A Crooked Tree

by Una Mannion

  “I don’t like his hands,” she whispered to me one night when we were lying in bed.

  “Whose hands?”

  “Bill’s.”

  “Why?” It disturbed me that she would say this. She’d crawled into my bed during the night, as she sometimes did, stepping across Ellen, asleep on the bottom trundle. She had snuggled in, facing me. She’d developed a habit of twisting sections of hair and looping them around her finger. We teased her that this was where her curls came from. Sometimes, without noticing, she did it to my hair when I was lying next to her. Marie said Beatrice was developing habits that displayed her worry.

  “He’s missing parts of his fingers on one of his hands. They’re just fat and round at the knuckles.”

  “Oh.” I paused. I didn’t like to question too much because Beatrice got upset when we started asking about her visits. Marie said it was messed up that our mom would force this secret on a child, tell her not to talk to her brother and sisters about it and drag her across the night to see someone she didn’t want to. When Dad died, Mom stopped meeting Bill for six or seven months. He didn’t phone our house, and she didn’t sneak away. But it was like she wasn’t there anymore. Marie and Thomas made our food, and Mom was either in bed or pulling a shift at the hospital, just sleeping and working and sleeping for months straight. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Grief is exhausting, Gwen, the counselor we’d barely gone to, said. I wanted to correct her. She had it wrong. Our mother had divorced our father. She’d chosen someone else, and she kept him a secret from all of us. While she was better now, and Bill was obviously back on the scene, it was like she couldn’t look at us anymore, the four older ones.

  I tried to think whether there were any men we knew who had missing fingers. We didn’t think Bill lived on the mountain because Beatrice said that most of the time they drove the same way we did when we went to swimming with Thomas: past the Guernsey Cow, the clog shop and the party shop, way farther down that same road, past the people with the horses and buggies, which meant Route 30, heading through Pennsylvania Dutch country toward Wilmington, Delaware.

  “Maybe Bill’s Amish,” Thomas joked, and Marie laughed so hard that the milk she was drinking snorted out of her nose. I was still afraid that Bill might be someone we actually knew and that I could even have been nice to him, not knowing who he was. Marie said the only possible reason for him to still be secret was that he was married.

  “Do you know what happened to his fingers?” I asked Beatrice. I thought how he’d lost them might be a clue about the work he did. Lying next to me in the dark, she coiled her hair and looked up at the ceiling.

  I must have fallen asleep, because I didn’t hear them come home. By morning my mother had already left with Thomas for swimming. The others were downstairs—Beatrice and Ellen on the sofa, Ellen stretched out, her feet touching Beatrice, who sat cross-legged, reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. We’d told Beatrice that Ellen had a bad fall when she was walking home in the dark because she’d tried to go through the woods to get here faster. We’d said we didn’t want Mom to know because she’d be mad that Ellen went into the woods. Beatrice had sworn herself to secrecy. We’d told Thomas the same thing. Ellen was wearing a long-sleeved Tweety Bird nightgown that covered up most of her injuries except her face. So far, my mother hadn’t seen Ellen but if she asked about the cuts we had our story straight. Marie was reading a book in the beanbag chair. Ellen was pestering Beatrice.

  “How was last night? Did you see Bill?” Her face was chalk white, and the gash under her eye had turned black.

  Beatrice kept reading.

  “What does he look like? Does he look like you?” Ellen was being mean.

  “No. He looks big and wide,” Beatrice said.

  “What kind of car does he drive? Do you go anywhere in his car?”

  “I told you a thousand times. He’s got a truck.”

  “Does he wear a suit like Mr. Walker wears to work, or does he wear clothes like the plumber?”

  “He wears shirts with squares all over them.”

  “Checked? Like cowboys?” Ellen asked.

  Beatrice shrugged.

  “Where’d you go last night?”

  “You know I’m not supposed to say I saw him. We just sat in the booth with our food, and then we sat in the parking lot.” She tucked her legs in under her.

  “Jesus, Ellen, lay off,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be resting or something?” Ellen looked like she was about to cry.

