by Una Mannion
I tried to smile at her, but my mouth wouldn’t work, and I could feel my lips twitching.
“Is everything okay with you and Ellen and all that happened? I heard about it. I should have checked to see.” I could tell Mrs. Boucher was nervous.
“Yes,” I said. “We were all fine.” Just Wilson was still recovering. The wires had been cut the week before, and he was coming back onto solid food. “How are Peter and Bruce?”
“Fine. In Florida on vacation right now with their dad and his new wife.”
“Oh. The wedding.” I had forgotten.
“Yeah. A few weeks ago. The same day as Charles and Diana. It was actually on purpose.” She laughed her wry laugh. And I rolled my eyes as if to say I know, how tacky. She shut the car door and walked around toward me. “Can we sit for a minute?” she asked.
I shrugged. I didn’t know what we had to talk about. Was she going to ask me why I’d told Sage? We sat on a log on the side of the road. Mrs. Boucher took her pack of Marlboro Lights out of her bag and lit a cigarette. Her hand had a tremor. I suddenly felt very tired. I’d been walking for miles, it was hot, and I had a card for Charlotte in my bag. I wanted to go home and write it.
“I’m very sorry, Libby. I let you and Ellen down. I should have reported what you told me straightaway. I had other stuff going on in my life this summer. It’s all very messy, and I felt I couldn’t face all of you and your mother. I just avoided it. I’ve felt so guilty.”
“Oh, it’s okay,” I said. This wasn’t what I’d been expecting. “Does someone else babysit for you now?”
“What? No. Oh—no, Libby. I haven’t been out, and the boys had the wedding coming up and then the Florida trip, and there’s been so much going on.”
“I thought you were angry with me.”
“No. Why on earth would I be angry with you?”
I breathed in and just said it. “Because I told Sage about you and her dad.”
Mrs. Boucher held her cigarette in midair. “You knew?”
“Yeah.” I felt miserable and put my head between my knees. “I feel like I’ve ruined their lives.”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
I thought about that, how Charlotte Adams had left. “Yeah. I guess you probably feel even worse.”
Mrs. Boucher gave a half laugh. “Believe me, I do.” I did believe her. She seemed unhappy, different. I wondered if my mom felt unhappy about her situation. I felt an ache in my chest when I thought about how she was willing to take such small slivers of love from someone, how I knew she deserved more than that.
Mrs. Boucher kept smoking, and then she said, “I didn’t know you told Sage. I doubt Grady knows that. He was going to tell them all anyway. So you have to understand that you didn’t do anything. I’m sure Sage knows this.”
“Sage and I aren’t really friends anymore.”
“That’s really sad. I’m sorry to hear that. She’s probably needed you.”
Had Sage needed me? When my father died, Sage came straight to the house. Had I called her, or did she just come? I couldn’t remember. She was just there, every day, for a long time. She and Charlotte brought black clothes for us to wear, and Sage did Beatrice’s hair for the funeral. The one time Thomas choked out a sob, it was Sage who moved across the room to him. Charlotte sat with my aunt in the kitchen and talked and listened to stories about Dad because Mom wasn’t able to. When everyone moved away from us in those few days, kept their respectful distance, Sage came toward us. My Irish aunt was confused by our empty house. Where were all the neighbors and friends? No one made tea for us, visited, brought us food. She couldn’t understand America. Everything felt wrong to her about our world—except Sage and Charlotte, who came every day. They were the only ones who made any sense to her at all.
I had always waited for Sage to come to me. In my room, I took out the card I bought for Charlotte and wrote it to Sage instead, just one line that she would know: “Lord, I miss you.” On the envelope I wrote “Sage,” and, underneath, “Kingdom before dark?” I cut through the trail to Hamilton Drive and walked as far as her house. There were no kids gathered at the nets playing basketball, no scattered bikes on the driveway. The Mercedes was parked on the far side, by the clinic. I knocked on the kitchen door, and no one answered. I wedged the envelope between the glass and the metal frame of the storm door. I didn’t know if Sage had moved with Charlotte or was working, but if she didn’t get it today, she’d get it another day, and she would know that I finally came and looked for her.
I walked to the Kingdom then. It was nearly a year and a half since the phone call had come from Dad’s cousin in New York. I see that day in slow motion. I was outside with Ellen on the street, and Thomas called to us and we came running up the azalea path. There was the moment before the path, us on the street playing four-square with the Hunters, an in-between moment, running up through afternoon light to the pine at the top of the hill where Thomas was standing, and then Thomas’s face, telling us something terrible, forever terrible, had happened. We had run up the path, and we were one thing at the start, and we were something else on the other side, in just a few hundred yards. Walking into the house, Marie on the living room floor, my mother upstairs on her bed, crying.
