The Last Tree Town

by Beth Turley

  The “lie down and do nothing” pose is called Shavasana.

  “Roll gently to a lying position. Do not underemphasize this pose. It is critical to your practice,” Lola says. She demonstrates Shavasana.

  “Finally.” Jac lies down, arms and legs spread into a yoga-mat angel.

  I turn toward Daniella. She rests on her back with her eyes closed and arms pressed tight to her sides. A tear wedges in the corner of her eye. It gleams like a diamond. I look away.

  I’m still mad at her for the way she made me feel at Kindly Vines, and the way she’s shut the Chordays out. So mad and confused sometimes that I think I’ll self-destruct.

  But that doesn’t mean I want to see her cry.

  7 Humpty Dumpty

  I wake up the next day with the sun in my eyes and a plan to sneak into Daniella’s room when she’s not there. I’ve never gone behind her back like that before, but that’s because I’ve never had to. Daniella used to keep her door cracked open. I could peek inside and find her propped against her pillows, listening to music.

  “Come in already,” she said when she saw me. Her bed had twelve decorative throw pillows. Each one was different. I leaned into the square one covered in sequins and watched our reflections in her mirror, which had handwritten notes and Polaroid pictures taped to it, while a slow song played out of her speakers. I listened closely to the lyrics. The singers were always losing the person they loved most.

  “Why do you like sad songs?” I asked her.

  “They make you feel things,” she answered, and sunk deeper into her striped body pillow. “They make you feel understood.”

  Those moments were different from the time when we danced on her carpet. We were quiet and still while the music put words to the feelings that we couldn’t.

  Now her door is always closed.

  A car pulls into our driveway. I peek through my blinds and see Jenna’s mom’s Jeep. Daniella comes out of the house.

  “Going to the mall. Be back later,” she calls out behind her. Everything is muffled—Daniella’s voice, the front door closing, the Jeep driving off. The way sounds get when you watch something from far away. I roll out of bed and pull on my holiday fuzzy socks. They’re the quietest on our hardwood floors.

  My shadow darkens the seashell DANIELLA. I open her door carefully so the sign won’t move, and step inside. I don’t really know what I’m looking for. Just a clue to explain Daniella’s growing pains.

  Her room smells like the coconut-mint body spray she’s been using since seventh grade. I sift through the clothes on her floor, check the mirror to see if any notes or pictures are torn down. Everything is the same. She has a Quote of the Day calendar on her dresser. It says Everyone must row with the oars he has. I look closer and see that it hasn’t been changed since July. The whole room is frozen in time. Stuck.

  Daniella didn’t make her bed before leaving, and the decorative pillows are tossed all over the floor. I think about reassembling them into their usual pyramid. I have her pattern memorized—big striped ones on the bottom, log shapes and circles in the middle, the square sequined one on top. But if I did, she’d know I was in here. Something with sharp blue edges sticks out from underneath her wrinkled bedsheet. It looks like the corner of a book. It’s none of your business, I think. But deep down I’m desperate to know what she’s reading.

  “Thoughts” is written in gold on the cover. I open to a page near the front. Daniella’s writing, small and precise, fills the page. I drop the diary back onto her bed.

  The fuzzy socks are too warm. I start to sweat. If this diary holds the truth, then how can I just stick it back under the sheet? I need to know why my sister has changed, like I know that she keeps sour worms in her sweater drawer.

  I pick the diary back up and read.

  August 4

  I always thought I was this certain kind of person. Someone who wakes up early because they like how mornings feel. A go-getter. Someone who might make history one day.

  But something is happening to me. I can feel it. It’s like the beginning of a cold but heavier. The only way I can describe it is that once upon a time I had a wall in my chest that surrounded my sadness and kept it contained, and now it’s fallen down. Like a Humpty Dumpty tragic kind of falling down.

  Maybe it fell a week ago, the day of high school orientation, when it took me six tries to get my locker open. It really shouldn’t have bothered me so much. But every failed try pushed the despair higher up in my chest until my whole heart was infected. The idea of opening this locker for the next four years made me want to drop onto the dirty floor and cry.

