What Light

by Jay Asher

  The smell of tree resin is thick in the wet air, and the damp soil tugs at my heavy boots. Branches scratch at my sleeves as I pull my phone from my pocket. I tap Uncle Bruce’s number and then hold the phone against my ear with my shoulder while I pull on work gloves.

  He laughs when he answers. “It sure didn’t take you long to get up there, Sierra!”

  “I wasn’t driving that fast,” I say. In truth, taking those turns and sliding through mud is way too fun to resist.

  “Not to worry, honey. I’ve torn up that hill plenty of times in my truck.”

  “I’ve seen you, which is how I knew it would be fun,” I say. “Anyway, I’m almost at the first bundle.”

  “Be there in a minute,” he says. Before he hangs up, I can hear the helicopter motor start to turn.

  From my jacket pocket, I remove an orange mesh safety vest and slip my arms through the holes. The Velcro strip running down the chest holds it in place so Uncle Bruce will be able to spot me from the air.

  From maybe two hundred yards ahead, I can hear chainsaws buzz as workers carve through the stumps of this year’s trees. Two months ago, we began tagging the ones we wanted cut down. On a branch near the top we tied a colored plastic ribbon. Red, yellow, or blue, depending on the height, to help us sort them later while loading the trucks. Any trees that remain untagged will be left to continue growing.

  In the distance, I can see the red helicopter flying this way. Mom and Dad helped Uncle Bruce buy it in exchange for his help airlifting our trees during the harvest. The helicopter keeps us from wasting land with crisscrossing access roads, and the trees get shipped fresher. The rest of the year, he uses it to fly tourists along the rocky coastline. Sometimes he even gets to play hero and find a lost hiker.

  After the workers ahead of me cut four or five trees, they lay them side-by-side atop two long cables, like placing them across railroad tracks. They pile more trees on top until they’ve gathered about a dozen. Then they lace the cables over the bundle and cinch them together before moving on.

  That’s where I come in.

  Last year was the first year Dad let me do this. I knew he wanted to tell me the work was too dangerous for a fifteen-year-old girl, but he wouldn’t dare say that out loud. A few of the guys he hires to cut the trees are classmates of mine, and he lets them wield chainsaws.

  The helicopter blades grow louder—thwump-thwump-thwump-thwump—slicing through the air. The beat of my heart matches their rhythm as I get ready to attach my first bundle of the season.

  I stand beside the first batch, flexing my gloved fingers. The early sunlight flashes across the window of the helicopter. A long line of cable trails behind it, dragging a heavy red hook through the sky.

  The helicopter slows as it approaches, and I dig my boots into the soil. Hovering above me, the blades boom. Thwump-thwump-thwump-thwump. The helicopter slowly lowers until the metal hook touches the needles of the bundled trees. I raise my arm over my head and make a circular motion to ask for more slack. When it lowers a few more inches, I grab the hook, slip it beneath the cables, and then take two large steps back.

  Looking up, I can see Uncle Bruce smile down at me. I point at him, he gives me a thumbs-up, and then up he goes. The heavy bundle pulls together as it lifts from the ground, and then it sails away.

  A crescent moon hangs over our farmhouse. Looking out from my upstairs window, I can see the hills roll off into deep shadows. As a child, I would stand here and pretend to be a ship’s captain watching the ocean at night, the swells often darker than the starry sky above.

  This view remains constant each year because of how we rotate the harvest. For each tree cut, we leave five in the ground and plant a new seedling in its place. In six years, all of these individual trees will have been shipped around the country to stand in homes as the centerpiece of the holidays.

  Because of this, my season has different traditions. The day before Thanksgiving, Mom and I will drive south and reunite with Dad. Then we’ll eat Thanksgiving dinner with Heather and her family. The next day we’ll start selling trees from morning to night, and we won’t stop until Christmas Eve. That night, exhausted, we’ll exchange one gift each. There isn’t room for many more gifts than that in our silver Airstream trailer—our home-away-from-home.

