The Family Tree (25 page)

“One thing I notice about the woods out there—” he gestured toward the window “—I can count fifteen distinct species from here. That’s just trees. Plus shrubs and grasses and various kinds of forbs. Harry Dionne was right to say other things than trees live in forests. I’d be amazed if there aren’t all kinds of birds and insects and probably small mammals….”

“Birds,” she agreed. “The birdsong gets louder every day. I’ve given up using an alarm clock. I don’t know about small mammals. I haven’t really looked.”

“Let’s look,” he said, rising, reaching out to take her by the hand. “Right now.”

Bemusedly, she followed him down the stairs and out into the woods, through the narrow belt of trees beside the swale and then down the swale itself, away from the house. The last of the sun dropped beneath the blanket of muttering cloud to shine in their eyes. Looking back, Dora saw her window reflecting the sunset, shining like a golden mirror.

“There,” he whispered. “Squirrel, up on that branch to your right.”

She looked up to meet bright, black eyes peering down at her. The squirrel chattered and jerked his tail, making it flow in a sinuous curve. As he did so, something tiny and brown zipped across the grasses from behind one tree to another.

“Mouse?” she asked.

“Umm,” he replied. “Or vole or ground squirrel. Whoa.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Look. Through the trees. There.”

She followed his gaze to see a procession in black-and-white, a large skunk followed by four little ones, the five animals strung out like a child’s pull toy, the line of them elongating, then clashing together, then stretching out again, tails waving, little feet trotting. The mother skunk took no notice of them as she crossed the swale and disappeared into the trees, her children following after.

“What else?” she whispered, enchanted.

“Oh, if we wanted to stay out, we’d probably see owls and maybe raccoons, and possibly coyotes. Some kind of cat, probably. Either a domestic cat gone wild or maybe a bobcat. It may be too soon for bobcat or deer to have invaded from the mountains, but I have no doubt they will. There! Look.”

She saw a seemingly boneless form sliding up a slanting trunk. “What?”

“Weasel, I think. Too small to be anything else. Not close enough to water to be mink, not big enough for fisher. Since you have so many birds, I could have predicted some predator on eggs and baby birds.” He stood staring into the treetops, ducking suddenly as a spate of huge raindrops splattered across his face. “I don’t see a nest anywhere, and it’s going to be too wet to look.” He grabbed her arm and began to run. “Come on. Back to your house. If there’s a restaurant within walking distance, I’ll take you to dinner.”

“There is, but I don’t want to walk with it doing this! I’ve got steaks, and salad stuff….”

He came inside after her, shutting the door behind them. “Isn’t that a great idea! If I’d known, I’d have brought wine.”

Wordlessly, she got out the wine. They had more beer while the steaks finished thawing, then wine with the steaks, drinking so thirstily that Dora opened a second bottle. They ate to the scent of wet leaves, the sound of
rain, which kept falling with a hard, steady drumming on the roof. When the food was gone to the last shred, they put the dishes in the dishwasher and Dora got out a frozen dessert, pastry and ice cream, and they ate that as greedily, finishing the whole thing.

“It says serves six,” she commented, looking ruefully at the empty package.

“Six midgets,” he remarked comfortably, leaning back on the couch and placing his saucer on his flat stomach, holding it horizontal with a relaxed finger while the other hand plied the coffee cup. “Good food, good wine, good coffee.”

“One of my few luxuries,” she said. “Grandma always loved her coffee, and she always bought the beans and ground them fresh.”

“And you eat,” he remarked. “It’s great to see a woman eat. I get so sick of that dieting talk.” His eyes were fixed on her face, wholly approving.

“I’m lucky,” she said, feeling his glance on her skin as though it reached through her clothes, like microwaves. “If I don’t do this too often, my weight pretty well stays down. I burn calories. My friend Loulee, she’s always dieting, but she doesn’t eat anywhere near as much as I do. She’s got fat genes. She can’t help it.” She flushed, aware she was babbling.

“Dora?”

“Ummm.”

“You’re as nervous as a cat! Are you worried that Jared might come back?” There was concern in his voice, almost tenderness.

