The Language of Trees

by Ilie Ruby

  “You wish I what?” Lion says, pushing the plate away.

  Leila puts Lucas down and kisses his head after fastening the diaper tabs. “Nothing,” Leila says, her voice hoarse, her throat tightening up.

  Leila sighs, looks away. She hasn’t seen that girl in a long time. It’s pointless to keep thinking about it.

  But it was true, even if no one believes it now. Even after the girls’ fights threatened to rip the roof right off of the house, Melanie would always go to Maya and apologize. What did they fight over? A few worthless pieces of coal? It was as though all the love in the world was measured by it. Leila explained a long time ago that diamonds were formed from coal over many lifetimes, a result of intense geological pressure. But the girls didn’t listen when she said that they could not make the coal into diamonds by squeezing it between their hands or anything near that. They didn’t listen when they snuck into the Shongos’ coal bin, and would come home covered in coal dust, tracking soot footprints across the linoleum floor. Even after Luke died, they still went back to the coal bin.

  Melanie once told Leila that it wasn’t about the coal. It was about a time when the three children were together, when they were a triangle, the strongest shape. Perhaps Leila shouldn’t have ever told them that, for without Luke, the girls felt like they were too weak to go on alone.

  A little old person, Leila used to call Melanie.

  She had the face of an angel and the soul of a martyr, the sort of mind that was always working. On overdrive sometimes, which caused insomnia from the time she was small, well before Luke was born. Melanie resisted sleep, refused the night with all her strength. She’d be awake into the morning, drawing or reading by the hall light. Worrying, worrying, always worrying. She’d climb down the stairs in the middle of the night to find Victor passed out with his hunting rifle by his side, and it would be Melanie who’d clean him up, drenched in his scent. In the morning, Leila would find him covered with a blanket wherever he had landed, and Melanie would be sitting at the bottom of the stairway, a glass of milk in her hand and a sketch pad laid out on the step in front of her. You could see it in her eyes, the growing wariness, the silvery circles that never went away, giving her a gaunt, unearthly beauty. The blue of her irises was not like the dark gray of her sister’s. Melanie’s eyes were changeable, vulnerable to every cold wind and shred of light. Every thought that trickled by would change the color, from ice blue to dove gray. Perhaps some of her sadness came from the wisdom or had the wisdom come from the sadness? Leila could never tell.

  After Luke died, Melanie slowly began to close up, like a flower. Watching her daughter late at night doing her homework at the kitchen table, Leila worried about the whitish cast to her lips, the hollowness in her voice. The one-word answers when she’d asked Melanie what she was thinking. There was only one night when Melanie gave her something to go on, talking about the unfairness of hidden things, the rocky shoal out in the lake that had taken down too many boats to count, the sacred objects that could heal the sick, and all the things a person’s subconscious could keep secret.

  Everyone had been so consumed with what was going on at home that no one in the family realized that Melanie had grown five inches and had become beautiful, all in one summer. No one could have predicted that at fourteen she’d win Canandaigua’s Harvest Queen, the youngest in the town’s history. Leila thought this would change things for her, give her a sense of pride and belonging, a fresh start. But it had worked just the opposite. Melanie hadn’t been prepared for the attention, or for Maya’s raging jealousy. The parade, ribbon cuttings, pictures in the paper. It all seemed to wear on Melanie’s already heavy shoulders, bringing her back to the time when Luke died, when there was a similar kind of scrutiny, a kind of curious and judgmental attention that made her feel sick.

  Melanie ran away for the first time a month later. Leila shudders every time she pictures Melanie stumbling down an empty road on a cold October night, willing to risk everything just to visit her new boyfriend, who was staying in Albany. How lucky they were that the trucker who picked her up wasn’t a nutcase, but a grandfather with three daughters. He’d dropped her off at the police station and sat with her as she called Leila to come and get her.

