The Language of Trees (20 page)

In the moiré window, she looks small. She feels frivolous and fearful, not quite measuring up. She doesn't even look like a grown woman, more like a little girl, her skin damp and pale but for the freckles. What sort of woman would go anywhere with her hair still wet? Without even putting on some makeup? She hears Grant's footsteps behind the heavy wooden door.

He opens the door.

His wet hair falls over his chest. His faded jeans hang loosely on his hips. A dark green flannel shirt drapes from his hand.

Look up, she tells herself. At his face. That's right. Up.

“You look great,” he says.

“I'm late.”

“I'm really glad to see you.” He is looking at her as though he is genuinely glad. For some reason this surprises her.

Grant looks as though he wants to lean over and kiss her on the cheek. But she could be imagining it. “To brighten your day,” Echo says, quickly shoving the bag of groceries toward Grant. “I hope you still like wine. You've always been pretty consistent…” She lets her voice drown out. What a stupid thing to say, she chides herself.

“That's what you remember about me? That I'm consistent? Jesus.” He takes the bag. “Come in, come in.”

She follows him, trying to concentrate on the feel of the place. “Make yourself at home.” Grant turns his back to her in the kitchen. “You can see the place hasn't changed much. Been trying to fix it up a little. A very little.” He turns around, smiles.

She runs her hand over the worn tropical fabric of the rattan couch where she and Grant used to lie for hours, arms and legs entwined. Echo stands awkwardly in the middle of the room, not knowing what to do. She rummages through her purse as though it were an escape hatch, as though she could shrink down and slide right into its wide dark mouth. It looks so safe in there among the loose sticks of gum and errant dimes. Clarisse's words remain with her:
No regrets.

“Did you lose something?” Grant calls from the kitchen, picking up an oven mitt.

“No,” she says, closing her purse. “Dinner smells great. Is that barbecue?” I can do this, she thinks. Just keep smiling and asking questions.

“It's my secret recipe. Been cooking the bird for hours.” As
he pulls on his shirt in front of the open refrigerator, she tries to look away.

He sets a wine bottle on the kitchen table. C
ONGRATULATIONS
G
RADUATE
is printed across the blue paper tablecloth in big red letters.

“What did I graduate from?” she asks. “The school of bad judgment?”

“You and me, both,” he says, with a smile. “It's the only tablecloth they had. It's festive, right?”

Echo notices the wolf lying nearby, under the living-room window.

“You're not keeping a wolf in this place, are you? I could swear that is the same wolf I saw in the middle of the road,” Echo says, backing up.

“He's friendly,” says Grant, kneeling, rubbing the wolf's stomach. “See? Not a mean bone in his body. Come and pet him.” Echo reaches out to pet the wolf's golden shaggy fur, and it rolls back and forth on its back.

Grant gets up. “So, I'm consistent, huh? Is that a good or bad thing?” He leans against the counter, and she watches as his fingers expertly weave his braid.

“Not a bad thing.” She remembers the last time he asked her to braid his hair for him just before she joined him on a run. She was seventeen and believed she'd be doing it forever.

“You look pretty,” he says, placing the tray on the stove. “But I probably should keep that to myself, right?”

“My hair is soaking wet.” She looks down, embarrassed.

“That's a good thing,” says Grant. “Anyway, storm the other night,” he says, pointing to the window. “Blew out the whole sheet of glass.”

“You're kidding.”

“Almost slept through it. You still have insomnia?” he asks.

“I'm a lifer,” she admits. “No one ever beats insomnia.”

“You always slept good next to me,” he says casually. “Glasses are right in here, by the way.” He points to the cabinet above the sink.

She walks into the kitchen. Now that she is standing with her back to him, she closes her eyes. It's all getting to her, the barbecue cooking and the lack of sleep. She should stay away from wine. Echo opens the
Foxfire
book on the counter. “‘Moonshining as a Fine Art.' Ten bucks if you can tell me the first line.”

