by Allison Moon
Chapter 6
The streets were strewn with the wreckage of the prior evening’s squall. Though it had sounded fierce at the time, seeing the littered streets in the new morning light made Lexie realize just how much damage had been done. A tree limb dangled overhead, entwined in sagging power lines, and a car sat stalled in a waterlogged dip in the road. Brown leaves plastered the sidewalks and the storm drains roared. It was painfully early, not even seven a.m. The sky remained overcast with a layer of grey cloud, unmoving and impenetrable.
Renee walked her to the sidewalk that unofficially divided the north side of campus from the south. They stood together on that invisible boundary, Lexie conscious of the effects that drinking all day and staying up all night must have wrought upon her face. She wanted to hide, but the cold glare of the overcast morning bathed her in grey light. Renee kissed her goodbye before turning back towards the Den. Lexie dragged feet back to her dorm.
She wore that kiss on her lips for the rest of the walk home, her mind racing with memories of the previous hours. She kissed a girl. She got a little drunk. Both were for the first time and both easier and more fun that she had anticipated. Yet, she had declined Renee’s invitation to her room which contradicted the collegiate vision she had created for herself. She wasn’t winning her game of “yes” and promised herself to recommit to her efforts.Rounding the corner to her dorm, the noise of a crowd tore her from her thoughts.
Clumps of students in bathrobes and pajamas stood bleary-eyed and confused on the dorm’s front lawn beyond a perimeter of yellow police tape. A fire crew, a handful of police officers, and five helmeted utility workers huddled around a massive oak tree that had crashed through the roof of her dormitory. Milton College’s president, a short-haired academic named Suzanne Fern, paced beyond the crowd, a cellphone pressed to her ear. She wore a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt instead of her usual pantsuit, likely due to the hour and because it was Saturday. As Lexie rounded the crowd for a better view, she recognized the tree. It was the one outside her window, and it was lodged squarely in her room.
The ancient oak rested in a violent, U-shaped gash of plaster, cement chunks, and wood, as if an errant monster had bitten a chunk out of the roof and wall of the building. Through the hole, she saw the poster she had affixed to her wall when she moved in: a glossy full moon shining on Haystack Rock. The oak lounged in the gash, branches like capillaries stretching in every direction. Orange leaves sprouted from the roof and fluttered like the theatrical flame effect of crepe paper and fan.
Lexie wandered, dumbfounded, to stand with her classmates. Brian Dalton, captain of the soccer team and president of Phi Kappa Phi, stood in his khakis, a t-shirt, and a varsity jacket, looking as though he was either just arriving or just leaving.
“That’s your room, isn’t it?” he asked as Lexie approached, her eyes fixed to the wreckage. She nodded, unsure whether to gasp or cry or just walk away. “I bet this will get you out of homework for at least a week,” he snarked.
Two of the crewmen struggled to wrap a pair of canvas straps around the bulk of the tree’s trunk. A crane waited nearby, its wheels sinking into the muddy lawn.
“Oh my God!” Anna shouted from the crowd as she spotted Lexie, energized by the sudden import of her otherwise meaningless vocation--her usual duties consisted of holding the hair of vomiting freshmen and negotiating standard roommate bitchery. She ran towards Lexie, embracing her with all the maternal warmth her healthy frame could conjure.
“Oh my God, oh my God! Thank God you weren’t home last night! You could have been crushed!”
Lexie stared at the damage, wondering if that were true. She wriggled in Anna’s grip. She really didn’t want Anna clutching her or the looks the R.A.’s panic was attracting.
“Yeah,” said Brian. He crossed his arms in front of his chest, emblazoned in burgundy with the word “Exeter.” “Good thing you’re such a slut.” His sleazy grin held steady as he raised his eyebrows. She had met him only a week prior and now he was calling her a slut. Charming. Lexie rolled her eyes, ignoring him as best she could.
“Where were you last night, heartbreaker?” he asked with a nudge.
“I got stuck at a friend’s house.”
“Riiight,” he prodded. “Which ‘friend’?”
Lexie sighed, far too exhausted for this sophomoric repartee.
