Sycamore

by Bryn Chancellor

  “He wasn’t like my father. He was in no way like my father.”

  “No, I mean he was like family, like a father figure,” Esther said. “That’s why you took it to heart.”

  He clenched his jaw. “He was not like my father in any way.”

  “Okay.” Esther sighed. “Whatever you say.”

  “But he was Dani’s father.”

  “Dani’s father,” Esther said. “But not Jess’s.”

  The heat pushed its way up into his limbs. He leaned over the counter, folded the top of the doughnut box down, and then squashed the box with the heels of his hands, flattening whatever remained inside. They all stared at him. Sean peeled off his elbow bandage and stuffed it inside the hole of the doughnut. His elbow scab had turned a reddish purple.

  “Well, I guess that’s that.” Esther stood up and dusted her hands.

  “Paul,” Iris said.

  Paul pointed at the crushed box, angry at himself now for losing control. “Can we talk about something else?”

  Esther said, “I have to be going anyway. I have to get to the bakery. Stop by if you like. Dani’s renting my guest house now. She works at the medical clinic. Alive and well.” She picked up her purse and walked to the door. She opened it and looked at him. “Adam’s still up in Kachina Village, as far as I know. Alone.” She smiled and shut the door with a gentle click.

  Paul stared at the flattened box. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Iris watching him as she wrung the cloth in her hands. Sean swiveled his stool from side to side. His fingers were brown with maple glaze.

  “Don’t ask me if I’m okay,” he said to Iris.

  “I’m not. I won’t.”

  To Sean, Paul said, “Okay, let’s get you cleaned up, buddy. Grandma’s taking you to the library for story time.”

  “I am,” Iris said. “You bet.”

  “We’re family, right, Grandma?” Sean said.

  “That’s right, honey,” she said to Sean, but looking at Paul. “We sure are.”

  Paul lifted Sean from the stool and carried him to the sink, biting his lip at the pain in his wrist. He turned on the faucet and lifted the boy up by the waist. “Rinse.”

  Sean rubbed his hands under the stream of water. “What happened to your friend, Daddy? Did she die too?”

  “I don’t know, buddy.” Paul glanced at his mother, who cupped her hand over her mouth. He held the boy tight and let the water run.

  Paul reset the ladder at the right pitch and climbed up. He kept scraping. The old paint had blistered and cracked, and he had to scrape down to bare wood. He’d have to prime before he put on another coat. His father had taught him that, too. Not Adam Newell. If he had a father figure beyond his own, it was Caryn’s father, Ken, a retired police detective who cried at old songs and weddings and baby pictures.

  If Paul was honest, though, it wasn’t as simple as his denial to Esther and his mother. The Newells indeed had been a family to him, and Adam a kind of parent. Of course they had. Given the timing—he’d started dating Dani six months after his father died—it would have been strange had he not attached himself as he had, if he hadn’t lunged to the safety of their vessel, clinging like a drowning victim. The first time Paul had walked into the Newells’ house, in fact, he’d had the sensation of floating. No sense of waking in the dark and wondering where he was, if anything would be right again. No blanket of grief smothering him until he ran into the orchard and ran. No dreams and imaginings of his father’s last moment before he fell over dead with a rake in hand. No Iris hovering, worrying, checking on him every five minutes, wanting him to quit track because he could get hurt. With the Newells, he found a family intact, dazzling in their wit and stories, comforting in both their togetherness and their autonomy. Adam, Rachel, and Dani Newell. Father, mother, daughter. All three of them, nuclear, unexploded. Their steadiness steadied him. He felt all right, there.

  And of course he’d found Dani there, too. Pretty, brainy, privately wild Dani Newell, whom he thought he’d love until the end of days. Until the night when everything began to unravel, when the anger first forced its way through.

