Sycamore

by Bryn Chancellor

  Normal.

  She kissed Warren hard on the mouth and looked up at the dark attic window. She was sure she saw the blind twitch.

  In November, the week before Thanksgiving, in the heart of the harvest, Sundown at the Orchard began. Jess helped Iris blast the town and region with flyers and coupons to get the word out. She and Iris wrapped the shop and outlying posts with hundreds of twinkle lights, lined the gravel driveway with brown paper luminarias, decorated and organized the bags of pecans and pies and pecan sandies Iris baked with the help of Ms. G and other women in town. Tourists flocked in from Sedona and on their way down from Jerome, bundled in their coats and hats except the ones from back east in their shirtsleeves, who scoffed, “Cold, ha! It’s three degrees at home right now!” They loaded up on gifts and mingled with the locals, who made jokes about their accents and cowboy boots after they left, who gossiped in the corners and drank cider and coffee from little Styrofoam cups.

  After nine on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, when they’d almost sold out of pecans, Jess helped Paul and Iris clean up and around ten bundled herself in her puffy coat and a wool cap and gloves. Since she’d had to work late, she had her mom’s car. The engine churned twice and then kicked, and she goosed the gas, tucking her knit skirt around her calves for warmth. She turned on the headlights, and that’s when she noticed a piece of paper tucked under the driver’s-side wiper.

  A note: Meet me? Last time, I promise. I’ll leave you alone. I’ll be in the orchard.

  She looked around for him, but Iris had turned off the shop lights. She and Paul were in their house, headed to bed.

  She turned off the car and got out. She peered down the dark rows of trees and walked into them. The moon was almost full, bright enough she could see her shadow. The shells they’d missed in the sweep crunched under her shoes. She thrust her hands into her coat pockets, moving farther into the trees, checking behind her when she heard a muffled crack. Just the wind in the branches.

  He leaned against a tree at the end of the row. He stood up straight when she reached him.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said.

  “I’m not staying,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “To talk a minute. To say a few things.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Talk.”

  “I know I handled this terribly.” His voice rose, and she understood he was angry. Angry with her. “I understand why you have to shut me out. I get it. But don’t act like you didn’t feel it. You felt everything.”

  She folded her arms. “What is your problem? Nothing happened. It’s over. I’m not going to tell, if that’s what you’re worried about. Dani’s my best friend. I wouldn’t hurt her.”

  He raised his voice. “I have to watch you kissing that boy in my driveway. You’re bringing sweet potatoes to my goddamn house for Thanksgiving tomorrow. Jesus Christ.” His voice broke. He bent at the waist and covered his face. His eyes gleamed. That got to her. That, and the desperate choke in his voice.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She slumped against the tree, the bark scratching her jacket.

  “No, I’m sorry.” He grabbed handfuls of his hair and pulled. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve never done anything like this before. Everything’s a mess. I’m trying to deal with my mother’s house, and I swear, I don’t even know what day it is.”

  “Thanksgiving,” she said.

  He laughed a little and stepped closer to her. She didn’t move away.

  He reached out and cupped her cheek. “God, Jess. Look at you. I can’t stop looking at you. It’s like I’m seeing for the first time.”

  She didn’t push his hand away. She lifted her head and stared up through the bare branches, unblinking. For a brief moment, she pressed her face into his palm, and then something moved in the periphery of her vision.

  “Did you see that?” She scanned the trees but could see nothing, could hear only a faint rustle, the low hoot of an owl in the distance.

  “No. What?” He glanced behind him. “Nothing’s there. Jess, listen.”

  “But what if someone comes?”

  “I love you,” he said. He traced her eyebrow with his thumb. “That’s what I wanted to say.”

  “No,” she said. “I love Warren.”

  He laughed. “No. You don’t.”

  “Shut up,” she said, sighing as he touched her cheek. “Don’t tell me who I love.”

  He slid his hand to her neck, leaned down, and kissed her forehead. “Me,” he said.

  “No. I can’t love you.”

  “Can’t, or don’t?”

