The Spirit Wood by Robert Masello

there was an ornamental stone fountain with a statue that shot a sporadic,feeble jet of water a few feet up into the air. What the statue was, they couldn't make out from such a distance.
    “That poor girl,” said Meg.
    “What girl?”
    “Leah, or whatever her name is—the one who's in there trying to clean that monster all by herself.”
    A gentle breeze rustled the new leaves overhead. Meg leaned her head back against one of the posts and closed her eyes; Peter absentmindedly rubbed his arm and rested his elbows on his knees. A cloud passed in front of the sun, leaving the house suddenly an even more somber gray. Peter thought of his grandfather, the fat man with the bushy white hair, wearing the black overcoat, standing at the foot of the grammar school steps. The only other thing he could really remember of him was the feel of his hand as it held his own on the brief walk home; it was bigger and thicker than any hand Peter had ever held until that time. It was strong and all-encompassing, but at the same time warm and slightly damp. Peter had thought it felt like the inside of his Batman puppet, wet and tight, but also slightly grainy.
    And from that, he thought, comes this. From that one short encounter, this estate. This fortune, assuming Kennedy was right and the IRS left something. This day. He glanced at Meg, her eyes still closed, her breathing as soft and regular as a child's. He suddenly felt for her an overwhelming sense of pity, tenderness . . . and fear. He was afraid for her, afraid that by binding her life to his own she'd committed a terrible mistake that someday she'd be sure to discover. Afraid that when she did discover it, she'd leave him. Afraid that his work, his career—the presumption of the word made him uncomfortable—would never amount to anything and that she would be there to witness his failure.
    Afraid, too, that she wouldn't be there.

    Her hands lay on top of each other in her lap. Her fingers, surprisingly thick and strongly boned, were also uncustomarily white; they had lost the redness and the rough patches that they'd always had when she was busy with her pottery and sculpture. He hoped the pottery co-op would find another wheel for her soon. He hoped she could go back to that carefree happiness that had first so attracted him, before, he believed, his own malign star had begun to exert its influence. With one finger, he hooked a stray wisp of hair behind her ear, just as she always did. She smiled, her eyes still closed.
    “Penny for your thoughts,” she murmured.
    “They weren't worth it.”
    “Want to know mine?”
    “Sure.”
    “I'm starved.”
    On their way back to the car to get the sandwiches, they took a short ramble through the woods. Here and there, they found narrow pathways that as often as not ended abruptly in tiny glades, or simply stopped altogether for no apparent reason at all. Sometimes Peter forged through the brambles to make a new path of their own; sometimes they just turned around and doubled back. It was like a maze, he thought, with its twistings and turnings and sudden dead-ends. But it differed from any traditional maze he'd been in—come to think of it, the only one he'd ever really tried was at Hampton Court—in that there seemed to be no formal design to it, and certainly no single points of entry or escape. The confusion seemed entirely random and, at the same time, somehow premeditated. When they finally broke out into the open again, they found themselves covered with burrs and standing at the far end of the drive, across from the house. The car glinted in the afternoon sun.
    “I just had a terrible thought,” said Meg. “I think I left the sandwiches broiling on the back seat.”

    The roast beef, they discovered, still passed muster; the ham and Swiss they decided not to risk. The Coke in the plastic thermos was tepid.
    “Why don't we take what's edible around back,” suggested Meg, “and eat it by that fountain?”
    As they went