  She made Melanie see a psychiatrist for two months. Melanie promised she wouldn’t repeat the behavior. But she was lying, or maybe she really believed it would end there. Leila still thinks she could have prevented this. This and the fresh-mouthed, empty-eyed boy who Melanie had met when she was tutoring kids after school. He had reveled in taking down Canandaigua’s Harvest Queen, a girl who never would have looked at him had she not felt that she deserved to be punished for her brother’s death. Was she merely following in Leila’s footsteps? Finding someone to punish her for never being good enough, for something unexplainable? Leila thinks about an earlier time, back when Victor tore up the lawn with his car. He had gotten out and fired his gun right into the trees. One, two, three shots that echoed through the forest and caused a flurry of blackbirds to explode into the sky. Melanie, at seven, had turned to Leila and in the most adult voice said, “You’re not going to let him do that again. You’re going to get us out of here. Right, Mom?”

  “Yes,” Leila had promised. What an act of courage for a child to ask to leave her own father, she had thought. She should have listened to Melanie then. But she was too weak.

  Leila forgave Victor that night, as she would time and time again. Their happiness would be bought off with a few red carnations wrapped in a plastic grocery-store wrapper and the promise that he would change. By the time Leila finally threw Victor out once and for all, the damage had been done. The girls had already suffered from the poor judgment of their mother. Leila had already lost a son. The divorce took two years. Victor had moved away and was often out of contact. The courts gave her custody of the girls, and Victor didn’t fight it. Then, he disappeared from their lives.

  Later that night, after they have eaten, Leila watches Lion rocking Lucas in his arms. Leila clears her throat. She tells Lion about the time, after Luke died, when she couldn’t get out of bed for weeks. How can she explain that her lungs were full of lead, and that she felt dizzy each time she stood up? She wants him to know what she did to contribute to Melanie’s problem. She is not without blame. They were her pills first. Her doctor prescribed Adderall—in effect, speed—to give her energy during the day, and Ambien to help her sleep at night, but the pills sat in the medicine cabinet, unused. She only took them for a few months and then forgot about them. She didn’t have to function. Melanie took care of the house, begging Leila to let her stay home from school day after day. Leila let herself be nursed and mothered by a nine-year-old girl for weeks, something that she now knows was wholly inappropriate.

  Leila hadn’t known Melanie saw her take the pills. Perhaps that is where Melanie learned about them.

  “At night,” Leila says, “this little creature would crawl into my bed with me and talk to me. I can still feel her hands on my face, hear her little voice whispering to me that things would be okay. Hers was the only voice I could listen to. I just couldn’t bear to be alone, isn’t that horrible? I let a child take care of me. But we survived. That’s how I know who she is, deep down, do you see? That same little girl, she’s still in there. She’s always with me,” Leila says, putting her hand over her heart.

  “Could you hold off on the when-Melanie-was-wonderful stories?” Lion says gruffly. He doesn’t want to hear it. He is convinced that Melanie is trying to punish him. These stories of a girl he never knew make him ache with loss. And he doesn’t want to feel that yet.

  Leila sighs. “Here, angel,” she sings, touching Lucas’s foot, ignoring the comment.

  Lion reaches across the table. “Mom, I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”

  “Well, I don’t want you saying things like that around him.”

  “But you don’t know her like I do.”

  “I beg your pardon,” says Leila. “I’m her
mother, Lion.”

  Lion gets up. “You think you have to tell me about her?” He paces back and forth with the child in his arms. Lucas begins to scream. “Take him,” Lion says quickly, handing her Lucas, who grabs on for dear life, coughs a few times before catching his breath.

  “Here you go,” Leila says. Lucas sticks his toes into the teething ring.

  Lion drops his head between his knees. “Do you know how hard it is for me? Not ever knowing what she’s gonna do next?”

  “Sweetie,” Leila says gently. “There was stress on you both. It happens when you have a child.”

  “So it’s because of me? I can’t make enough money. Yeah, I’m sick of thinking about it. I never asked for this.” He gets up and slams the back door, escaping out into the backyard, where he stops in front of Luke’s gravestone.

