by Jon Cohen
“It’s unlucky.”
She smacked her fist into her palm in triumph. “I knew it! I knew it had to be magic.”
“I said, unlucky.”
“Unlucky is a kind of magic.” Oriana closed her eyes, as if conjuring, and said, “Eleven, twenty-nine, thirty-six, sixty-seven, fifty-eight.” A pause. “And fifteen.”
“What is that? What are you doing?”
“You don’t know?”
“Hey. Oriana Jeffers. I tried to hang myself. And all I’ve had to eat is one mini Snickers. And you’re talking in riddles.”
“It’s your numbers. On your lottery ticket.”
“Give. It. Back.”
Oriana pulled the pockets of her red jacket inside out, did the same with her pants pockets, looking Harry in the eye the whole time. “I hid it. I’m good at hiding things. I hid it in a tree on the way over here.” She pointed out a large triangle-shaped window. “It’s out there in Oriana’s Forest. And anyway, if there’s bad magic in it, it’s too late. I touched it and I memorized it. The numbers are doubly inside of me.”
Harry swallowed.
“Magic usually works fast,” Oriana continued. “Like when Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on the spinning wheel. Or Snow White bites the apple. But I’m not asleep. Or changed or anything different.”
Sleeping Beauty? thought Harry. Snow White?
“Which means—its magic works only on you.” She paused, pondering deeply. “That must be it. That has to be it. The ticket’s magic made you try to hang yourself, didn’t it?”
Harry gripped the metal edge of the cot. He could almost feel the tree house vibrating from the cogs churning and grinding inside the girl’s strange, fervid brain. But my God, in a way, she was right. The magic of the lottery ticket, his unlucky talisman, did ultimately lead him to the sugar maple tree, rope in hand.
“And you know what I think?” said Oriana. “I’m supposed to keep it. That’s why it came to me. If I keep it, then you won’t try any of that noose stuff again.”
There was a grain of truth in what she said: she had the ticket—and whatever crazed energy had gotten him atop the wall with a rope around his neck had indeed dissipated.
But something didn’t make sense. Well, none of it made sense, but one thing was utterly impossible. “Back up. You said your father saved me.” He thought back to the moment on the wall: Noose around his neck. Snickers. Branch breaking. “I was alone. No one saved me, what are you talking about?”
Oriana didn’t answer. Instead, she turned and placed her hand on one of the thick columnar branches running up through the floor of the tree house. Harry shivered. Somehow, he felt the silky roughness of the beech bark communicated to his own fingertips.
She kept her hand on the beech, as if she perceived this, intended it, knew that the way to reach Harry was through trees. Trees, their special common language. The tree house swayed in the wind, back and forth like a gently rocked cradle. She said, “When did you fall in love with trees? Did your father teach you about them? My father taught me.”
The sensation in his fingertips—real or imagined—abruptly vanished.
“My father wouldn’t know a tree if it fell on him.” And Harry often wished one had. Specifically, on the Chevy Citation X-11 Jeffrey Crane purchased the day he abandoned his family.
“Your American beech,” Oriana said. “The one in your front yard. Did your father build you a tree house?”
“I told you. He had no interest in trees. And we’re not talking about my father, we’re talking about yours.”
“You had a beech tree when you were a kid, and I have this one. Did your dad build you a tree house? Tell me.”
“No. He did not.” In his mind, Harry saw his childhood tree. Saw himself safe in its powerful arms. He blinked.
“What?” said Oriana.
Harry reached past her and touched the beech tree branch. Moved his fingers over the bark. Oriana closed her eyes, as if this time she was the one receiving something tactile from him. She said, “Tell me.”
“My father never built a tree house for me. But he did this one, tiny thing. And it wasn’t even for me. I know it wasn’t for me.”
“Did your father die when you were little?” Oriana’s voice was a whisper.
“No,” said Harry. “Well, kind of. He vanished. When I was about your age.”
“Vanished.”
“Wait. No. Wrong word. Not vanished in some magic way. Not in a puff of smoke. He left us. Drove away in a car and never came back.”