  Our farmhouse was built in the 1930s. The old wooden floors and stairs make it impossible to get out of bed in the middle of the night without making noise, but I stick close to the least creaky side of the stairs. I’m three steps from the kitchen floor when Mom calls to me from the living room.

  “Sierra, you need to get at least a few hours of sleep.”

  Whenever Dad’s not here, Mom falls asleep on the couch with the TV on. The romantic side of me wants to believe their bedroom feels too lonely when he’s gone. My nonromantic side thinks falling asleep on the couch makes her feel rebellious.

  I hold my robe around me and slip my feet into tattered sneakers by the couch. Mom yawns and reaches for the remote control on the floor. She turns off the TV, which blackens the room.

  She clicks on a side lamp. “Where are you going?”

  “To the greenhouse,” I say. “I want to bring the tree in here so we don’t forget it.”

  Rather than loading our car the night before we leave, we place all of our bags near the front door so we can look them over one more time before the drive. Once we hit the highway, the road ahead is too long to turn back.

  “And then you need to go right to bed,” Mom says. She shares my curse of not being able to sleep if I’m worried about something. “Otherwise, I can’t let you drive tomorrow.”

  I promise her and close the front door, pulling my robe tighter to keep out the cold night air. The greenhouse will be warm, but I’ll be inside only long enough to grab the little tree, which I recently transplanted into a black plastic bucket. I’ll put that tree by our luggage and then Heather and I will plant it after dinner on Thanksgiving. This will make six trees, which started on our farm, that now grow atop Cardinals Peak in California. The plan for next year has always been to cut down the first one we planted and give it to Heather’s family.

  That’s one more reason this can’t be our last season.

  CHAPTER THREE

  From outside, the trailer may look like a silver thermos tipped on its side, but the inside has always felt cozy to me. A small dining table is attached to the wall at one end, with the edge of my bed doubling as one of the benches. The kitchen is compact with a sink, refrigerator, stove, and microwave. The bathroom feels smaller every year even though my parents upgraded for a bigger shower. With a standard shower, it would have been impossible to reach down and wash my legs without doing stretches first. At the other end of the trailer from my bed is the door to Mom and Dad’s room, which has barely enough space for their bed, a small closet, and a footstool. Their door is shut now, but I can hear Mom snoring as she recovers from our long drive.

  The foot of my bed touches the kitchen cabinet, and there’s a wooden cupboard above it. I press a large white thumbtack into the cupboard. On the table beside me are the picture frames from Rachel and Elizabeth. I’ve connected them with shiny green ribbon so they’ll hang one on top of the other. I tie a loop at the end of the ribbon and hook it onto the thumbtack so my friends back home can be with me every day.

  “Welcome to California,” I tell them.

  I scoot to the head of my bed and slide the curtains apart.

  A Christmas tree topples against the window and I scream. The needles scratch the glass as someone struggles to pull the tree upright again.

  Andrew peeks around the branches, probably to make sure he didn’t bust the glass. He blushes when he sees me, and I glance down to make sure I put on a shirt after showering. Over the years I have taken a few morning showers and then walked around the trailer in a towel before remembering a lot of high school guys work right outside. />
  Last year, Andrew became the first and the last guy to ask me out down here. He did it with a note taped to the other side of my window. It was meant to look cute, I guess, but what I pictured was him tiptoeing in the dark mere inches from where I slept. Thankfully, I was able to tell him it wouldn’t be smart to date anyone who works here. That’s not an actual rule, but my parents have mentioned a few times how uncomfortable that might be for everyone involved since they work here, too.

  Mom and Dad met when they were my age, and he worked with his parents on this very lot. Her family lived a few blocks away, and one winter they fell so hard for each other, he returned for baseball camp that summer. After they married and took over the lot, for extra help they began hiring ballplayers from the local high school who wanted extra holiday cash. This was never a problem when I was young, but once I entered puberty, new and thicker curtains were hung up around the trailer.