  Marie looked up from her book. “Ellen, go upstairs. Take two of the baby aspirins out of the bottle in the medicine cabinet. The one with the pink cap.”

  Ellen got up and walked slowly up the stairs, taking just one step at a time, using the banister.

  I sat there in the rec room with Beatrice and Marie, both reading their books. We had cream tiles that reflected the trees outside, so that the floor always seemed to be moving, shadows shifting light and dark from the swaying branches outside. The phone ringing jolted me.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, though no one else was moving. It was Sage.

  “Charlotte’s bringing me to work in a few minutes, but I have to tell you something first.” I took the phone into the laundry room, where the others couldn’t hear me.

  “What?”

  “Last night, up at the tower, Abbey said Wilson was there earlier, trying to get a few boys together—you know, getting them to promise to go with him to take some pervert out. That the guy they were going to take care of had hurt a little girl from the mountain.”

  I sank into the pile of dirty clothes on the floor in front of the washing machine.

  “Oh my God.”

  “I know.”

  “Did he say who we were? Did Abbey know it was Ellen?”

  “I don’t think so. She would’ve said.”

  “Did they go?”

  “No. Well, not last night. Wilson said he was still finding the guy. But asking would they help him. He’d give them dime bags of pot, and he’d get a case of beer after.”

  “Why’s he doing this?”

  “I don’t know. Look, he’ll probably never find the guy anyway.”

  My mouth had gone so dry, the words seemed stuck. “Why can’t he just leave us alone?”

  “Tell your mom, Libby.”

  I shook my head. “Can’t.”

  When I stood to hang up the phone, I saw that I’d been sitting on Ellen’s dirty uniform, silt, blood, and grit visible on the shirt. She had just left it there. Everything seemed out of control. I threw the clothes into the washing machine and ran a long cycle and went back out to the rec room. The others were still reading, oblivious to all the trouble coming toward us.

  I would tell Marie later and get her to get Wilson to back off, to stay away. I curled up on the sofa next to Beatrice, pulling my knees to my chest. I could feel the twill fabric against my cheek as I lay there watching the patterns on the floor. I tried to slow my breathing. After he left, Dad had stayed on the sofa once for almost a week when he was very sick. It pulled out into a bed, and we had made it up with sheets and blankets for him. My mom had called a doctor. It was a time when everything felt right, my mother sitting on the edge of the pull-out sofa putting a thermometer under his tongue and cool cloths on his head, all of us taking care of him. Even then I knew it wasn’t real.

  Later that week, when he was better and sitting up, we had piled on either side of him and he’d read to us. Even Thomas, who was sometimes shy around Dad, lay on the edge of the sofa bed with us. Dad could recite sections of “The Deserted Village” by heart. He’d often repeated those lines—“Where wealth accumulates, and men decay”—when we said something about someone being rich or someone’s big house or another father’s big job. That week when he was sick, he read “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” a poem by Yeats he loved. The five of us were on the pull-out bed with him, as if it were a boat we were all clinging to on a pitching sea. He changed his tone of voice for the final lines, a
s if it always got to him. I could see the world described, the “long dappled grass,” the silver and gold. I’d written the lines on the inside cover of my tree notebook. When I thought of those lines, I pictured him in a golden meadow, walking in the long grass, searching.

  “They didn’t even let us wake his body,” Aunt Rosie had said, with such pain that I knew we had done something terribly wrong, something we could never fix. I wished now, as I had a thousand times before, that I could have gone to him at that moment when he was dying, away from us and alone, and said something to him so he would have known how he was loved, even though we never talked like that in my family.

  A cloud moved across the rec room floor, and the room went dark. I looked up. Marie was still reading. Beatrice was leaning back, her book on her knees.

  “Is it good?” I asked.

  She moved her head up and down slowly without taking her eyes off the page. I looked out the window. The woods looked like rain.