“‘Go into the woods and find a good place,'” he says, with his head in the oven.

Music fills the cabin. Old Fleetwood Mac. The tinny guitar strums out the melodic beat of “Second Hand News.” Grant is pouring barbecue sauce over the turkey, pretending that he knows what he is doing. Echo brings the glass of wine to her lips, watching him from across the table. She knows he has no idea but she'll play along.

The wolf has finagled his way under the table and every so often rests his head on Echo's knee until he gets a piece of turkey. Soon she and Grant settle into a dialogue, but she's certain she's coming off as nervous as she feels. And he seems preoccupied, too. He asks her what she remembers about him as a kid and she reminds him that he wore his sandals with black socks.

“My students would love to hear that. I'm addicted to black socks.”

When she starts to laugh, he tells her that she made being together so easy. He's remembering all the little things they did for each other. How they would touch whenever they passed each other at the store, no words, but a hand loosely trailing an elbow, fingers catching, and then letting go. She's moved
by the memory, but every so often she thinks about Clarisse's story about Victor. His violence. She keeps drinking.

At times the clink of silverware is an embarrassing reminder of what they don't say. When Grant asks about her life, she offers a quick remark or two. She explains a little about magazine work, albeit she can't seem to muster any level of passion, especially in lieu of the fact that he's been teaching all this time, saving the future of civilization.

“It's not easy,” he tells her. “There's a lot of kid-hate to swallow. Some days are hard as hell. Most days, in fact.”

“Then why stick with it?” Echo asks.

He takes a swig of wine and leans back in his chair. “I'm consistent. Don't you remember?”

She smiles. She forces herself to eat a roll. Not another glass, she tells herself. She doesn't want another scene like the one that happened last year when Stephen got her so drunk on sangria that he had to sneak into the ladies' room at Dali Restaurant and hold her hair back while she threw up.

“I must have done something pretty bad in my last life to love teaching this much. When you're in the classroom and you've been talking for an hour and their eyes are glazed over and you know they want you dead, well, then, all of a sudden, one of them will get it. Even the mean ones get excited. Doesn't even matter that they just called you a motherfucker or a shit-head or an asshole. It's the look on their face that's priceless. For a split second they forget they hate you. They forget who they
think
they are. You see who they really are. There is nothing, absolutely nothing like it.”

He surprises himself as the words fall convincingly from his lips. “But here's the real secret about teenagers. They've got venom for blood.” He refills his glass.

“Which is why you love it.”

“Exactly. More wine?”

She holds out her glass.

“I was so goddamn frustrated at that age,” he says. “Impatient. Always waiting and waiting.”

“For what?” she asks.

“To become one of the regular people.”

“You're still waiting, no?” she says, sipping her wine.

“Still waiting. Yes, absolutely.”

“They like you, after, right? I mean, after they get it.”

“No. Not really. Potato?” He smiles, holds up the green ceramic bowl.

She shakes her head. What has she got to show for herself except that she's made Joseph proud? Maybe that's enough. She's been at the same company since graduating college. An ability to stay in one place is no small feat. And she likes her job all right. She tells Grant that the company offers free cappuccino every afternoon, though she doesn't know why this would impress him. Well, at least there's free parking, and in Cambridge that's nearly impossible to find.

“So that's great,” he says. “That you're happy, right?”

“Yes. Absolutely happy,” she says, and he smiles, looking like he buys it.

“Good. I'm glad,” he says, rolling up the cuffs of his shirt. He glances at the wolf pacing back and forth in front of the glass door impatiently.

“You should name him. What about Einstein?” she says.

“Because of his brilliance.”

“It fits him,” she says. She finishes her wine. She knows she should slow down but won't. She will, in fact, have a little too much. She is thinking of Clarisse, of a lifetime spent standing in a kitchen, aching for the man she loves. She pours another glass of wine. She already knows she'll have to wear sunglasses all
day tomorrow. The relaxation she feels after the second glass of wine is seductive, making her think that she can confess things, that she can tell him that she still never feels entirely settled, that she is haunted by the thought that she may wake up one morning and find she's floating out there lost in the universe with nothing to tether her. “It's so ridiculous,” she admits.

