Stay Away

by Ike Hamill

  “In the winter, they would break into a summer camp if they saw it had a chimney. Then they would play house together, drinking and smoking and pretending they were married. Just before I was supposed to leave for school, she came and asked for my help. I was sure that she was in trouble. Our friend Jeannie had gotten into trouble the summer before and had to go to a home in Virginia to have it. That’s what I thought she was going to say.”

  Zinnia laughed and squeezed her temples with spread fingers.

  “Boy was I surprised when we ended back over at the Trading Tree,” Zinnia said. “He wasn’t there. Rose called, ‘I came back, like you suggested.’ I couldn’t remember what she was talking about for a while. I guess I had blocked it all out? I barely remembered anything about the tree at all, to be honest. Rose said, ‘I’m ready to do that trade we discussed. Did you forget?’ I grabbed her arm and told her that we should go. It just didn’t feel right. I almost got her to leave when we heard his voice.”

  Reynold reached out to take her hand when he saw that she was shaking. She didn’t notice. Zinnia was lost in her memory again.

  “He sounded so happy. He said, ‘I thought you had forgotten.’ It had been years since we had gone there the first time, when Rose wanted to trade for a gun. He stepped out and looked exactly as I had remembered him, except his suit looked a little shinier. I suppose that might have just been the angle of the sun, but with his shiny suit he looked livelier.”

  “You never found out this man’s name or where he lived?” Reynold asked.

  She shook her head. “Honestly, I think he’s a part of that tree.”

  Reynold couldn’t stop himself from frowning. Zinnia didn’t notice.

  # # #

  “He asked, ‘Have you brought something to trade?’ and she said that she had. I looked at her and then the man. They were both smiling and I remembered that he had whispered something to her the last time we were there. I still didn’t know what he had promised. Rose’s hands were empty and her dress didn’t have any pockets in it. I couldn’t imagine what she had to trade, unless it was bills tucked into her bra. I leaned over to ask her what this was about, but she ignored me. She raised her chin to the Trader and said, ‘My price has gone up.’ His smile only got bigger and he said, ‘I see.’”

  Zinnia leaned closer to Reynold and squeezed his hand.

  “But she hadn’t named a price, unless she was talking about the gun. All I could think was that she had been talking to the Trader in the years in between, but that didn’t make sense either. I opened my mouth to ask her what she was trying to get. I wanted to tell Rose that whatever it was we could find another way. There was only trouble if we dealt with this man. Like I said, it wasn’t a Monkey’s Paw thing, but it was trouble.”

  “You keep bringing up that Monkey’s Paw,” Reynold said.

  Zinnia ignored his comment.

  “Reynold, the things she asked for... She wanted a house and a car. She was only sixteen. Rose wanted to move far away from Maine, I always knew that. And, like I said, she was naturally good at things, but she wasn’t good at working for things. It was just like her to try to shortcut everything like that. Before I could stop her, she said, ‘And I want my sister to succeed in college.’ I was baffled. Not only had she asked for things that would take a decade to earn, she also wanted to get something for me that only hard work could achieve. He asked, ‘Do you want to succeed in college?’ I realized that’s why Rose made me come along. She didn’t need my help, but she needed me to affirm the request. At the same time, what was I supposed to say? I couldn’t answer that I didn’t want to succeed. I had to say yes.”

  “Why say anything?”

  She shook her head. “Superstition, I guess? I don’t know. The transaction was over as soon as it began. He slipped behind the tree. I rushed after him, to declare that I was going to succeed anyway. I didn’t need his help. He wasn’t there, Reynold. He was just gone.”

  “I’m sure that…”

  She cut him off. “You weren’t there. Don’t tell me what happened.”

  “Okay. I can see that…” he began to say something that he needed to say, even though he knew it would cause a fight. The words trailed off as he remembered something that had crossed his mind earlier.

  “You remember the thing I’m not supposed to remind you of?” he asked.

  Zinnia’s expression was blank for a moment until she snapped out of the past.

  “About me insisting on things?” she asked.

  Reynold nodded.

  Soon after they were married, Zinnia had shared something. She was extremely insightful, but rarely turned that scrutiny on herself. In one moment, just before they fell asleep, she had said, “You know, if I secretly believe something to be true, those are the things that I always argue the hardest against.”

  Reynold hadn’t any idea what she was talking about at the time. Almost a week later, he finally asked her what she had meant. Zinnia had blushed and admitted, “I keep telling you and the world that my firm doesn’t treat me any differently just because I’m a woman. It’s not true—I see the signs every now and then. They have a weekly meeting scheduled where it’s written into the requirements that a person has to wear some sort of facial hair to attend. It was seen as a joke. The partners are always called ‘The Mustaches’, and Clive actually grew a mustache when he was made partner. We all thought it was a big joke.”

  Zinnia rarely cried, but she had cried when she finally admitted the truth to him that day.

