The Language of Trees

by Ilie Ruby

  “Yeah. I can see it.”

  “I didn’t move. Didn’t do a thing. You know how when you’re a kid, you know you should run but you don’t? You just stay in one place, daring yourself to see how long you can last?”

  Lion nods. “Know all about that.”

  “She thanked me. My mother was lying in bed, coughing up blood. And I lit her cigarette.”

  “That’s crazy. Damn. But it doesn’t matter what you did. You were her son. You were messed up.” Lion wipes away his name on the window pane.

  “I couldn’t look my old man in the eye after she died. I went pretty crazy.”

  Lion looks at Grant, his eyes filled with compassion. “Damn. But you did what you had to. Doesn’t matter what anyone says. You did it because you were her son and she needed you to do it.”

  “Yeah.” At once, they are equals, and it is better this way, just as Lion had said. A few moments pass. The rain is gone. Grant is watching the sun’s rays reaching through the porch screen and into the house. Within seconds, it’s so bright out, even the kingfishers look frightfully pale, their blue tufts of feathers appearing a hollow gray. The trees are now only hazy reflections of themselves in the water. Grant blinks hard. The wolf has now stretched out in the middle of the lawn, looking relaxed and incredibly big. “My mom was a pretty strong person. But she wasn’t a happy person. I wish I could remember her being happy.”

  “Melanie sings when she’s happy.”

  Grant smiles, grateful for the distraction. “That’s great. What does she sing?”

  “She turns up the radio loud. She thinks she’s singing along. But she makes up her own words. It’s pretty funny. She doesn’t even realize she’s doing it, making dinner, or painting, or whatever. I always try to hear. She gets mad when I laugh at her, though. I run out of the room sometimes I’m laughing so hard.”

  Grant’s hands are burning. He turns them over, staring at the blistered palms.

  “Go ahead,” Lion says, blinking hard. “Ask it.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Ask it.”

  “Why?”

  “Say it.”

  “Is she at Two Bears’ Cave?”

  “Fuck, man. You didn’t have to say it. I knew you didn’t believe me.”

  Everyone knows Two Bears’ Cave on the East Side of Loomis Hill, on the other side of the hill from the Iroquois longhouse. At one time, the Cave was a sacred healing place, revered for its power, and hidden to all but a few that had been healed there but never spoke of it. So people made up stories of magical stones and herbs and animal skulls stuck on posts, of spirits cloaked under the wings of bats that hung from the ceilings. Now the Cave, with its large fire pit and shelves carved into the walls, is littered with old bags of food, empty bottles, and used needles, a hangout for drunks and general itinerant traffic.

  No one can tell just who’s hiding out at the place at any given time, or when the spirit of a Seneca healer called Two Bears will appear to those in a drug-induced state. The local cops stay away, content to let the vagrants have their space. Better there, out of the way, than the marina, where they’d make real trouble. Two Bears’ Cave is part of the local culture, like O’Connell’s Feed & Grain or Kelley’s Bar.

  Two Bears had a reputation in town back when he was alive. A giant, a hermit, they say, staying mostly to himself, fiercely private. He only came into town at night to buy supplies from O’Connell’s Feed & Grain. Some reported seeing him at night, treading the woody trails to gather herbs. Mostly, he just kept company with the Indians who traveled from far-off reservations seeking his cures. Not many other people had seen him, although the story was that he was seven feet tall, with hair to his waist, hands the size of cabbages, and skin pocked from the lit embers of healing ceremonies. Some people said he could hold his hands in a fire for an hour unscathed.

  “What do you know about the Cave anyway?” asks Lion.

  “It’s not someplace I’d like to vacation. There’s no point in talking anymore about it. If she’s not using, she’s not there.”

  “Wish I’d have learned,” Lion confesses, “how not to hate the water.”

  “Look, don’t be ashamed. People learn to swim at all ages.”

