by Jill Malone
“It’s just amazing,” Grey agreed. “I hadn’t expected anything so modern. I guess I’d pictured a farm rather than an orchard. I mean, this place goes on for acres.”
Toby, the old shepherd, was settled at Grey’s feet, his muzzle white, his sanguine temperament now calmed toward comatose. He had licked our hands when we came to the door and returned to his bed in the kitchen while we toured the house. In an extreme and heroic effort, he’d stood, walked four steps, and collapsed against Grey’s boots when we resettled in the kitchen. I could hear the short push of his breathing.
I watched my father move around the kitchen, arranging wine glasses on a tray with a plate of cheese and crackers. As far as I remembered, we had rarely entertained. A couple of potluck dinners after harvest, but then the wives of his men had done most of the work, letting me watch over the drinks while they prepared the table and the dishes; cleaning everything afterward while I collected the garbage and put the bottles in recycling.
He wouldn’t let me help him now, and cradled a bottle of wine in his arm as he balanced the tray to the table. When he sat down, his eyes never having left me, he uncorked the bottle and remarked, “Still so thin.”
Grey and Emily grinned, ready to join the game:
“I told her she’d never have to worry about sharks while we’re surfing.”
“Ever seen a shark attack a stick?”
(Laughter.)
“We had to tie her to one of those kid ropes when we went up to Pali Lookout.”
“Yeah and then weight the rope.”
(Much laughter.)
“Jane won’t ever get locked out of the house.”
“She can drop through the mail slot.”
“She can slide right under the front door.”
It was their standard shtick, and my father was enjoying it as much as they were.
“You know, they wouldn’t let her give blood.”
“Well, you have to weigh at least ninety-five pounds.”
“When she was a child,” my father said, “the school nurse would send home sealed letters that Janie was entrusted to deliver. The envelopes each had twenty pieces of folded paper inside. The first sheet always had one question: Are you feeding this child? And the rest were blank. After a couple of months of this, I asked Janie why the nurse was sending her home with nineteen blank sheets of paper.”
Here he paused; Emily and Grey fidgeted with anticipation—practically vibrating off their chairs for the punch line. He brought it home:
“So Janie tells me, ‘The nurse was worried a breeze would carry me away without the extra weight.’ ”
(Decades of laughter.)
I smiled with them in an exasperated way so as not to encourage the routine past all forbearance. These were old jokes to a thin girl. I’d had boys pinch my legs all my life, asking how I could hold myself up on those slivers. Stork-girl, bone, heroin-baby, waif, I’d heard every thin joke. When I turned sideways, did I disappear? Was I strong enough to lift a fork to my mouth?
My father’s eyes were bright again in the folds of his wrinkles. His brown hair cropped close to his skull and sprinkled with gray like shards of glass suddenly in the sand. He patted my hand good-naturedly and shook his head. I was a good sport, his look said. I had always been a good sport. His accent was ever slighter, so that the Australian lilt curled the ends of his speech and seemed to slip away in the middle of his sentences. He was still handsome, though, beautiful and old.
“You’re a good girl, my Jane. And I’m glad to have you home.”
I hadn’t spoken since we’d arrived. Emily and Grey had introduced themselves as the new house, the new father, overcame me. I rested my hand inside his hand and smiled. I thought if I opened my mouth, I might weep.
“Would you believe Therese is fifty now, Janie?”
On the flight from Oahu, in my best shorthand, I’d told Grey and Emily that Therese had helped raise me.
“Therese,” my father explained now to Emily and Grey, “has lived here since before Janie was born. She’s become middle-aged while Toby and I have grown old. She’s driven into town to buy food for supper. Expect something lavish; the grill’s going.”
“Jane told us you taught her to surf, Mr. Elliot.”
“Please call me Caleb.”
“Caleb,” Emily tested his name in her mouth and grinned. “You taught Jane to surf?”
