The Language of Trees (15 page)

After Luke died, Melanie slowly began to close up, like a flower. Watching her daughter late at night doing her homework at the kitchen table, Leila worried about the whitish cast to her lips, the hollowness in her voice. The one-word answers when she'd asked Melanie what she was thinking. There was only one night when Melanie gave her something to go on, talking about the unfairness of hidden things, the rocky shoal
out in the lake that had taken down too many boats to count, the sacred objects that could heal the sick, and all the things a person's subconscious could keep secret.

Everyone had been so consumed with what was going on at home that no one in the family realized that Melanie had grown five inches and had become beautiful, all in one summer. No one could have predicted that at fourteen she'd win Canandaigua's Harvest Queen, the youngest in the town's history. Leila thought this would change things for her, give her a sense of pride and belonging, a fresh start. But it had worked just the opposite. Melanie hadn't been prepared for the attention, or for Maya's raging jealousy. The parade, ribbon cuttings, pictures in the paper. It all seemed to wear on Melanie's already heavy shoulders, bringing her back to the time when Luke died, when there was a similar kind of scrutiny, a kind of curious and judgmental attention that made her feel sick.

Melanie ran away for the first time a month later. Leila shudders every time she pictures Melanie stumbling down an empty road on a cold October night, willing to risk everything just to visit her new boyfriend, who was staying in Albany. How lucky they were that the trucker who picked her up wasn't a nutcase, but a grandfather with three daughters. He'd dropped her off at the police station and sat with her as she called Leila to come and get her.

She made Melanie see a psychiatrist for two months. Melanie promised she wouldn't repeat the behavior. But she was lying, or maybe she really believed it would end there. Leila still thinks she could have prevented this. This and the fresh-mouthed, empty-eyed boy who Melanie had met when she was tutoring kids after school. He had reveled in taking down Canandaigua's Harvest Queen, a girl who never would have looked at him had she not felt that she deserved to be punished for her brother's
death. Was she merely following in Leila's footsteps? Finding someone to punish her for never being good enough, for something unexplainable? Leila thinks about an earlier time, back when Victor tore up the lawn with his car. He had gotten out and fired his gun right into the trees. One, two, three shots that echoed through the forest and caused a flurry of blackbirds to explode into the sky. Melanie, at seven, had turned to Leila and in the most adult voice said, “You're not going to let him do that again. You're going to get us out of here. Right, Mom?”

“Yes,” Leila had promised. What an act of courage for a child to ask to leave her own father, she had thought. She should have listened to Melanie then. But she was too weak.

Leila forgave Victor that night, as she would time and time again. Their happiness would be bought off with a few red carnations wrapped in a plastic grocery-store wrapper and the promise that he would change. By the time Leila finally threw Victor out once and for all, the damage had been done. The girls had already suffered from the poor judgment of their mother. Leila had already lost a son. The divorce took two years. Victor had moved away and was often out of contact. The courts gave her custody of the girls, and Victor didn't fight it. Then, he disappeared from their lives.

Later that night, after they have eaten, Leila watches Lion rocking Lucas in his arms. Leila clears her throat. She tells Lion about the time, after Luke died, when she couldn't get out of bed for weeks. How can she explain that her lungs were full of lead, and that she felt dizzy each time she stood up? She wants him to know what she did to contribute to Melanie's problem. She is not without blame. They were
her
pills first. Her doctor prescribed Adderall—in effect, speed—to give her energy during the day, and Ambien to help her sleep at night, but the pills sat in the medicine cabinet, unused. She only took
them for a few months and then forgot about them. She didn't have to function. Melanie took care of the house, begging Leila to let her stay home from school day after day. Leila let herself be nursed and mothered by a nine-year-old girl for weeks, something that she now knows was wholly inappropriate.

Leila hadn't known Melanie saw her take the pills. Perhaps that is where Melanie learned about them.