“Blythe LaCoste,” Lexie replied with raised eyebrow, as if the name alone could call forth the sassy comebacks and vigorous defenses of the Pack.
“Those hairy fucking femi-nazis? Christ.” Brian scowled as though smelling something rank.
“Briiiiaann!” Anna responded with flirtatious, mock-offense.
Lexie bit her tongue, the heat rising up the back of her neck to prickle at the fine hairs behind her ears.
“You can’t be a lesbo, Lex.” Brian leered. “You’re too cute for that shit. It’d be a waste.” His eyes scanned her as though the truth of the matter was hidden beneath her shirt. “Lexie the Lezzie. Hah. That’s too easy.”
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Lexie crossed her arms in front of her chest.
“Anna,” he said. “Scraping the bottom of the barrel, admittedly, but a man’s got his needs. Sometimes you just don’t want them to put up a fight, you know?”
Anna giggled warily and Lexie grimaced.
“Fucking tree didn’t let me get it done, either. My woody is stuck behind my waistband, and it’s starting to chafe. Unless. . .” he included both girls in his leer, raising his eyebrows as means of suggestion.
Lexie flushed red with rage. She wished the Pack was here to deliver the cutting rejoinder she was incapable of coming up with herself.
Brian laughed. “I’m just joshin’. Lighten up, Lex.” He slapped her shoulder and squeezed it.
Their standoff was interrupted by the loud beeping of the crane as it rolled into place through the thick mud.
The crane jerked into action and the chains clinked with the burden of the tree, silencing the onlooking crowd. Lexie stepped away from Brian and Anna just as a hefty copper-colored pickup truck cruised onto the lawn. A woman stepped out of the truck. Stunning and strong, she was clad in work boots, blue jeans and a long-sleeved thermal shirt. She reached into the bed of her truck and lifted out a large chainsaw and a pair of work goggles. Her hair, an earthy chestnut brown, grazed her shoulders and hung partly in front of her face. Mirrored sunglasses hid her eyes. Lexie found herself wondering what they looked like. Unable to see them, Lexie had trouble parsing the rest of the woman’s face, as though knowing her eyes would solve some important mystery of her ethnicity, relations, or role in this small town.
As the woman approached and Lexie ran through the possible permutations of eye color and shape, a claw of pain raked across the inside of her abdomen. A wave of nausea flooded through Lexie, like the first realization of food poisoning. She doubled over, hands braced on her thighs. Her blood ran hot, flooding her body with queasy tingles. Strange pings of pleasure roiled within the discomfort. Saliva pooled in her mouth, and she swallowed hard as her muscles fought her bones. The spell passed swiftly. Damn cramps. She pushed herself upright, stretching past the tension, negating the pain. Breathing deeply, she wandered back to the crowd, hoping to find some solidity in the distraction of other people. Standing among them, though, Lexie kept glancing over her shoulder at the strange woman.
The crowd cheered as the tree was freed from the building like a thorn wrenched from a beast’s paw. Looking up, Lexie felt a second pulse of shame as the inside of her room was exposed to the sky. Her bed was made, the closet was open, and books shone in the white daylight on her desk.
Bits of plastic and glass rained down onto the grass, shaken loose from the dangling tree. It felt perverse, this crowd gaping at her private existence, as if she was being forced to undress before them. As the crane levered the tree out of the dorm, Lexie spied gobs of color adhered to it, tangled within the branches. Oh God. A blue t-shirt clung to the
fine branches at the edge of the tree’s corona of twigs and, more damningly, a pair of underwear dangled from a burr in the tree’s bark. Lexie felt the overwhelming urge to flee, or vomit, or both. Brian laughed aloud.
“Cute chones, girl. I didn’t know you had a penchant for polka dots.” He elbowed her in the arm, and it felt as though the simple touch could send her careening to the ground.
The crane spun the tree ninety degrees, swooping over the students’ heads. Lexie’s panties dangled over the crowd like a polka-dotted pinata. Snickers and giggles sprang up as people noticed and pointed them out. The cops hustled forward, arms spread wide, herding the crowd out from under the shadow of the great beast.
