The Language of Trees (13 page)

L
EILA
E
LLIS IS EXHAUSTED
from driving through the streets all night long searching for her daughter, an envelope of flyers in her lap. The gray business suit she is wearing is more than twenty years old and pulls across her breasts, bought for her only office job when she was a secretary at the construction company where she met Victor. But it is not giving her a feeling of authority as she had hoped, and the black pleather pumps are only pinching her toes, not making her feel she has command over her environment so that people will take her seriously. It has been three days since Melanie disappeared, but a mother knows when something bad has happened. For the past several months, Leila has had
the feeling
, the one that lives deep in her gut and is never wrong. A mother can sense disaster coming, smell it in the air the way that some animals will lie down before a storm. “Do you know my daughter?” Have you seen this face? You
think
so. You
may
have.
What do you mean you don't?

This searching is taking its toll. And with all this straining to keep an eye on little Lucas in the backseat, her neck muscles ache. She knows she shouldn't complain. He is a good
boy, happy to sleep most of the way, but night driving still makes her uncomfortable, a reminder of the 2-
A.M
. hospital runs that she used to make with Luke. Now, at sixty-one, her eyes are not what they used to be. She is not so good anymore at spotting her daughter's blond crew cut in her favorite hangouts—Eastview Mall, Blood Alley, the marina. All the wild young kids hang out at the pier with their motorcycles and cars.

Things had been going too well. Leila had almost begun to relax. Even the messy divorce from the girls' father in 1991 had been relegated to a dull ache behind her eyes. When she had finally, with Lion's help, turned the gun cabinet into a beautiful glass étagère, she knew Victor was out of her life for good. The fact was that her family had enjoyed two full years of blessings—the birth of her grandson, a new job for Lion and a new apartment with a shiny bright red door for him and Melanie. And of course, this baby reminds her more of her late son than even she can admit.

The feeling almost approached happiness.

This just wasn't the type of luck the Ellises had. They were due.

Leila knows all about her daughter's hangouts. Over the years, she has tracked her down too many times to count. But this time, it won't be so easy. She knows Melanie wouldn't leave Lucas. Still Leila is doing what the police suggest. Make a list of places Melanie has run to in the past during times of despair when the battle for her abstinence was waged and lost. It was too late to try Cheever Hospital, Melanie's last resort where she historically sought refuge with Maya whenever she was very out of sorts. But Melanie had hardly seen her sister over the last couple of years. The wall between the girls only came down during bad times.

Melanie had been happy since meeting Lion and having a baby, Leila was sure of it.

But Leila couldn't argue with what the disinterested detective told her when she called to report Melanie missing. She couldn't get in touch with Charlie Cooke. And she hated to deal with someone she didn't know. She had to listen to some stranger try to make her feel bad, telling her that this was the ninth missing persons report. The
eighth
report, she corrected him.

Send a car around, sure. Anything more? Don't count on it.

Leila knew what he did not say. Why should he waste manpower on a drug addict when there were honest people who needed help? Before hanging up, he had actually said to her, “Mrs. Ellis, the city of Canandaigua has exhausted its resources looking for your daughter. Perhaps you should let her come back on her own. She always does.”

Perhaps the worst thoughts came from her own mind. Had the novelty of having a child finally worn off for Melanie? Would boredom or frustration return her to her old ways? No, Leila would not believe it. People could change. There had to be room for faith.

Since Luke's death, whenever people pass Leila on the street, they smile sympathetically or avert their eyes for what has become of her children. Leila can feel the blame and the pity. She has become a pariah—such a succession of bad luck has made people afraid to breathe the same air she does. People are superstitious; afraid the bad luck will rub off on them. Perhaps she has encouraged it with her own inability to ask for help or in the way she just backed away from her few close friends, anticipating their rejection. Leila stopped getting her hair styled at Le Chic Salon because the women sitting under the dryers routinely flashed wallet-sized pictures of their children, without so much as a question about Maya and Melanie. Instead, they
talked long and loud about choosing their children's classes at Harvard and Yale, about whether International Relations was more lucrative than Microbiology. Leila had no more stomach for the game-show-hostess smiles, for sitting silently with her hands folded in her lap, for wishing people knew her children were just as smart, just as good as other children—even stronger, given what they had been through.