  While I can’t hear Andrew, I see him mouth “Sorry” from the other side of the window. He finally gets the tree upright and then shimmies the stand back a few feet so the lower branches don’t touch any tree around it.

  There’s no reason to let our past awkwardness keep us from being cordial, so I slide the window partly open. “So you’re back for another year,” I say.

  Andrew takes a look around, but there’s no one else I could be talking to. He faces me, putting his hands in his pockets. “It’s nice to see you again,” he says.

  It’s great when workers return for subsequent seasons, but I am careful not to give this one the wrong idea again. “I heard some other guys from the team came back, too.”

  Andrew looks at the nearest tree and plucks a couple of needles. “Yep,” he says. He petulantly flicks the needles to the dirt and walks away.

  Rather than let this get to me, I slide the window open further and close my eyes. The air out there will never smell exactly like home, but it does try. The view is very different, though. Instead of Christmas trees growing on rolling hills, they’re propped up in metal stands on a dirt lot. Instead of hundreds of acres of farmland stretching to the horizon, we have one acre that stops at Oak Boulevard. On the other side of the street, an empty parking lot stretches toward a grocery store. Since it’s Thanksgiving, McGregor’s Market closed early today.

  McGregor’s has been in that spot since well before my family began selling trees here. It’s now the only non-chain market in town. Last year, the owner told my parents they might not be in business when we returned. When Dad called home a couple of weeks ago to say he made it, the first thing I asked was whether McGregor’s was still there. As a child I loved when Mom or Dad took a break from selling trees and walked me across the street for groceries. Years later, they would hand me a shopping list and I would go over on my own. The last few years it’s been my responsibility to make that list as well as shop.

  I watch a white car drive across the asphalt, probably to make sure the market really is closed for the evening. The driver slows as he passes the storefront, then speeds back across the lot to the street.

  From somewhere within our trees, Dad shouts, “Must’ve forgot the cranberry sauce!”

  Throughout the lot, I can hear the baseball players laugh.

  Every year on this day, Dad jokes about the frustrated drivers speeding away from McGregor’s. “But it won’t be Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie!” Or, “I guess someone forgot the stuffing!” The guys always laugh along.

  I watch two of them carry a large tree past the trailer. One has his arms buried in the middle branches while the other follows, holding the trunk. They both stop walking so that the one in the branches can adjust his grip. The other guy, waiting, looks to the trailer and catches my eye. He smiles and then whispers something to the first guy that I can’t hear but that causes his teammate to also look my way.

  I desperately want to make sure my hair isn’t a tangled mess even though I have no reason to impress them (no matter how cute they are). So I politely wave and then walk away.

  On the other side of the trailer door, someone scrapes the bottoms of their shoes on the metal steps. Although it hasn’t rained since Dad set things up this year, the ground outside always has damp spots. A few times each day, the tree stands get filled with water and the needles are sprayed with misters.

  “Knock-knock!”

  I barely get the door unlatched before Heather yanks it open and squeals. Her dark curls bounce as she raises her arms and then hugs me. I laugh at her high-pitched excitement and follow her as she kneels at my bed for a closer look at the photos of Rachel and Elizabeth.

  “They gave me those before I left,” I tell her.

  Heather touches the top frame. “This is Rachel, right? Is she supposed to be hiding from the paparazzi?”

  “Oh, she would be so happy to know you figured that out,” I say.

  Heather scoots to the window so she can see outside. She taps on the glass with her fingertip and one of the ballplayers looks our way. He’s carrying a cardboard box marked “mistletoe” to the green-and-white tent we call the Bigtop. That’s where we ring up customers, sell other merchandise, and display the trees flocked with artificial snow.

  Without looking at me, Heather asks, “Did you notice how hot this year’s team is?”