  Leila calls after him. He doesn’t respond, and Leila can’t blame him. It’s true he never asked for any of this. But who asks for half the things life gives them? Life had taught Leila the practiced art of making do.

  Most of all, try not to disappoint people.

  Including yourself. This is something that has taken Leila the most time to learn.

  Lucas’s little fists grasp the teething ring so tightly that she cannot unlock it from his grip. He’s more like Lion than any of them knows.

  She knows to give Lion breathing room at times like this. This is what she’d tell Melanie each time she and Lion had a fight. Men need to go into their cave. Let him work it out alone. Some problems are best handled by backing away. But now she thinks that perhaps she has backed away too much. If people in a family develop certain personality traits in order to compensate for each other, Leila hadn’t known. Perhaps Melanie had become so impulsive because Leila was so immobilized. She could have prevented all this if she’d been smarter back then, if she’d been more balanced herself.

  Leila kisses Lucas’s forehead and puts him in his playpen. She drops into the rocking chair, trying to let her guilt flow through her body and out the tips of her fingers. She picks up the pale green acrylic yarn and the hat and boot set she has been knitting. From her chair, she sees Lion’s tall shadow cut across the lawn, back and forth. He’s trying to figure out what to do.

  The way the light hits the windows of Clarisse Mellon’s house next door and spills into the grass between the two, it’s as though Leila is sitting on the bank of a golden river. She recalls the sight of a yellow farmhouse she used to drive by on the outskirts of town. Not a new house or a large house, but an ordinary house, in front of which stood a wooden trellis hung with bundles of leathery blue grapes. If Leila closes her eyes, if she tries hard enough, she can taste their sweet juice. Even though she never got out of the car, she believed she could taste them. Leila knows about longing. If a person ever wants anything badly enough, it is quite possible to turn a wish into a memory purely through the repetition of thought, sometimes to the point of no longer wanting it at all.

  “I’m sorry,” says the low voice behind her. The hand on her shoulder is rocking her gently for the second time today. She looks down at the large silver diver’s watch gleaming against the dark skin. She still doesn’t know why he had wanted it for Christmas, when he always said how much he hated the water, but she never questioned him. She stares up at Lion as he shoves his hands deep in his pockets.

  “You don’t have to be sorry. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have pushed you. I should be smarter,” she says.

  “I love her,” Lion says, his brown eyes welling with tears. “I’ve loved her from the minute I saw her. More than I ever thought I could love anyone. She is my whole life.”

  “Come here,” Leila says.

  Lion kneels, rests his head on her lap.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “You won’t get it,” he says, staring at the floor.

  “You know better.”

  “I messed up my insurance,” he says.

  “What?”

  He studies the worn slats of wood, kicks at the corner of the beige rag rug with the cornucopia emblazoned in the center. “Church. I haven’t been going. I made this deal. With God. A promise.”

  “Oh sweetie,” Leila says.

  He continues. “No, listen. If I didn’t miss church for a year, then everything would go good. Our relationship. The pregnancy, everything. And I had Matrina on my side, helping out.”

  “Now wait a minute. Going to church or not. You can’t control—”

  “But it worked,” he says, his voice pleading. “I know it did. Lucas is proof.”

  “Lion—”

  “You can’t say everything wasn’t going great. And then I go and—”

  “Stop this. She’ll be back,” Leila says, praying the doubt doesn’t come through in her voice. And that her words will hold true as she forces them into the room.

  “Mom. We had a fight.”

  “You’re overtired. You need some rest. I just put fresh sheets in the guest bedroom—”

  “I told her I was splitting,” he confesses.

  “Oh Lion, no.”

  “I’d never really leave her. Just trying to scare her, I guess. It was stupid.” He gets up, wipes his eyes. “I threatened her with leaving. And so she did it to me first.”

  Leila glances at Lucas, who is fast asleep under the blanket.