  “I didn’t plan on moving to a lake. I was just, you know, a drifter, kind of lost. California’s home. But I never touched the Pacific Ocean. Not even with my little toe. I know lots of people who grew up looking at the ocean but never swimming in it. But then one day I just washed up here like a piece of junk, or an old candy wrapper.”

  “Fear’s a strange thing. It’s a magnet. Sometimes you find yourself running toward what you fear most. You can’t stop yourself, right? Heck, it’s happened to me.”

  “That’s what happened with your mom, right? Why she kept smoking.”

  “Something like that.”

  Lion pulls the blanket tighter around him. “Well, I know it was all meant to be, anyway, me coming here,” he says, nodding. “I wouldn’t have met Melanie. Wouldn’t have my son.”

  “Drink this,” Grant says, pushing a cup of coffee toward Lion. Lion takes a sip. He seems almost peaceful, as though the water has taken all the fight from him, which is probably why he has always feared it.

  “Hey,” says Lion. “I miss my boy bad. You ever had a kid?”

  Grant shakes his head.

  “’Cause I didn’t see any pictures around. You ever have a wife?”

  Grant stares at the faded line that is disappearing from his finger. “Yeah, not too long ago.”

  “Where is she?” Lion asks, repositioning the blanket. He sits cross-legged. He puts his hands in his lap.

  “She left.”

  “Why she leave?”

  “She said she didn’t think I loved her enough.”

  “Was she right?”

  “There’re all kinds of love.”

  “Nah, man, there’s only one kind of love.”

  On their first official date, Lion had taken Melanie on a drive through Naples. It was snowing like crazy. He didn’t know about the deadly black ice, which sometimes looked like a huge crow had spread its slick wings over the road. He didn’t know that some lakes never freeze over entirely because of their constant current. He hadn’t paid attention to the two cars up ahead, owned by ice fishermen Squeaky Loomis and Joseph O’Connell, who, bundled in layers of down, had pulled over a mile back to wait out the storm. If he’d seen them, maybe he’d have turned around, but he was so taken with listening to her describe the colors of snow that he just kept driving, faster and faster.

  When they hit black ice, his car skidded off the road into a bank. After the shock, even though she hit her head, Melanie had started to laugh. She didn’t even make him feel stupid for not pumping the brakes like he was supposed to. He cleaned up her cut and got out to push the car, and she jumped out, too. He told her to get in but she took one of her gloves off and put it on his hand. And he didn’t want to send her running for her life by telling her how pretty she looked and that he’d never felt luckier. He just went with it, sliding in rubbery soles and getting soaked in the snow.

  Snowflakes covered her hair like a veil, like a beautiful bride who was just laughing and laughing, her eyelashes turning powder white. Then he saw it, what she meant, because when he looked up, her eyes were a color he’d heard of but never seen: ice blue. She didn’t care about the cold or the wet or his ineptitude. She said she was having so much fun it was all worth it, that they were making memories. He never knew memories were something you could decide to make, rather than the results of things that just happened to you.

  Grant leans back against the counter. “Look, I have time, if you need help. I mean, I could drive around. Try to find her.”

  “Why you want to help me so bad?”

  “Why were you drunk instead of looking for Melanie?”

  “I had to cool down. But you. Nah man, there’s something about you that’s not right. Keeping a wolf. Keeping a ghost.” Lion waits,
daring Grant to ask what Lion saw in the water. Lion squints at Grant, peering at him as though they are both standing in the darkness of a coal mine.

  “You’ve got a good imagination,” Grant scoffs, glancing at the living room. He gasps. Soot marks have reappeared across the carpet. “I’ll take you home now,” he says nervously.

  “I’m making you uncomfortable, right?” Lion asks. “Answer my question. Why do you want to help me?”

  “You really want to know?” Grant looks up.

  Lion nods.

  “Fine. Maybe I have nothing better to do,” Grant says.

  Lion hesitates, rubbing his head. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “All right. That’s all I wanted to know. I got a plan to find her if she’s not back already. I don’t care if no one believes it. I know her. She’s not on drugs again. She’s good at being a mother. She says it’s the reason she was put on earth. You believe me, right? She wouldn’t do anything to hurt Lucas.”

