Sycamore

by Bryn Chancellor

  “It’s a good little car. I just drove it up to Colorado this past week to get more of my mother’s things.”

  “I’m sorry. About your mother, I mean,” Jess said.

  “Thank you.” He stared down and rubbed the vinyl seat with his thumb. “It was a beautiful drive. That part of the country.” He shook his head and looked up. He said, “Dani’s funny. She doesn’t like to drive. I thought if she had a different car, kind of unusual, she might like it better.”

  “I know,” Jess said. “I’d kill for a car like this.”

  He laughed. “It’s been a lot of work. Do you know what you want?”

  “Not really. I’m saving right now. Whatever costs a thousand dollars and won’t die on me. My dad was going to help, but.” She shrugged. “My mom said she’d cover insurance.”

  Frowning, he buckled his seat belt. “That’s hard. I’m sure it’s been hard for you. I’d be happy to help you look for one when the time comes. If you want help.”

  “Thanks,” she said. She pressed her foot hard on the brake.

  He nodded at the windscreen. “All right, ready when you are.” He loosened his tie and rested his arm on the open window.

  She shifted into first and let out the clutch. The car lurched once, but she adjusted, coasting down the orchard’s gravel driveway. “Good, you got it!” he said. When she hit the main road and picked up speed, the wind knocked her hat off and swept tangled strands of hair across her face. She held the wheel tight, and he picked up her hat from where it landed at his feet. Dirt crusted her knuckles and streaked her forearms, and her muscles, strained from digging, gave off a faint feverish ache. The bright summer sky had softened to a whisper of itself, burnished and dusky, and the air smelled of smoke, perhaps from a nearby brush fire. Her beehive mind started buzzing with questions—Smoke: Was something burning down out there? Was it someone’s house? What was botany? Would Mom have a good date tonight? Would Dad find out she was dating?—but her physical exhaustion and a sense of gratification beat the thoughts back. She sank against the seat and relaxed her arms. She felt the tremble of the engine in her thighs, a flush in her cheek. She felt—happy. She started laughing.

  “What’s funny?” Mr. Newell said.

  She shook her head. She raised her voice over the engine and the wind. “Nothing.”

  His smile faded as he turned away and stared out the open window, holding her hat in his lap.

  In late June, when the monsoon began to lumber in, Jess’s mom took her and Dani on a camping trip to San Felipe, Mexico—their old vacation spot, the first time without her father. The trip was a first for Dani, too—her first time tent-camping and her first time in Mexico, a new pushpin for her travel map. Jess’s mom bought a second tent for the girls and hunted up coolers and snorkels and rafts from the storage shed, wedging it all in the trunk for the eight-hour drive. They drove through Phoenix and Gila Bend and Yuma, past the thrumming cars at the Calexico-Mexicali border and into Baja, speeding across a desert dotted with creosote and salt bush and ocotillo until there: the glimmering Sea of Cortez. On a secluded beach at the cheap campground, the girls slathered themselves in coconut-scented suntan lotion and body-surfed and snorkeled and watched the grunions spawn at sunset. They wore cutoffs over their suits, plastic flip-flops on their feet. In the afternoons and evenings, Jess’s mom, her hair knotted atop her head, sat on the beach under an umbrella with a fat paperback and a cold beer. “All I want to do is read and watch the tides,” she said. They walked into town, bought carne asada tacos from a roadside stand and groceries and supplies at a small mercado, pleased when their Spanish was good enough to be understood. They stopped at a beach bar and ordered piña coladas with nutmeg on top, growing tipsy and giggly a few sips in. They didn’t shower for four days, their hair stiff with salt, sand in their seams and waistbands and in between their toes.

  In the tent, its screened vent open to a patch of starry night, they learned to talk to each other. They talked about Paul and other boys and stupid things like their tan lines, yes, but then shifted to what they didn’t know yet: where would they go to college—of course they would apply to the same places, or at least schools near each other—about their futures, their careers. And they talked about what they didn’t know how to know: divorce, and family, and God, and love, and fear, and what it meant to be alive.

