A Crooked Tree

by Una Mannion

  “God, two weeks with Gabriel Gambino sounds like punishment,” I said. Gabriel was strange. He wore suits around the house, with his shirt buttoned up to the top, and he did everything with his mother. I’d never seen him in colorful clothes, always black and white. Even though his father was a laborer like ours, Gabriel had always looked at us as if we were feral beasts. He was immaculate.

  “Don’t be smart, Libby,” my mother said. “They’re doing us a favor.”

  “And guess what?” said Beatrice. “I’m going to a sleepover camp for two weeks.”

  “What camp? Where?” Beatrice had never been away from home before, and she had never been to a camp, never mind a sleepover one.

  “It’s in North Carolina. In the mountains, where you sleep in a cabin. It’s a really good one, and Mom’s coming down there too. She’ll see me on Sundays.”

  “They take moms at the camp?”

  “Noooo.” Beatrice laughed at me. “She’ll stay nearby.”

  “Camp Arrowhead,” said Mom. “In the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from Asheville.”

  “Isn’t seven young?”

  “They take campers from six. Beatrice will be absolutely fine.”

  “What about us?”

  “You and Thomas are going to be here on your own, unless you can stay with Sage?” She said it like a half question: Can you ask the Adamses, because you know I can’t?

  “No, I can’t stay with Sage. She’s working. I’ll stay here with Thomas.” It annoyed me that she was throwing it back on me to ask. “Where are you going to be?”

  “Nearby.”

  “Where nearby?”

  “Asheville.”

  “But where exactly? A motel? Log cabin? Pig farm?”

  “There’s a place that’s not far.”

  She was evading the question. She wasn’t going to tell us, and there could only be one reason. He was going. The camps Ellen and Beatrice were suddenly allowed to go to gave her the space to do this, to have freedom away from us with her boyfriend, and it made me angry. I wanted to demolish her lies. We all knew what she wasn’t saying. Beatrice started looping her hair; Ellen stared at the pattern on the tablecloth.

  “I’ll go with you too.”

  “You know that’s not possible.” My mom looked tired. She fiddled with the label at the end of her tea bag, preoccupied and worried, and I felt miserable. It’s true, I thought. I don’t care about her happiness. I get in its way.

  “Please, Libby.” It was Ellen. She was siding with Mom? I turned to snap back at her and saw her face. She had the chance to be away from here and Barbie Man, and I was threatening it. It wasn’t just about the art camp. She’d barely left the house the past four weeks. She was afraid. Being away would solve the problem. For me too. I wouldn’t have to worry every minute. She’d be safe. I was blowing it. I had to back down.

  I sat next to Beatrice at the table. “I have to babysit anyway. Camp in the mountains sounds great. When’s everyone going?”

  “Next Saturday,” said Mom. “Early.”

  “But the bike parade. Ellen’s made Beatrice an outfit.”

  “I’m sorry. They can’t. I’m dropping Ellen first at the Gambinos’, and then we have the drive to North Carolina, which could be at least nine or ten hours.”

  The parade didn’t start until midday. There was no choice. Ellen was getting art camp, Beatrice was heading off to overnight camp, where she would share a cabin with other girls and spend days canoeing and horseback riding and having campfires, telling stories. This was good and the costumes didn’t matter and my mom was trying to do something, giving Ellen the camp and trying to make up with her, whatever her other reasons.

  “Ellen,” I said, “I thought of something. We could give the costume you made to Peter Boucher. He loves Dr. Seuss.”

  “Really?” She thought about it for a moment. “The face paints are important, though, for it all to look right. Paint his face with the white face paint first, and then for the cheeks I was going to do the American flag inside heart shapes.”

  “That’s a great idea.” Mom looked grateful.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll ask Mrs. Boucher first. I don’t even know if they’re doing the parade.”

  Everything settled, as if the room had taken a deep breath and exhaled. We were all calm again.