  The night before Thanksgiving, Paul helped his mother and Jess close down after Sundown at the Orchard. He waited until Iris climbed in bed, and then he crept outside, running through the orchard toward the river, to the path that would take him the back way into town, to Dani’s. The bright moon guided him through the trees. Nestled in his backpack was a new box of condoms. It wasn’t very late, after ten, so he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to climb in her window, if Adam would still be up painting or if Rachel would be up reading or getting ready for tomorrow’s dinner. Maybe they could sneak out into the backyard. The thought was sexy: to be out there in the cold dark with the glowing window above them, the moon lighting up their bodies. He felt himself grow hard. God, he loved Dani, and god, he loved sex. Fucking, she called it sometimes, in his ear, and he thought he’d lose his mind. Fuck me, she’d say, and Jesus, he’d almost go right then before he was inside her.

  He was deep in the trees, almost to the river trail, when he heard a noise. A scuffling, a low swish of leaves, a crack of twigs. His first thought was javelina, and he stopped, looking around. It would be bad to startle a pack. Then he saw the source: two people standing against a tree. He’d started to walk toward them, puzzled, thinking at first they were tourists. A man and a girl. He’d been about to call out, Hello, what’s going on? Can I help you? when the man stepped forward and touched the girl’s face.

  The man said, “God, Jess. Look at you.”

  The voice startled Paul so much he fell to his knees. He knew that voice. He crawled toward a tree trunk and pressed himself against it. He held his breath. An owl hooted. He peered around the tree, trying to calm his gasping breaths. He stared at Adam’s face, at the sharp curve of his nose in profile. He recognized Jess’s puffy coat then, her curly hair sticking out from her wool cap. He couldn’t look away.

  “I love you,” Adam said, his hand on her face.

  Paul kneeled in the damp grass and watched as Adam kissed her forehead, and then he began to crawl along the path toward his house. He crawled and crawled and then leaped to his feet and tried to run. But he was aroused. He was shocked and aroused and ashamed at his arousal all at once. He stumbled at an awkward gait, his pack slamming his spine, chased by the image of Adam’s face and his declaration in the moonlight, by the burning rage building in his belly. Not a father. A man, his jaw clenched with desire.

  Paul scraped paint all afternoon and into the early evening. His wrists, shoulders, and back would be sore tomorrow—his sprained wrist throbbed—but he didn’t want to stop. He kept thinking, One more patch. Iris and Sean came home in the afternoon with a sack full of library books, and Paul took a break to eat a sandwich and read to his son. When Sean went down for his nap, Paul went outside. He stepped up and down the ladder to refill his water bottle and reapply sunblock, making sure to reset the ladder each time. He took a break when the monsoon swept through, a brief furious rain that washed away the green flecks of paint and cooled the air. He breathed. He breathed his way to calm, the way his counselor taught him when he’d finally agreed to go at Caryn’s insistence.

  Iris called to him to come in for supper, and he waved her off, told her he’d be in in a minute, to get started without him. He wanted to finish the last stretch so he could start priming tomorrow. He was still working when the sun set. His mother called to him again.

  “Paul!” she said. “Come on. Sean’s going to need a bath before bed.”

  He sighed. “One minute!”

  He thought he heard her say, “Jesus Christ.” She turned on the outdoor lights. The house lit up with twinkle lights. Those lights. She left them up all year.

  They had been Jess Winters’s idea. He could still see Jess out here with his mother, twisting the cords around the posts, his mother locking them in place with a staple gun. The night she’d disappeared had been a Sundown night a fe
w days before Christmas. Usually one of their busiest times but slow that weekend because it had been pouring rain for two days. Almost a foot of snow had dumped on Flagstaff, closing I-40. He remembered the details because he’d had to tell the police several times. He hadn’t seen Jess that night, not at all, but that wasn’t a surprise; she hadn’t been coming to the orchard since Thanksgiving—the last day he’d seen her.

  The details of Thanksgiving were less clear. He’d barely slept after he returned from the orchard, trying to make sense of what he’d seen, trying to figure out how to tell Dani. The rage had simmered all night. Rage, plus a sick sense of shame for being turned on by seeing them, plus a strange feeling of betrayal. Adam wasn’t the father he’d believed him to be. And his father: still gone. Nothing was all right after all. He’d not planned to make a scene, but at dinner, as he watched them smile and pass heaping bowls and share pleasantries, the boiled-over rage blindsided him, pushing him out of his chair. He could still feel the cold weight of the butter knife in his hand, the satisfying thud it made against the wall. He could smell the cinnamon and nutmeg of the crushed apple pie. He could see the terror on Jess’s face, hear the whimper in her throat. Her hands, thrashing like a hummingbird trapped against a window. When the memories crept in like this, the two moments sometimes conflated: Jess against a tree in the orchard, Jess frozen at a dining table. Trapped, he realized now, first by Adam, and then by him.