  “But, deep down, I know it wasn’t a joke. That rule was meant for me, or any other woman who might challenge their little club. I know why they hired me. It was a reaction. If the prosecutor is a woman, or even if they get some feminists on the jury, they need a woman to sit on the defense team. I’m supposed to just sit there and take notes with my tits, I guess. So, they put in a safeguard. Partners wear facial hair. It’s silly, but it sends the message.”

  After she had shared that insight, Reynold began to see her demonstrate it regularly. If she insisted that she had remembered to buy milk, the likelihood that she had was inversely proportional to how strongly she made the claim.

  Eventually, he had been forbidden to bring the subject up.

  “I’m not going to tell you things if you’re just going to throw them back in my face years after,” she had said.

  “I’m not throwing it back in your face,” he said. “It was a good bit of self reflection, and I’m just reminding you of it. What good is an epiphany if you forget it immediately and keep living your life in the same flawed way that you already recognized?”

  “You think I’m flawed then?”

  “Of course not. That’s not at all what I meant. You just don’t want to admit that you might be wrong.”

  He couldn’t even remember what that fight had been about. It certainly hadn’t been about whether or not she had remembered to pick up milk. At any rate, after that fight he had been barred from bringing up her habit of arguing about things that she knew to be untrue.

  But now, looking at her as she told him some crazy story about her deceased sister, he couldn’t help himself.

  “You’re going to tell me that I’m insisting on this man being real because, deep down, I know that it was just the fantasy of an overactive teenage imagination?” she asked.

  “It’s interesting that you went there,” he said. “No, that’s not what I was going to say at all, but I do think it’s worth thinking about why you thought I was talking about that.”

  “Then what are you talking about?” she demanded.

  “You keep saying that the Exchange Tree Phantom…”

  “The Trader,” she interrupted.

  “The Trading Tree Phantom is not a Monkey’s Foot situation, whatever that means. I’m reminding that since you keep mentioning it’s not, maybe it’s because you secretly think that it is a Monkey’s Foot situation.”

  “And I’ll remind you that you have a super annoying tenden
cy of gently mocking a subject by changing the name of it,” she said.

  “I’m just not that good at names.”

  “Oh, bullshit. You remember names all the time, but you’re telling me that you thought I said ‘Exchange Tree Phantom’ at any point? This is serious shit, Reynold. I shouldn’t have to remind you of that. I also shouldn’t have to endure ad hominem attacks because you don’t have any other way to discredit my account.”

  “I’m not attacking you,” Reynold said. He locked eyes with her. “You’ve driven this investigation farther and faster than anyone else would even be capable of. But you ran out of road a while ago and you’re still driving it. If you’ll allow the analogy, the only thing that’s going to stop you is when you’ll inevitably crash.”

  “Or find our son,” she said. “That is still a possible outcome.”

  “Of course.”

  ZINNIA

  ZINNIA LOVED HER HUSBAND. He was predictable. Lately, that trait was described as a fault. A few nights before, the whole family had been zonked out in front of the television, trying to forget about what faced them the next day. The woman on the screen had complained to her friend that her husband thought she was, “Too predictable!”

  People even talked about it at work. “We would have gone up to Monmouth again, but I’m afraid we’re becoming too predictable.”

  Zinnia couldn’t imagine why people thought that was a bad thing. When she was growing up, she had fantasized about a predictable house, where they would come home and find all their clothes still clean, folded, and put away where they had left them. She had longed for a home where dinner would always be on the table at the same time every evening and they would sit down together to give thanks and break bread.

  Predictable was another word for safe and sturdy. These adjectives were also pejoratives lately.

  Zinnia took a left at the top of the stairs and found the hallway she was looking for. She rarely ventured up there anymore. Jessie’s bathroom was always a mess and Eric was always putting up or tearing down a wall. The second floor was chaos and Zinnia wanted no part of that. It was too…

  “Unpredictable,” she whispered.

  Down the hall, she found the door to what she hoped was Eric’s room.

  She knocked lightly before opening the door.

  Eric was zipping up coveralls over shorts and a t-shirt.

  “Oh! Sorry. I should have waited for you to answer,” she said as she closed the door to a crack. If it had been Jessie, she would have walked right in. It was different with Eric, even though he was practically her own son.

  “It’s okay,” he said, waving her in. “It’s locked when it needs to be.”

  She looked down at the door knob and saw that it did have a lock. She wouldn’t have guessed.

  “I’m just about to head back up to the attic,” he said. “There’s still a draft.”

  “Can I bug you for a minute first?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed and put on his shoes. She sat in his desk chair.

  “I want to thank you for what you said. I know it must have been hard for you, and I also want you to know that nobody believes that you had anything to do with Wendell’s disappearance.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I believe you about the man. I believe you because I saw him myself and I know what he’s capable of. But that’s not to say that I think you’re right about your mother.”

  “Yeah?”

  Zinnia shook her head. “She had her own arrangement with the Trader. Just because he showed up in Ohio while you were, it doesn’t mean that you had anything to do with it. She ran from him more than once.”

  “She did?”

  “That’s all beside the point. I really don’t think that any of that has to do with Wendell. I really believe that he made his own arrangement with the Trader, and that’s where we need to go for answers.”

