The Night Before

by Rice, Luanne

  Had Sara knelt on the stones? Lydia tried to imagine the family making a pilgrimage like that; what had it been for? Had they prayed for a cure? Was that so different from Lydia’s and her father’s fervent hopes? One night they returned to Black Hall from the hospital to find snow had fallen, followed by sleet. The temperature had dropped fast, freezing a thin layer of ice on top of six inches of snow.

  “We’ll be lucky if the trees survive this,” her father had said as they’d walked up the sidewalk toward the kitchen door.

  “They have to.”

  “Because we want them to? It doesn’t work that way, Lydia.”

  “Yes, I want the trees to survive. And Mom, too!”

  “Okay, honey,” her father had said, hand on her shoulder, sensing she was losing it, as she had repeatedly since they’d been told that this was it, that her mother probably wouldn’t live until Christmas.

  She had waited until he’d gone upstairs. She told him she had homework to do. If he had been paying attention he would have realized the teachers were taking it easy on her; Black Hall was a small town, and the school looked after her. The teachers were not expecting much while her mother was so sick.

  Lydia walked outside. She was twelve and tall, and she wore her mother’s old down jacket, patched with duct tape from where stray fir branches had torn the fabric over the years. The coat smelled like her: lemon shampoo, lavender lotion, pine tar, and salt air.

  Walking down the rows of Christmas trees, she heard her boots crunching through the thin layer of ice. When she got to the inner circle, the tallest and oldest trees around the clearing, the ones that were her mother’s favorites, Lydia could hardly breathe.

  Her father was right—the snow and sleet weighed heavy on the trees; their branches drooped almost straight down. The youngest saplings leaned so far over they looked ready to break in half. The old trees had sagging branches, ready to crack. The outdoor thermometer, nailed up to the faded red shed, registered 8 degrees. Lydia’s lungs hurt, breathing out clouds of cold white air.

  “If the trees live, you will live,” Lydia said out loud, walking down the first row. “If the branches don’t break, you won’t break.”

  She listened for her mother, but heard nothing. She was in the hospital twenty miles away, and it was impossible she could die. Lydia couldn’t conceive of a world without her mother. The planet would skid off its axis; the oceans would spill into space; the monarch butterflies would disappear first, because her mother had loved them so, followed by every other species.

  “Live, Mom,” Lydia said. “Stay.”

  She reached out, shook the branches on the first tree, one of the oldest, encircling the clearing where her mother always said Lydia would one day get married. Ice tinkled, falling like broken glass to the ground. The limbs, relieved of the weight, bounced up. So Lydia shattered the glass on the next pine and the next. She ran through the tree farm shaking every branch, each trunk, leaving her footprints and piles of bright, clear ice behind.

  There were four hundred trees.

  By the time she finished, her mittens were frozen and her fingers were stiff and blue. The sky above the Connecticut shoreline blazed with winter constellations. Orion seemed to be walking from one treetop to the next before dipping below the horizon over the Sound.

  “Lydia!” she heard her father bellow.

  Was he angry, had he looked in her room and not found her? “Here!” Lydia called, running toward the house. She couldn’t wait to tell him what she’d done—she’d saved the tree crop to save her mother.

  “Your room was empty,” he said, opening his arms so she could throw herself into them. “Your mother’s not here, and neither were you.”

  “I’m here. And Mom will come back,” she said.

  Her mother died that night. The trees lived.

  Now, walking through the Mexican plaza, quiet except for speeding cars and birds singing, Lydia thought about deals with God. What was she doing? She entered the tall and many-spired pink cathedral. A bank of candles glowed at the altar. From childhood habit she genuflected and lit one. Saints and Stations of the Cross decked the walls. She paused by Señor de la Conquista, the crucifix painted with cornstalk paste by indigenous people.

