Sycamore

by Bryn Chancellor

  “Hello, Jess.” He picked up a rag from the workbench and wiped his hands. He wiped and wiped until there couldn’t have been a speck of anything left. He sat on the front bumper, his hands braced on his thighs. Then he looked straight at her. Hawk nose, hawklike intensity.

  She understood then she hadn’t imagined the night on the deck. She knew why she hadn’t seen him since. He didn’t have to say it. It was there in the solemnness of his face, the furrowed brow, the pulled-down corners of his mouth. She locked her legs together and held the doorframe.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ll go.”

  He said, “It’s not your fault.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “You know what I mean,” he said. He sighed, long and hard, and he pressed down on the bumper, half lifting himself. “You’re the age of my child.”

  “I’m not a child,” she said.

  “You think you’re not.” He laughed a little.

  At that laugh, the confusion of the past weeks—really of the past year—bloomed into anger. “Don’t laugh at me,” she said. “Don’t assume you know me. You don’t know me. I’m not your daughter. Just because you’ve been this age doesn’t mean you know me.”

  He nodded and wiped his forehead, leaving a black streak. “Sorry. You’re right.”

  Though her skin burned, her teeth began to chatter. She took a step closer to him.

  “Stay over there,” he said.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “I’m Dani’s father. I’m a married man. I love my family. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said. She shook her head. She understood what he was saying but not what she was feeling. Her bones ached, as if they were growing right that minute, straining against the muscle. She pointed at him. “Is this even real? You’re sitting right there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “So what is this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I don’t know, Jess.” He slapped the rag against his leg.

  “But I didn’t imagine it, right? You feel it, too?”

  He twisted the rag. “We need to forget about this.”

  The car rocked as he emphasized his words with the weight of his body. He clenched his jaw. He clenched the bumper, the veins in his hands popping. In his body, she saw the truth: it was real. Her first reaction was relief: she was not alone in this feeling. She hadn’t made it up. Someone else felt it, too.

  He said, “We have to forget it. We have to go back to normal.”

  Meaning this, what she was feeling, was abnormal. That she was abnormal. Wrong. Nothing new there.

  Her initial relief turned to excruciating sadness, and tears stung her eyes—which made her furious. Fury that she didn’t understand her own emotions, or his, fury at her abnormality, fury at herself for that lustful shaking heat inside, for wanting something she knew to be wrong. All these conflicting emotions surged, combusted, strangely alchemic. She pulled herself to her full height, rising to her tiptoes. Her rear’d arm / crested the world.

  “Go ahead, Adam,” she said, his name in her mouth for the first time. “Forget me.”

  Maybe You Already Know

  Hi love, it’s me. I’m back. I guess I don’t need to announce myself, although who knows. I thought I’d kicked this habit years ago, but here I am. I still have days when I want to talk to you, like we used to. Sit out on the deck after putting Paul to bed, mix up a gin and tonic, shoot the shit. The worst part is I’m having trouble hearing your voice. I can hear the crickets and cicadas and the fizz of the tonic, I can smell the lime, but I can’t remember your damn voice.

  I’m out on the deck now. It’s late. I just got in. A long day. Lots to tell. The moon’s hanging low on the horizon, and the stars are out by the millions. The monsoon blew through earlier, and I can smell the damp grass. You better believe it’s pretty, buster. I hope you can see it. I think of you up there as particles, floating above me in some part of the universe. I figure you had to go somewhere. It’s like you always quoted Carl Sagan: We are all made of star stuff. I loved how you said that, imitating him. Starrrr stuff. That I can still hear.

  Well, first off, Paul’s come home, with Sean. First time since Caryn died. Got here a couple of days ago. Maybe you already know. I don’t know how he’s doing because he won’t tell me anything. You should see him. He looks like my father, with those bushy caterpillar eyebrows. Maybe his will turn gray too. And he looks like you, of course. Those big old ears. Some days he’ll turn and I’ll see his profile and catch my breath. Smart as ever, but also lost. And angry. That tension still radiates from him. I guess you never saw that part of him, although maybe you know. Heaven forbid I ask him anything. Hates it when I fuss and worry. I hate it myself. I’ve turned into a big fat worrier, like my mother. I’ll bet you can guess how much I like admitting that.