  7

  On Friday morning, I woke to a lawn mower outside, a sound of order in the world, of adults taking care of things. A full week had passed since the night in the car. Mom had been working, and Marie and Ellen had mostly stayed in our room, Ellen resting and Marie sorting through her stuff and keeping an eye on how Ellen was. The rumble of the engine rose and fell while the sun moved to light the wall beside me. I could almost smell the cut grass. The machine reached a crescendo, and I heard the jolt when it hit a rock. It was outside my window. I sat up. Someone was cutting our lawn. For a moment I felt happy. I stepped across Ellen, who was sleeping on the lower trundle, and looked out the window. I could see the line the lawn mower had made past the window and down at the end of the driveway, where the quartz boulders could be seen whole again. I thought my mother must have organized it.

  Downstairs in the kitchen Thomas was hunched over his cereal at the table. He had broad shoulders from swimming and looked older than sixteen. He’d been shaving for a year. We all stood around the sink and watched the first night he did it, Marie giving instructions.

  “Fuck’s sake, Libby. Did you do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “GI Joe out there.” Thomas pushed the cereal away. “He’s a creep. I told you I was going to ask the Griffiths to borrow their lawn mower and just wheel it down. Why couldn’t you just wait?”

  I went to the front door and looked out right as Wilson McVay passed. He was wearing jeans and had taken off his white T-shirt and slung it over his shoulder. He looked like one of those men in the Levi’s ads, rugged and beautiful. Except it was Wilson. He waved at me when he passed again, flashing a smile, and I felt sick. I went back into the kitchen.

  “I have nothing to do with this. Has Mom gone to work already? Does she know?”

  But Thomas slammed the plastic bowl and spoon into the sink and stamped up the stairs.

  I ran up to Beatrice’s room and looked out the window over the driveway. Mr. McVay’s Buick was parked there, with the trunk open and a can of gasoline on the drive. A rake was leaning against the passenger door.

  I went back into our bedroom.

  “Marie. Marie, wake up.” I shook her.

  “What? Shit, what time is it?” Marie rolled onto her side and leaned up on her elbow and yawned. “What?”

  “Did you ask Wilson McVay to cut the grass?”

  “No. Why?”

  The sound of the lawn mower passed again, and Marie sat up fully and leaned against the wall.

  “Whoa. Wilson is cutting our lawn?”

  “Yeah. He’s here with his dad’s Buick. Did he wait for Mom to go to work? Is he watching us or something? Thomas is upset. He was trying to borrow a lawn mower.”

  “So what if he cuts the lawn?” Ellen sat up on her trundle, her thin hair tangled and flat from sleep. “It’s nice of him. Thomas should thank him. Now he doesn’t have to do it.”

  “Marie, make him go. Please. Please make him go.”

  “What do you want me to do, go out there and say, ‘How dare you answer our call for help in the middle of the night and then kindly come cut our grass?’ I mean, he obviously thinks he’s doing a good thing.”

  “He is,” said Ellen.

  I hadn’t told Marie yet about what Wilson was planning. Maybe she knew. “Marie, just tell him to leave us alone. Now. Tell him to just go. Thomas wanted to cut the lawn.”

  “You’re being totally melodramatic,” Marie said. “Thomas can cut it next time, and the hard work will be done for him.” She stood over by the window, looking out. “It looks like shit, anyway. It’s yellow.”

  “Please, Marie. I don’t want him here. He scares me.”

  The back door slammed.

  “Well, there goes Thomas,” Marie said, looking out. The three of us stood at the window and watched Thomas walk down the driveway. He kicked at the ground but squared his shoulders, staring straight ahead when he went past Wilson. Wilson waved but Thomas ignored him and kept walking. Wilson didn’t seem fazed at all. He looked like he was singing.

  Marie and Ellen made iced tea and took out glasses to the driveway when Wilson was finished. When we’d cut lawns with Dad, some owners would come out with drinks for us.

  I watched the three of them from Beatrice’s window, Ellen looking at him like he was a hero and Marie making him laugh. I wanted to shout out the window for him to put his shirt back on, that it was obscene and all the neighbors could see. I wanted to scream “Get out and stop intruding!”