  The land had touched them, and they had touched the land—like her parents, like Sara. She didn’t believe, but she knelt, as Sara had done on the ground outside. And her mother had died anyway. Lydia tried to feel what had been familiar when she was a child: going to church, kneeling and praying, smelling the old wood and incense and candle smoke. She had believed in miracles back then. In fact, it had seemed that the most ordinary thing—butterflies, a full moon, the high tide, a piece of blue sea glass—was divine, a miracle sent just for her. But that was long ago.

  She left the church in San Miguel de Allende, lighting two candles on the way out: one for her mother, and one for Sara’s. She skipped breakfast, went straight up the hill with her backpack, canvas, and collapsible easel, and set up in the usual spot. It was an hour earlier, and she was surprised to see the workers already on their ladders. No sign of Sara, though.

  Painting intently, she waited for her friend to walk over with some cool water. She ran words through her mind, trying to figure out what to say about the church, about the emptiness she’d felt there. By eleven, Sara hadn’t come over, so Lydia walked into the orchard, over to a cluster of ladders stretching up to the highest trees in the grove. Sara wasn’t there. Lydia waited for someone to notice her, but they were too busy working. Eventually she called up.

  “Hola!”

  “Sí?” an old man asked, peering down.

  “I’m looking for Sara.”

  “Como?”

  “I don’t speak Spanish, I’m sorry. Sara? Where is she?”

  “Bebé. Hospital,” Sara’s brother called from another ladder, down the row.

  No problem understanding that: but this was July, and Sara wasn’t due until September.

  “Which hospital?” Lydia asked.

  “Público.”

  Lydia gathered her things and went straight back to town. She asked for directions and found the public hospital, a semi-modern building, notably austere in this five-hundred-year-old city of Gothic and baroque structures. Security inside seemed lax, and not knowing her friend’s last name, she looked for a sign for the maternity floor. Seeing a man carrying a blue plush teddy bear, she followed at a distance.

  Her heart was pounding. She hadn’t been in a hospital since she’d last seen her mother. The sounds and smells were the same—crackling voices over the loudspeaker, disinfectant and illness. She wanted to run back outside, into the fresh air and back to the hillside. She didn’t even know this woman, who’d said her painting was “not bad.” But she kept moving, looking into each open door until she saw Sara sitting in a bed in a crowded room.

  At the sight of her, Sara began to cry.

  “What’s the matter?” Lydia said, rushing over. “Isabel?”

  “She’s beautiful,” Sara said. “Five weeks too early and tiny, but she will be okay. I need to see her, though. She must be hungry again, but they’re too busy to take me to the nursery.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “Sí,” Sara said.

  Lydia looked around for a wheelchair, but when she couldn’t find one right away, Sara got impatient and gestured for Lydia to haul her out of bed. With her arm slung around Lydia’s neck, white hospital gown drooping and open in the back, Sara inched along the corridor. They passed the nurses’ station, but it was empty, everyone busy in other rooms.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.” But she looked pale, and could barely shuffle.

  “I told you: you should have stopped working. What happened, did you slip on the ladder, or get so tired, or…”

  “My water broke in the middle of the night, when I was fast asleep in my nice bed. So it wasn’t work—it was just Isabel being ready to be born. There she is!”

  They ha
d reached the nursery. The nurse in charge was holding an infant, but at the sight of Sara, she placed the baby back in an incubator, hurried over to take Sara’s arm and help her to a chair. They exchanged few words. The nurse went to get Isabel from her incubator.

  The baby was awake, eyes wide open. Unlike some of the other infants, she had only a heart monitor stuck to her chest. The nurse unhooked it, wrapped her in a white blanket, and handed her to Sara. She untied the back of the hospital gown, slipped it down in front so Isabel could latch onto Sara’s breast.

  Isabel drank hungrily. Lydia leaned against the wall. Both mother’s and daughter’s eyes were closed, as if they had exhausted themselves just getting to this point. She thought of the last hospital, when her mother was dying, and then she remembered—she swore it was a true clear memory—the first hospital, when she’d been born and her mother had fed her. Death was a long way off, and so was birth, and it made circles between people who loved each other through all of it.

