He turned. “Yeah?”
“I’ll—I’ll go with you. I mean, not to smoke, I just—”
He smiled. “Come on. I think we could both use some air.”
~~**~~
Elise was surprised at how touching all the items and putting them in boxes, then hearing that tinny thunk as they hit the bottom of the dumpster, made her feel. She’d expected it would be liberating, but it was exactly the opposite. She thought back to the person who had stolen her belongings from her apartment, and she somehow thought that when he took them he’d gotten some kind of satisfaction from it, as in if I sell this TV I can eat this week, or even, if I sell this TV I can buy my drugs. Taking her things had been, probably, some sort of means to an end for whoever it was. This had no such quality. She was tossing out this—junk—and when it was done, all she would have was an empty room, and a dumpster full of worthless things. And there was a sadness underneath it all, too. She actually wished her mother were here to tell her what all this was.
And why it was so important she had to toss out Elise’s things to make room. It wasn’t like the house was small.
They were halfway through clearing the room when Pete said, “So, you’re really going to go, huh? You wouldn’t consider just fixing this place up and moving back into it?”
“It’s falling down, as you can see. It’s kind of a train wreck.”
He shrugged and tossed some balls of twine into the box he was filling. “This is the kind of work I do every day, you know. I could fix it up for you over time. A side project. It’s nice. Around here, if this were fixed up, it’d cost a pretty penny to buy.”
“I know.”
“So you’ve considered keeping it, then?”
“No.” She bent over to retrieve another pile of house shapes. “I just want everything in this place thrown out right now.”
“And then you’ll think about keeping it? Or you’ve decided?”
She was suddenly annoyed. “I’ve decided. What’s here for me, really? Except the past, I guess. That’s a dead-end street.”
“I thought I was.”
She had finished setting another stack of house-shapes, this pile fashioned of cardboard, into a box before what he’d said registered. She looked at him. He was watching her.
“What?”
He turned away, toward one of the last three piles in the corner. “Never mind.”
“No.” She took a step forward. “What did you say? I honestly didn’t hear you.”
He blinked. “I said, ‘I thought I was.’ Meaning, I’m here.”
She felt her face flush, and she smiled nervously. “Well, of course you’re here. You live here.”
His expression changed. “That’s kinda not what I meant.”
It occurred to her then that she did know what he meant. She had known all along what he meant. She opened her mouth to respond—
—but he’d already taken offense.
“There’s beer in the truck. Why don’t you go get it and I’ll . . . start opening up these other doors.”
The way he’d said it was snappish, clipped.
“I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I get it. I’ll open up these other doors, and you can do what you want and go where you want and do whatever.”
“But it’s not that—”
“We’ve been dancing around this for five years. You haven’t noticed?”
She looked at the floor. “No. Really.”
“Right.”
“I’m not lying. I swear I’m not.”
“Go get the beer.”
She hesitated for a moment, but knew she couldn’t convince him. She hurried through the hall, down the stairs, out to his truck, and set her hand on the six-pack. Then she considered not going back inside. She glared at the decrepit place, recognizing that right now finishing this project was too much for her. She could walk away. Walk away from the house. Walk away from him. Turn off the electricity; let the damn thing rot.
But she heard him calling her: “Elise! I think you’d better see this!”
She swallowed. For the first time since she’d been at Pete’s asking for help, she felt terrified about what she might find.
She slammed the door to the truck and walked as quickly as she could over the uneven, muddy ground. At the base of the stairs, she set her hand on the newel post; it was sticky. “Are you okay?”
“Wow,” he said.
She ascended the stairs. “Is it . . . is it really bad? Worse than my room?”
“No, I mean . . . wow. You never told me your mother was an artist.”
“What are you talking about?” Her voice was so loud she must have startled another mouse; she heard something scurry behind her, but she kept moving down the hall.
“I’m in here.” His hand stuck out from the doorway to the room that had once been her father’s study.
She approached and peered inside.
Her mouth fell open.
The room was crammed with houses. Six inches high, two feet high, three feet high, five feet high. Houses made from driftwood. Houses covered with tar paper, tacked together with nails, covered in beautiful shells. Gleaming, silver chimneys made from old cans. And each house . . . each house had windows and doors. And each window or door revealed the houses’ interiors.
They were full.
Full of seagull bones. Full of nails. Full of broken glass. Full of shells, full of crosses, full of sugar stars.
“Oh my God,” was all she could say.
Pete nodded at their surroundings. “Every room on this floor—even the old bathroom—they’re all full of these things. They’re really intricate . . . must’ve taken years.”
“Many years. I . . .” she recalled what her mother had said—she was doing work, or she was doing good work, or something like that. “I had no idea she was doing any of this.”
Pete bent over and moved the three-foot-tall structure blocking her entrance slightly to the side, then stepped over another two or three small houses, turned, and reached for her hand. “Come on in—watch your step.”
She marveled at his bare hand for a moment, struck by the deep lines in his palm.
“I don’t want you to fall.”
Their eyes met. She bit her lip and took his hand, and he helped her over. And then she let go and rubbed her arms, feeling the enormity and the chill of all of it. The sad little houses. The lovely, sad little houses made of broken junk.
