The Language of Trees (25 page)

Charlie falls back, a dimpled hole between his eyes. His arms
flail and he staggers back, once, twice. His legs collapse. Then there is only the soft thud of Charlie's body spilling onto the floor, his mouth still slightly open. Victor watches Charlie's right hand open and close. Charlie's legs are moving back and forth as though he were still trying to run, smearing blood in a fan across the tile.

For a second, Victor stands there, paralyzed by the image. In his mind, he is remembering a pregnant doe he shot eighteen years ago, who took a bullet in the back of the neck, right between the shoulders, but kept running, splattering the air with blood. She had run almost fifty feet with her left side completely lame before she fell on the ice. It is all still fresh in his mind. Victor had stood there, shaking, as the doe lunged for him a final time, pushed the air from her lungs, flopping like a clown. From then on, Victor no longer wanted the hunt to end in death. He wanted only a regeneration of life. To make a creature's spirit rise up from its wounds, just as his own spirit had to so many times.

The day he killed the doe was the same day Leila had gone into labor with a premature Luke, who was not supposed to be born for another two months. It wasn't until six months later that Victor noticed the small birthmark between the baby's shoulder blades in the exact spot where the doe had been shot. That is when he knew the child would be his downfall.

Victor, dazed, steps over Charlie's body.

He makes himself leave the house now. He slips out the door, through the overwhelming scent of lilacs, and into Charlie Cooke's car, which is still running, the keys still in the ignition. He must get back to Melanie. She will be hungry. Although he has always feared moving water, Victor will make himself stay with her on the island for yet another night. When it gets
dark he will walk to the shore of Squaw Island and stare out at the rippling waves in sheer defiance, trying to absorb the independence of moving water, just the way he had stood on the shoreline of the Shongos' property twelve years ago, watching his three children sail off in a small boat, when only two of them would return.

G
RANT DRIVES
L
EILA'S CAR
back from Two Bears' Cave alone.

Grant finally falls asleep around dawn. He is dreaming that he and Luke are floating over the treetops and into the whirling winds, following a trail of white stones to a place shrouded in sooty darkness where he can hear the lapping waves. Below, he sees Melanie lying on a pile of hot coals. A flurry of little blue lights hovers above her chest. Grant wakes up sweating.

There's knocking on the window. Someone is calling his name.

He stumbles out of bed, thinking it is Echo. He blinks hard before his mind registers the face. “What are you doing here?”

“Hi. I'm sorry. I need to talk to you. I know it's early,” Susanna says. Her smile is sobering. “Can I come inside?”

Susanna's ivory skin is as plain as her eyes are wild, dark. Her hair is cut to the chin, with chopped bangs that stop above her eyebrows. She's wearing an orange silk blouse with black pants and black heels. Slung over one shoulder is a black suede jacket. A purse that has Gucci all over it has replaced her worn
blue knapsack. She's probably lost those few extra pounds she was always struggling with. He can't even believe she's standing here.

Grant still has dirt on his face. He glances at the lake. The water is calm, smooth as slate and just as cool. “Jesus. No,” he manages to say from behind the screen. “I'll come out.”

He has rehearsed a million things to say to Susanna, all with varying degrees of anger, sadness, insult, but now as he looks at her, he's filled with distant fascination. She's like a foreign country he visited a long time ago, once overwhelmed by the mystique. But now, something is missing.

“Okay, well. Have it your way,” she says. He catches a glimpse of the black Lexus through the screen.

“I tried to call, but obviously, you have no cell phone and I'm not sure what the deal is with this place.” She explains how she tried to find his phone number. It was listed but the phone wasn't working. She tries to make a joke, to laugh it off, but he can't feel an ounce of humor in the air. She has picked up on his feeling, eyeing him distantly as she takes some papers out of a bag.

“I've started doing photography again,” she tells him. “You always encouraged me in that way. I've taken a few really beautiful pictures. And I'm working at a gallery. Selling my work and other people's,” she says, embarrassed. “But they give me studio space. Can we please sit?” She waves her arms at the wicker chairs, and smiles weakly.

He tries to find some compassion or connection in it all. But he is so exhausted and generally agitated that all he can give her is a nod. As he's opening the door, he's wishing it were Echo standing here. Einstein scoots by him, brazen.

“That is one huge dog.”

“What time is it?” asks Grant, pulling his chair out.

“I don't know. Do you have somewhere to be?” Susanna pulls the wicker chair far away from the wall, and neatly smoothes her pants before sitting down. “Well, how are you?”

“Fantastic,” Grant says, falling into the other chair.

“Good. Well, you look like a little kid, like you've been at camp or something,” she says, folding her hands on the small table between them. “I mean, that's a good thing, you've got some color in your face,” she continues. “But all those mosquito bites.”

“What?”

“On your arms.”

This is all so civilized it makes him want to yell.

Einstein gets up from his place on the grass and stretches his hind legs.

Susanna eyes Einstein nervously. The wolf trots across the porch and flops down across the top step as though to prevent anyone from leaving. Grant gives him the nod, and Einstein licks his front paws and moves over. “I have been wondering how you are.” Susanna clears her throat, rubbing her chest with her palm. Then she sits up. “Do you have some tea? Anything to drink? Oh never mind,” she says, becoming impatient with his distance. “Your hair's quite long. I always liked it out of the braid.”