The crooked tree was ahead of me. When my dad first pointed it out, he’d said it could be a wayfinder, that Indians had bent the tree at a time in its sapling life when the tree was flexible and could withstand the strain. I wondered if, in tree age, I was past my sapling time. I waited for Sage in her brother’s Lone Ranger sleeping bag, and must have fallen asleep because I woke in the dark. She hadn’t come.
I walked back home. The crickets were out, and the lights of my house blinked through the trees as I came off the trail. Ellen or Thomas had turned on the outdoor lamppost, and I could see that the grass was nearly knee-high again. I thought about what we had been since that day on the azalea path, how we had each tried to measure the world, order it in our own way, naming or drawing it, making lists, trying to stave off its disorder by mapping its galaxies, plotting its paths. I wanted to order my section of that world, to keep it and look after it.
Inside, Ellen was sitting at the kitchen table. I went to the drawer under the stovetop and took out the kitchen scissors.
“Sage called,” she said. “She’s at her mom’s. She said to tell you her brother read the card over the phone. She said to write this down for you. It’s weird.” Ellen handed me a piece of folded paper.
I sat on the bottom step in the hallway and opened it.
“Wild, wild horses, we’ll ride them some day.” Not tomorrow but soon.
I went back outside to the end of the driveway with the scissors and in the circle of light from the lamppost, I knelt on the ground and started to cut the grass.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to so many, but my first debt is always to my seven sisters and brothers who are my wolf pack, my country. Grainne, Maeve, Brian, Kieran, Deirdre, Aideen, and Siobhan, thank you.
To my mother, courageous and always unconventional, I am grateful that you always blazed your own way. You left gifts in the wake. To my band of nieces and nephews, you are the coolest people I know. All of you. To my cousin Mary Devins Felton for showing me that the glass is full, I am grateful.
It was in The Sandy Field Writers Group in Sligo that some of the scenes in this book were first put to paper and shared with the most generous group of readers and writers especially Nora McGillen, Rose Jordan, Niamh MacCabe, Julianna Holland, and Mairead McCann.
To Mike McCormack, who encouraged me to start a novel, and to Sinéad Gleeson, whose generosity set me on this journey, I am so thankful.
I am grateful for my colleagues and friends at IT Sligo, especially Tommy Weir and Rhona Trench, without whom I would be lost. Thank you, Eoin McNamee and Alice Lyons, not only for your friendship but your words. To all the students and staff on the Writing + Literature and Performing Arts courses, thank you for inspiring me
every day.
For their absolute friendship, even when I’ve been truant, and for reeling me back into the world, I am forever thankful for Lisa Johnson Viveros, Thérèse O’Loughlin, Julie Ellwood, and Molly McCloskey. For her daily unflinching support through all my states of panic and writing despair, thank you Louise Kennedy, who is a total touchstone in my life. Thank you also Cecilia Mace Hardy, Isabel Grayson, Catherine McGlinchey, Mary Quill Eglinton, and Siobhan, and all the Hennessys in Sooey.
The River Mill in County Down provided sustenance and space to write. Thank you, Paul.
To my agent, Peter Straus, for his belief and his invaluable guidance, and to all at Rogers Coleridge & White, who have been so generous and supportive, including Eliza Plowden, Stephen Edwards, and Tristan Kendrick. I feel so fortunate to have you on my side.
Thank you, Noah Eaker, my editor at Harper, for your thoughtful insights and incredible editorial care. I am so grateful to you, Mary Gaule, Katherine Beitner, and all at HarperCollins. The book is better for your input. Louisa Joyner, my editor at Faber, you rewrote my reality when you chose A Crooked Tree. Thank you for your perceptive edits, your guidance, and exuberance. You and Libby Marshall are heroes. Thank you also to Lizzie Bishop and Josephine Salverda at Faber.
I now have first-hand experience of the refined art of copyediting, and thank you forever Silvia Crompton and Miranda Ottewell, for your scrupulous care and expertise, and for saving me from humiliation.
To my oldest friends, Cristin Cline Ortlieb and Jeannie McGovern Fogal, I was blessed to have spent my youth in the woods with you. You made me better.
To the family I have made, my children Dúaltagh, Brónagh, and Aoibhín—everything is good because you are in the world. Michael, for all, thank you.
Finally, I am infinitely grateful to those who are gone—my grandparents and my father.
About the Author
Una Mannion was born in Philadelphia and now lives in county Sligo, Ireland. A Crooked Tree is her first novel.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
a crooked tree. Copyright © 2021 by Una Mannion. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Caroline Johnson
Cover images © Michael Duva/Getty Images (roadway); © Perry Wunderlich/EyeEm/Getty Images (tree)
first edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition JANUARY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-304985-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-304984-0
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