The Language of Trees (7 page)

A black bra dangled over one side of Luke's head as he sat on a milk crate, dressed in an adult's robe, in front of a handmade sign that read, “Paper airplanes for a dime!” He was intense and focused, folding the yellow legal paper, which he handed over to his sisters, Melanie and Maya, who sent the planes spiraling out into the air. Passengers waved from car windows. People on bikes slowed to watch him. Luke had always been obsessed with collecting dimes. He had just seen a movie about airplanes on television, Leila later told Clarisse, and now he'd become completely obsessed with flying.

When a strong wind kicked up, the paper airplanes took off in a million different directions, and the girls chased them down driveways four neighbors deep. What could Clarisse do when Luke asked her for eighty cents, pointing to four airplanes on her roof? It didn't matter that he had added wrong, or that he spilled purple juice all over her shoes when he hugged her after she had given him his money. Back then, she loved having the children next door. She loved the sight of him flying down the driveway later that afternoon with a large black plastic bag for a cape, his long blond curls making him look wild, a purple scarf flapping around his neck. That evening Clarisse had gone outside to hold the ladder for Leila, who was determined to
remove a slew of paper airplanes from Clarisse's roof and gutters. The children looked on, remarking that the two women were as brave as superheroes.

Still, even after all these years, a paper airplane will occasionally turn up when Clarisse is trimming back her rhododendron bush, or cleaning out her garage. It always takes her breath away.

At least Melanie is harmless.

The girl has a good heart even though it appears the opposite, with her crew cut, army boots and big blue tattoo that she got years after Luke died. Clarisse would gladly take her over Maya any day. Both girls are blonds, slight in body. They are doll-like creatures with flawless porcelain skin and wide cornflower blue eyes. Both just barely clear five feet. But what they lack in height, they make up for in presence. For instance, when Maya sits under the lilac tree it tends to seize the throats of nearby blackbirds.

When Maya is on a home visit from Cheever Residential Hospital, she never leaves the yard. She will sit in front of Luke's small tombstone for hours, rocking back and forth, humming to herself, her yellow hair rippling down over her shoulders. Sporadically, she'll sashay across the grass in a faded red nightgown, supposedly unaware that either the Poland Springs delivery boy or the mailman are lingering by the fence, transfixed by her graceful dance.

Most people explain away Maya's strange behavior saying that the tragedy took its toll, but no one has suffered more than Leila. She had spent many nights crying, holding Luke in her arms when he'd wake up with an asthma attack, his throat swollen enough to stop his breathing. At any time of night, Clarisse would see Dr. Shongo's white station wagon pull up into the Ellises' driveway. The winter months were always
scarier for Leila, with the black ice coating the streets and Dr. Shongo living back in Rochester, half an hour away. On unlucky nights, when Leila could not find any one of Luke's several inhalers, they would rush to Emergency at Canandaigua Hospital. Clarisse would watch Leila putting Luke into the gold Ford Bronco, and the girls, in parkas and nightgowns, following their dolls into the backseat.

Folks in town refer to Luke's accident as
the tragedy
when they speak of it. But Clarisse knows something. One has to listen to people with more than her ears.

After the accident, Clarisse had tried to help Leila make sense of the story. She held Leila's hand as tears poured from the eyes of the two hysterical little girls. Leila and Victor had a fight that night, and Old Sally, their Newfoundland, had cut loose. Melanie told the story as Maya stood beside her, fidgeting. Maya did not look up. She pulled at the rip on her dress. She picked at her nails. She knelt to scrape mud from her shoes. She looked everywhere but into Clarisse's eyes. When she finally did look up, Clarisse felt her stomach turn at the emptiness in those eyes.

Melanie's account of what had happened continued. Victor had shouted at Leila because she had burned the garlic bread. Old Sally had slipped out the back window and the children followed, chasing her through the neighborhood and through the north of Vine Valley, all the way to the Shongos' cabin. The dog knew the way for it was a familiar route. The children often sneaked into the Shongos' coal bin in the weeks before Dr. Shongo's family made their annual trip to Canandaigua to open the cabin for the season. By dark it had begun to rain. The children cornered Old Sally on the Shongos' property, smack in between the Diamond Trees. Melanie tied the dog to the trunk of one of the trees, and the children fell to the ground, breathless.

That is when they heard the Seneca spirits calling to them from Squaw Island.

The light flickering off the Diamond Trees lit up an old canoe, half hidden under an old gray tarp. They found a paddle in the dirt nearby. The children dragged the boat to the shore, Maya and Luke climbed in and Melanie pushed them out into the cold lake, jumping in as it glided and bobbed over the water. They paddled out toward Squaw Island, in the direction of the whispering spirits.