  After you died, I used to sneak into Paul’s room and stand over his bed and watch his chest rise and fall. I’d stand there in the dark and conjure elaborate scenarios of someone trying to hurt him, and I’d grow murderous in my imagination, punching and kicking at the air, at the fictional intruders, while he lay there sleeping, having exhausted himself from running god knows how many miles. Some nights he wouldn’t be there, and I knew he was sneaking out to meet Dani but I never busted him or let on I knew. I worried about him out there, but I worried more if I held too tight, he’d never come home. Well, he’s home now.

  I know it’s not easy for him to be here, but the truth is, it’s not easy for me, either. Because it makes me think about you. About how much we lost, about what I’d thought my life was supposed to be. All those emotions I thought I’d buried come rushing back. Because I want to be done—I’m done grieving you, damn it. But that’s not how it works. Not for him. Not for me. Coming up on the nineteenth anniversary of me finding you out in the orchard, lying next to the trimmers like you were sleeping. Just taking a nap.

  God, we were so young, weren’t we? A couple of idiot college dropouts, backpacking around the West, hitchhiking, sleeping under that great big moon, thinking we’d live forever and a day. When your granddad died, us thinking, yes, yes, let’s work the land. Another adventure. I remember those early days, here with Paul on my hip, shaking scorpions out of my shoes, whacking at the trees with a broomstick to get the pecans to fall, and thinking, Dear god, what have we done? And there I was not even that much later, a widow at forty-one. Now here I am, almost sixty, an old woman talking to herself out on the porch. Christ on a crutch, as Esther would say.

  But you know all this. I’m repeating myself, as always. While we’re young, Iris, right? Funny, I know you said that all the time, but I can’t hear how you said it. Well, we’re not young anymore, that’s for sure. But I made it. Still here, keeping it together. Mostly. I made it this far without you.

  The other big news. A new woman in town, she’s a new professor at the Syc, was out walking in the dry wash out by the old lake where you used to fish—shoot, I don’t know if I ever told you that story. Not long after you died, a sinkhole opened up under it, and whoosh—it was gone overnight. Maybe I already told you. Anyway, the woman was walking in the wash, said she was looking for rocks to add to Stevie Prentiss’s pile. Oh, Stevie. You should see her now. Still as odd as she was as a kid, and for years she’s been gathering up stones and placing them inside and around the old lake. She moves them, changes the patterns, adds new circles and lines. It’s lovely, actually. Our own strange Spiral Jetty. Anyway, the professor! While we’re young, Iris! I’m not good with straight lines, buster, never have been.

  The point of this is, the professor found bones. Wedged in a deep crack in the wash. They think it might be Jess Winters. I know you never knew her, but maybe you know anyway. That was a tough one when she never came home. I hired her out here, oh, about six months or so after you’d died. She and her mother Maud moved here alone, and Maud delivers our mail here, and I told her I was looking to hire some
one part-time, so she sent Jess on over. Great kid. Great worker. Sharp, funny. Quirky, really. Struck me as a kind of old soul. Then all hell broke loose with Adam Newell, and Paul right in the middle of it, like he needed that to worry about on top of everything. I didn’t know Jess well, certainly not like Maud knew her. She was a lovely girl, but that wasn’t it. She loved the orchard, and the fact is, she reminded me of you. She was fascinated by the trees. She soaked up everything I told her—all those things you and I figured out as we spliced together our life out here. And then she was gone, too.

  It’s hard to believe how long it’s been. Maud—every day, she still brings the mail. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor missing child. Jesus. Some days I can hardly stand to see her coming. She’s changed so much. So gray now, her back humped. We’ve all been waiting for this news. For any news. Something. I was over there tonight after Esther called me. Esther and I brought food. Sat with her. What else can we do? Rachel would have come, but she’s out of town. At this point, there’s nothing much to do but wait. The police are running tests. I haven’t had a chance to tell Paul yet. He was in bed by the time I got home.