  She pulled her face away from his hand. She looked over his shoulder, through the trees toward the orchard office, catching a glimpse of the twinkle lights. “I have to go,” she said.

  “Please stay.” His breath was warm on her forehead, and that traitorous heat snuck in, coiled in her belly. She wanted to wrap her legs around him, let him push her up against the tree, let the bark chafe her jacket and scalp. She wanted to do with him what she did with that sweet boy in the night house. Rutting, she thought, and her whole body flushed.

  She pushed his chest and stepped around him. “Go home to your daughter, Adam. To your wife. To your fucking family. You love them.”

  “Jess—”

  “Shut up!” She pulled her hat lower and covered her ears. She ran through the trees to the car, hands to ears, blocking out his voice behind her. In the driver’s seat, she fumbled with the keys, her fingers numb. All of her, numb, frozen with fear.

  Who, What, Where, When

  Sixteen feet up a ladder, Paul Overton scraped dried paint off the fascia boards of the orchard’s cleaning shed. The dry flakes fluttered down, dusting the tops of his boots and the ladder rungs and the gallon of Old Forest Green at the bottom. The extension ladder, propped at a steep vertical pitch, snapped against the roof like a sail in sharp wind with each jerk of his arm. He knew better. His father had taught him how to set a ladder, but these days he was having trouble remembering what day it was. Who, What, Where, When, Why, How: the journalist’s credo. Get it in the lede, tight, no frills, and now fuck all if he couldn’t do it for himself. Who? Who knew anymore. What? Good question. He couldn’t remember what was on the grocery list or what he was about to say in the middle of a sentence or what bills were due when. He couldn’t remember what to eat, when to sleep, when to go to work, where he was when he woke up or how he got there or why he couldn’t stop the ball of rage expanding in his stomach.

  Instead, his head was cluttered with images. He kept seeing Caryn: how she rose earlier and earlier in the weeks before she couldn’t get out of bed at all; he’d find her in the kitchen, lit by the streetlight, sheet creases in her cheek. “I don’t want to sleep,” she’d say, staring out the window, at the sun on the cusp of rising. “I don’t want to miss any more of it.” (Why: Because she was dying, at motherfucking thirty-four years of age.) He kept seeing Sean on that bike. (When: Two days ago, four months after they buried his mother.) The boy swerved toward the curb at the same moment Paul realized he’d fallen too far behind to grab him (Why: Because he’d been lost in thinking about his late wife), and then Sean was off the curb and into the street, and Paul was shouting and running faster than he’d ever run. He heard the squeal of brakes as he flung himself toward the bike and knocked Sean to the pavement. Both of them lay on the hot street, the bumper of a car above Paul’s shoulder, Paul’s left wrist ballooning and Sean with a scraped elbow and knee.

  And so Paul had brought his boy—and himself—home, to figure out what to do next. Stay in Phoenix? Sell the house? Donate her clothes? And fuck all if now he hadn’t added a film reel of his childhood to the images clogging his mind: his father carrying this aluminum ladder around the orchard, leaning it on a pecan trunk and then climbing high into the branches. His mother, her cloud of hair shaved into the sink the week after his father’s funeral. Dani Newell beneath him, her skirt up around her waist. Je
ss Winters, her hands flailing. And now, now, the news about the bones. He didn’t think he could take one more picture in his head. He scraped until he was out of breath and had to grab the roof with his injured hand to keep from flying backward.

  Paul rested his forearms on the roof and took a sip of coffee from the mug he’d set on the attached paint tray. He tried to catch his breath. The morning air was still cool, a bit humid, rich with the smell of dirt and citrusy tang of the pecan trees. At home in Phoenix, it’d be well over 90 degrees. He’d grown to love the wild, never-ending summer heat, when it was 100 degrees at midnight when he stepped out of the newspaper office after filing a breaking story. He’d go running at that late hour—the best way to get rid of any simmering anger, which had over the years led him to throw and break tools, to kick and punch through drywall, until Caryn got him to see a counselor. After his run, he’d stop to stretch, the sidewalk still hot under his fingers, and then he’d go home to his wife and baby son. He’d step inside, and except for the glow of a nightlight in the hall bath, all was dark, the windows blocked with blackout curtains to help with the heat and with Caryn’s bouts of insomnia. A silence like the orchard, solemn and protected among the trees. He found his way to them with his eyes closed. “Where are you?” Caryn would say, flinging out her arm from the sheets, and he’d say, “I’m right here.” And he would think of another sense of right: restored, safe, healthy. Yes, he’d think, touching his wife’s cheek. He was right, here.