  It was almost dark when Paul finished scraping. Twilight. Dusk, Caryn called it. Her favorite time of day. The time when things slip through, she said. He heard her voice in his ear, something she’d murmured in her last days. Meet me in the dusk, love. I’ll be there.

  Paul stood on his father’s ladder and he called out, “I’m right here.” Right here. Right, here. A comma could change everything. And everything could change in the smallest space, the smallest breath of time.

  He looked at the lights twined around his mother’s house, at the lights of Jerome up on the hill. Ethereal, Dani had called them, when they sat in her car and watched them together. Before she’d stopped seeing him, stopped talking to him altogether. Here he was, at his family’s house, in the ethereal dusk. Home.

  He took a step down, and his foot slipped. He missed the step. In a panic, he flung his right arm out away from the roof, and the ladder lifted. He lunged forward, trying to correct, and for a moment the ladder hovered and seemed to stop straight in the air. But then gravity won, and Paul was falling. He let go of the ladder and jumped, some twelve feet off the ground. He tried to turn his body to land on his feet so he could take the tumble in a forward roll. He almost made it. Almost. He landed on two feet and rolled forward, but his shoulder wrenched beneath him.

  Stunned, he lay in the grass—thank god it wasn’t cement—and assessed the pain. Ankle, a little twisted, but he could move it. Shoulder, throbbing, on fire. But he was breathing. He lay on his back, not yet touching his shoulder. He groaned as the pain rose to the surface, and he choked back tears. What: A father, an idiot man not paying attention, crying like a boy on the lawn. Where: Right here. Home. If he could ever make it right. Why: Because too many people he loved were gone, buried in the earth, leaving him—boy turned man, man turned father, but still a son, always—lying faceup in the grass, weeping, alive.

  At the Front Door

  At sunset, Rachel Fischer hurried home from the theater, half skipping, half running down the sidewalk. She was late for dinner. Hugh was cooking them an anniversary meal—eleven years!—and she forgot. Forgot! Though it was summer and she was technically “off”—ha!—she was helping stage-manage the town’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof because many of her students had roles. Dress rehearsal was tomorrow, the opening in two days, and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were they behind. She’d been marking the stage, rolls of neon spike tape shoved up her arms like bracelets, her knees and spine screaming from crouching and kneeling on the wood, when the clock tower struck. She’d run out of the black box and into the fading sunshine, wincing at the brightness, the tape rolls clacking around her wrists.

  She darted up the driveway and checked her watch. Ten—well, fifteen—minutes late, but that wasn’t good. They had just spent three days—three days she couldn’t afford to take off from rehearsals—with Dr. Steve in Prescott talking about their exasperating habits: her constant lateness and absence, her tendency to be distant, her obsession with work; his neediness stemming from lack of self-esteem, his hypersensitivity to perceived criticism. She shoved the tape rolls in her bag.

  “Honey, I’m here!” she called, out of breath. “I’m home.”

  For a moment, she forgot and expected the Captain to stumble out with his sweet hoarse bark. Poor doggy. They’d boxed up his dishes and toys and put them on a shelf in the garage, as she couldn’t bring herself to donate them yet. The house seemed so quiet now. Even though she wished Dani had handled things differently with the Captain, Rachel was relieved she hadn’t had to make the call to put him down. Almost seventeen years she’d had him, bless his heart. Such a little guy, but he’d filled up the emptiness. Maud had been the one to name him. Well, hello, Captain Barks-a-Lot, she’d said, giving him a pat. He hopped right in her lap.

  Maud. Rachel had called and left a message, and then got caught up in the production, forgetting to try again. Jesus, what was wrong with her? When was she going to get her head on straight?

  “Hugh! I’m here.” No answer. “Sweetheart, I forgot the olives,” she said. “Hugh?”