  Now, standing in her Black Point kitchen as the last remnants of the thunderstorm moved offshore, across Long Island Sound, she heard footsteps on the stairs and filled a mug with coffee.

  “Good morning, Isabel,” she said, and handed Sara’s daughter the mug as she entered the room.

  “Good morning, Tía Lydia.”

  Lydia smiled. She liked being called “aunt.” She had become the girl’s honorary aunt that first day of her life, when she’d made the promise to Sara. And she’d gone through these two decades without a daughter of her own—painting and traveling, considering art to be her child, nurturing it, and worrying about it, and cherishing it as much as she could. But this was the girl she’d sworn to care for.

  “I woke up and couldn’t find Danny,” Isabel said.

  “He’s outside.”

  “In the storm? There was lightning.” Her voice was calm. She touched the screen door with her fingertips.

  “He waited until it ended.”

  Growing up on a tree farm, one of the first things you learned was that as soon as you could hear thunder, a lightning strike was possible. When thunder roars, go indoors, her mother had taught her.

  “He’s fine,” Lydia reassured her.

  Just to be sure, they headed outside. A few scraps of clouds lingered, but the storm had moved on, leaving the dawn air indigo blue and shining with the night’s last stars. The rain had soaked the trees and ground. The smell of pine was intoxicating as the earth squished beneath their feet.

  Danny was in the center of the clearing, surveying damage: the storm had twisted and splintered twenty of the oldest trees, the ones that had been her mother’s favorites.

  “Oh, no!” Lydia cried out.

  “It wasn’t just a thunderstorm,” Danny said as she hurried over. “A tornado must have come through.”

  “They’re all gone.”

  The tallest, oldest trees encircled the meadow; the spruce and pines had been planted by Lydia’s parents, with the idea they would never be cut, they would be allowed to grow tall, and family celebrations could be held here, and the space could exist forever. Tally nosed around the edges, where the hay hadn’t been mown, where raindrops clung to spider webs, and tracks of rabbits and field mice led into grass tunnels.

  “I’m so sorry about this,” Isabel said, as if the fact that her wedding would be today had anything to do with it.

  “We’ve had so many hurricanes and blizzards, but never a tornado before, never this kind of damage,” Lydia said.

  She had gotten married here, in the clearing, to Morgan. Her father had walked her from the house, down one of the pine-lined lanes, her arm tucked in his. She had felt her mother’s absence in her heart, and she’d whispered to her father that she missed her, and he had told her to listen, she was right there with them: and she was. Lydia had heard the breeze through the branches of the trees her mother had planted, and somehow that had brought comfort and connection, had made her feel her mother was right there with her.

  The marriage hadn’t lasted, but the memory lived forever.

  The trees had made that possible: living things planted by her mother. Her mother’s hands had dug the holes, placed the burlap-bound root balls carefully into the dirt, covered and watered them. Her mother had watched them grow, and she’d taken care of them; she had tended these trees, just as she’d raised Lydia. How could you measure love? The care she had bestowed on the pines had come from the same heart as the devotion she’d felt for her daughter.

  Danny, Isabel, and Lydia used the Volvo tractor to clear the fallen trees away. Last night they had been living things; now they were dead. Lydia knew they’d be mulched and would reenter the growing cycle, giving new life to young saplings, but right then it was all she could do to haul them out of the circle, feeling grief and attachment.

  “Are you okay?” Danny asked.

  “I am,” she said.

  “You look sad. They’re old trees—it’s hard to see them go.”

  “Yeah,” she said. He was young, but he got it.

  “In Nova Scotia,” Danny said, “when trees died we’d leave them on the beach, above the tide line, to dry all summer long. Then we’d have a bonfire.”

  “That’s what we’ll do here. They’ll serve a purpose, pull in sand, hold back erosion,” Lydia said. She tried to sound positive, but she was just speaking the words. She felt numb.

  Danny squeezed her shoulders, then got back to work.