  Later, hours after he’d left, I went and sat on the front porch and looked across the yard. He had done a good job: neat edges, and he’d cut it twice, creating a diagonal pattern. The grass was yellow, but in the odd place there were narrow strips of green. The smell of gasoline lingered with the cuttings.

  Thomas and I had worked with Dad the most. Marie wasn’t the outdoor type, and Ellen had been too small. I wondered if our machines were still in the Bronx, or whether the cousin had sold them. They belonged to us. I knew where each of them had been bought, which lawns we’d cut with which specific lawn mower. I knew how to clean them and how to get them on and off the truck. My throat tightened. I breathed deeply again—gas, cuttings, summer heat. The past. Thomas still had not come home. Last summer he’d gone door to door, asking to borrow a lawn mower. Wilson just had to take his dad’s keys and throw their machine in the trunk. What were we going to tell Mom? I sat outside until I saw the first lightning bug.

  Peter answered the door at the Bouchers’ that night. “Libby!” he shouted, and grabbed my hand, pulling me in across the threshold.

  “Hey, Mr. Peter Rabbit, how’s the gangster-rabbit life? You eating lots of stolen cabbage and carrots?”

  Peter laughed and ran around the kitchen. “Bang, bang. This is a holdup. Give me all your lettuce!”

  “Hi, Libby,” Mrs. Boucher said, coming into the kitchen as she fastened an earring. The scent of lemons drifted around her.

  “Hi, Mrs. Boucher”—and just as I said it, I saw the brown towel set we’d used the week before, folded on the countertop. I had put them in Mrs. Boucher’s washing machine after Ellen and Wilson left but had never taken them out. I looked at the towels, the heat flushing my face, and then at Mrs. Boucher, who was looking at me.

  “Was everything okay last week, Libby? I meant to ask you.”

  I was about to make up a story about knocking a cup of coffee over and getting brown towels so it wouldn’t stain the kitchen rag, but I knew it would sound hollow.

  “Hold ’em up, Libby,” Peter shouted. I put up my hands as if to give in. I would tell her.

  “Last Friday, Ellen had an accident, and she came here. I am really sorry. I should have told you. I’ve never had anyone in the house before when you weren’t here.” I could hear the waver in my voice.

  We sat at Mrs. Boucher’s long table. I told her almost everything. The art camp, getting kicked out of the car, hitchhiking. The man in the Camaro with white hair like a Barbie, Ellen jumping out and showing up at the B
ouchers’. I didn’t say how the man had touched all the way up Ellen’s leg, how he wasn’t going to let her out of the car. I made it sound more like she just got scared and she jumped when the car was going very slow. I didn’t say how Wilson was organizing people to go find and hurt him. I told her Wilson McVay had appeared out of the dark to collect her, how I was confused about how Marie seemed to know him, how he had been hanging around since. “He even came and cut our grass today.”

  “Does your mother know what happened to Ellen?”

  “No, Mrs. Boucher.” I shook my head. “Please don’t tell her. Please.”

  She squeezed my wrist for a moment. “Your mother needs to know, Libby. Ellen should see a doctor.”

  “She’s fine, honestly. She’s bossing Beatrice around, fighting with Thomas. She’s completely like herself. My mother would just punish her. You know what she’s like. Please.”

  Mrs. Boucher pushed her hands through her hair and looked at me. “Leaving a child on the road. It’s appalling, really.”

  I looked at the grain of the table. Everything I did made things worse. “Please don’t tell anyone. I promise everything’s okay now.”

  I should never have told her anything. Earlier in the year, when I told Sister Benedict about my mom leaving sometimes for a few days and her not cooking, they’d called my mother in for a meeting. Afterward my mom had exploded. Sister Benedict had used the word neglect. She’d said she understood all we had been through and was very sorry, but she was concerned about our well-being.

  “Do you realize what you’ve done, Libby?” my mother had shouted at me. The others, even Marie, looked at me like I was destroying us all. I had broken a code of silence we all kept about everything, and now here was another example of how, if I told our secrets to outsiders, bad things would happen to all of us.

  Mrs. Boucher sat there for a moment. Then she asked, “Did Ellen get the license plate number from the car?”

  “No.”