  He craned his neck and looked at the symmetrical rows of trees, shaggy now with their tooth-edged leaflets and bent with the weight of the ripening pecans. Paul used to run inside those trees, up and down, for miles. He’d been assured by the linearity, the routine in a world upended by his father’s sudden death. In these days he’d been home, he’d been running them in the early mornings, taking the eastern rows to the river path on the far end. He’d then loop the town, waving to Stevie Prentiss at the old lake and to the woman who walked in the bright green visor and to Angie Juarez on her way to the shop, but otherwise keeping his head down.

  Though he had yet to admit it, he knew why he had come. This visit was more than a visit. He was trying this on for him and Sean, seeing if he could be here again, if he could move from journalist to pecan orchard owner, from city to town, from his future to his past. His mother told him he was welcome to stay as long as he needed. She told him she could help with Sean. She said, “This is your home, son.” But was it? He couldn’t explain the relief he felt (and guilt for that relief) away from here. He couldn’t tell her he’d only felt able to make a family once he’d left this place where everything had fallen apart. Nothing was right, here. Of course, now the family he made had fallen apart too. Caryn was gone, and Paul had no choice but to change. Who: a widower, a father of a four-year-old boy.

  “Dad!” Sean called.

  Startled, Paul turned, and with the sway of his body, the ladder popped off the roof. He pitched his weight forward until it snapped tight again. His son stood near the base of the ladder with Iris, who held Sean’s hand and waved a newspaper. She wore her slippers and cotton nightdress. She said something he couldn’t make out.

  “Can’t hear you!” he called. He could hardly hear her in the house, either. In her socks or foam slippers, she whispered around the wood floors. She was sixty now, an age he could no longer ignore, her silver hair still cropped short.

  “Come down,” Iris said. “Esther’s here. You’ll want to see this.” She shook the paper, and even from that height he could see the loose skin drooping on the underside of her arm like a wet sock. He looked at the fascia board. She had lived long enough to turn sixty. Who: his mother, a widow for almost twenty years. He knew what she wanted to show him, the news he’d seen in the paper at the coffee shop early that morning. Who, what, where, when: Jess Winters, a girl gone missing at age seventeen from Sycamore almost two decades ago. Why, how: No one knew.

  He said, “I saw it.”

  “Are you okay up there? Be careful. That ladder looks off.”

  “Mom, I’m fine.” He tried not to bristle at her tone, her constant clucking and worrying. “I’ll be down in a minute, okay? Let me finish this stretch.”

  Iris didn’t answer. When he glanced down, she gazed at the orchard rows, shielding her eyes.

  “Miss Esther brought doughnuts, Dad,” Sean said. “Doughnuts, doughnuts, doughnuts.” He dropped Iris’s hand and started to run in circles, his pajama top ballooning with air. The white bandage on his knee flapped loose.

  Iris squinted up at Paul and swatted the paper against her open palm. “Come down, honey. And be careful.” She walked toward the house, seeming to float across the grass.

  He sighed and started down, keeping his weight forward. He needed to reset the ladder anyway.

  “Hey, Esther,” Paul said, leaning into her hug. She still smelled like the vanilla lotion she’d kept on her school desk—he always thought of her when Caryn used a store tester. Esther had been the first one there when his father died, bringing box after box of pastries and answering the door and phone and running errands. She didn’t look much different than she had then, a little heavier around the hips maybe, a little grayer in her frizzy curls. Her face, with those sharp blue eyes and round chin, reminded him of a cat. Or an elf. It always had shamed him when he would get aroused when she’d pace in front of the class in all her loud strangeness, her skirts swirling like a dust devil. Of course, he could get aroused by a stiff wind then. Hell, just the word stiff would do the trick. But she was the one who taught him how to write. “Stop bullshitting,” she’d write in the margins. “Say what you mean. Shut up and get on with it, darling. SNORE. Get to the point. Careful with commas; they can change everything.”