  After all this time, still no one knows what happened. I mean, we know what happened before, of course. I was at Thanksgiving dinner, and Rachel blasted the town with that letter. But the night she disappeared, he was in Flagstaff. He still lives up there, I guess. Haven’t seen him since. Rachel still doesn’t talk to him. I don’t know if Dani does. Rachel remarried, gosh, what, ten years ago now? Hugh’s a good guy. Town attorney. Ten years younger, good for her. But Dani, poor kid. I know I wasn’t sorry when she broke up with Paul. They were too serious, too young. But I didn’t think she’d fall apart quite the way she did. Got into Stanford and you better believe Rachel scraped together that tuition. Then she failed out, came home, worked odd jobs. She finished her degree a year ago, finally. Hallelujah, as Rachel said. She works out at the medical clinic now. A phlebotomist. She’s living in Esther’s guest house. Aside from Maud, I think it hit her the hardest.

  So much for plans, eh, Beau? So much for dreams.

  Do I need to speak? Maybe you can read my thoughts. Maybe I’ve breathed you in.

  The truth is, Beau, I’m tired. I’m tired of running this place. Our place. There. I said it. Thinking about retiring. About what’s next. That’s the age I am now.

  If Paul comes home for good, then great. He can take it over. If he decides not to, well, then we have a decision to make.

  We. After all this time, I still do it. We have a son, we have a grandson, we own an orchard.

  I have a decision to make.

  I still have the acreage up in Payson. I still think about our plans: selling the orchard, the land, the house. Taking our profits and building our retirement home in the mountains. A house with pine beams and a big fat deck overlooking the lake and not a pecan tree in sight. Hiking, cooking, traveling, reading books, taking care of the grandkids. A perfect life. I’m sure it would have been, or pretty near to it. I don’t know. It’s easy to sentimentalize, to idealize you. You sure as heck weren’t perfect, buster, and neither am I. But somehow we were perfect together. Don’t you think?

  Anyway, now I have to think about my life. I’ve outlived my husband and a seventeen-year-old girl and friends and too many young soldiers to count and god knows who else. You would think by now I would have a goddamn clue what I want. You’d think I’d have figured it out by now.

  Do you know what’s in my heart, Beau? What I don’t tell you? Can you see inside of me?

  Because I’ve been thinking. Thinking and thinking and thinking. And you know what I want to do? I want to go to college. Almost sixty, and I think it’s time for this old girl to learn a thing or two. About art, and philosophy, and literature, and the whole blooming universe, all that starrrr stuff. To get out of my body and into my mind for a while.

  I wish you were here to tell me if I’m right. I wish I could hear your voice.

  The Shaking Season

  September–November 1991

  The envelope, with her typed name and address in the center but the left corner blank, arrived on a Saturday in her mailbox in early September after school had started. Jess collected the mail after work as usual and almost missed it. There was never anything for her, except for those cards from California with her father’s phone number, which she stuck in her desk drawer.

  Inside was a torn slip of paper folded in half. At the top were two words: “I can’t.” Beneath was an address and a date—Sept. 7, 1991—followed by the words “after midnight.” Adhered to the sheet with two strips of masking tape was a silver key.

  Jess sat on her bed and stared at the paper, crushing it in her grip. Of course she knew it was from him, but she didn’t understand. She ran her finger over those two cryptic words: I can’t. If he couldn’t, then why was he giving her an address? Was he asking her to meet him, or wasn’t he? Can’t what? See her anymore? Figure out what to do? She recalled her last words, her bold admonition on the last night she’d seen him: Forget me. She gasped as she understood.

  Her mother pulled into the driveway then, and Jess jumped up from the bed in a panic. She ripped the key from the paper, balled up the note, and threw it in the wastebasket under a tissue and string of floss, then pulled it out and shoved it in the drawer with her father’s cards. Her mom called out, “I’m home, J-bird. I picked up dinner. Come eat—I’m starving!” Jess stuffed the key in her pocket, pulled the crumpled paper from the drawer, wrote the address down in her notebook, and tore the paper to bits. Later, she would sneak the town map from the car’s glove box, but now she hurried out to meet her mother. That skipping sensation again: a stone across the lake, her ripples bending outward.