Oriana, taking this in. “You never saw him again.”
Where in God’s name was she leading him, this child? This child who was way, way too much for him.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Whatever you think is going on, this magical link between us, whatever you think I am, I’m not. Okay? I’m some guy. A human guy. Not a grum, whatever that is, on some kind of secret magic mission. You’re making up stories out of...nothing.”
Oriana persisted. “What did your daddy leave for you in your beech tree?”
“His initials. That’s all. JC. He carved them, high up, and one day I found them.”
She reached out and took Harry’s hand and guided it around to the other side of the beech tree branch. On its smooth bark, he felt two scars, a year or two healed over. They were letters. Harry read them with his fingertips. “D,” he said. “J.”
“My dad’s name is Dean Jeffers.”
Harry took a deep breath.
“Mom will be back any minute,” she said anxiously. “We have so much to figure out.”
“This is not a ‘we’ thing! It’s an ‘I’ thing. I, Harry Crane, came here to kill myself! It had nothing to do with you!”
“The lottery ticket guided you here. So my father could save you.”
“How did he save my life if he wasn’t here!”
She stared out of a little oval window for a long moment. Spoke without looking at him. “I came through the trees. You were standing on the stone wall, ready to jump. But you didn’t. You saw the Snickers. You reached for it.”
Now she turned and looked at him with inescapable eyes. “When you saw the Snickers you didn’t want to die. When you slipped, you grabbed the rope and held on. You held on and kicked with all your might until you broke the branch.”
Harry rubbed his neck. “Okay, maybe. That’s one interpretation, I guess.”
“That’s how he saved you. I didn’t put the Snickers in the knothole. It’s too high up.” She waved him over to the window. When he was beside her, she pointed and stepped back. He looked out. He could see candy and juice pouches in the trees and bushes around the beech tree. None of it was higher up than what Oriana could reach on her tiptoes.
“He put it up in the knothole,” Oriana said. “My dad put that Snickers up there.” When Harry turned from the window she handed him The Sibley Guide to Birds. On its cover, a red-tailed hawk.
The hawk seemed ready to leap from the page. Harry was instantly drawn back to the stone wall and the sugar maple. He felt the brush of feathers against his cheek, the beat of wings and a fluttering wind. He squinted at the bright glitter of gold.
“Daddy put it in the knothole for you. He brought us together. He guided me right to you.”
“Oriana.”
“Do you believe me yet?”
“No.”
“Well, you have to! You don’t have a choice. Because you know why? You know what else?”
Harry steadied himself against the beech tree.
“Your magic lottery ticket!” There were tears in her eyes. Fierce and desperate. “The date on it? The day you bought it? That’s the day my dad died in the snow. My daddy, Dean Jeffers, made wings in the snow and he turned into a red-tailed hawk and he put that Snickers in the knothole and he saved your life. And you know it!”
Harry’s mouth opened and closed. He looked up at the skylights into the canopy of the beech tree and beyond it to the cloudless sky. Unstuck in time, he saw Beth in her red coat as she tried to hand him the gold-wrapped mini Snickers. Unstuck, he saw a red-tailed hawk circling, a piece of sunlit gold clutched in its claw.
Oriana grabbed the bird guide from his hands and thrust The Grum’s Ledger at him. Harry gripped it tight, as if he was holding on for dear life.
“We have to read it,” Oriana said. “We have to figure everything out.”
They heard Amanda at the base of the tree, starting up the spiral stairs.
Harry thrust the book at Oriana and jumped back into bed. Oriana scrambled over to the Adirondack chair, put The Grum’s Ledger on the seat and sat on it. Then realized she was holding the bird guide. She rushed over to the bookshelf and put it back and picked up the field guide to trees.
Amanda came in, with a plastic bag full of supplies, out of breath from climbing the steep stairs. She looked at Oriana, thumbing through the tree guide. Then at Harry on the cot, the army blanket pulled up to his chin.
“Well. Has she stumped you yet?”
“A surprising number of times,” Harry said.
“Maybe it’s that bump on your head.”