  “Hey yourself, honey,” Esther said. “Goddamn it. I hate it for you. Hate it.”

  He pulled away gently. “Thanks.”

  “Fucking cancer.”

  Iris said, “Esther,” and nodded at Sean, who sat at the counter with a doughnut on a plate in front of him. His eyes were round.

  Esther said, “There’s a time and place for swearing, darling, and this is one of them. I’m sure your father knows.”

  Paul said, “We left the cuss jar at home, didn’t we, buddy?”

  Sean nodded and stuck his finger in the hole of his doughnut. “The f-word’s a quarter.”

  Esther laughed. “Smart kid.” She pointed at the white pastry box on the counter, printed with yum in bright yellow block letters. “Have one. Save me from myself.”

  Iris pointed at Sean’s doughnut. “Eat. Don’t play with it.”

  “I am,” Sean said. He broke off a piece but didn’t put it in his mouth.

  Esther touched Paul’s arm. “Tell me about the news racket. I keep track of your bylines. You keeping those crooks in the legislature on their toes?”

  “Trying,” Paul said. “I’m on leave right now.”

  “Of course you are.” She smacked her forehead and then tapped the paper folded at her elbow. “You saw the paper today?”

  He nodded. “This morning when I went for coffee.”

  Iris said, “I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe it’s her.”

  “Who?” Sean said.

  “Oh, a friend of your father’s from high school,” Iris said.

  Paul shook his head, irritated by the description. “Not exactly a friend. Someone I knew.”

  Iris frowned at him. “She was a friend. A good kid,” she said. “I don’t care about the rest of it.” She picked up a cloth from the sink and wiped the counter.

  His hands curled into fists. “You don’t care about what they did to Dani? Or Rachel?”

  “They didn’t do it to Dani and Rachel. It happened.”

  “It didn’t just happen. It wasn’t an act of God, like a hurricane or something.”

  “So what?” Iris said. “That’s not what we’re talking about. What is wrong with you? Think about her mother. Think about the bigger picture here.�
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  “Bones in a dry wash,” Esther said. “A goddamn ditch.”

  Sean looked at Paul. “What bones, Daddy?”

  Paul patted Sean’s back. “Nothing. It’s okay, buddy.” He knocked his sprained wrist against the counter and winced. He rubbed at the elastic bandage. “I forgave them a long time ago.”

  Esther narrowed her eyes. “Forgave them? How noble of you.” She snorted. “What did you have to forgive? What business was it of yours? I love Dani and Rachel, too, but, honey, this isn’t the time for petty teenage grievances.”

  He started at the vehemence in her tone. “They were like family to me. In a way.”

  “They weren’t your family,” Iris said.

  “I said ‘like’ family. But they might have been if—”

  “You weren’t going to marry her,” Iris said. “You were too young.”

  “Marry who?” Sean picked at the bandage at his elbow. “Mama?”

  “No, buddy. It’s okay. Leave that alone.”

  Iris scrubbed at a spot on the tile. “I did my best, you know. I did my best without him. I made the best family I could.”

  Paul blinked. He saw her standing over the sink with the clippers, buzzing her head, the clouds of hair falling to the basin. She’d said, “Who needs it?” She’d never grown it out again, kept it cropped short.

  “Mom, I know that. That’s not what I’m saying.”

  Esther folded her arms on the counter and rested her chin on her forearms. “Adam was like your father.”

  “No,” Paul said. He pictured Adam Newell, the man with his face contorted at the dinner table, the man in the moonlit orchard. That old angry heat expanded in his stomach, a sensation that had died down once he’d moved away but with which he always wrestled. Deep breaths, love, he could hear Caryn say. I don’t want your heart to blow.