Blankness. Here was a fork in the road. Did she take a step, or back off? Turn around, maybe, go somewhere else. Was she worried that Jared might come back? Well, wasn’t that the reason she’d asked him to come over?

She swallowed and fought down the urge to run. “I guess. I mean, yes. Yes, of course. That was in my mind when I called you. I thought, if he came back, or if he hung around out there, he’d see I had company, and he’d go away.”

“I can sleep on your couch. Quite frankly, I’d just as soon not go out in that downpour, if you don’t mind.”

She blushed, feeling the heat move from her throat onto her breast.

As though aware of her discomfort, he went to the window, turning his back to her, leaning against the glass and peering out at the downpour. “Do you realize it’s been only a century that we’ve been able to go from house to car to office to car to wherever, with the heater on, and the defroster on, protected from the rain and the cold? It hasn’t been much longer than that we’ve had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out there, all that mystery that we’ve turned into well-lighted concrete bunkers, safe and warm and dull.”

She took a deep breath and got up to refill her coffee cup. Since she was on her feet, she went to stand beside him. It was almost totally dark. The woods could hide legions of shadowy attackers. The moon wouldn’t rise until the early morning, if the sky cleared. It was raining hard. It wouldn’t be polite to make Abby go out into the rain….

“You can stay here, Abby. The couch is a sofa bed. It’s more comfortable unfolded.”

“Either way,” he said from close beside her, his lips at her ear. “Folded or unfolded.”

Her heart drummed, she felt the beginnings of panic. Leaning away from him she pushed the casements farther open, letting in the night. A heavy fragrance came on the moist air, flowery, musky, with something else in it, something she remembered from her breakfast with Harry Dionne. That strong, not unpleasant odor which she identified suddenly as a rain-on-the-garden smell: moist leaves, fecund soil. She took a deep breath, and another, as though she could not breathe deeply enough. When she turned he was close, and his arms went around her, pulling her against him until she felt the heat of his body through the light shirt he was wearing, felt the strength of his arms gathering her in.

Warm, and the smell of his skin, and the feel of his
arms. If she just let go, maybe there’d be trumpets…. Oh, lord, she’d love some trumpets. Still…still!

“Abby…” she murmured. “Please. It’s too…quick.”

He gave her a quick squeeze and released her. “It’s okay, delightful Dora. You don’t need to worry about me. An invitation to sleep on your couch is not an invitation to anything else. I know that.”

He moved away, began gathering up the glasses, grinning at her, striking an elder-statesman pose, left hand on chest, right hand raised as though taking an oath. “Though my virtues have not been fully developed without a good deal of effort, through long association with a good wife who took great pains with my enlightenment, I have become one of those rare and wonderful men who are able, with some degree of sincerity, to pride themselves on being unmacho about sexual matters.”

She felt the little laugh that bubbled up in her throat. “Then you have lots of women friends, don’t you?”

“The women I like well enough to get to know are my friends, yes. How did you know?” He took the glasses to the kitchen, rinsed them, glancing at her over his shoulder. “You’re thinking that we hardly know one another.”

She nodded. “We’ve met twice.”

He grinned again. “You’re perfectly right. We don’t know one another. But time will remedy that. I say this merely to indicate that I’m willing to take time. Not an eternity, of course, but a lengthy spell.”

She fetched him a pillow, helped him find a book, put out clean towels. She took herself off to bed and fell asleep almost at once, surprisingly unworried, or maybe, so she drowsily told herself, only rather drunk.

Sometime later, she thought she woke.

The world where she found herself was a rock-strewn desert, with pillars of stone standing like chessmen on calcined soil. She was walking toward one such pillar, desirous of its shade, for the sun had burned her dry.
Her feet scuffed sand. Her breath rasped. The shade lay ahead of her, like a dark road, leading to the stone pillar itself. She came within the shadow and looked up to see an erose edge, the stone fanged with living things, angularly huddled shapes that looked down at her and cried out to one another in a strange tongue that she, nonetheless, understood: “See, there’s one. There’s one!”

She screamed and fled, out into the sands once more…. And woke, listening for the sound that had roused her.