  Their last night, Dani rolled over on her stomach. “Trace me,” she said.

  Jess could see the tan lines from her bathing suit, white ghost straps, and she started to write letters between her shoulder blades with her finger.

  “F,” Dani said, her voice muffled in the sleeping bag. “I. S. H. Fish. Come on. Make it worth my while. And why fish, you weirdo.” She laughed. “Do another one.”

  Jess wrote grunion, and botany, and lozenge, and pristine. Dani guessed half of them, her voice sleepy.

  “Now me,” Jess said. She turned over with her face in her pillow. Dani’s finger on her back felt like an eraser. “Not so hard,” she said. Dani eased up. She wrote fusion, and esoteric, and sunstroke, and Jess guessed all but the second. On the last, Jess, drowsy, couldn’t tell what the word was.

  “Song?” she asked.

  “Nope.” Dani moved her finger in the same place, over and over, until Jess got the chills.

  Jess struggled to keep her eyes open. “Doll? I can’t tell.”

  “ ‘Love,’ you simpleton,” Dani said. She sighed and lay down.

  Jess laughed into the pillow. She rolled on her side and opened her eyes. Dani curled like a shrimp inside her bag, her glasses off, eyes closed. The sky yawned above them, too, and Jess closed her eyes against the shimmering, star-scarred blackness. She fell asleep hard and fast, the kind of sleep she could rarely find at night—heavy, dreamless—not waking until late the next morning, sweltering in the damp tent.

  Then she and Dani climbed in the back seat for the drive home, propped up on sandy pillows, sunburned and sticky, the taste of salt on their lips. Jess took one last look out the window at the place where the desert met the sea. Next summer would be their last trip together before she went off to college. This, the penultimate. And never again with her father and mother together. This last thought snuck up on her. She blinked back the sting of tears.

  Dani said, “Thank you, Maud. This trip completely made my summer. My life, really.”

  “You’re very welcome.” Jess’s mom looked in the rearview, frowning when she noticed the tears.

  Jess smiled, waving her off. “Completely. Best Mom prize for sure.” She plumped her pillow and leaned against the window, pressed her palm against the warm glass. Lulled by the sound of the engine, safe in her mother’s care and with her friend beside her, she slept again. She woke disoriented, staring at a strange stretch of road. She lifted her head and looked to the front of the car.

  Her mom smiled at her in the rearview, reached back and patted her knee.

  “Not too much farther,” she said. “Almost home.”

  On the Fourth of July, Jess went with Dani and Paul to the fireworks at the ball field. A friend of Paul’s from the track team, Warren Smith, whom everyone called Smitty, joined them on the blanket they’d spread in right field. He sat next to Jess. As the evening progressed, he reached out and hooked two fingers around her right pinkie. Jess kept her eyes on the fireworks that streaked and flowered against the onyx sky. When she jumped at the booms of the duds, Smitty squeezed her pinkie. When they said good night, he kissed her on the mouth, a quick peck with firm, dry lips. She smiled, her heart warm. He was sweet. She couldn’t help but think of his first name: Warren. A rabbit’s den. A sweet rabbity kiss.

  After, Jess stayed the night at Dani’s. They climbed into the twin beds and debriefed about Warren and his pinkie squeeze, and when her parents went to bed, Dani snuck out her bedroom window to meet Paul. Left alone, Jess tossed in the bed, unable to sleep. She went to the living room and sat on the sofa, peering at the familiar objects—books, picture frames, figurines
—rendered strange by darkness. The stiff tweed cushions scratched her bare thighs. She couldn’t curl up here as she would on her sofa at home, cocooned in worn plaid twill, the shelf of green encyclopedias and Big Red in her line of sight.

  She opened the sliding glass door that led onto the Newells’ redwood deck, where more than once she had sat in the wooden Adirondack chairs and eaten a sandwich or sipped a soda, her feet propped on the railing, her friend’s house fast becoming her second home. She plopped down now in one of the chairs before she realized someone else was there. Mr. Newell. He leaned against the railing, smoking a cigarette.