  “We had a bad fight. She was yelling. She never yells. She was mad that we didn’t have money, and about all the bills. She wants to take a trip to Niagara Falls. She says we need a break, that we have to get back on track. She says she wants to stay in a hotel for the weekend. That she wants to take a boat ride on the Maid of the Mist and get a fake picture taken of the two of us in a barrel. I tell her, you don’t have to pretend because we’re already going over in a barrel. Why didn’t I say okay? I’d never really leave her, Mom.”

  “I know you wouldn’t, Lion. I do know that.”

  Leila is trembling. She pours herself a glass of water and sits down.

  “But I left the house. That’s something I promised her I would never do. I broke my promise on that. An hour later I came back and she was gone. She had left Lucas all alone. I couldn’t believe she’d do it. Now, all I keep thinking is, what if she does this forever? I mean, what about Lucas? I don’t know what I’ll do if…”

  “If what?”

  “If she comes back,” he says, his face now streaked with tears.

  “When she comes back.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do when and if she comes back.”

  Leila holds her hand over her eyes to shield the sun. “You have a child now, you’ve got no choice but to stick—you’ll do it just like I did.”

  “Melanie promised she would, too, and look what happened.”

  Lion is sitting in front of her, his face damp.

  “Here’s a secret, sweetie. You have become the rock of this family.” She has told him this before, but she’s not sure he listened. It’s more of a plea now.

  “But Mom, when he grows up, will he hate me? For being such a screwup, for not doing it right?”

  Leila swallows hard. “Sometimes it’ll feel just like hate.”

  “How do you know what to do? That you’re saying and doing the right things?”

  “Here’s a secret. Nobody knows what they’re doing.” Leila looks at her grandson. “Melanie wouldn’t leave him.”

  “Maybe she wanted to leave all along. Maybe she wants a different life, you know, than me.”

  “I don’t believe that. She once told me her life started when she met you.” Leila is lying, but he needs to hear that. She swallows hard, wondering if he is right, watching Lion walk over to the playpen. He is wise for not telling the police about the fight, Leila thinks. It had been hard enough to get them to send a car around. Now Leila feels in her bones that Melanie is in the worst sort of trouble. As Lion picks up Lucas, the little boy lets out a cry. Leila tries to comfort her grandson but he is inconsolable, his shattering screams echoing through the empty house. />
  13

  LUCAS’S CRIES REACH ACROSS the cold water like white ribbons of light, winding around the tips of the blue spruce that line the lake, under the boat docks and summertime hammocks, sweeping through the flickering leaves of the Diamond Trees, which can be seen from every inch of this place, and circling back across the water to the dirt floor where Melanie is being held. When people on the shoreline hear the cries, they will shiver, commenting on how the wind sounds like a baby crying. But Melanie can recognize her own child’s voice. It has been four days with no food. Melanie does not know where she is, but she knows she is near the lake. She can smell its thick muddy scent. Can hear the gulls crying overhead, blending into the sound of her son’s voice. She squeezes her eyes shut, and then in her mind she is holding her baby, telling him stories about feathers and dancers and drums. She is breaking into bits of light, listening to him breathe. His heart is a pendulum that measures her life.

  She tries to reach for Lucas but she has no arms. Her arms are icy wings folded inside her body. She is empty. The corners of her mouth bleed and burn with thirst so deep, even light feels wet on her skin.

  Gulls circle, spread their wings. Their voices, human. Melanie’s own voice, bird-like.

  At times like this when the despair is this close, she feels Luke’s presence surrounding her. Melanie slips in and out of darkness. Desperate times come flooding back. Times where she was this close to abstinence. Times when she failed.

  Once it had been sixty-eight days. This was before Lion. She had gotten herself clean. Hard times were behind her, she was sure. Leila had gone away overnight and Maya was coming home from Cheever for the night. Maya had made great progress over the course of a year and hadn’t had an episode of catatonia in two years. Melanie had seen it once, seen her sister’s limbs freeze up so that Maya couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. But that was all supposedly in the past. She had grown out of it.