“She used to wake me every morning before dawn and we’d drive down to the beach to longboard. You should have seen her, tiny little arms like jackknives shooting her through the water: absolutely fearless. One summer, then she was just a seal out there—sleek and wild.”
“And fast,” Emily said. “Jesus she’s fast. When she first moved to Oahu, she was going on and on about how she’d been away for so long and it would take her months to get back into shape and oh my god, the drama! So we’re out there the first day and she’s up on the second wave—I can’t even keep up with her—she’s cutting into the crest, skimming along the barrel, one-legged, throwing shakas, dancing hula up and down the length of the board …”
They all laughed and this time I joined them, my stomach knots loosening as they all talked me down. Sensing somehow this was too much for me, Emily and Grey had taken the pressure off; they were blocking for me, letting me bide my time, hang back, watch the field.
We talked in the kitchen as the slant of light receded slowly through the length of the room and Toby kept time with the insistence of his sleep. Therese kicked the door open at nearly six o’clock, her arms full of groceries, and more in the truckbed. Emily, Grey, and Dad ran out to grab the rest while Therese pounced on me like a pitbull. She was Filipino, a compact, exceptionally strong woman with cropped hair and deep-set, searching black eyes. She wore a denim skirt, doubtless for company, and a button-down lilac linen shirt with her standard blue T & C slippers. She didn’t look anything like fifty.
“Doesn’t anybody feed you, girl? My god, you’re the same stick as always. Now you’ve got some crazy hair too. You dyed your hair blue? You’re some kind of grudge character?”
“I think you mean grunge.”
“Oh, grunge. Grunge is even worse. You’re one of those grunge characters with the piercings and the tattoos and the black-sack clothes and hair that’s never washed?”
She felt my face as though I might be hiding piercings, brushed at my hair in a hopeless effort to tame it, and smiled up at me.
“You’re thinking of Emily, Therese. She’s got a bellyring and everything. She’s with the cause. She’s warring against the man.”
Therese had turned her sharp, accusing eyes toward the door as Emily entered. She spotted Emily’s bellyring and let go of me. In honor of meeting my father, Emily’s croptop fell just below her ribs and her sarong came down nearly to her knees; she was virtually twice clothed. Therese eyed her carefully.
“No, this one’s a hippie.”
Emily laughed, set the grocery bags on the counter, and shook Therese’s proffered hand.
“And what do you think of my little girl?” Therese asked as she wound her arm around my waist.
Emily put her hands over my ears and whispered: “I think she could use a lot of help.”
“Did you help dye her hair blue?”
“They’re henna highlights; they were supposed to lighten her hair.”
“God, you are a hippie. Nuevo hippies, I can’t believe it.”
“It’s not really blue, Therese, it’s just a blue glow around my temples. It was supposed to be an auburn highlight.”
“Auburn highlight on black hair? There’s the first flaw in your logic, girls. When does it come out?”
“Oh, it’s almost out now. You should have seen it two weeks ago.”
She didn’t look convinced. Two weeks previously, the top of my head had been the color of the cookie monster, much to the amusement of my students, who had taken to calling me Post-Punk. Now the black was reclaiming my scalp.
“You have
to eat more. Eat more and no more blue hair. Your father will grill steaks and oysters. There’s rice in the cooker and you two can help make the fruit salad, yeah?”
Fresh mangoes, starfruit, papaya, grapes, and kiwi were sliced and sprinkled with cinnamon to make salad, the acid burning our fingers as we sucked the mango seed for fruit we couldn’t reach with a knife. Ripe orchard fruit tasted bolder and sharper than any other fruit I’d ever known; I was high with the burn in my throat, the tangy flare of each bite, holding the starfruit and mango in my mouth like a child to prolong the delight.
That evening, we sat for hours, drinking wine and gorging ourselves on oysters with sliced jalapenos doused in shoyu and strips of flank steak. My father brought out the whiskey and brandy as night fell into the orchard over the chirp of crickets.