  It was high summer now. The sky was almost shrouded by the canopy, except for the trace of the trail I could see where the trees didn’t quite meet. I always liked to look at that line, like a bright river above me to follow, how the path was written in the sky. Everything was lush and alive. I should have been happy. My mother would be gone for two weeks. Thomas and I would be home alone. Ellen would be safe. But instead I felt something I couldn’t name, like grief.

  I looked at my feet. The trace of blood was still there, a dark smear in the creamy white of the shoe. One of the last times Ellen had come working with us, it was a job for people we’d never worked for before, just a one-off, in a rural place. In a weird way, it had made Dad more uncomfortable, like these were people that should be turning their grassland for hay, and why were we there cutting a big lumpy meadow for them. The woman who came to the door was young, and she had a pile of children around her. She reminded me of Laura Ingalls’s mother in the Little House on the Prairie series. Even though it was the late 1970s, this woman at the door looked like she belonged to another century.

  Dad had gotten a seat for the Gravely. It didn’t have a steering wheel—we had to turn the machine using levers on the handles—but it had a seat that hooked on, and it was the first and only time we ever had anything resembling a sit-on lawn mower or tractor. All day Ellen begged him for a ride on it. The handles were thicker than her wrists, but she kept asking. Dad and Thomas were running it across this huge field, maybe five acres. The grass had yellowed and thinned and gone to seed. Papery spears reached my thighs. We didn’t even try to catch the grass; the woman just wanted it cut. I was going around large oak trees and their bumpy roots with the edging mower. Ellen wanted to try the big one, and eventually Dad let her sit up on the seat for a few rows and walked alongside her as she drove it. She was halfway up the second row when he reached over and hit the ignition off. He told her to get down and step back.

  She’d hit something.

  Ellen climbed down and looked behind her at the path she’d cut through the grass and screamed, jumping back. Thomas and I came over. It was a nest of baby rabbits. Parts of them were dispersed across the gold stubble of the field. We all stood, horrified. Ellen turned white with shock. I’d always seen her as being tougher than me, more abrasive and thicker-skinned. After hitting the rabbits, she was wounded. Even days later, she swears to me she wasn’t thinking about it or remembering it, but her body would still have that feeling, and when she would try to think what it was, what was wrong, she would remember.

  After Dad died, I knew that feeling, too, how sadness could be in your body even when it wasn’t in your head. Maybe that’s why she didn’t work with us as much after that. I was saddened by the rabbits and really sad for the weight on Ellen for what she thought she’d done, but I reacted differently than she did. More detached. The same with the deer the night before. I was sad that it had happened but not distraught. Maybe that was the difference—when you were the cause of the catastrophe. Maybe if it had been me sitting on the Gravely or driving Grady’s Mercedes, I would have been devastated.

  Inside the Kingdom, I pulled an oak leaf and lay on my back, stretching my legs against its trunk. I had bruises on my right shin and raw scratched mosquito bites. I held the leaf toward the light. Red oak. Its underside is a paler green. Toothed lobes, slender stalk, and very fine tufts of hair along the midrib. Its leaves can grow ten inches long and seven inches wide. The bark of the red oak looks like it has bright shiny silver stripes running down it. It was the most common tree in this part of the woods. Ancient cultures believed that the oak was sacred, and they interpreted the messages of Zeus and other gods thr
ough the rustling of the oak’s leaves. Suddenly nearby I heard a rumbling. I dropped the leaf and listened. I knew it was Wilson McVay.

  I lowered my legs and rolled onto my stomach, keeping my head down. The motorcycle downshifted, slowed, the throttle dropping. It stopped.

  “Hello?”

  I kept my face down in the soft moss and didn’t move.

  “Libby?”

  I stayed perfectly quiet, not scared so much as resigned to the fact that he was following me, maybe all of us, and it was weird. He brought danger wherever he went because people were looking for him. It wasn’t his crimes now that bothered me as much as knowing that he was someone who was confused and could also be violent. I couldn’t lose the picture of him terrorizing people, punching out their windows and then standing there naked and bleeding in the dark.

