As Sally straightened from her defensive crouch, the tall heavyset man quickly wheeled the old woman away, murmuring, “Shhh. C’est bon, grand-mère.”

A French man with a Midwest grandma, she thought, distractedly. Another story I’ll never know.

She still felt empty: she couldn’t see the little fairy! Unless maybe the whirling dust motes gleamed a little brighter in that sunbeam?

“You saw something, huh?” Lavinia asked, face creased with concern.

“I heard something, that fucking scream again,” she said around the lump in her throat. In a tiny voice she added, “But I thought I saw, I almost saw the little fairy from my dree-hee-heammsss,” and was crying quietly in Lavinia’s arms. Lavinia stroked her hair, kissed her wet cheeks. I’ve so changed, Sally realized. She once would have been horrified to break down like this.

“Babe, babe, it’s okay, shhh, it’s okay.” How incredibly sweet to be held while you cried. Oh, I’m so lucky.

“I didn’t really see anything,” she said with bittersweet sorrow. “Just, when I was asking to come in, oh I saw her so clear with my eyes closed.”

She leaned back in those arms and looked up at those amazing eyes. “You didn’t see anything?”

“No, kid, sorry. But you did. She was there. I believe you.”

“I love you,” Sally whispered, both to Lavinia and to the little fairy who might be just at the edge of sight. “Come on, let’s find a tree for you to hug.”

There was no shortage of trees. On the other side of a smooth, slightly sticky wooden fence stood a forest giant with rusty-looking bark partly pulled away from hard shiny wood.

She was about to say, “Hey, try hugging this one here,” when two young men talking German came up behind them. Sally blushed and leaned with elaborate nonchalance against the railing while they passed.

Lavinia, unconcerned as ever, reached out a hand, molded it to the soft fraying red bark. She cocked her head as if listening, a movement so like the fairy’s that Sally’s heart leapt.

A revelation seemed to swell: the little face had looked like Lavinia’s! But no, it had also looked like a picture Sally had once seen of her mother as a girl. And the fairy’s green, glittering eyes had been Cinnamon’s.

Lavinia leaned forward, put her ear against the trunk. “There’s something. It’s faint…” She listened while Sally’s thoughts raced. “Naw, too faint. Let’s find another one, one not right up against a fence.”

They passed tree after tree until the boardwalk ended and an asphalt trail went on. A side trail climbed steeply up a set of steps to their right. A sign called it the Canopy View trail. They passed it up heading for an enormous redwood which had pushed roots under the asphalt and made it ripple. There was no fence. They could walk right up and hug it.

But there were the two young men, talking to a ranger in an electric cart. Sally’s face burned red again.

Then she realized they were asking, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “Say, is zere a place ve can actually hug a tree?”

And the ranger answered with good humor, “You can hug ‘em anywhere you like, long as you don’t leave the trail. I’d cross the river at the bridge just back there? There are trees you can actually walk inside.”

Lavinia gave Sally a nudge and a wink and turned to walk back to the bridge. As Sally turned to follow, a ghostly face gleamed from the tree behind the ranger.

Heart pounding, she turned back, wincing as she looked closer.

Some of the roots were above ground, flowing from the tree’s base like a knobby wooden river. One large bulge in a patch of sun had a pair of holes like eyes, one glaring and the other half closed in a wink. Below them, two slits in a brown circle made the skeletal nose of a vampire face emerging from the living wood. But when she stepped forward the perspective shifted and the illusion was gone. She shivered.

Lavinia was halfway across the bridge. Sally hurried and caught up with her.

On the other side of the river the trees had been touched too much. Up to the height that a stretched hand could reach the bark was brighter and smoother than higher up. Lavinia laid a hand on tree after tree and her face crinkled, like someone trying to catch words in a noisy room.

“These trees all see too many people,” she finally announced. “They’ve been loved and spat on and laughed at and hated and hacked at with pen knives and hugged. Babe, come on, let’s find us a tree or two that doesn’t get touched so much.”

“That steep side trail…?”

“Just what I was thinking.”

Less than a hundred feet up the side trail, they left behind all trace of other people. After the initial stairway the trail meandered through hillside forest and around an elbow over a tiny stream. Lavinia brushed her hand along trunks, murmuring, “Clearer, a little clearer. What is it, though?”

When Sally touched any of the sturdy old trees and felt their cool bark, she only sensed great age and quiet, slow thinking. But she realized how happy she was walking through this forest with Lavinia.

At last, Lavinia turned and walked off the trail. She scampered (and Sally struggled) up a steep slope littered with thick beds of fallen needles and springing boughs. Sally stopped the pang of jealousy at the easy way Lavinia ran while she panted and sweated but was about to call, “Time out, babe, jeez!” when they emerged in a sloping circle of ancient giants.

Sally put her hands on her knees and gasped. But Lavinia, eyes shining, walked up to the biggest of the forest giants. She hesitated, face holding hope but ready for disappointment.

Then she flung her arms wide, embraced that mighty trunk, rubbed her cheek against it, made a tiny sound of happiness. Sally saw her eyes become huge.

“You got it that time?” Sally asked, when Lavinia said nothing further.

Lavinia turned slowly, mouth open.

A splinter of wood, just large enough to be visible, was jammed into her left index finger.

Is it only wood through the heart that can kill you? Sally remembered asking. What happens if a vampire gets a brain injury from wood? What happens if you get a splinter?

As Sally scrambled through nightmarishly shifting forest litter, Lavinia crumpled slowly to the ground.