There were wings outside, heavy wings, less crisp than the
snap, snap, snap
of a crow flight, far less silent than an owl. The roof creaked above the corner of the bedroom as though something weighty had just landed there, and through the window came the carrion smell of something long dead. The thing on the roof took a step, then another, coming across the roof toward the eave just above the window.

She came out of the bed in a flash, her hand going to the side of her head, where Jared had pulled those hairs loose. Momma had said it, Jared would have had her back by now, except she’d cleaned the house too well. She hadn’t left any hair. No fingernail clippings. No sweat on the sheets. No flakes of skin in the carpet….

Above her, the thing moved, another step toward the window.

The sofa springs creaked in the living room, once, then again. Abby said something to himself. There was a stumble, a muffled curse, and footsteps as he rose and went into the kitchen. Pipes banged, water ran and splashed. In a moment he went back to his bed.

When the silence returned, she listened for the heavy footsteps over her head, but they did not come again. She sniffed for the carrion smell, but it was gone.

Perhaps it had only come to learn if she’d been telling the truth.

Perhaps she had dreamed it. Perhaps.

When she arrived at work the following morning, Dora made a point of being very brisk and businesslike. She had the idea that anyone who looked at her could probably tell she’d spent the night with…well, something or somebody. Seeing herself in the mirror when she got up, she had thought it possible. She looked flustered. Definitely flustered, and it wasn’t Abby’s fault. He had gone early, before full light, refusing her company for the six-block walk to the avenue.

“Just tell the tree the car’s yours,” she’d remarked sleepily when he poked his head into the bedroom to say good-bye. “It’ll probably remember, anyhow.”

Then she was asleep again in the half light, until the birds woke her, caroling under a sky cleared by the night’s rain. When she was brushing her teeth, she remembered the night visitation and stopped, mouth foaming, to stare at herself in the mirror. Had she dreamed that? Well, of course. She must have dreamed that.

Still, the sense of apprehension stayed with her, showing up as a pinched pallor around her mouth, a tendency to look over her shoulder. Phil didn’t notice. He plumped himself down across from her in the office, already in full cry.

“Charlene is fit to be tied,” he announced portentously.

“What’s the matter with Charlene?”

“Well, hell, you know Charlene. Nothing stops her. She’s like the postal service is supposed to be, not heat nor rain nor dark of night, you know. So she’s got this listing on a house out on the edge of town, and even though you’ve got to walk most of half a mile to get there, she’s been showing it right along, trees or no trees. So, yesterday afternoon she takes some people out there…”

“And?”

“And the house is gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone. I don’t mean lost or strayed or stolen, I mean gone. The foundation is still there, most of the fence and
the front gate, but the place is gone. Now there’s just woods.”

“You think the trees ate it?”

“Who knows. This isn’t all. Naturally, Charlene is some upset. She can’t get a commission on a house that isn’t there anymore. So she calls her boss, and they get to bitching about one thing and another, and her boss tells her about this house being listed by a young couple because he’s been transferred to the coast, and it had two bedrooms, right, one for the young couple and one for the kids maybe someday. Only now it’s only got one bedroom. The other bedroom got filled in.”

“Filled in?” she asked, hollowly. “You mean, trees growing in it?”

“I mean, the outside corner walls are gone and the roof over that corner of the house is gone, and the floor is gone and there’s only one bedroom.”

“Unused space,” she murmured, looking at the far wall as though consulting a crystal ball. “What about window screens? My trees made me window screens. And a hammock.”

“I didn’t hear about window screens. I did hear about this place that had a leaky roof, only now there’s new roof tiles made out of bark, and they don’t leak.”

“The paper hasn’t said a word about stuff like that.”

“Maybe the paper doesn’t know. When Charlene talks about it, she whispers, like it was a secret. Like if she spoke out loud, something might come out of the woodwork and eat her.”

“I wonder if Abby McCord knows,” she said. “Somebody ought to tell him.”

“So tell him,” said Phil, shuffling his papers. “I called him last night, but he wasn’t home.”

Her face went up in flames, but Phil didn’t notice. He was busy hunting for something he couldn’t find.

The captain came out of his office and leaned on the desk.