But the houses were full. They were all full of something. Just like her mother’s house had been full of something. Full of the sounds, maybe, of her mother working. And what was Elise’s life full of? Her little apartments were empty. Her life was empty.
She and Pete stood there in the quiet.
Pete was the first one to speak. “Look, I don’t . . . I don’t mean to be telling you what to do. But I don’t think you’re going to be able to throw this stuff away.”
“I know,” she said, remembering the sugar star she’d crushed under her foot, wondering if maybe it could be glued. She reached for his hand, and he took it. “I know.”
There was the sound of dripping water coming from the corner of the room. It made her think of tears.
Outside, it rained harder.
ROOTS
T he only place I see my daughter Anna’s face now is on a milk carton.
She was just five years old when she wandered out the back door into the woods behind the house and disappeared, but in that moment, less traumatic but still painful, I lost more than the Anna I loved. The other women on Merrow Street—neighbors, friends, confidantes—withdrew; they didn’t understand because they still had their children. Oh, certainly, in those first days they were all aflutter, alighting on my doorstep with their lasagnas, cookies, and wine. Two weeks in, their voluntary visits tapered off, and despite my well-in-advance invitations, they had their excuses: Bethany was in the weeds picking up after the girls; Diane had to take Derek and Tyler to soc
cer practice; Sabrina had to give Miranda her piano lesson. I knew, of course, that they weren’t really that consumed; they hadn’t been too busy for me when I had my Anna. They regarded me as though I had an infectious condition; as though the loss of a child were viral; as though being near me were to guarantee that one day their children would disappear, too.
Nick has become distant, but I don’t blame him; instead of the minutiae you discuss with your husband—how was work, don’t forget we’re heading to the Sheltons’ for cocktails on Friday night, I took the van in for the oil change today—that which isn’t minutiae casts a pall over everything. Work and cocktail parties and oil changes are too trivial, but we can’t really talk about that the little girl we made is missing thing either, because that is too overwhelming. So yet again we eat another meal of broiled salmon and saffron rice, our last meal before he goes on yet another overseas business trip, in silence.
I used to miss him when he went on business trips. Now the only thing I miss is his laundry.
I’ve taken to gardening, the only activity that seems not to remind me of Anna. Before she vanished, there wasn’t a garden of any sort behind my house. In autumn, the flowerbeds were buried beneath dead leaves; in spring, dandelions sprouted through the rotting wood chips; in summer, some withered stalks thrust up around the grubby, cracked birdbath. But after Anna went missing and my friends went away, I grew roses, geraniums, and forsythia. When that was done, I moved over to the area near the woods and put in hemlocks, careful, always careful to never plant in the area where I thought my Anna would have trodden in case she returned and couldn’t find her way back into the yard.
In our neighborhood, the houses are abreast with nary a hedge between them, and sometimes I sense my former friends watching me. Busy with their children, indeed; they seem to have plenty of time to stare at a grief-stricken soul on her haunches, clawing rocks from the ground.
There is the one in the pink house next door who isn’t busy with her children because she has none—Onja, who grew up in Madagascar but moved here when she married Grant. She was from the capital city there. I imagined it a lush, rainbowed place full of parties, because Onja is always dressed in the bright colors of a plumed bird and her speech is melodic, even though sometimes it’s difficult to comprehend. This works both ways, though, because when she first moved in—two years before Anna went missing—I invited her for ladies’ night. She asked what she could bring and I told her, salad, since I knew my other friends liked to grandstand with their oysters Rockefeller and mango martinis; no one would deign to bring simple greens. Onja showed up at the door with rice and a carved coconut full of sauce that reeked of chili and ginger, an appetizer no one touched.
She also regaled us with odd stories. She told us she was born because her relatives perform a ritual in which they unearth their ancestors’ bodies and replace their burial clothes—women who cannot conceive, like her mother, jam a piece of the old shroud beneath their mattresses as a cure. And she told us that she knows there is such a thing as a man-eating tree, which flourishes deep in the Madagascar jungles and has claimed its share of wayward explorers since the island’s discovery.
Diane, tall, broad, and pear-shaped, was still busy poking fun at a putrid death shroud as a fertility treatment when Bethany, who lives in the green house next door, bulldozed the conversation. “Every culture has its—antiquated cures, but—a man-eating tree? Really, now.” She has four small girls, and I could never imagine how she could’ve given birth to them just about one right after the other when she’s shaped like a string; I was tubby after Anna and still can’t get rid of my pouch. “That’s absurd!”
“Not so much.” Onja sipped her martini. “You hear of the Venus flytrap? The corpse flower? They eat meat.”
Bethany, who always reminds me of a chicken when she’s gossiping, pulled her head back and looked like she was about to cluck. Instead, she daintily wiped the corner of her mouth with a napkin and said, “But a tree, as big as you’re saying, that just reaches out and grabs people? That just doesn’t make any sense.”
“The Mkodo tribe, they sacrificed young women to the trees. To ensure that they would have good harvest.”