  Startled, she pulled her nightshirt down her thighs and scrambled to get out of the low chair. “Sorry. I didn’t know anyone was out here.”

  He said, “Stay. It’s fine. Don’t tell Dani I’m smoking, though. I quit. Is she asleep?”

  “Yes,” Jess said, looking at her hands.

  “But you couldn’t, huh?” He crushed out the cigarette. “Me either. Thinking too much.”

  He dragged a chair to sit next to her. Because it was dark, he misjudged and scooted the chair too close, and when he sat down, their knees brushed. Jess flinched and pulled her knee away, and he did the same. They sat there, unmoving, knees so close she could feel the heat from his skin. She breathed as if through a fireplace bellow: air sucked from her lungs and then blasted back in. But he didn’t move the chair.

  She tried to think of something to say. She glanced at his profile. That beaky nose with its knuckle in the center. A yellow pencil behind his ear again. She thought of his aspen painting upstairs, soft and milky, and she smelled snow and lemon-soaked apples, and time seemed to slow for her. Dream time, supple and lethargic. Her breath shallow, she pressed her knee closer, skin to skin, almost as an experiment to see what he’d do.

  He didn’t move. He kept looking straight ahead, but he put his hand on his knee so the edge of his palm brushed her kneecap. A wisp of contact. He still didn’t look at her. In her dream state, she reached out and took the pencil from behind his ear. When she did, she heard him give a little sigh. The pencil was warm from his skin, and she held it tight.

  He said, “You should go inside. It’s late.”

  His voice startled her. She jumped up from the chair, tugging her shirt down, her legs shaking. All of her, shaking. She stumbled inside, tripping over a rug in the doorway. She climbed into the bed in her best friend’s room, listening to her best friend’s father move down the hall and climb the stairs to his painting studio. She listened to the creak of footsteps above her. She clutched the pencil, running her thumb down its ridges. She put it lengthwise across her lips and bit it, feeling the soft wood give between her teeth.

  When Dani snuck through the window an hour later and whispered, “Hey, are you awake?” Jess feigned sleep. But she did not sleep. She dressed and slipped out the door before Dani was awake, leaving a note: “Had to get home. Call you later, gator.” Walking home in the cool morning, she shivered, but she wasn’t cold. The opposite. As if someone had struck a match and lit her. Or more like she was the match, scraping across the red striker pad, and whoosh. Phosphorescence.

  For weeks, she did not see him again. When she came by Dani’s after work or slept over, she would hear footsteps but see no sign of him. She began to believe she’d dreamed it. Even when she held the pencil dented with her bite marks, she couldn’t be sure. Because how could she believe it? He was Dani’s father. Even if it had happened, it was an accident. He did not feel what she did. That heat, that match-struck feeling—that was her problem, not his. She told herself it was no big deal, but when she saw Mrs. Newell—who seemed always to be dashing from house to college to theater to home, her dark, winged eyebrows pulled low—Jess couldn’t quite meet her eye, her face aflame. Her mother went on more dates with Mr. Juarez, and Jess went on a few dates alone with Warren the Rabbit. When they said good-bye, she kissed and rubbed up against him. Once she got so carried away, she bit his lip and drew blood. He pulled away in surprise. “Ow,” he said, as if she’d hurt his feelings.

  She worked at the orchard, the days hot and sluggish, making sure the trees had enough water. Iris called July and August the water stage, a time crucial to the growth of the nut. A hundred and fifty gallons a day. Though the monsoon helped, the storms were not enough. Jess checked and fixed irrigation lines, carried hoses, pushed a wheelbarrow piled high with branches. She cleared weeds and drove the mower for the first time, cutting the grass low to keep it from competing for water with the trees. So much work to protect and nurture those tiny little nuts, and she remembered botany, which she’d circled in Big Red’s pages. The scientific study of plants. From the root botane, “plant.” Throughout the day, Jess, too, needed water, gulping it straight from the hose.