  Grant pauses. “I believe you.”

  Lion has barely any energy left. His limbs feel like one-hundred-pound weights. “Yeah. She’s probably back by now. I’m her rock and she’s mine. You know what that does to you when you have to be someone’s rock.”

  “Can’t say I do,” Grant tells him, remembering how Susanna’s sadness had weighed him down, and how his mother’s illness had torn him apart.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I think you do.”

  As Lion walks through the living room toward the front door, he notices a line of tiny black footprints leading across the room to the basement door. He won’t go near that door. He needs to get the hell out of here. Waiting on the porch for Grant to get his keys, he glances at the metal sections of dock. He sees a splash of water kick up, even though there are no waves.

  12

  LEILA ELLIS IS EXHAUSTED from driving through the streets all night long searching for her daughter, an envelope of flyers in her lap. The gray business suit she is wearing is more than twenty years old and pulls across her breasts, bought for her only office job when she was a secretary at the construction company where she met Victor. But it is not giving her a feeling of authority as she had hoped, and the black pleather pumps are only pinching her toes, not making her feel she has command over her environment so that people will take her seriously. It has been three days since Melanie disappeared, but a mother knows when something bad has happened. For the past several months, Leila has had the feeling, the one that lives deep in her gut and is never wrong. A mother can sense disaster coming, smell it in the air the way that some animals will lie down before a storm. “Do you know my daughter?” Have you seen this face? You think so. You may have. What do you mean you don’t?

  This searching is taking its toll. And with all this straining to keep an eye on little Lucas in the backseat, her neck muscles ache. She knows she shouldn’t complain. He is a good boy, happy to sleep most of the way, but night driving still makes her uncomfortable, a reminder of the 2-A.M. hospital runs that she used to make with Luke. Now, at sixty-one, her eyes are not what they used to be. She is not so good anymore at spotting her daughter’s blond crew cut in her favorite hangouts—Eastview Mall, Blood Alley, the marina. All the wild young kids hang out at the pier with their motorcycles and cars.

  Things had been going too well. Leila had almost begun to relax. Even the messy divorce from the girls’ father in 1991 had been relegated to a dull ache behind her eyes. When she had finally, with Lion’s help, turned the gun cabinet into a beautiful glass étagère, she knew Victor was out of her life for good. The fact was that her family had enjoyed two full years of blessings—the birth of her grandson, a new job for Lion and a new apartment with a shiny bright red door for him and Melanie. And of course, this baby reminds her more of her late son than even she can admit.

  The feeling almost approached happiness.

  This just wasn’t the type of luck the Ellises had. They were due.

  Leila knows all about her daughter’s hangouts. Over the years, she has tracked her down too many times to count. But this time, it won’t be so easy. She knows Melanie wouldn’t leave Lucas. Still Leila is doing what the police suggest. Make a list of places Melanie has run to in the past during times of despair when the battle for her abstinence was waged and lost. It was too late to try Cheever Hospital, Melanie’s last resort where she historically sought refuge with Maya whenever she was very out of sorts. But Melanie had hardly seen her sister over the last couple of years. The wall between the girls only came down during bad times.

  Melanie had been happy since meeting Lion and having a baby, Leila was sure of it.

  But Leila couldn’t argue with what the disinterested detective told her when she called to report Melanie missing. She couldn’t get in touch with Charlie Cooke. And she hated to deal with someone she didn’t know. She had to listen to some stranger try to make her feel bad, telling her that this was the ninth missing persons report. The eighth report, she corrected him.

  Send a car around, sure. Anything more? Don’t count on it.

  Leila knew what he did not say. Why should he waste manpower on a drug addict when there were honest people who needed help? Before hanging up, he had actually said to her, “Mrs. Ellis, the city of Canandaigua has exhausted its resources looking for your daughter. Perhaps you should let her come back on her own. She always does.”

