the possibilities laid out before her. Every decision felt momentous in its ability to shift her course. Is that why she made so few of them? She lived at home with her parents all through college. It’s where she met her husband, and they married soon after graduation. He was ambitious, and Alice contented herself to leading a life in his wake, rather than making one of her own.
When she’s back in the forest, she takes a different path than last time, going wide rather than deep. It’s not that she’s hiding from the interior, more like saving it. She wants to explore all there is to see in the exterior, better-lit, less dense parts before pushing herself deeper within the Ironwood. These trees deserve her attention, too.
She comes upon another Whitewood, which is similar to the one from her first path, but looks older. The main trunk is wider, and there are more branches to climb. She puts a foot on the lowest, which is only a few inches above the ground, and uses her hands to help her scramble up the next few. She’s out of breath when she perches on a branch about shoulder-height off the ground. It has a nice nook where she can nestle her back against the trunk and rest.
Her mind wanders as she sits there. She was never much for meditation and that kind of thing, but the forest brings something out of her. Some of the time, she simply observes. She studies this tree where she sits, with its smooth, sturdy branches and its oval, waxy leaves. She can still hear that faint birdsong but sees no birds. Instinct tells her she’ll find them in the deepest of the interior, beyond the Ironwood.
She thinks about the life that brought her here, and how she’s supposed to pick it back up again. She can’t say if her ancestors were lovers or scoundrels, but there’s one thing they all had in common–they didn’t fall in with the status quo, which is all Alice has ever done. For a person with so much, as her ex-husband used to say, variety in her bloodline, she sees now how flat and plain her life has been. She owns a store that sells expensive candles and embroidered napkins. The only thing she’s ever created is a daughter who may or may not be scared of her own future. Alice does not yet know how to address these issues. She wonders if the birds beyond the Ironwood might offer some guidance.
She’s thinking about the birds and the Ironwood when she’s back in bed and the doctor is there, talking her mother through the discharge process. Apparently, Alice is well enough to go home, as long as she comes back twice a week for physical therapy. Her mother is surprised by this, but it’s all got something to do with insurance and Alice doesn’t have the interest to track the details.
“I’ll see her on Wednesdays, after her PT,” the doctor tells Alice’s mother. “The nurse can walk you through the medication schedule.”
Alice wants to go back to her house, but the doctor nixes the idea, at least until she’s out of the wheelchair. Her mother has a downstairs guestroom Alice can use. The doctor advises in-home care, at least at night, someone to watch over Alice while her mother sleeps, just to make sure she doesn’t try to get out of bed. There are other particulars and details and lots of forms to sign, but the doctor and Alice’s mother don’t ask her opinion much.
While her mother packs up the small bag of Alice’s things, Alice studies the trees, puzzling how the forest will come with her. Will all of it fit in the car, then miraculously reflate once they arrive at Alice’s mother’s house? She doesn’t want it harmed, but she doesn’t want to leave it here, either. Maybe the forest will trail them from the outside, so that when Alice gazes out the passenger window, she will see all the cars on their way to work, only they will also be winding through an improbable mix of trees from all over the world, which are floating around Alice’s mother’s car as if in tow, only the forest will be doubling, maybe tripling in size, as it travels close behind Alice, out there, free and expanding, in the open air.