  On breaks inside, the A/C cooling her sweaty face, she helped Iris map out plans for Sundown at the Orchard, those fall and winter nights when they’d stay open late and sell nuts to the holiday crowds. Jess suggested lining the driveway with luminarias, winding the posts with twinkle lights. “I can help bake,” she told Iris, and Iris said, “You’ll have school.” But Jess wasn’t thinking about school. She was thinking about the brush of a palm. She was thinking about hands she had no right to think about. She was looking up the meaning of spontaneous combustion.

  On her nighttime excursions, she walked into town, up and down through the dips of her unlit road. Once she reached the bottom of the hill, she turned onto Quail Run, passed the swath of the orchard, and then turned onto College Drive, the street that bordered Sycamore College and led to the District. Occasionally she saw people or headlights coming toward her, and she would dive into the shallow drainage ditch and hold her breath, waiting until the footsteps or tires passed. She never went onto campus, even though it was right there, two blocks away from Dani’s, less than a mile from her own house. Something about the iron gates created a sense of a barrier, even though they were open, unlocked, and she could see college students along the lit paths, hear shouts and calls and laughter. She was sure the second she set foot inside, they would know she didn’t belong.

  When she reached Main Street and the District, she sat across from the Woodchute Motor Lodge in the shadowed alcove of a vacant building. From there, unseen, she watched the windows of the motel rooms, the cracks of light through the closed curtains, wondering who was inside, what they were doing on the beds. She caught sight of Stevie Prentiss, the girl with the birthmark, through the window of the office. She wondered at the birthmark’s splotchy shape, its visibility even from a distance, and she touched her own face. Birthmark. Marked from birth. What did that mean? Marked for what? She watched her drunken classmates gather across the street at Casa Verde and the Patty Melt and next door at the Circle K gas station, hollering to each other out open car windows. Marked to be assholes, fools, fuck-ups. One night she saw Angie Juarez’s Impala swing into the motel lot and park in front of Room 7. Angie, Stevie’s younger sister Rose, and Beto Navarro hopped out of the car, and Rose ran to the front office. Angie and Beto waited, leaning against the car, until Rose skipped out and unlocked Room 7, and all three headed inside. Jess felt that old twinge of sadness about Angie, their friendship severed for no reason Jess could fathom. She didn’t resent her finding new friends, but the moment reasserted a lingering sense of shame, as if she had done something wrong—as if something was wrong with her. And something was wrong with her, wasn’t it? With Dani, she had finally found friendship, a second family, a welcoming space she wanted to crawl inside and burrow. And now here she was obsessing about a surreal moment with Dani’s father, consumed by a ridiculous heat. She didn’t know how to fix herself, only that she better figure it out before Dani disappeared too.

  She walked through the darkened college neighborhood, past the pretty houses with their tidy shrubs and recessed porches, their soft lights and watered grass. She turned onto Piñon Drive. She passed the Newells, standing in the street to watch the glowing attic window.

&n
bsp; In her notebook, with a tooth-gouged yellow No. 2 pencil, she wrote:

  The nuts grow in clusters,

  oblong and taut,

  tender as limes to the touch.

  They cling to the branches

  afraid of falling

  though fall they must

  come fall

  Summer is too soon

  for the shaking season.

  So what is this tremble they feel?

  What is this hot change

  that pushes their skin outward

  their seams like scars?

  Shaking now, shaking

  Come, fall.

  Hurry.

  They’re losing their grip

  They can’t hold on much longer.

  Then she erased it, scratched and shaded the page in a fine sheen of carbon.

  In August, weeks before her senior year began, in the last-gasp days of summer freedom, Jess stayed over at Dani’s again. They stayed up late watching movies and eating Dusty Roads, bowls of vanilla ice cream sprinkled with malt powder and chocolate syrup. When Dani fell asleep, Jess lay in bed, straining to hear footsteps, but the house was silent aside from the occasional muffled creak or clang. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water. A door off the kitchen led to the garage, and a strip of light shone beneath it.

  She opened the door. Mr. Newell was inside, leaning into the hood of the Squareback. The door swung shut behind her, hitting her heels, and he turned.

  “Hello,” she said. She lifted her hand but then dropped it. The cement was cool under her bare feet.