  Perhaps the worst thoughts came from her own mind. Had the novelty of having a child finally worn off for Melanie? Would boredom or frustration return her to her old ways? No, Leila would not believe it. People could change. There had to be room for faith.

  Since Luke’s death, whenever people pass Leila on the street, they smile sympathetically or avert their eyes for what has become of her children. Leila can feel the blame and the pity. She has become a pariah—such a succession of bad luck has made people afraid to breathe the same air she does. People are superstitious; afraid the bad luck will rub off on them. Perhaps she has encouraged it with her own inability to ask for help or in the way she just backed away from her few close friends, anticipating their rejection. Leila stopped getting her hair styled at Le Chic Salon because the women sitting under the dryers routinely flashed wallet-sized pictures of their children, without so much as a question about Maya and Melanie. Instead, they talked long and loud about choosing their children’s classes at Harvard and Yale, about whether International Relations was more lucrative than Microbiology. Leila had no more stomach for the game-show-hostess smiles, for sitting silently with her hands folded in her lap, for wishing people knew her children were just as smart, just as good as other children—even stronger, given what they had been through.

  Some children were more heroic than others, in ways you could never know just by looking at them. What about keeping yourself calm when you’re suffocating, calm enough to count to ten when your throat is swelling shut and your inhaler is missing? How about beating a life-threatening addiction, or knowing, at the age of fifteen, that you have to leave a boy you love because he has abused you, even after he has cried tears of apology, knowing he will hit you for the rest of your life? Some children are far more heroic than even their own mothers.

  It seemed not too long ago that Leila could fix everything with a surprise dinner at the Aloha Polynesian restaurant. The children loved the green papier-mâché trees that grew right out of the walls. The restaurant’s main attraction was a fountain that rose out of a wishing pool, throwing pink ropy lights into the air every eighteen minutes. People made wishes and threw in coins. The lights made the children rub their eyes, and the sound of the slapping water made everyone hush. The children would hold hands around the table as though in prayer, and for that one moment with Melanie, Maya, and Luke, all was perfect. When the fountain receded into the pink water, Hawaiian music flowed in from all corners of the room and conversations picked back up. Luke would spend most of the dinner running back and forth to the bamboo bridge, using up all of the precious dimes he’d saved
, then begging for more, his little cheeks flushed with excitement. A few years ago, Leila had gone to the restaurant alone. She had been missing him, and when she happened to look over at the fountain she swore she saw him standing there, knee-deep in pinkish water and holding a paper airplane in one hand. The image shook her. He was looking for his own dimes, he said, because he changed his mind about some of his wishes.

  Leila pulls up at a stoplight, pushes her wavy gray hair back from her face. In the rearview mirror, she watches Lucas pull a curl of his own hair, his pouty lips yawning peacefully. He’s angelic, a beautiful child with bright blue eyes and a funny belly laugh, the kind that lifts the spirits of everyone in the room.

  When she turns her attention forward, a sweep of yellow curls streaks across the windshield, turning it golden. “Luke!” she cries, tears flowing down her cheeks. She gets out of the car and looks up at the pink morning sky. Help me find Melanie, she pleads, shutting her eyes. Help me, Luke.

  The car behind her is blaring its horn. She blinks several times, rubs her eyes. When she looks up again, the sky is filling with golden rivulets spilling into a lavender lake. She gets back into the car and when she steps on the gas, all she can think about is how very tired she feels.

  She’s driving in circles.

  She’s exhausted. She has double-checked every place she can think of. The city of Canandaigua is not that big, but there are acres and acres of land on the outskirts of Canandaigua proper. Forests, fields, and wild vineyards. More farms than she can count. Leila couldn’t cover them all, even if she tried. Well, she shouldn’t even be driving. Her body is giving up now. Only for now. She pulls up in the driveway of her blue clapboard house, wraps a sleeping Lucas in a blanket and carries him inside. His arms dangle from her clutch; his thick blond curls bounce slightly with each of her steps. When Leila opens the door, she has to push Old Sally out of the way with her foot. The dog’s tail is wagging slightly. That’s as excited as she gets at sixteen.