  The motorcycle started up again and moved farther down the trail. I stayed where I was, waiting for it to sound farther away, but instead he sounded closer.

  “Libby? Marie called me. About the mall.” Shit. Marie had said she was going to call him. I’d said not to. He knew I was near. There was no point in hiding.

  “Here. I’m over here.”

  Wilson pushed through the understory, crashing in rather than coming around to the gap at the back. He nearly stepped on me as he entered the clearing.

  “What the fuck are you doing on the ground?”

  “I was looking at the sky.”

  “You’re facing the wrong way.”

  “Yeah. I ducked when I heard your bike.”

  “You’re like a kid who covers their eyes and then thinks you can’t see them.” He dropped his helmet as if he were in someone’s living room and plopped down on the moss carpet next to me. “Wow. Good find.” He leaned back and looked up. “Like a little fort.”

  “It is our fort. Or was. Mine and Sage’s.”

  “I was waiting for your mom to leave, and she hasn’t. Usually on a Saturday she’s gone by now.”

  Oh great, he knew her schedule even at weekends. “Swim season’s over. So you were watching our house? You actually do that?”

  “I guess so. Yeah.”

  “Do you realize just how creepy that is?” I knew I should feel more terror or anger, but deep down I already knew he’d been watching and that there was something wrong with him; he probably watched other people, too.

  “Yeah, well. You made it clear you don’t want me doing your lawn or helping out, but Marie called last night and said you had some bother at the mall yesterday.”

  “Please leave us alone.”

  “Marie said the guy was up here?”

  “Thomas saw him. He was looking for whoever owned a green Impala.”

  “Fucking Kowalski. Idiot.” I didn’t ask what he meant but he offered anyway. “Drove right by him when he was still on the ground, shouting out the window. That’s how he saw the car.”

  I didn’t want to know the information. It made me feel sick. Teenage boys hunting down a psychopath and then going back while he was injured on the ground to taunt and provoke him further.

  “It’s not Craig’s car that led them to Valley Forge Mountain. Ellen said in the car that’s where she lived.”

  “Oh.” I could tell Wilson didn’t know this, and that it made sense now that Barbie Man had shown up here. “I was wondering, because an Impala’s a pretty generic car to have chased down.”

  “Anyway, if Marie called you, it was only to warn you that he’s looking for you. We don’t want to be caught up in this.”

  “Well, you are,” Wilson said.

  “I don’t want to be. Please.” I looked at him when I said it.

  “Where’s Ellen?”

  “She’s at home, but she’s going away to camp next week, so she’ll be gone.”

  “Good.”

  I had a sudden sensation of the sky spinning. I sat up. Wilson was stretched out next to me, relaxed and leaning back on his elbows. I pulled my knees in toward me.

  “New Converse?” Even my mom hadn’t noticed.

  “Yeah. Except I already messed them up.” I pointed to the stain. “Blood.”

  “Whose?”

  “A deer that got hit last night.”

  “You’ve been out examining roadkill? Or took one out with your brother’s Western Flyer?”

  “No. Someone hit it on Horseshoe. We saw it on the way home from babysitting.” I told him about meeting Grady Adams on the road. I didn’t know why I had started to have a regular conversation with him. His craziness was wrecking our lives, and he had just confirmed that he was watching us.

  “I have to go,” I said. I left him in the middle of the laurel and rhododendron, lying on our moss carpet like it was his Kingdom.