  Or it might have fallen when we moved Buelo into Kindly Vines. Just me and Mom and Buela. Dad had to work and Mom didn’t think Cass should be part of it. I guess fourteen is old enough to be a part of the ugly things. Buelo knocked over the chair in his room, and called Mom and Buela terrible names. He caught my eye in the middle of it, and it was like he’d never seen me in his life. Mom drove slow on the way home and told me what I already knew—Buelo has dementia. His brain has clouded up and made the memories hard to see.

  I don’t want to think about the way I’m feeling. I want it to go away. So for now I’ll just say my wall fell down. And like Humpty Dumpty, maybe not even the king’s horses and men can put it back together again.

  Mom drops something metal on the kitchen floor, and I lose the nerve to keep reading. I put the diary back with the corner sticking out from the mess of sheets. My heartbeat thumps, sad and slow. I picture Daniella covered in thin cracks, her growing pains hurting more than any of us realized.

  I check her sweater drawer before I leave. I move the cardigans and pullovers around, but there aren’t any sour worms in there anymore. If Daniella isn’t going to tell me about her high school locker or where she’s hiding her candy now, I’m going to have to find out for myself.

  And if the king’s horses and men can’t fix the wall in her chest, then I’ll do it. Even if I have to keep sneaking into her room to read her diary.

  8 Fire + Rain

  From the backyard, I can see Daniella’s window. She has it cracked and the curtains are open. I sit out by the unlit fire pit in a white plastic chair. The other three chairs are still here from the Chordays’ last summer night. My brain burns with an idea.

  “Daniella,” I call to her window. I know she’s in there. She disappeared inside with the door closed after dinner. “Daniella!”

  Her face appears, blocked by the screen and framed by banana-yellow curtains.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Come make a fire with me.”

  She glances at the pit. I wonder what she thinks about when she looks at the empty chairs. Does she remember the time when Jac scorched her marshmallow and made us all laugh so hard that Ben tipped over onto the grass?

  “It’s going to rain,” she says.

  I look up at the sky. No clouds clog up the dim, clear blue.

  “It’s not raining right now.”

  “I don’t know, Cass.”

  “Please. We don’t have many more weekends until the official end of summer.” If I had known that that fire was going to be our last, I never would have put it out. I would have kept feeding it branches and newspaper forever.

  “Fine,” she says. She disappears from the window. Her bedroom light turns off. A minute later, she comes out the back door wearing jean shorts and a hoodie. She walks barefoot across the deck and onto the grass.

  “Did you start?” she asks.

  “No, I wanted to wait for you.”

  She rolls her eyes and picks up some branches from the pile we keep near the pit. I copy her. The wood crisscrosses together on top of burnt ashes, ghosts from summer nights past.

  “What’s high school like?” I ask, adding a crumpled sheet of newspaper to the pit.

  “It’s school,” Daniella says. She picks up the lighter and holds it close to the wood, just how Dad taught us to. The flame appears and sets a whole stick
on fire.

  “It has to be a little different. You’re my older sister; it’s your job to tell me.” I take the bottle of lighter fluid and drench the wood in the sharp-smelling liquid. The fire swells.

  “Okay, it’s a little different.” She sits in one of the chairs, and I take the one next to her.

  “We could talk about it, you know. Or we can talk about anything you want to,” I say.

  She turns to me. The fire lights up half her face. For a second I think she might tell me about the wall in her chest, or her high school orientation, or that moving Buelo to Kindly Vines changed something inside her.

  “How’s Jac and Ben?”

  “Jac is Jac. Ben’s already talking about the spring musical.”

  I think she might smile a little, but it’s hard to tell in the dusky light.

  “Of course he is,” she says.

  “I know they want to hang out with you. The four of us. Like always.” I try to keep my voice even. Casual. Everything can be normal if I just act normal. I’m still Cassi and she’s still Daniella and we’re still the Chordays.