“At night,” Leila says, “this little creature would crawl into my bed with me and talk to me. I can still feel her hands on my face, hear her little voice whispering to me that things would be okay. Hers was the only voice I could listen to. I just couldn't bear to be alone, isn't that horrible? I let a child take care of me. But we survived. That's how I know who she is, deep down, do you see? That same little girl, she's still in there. She's always with me,” Leila says, putting her hand over her heart.

“Could you hold off on the when-Melanie-was-wonderful stories?” Lion says gruffly. He doesn't want to hear it. He is convinced that Melanie is trying to punish him. These stories of a girl he never knew make him ache with loss. And he doesn't want to feel that yet.

Leila sighs. “Here, angel,” she sings, touching Lucas's foot, ignoring the comment.

Lion reaches across the table. “Mom, I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that.”

“Well, I don't want you saying things like that around him.”

“But you don't know her like I do.”

“I beg your pardon,” says Leila. “I'm her mother, Lion.”

Lion gets up. “You think you have to tell me about her?” He paces back and forth with the child in his arms. Lucas begins to scream. “Take him,” Lion says quickly, handing her Lucas, who grabs on for dear life, coughs a few times before catching his breath.

“Here you go,” Leila says. Lucas sticks his toes into the teething ring.

Lion drops his head between his knees. “Do you know how hard it is for me? Not ever knowing what she's gonna do next?”

“Sweetie,” Leila says gently. “There was stress on you both. It happens when you have a child.”

“So it's because of me? I can't make enough money. Yeah, I'm sick of thinking about it. I never asked for this.” He gets up and slams the back door, escaping out into the backyard, where he stops in front of Luke's gravestone.

Leila calls after him. He doesn't respond, and Leila can't blame him. It's true he never asked for any of this. But who asks for half the things life gives them? Life had taught Leila the practiced art of making do.

Most of all, try not to disappoint people.

Including yourself. This is something that has taken Leila the most time to learn.

Lucas's little fists grasp the teething ring so tightly that she cannot unlock it from his grip. He's more like Lion than any of them knows.

She knows to give Lion breathing room at times like this. This is what she'd tell Melanie each time she and Lion had a fight. Men need to go into their cave. Let him work it out alone. Some problems are best handled by backing away. But now she thinks that perhaps she has backed away too much. If people in a family develop certain personality traits in order to compensate for each other, Leila hadn't known. Perhaps Melanie had become so impulsive because Leila was so immobilized. She could have prevented all this if she'd been smarter back then, if she'd been more balanced herself.

Leila kisses Lucas's forehead and puts him in his playpen.
She drops into the rocking chair, trying to let her guilt flow through her body and out the tips of her fingers. She picks up the pale green acrylic yarn and the hat and boot set she has been knitting. From her chair, she sees Lion's tall shadow cut across the lawn, back and forth. He's trying to figure out what to do.

The way the light hits the windows of Clarisse Mellon's house next door and spills into the grass between the two, it's as though Leila is sitting on the bank of a golden river. She recalls the sight of a yellow farmhouse she used to drive by on the outskirts of town. Not a new house or a large house, but an ordinary house, in front of which stood a wooden trellis hung with bundles of leathery blue grapes. If Leila closes her eyes, if she tries hard enough, she can taste their sweet juice. Even though she never got out of the car, she believed she could taste them. Leila knows about longing. If a person ever wants anything badly enough, it is quite possible to turn a wish into a memory purely through the repetition of thought, sometimes to the point of no longer wanting it at all.

“I'm sorry,” says the low voice behind her. The hand on her shoulder is rocking her gently for the second time today. She looks down at the large silver diver's watch gleaming against the dark skin. She still doesn't know why he had wanted it for Christmas, when he always said how much he hated the water, but she never questioned him. She stares up at Lion as he shoves his hands deep in his pockets.

“You don't have to be sorry. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have pushed you. I should be smarter,” she says.

“I love her,” Lion says, his brown eyes welling with tears. “I've loved her from the minute I saw her. More than I ever thought I could love anyone. She is my whole life.”