Soon the storm kicked up. Melanie said the water pulled the paddle out of her hands. When Melanie stood up to get the attention of a giant on the island, the boat started to flip. She hit her head and, in her own words,
died for a few minutes
. Luke fell into the water and Maya tried to grab him, but he couldn't hold on. Or so they said.

Today, the island is desolate and small. But Clarisse remembers how that island was teeming with people after the little boy was lost. Some of the men camped out there for weeks, swimming the mile and a half wide lake over and over, even in their dreams. The giant that Melanie saw was cursorily investigated. The rain had washed away any sign of prints or tracks. The weather had been so bad that night, the police concluded that the giant was probably just tree branches waving in the wind. Yet the story of the giant with the axe took hold and became local legend.

Everyone looked to place blame. They blamed Leila for letting the children run off. Some blamed Dr. Shongo for leaving that old canoe out on the property all winter, when he knew kids liked to play around, and that he had been too busy to take the time to put it away properly for the season. Clarisse often wondered if he blamed himself for the death of a boy he had nursed back to health again and again. Some blamed
Victor, the children's abusive father, who never treated them well, who was more interested in guns and hunting than in his children. Joseph at the Feed & Grain always said no one was to blame.

Clarisse agreed with Joseph. Some mistakes are too dreadful to be blamed. But still she never bought the girls' story.

Even though she lives next door, Clarisse won't so much as talk when Maya is outside, rocking in that hypnotic way. The girl is nearly eighteen now, but the mark on some souls never leaves.

And Clarisse can't forget what she saw all those years ago.

A few months after the tragedy, Clarisse had been looking out over the sink as she washed raspberries picked from her own backyard. Through the slats in the window blinds, she caught sight of Maya kneeling in the grass under the lilac tree, holding a basket full of paper airplanes. How beautiful the girl looked in the sunlight, her face, framed in curls, her expression, one of pure angelic tranquility. She had a pile of dolls next to her and started setting them up in a half circle. That's when Clarisse saw the tombstone, just as small and pale as though it were Luke himself, standing there in the dirt. When Clarisse looked closer, she realized that Maya was having a tea party with her dolls.

No one argues that it was morbid that Leila Ellis had wanted to bury her son right in her own backyard, especially when the ground was so packed with spirits, there may not have been room for one more.

I
N THE EARLY AFTERNOON
hours, some people claim that there are more accidents in Canandaigua than at any other time of day. The way the color of the sky merges into the color of the lake makes it all look like one huge painted watercolor. It is easy to get lost in the middle of it, to veer off track. Right now, the sky is the color of a confession, and the air so raw, it turns both the water and the road a deep shade of red. As Echo squints, fumbling for her glasses, she hears footsteps behind her. She grabs hold of the door and stands. She doesn't want to turn around and have to explain to anyone how she could have been so stupid. Why she was driving with broken wipers, and how there came to be a wolf standing right in the middle of the road. Part of the fault is the flurry of flies that tumble, cloud-like, into the windshields of cars. Part of it. She is lucky if not exhausted. Maybe she's even hallucinating. She actually thought she saw Grant Shongo jogging back there in the breakdown lane. Now her car has wound up right smack in the heart of an old tree.

Echo hopes the stranger walking toward her won't want to chat. That he'll know just enough to check out her car, change
a tire, and then see her on her way. Maybe he'll tell her why the wolves just returned to Canandaigua. Flickering lights are everywhere, in the trees, the water, across the road. When she focuses in on the figure coming toward her, she thinks she may have a concussion. He's thinner than she remembers. His silhouette is a silver wire. Maybe his shoulders are a bit stooped.

He's no more than ten feet away. All she can think about is the number of times she has sat at work and written his name on her stationery. If he only knew about all the daughters they've had: Virginia Shongo, Eudora Shongo, Flannery Shongo. She is certain that he's never once thought of her. Certainly he will read the humiliation in her eyes.

Grant looks at her. “Jesus,” he says, his hazel eyes reflecting the color of leaves. “I can't believe this. When did you—”?

He reaches for her instinctively.

She steps back, picks up her broken glasses from the ground. Her hands are shaking, and she prays that they will stop. Look away. Look anywhere but at him, she tells herself. What if there is everything to say?

Echo heard Grant got married about five years ago, that his wife is a talented photographer. The last time Echo saw him was right before they were about to leave for college. She had been wracked with panic about leaving both him and Joseph. She had just turned seventeen and was so full of worry that she had lost five pounds in one week and her long wavy hair had curled up so tightly that tiny tendrils framed her face. And Grant hadn't responded when she told him she loved him the night they made love. He let her stand there like an idiot, naked, waiting for his answer. She had wanted to hurt him, to distance herself. She believed Grant had always held this fantasy about his parents' marriage, but Echo knew Emily Shongo was unhappy. Whenever she came into the store, her glassy
eyes hardly met anyone's gaze as she joked with Joseph in a low whisper about how the sick ran their lives, and how her husband always forgot to call when he'd be home late because
somebody needed him
. What did that leave Emily but a life of waiting and patience, she always said, tapping her short, bitten nails on the counter. On occasion, she'd sit on the bench on the front porch of the store, chain-smoking for an hour or so before returning home. Echo surmised that her tired eyes meant she was suffering, and the bitten nails, that she had spent too much time waiting.