Emily and Grey cleared the plates while I washed the dishes. At the sink Emily sidled behind me and put her arms around my waist, pressing her face into my neck. I flinched. Her hands slid loose and she withdrew.
“We’re the only ones here.”
I looked behind me to see a vacant kitchen—the chairs pressed neatly under the table—the surfaces all wiped and gleaming; everyone else had gone up to bed. I toweled off my hands and stretched toward her.
“Sorry. It’s just weird in my childhood house, you know?”
“Yeah. I’m tired anyway.”
Without looking at me, she turned and went upstairs. I hadn’t told Emily and Grey about my mother’s suicide. I hadn’t even explained about Therese. How could I explain? Slowly, Toby stood and stretched before hobbling to the door. I followed him outside into the familiar dark.
XIII.
The five of us walked through the orchard in twilight, my feet quickly readjusted to the paths as if nine years had not passed, and my father told Grey and Emily about harvest—the urgent shift of wooden ladders and wheelbarrows along the pathways and trunks as the men plucked the fruit rapidly in a single delicate pull, and crate upon crate were loaded into trucks to be driven to Kahului for market or transport to Oahu. When I was a child, harvest had seemed painful to me; the trees overburdened with their fruit like monkeys whose young clung to their backs and bellies. As the men worked, the branches and leaves rattled and trembled until I imagined the trees fighting back the only way they knew against these deft looters.
My mother had told me that the trees in the old days were sick with dark; their bark white and shredded, their sores bled sap as their leaves fell in dark piles that covered the ground. The tender of the trees was old and ill as well, but his daughter, Sophia, was slender and green as a sapling. Alone, she roamed among the trees, tending to their wounds even as she knelt by the bed of her father, feeding him soup and mopping his brow with a wet cloth. Each day as her father became weaker so too the trees groaned and shrugged against the dark. Sophia began to despair for the trees and woke her father to ask his advice.
“The trees mimic your illness, Father. Is there no relief for either of you?”
Her father shuddered and raised himself on twiggy elbows to look at his daughter more closely. Like a vine, his white hair fell around his face, as he contemplated her question. He knew but one way.
“I am to die, my girl, but you might live forever and the trees with you.”
“How might I, Father?”
“You must become like them.”
“In the dark?”
“In light and dark, child. If they heal, then the world will be light and dark again, for the trees color the world.”
Never to run or walk again, always to root in a single place with a single view would be hard indeed, but the dark was hard as well, and the sickness.
“I will be a tree, Father. I am not afraid.”
He nodded. He had known of this day for many years.
“Help me outside, child, and we shall transform the world.”
She gathered her father from the bed, his body thin as a dogwood, and they walked from the cottage into a nearby field. A brook ambled through the field, and her father told her to run along its bank and not to turn back. She hesitated a moment and then fled from his side.
She ran in the dark and let the sound of the water guide her steps beside its bank, she ran as her chest began to tighten and her skin tore apart. Her legs sank into the cold earth even as her head burst with branches, her hair shaping into leaves. Her mouth opened in one single motion of despair, swallowed in the maple trunk that enfolded her heart like a coffin.
From the cottage, her father watched her transformation until his own heart gave out and he fell in the field. Later the sun climbed the sky above the cottage; the trees had healed.
Grey and Emily were each given guest rooms and I was in my old room, which had been re-painted, a soft Irish orange. Through the skylight, the stars pricked, and I lay on the bed, looking at the sky for hours until finally I got up and walked through the orchard again. The wind was cold enough that I shivered in spite of my jeans and sweatshirt. Though my feet guided me along the paths easily enough, the branches had changed shape and dimension so that these trees were not the trees I had left but some new beast grasping toward the sky. In my absence the orchard, the house, my father had morphed with a spirit that had eluded me. Was that what had happened? I wasn’t sure. Never in my life had he talked so openly, particularly among strangers, and he and Therese shared a tenderness now that was new to my observation. Had I missed these signs at eighteen, or hadn’t they existed before I went away? The house no longer ached with my mother’s absence—that palpable sense of loss that had encased us as if behind glass—a dead woman filling up the world. Had I dreamed that grief? Had I mourned alone these years?