  He wasn’t in the kitchen. He wasn’t in the bedrooms, or the garage, though his car was there, or up in the attic, or on the deck. The house smelled of garlic and onions, and the oven was on. She peered in. Veggie lasagna. Her favorite. Her stomach growled—what had she eaten today? O hell-kite, she couldn’t recall. She washed her hands and looked around for a note. Nothing.

  She sat down at the dining table, which was set for two with unlit candles, a bottle of chilled white. “Hugh!” she yelled, irritated, half expecting him to pop out from a hiding place and surprise her. But he didn’t. He wasn’t there.

  Well, didn’t that beat the band. She poured herself a glass of wine. He must have forgotten something at the store. He wouldn’t leave. She was only ten—well, fifteen—minutes late. She remembered his face at Dr. Steve’s, plaintive, lip quivering, and what was wrong with her that she felt not sympathy but irritation? She was busy. Staging a play took time. Not to mention she had classes to prep, and don’t get her started on committee work. She was in charge of new faculty orientation this year, and she was already behind. Thank god they had only two new faculty members, Laura Drennan in history and Wyatt What’s-His-Face in English. God, Laura Drennan. What a thing to have happened. New in town, and you find a body. Anyway, that was how it worked at the Syc, too much to do, not enough time to do it. At Dr. Steve’s, she had promised Hugh she would be more conscientious. Yes, she would make a plan to retire in the next few years—yes, it was time, yes, she wanted to spend time with him, yes, yes, yes. But now here she was, two days later, back to her old habits. What could she say? They were old habits for a reason.

  She stared around the dining room, feeling disoriented. When she was in the theater, she tended to forget everything but the production—she was engrossed in making a story come to life onstage, guiding and correcting students, worrying about lighting and lines and timing. This demanded close observation, her full attention, and it was hard to return to this world from that one. When Dani was little, Rachel would come home and sit with a glass of wine at the kitchen table. Dani would say, “Mama, are you back yet?” And Adam would say, “Give her a minute, she’s right around the corner.” They turned it into a game, teasing her: She’s on the front lawn! No, no, she’s on the front porch! Now she’s at the front door! And then she would shout “Boo!” and grab Dani, who would shriek with delight. And Adam—he would smile. How he smiled at her then. She took a long sip of wine.

  She got up and pulled the recycle bin from unde
r the sink, digging out yesterday’s newspaper. Dani had left a message, telling her to read it, but she hadn’t. And then Iris and Esther had called, so she hadn’t needed to. She already knew the news. When Rachel got home, she’d picked up the paper and folded it, sticking it down beneath the milk jug and soup cans.

  Now she opened it and looked at the article. At that girl’s photograph. Maud’s girl. Dani’s erstwhile best friend. As she read, her breath caught and her cheeks burned. In the aftermath of that Thanksgiving dinner, Rachel had wanted hell to rain down on the two of them. She’d wanted to go Greek tragedy on his ass. She’d wanted to spit blood from her eyes like a horned toad. She’d wanted to watch the two of them implode, watch that young, fresh-faced girl reject him, hear the crack and squish of his betrayer’s heart. She wanted to see his face then, for him to know what it was to be left behind.

  But that changed when Maud’s girl went missing. Rachel wouldn’t speak with Adam, and Dani refused to talk about it, but oddly enough Rachel began to speak with Maud. Before Rachel met and married Hugh, she’d be sitting in her house, which once had been filled with her child and husband and now was a shell of itself, and she’d thought, if she was feeling this bad when Dani still lived down the street, what must Maud be feeling? And so out of the blue, she swung by to see her. They’d shared a number of comforting afternoon and evenings, drinking coffee and wine and swapping stories about their kids. About their ex-husbands. How she never would have believed it of him, never saw it coming, never in a million years. But over time, she saw more: how they buried themselves in work, away from each other, her at the theater, him in the attic. Her career fine, his stalled, a stew of resentment simmering on each side. The sudden death of his estranged mother, his increasing distance. It wasn’t surprising he’d looked elsewhere. What she couldn’t get past was who he’d turned to. A child. A girl their daughter’s age.