“Come here,” Leila says.

Lion kneels, rests his head on her lap.

“Why are you crying?”

“You won't get it,” he says, staring at the floor.

“You know better.”

“I messed up my insurance,” he says.

“What?”

He studies the worn slats of wood, kicks at the corner of the beige rag rug with the cornucopia emblazoned in the center. “Church. I haven't been going. I made this deal. With God. A promise.”

“Oh sweetie,” Leila says.

He continues. “No, listen. If I didn't miss church for a year, then everything would go good. Our relationship. The pregnancy, everything. And I had Matrina on my side, helping out.”

“Now wait a minute. Going to church or not. You can't control—”

“But it worked,” he says, his voice pleading. “I know it did. Lucas is proof.”

“Lion—”

“You can't say everything wasn't going great. And then I go and—”

“Stop this. She'll be back,” Leila says, praying the doubt doesn't come through in her voice. And that her words will hold true as she forces them into the room.

“Mom. We had a fight.”

“You're overtired. You need some rest. I just put fresh sheets in the guest bedroom—”

“I told her I was splitting,” he confesses.

“Oh Lion, no.”

“I'd never really leave her. Just trying to scare her, I guess. It
was stupid.” He gets up, wipes his eyes. “I threatened her with leaving. And so she did it to me first.”

Leila glances at Lucas, who is fast asleep under the blanket.

“We had a bad fight. She was yelling. She never yells. She was mad that we didn't have money, and about all the bills. She wants to take a trip to Niagara Falls. She says we need a break, that we have to get back on track. She says she wants to stay in a hotel for the weekend. That she wants to take a boat ride on the
Maid of the Mist
and get a fake picture taken of the two of us in a barrel. I tell her, you don't have to pretend because we're already going over in a barrel. Why didn't I say okay? I'd never really leave her, Mom.”

“I know you wouldn't, Lion. I do know that.”

Leila is trembling. She pours herself a glass of water and sits down.

“But I left the house. That's something I promised her I would never do. I broke my promise on that. An hour later I came back and she was gone. She had left Lucas all alone. I couldn't believe she'd do it. Now, all I keep thinking is, what if she does this forever? I mean, what about Lucas? I don't know what I'll do if…”

“If what?”

“If she comes back,” he says, his face now streaked with tears.

“
When
she comes back.”

“I don't know what I'll do when and if she comes back.”

Leila holds her hand over her eyes to shield the sun. “You have a child now, you've got no choice but to stick—you'll do it just like I did.”

“Melanie promised she would, too, and look what happened.”

Lion is sitting in front of her, his face damp.

“Here's a secret, sweetie. You have become the rock of this family.” She has told him this before, but she's not sure he listened. It's more of a plea now.

“But Mom, when he grows up, will he hate me? For being such a screwup, for not doing it right?”

Leila swallows hard. “Sometimes it'll feel just like hate.”

“How do you know what to do? That you're saying and doing the right things?”

“Here's a secret. Nobody knows what they're doing.” Leila looks at her grandson. “Melanie wouldn't leave him.”

“Maybe she wanted to leave all along. Maybe she wants a different life, you know, than me.”

“I don't believe that. She once told me her life started when she met you.” Leila is lying, but he needs to hear that. She swallows hard, wondering if he is right, watching Lion walk over to the playpen. He is wise for not telling the police about the fight, Leila thinks. It had been hard enough to get them to send a car around. Now Leila feels in her bones that Melanie is in the worst sort of trouble. As Lion picks up Lucas, the little boy lets out a cry. Leila tries to comfort her grandson but he is inconsolable, his shattering screams echoing through the empty house.