  She’d hired him five years ago, when he’d answered an ad she’d placed in a tree journal. He’d just received his certificate from the School of Professional Horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden in New York City; he had grown up on a tree farm in Nova Scotia, spent every December with his family selling Christmas trees on a Chelsea street corner.

  Isabel had come here last year, after her twentieth birthday, after Sara had written to ask Lydia to take her in. They had moved back to Juárez—work was scarce near San Miguel after greening disease had struck the lemon orchard—and violence against women was again rising. Ciudad Juárez was a cauldron of cartels, coyotes, and rage against women working at the maquiladoras—the big factories that ringed the town. Women got kidnapped with stunning frequency. They disappeared, sometimes to be found dead in the desert months later, often without any trace at all. Sara had had too many friends lose daughters and sisters.

  So Sara and Lydia had made a plan. Isabel would travel to Black Hall, Connecticut, on the same exchange program that had taken Lydia to Mexico all those years ago, in reverse. By sending Isabel far away, she would protect her. Isabel had been accepted to the Black Hall College for a semester, and she had done well. She had lived with Lydia, working on the tree farm, and had met Danny.

  Lydia knew this hadn’t been part of Sara’s plan. She had wanted her daughter removed from the immediate danger of Juárez, but she hadn’t envisioned her meeting a young man, falling in love, planning a life in Connecticut. Sara, because of her deportation two decades ago, had been unable to get a visa to attend Isabel’s wedding.

  Lydia, Danny, and Isabel spent all morning running the chain saw, cutting the trees and dragging them away with the tractor. Danny’s family arrived at noon—his father and best man, Christy Byrne, was dressed in his best black suit, but as soon as he saw the damage he borrowed a set of Danny’s work clothes and grabbed a saw. His wife Catherine and daughter Bridget borrowed jeans from Lydia and Isabel, and they all worked at preparing the scene.

  “It was a bad one,” Christy said of the storm, helping Lydia pile debris into a flatbed wagon.

  “I heard the thunder, assumed it was just passing through, but when we came out, this is what we found. We thought the worst would be wet ground—that we’d have to protect Isabel’s dress.”

  “Trees grow back,” Christy said. “That’s the beauty of conifers. They grow fast.”

  “These were never going to be cut,” Lydia said.

  “Christmas trees never to be cut?” he asked.

  �
��Most of them, yes. But not these, not the inner ring,” she said. “My mother and father planted them.”

  “Oh, that’s different,” he said, with the kind of gravity in his voice that she felt in her chest. He was a tree man who understood. Catherine joined them at the wagon, filling it with as many trees and branches as would fit. Once they had swept the meadow free of wreckage, Danny hooked the wagon to the tractor, and they followed it down the path to the beach.

  It felt like a funeral procession: Danny driving the tractor, the rest of them walking slowly behind. Christy was right: pines grew fast. But the very quality that made that possible rendered them more fragile than other trees. Their trunks weren’t as dense, their branches were not as strong as oaks or maples, hardwoods that lived in the forests of Black Hall, up the Connecticut River.

  “Are you okay?” Isabel asked, falling into step with Lydia.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “How about you? This isn’t the start I had imagined for your wedding day.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Isabel said. “Danny’s family is here. We’re all working together. It reminds me of the orchard, when I was little.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Of course. My mom, my aunts and uncles, lemon trees everywhere. The sun was always shining, and my uncle was always singing.”

  “I remember that,” Lydia said. “He had a good voice. He sounded happy.”

  “We might still be working there if the trees hadn’t gotten sick.”

  “Citrus greening disease.”

  “We called it ‘yellow dragon disease,’” Isabel said. “It seemed like a monster that came out of the trees themselves, out of the leaves, and coated all the lemons with bacteria. It seemed like the worst thing. The poor trees.”

  “And the orchard closed,” Lydia said as they walked closer to the beach; the storm had kicked up a steady wind, and she could hear waves breaking from fifty yards away.

  “Yes. And there was no more work. So my mom moved with me to Juárez so she could work in the maquiladora.”