Echo has wanted to apologize to Grant Shongo for all these years. How could he have found it in his heart to call her up and offer her a ring only weeks later? How could he have been so forgiving? “Everything is different, we're too far apart,” she had told him, holding the phone against her cheek in the hallway of her college dorm. “You'll meet someone and—“

“But I don't want to meet anyone else.”

She was following sage advice about moving on and letting the one you loved go free. And as a rule she didn't think about forever. The loss of her parents had taught her this. She had stayed at college over the next few summers taking classes in order to avoid seeing him. Still filled with shame, she graduated a year early and moved right to Boston, the wake of that emotion directing her life even though she swore she never thought of him anymore.

Besides, she had always told him that she would probably never get married, no matter how much she loved.

 

“A
RE YOU OKAY
?” he says.

“There was a wolf,” she whispers, stupidly. Oh God, she was right not to talk. She thinks about refusing to give in and call him all those years ago. All those years of wrestling with her
self, as though giving in were a sign of weakness. Now she thinks giving in may be a sign of strength. Fighting yourself takes more energy out of you than you can believe, she suddenly realizes. How much natural joy has it stolen over a lifetime?

“Easy now,” he says. He takes her arm, helps her to the boulder by the side of the road. She is supposed to be the unflappable one. Her friends say she is fearless. But the truth is that she's not attached to anything. Why then, has all coherent thought just emptied out of her mind?

She puts her glasses in her pocket, still caught in shock. She absently pushes the hair from her eyes. Is it that everything has been turned on its side? A wolf lounging in the road. And the white blossoms of dogwood pawing the air, choking the earth with fragrance. “Where's the wolf?”

Grant stares off into the brush. “He's long gone,” he says, hopefully.

“I saw it. It was right in the middle of the road. You see it?”

“I think I might have,” says Grant. “It's not a wolf, it's one of those hybrids. You missed him by a hair.”

“What are you doing here?” she asks, turning to him as though she has hardly heard him. I'm dreaming this, she thinks. I must be dead.

“I'm with Animal Control,” Grant says, smiling.

His face is sunburnt. His hairline ebbs a little at the corners. He still has the space between his two front teeth. She wonders if he can still whistle.

She looks up. “Really?”

“No, not really,” he says. He kicks the dirt as though he were, say, eleven.

She's on emotional overload, wipes her eyes, but the tears won't stop.

Just take a deep breath, she tells herself.

He takes the bandanna from his pocket and dabs her elbow. She'd look at him but her face is on fire. His fingers softly brush her knee. “You're okay,” he says. “So you here to see the old man?”

“I didn't tell him, he doesn't know.”

“Surprising him, he'll love it. Look at you. You're shaking.”

She tries to smile. “That's because I haven't had my usual ten cups of coffee today. Caffeine calms me down.”

“How many of me do you see?” He stares at her, wiping a bit of blood from her lip where she has bitten it. He puts his hand on her cheek, letting it rest there for just a second, noticing the heat of her skin.

“Really, it's okay,” she says, pulling away. With the sleeves of his faded blue flannel rolled up to his armpits, she can see his ropy muscles. There's something about his face that makes her want to look, its openness. He's somehow taller than most of the men she knows even if he is a bit hunched over. And his skin is the same. It always seemed sunburnt across his cheekbones. The eyes: Green flecked with brown, and when he looks at her with that steady focus it puts her right back there at sixteen.

The thick cover of clouds breaks apart, showing a patch of dusky sky filled with pink and yellow hues. Still, the rain falls.

“Good day to be a duck,” Grant says, looking up at the sky with a shrug. And then the stupid look on his face is too much. Echo cracks a smile, lets herself laugh. Thankfully, he smiles back. Even out here in the smoky drizzle, at least for right now, the floodgates have been opened.

It's comical how long the two of them stand there, fog circling around them, their eyes shifting across the wet ground,
the dusky breeze bristling a chill into the air. Of course everyone had said they were too young, that it was too much of a good thing, too fast. But now it's as though the past has been whisked away, leaving only an empty space between them. Echo will not feed it with words. Instead she lets all the fear and apprehension spread out through the trees, jolting awake the snowy owl that has positioned itself on a branch above their heads.