Just beyond where the students and workers reassembled, the crane eased the tree to the ground as gently as lowering a lover into bed. The wood heaved and creaked as the tree’s weight settled, then stilled. The subsequent silence triggered a cascade of action and conversation. Dr. Fern, nodding into the cell phone she cradled against her ear, beckoned with her notebook for the students to gather around her. Various civil servants drove away or began filling out clipboards of paperwork. Some people snapped pictures with their cellphones.
While the rest of her dormmates waited for Dr. Fern to explain the next steps, Lexie pressed up against the thin, yellow barrier of the police tape. The strange, dark woman ducked past the perimeter of police tape, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear with her free hand, while holding the chainsaw in the other. She strode to the tree, her swaying hips counterpoised to her shoulders. She moved as though an extension of the ground itself, solid and unwavering.
Discovering the bits of clothing tangled in the tree, the woman put down her chainsaw and extricated them from the branches. Clothes in hand, she scanned the crowd of students for the steward of the laundry. Lexie’s ears grew hot. The woman walked to Lexie and wordlessly handed her the offending garments. Lexie snatched them away and stuffed them into her bag. In the lenses of the woman’s sunglasses, she saw her own discomfort reflected. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the woman’s shrouded gaze, praying that her ears weren’t as red as they felt.
“I’m sorry about your room,” the woman said. Her voice was low and even, formal in its clarity.
Lexie shrugged and twisted her mouth in a moue of powerlessness. “How did you know?” she asked.
The woman’s reply was a crafty grin. Her skin was the color of arid fields and her hair that of fire-licked bricks, a brown belying red revealed only by sunlight. She picked up her chainsaw.
“What are you doing with the tree?” Lexie asked, desperate to dispel her anxiety with a bit of small talk.
“I’m here to take care of it,” the woman replied, removing her sunglasses and hanging them on the collar of her shirt, revealing particolored eyes. Even if Lexie had guessed a color, she would only have been half right.
The woman’s left eye elicited a memory of Lexie’s childhood: her mother’s birthday, when Lexie had been only six. Her father had presented her mother with a small white cardboard box, within which was a smooth, translucent golden rock. It was rare, he said, to find such a thing in this part of the world. Lexie had laughed when he said it was called “amber,” because that was the name of their neighbors’ golden retriever. Now, looking at the impossible color of this woman’s left eye, Lexie found herself wondering whatever happened to that stone.
Stranger still was her right eye, the shade of the jagged slate cliffs overlooking the ocean thirty miles to the west. The light caught the woman’s iris like the moonstone embedded in the hilt of Lexie’s new knife, as cool and fragile as ice melting in spring. The overall effect was disconcerting, like looking at two faces superimposed over one another.
“Whoa,” Lexie breathed.
“Pardon?” The woman tilted her head, that rebellious lock of hair again sliding free.
“Oh, nothing. Just. Um. Your eyes are . . .”
The woman lowered her head and scratched her eyebrow with a small chuckle.
“Sorry! I’m sorry,” Lexie stammered. “I’ve just never seen eyes like yours before.” She paused, searching for some way to salvage the doomed conversation.
“It’s called heterochromia,” the woman said. Her mauve lips curved into a cheshire grin.
Lexie glanced past her to the tree. Its massive trunk bisected the lawn while bored utility workers smoked and texted, kicking at the mud with their boots.
The woman held out her hand to in greeting. “I’m Archer.” Her palm was warm and strong, smooth from work, radiating heat like a sunburn.
“Lexie.” Her father had taught her how to give a good handshake, but now her arm struggled to hold firm as Archer jerked it. Archer eyed Lexie curiously before stepping away to the tree trunk, lips moving without sound as her eyes scanned and evaluated the protruding branches.
“You’re taking care of it? Why?” Lexie asked.
“Suzanne Fern called me.”
Archer stepped away, attention focused on the tree. Lexie rocked back and forth on her heels, pressing her belly against the police tape, then withdrawing, over and over again. What could she do to pull the woman’s attention back to her?
“Help?” Lexie squeaked, uncertain of the language she was speaking, but certain she needed to say something. The word sounded odd on its own, so she rushed to qualify, “You want . . . Help? Any?”