Bethany squawked in laughter.
“Be amused.” Onja set her empty glass on the counter and met Bethany’s stare. “These trees, they have fanahy—intelligence, character, part of a man that is forever a soul. They know flesh from flesh and they can pick-choose their victims.”
That quieted everyone down; Bethany looked at me in the ensuing silence, then gathered up the dirty appetizer plates. Diane, Sabrina, and the other women demurred to the sitting room and helped themselves to the Linzer tarts I’d served on my bone china.
While the others had been unsettled by the story, I was charmed by it; Onja was quite an entertainer. Although I never invited her over again. She wasn’t one of us; clearly, she never would be.
Today I’m weeding the garden, pulling up stubborn pachysandra that have been threatening to choke my roses, and I hear Onja say to me, “Christelle, you have such a good garden. I brought you this.”
I stand and brush the dirt off my knees, even though I’m certain I have a smudged face and root-threaded hair. Onja, stunning in a yellow and pink blouse, carries a chartreuse and orange ceramic pot adorned with purple crosses. In it sits something akin to and twice the size of a pineapple, but where this common fruit’s angular leaves should be are hairy, purplish-green, sinuous strands, their tips curling, pulsing . . . moving like the tentacles of a squid.
My stomach knots.
“Something for your garden.” She holds it forward.
I take a step back. “What is it?”
She smiles. Her teeth are faultless. “It is a tepe. A sacred tree. A man-eating tree.”
It doesn’t look big enough to be a tree, and I’m sure she is sowing more stories. “Oh, come now. You were just making conversation.”
She furrows her brow. “It was no story. I gave you the truth. Here it is. For you.”
In her green house next door, Bethany stands at the picture window in her dining room, looking into my yard. She’s sipping a mug of something, and next to her is the youngest of her four blonde girls: Kathy, who is the same age my Anna was when she disappeared. The child rushes to her side and pulls on her pant leg.
Bethany notices I see her staring, and shuttles her daughter away from the window.
“You need someone who will not run away on you,” Onja says. “Someone you can love and care for, someone who will always be there.”
I just stare at it.
“Take it.” She thrusts it into my hands.
I have no choice. I wrap my hands around the cool ceramic.
“Plant it.” She turns to go back to her pink house.
I watch her retreat across the lawn. I see Bethany has returned to the window and is eyeing me again. I remember my husband will be in China for another three weeks.
Someone who will not run away on you. Someone you can love and care for. Someone who will always be there.
The serpentine appendages quiver and reach.
“Onja!”
She turns.
“It won’t—it won’t eat me, will it?”
Onja throws back her head and laughs, a loud guffaw. “You are its mother now. It does not bite the hand which feeds it.”
I like the sound of mother.
“How do I—take care of it?”
“It will eat bugs and perhaps a small animal which crosses its path when it gets big enough. If you really want it to grow, give it love—talk to it; it will listen and know your soul . . . and give it meat. Raw steak. Four times a day and it will grow like the size of your house in a fast way.” She nods, turns, and continues back to her house.
Something touches my breast. It is one of the tree’s tentacles. It stirs something inside me, something I’ve not felt in a long time. “Come now, baby,” I say, letting the tentacle curl around my finger; it is cool and mu
scular. “Let’s get you planted.”
~~**~~
The tree needs someplace safe, so I choose the spot in the woods at the point where I’ve often imagined Anna entered; it is far enough in that it is away from Bethany’s prying eyes. The tree is not hard to plant at all; even its roots seem to have their own mind, and it practically buries itself when I set it into the hole I’ve dug. I’m wrapped in a scent like melon and peanut butter.
I go to the market and fill a reusable shopping bag with raw steak, chopped meat, chicken, and pork.
When I return, I haul my bag down to the tree’s base; its hairy appendages creep toward my bare ankles. At first my breath leaves me in fear, but then I remember you are its mother now, and I hold my ground.
They caress my leg, and warmth penetrates my bones.
They move to the bag of meat. There is hesitation; the tree seems to be aware it cannot eat the plastic and Styrofoam packaging. I tear the sustenance free, and watch as the worm-like things grope to lift it from the ground without much success.
“Here.” I gather it in my hands and hold it up. “It’s for you. Food.”
There is a blast of that melon and peanut butter smell again, something I will eventually translate to mean pleasure. It slides the steak from my palms and places it inside its crown, where it eats.
At first, the tree is only waist high and doesn’t consume as much as I’d expected; it is at several pounds per day. But Onja was right; the tree grows so fast that it isn’t long before I’m making a daily trip to the market and filling a cart to the brim. Sometimes I clean out one whole section of the meat counter and have to drive to the superstore across town.
The women certainly pay a bit more attention to me now, but it’s only in the stores. They rush about with their clingy children at their waists and try to sneak by without talking to me; they don’t ask me what I’m doing with all this meat, but occasionally I hear she’s lost her mind, tut-tut, poor dear and the like drift from the end of the seafood line or the soup aisle. But this doesn’t upset me as much as it used to; now, I have the tree, my baby, to take care of, to talk to.
The Shadows Behind Page 18