L
UCAS'S CRIES REACH ACROSS
the cold water like white ribbons of light, winding around the tips of the blue spruce that line the lake, under the boat docks and summertime hammocks, sweeping through the flickering leaves of the Diamond Trees, which can be seen from every inch of this place, and circling back across the water to the dirt floor where Melanie is being held. When people on the shoreline hear the cries, they will shiver, commenting on how the wind sounds like a baby crying. But Melanie can recognize her own child's voice. It has been four days with no food. Melanie does not know where she is, but she knows she is near the lake. She can smell its thick muddy scent. Can hear the gulls crying overhead, blending into the sound of her son's voice. She squeezes her eyes shut, and then in her mind she is holding her baby, telling him stories about feathers and dancers and drums. She is breaking into bits of light, listening to him breathe. His heart is a pendulum that measures her life.

She tries to reach for Lucas but she has no arms. Her arms are icy wings folded inside her body. She is empty. The corners of
her mouth bleed and burn with thirst so deep, even light feels wet on her skin.

Gulls circle, spread their wings. Their voices, human. Melanie's own voice, bird-like.

At times like this when the despair is this close, she feels Luke's presence surrounding her. Melanie slips in and out of darkness. Desperate times come flooding back. Times where she was this close to abstinence. Times when she failed.

Once it had been sixty-eight days. This was before Lion. She had gotten herself clean. Hard times were behind her, she was sure. Leila had gone away overnight and Maya was coming home from Cheever for the night. Maya had made great progress over the course of a year and hadn't had an episode of catatonia in two years. Melanie had seen it once, seen her sister's limbs freeze up so that Maya couldn't move, couldn't speak. But that was all supposedly in the past. She had grown out of it.

Still, Melanie would be cautious with her. She would walk on eggshells, for fear something would trigger it. But she would do what she had to, just to have her sister back. Melanie was actually looking forward to spending normal girl time together. She had rented a DVD of
Seinfeld
episodes and also the movie
Fried Green Tomatoes
, a real chick-flick. She had even bought two baskets of apples and some rhubarb so that they could bake crispy apple-rhubarb pie, Leila's favorite, from scratch.

Carefully they sliced the fruit as the warming oven made their cheeks glowy. Their speech was measured at first, saying please and thank you, being generous with their compliments. But they soon fell into easy talk about how much they loved Leila, and how much they didn't like their father, who had by this time been gone for years. It was one of the few times Melanie felt connected to her sister, close without the tight cord that seemed to shut Maya off from her. After everything she and
Maya had been through, it was only important to step over the jealousy and resentment and just forgive.

This was what it was like to have a real sister, Melanie decided, as the fruit browned in the mixture of sugar and orange juice. They began to sing along with Bruce Springsteen on the radio. Maya started dancing as she pushed a fist of dough across a cheese grater so that the golden swivels fell out into the pie tin to make an even crust, Leila's trick, and Melanie stirred the butter and crushed corn-flake topping with a wooden spoon. She wanted to let the moment carry them as far as it could, and she started singing into her spoon. Soon they were both dancing around the kitchen, pounding out a beat on the pots, on the linoleum floor, on the glass jars filled with raw macaroni pasta. Even Old Sally, usually more interested in sleep than play, got crazy and chased her tail.

When the song ended, they looked at each other, breathless. They held each other's eyes for a moment, smiling through the hesitation. So what if they were always turning over new leaves? It didn't matter.

The windows were closed, but suddenly, a rush of wind brushed their faces and the scent of lilacs permeated the air. The heavy bowl of syrupy mixture spun off the counter. Neither of the girls said what they were thinking as they watched the bowl topple across the floor. Apple and rhubarb slices stuck like big brown grubs on the linoleum. Maya looked up nervously at Melanie. “It's all your fault.”

“No big deal,” Melanie said. “We'll just make more. You slice this time, okay?” asked Melanie, becoming Leila as she wiped up the mess, just as she had watched Leila do so many times under Victor's impatient glare. “See, no biggie,” she said, her voice chirpy, and in that moment she felt she understood her mother completely.