Though Lexie felt quite certain she sounded like an idiot, Archer didn’t seem to notice.
“Are you comfortable with a chainsaw?”
Lexie took a deep breath and nodded, pleased that this was all that would be asked of her. She threw a glance back at Dr. Fern.
Archer waved off her concern. “Don’t worry about Sue. She’s cool.” Archer replaced her sunglasses, handing the goggles to Lexie to wear. They shared a brief smile as Lexie ducked beneath the police tape and followed Archer to the felled beast.
After twenty-five minutes of ear-searing noise, the tree lay in rough, thick discs and the bed of Archer’s truck was open with two planks of wood ramped to the ground. They had worked the tree from both ends, Lexie taking care of the branches while Archer attacked the trunk, working her way to the core. Lexie and Archer rolled the larger pieces up the planks to the truck bed, which sagged beneath the weight. Archer was not much larger than Lexie, but she was shockingly strong. Not even several trips carrying the disks of tree back to her truck had broken her breath.
The utility men cleared the rest of the wreckage and wheeled in a wood chipper as police officers escorted the students to their rooms to gather their necessities. The students would have to stay the next night scattered in other rooms throughout campus until the structural integrity of the building could be verified, after which they could return to their rooms with some slight reshuffling and double-occupancy demotions.
Satisfied that the first phase of her plan was working, Dr. Fern turned her attention to Lexie. “Ms. Clarion!”
While Lexie suspected Dr. Fern would prefer not to have to deal with the complaints of thirty-five displaced students, she also couldn’t help but notice how this problem-solving invigorated the president. Dr. Fern’s eyes brightened as she tied up each loose end, nearing the finish line after which she could return to her slippers, weekend crossword or whatever else it was school administrators did on the weekend. It seemed that even though beckoned from bed because of extensive property damage and a student’s brush with death, Dr. Fern was enjoying herself, if in an odd, exasperated way.
She laid out a plan that involved overnight bags, deferred homework assignments, an optional meeting with Lexie’s father, and double occupancy in German House until an alternative could be arranged.
“But I don’t speak German,” Lexie said.
“You don’t have to, Alexis,” Dr. Fern replied, making a note in a leather-bound planner. Satisfied with her proposed resolution, Dr. Fern snapped shut her planner and turned her attention to Archer.
“Archer, it’s wonderful to see you.
It’s been too long.” A broad smile opened on her face, revealing deep, cozy wrinkles around her eyes and forehead. She embraced Archer like an old friend. “I had heard you were back.”
Archer returned the hug. “Hard to keep a secret in this town.”
“I do keep an ear to the ground. When did you get back?”
“About six weeks ago. I’ve just been at the cabin, sweeping out the cobwebs.”
Dr. Fern placed her hand on Archer’s shoulder. “I hope you’ll be sticking around then.”
Archer smiled open and warm, unlike the shrouded smile she had given to Lexie. It was strange to witness such different personas displayed by the same woman. “Thanks for the tree,” she said.
“Thank you. She’d end up in the wood chipper if not for you,” Dr. Fern said. “I hope you can breathe new life into the old girl. She’s older than all of us.” She chuckled. “Well, close enough.”
Lexie asked, “What do you do?”
Archer grinned. “I’m a carpenter.”
“Like hell you are,” Dr. Fern interrupted. She turned to Lexie. “Ms. Racine is an artist.”
“You’re too kind,” Archer said.
Dr. Fern snorted. “Don’t tell the Board of Governors.” With a wave, she hurried off to salvage what was left of her Saturday morning.
Lexie walked with Archer back to her truck, as a volunteer firefighter scraped mud from his boots, waiting to escort her into her decimated room.
“So what are you going to do with the tree?” Lexie asked, not yet ready to call her father or address her new series of woes.
“I had an idea,” Archer said, shaking her head. “But I may re-imagine it. I expect something more interesting will take its place.”
Archer’s lips slid into that crafty grin, and Lexie wondered if there were any other people in Archer’s life like Dr. Fern, to whom she offered her wide smile. What would it be like to be one of those people, to see all the faces of Archer?