Echo feels her wet T-shirt clinging to her chest, and the wind is making it worse. No bra. Careless. Unprepared. She folds her arms and looks down as often as possible. She tries to envision Grant as she did that first time. But her eyes fall on his sharp cheekbones. He looks stronger, rougher. His skin is dry and sandy, like baked earth. They're older now. People change. She can feel the emotion stiffening her fingers and catching in her throat, making her clumsy and silent.

One of these days she will forgive herself.

Striking out at him was a finely honed instinct, the same troublesome aspect of her personality that showed itself whenever she felt the most vulnerable, the same part that, at six, had caused her to put her cornhusk doll on the floor of her closet. She had left the door slightly open and had sat in bed, staring at the doll, aching to hold her. Even as tears rolled down her cheeks, she had forced herself not to move, refusing to hold the doll or bring her back into bed where she had slept alongside her for the last two weeks since arriving at Joseph's. She was getting attached to Joseph and so she was teaching herself how to say good-bye, just in case.

“Pretty incredible, seeing you,” he says.

“It's been fifteen years,” she says.

“It's been too long.”

She nods. “I'm freezing.” The goose bumps prickle up on
her bare arms. The hair blowing across her face catches in her mouth. She's all of a sudden aware that she'd like a blanket and a glass of wine. “I've got to go. I think the Jeep is drivable, don't you?”

Grant picks up a stone and tosses it into the bush. A family of napping flies explodes into the air. “Let me drive you.”

The wind blowing off the water is getting colder by the minute. Does it matter that they're out here getting drenched, and neither of them cares? She's remembering the four stray hybrid wolf pups they once found in an old black stove in a neighbor's barn. She and Grant had stayed for hours, worried the pup's mother wouldn't return, as the pup's needle teeth chewed their shoes and bit their fingers. As the rain lapped at the windows, the farmer stuck his head in and said it was best not to get attached, that these strays had no right to expect much from life. Echo said she wanted to adopt them. She ached to feel what a mother felt, or perhaps it was to feel loved by a mother. All that emotion. All that belonging. She would adopt them all. Joseph would let her keep them, she was sure. She would raise them, and Grant would help her. When the ice blue mother wolf with the singed beard slinked through a crack in the wall, rib thin and teats swollen, she went right to her babies. Echo ran out and jumped on her bike. Echo didn't wear her jacket on the ride home through the rain. She pedaled hard, staying ahead of Grant, her head down and her eyes open, letting the tears soak the loss from her skin.

 

G
RANT NOTICES THE GASH
in the door of the Jeep, the twisted metal bumper. Silently, Echo follows him. She gets in on the passenger's side as though they've been doing it this way forever. She doesn't think this is necessarily the best idea, sitting in a contained space with all this emotion about to blow the
windows right out. She edges as far away from him as she can because there are only two things you can do with this much feeling. Run like hell or get naked.

Grant backs up the Jeep. There is the sound of wood cracking, metal tearing.

“Wake me up when it's over,” she says.

He backs up a few more feet. “Give me a second, I need to check something.” He hops out. From the Jeep, Echo watches Grant run his hand along the dark broad trunk. He is trying to find the face in the wood, to see the spirit in the tree. This is something he once shared with her, something he knew that his father used to do. But only those who were a part of the Senecas' secret medicine societies could do this, and Grant's father had strictly forbidden him to be part of it.

Grant tramples around the side of the Jeep, and stands in front of the exposed orange inner bark of the black oak. This man moves her. She can't argue it. There's something that links a human soul with the soul of trees, the blue herons and the wild grasses. And he's part of that chain. The fact that he knows there's a spirit deep within every single tree is something rare. Grant told her this long ago. But she might just as easily have told it to him.

 

G
RANT IS GLAD TO
get a moment to calm his pulse. He's off balance, swears he can feel her right in his belly. He breathes a sigh of relief when he touches the tree. Really he's just trying to ground himself. Three days ago, he could barely muster the will to live let alone an ounce of desire. But now he's overflowing with it.

What is she doing here? He knows that you don't return home at this age unless you're leaving a marriage, putting one of your parents in a rest home, attending a wedding or funeral.

He's remembering the old oak tree outside Echo's bedroom window above the Feed & Grain, how he used to climb it on summer nights. It's been years, but he remembers how well his hands found the knots, how his feet trusted the thick branches to hold him as he'd climb. He'd stand on the biggest branch, looking down through the leaves at the sun-scorched patches of grass under the floodlights. He can picture their last summer with amazing clarity, how he held her in his arms, her thin body pressed against his chest. Each night, they pushed their desire a little further until soon they couldn't even be in the same room without touching. Grant would walk through the front door of the Feed & Grain, and the entire line of people waiting at the cash register would turn around to see the reason for her flushed cheeks. Echo would smile at him and he'd have to walk right back out for fear someone would see that he was nothing more than a blade of grass, flattened with the slightest wind.