“Maybe,” he said.
* * *
Amanda cleaned and disinfected his scrapes, put Band-Aids on them, gave him Advil and now he was finishing a bowl of stew.
“Never had venison stew before,” Harry said. “It’s good.”
“Glad to hear it,” Amanda said.
She reached for Harry’s empty bowl and handed it to Oriana, who took it to the sink.
“All right,” Amanda said. “Let’s not beat around the bush. What are you going to do about our illegal little tree house?”
Washing the bowl in the little sink, Oriana listened intently.
“Stay in it.”
That caught Amanda by surprise. “What?”
Behind her, Oriana silently punched the air and mouthed, Yes!
Harry ignored her and concentrated on Amanda. “I was planning to stay at the Holiday Inn Express in Scranton.”
“But now you want to stay here. Out here. I’m sorry, but you look like the office type.” She was staring at his hands. Not a callus in sight. Her eyes lingered on his wedding band.
“Yeah, I am. But with sequestration and downsizing, office types have to take on more fieldwork. This tract—Wilderness Tract A803—is ten years overdue for on-site evaluation. Photogrammetry and remote sensing has to be overlaid with physical data from trek mapping, clinometrics, increment borers...”
Harry watched her eyes glaze over. Good. He hoped he was hypnotizing her. Harry Crane is not interesting. Harry Crane did not just try to hang himself from a sugar maple. Harry Crane is invisible so leave him alone. Go away and take that relentless daughter of yours with you.
“Look,” he said. “If I’m going to be out in the trees, then what’s better than this? And by the way, I wasn’t born in an office. Half of my forestry training was outdoors. Obviously. Also, honestly, I do not want to spend one minute in a motel room in Scranton.”
“I get it.”
“We hate Scranton. Except for the train museum,” Oriana said.
“I have a stipend for living expenses,” Harry said. “But instead of paying the Holiday Inn, I’ll pay you.”
“There’s no refrigerator,” Amanda said. “And no toilet, and no hot water.”
“Okay. So maybe you don’t get the entire stipend.”
She almost, but not quite, smiled. “What will your wife think, you living in a tree house?” she said.
Harry fiddled with his wedding band, then looked up at Amanda. “That it’s just what I need. She thinks I’ve spent too many years behind a desk.”
Harry took his phone out of his pocket. As if he intended to put in a call to her. A lie, but really, today he wasn’t certain about the truth of anything. Today, there was no terra firma. Stone walls were unsteady, and the thick limbs of a sugar maple did not support. And besides—tell her about Beth? No. It was too much. Amanda had not spoken of her Dean, and he would not offer up Beth.
“So after you leave in...”
“Three weeks...?” He pulled the number out of thin air. It seemed enough time to regroup and ponder his next step.
“In three weeks, we won’t have to tear this down? Even though it’s illegal?”
“In three weeks this tree house becomes officially invisible to the government.”
“Mom, let him.”
“There is one thing,” Harry said. And now he looked directly at Oriana. “All the Ziploc bags and candy wrappers—it’s called littering. Littering remains illegal.”
Now Amanda smiled. “She’ll clean it up, every bit of it. Right, Oriana?”
Oriana looked at the two adults. Then, with a nod, agreed to the deal.
* * *
Nighttime. Oriana, in her pajamas, stood at her bedroom window looking out into the dark.
“I can just see his light. See it, Mom?”
“Yep.”
Amanda tucked Oriana into bed.
When she walked by the window, Amanda paused. The moon, a star and the faint flickering of a distant kerosene lamp. Fine, good. Stay as long as you want, Harry Crane. Frankly, I can use the rent money—and you could use a few weeks in the woods to air out your lungs. And maybe grow your hair a little. You have good hair. Amanda blushed, ever so slightly, remembering her hands moving over Harry’s scalp. You have good hair—and I bet your wife would like it a little longer. Married, Amanda reminded herself. And dull. She glanced at the moon again. But for a dull man, he sure knows how to make a day interesting.