Some children were more heroic than others, in ways you could never know just by looking at them. What about keeping yourself calm when you're suffocating, calm enough to count to ten when your throat is swelling shut and your inhaler is missing? How about beating a life-threatening addiction, or knowing, at the age of fifteen, that you have to leave a boy you love because he has abused you, even after he has cried tears of apology, knowing he will hit you for the rest of your life? Some children are far more heroic than even their own mothers.

It seemed not too long ago that Leila could fix everything with a surprise dinner at the Aloha Polynesian restaurant. The children loved the green papier-mâché trees that grew right out of the walls. The restaurant's main attraction was a fountain that rose out of a wishing pool, throwing pink ropy lights into the air every eighteen minutes. People made wishes and threw in coins. The lights made the children rub their eyes, and the sound of the slapping water made everyone hush. The children would hold hands around the table as though in prayer, and for that one moment with Melanie, Maya, and Luke, all was perfect. When the fountain receded into the pink water, Hawaiian music flowed in from all corners of the room and conversations picked back up. Luke would spend most of the dinner running back and forth to the bamboo bridge, using up all of the precious dimes he'd saved, then begging for more, his little cheeks flushed with excitement. A few years ago, Leila had gone to
the restaurant alone. She had been missing him, and when she happened to look over at the fountain she swore she saw him standing there, knee-deep in pinkish water and holding a paper airplane in one hand. The image shook her. He was looking for his own dimes, he said, because he changed his mind about some of his wishes.

Leila pulls up at a stoplight, pushes her wavy gray hair back from her face. In the rearview mirror, she watches Lucas pull a curl of his own hair, his pouty lips yawning peacefully. He's angelic, a beautiful child with bright blue eyes and a funny belly laugh, the kind that lifts the spirits of everyone in the room.

When she turns her attention forward, a sweep of yellow curls streaks across the windshield, turning it golden. “
Luke!
” she cries, tears flowing down her cheeks. She gets out of the car and looks up at the pink morning sky.
Help me find Melanie
, she pleads, shutting her eyes.
Help me, Luke
.

The car behind her is blaring its horn. She blinks several times, rubs her eyes. When she looks up again, the sky is filling with golden rivulets spilling into a lavender lake. She gets back into the car and when she steps on the gas, all she can think about is how very tired she feels.

She's driving in circles.

She's exhausted. She has double-checked every place she can think of. The city of Canandaigua is not that big, but there are acres and acres of land on the outskirts of Canandaigua proper. Forests, fields, and wild vineyards. More farms than she can count. Leila couldn't cover them all, even if she tried. Well, she shouldn't even be driving. Her body is giving up now. Only for now. She pulls up in the driveway of her blue clapboard house, wraps a sleeping Lucas in a blanket and carries him inside. His arms dangle from her clutch; his thick blond curls bounce
slightly with each of her steps. When Leila opens the door, she has to push Old Sally out of the way with her foot. The dog's tail is wagging slightly. That's as excited as she gets at sixteen.

Leila gently places Lucas in his playpen. He immediately turns over on his stomach. Then she drops to her knees. The house is silent. She listens to him cooing sleepily, watches him twist the blanket around his fist. “We're going to find Mommy,” she tells him. “I promise you.” Then, right there in the middle of the living room, Leila curls up on the floor, a draft pricking up her skin, her back pressed against the warm chest of the dog, whose breath drags along like a freight train echoing through the empty house.

Leila remembers how isolated she felt that one February when it snowed for two weeks straight. Snowflakes the weight of silver dollars sank tree branches to the ground. She remembers looking out the window at the snowdrifts and thinking they looked like geese licking the wind. Luke would have noticed it, too. It was as if all the other birds had left the earth.

The world was silent, as it had been in the months after his death. This was a dead snow, heavy and slow, the kind of snow that stops time. Meteorologists didn't see an end in sight. The roads froze over quickly, forming opaque sheets of shark-gray ice. A snow emergency went into effect, hollowing out the streets, but the occasional screech of a car spinning into a telephone pole would wake her at night. Awake in a fright, thinking of Luke. It had been three years, but he was still very much with her.