  Eric swallowed, but didn’t look away.

  “And I’ll need your help.”

  He nodded.

  “Reynold doesn’t believe in any of this, and that’s a good thing. We’ll need him to be solid. We’ll need him to be our pillar of sanity. For obvious reasons, I don’t want to involve Jessie or Lily. Maybe it’s not so obvious. All I’m saying is that they’re not already wrapped up in all of this, but you and I are. If we can keep them away…”

  “We’ll keep them away,” Eric said.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  ERIC

  ERIC LOOKED THROUGH THE window and then back down to his black thumbnail. Whenever he focused on it, he could feel his pulse in the pressure beneath the cuticle. The dull throbbing sped up with attention and then faded when he looked back down to the street. His aunt’s car came down the street and turned into their driveway. Eric bent to tie his shoelaces.

  They met in the kitchen. Her eyes only landed on him for a moment and then she turned to set her purse and briefcase on the table.

  “Give me five minutes to change,” she said. “No, I can go in this. No… Fuck it. Pardon me.”

  She left, flustered. In a way, Eric was glad that she looked as nervous as he felt. He tried to make himself busy in the kitchen, but there was nothing left to do. After Lily and his uncle left for their jobs, and Jessie went off to school, he always put the house right before he began working on his construction projects. It wasn’t difficult. His family cleaned up after themselves, generally, but there were always a few little things like a milk-ring on the table or a coffee mug in the sink. Tidying felt like the least he could do.

  In the living room, he found some magazines to be tossed and an ashtray to empty. He was straightening the blanket they kept on the back of the couch when his aunt’s voice stopped him.

  “Ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  They put on jackets and boots. The sun was out and the snow was melting, but the wind still cut.

  Out on the street, his aunt put on her hood and zipped up.

  “You don’t have to act like our maid, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not telling you to stop though.”

  He slipped on a patch of ice and almost fell. His aunt laughed.

  “Enjoy it while you can,” she said. “I would have gone down on my ass and probably smashed my head to oblivion.”

  Eric saw a flash of a face in the window of the Caswell house. They were being watched.

  He waited until they had walked a bit farther before he said anything.

  “He saw us. What will he say?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I always told myself that I didn’t give a single shit about what people thought of me.”

  They paused at the curb before crossing the street. Aside from a few patches of ice here and there, the pavement was mostly clear. Together, they stepped down and crossed.

  “But ever since Wendell, my esteem for our neighbors has dropped to a new low. How they could possibly blame us is beyond me. Pardon my French, but fuck them and whatever rumor they want to spread next.”

  “I’m just thinking about Uncle Reynold and Jessie and Lily.”

  “Oh. That’s a good point. I tell you what—if anyone asks we will tell them that I took the day off to do some research in the cemetery. You came along to help me out. We can leave a couple of footprints in the snow to back up the story.”

  “What kind of research would you be doing in the cemetery?”

  “Let me tell you a little secret, Eric—they all think I’m crazy. I’ve been chasing witnesses and clues for months now and not one of them has any idea how one thing leads to another. They’ll believe anything.”

  She laughed and started to veer right, hugging the side of the road.

  “Wait, we’re not going this way?” Eric asked, pointing at the sweep of the road that led next to the cemetery. Somewhere up there was the path that continued on to the culvert, where Wendell had been seen last. The path would be snowed in, but Eric ima
gined that the Trading Tree must be up there somewhere. In truth, he had never really cared enough to find out precisely where it was. The stories were tossed around, but Eric only had a vague idea of what they were talking about.

  “It’s down there,” she said, pointing at the oak tree near the far corner of the cemetery.

  Eric stopped where he stood.

  A memory tried to come back to him, but it felt like it had happened a million years before. It was from a completely different life.

  There had been a man who had startled him on the way home. He could almost picture him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That was the same man,” he whispered.

  “Eric, get out of the street.”

  She rushed to him and pulled him to the side of the road just as a car came around the corner.

  He felt the rush of air behind him, but didn’t even turn to look at the car. His eyes were locked on the tree. Staying perfectly still felt like the only way he would get the memory to come back.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I forgot,” he said. “How did I forget?”

  He didn’t see his aunt’s hand until it reached up and grabbed his chin. She pointed his face at hers.

  “Hey. What’s wrong?”

  Eric blinked until his eyes cleared and he saw her.

  “I think I made a trade.”

  “You think?”

  He nodded.

  # # #

  She inched forward first, gesturing for him to stay back. His aunt focused on the snow, looking for any sign that it had been disturbed around the base of the tree. When her investigation was complete, she waved him forward.

  Whispering, she said, “Announce that you have a trade to make.”

  He nodded and swallowed.

  “I’m here to make a trade.”

  Eric could feel this thundering heartbeat in his throbbing thumbnail. He had tucked a quarter into his pocket. He took off a glove so he could dig it out.

  “I have money,” he said, holding it up.

  His aunt looked at the coin like she had never seen one before. While he stood, proffering his payment, she moved a little farther down the road to get a look at the other side of the tree.