  At midnight, Jess again opened the front door and slipped outside. Again, she ran on long legs, loping down Roadrunner Lane toward town, a silver key loose in her jeans pocket. A cracked eggshell moon, three-quarters round, lit her way. The desert around her rustled. Nocturnal, like her. In the distance she saw what she thought was another person, but she didn’t try to hide, just turned the corner and kept running. Catching speed, she leaped across the low dips and then lunged upward, her thighs burning.

  The address was a house on a secluded dead-end street not far from her own. A car sat parked at the end of the street, but not one she recognized. She squinted at a sign in the yard: For Sale. No porch light, no car in the driveway, no movement in the drape-drawn windows. She stood on the curb and scanned the house, unsure what to do next. The only light was at a neighbor’s house several yards up the street.

  She walked up to the front door. Still uncertain, she slid the key in the lock and turned it just as the door opened.

  “Quickly,” he said. He moved to let her in, and she stepped over the threshold.

  Inside, her nostrils flared at the warm air, stagnant with lemon cleaner and cigarette smoke. The back window’s curtains, partly drawn, let in a shaft of moonlight, and she could see that the entryway opened into a large carpeted living room. Not a stick of furniture. No trace of who once lived here. He knelt in the center of the living room, where he’d spread a blanket, and turned on a small propane camping lantern. Its fabric bulbs glowed white.

  “Come in,” he said, gesturing toward the blanket.

  She hovered near the blanket and then sat cross-legged in the corner of the room, her back against the wall. She hadn’t yet looked him in the face. “Whose house is this?”

  “A client’s,” he said. He wore loose Bermuda shorts and tennis shoes without socks, a windbreaker left unzipped. “It’s been on the market a while. Listed too high, though they won’t listen to me.” He spoke faster than usual and fiddled with his jacket zipper. Instead of sitting, he began to pace along the edge of the blanket.

  She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them, watching his feet move back and forth on the carpet.

  “It’s—safe,” he said. “They moved out of town. No one will come.”

  �
�I see,” she said. The words sounded dramatic, suggesting she understood the subtext, which was the farthest thing from the truth. She saw nothing. She couldn’t see beyond her own hands. She couldn’t see his face. And she did not feel in any way safe as the musty air pressed down on her, as the silence stretched.

  He said, “I wasn’t sure you would show up.”

  “I wasn’t sure I should.”

  “I know. This is strange.” He rubbed his hand over his hair. He began to walk the whole square of the blanket, stepping along its sides as if it were a maze. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “In private.”

  “What about?”

  “Jess,” he said. He stopped pacing and knelt on the blanket, facing her. He gazed at her across the lantern, his face in shadow.

  “We’re supposed to forget it. Go back to normal,” she said. That was the word she’d repeated to herself in the last three weeks, as she trudged through the orchard in the heat, the ground slick and muddy from monsoon rain, as she huddled on the couch next to her mother watching Masterpiece Mystery, as she curled in her bed with a book open, unread, as she started her senior year, walking the halls with her best friend but unable to meet her eyes.

  He crawled toward her in the corner. She could see his face now, the shadow of stubble, the knuckle in his nose, a divot in his left eyebrow she hadn’t noticed before.

  He said, “I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about it. I feel like I’m losing my mind. Trying to figure it out. To explain it away. I keep going round and round. All the reasons it’s wrong, all the reasons I’m a terrible person for even thinking about it.”

  She nodded. If she understood anything, it was spinning thoughts and feeling terrible. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept through the night. She wanted to punch a hole in her skull to release the pressure.

  “Nothing’s changed,” he said. “It’s still wrong.” He moved closer. He kneeled in front of her, his face lit from below, mottled with shadow. The knot in his throat moved up and down. “I don’t understand what’s happening. Is this a midlife crisis? Is this what everyone talks about?”