That February, Leila had been inside so long that she looked out the window and saw only squalls of geese hunting for breadcrumbs in the road. She knew she had gotten so used to the darkness and her own imagination that she stopped turning on the lamps inside, preferring to walk the dark hallways
and find her way by touch. All her other senses had become decisively clear. It was February, the cruelest month, and she was lonely and heard about someone else who was lonely. She went to great lengths to disguise her need as just being charitable, but eventually, she realized she was in too deep. Suddenly, everything had changed. The dull snore of a man in the guest room, for instance, made her feel safer than the bolt on her front door that had kept her protected for years, that had even kept out Victor since the divorce. The taste of her homemade bread, heavily packed with walnuts and raisins, was not filling enough no matter how much of it she ate. And her daughters' voices sounded so compliant and distant that she lay in bed picturing their weddings and imagining how she would say good-bye, just as she had said good-bye every night since Luke had been lost.

They called it the Blizzard of '94. The girls were in the throes of early adolescence. February vacation was already in full gear. The neighborhood kids grew sullen, feeling gypped that the snow emergency hadn't occurred during school. Temperatures loped below zero. Radiators broke. Pipes froze. Tempers flared. Even the biggest bullies in the neighborhood turned down ice hockey, preferring to stay inside and save their mothers the worry. Aside from an occasional plow denting the narrow street, Leila couldn't see anything moving outside but the blinding snowflakes. The blizzard was only a natural extension of the chaos that was going on in her house.

She and the girls had gone stir crazy, sleeping too much and never feeling quite awake. They wandered through rooms like zombies as the days blurred together. Soon, the girls could hardly look at each other without an argument. The fighting was growing worse. Leila didn't know what to do. They were like magnets, bonded one minute, violently repelled the next.

Sometimes Leila wouldn't see anything but there would be crying. Other times they hardly noticed her telling them to stop, too involved in their fight, ring-bound, hypnotized by the footsteps in and out of a circle only they could see. They fought with fists. They fought with words. Sometimes there were tears but never any voices or blood, as though the feel of their tiny fists didn't register any real pain until the death blow was given. Inside, each girl felt as though her heart was a frozen lake.

They told Leila that Luke talked to them in dreams. And sometimes Leila would overhear one of them talking back to him, when they didn't think anyone was listening.

The fact that Charlie Cooke was willing to brave the snow and come for a Valentine's Day dinner both surprised and terrified Leila. She knew he was on temporary leave from work, and she had overheard that his wife, Candice, had asked him to move out just weeks before, but as Leila cooked a turkey in haste, she half wondered whether she had lost her mind to the darkness. Her divorce was over. She hadn't thought she would ever date again. When Charlie returned her call, she had mistakenly asked him to arrive at five instead of eight, which would have given her enough time to have everything ready. And when he eagerly agreed, she was so nervous she hadn't corrected herself.

Hadn't they managed to have a perfect dinner? Charlie took the seat at the head of the table before Leila offered it, as though he had always sat there, pushing aside any images of Victor still lurking in her memory. When Charlie led them in saying grace, the girls bowed their heads without a smirk, and later impressed Leila with their pleases and thank-you-ma'ams, and soon Leila wondered if they were aliens or whether they had always spoken that way. After dinner, Leila and Charlie talked
over the dishes and the girls offered to go upstairs to clean their room. Clean their room? Leila was certain she was dreaming as the girls waved and disappeared, and Charlie rolled up his sleeves to dry the dishes. She felt a little nervous, a little stunned that things between a man and a woman could feel this peaceful, for this kitchen had been the source of many of Victor's rages. But as she listened to Charlie tell her about his longtime dream of having children, she began to relax. Leila told him about her adoration of an old farmhouse that she had driven by but had never gone into that was for sale. Charlie asked her a million questions about the place, which made her deliriously stupid with hope, and neither of them noticed the snow piling up against the doorway, or the frost creeping across the windows, blocking even the tiniest shreds of light. When Charlie went to leave at 4
A.M
., even the veritable detective of thirty years had to resign himself to the fact that he could not and should not open the door. And both he and Leila were secretly relieved.