After, when they went upstairs to get ready for bed, they found silky spaghetti-strap nightgowns folded on their beds, each with a bar of lavender soap on top, a surprise from Leila. Maya's nightgown was a brilliant crimson, her favorite color, with tiny crystal beading at the top, which she loved. Melanie's was a pale lavender with pink ribbon and two tiny buttons. In the dim light, they undressed in front of the mirror. They had the same rosy breasts and flat stomachs. Melanie could see Maya watching her, her eyes fastening on Melanie's bird tattoo. Melanie quickly pulled her nightgown over her head and her long hair caught in a button. Maya untangled it, telling Melanie she needed a haircut. Melanie's need to feel close was so strong that she asked Maya to trim her hair, the greatest show of trust she could think of. “Just the ends, just half an inch,” Melanie said.

In nightgowns and bare feet, they marched outside to sit in the crisp grass under the lilac tree near Luke's tombstone. The air was loose, the leaves unfurling white tongues into the foggy night.

Out there, with the scent of browning pie reminding her of old times and the cool wind on her neck, Melanie pushed through her apprehension and told Maya about her recent abstinence. She remembered going to see Maya at Cheever and befriending the orderly, Sebastian, who first slipped her some speed after she complained about how tired she was. Now that was all over. She would never again ask Sebastian to get her pills. She wanted to remember things clearly, she said. Everyone got to a point when it was important to remember the past.

Maya had become reticent. Tufts of blond hair fluttered through the darkness. Melanie wanted to stop her, but she couldn't speak, her throat burning with fear. Fear of what.
Triggering Maya's catatonia. Or losing the connection she felt to her.

For the rest of her life, Melanie would remember the feeling of a trapped bird in her chest as she quietly watched most of her hair blowing easily across the yard, blond strands that caught in the grass near the gravestone, lighting up the night like golden thread.

 

A
BREEZE RIDES THE
prisms of light coming through the broken slats. Melanie's breathing is faint; she is almost nonexistent.

There is water seeping under her cheek. She opens her mouth, letting the water wet her tongue. She will only drink enough to lessen the burn. Melanie has no pride. Pride is not even a question.

At once she feels her brother nearby. He is everywhere. In the light, in the stone floor. He could be perched on her shoulder, whispering in her ear. Melanie exists in a dreamlike state her mother used to call twilight, when the body is heavy and immovable and yet the mind is struck by golden lightning bolts of thought. Within this state, Melanie is flitting through the halls of memory, reliving the weeks after Luke was lost. She remembers how each night, either she or Maya woke up sobbing and ran into Leila's room, where they would find her piled under blankets, her body curled into a fist, as though she could ward off the fact that her youngest child was lost—that he was somehow safely tucked against her breast, as though her body, with its sturdy roundness, was enough of a barrier to protect him.

As the months wore on, the girls stopped going to Leila. Instead, they whispered to each other across the moonlit nights. They wouldn't say Luke's name. They called him
the baby
. They
told each other that
the baby
was under the bed, in the window, on the roof. That he was everywhere. They played games and said that the baby was playing, too. That he was just invisible. When late spring came, they even snuck out to look for diamonds in the Shongos' cabin, just as they always had, with Old Sally leading the way. But they both knew they were looking for Luke. They both had been dreaming of him.

Nothing had been right since they lost him. They needed him. They needed him to bring everything back together the way it was when they were a family, their own family, somehow separate from their parents. They longed for the nights when they'd stay up late in their princess costumes, dancing in their bedroom in the milky light with Luke, their only audience. Only Luke could sing to the beetles that lived under the rocks, and only Luke could see what they saw, that the stars were very old angels, that the lilac trees were really other princesses waving in the window, and that the clouds were really children in disguise who had not yet been born but were watching to see who they liked, who was fun, and who they wanted their parents to be. They told Luke stories about children that turned to snowflakes in winter and fireflies in summer. Their little bird arms and legs would flap up and down as they giggled, jumping off their dressers onto their beds.