I stopped walking when I came to the mango grove; it was nearly 4:00 a.m., the sky arched above me, and I was a child again, aching to be held. From among the trees, a form emerged.
“Jane?”
“Here I am.”
“It’s too dark to walk out here.”
“You have to keep to the path.”
“Follow me, Jane.”
I stood up and moved toward her. The distance between us spread. Her shape receded as though she were in danger of vanishing. I ran forward—the impression of her slid into shadow the way stars disappear at sunrise—still the distance between us grew.
“Mother?” I called. “Mother?”
“Where are you, Jane?”
I opened my eyes in a fever, someone pressed against me, in the dark room, the warm bed.
“Quiet, honey,” she whispered. “You’ll wake the house.”
Emily held onto me, covered my eyes with her right palm, and leaned hard against me, as if to keep me rooted to the bed to the room to the planet. I was inside again, or still—I wasn’t sure which—only that I was chilled and trembling against Emily’s tensed body. She’d braced herself, ready for me to struggle.
I let out a breath and felt my back muscles ease. Something in my throat choked, releasing a sound like a whimper. She held me tightly and leaned hard forward until I fell back against the pillow. Rubbing her hands up and down my arms, she rested her cheek against my cheek until my breathing slowed.
I’d seen someone in the orchard. Had I been in the orchard? I shivered into the sheets, into the warmth of her body, her mouth on my throat.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I dreamt, I dreamt something horrible.”
I curled into her and slept heavily, a hibernation. When I woke late the next morning, I was alone in my room and could not separate the real from the imagined in what I knew. On the nightstand, the alarm clock ticked noisily, and I climbed from bed slowly, nursing my body as though I distrusted it.
Rice sat hissing in the cooker, a font of steam rising toward the open window merging with the brilliant sunlight slanting into the room. Therese was alone in the kitchen when I came downstairs. Focused on prepping supper (bul-go-gi from the look of the meat), she started when I came up behind her.
“So you wake, sleepyhead.
Thought you might stay in bed all day like in high school, little princess. They went surfing. Ryan and your father wanted to wake you, but Emily said you’d slept badly.”
I pulled a pitcher of juice from the fridge and poured a glass. Her face tight with worry, she reached out and pushed my hair back from my face.
“So you slept badly?”
I nodded. Her fingers were cold, her hand small.
“I still have insomnia. I’ve just learned to live with it, you know, I don’t even mind anymore. But last night—”
“Last night?”
“It was something else. I was awake and asleep, dreaming these bizarre frightening things. I was outside in the orchard but I was inside with this fever. I’m not sure which.”
“Nine years is a long time. Was it hard to come back?”
I looked up at her black eyes and tried to smile. Not too serious, please.
“Have I neglected you, Therese? Have I neglected you and Dad?”
“Nine years is a long time.”
“The house is another place altogether. And you and Dad—”
Her ears colored and she turned back toward the counter as though to check the meat.
“Are a different couple.”
She spun back toward me and met my eyes defiantly, daring me to go on.
“Aren’t you?” I said, and reached my hand to her wrist.
A smile played across her face, and her shoulders relaxed.
“It means something that it doesn’t bother you.”
“It makes sense. I was stupid never to notice.”
“There was nothing to notice before. Something happened when you left; I thought your father would never survive your absence. I wasn’t sure I would. It was terrible—the emptiness of this house without you—and those first few years I don’t know how we managed. You smile, but it was terrible. I’ll never forget your father’s face, so empty. We’d eat in the kitchen, in the dark, both of us getting old.
“Then, after we came back from your graduation, something had shifted. You’d graduated with honors; your professors loved you; you looked so glamorous with your short hair and European accent—nothing like the little girl who’d left us. We came home and attacked the house. Lifetimes we worked on this house; put everything into perspective.”