* * *
Harry sat in an Adirondack chair. He poked the fire and looked out a window into the forest night. Way off, he could see the light coming from the Jeffers house. The light went out.
Time for bed. He was exhausted and achy. Toland. Beth. This forest and tree house. And God, he’d tried to hang himself? Long day. He lay down on the cot and dropped back on the pillow.
For the second time in one day, his head bonked against something. He reached inside the pillow case and pulled out The Grum’s Ledger. This child, the way her mind worked. Secretive, unyielding. Making sure he’d find it. Oriana wanted what she wanted, whatever that was. And he wanted what he wanted, which was to stay in these woods and...
Did they want the same thing? He knew he should not let that thought in, but there it was.
Harry’s Trees. Oriana’s Forest.
They had arrived in these deep woods by two separate paths. Or was it the same path?
Harry’s lottery ticket. Oriana’s book.
He opened The Grum’s Ledger to the first page. There sat the grum, with his doleful eyes. My God. Harry didn’t mean to, but the opening words were right there below the creature, on the lined, white page, handwritten in black ink in large shaky letters. Was it age or emotion that shaped them? He read them silently. Once upon an endless time in the Endless Mountains... You could almost hear a whispered weariness in them.
No. He shut the book. What he did not need was a grum running around in his brain. If the girl thought he was going to read her damn book, she was mistaken. He tossed it onto the Adirondack chair and turned his back to it. The pages fluttered lightly, as if the grum had breathed across them with a sigh.
Enough, enough. Harry closed his eyes and let the beech tree hold him. Soon he was fast asleep in Oriana’s Forest.
8
“Once upon an endless time in the Endless Mountains,” said Olive Perkins as she fished around in her frayed cloth book bag and pulled out a large brass key. Olive was a sharp-boned seventy-nine years old. She leaned forward and squinted through her bifocals, guiding the key into the iron ke
yhole in the center of the absurdly grand oak double doors of the Pratt Public Library like she was threading a needle. Built in 1910, a time when books were holy, the library looked like one of the old neoclassical banks down in Scranton, or maybe a fancy mausoleum in a cemetery for the rich.
Mausoleum. Pratt Library sure felt like one these days. Olive eyed the once glorious limestone facade, streaked green from the sagging copper of the ornate gutters and downspouts. A weathered slate roof tile lay shattered on the wobbly marble steps.
“Once upon an endless time,” she said again with a sigh, nudging the tile aside with her sneakered foot. She dropped the key back into her bag, leaned a skinny shoulder against the door and pushed. She groaned, and the door groaned in greeting back to her. Some days, that was the extent of Olive’s worldly dialogue. Two groans to open the library, two groans at the close of the day, with very little sound in between. Olive was the town librarian, or ghost librarian as she sometimes put it if she was feeling less than cheerful. I’m a ghost in a mausoleum of books. Well, this town made you lose your cheer sometimes. New Milford had almost closed the library back in 2010, but Olive shook her fist in protest at the town council.
That evening, she rose from her folding chair and approached the seven council members. She slammed her hands on the cloth-covered table that was really just three lengths of plywood set on sawhorses, aimed a gimlet eye at each member in turn, then stood back and folded her arms.
“A town that would close its library. Shame on you!” she shouted, but really it wasn’t much of a shout because her gravelly voice had been weakened by decades of reading to children and by the meerschaum pipe she smoked, the ivory bowl a hand-carved, blazing-eyed likeness of Mark Twain. She liked to sit on the front steps of her little clapboard house up on Zick Hill and watch the sunset and smoke a bowl of tobacco—or the sunrise if her old bones woke her in the night and she was just too achy and lonesome to fall back to sleep.
The council president was Stu Giptner, an associate agent at Endless Dreams Realty. “We can’t maintain the library and pay you a salary, Olive,” he said, in that piercingly nasal voice of his. “The state doesn’t have the money, and the town don’t either. We’re just small-town businessmen and dairy farmers and quarrymen.” He quickly added, “And Pump N Pantry head clerks,” when Blair Peterson leaned out from her end of the table and raised an eyebrow.