  Of course I noticed, but it would be so much easier if I hadn’t. If Dad even thought I was flirting with one of the workers, he would make the guy thoroughly clean both outhouses in hopes that the stink would keep me away—which it would.

  Not that I would want to date someone down here, whether he worked for us or not. Why put my heart into something fate will only tear apart Christmas morning?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After we stuff ourselves with Thanksgiving dinner, and Heather’s dad makes his annual “hibernate through the winter” joke, all of us move to what have become our traditional destinations. The dads clear and wash the dishes, partly so they can continue nibbling at the turkey. The moms head to the garage to start bringing in far too many boxes of Christmas decorations. Heather runs upstairs to grab two flashlights, and I wait for her at the bottom of the stairs.

  From the closet near the front door, I take down a forest green hoodie Mom wore on our walk over. Yellow block letters spell LUMBERJACKS, her college mascot, across the chest. I pull the sweatshirt over my head and hear the back door in the kitchen open, which means the moms are returning. I quickly look upstairs to see if Heather’s on her way down. We were trying to leave before they returned and asked for help.

  “Sierra?” Mom calls.

  I tug my hair up through the collar. “About to leave!” I shout back.

  Mom carries in a large transparent plastic tub full of newspaper-wrapped decorations.

  “Is it okay if I borrow your sweatshirt?” I ask. “When you and Dad go back, you can wear mine.”

  “No, yours is so thin,” she says.

  “I know, but you won’t be out nearly as long as us,” I say. “Plus, it’s not even that cold.”

  “Plus,” Mom says sarcastically, “you should have thought of that before we came over.”

  I begin to take off her sweatshirt, but she motions for me to keep it on.

  “Next year, stay and help us with . . .” Her words trail off.

  I shift my eyes to the stairs. She doesn’t know I’ve heard the conversations between her and Dad, or between both of them and Uncle Bruce, about whether or not we’ll open the lot next year. Apparently it would have made the most sense to pull up stakes two years ago, but everyone’s hoping things will bounce back.

  Mom sets the plastic tub on the living room carpet and pops off the top.

  “Sure,” I say. “Next year.”

  Heather skips down the stairs in the faded red sweatshirt she only wears this one night a year. The cuffs are in tatters and the neckline is stretched. We got it at a thrift shop soon after my grandpa’s f
uneral, when Heather’s mom took us shopping to cheer me up. Seeing her in it always feels bittersweet. It reminds me of how much I miss my grandparents when I’m down here but also how great a friend Heather has been to me.

  She stops at the bottom of the stairs and offers me a choice of two small flashlights, purple or blue. I take the purple one and put it in my pocket.

  Mom unrolls a newspaper-wrapped snowman candle. Unless Heather’s mom changed decorating plans for the first time in forever, that candle will go in the front bathroom. The wick is black from the one brief moment Heather’s dad lit it last year. At the first smell of burning wax, her mom pounded on the bathroom door until he blew it out. “It’s a decoration!” she shouted. “You don’t light decorations!”

  Mom looks at the kitchen and then to us. “If you want to make it out of here, you’d better go now,” she says. “Your mom’s looking for her entry in this year’s ugly Christmas sweater contest. Apparently she’s got a winner.”

  “How bad is it?” I ask.

  Heather scrunches her nose. “If she doesn’t win, those judges have no sense of horrendous.”

  When we hear the back door open, we scramble out the front door and slam it shut behind us.

  Next to the welcome mat is the small tree I carried over from the lot. Earlier, I transferred the tree out of the plastic bucket, so its roots are now bound in a scratchy burlap sack.

  “I’ll carry it up the first half,” Heather says. She picks up the basketball-sized bag and settles it in the crook of her arm. “You can carry that little shovel thingie you brought.”

  I pick up the gardening trowel and we head out.

  Less than halfway up Cardinals Peak, Heather says it’s time to switch. I slide my flashlight into my back pocket and then we shift the tree into my arms.

  “You got it?” she asks. When I nod, she takes the trowel from my hand.