They had always been stronger together. Three children were a triangle, and Leila had always told them that a triangle was the strongest shape. They had grown close out of the necessity of protecting each other. There was that one cold fall morning when they had been forced to go on Victor's fishing trip to Whiskey Point. They had begged Leila to not allow them to go, but she said that would make their father sad and so they agreed. They'd followed Victor through the reeds, with him carrying only a bottle of whiskey as the girls lugged the cooler
and fishing poles. Luke trailed the group, clutching a can of worms. They quietly stayed far enough back from Victor so as not to smell the whiskey or hear his singing. But they didn't see that Luke had been secretly dropping the worms, one by one, back to the earth. None of those worms deserved to die on a September morning, did they? Luke would later ask. Victor's eyes blazed when they reached the point and he discovered there were no worms left. He threatened to leave the children out there for eternity, to lock them all out of the house if they ever returned, unless they found each and every worm. But the sky was as cold as sheet metal, and although the children clawed the muddy bank for twenty minutes, they didn't come up with a single worm. Maya and Luke complained that they couldn't feel their fingers or their toes in their wet sneakers, and started to cry. Melanie marched up to Victor, who was sitting on the dock, finishing his drink. She demanded that he take them home. “Right now. Before the kids get sick,” Melanie said, her feet anchored apart, her old dingy gray parka pulling under her arms. Her legs trembled, but it was okay because all the strength in her body had risen right into her chest, making her voice feel like thunder.

Victor swung his legs off the dock, his whiskey breath flaring into the cold air. “The kids…Who in the hell do you think you are, you little shit?” He took a final swig and tossed the bottle into the lake.

“Run!” Melanie cried. And the children ran and ran through the muddy fields with Old Sally running alongside and Victor running after them, hardly able to keep up. By the time they reached the Shongos' cabin, Victor had given up and was on his way to Kelley's Bar.

When Victor returned home that night, he yelled so loud it made the windows shake. Luke and Maya hid in the corners,
whimpering. Melanie refused to cry when Victor shouted at her, and this drove him crazy, so much that he sent her to bed without dinner. Later, Leila got soap in her eyes while she did the dishes and had to go out on the front porch with a box of Kleenex, where she stayed for two hours. When Victor fell asleep in front of the TV, Luke sneaked a half-eaten rhubarb pie upstairs that Leila had put out for Old Sally. He forgot to bring her a fork but Melanie said she didn't care, that it would taste better with their hands. Maya had joined them, and as their hands and faces grew sweeter and stickier, they wholeheartedly agreed that pie tasted so much better this way. Everything was better when they were a triangle. Good things, not bad things, happened in threes. Leila said most people had it wrong.

 

W
HEN
L
UKE'S BODY WAS
finally found a year later, Melanie and Maya stopped reminiscing about
the baby
, and stopped playing make-believe. They still raced over the wet grass, their feet tracing old footsteps leading to the Shongos' cabin. But things were different. They fought over everything. Suddenly, there was not enough of anything for them both. Certainly there was not enough of Leila. When they lost Luke, they lost each other. He was the separation, the space they needed. Without him, they collided.

Anxiously, they foraged through the coal bin and argued over a shiny piece of coal. Who saw it first? Who had gotten the last good one? They struggled. Someone hit someone else. No one knew who had started it, but by the end, they were both bruised and crying.

“Everyone knows it was your fault,” Maya said. “It was your idea to take the canoe into the lake, the whole thing was your—”

“You could have grabbed him when—”

“You stood up and made him fall.”

Melanie lost control and flung herself at Maya. Maya's hands pulled at her hair, leaving tufts of blond curls scattered across the coal. They fought without sound. They fought harder than ever, and they didn't know why. Perhaps because they loved each other and they didn't know how anything would ever be the same again. If a ghost had tried to separate them, they wouldn't have felt it. Potato bugs stopped moving grains of sand. Spiders stopped in midstream. The girls walked home an hour before sunrise, muscles sore, both crying silently, pockets stuffed with shiny pieces of coal.