  18

  Sage had called and said to come up. I hadn’t been to her house since Grady Adams drove me home and mentioned Ellen. Most summers, I’d have been there until late at night, playing kick-the-can in the dark with Sage and her brothers and other Valley Forge Mountain kids, or in her basement eating Charles Pretzels from large tins they bulk-ordered, watching The Love Boat or Fantasy Island and sneaking out to smoke Charlotte’s Kents and listening to Rolling Stones eight-tracks. I walked to Sage’s at dusk, vigilant. Wings whirred at my ears; I brushed them away and felt the clammy touch of skin against my fingers. There was no visible moon. Before I’d left the house, Thomas pointed to the moon calendar above the kitchen table. He’d come back earlier from the shore, tanned and healthy looking. He said it was great, and I didn’t ask too many questions. There was a black circle positioned on Wednesday, July 1, the new moon. “It’s the first day,” he said, “so you won’t see it.”

  Thomas made a moon calendar every year. Dad had told us that when he was growing up, they always knew the phases of the moon and how the tides would change according to what the moon was doing. They needed to know for fishing and harvesting shellfish he said, not like here in America, where no one knew where anything came from anymore.

  In the last year or two before he died, when he would go on like that, complaining about America and Americans, it embarrassed me. He seemed angry a lot of the time, angry that Americans didn’t know geography or where the olive in their martini came from or how to grow things. They just consumed, he said—consumed and discarded. When he was like this, and maybe had been drinking, and was collecting me at someone’s house or from a hockey game, my friends or my friends’ parents or whoever we were with would be uncomfortable. I knew they were because they would say nothing or just sort of agree with him about Americans to make it stop. They wouldn’t argue with him, which would have been better, at least to show his views some respect. They just shut down. I felt shame in those moments, and I think he knew it, sensed it in how I looked away, interrupted to say we’d better go or just fell silent, leaving him alone, adrift in the conversation.

  Not long before my dad left for New York, Sage had told me that she thought he had changed, that she used to think he was always smiling and happy but not lately, not anymore. “Maybe he’s unhappy,” she said. “Maybe he should go home to Ireland.” Even the memory of it hurt. Sage’s honesty. I knew that I’d held these things against her, had resented her for being there, for being so close that she could see the things I couldn’t or didn’t want to. I hated myself for having told her anything and her for listening, for witnessing things and sometimes saying them back to me.

  There are superstitions about new moons. It’s important to see them in the open air outside. On our last trip to Ireland we waited for the sun to fall—which was nearly midnight, because the days are very long in the summer where it’s so far north—and went outside to look for the waxing crescent because seeing it through glass was unlucky. It was there just as the sun dropped, a thin silver arc on a dark shape. We stood and watched as it faded and then disappeared. I started to walk back to the house, but Dad said to stop and listen. At first I didn’t hear it, but then I did, a distant rumble.

  “That’s the sound I miss the
most when I’m away from here,” he said. I hadn’t noticed it before.

  “What is it?”

  “The sea.”

  We listened, and after a while we heard another sound from the long grasses near the pines where the pheasants roosted, a grating squawk. I thought it was the female pheasant that he’d pointed out to me over and over, a sound almost like a hoarse bark. I was wrong.

  “The corncrake,” he said, so low I barely heard him. It sounded again, like a raspy quack, but I knew how happy he was to hear it and to be able to name it.

  Now, as I walked toward Sage’s, I listened to the click of crickets at the woods’ edge, the slight whisper of trees, the sounds of the mountain, as if there were another frequency to hear and to be moved by. I wondered if one day I would have that same wrenching longing for this place that my father had for the sounds he’d heard growing up.

  I hadn’t seen Sage since she walked us to Wanamaker’s glass doors for the bus. Her lie still hung between us, but I needed and missed her. I started to run toward her house. At the top of her driveway a pile of bikes had been dropped on the ground. A group of boys were playing basketball outside with Sage’s brothers. The boys barely noticed me as I walked through their game to the back door. Grady and Charlotte were inside, watching TV.

  “Hey, Libby—stranger.” Charlotte stood and gave me a hug with one arm, the other holding her cigarette away from me.

  “Hi, Mrs. Adams. Hi, Dr. Adams.”

  Grady glanced up. “Hey there, Libby.” He turned back to the television. The news was on: Charles and Diana and the upcoming royal wedding at the end of July.