  “I’ve been busy. I have… more homework now.”

  How much homework could she have one week into the school year? The truth is as bright as the flames. She’s not going to tell me anything. I stare at the fire until my eyes hurt. When I look away, I see dark spots. No, they’re real spots. Wet spots.

  “I knew it was going to rain,” Daniella says.

  The rain comes down, persistent but too light to put the fire out completely. Daniella runs to the hose and fills a bucket with water. She comes back over to dump the bucket onto the wood. Smoke shoots up into the storm. Daniella tosses the bucket away and sprints inside just as the rain starts to pour. I’m right behind her, thinking about how fast the sky can switch from blue to gray.

  “Sorry,” I say when we reach the kitchen. I close the screen door.

  I want us to collapse into a pile of laughter, the way we used to when summer showers caught us by surprise. I want us to dry our hair with the dishtowels next to the sink.

  “I don’t think you’ve been rained on enough,” she said, and squeezed her T-shirt out onto my arms.

  “I have, I have,” I cried, almost choking on giddiness.

  “Whatever, Cassi.”

  Daniella’s voice sounds like it did at Kindly Vines. Like she’s accusing me of something. She walks out of the kitchen, leaving watery footprints and loose blades of grass and me behind.

  9 Nachos

  Making nachos requires a careful system. I spread the chips, Jac sprinkles the cheese on top, and Ben mans the microwave to make sure the cheese fully melts. There was a fourth piece to the process when Daniella would hang out with us. She handled the toppings, since she could chop onions without crying. Ben does it now.

  “Is that a fourth handful?” I ask. Jac’s hand is in the plastic bag of shredded cheddar.

  “I lost count.” She grins.

  “Three handfuls, Jac. Otherwise the chip-to-cheese ratio is compromised.”

  “Live a little.” She spreads the most-likely-fourth handful over the tortilla chips.

  Ben dumps the tomatoes and onions and jalapeños on top and then sticks the plate into the microwave. He tap-dances in his socks on the kitchen tiles while the timer ticks down. I can’t help but notice how his face is an even blend of his parents, who are both Korean. Jac imitates taking pictures of him like a celebrity photographer. She crouches and then hops onto the counter.

  “Why didn’t you ever come back to the floor?” Ben asked while we walked to Mrs. Chay’s station wagon after the Welcome to Middle School dance. He cha-cha’d across the sidewalk, like there was still music playing in his head. Jac pretended to shake maracas.

  I didn’t want to say that it felt hard to be myself, when it seemed like the easiest thing in the world for them.

  “The fruit punch had real fruit in it,” I answered.

  Maybe everyone’s sets of facts about their friends have missing pieces. Some things you just keep to yourself.

  The microwave beeps. Ben pulls the plate out and sets it on the counter.

  “Definitely more than three handfuls,” he says. There’s so much cheese, you can’t even see the chips. The nachos are like me. The ratio is off.

  We take our food to the living room and eat on the floor. Jac starts the next episode of a documentary series we’ve been watching about people who’ve had real encounters with ghosts. The orchard owners in the last episode could tell the ghost was around when they started to smell oranges, because oranges weren’t able to grow at the orchard anymore. I slept with the light on for a week and haven’t eaten an orange since.

  “I tried to help Daniella,” I say over the creepy intro music.

  “How?” Ben asks. He shrugs his shoulders a bunch of times.

  “I re-created a classic Chorday memory. Backyard bonfire.”

  We stare at the plate of nachos like we’ve all just remembered who was supposed to chop the onions.

  “Did it work? Was she… like herself again?” Jac asks.

  “It started raining.”

  Ben’s head pops up. He has his about-to-sing face on.

  “That memory isn’t even the best one.” Each word in his sentence goes up an octave. “There’s tons of others to re-create.” He reaches his falsetto. Jac covers her ears.

  “Like what?” I ask, ready to add to my list of ways to bring Daniella back.

  “Watching the Founders’ Day fireworks on the hill outside.” Ben switches back to speaking. He pries Jac’s palms off her face. “You love my singing.”