“No, it's actually perfectly understandable,” he says.

“Am I rambling? It's the wine…. You seem distracted. What are you thinking about?”

“Lion and Melanie. I'm fine. I like the rambling. More?”

She nods, removing her napkin from under the glass. “Sure. I'll be drunk and passed out in about five minutes, in case you're timing me.”

“I lost my stopwatch. I'm not timing you.”

She knows she must break the tension. “Do you remember what album we were listening to the first time you went up my shirt?”

He smiles. “Best day of my sorry old life.”

“Kiss. The album
Love Gun
,” she says.

“You still have that pink plastic record player, and I'm willing to bet that it's still under your bed at Joseph's.”

“You think you've got me pegged.”

“You're pretty consistent,” he laughs. The wolf begins to whimper. They look at the scraggly mutt as though they're waiting for him to take over the conversation. “Did you say you wanted a pet?” Grant asks, getting up.

He lets the wolf outside. Then he takes two candlesticks out of the cabinet and plunks them in their holders in the center of the table. “Forgot about these,” he says, lighting the candles. “It's not too late for candles, is it?”

“No. Never too late,” she says, finishing her wine. “Your mom always bought candles from the store. I remember.”

“She lit them every night so my dad could eat by candlelight and relax. She'd sit out there on the porch smoking her cigarettes, waiting for him. I can picture it like it was yesterday.”

“Your dad always came home late.”

Grant nods and finishes his glass. “I hated that he did that. Seven or eight at night, fine, but nine or ten? Come on. Something was up.”

“What do you mean, something?” Echo can tell he's a little drunk, but he seems to need this and so does she. She looks out the window at the row of birch, long and slender, not at all crowded for root room. In the moonlight, the bark's white skin peeling back from the trunks looks too exposed. It makes her shiver.

“She never got upset with him, though,” says Grant. “At least not to his face. She should have put her foot down.”

“‘Waiting and patience are a life's work,' she'd say.”

“You remember that.” Grant touches her hand. “He didn't see her. She was invisible to him.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“She tried,” he says, thinking about how every morning his mother set a table with china, silverware polished to perfection, and hand-dyed Indian fabric she had made into napkins. Every night she would set the table for three as though she expected Ben Shongo would actually be home for dinner. She ate so slowly, painfully slowly Grant had thought, hoping her husband might walk in the door any minute. And yet when Ben Shongo came home for dinner, whether it was nine or ten o'clock at night, whether he had called or not, his dinner was waiting by candlelight and Emily had gone to bed.

Ben Shongo never talked much about his upbringing, only bits of stories and legends, here and there. Grant knew that his mother had been the one to keep tradition, preserving what
she could from what she had pieced together. The Seneca were a matriarchal society with a tradition of property rights for women. Their governmental acts helped inspire the founders of the feminist movement in the 1840s. She thought it important that Grant know his heritage, that he knew the strength of the women in his ancestry even if his own mother possessed little of it.

“I'm sorry for what happened all those years ago. I judged your mother. She was just being protective of you. I should have been more like Joseph. Never judging anyone. I hardly understood anything back then.”

“Do you now?”

“I'm still impulsive,” she smiles. “You?”

In the flicker of candlelight, Grant's eyes are glistening as he smiles. He gets up and opens the door and Einstein tramples mud across the carpet.

“I could have sworn you said you wanted a pet,” he tells Echo.

Einstein leans up against Grant's legs, as though bracing him for support. Grant scratches his neck. He tells her how when his mother died, she had specifically asked to be cremated, that there be no funeral or memorial service, but how a few relatives had come to the house to pay their respects. He had overheard a relative mentioning his mother's lifelong fear of snakes. Grant had been struck with guilt, remembering all the garter snakes he had brought home as a boy. His mother had let him keep the snakes, never once mentioning her fear.