  I think about the fireworks last June. I sat between Jac and Ben on Jac’s camouflage comforter. Daniella laid with her head in my lap while I tied sections of her hair into braids.

  “That’s a good one,” I say. “Except I don’t really have access to fireworks on a daily basis.”

  “Doing our skits at the library Open Mic night?” Ben suggests.

  Mom runs the Open Mic night at the library every fall. The Chordays always perform. Ben writes our skits and types them up on professional-looking paper.

  Sometimes they’re so funny, we end up laughing too hard to finish. Sometimes they’re serious, like last year’s. Ben wrote about a character who’d been trapped in a locker, and the people the character saw and the things he overheard while stuck inside. Ben played the one in the locker. The rest of us played the people who didn’t stop to help him.

  We were quiet after that skit.

  “Much better,” I say. “Make sure you have a skit ready to go for this year?”

  “On it.” He puts his hands under his chin and squints like he’s already thinking hard about plots and dialogue.

  “I got one! The day we signed our names on my wall in permanent marker,” Jac adds.

  Ben and I look at her.

  “We were grounded for that,” I say.

  “Though I still don’t understand how your dad had the power to ground all of us,” Ben adds.

  Jac smiles. The TV behind her zooms in on a picture of a skull.

  “Rebellion makes me feel alive.” Her ponytail tips to the side, a bright blue reminder of that fact.

  We get quiet and turn back to the documentary, like listing memories has worn us out. The story behind the episode begins: A cobbler is being haunted by a customer who died while buying boots. The show is done with reenactments and bad animation, but the ghosts still stick in my mind for days.

  “I thought a cobbler was a fruit-filled dessert,” Jac says.

  “It’s a shoemaker, too,” I tell her.

  “This acting is terrible,” Ben says, but his voice is a shaky whisper.

  The front door opens.

  Ben screams, and it echoes through the whole town house. Uncle Eric stands at the entrance.

  “Nice to see you too, Ben.” He steps inside. A woman in tight jeans and high-heeled boots follows behind him, holding a giant teddy bear. Jac makes a growling sound
in her throat.

  The cobbler goes down to the basement of his shop. Everyone knows you should never go into a basement if you suspect a haunting.

  “I want to introduce you to Leslie.” Uncle Eric waves an arm in front of his date like she’s a fancy product on a shopping network. “The carnival is awesome this year, you three. I’ll take you tomorrow if you want to go.”

  “And I’d love to go again.” Leslie’s voice is kind; her eyes are on Jac.

  “No, thanks.” Jac is still facing the TV.

  The basement door slams behind the cobbler even though no one pushed it. I flinch.

  “Maybe another time.” Leslie shifts her focus to the teddy bear. It has a red bow tie sewn into its neck.

  Ben and I look at each other. Jac can make this moment awkward to the power of ten. She’s done it before—to Shauna and Corrine and Kerry and everyone else Uncle Eric has dated since separating from Jac’s mom last year. Jac spends most of her time at Uncle Eric’s since it’s closer to school, and the rest of her time at her mom’s new house in the next town over. Mom said that when two people meet in high school like Uncle Eric and Jac’s mom did, they sometimes drift apart from one another. It confused me, because I knew that Mom and Dad had met in high school too. I wondered why some people stayed together, and others split apart.

  “Probably not. In fact, I will probably never see you again.” She looks at Uncle Eric. “Right, Dad?”

  The cobbler tries to escape but the door is locked. Uncle Eric runs a hand over his bald head.

  “Jac was born with a wonderful sense of humor,” he adds, and guides Leslie to the door. “Let me walk you out.”

  I think she whispers good-bye. I can faintly hear her heels tap down the brick front steps.

  “That was a hot mess.” Ben snaps his fingers.

  “You’re a hot mess.” Jac bends her legs up to her chest and rests her chin on her knees. Her eyes stay glued to the TV screen, like there aren’t rivers of blood leaking down the basement steps. I’ll be sleeping with the light on tonight.