“Susanna,” Grant says. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, as luck would have it, we have an offer on our house.”

“I didn't know we—”

“I had to make arrangements, Grant. Things happened quickly. You didn't expect me to just let the place sit there and rot. After all the work you, we, put into it, it's worth a good deal of money. I know that was never important to you, but it was my mother's house and she's not well, and—”

“Love the Lexus,” he says.

“Thanks,” she whispers.

“Let me see the papers.” He pushes his hair back behind his ears.

“Oh, that sun,” Susanna says, standing up. She walks across the porch. He listens to her heels clicking across the wood. “I've been picturing this view for a long time. God, it feels good to be back here. The herons. Look at them. Look!” she says, stretching out her arms.

For a moment, Grant can remember what had attracted him most, that sense of little girl excitement. He allows himself to appreciate the quality without having it move him. He leans back, satisfied. Progress.

“There's three of them. God, I'd love to photograph them again,” says Susanna.

He glances over the sale papers. “Can you leave these with me? I want to look them over and I'm exhausted. Seeing double, practically. I'll mail them back to you or I can drop them off somewhere. Whatever you want.”

“Well, I was hoping, it's just, I really need them now,” she tells him, putting on her coat. A warm wind has begun to blow off the water but it hardly touches her hair. She sits back a moment, gazing at what looks to be a huge beaver looping in and out of the water.

“What difference is a few days going to make?” he asks, rubbing his eyes.

Einstein whimpers and runs down to the dock, barking at the water. Grant whistles and he comes bounding across the porch. Grant runs his hands across the animal's fur. Einstein begins to relax, settles down, laying his chin over Grant's bare foot.

“The market's tight and the buyer's a little anxious,” Susanna continues. “These things are very time sensitive.” She rummages through her purse, and pulls out a small mirror. As though Grant weren't a stranger now, she fixes her lipstick. She looks up at him.

A gust of wind blows a piece of paper from the stack. Grant chases it down the stairs, grabs it. Thoughts of Echo are pulling at the edges of his mind. He rifles through the papers. “No Realtor? How's that work? How are you doing this from Syracuse?”

“Well,” Susanna hesitates. “I'm not exactly living with my mother. I'm sort of, you know, back and forth.” She slips a gold beaded bracelet off her wrist, and then back on. He notices her bright red nails. She'd never been the type for nail polish. And a few other things have changed, now that he's really noticing. She's wearing a pearl choker he doesn't recognize and her lips are lined with a dark red liner. She hadn't been one for lipstick, either. Said it ruined too much of her clothing. He once knew the most intimate details about her.

Grant reads the name out loud. “Buyer, Dr. Owen Bergen. Why's that name familiar to me?”

Susanna smiles nervously, clears her throat. “You met him. He was one of our fertility specialists. He had the alternative medicine practice. You remember, don't you? In that old mill they made into an office building?”

“Yeah, he wanted you to eat bee's wax.”

“Bee pollen.” She tightens the belt of her jacket.

“What's going on?” Grant asks.

“Nothing, Grant, why?”

“Susanna, don't treat me like a fool,” he says.

“Look, if you can't do this now, then I'll come back. It's fine;
I can wait a few more days. I don't mind coming back. I always liked the drive.” She reaches for the papers. He puts his hand on hers.

Grant stares at the large diamond ring that sits where her wedding ring had been only months before. “I didn't want to tell you this now.” She looks at the papers when she says this, as though she were reading words from a script. The words fall off her lips but register no emotion as she explains how she and the good doctor met accidentally in the post office six months ago.

“And, you're marrying him.”

She moves her purse from one side of her chair to the other. “It's not what you think. It's been over a year since you and I split. The divorce is almost final…. I—I know how this must look, but really. What we had, Grant. We could both do better, you know?”

“Jesus, what the hell did you marry me for?”

Susanna takes a packet of Kleenex from her purse. She dabs at her mascara. “I felt a need, I suppose, to try. I loved you. Even though I knew you didn't love me. I know you don't want to hear this. I'm no cakewalk, I know that. But I'm sorry for us both. For the whole thing.”

“For the whole thing, you talk about it like it was a bad meal in a restaurant. Four years of my goddamn life.”

“I knew you'd react this way…. I have no right to ask for anything. Look, I could have done things better. But I refuse to curl up and die, Grant. I want to have my life; I want to have a baby. Anything I could have done better, I would have done. I only regret the end. Just the end.” Tears slip from her eyes, which she catches carefully in a tissue held under her chin. “I never had your heart, did I? You were never mine.” Grant thinks he sees the feeling in her eyes. He recalls the miscar
riages, the images of his children leaving this world. Perhaps he did not love her enough.

“Keep all of it. Everything. Where do I sign?” he asks.

“You'll find someone better,” she whispers. “You're easy to love, Grant. But you're a difficult person to be in love with.”

Rifling through the papers, he looks up.

Echo has ridden her old bike all the way to Bare Hill, pedaling furiously, determined to tell Grant who he is and how she feels. She needs him to come to the store with her and talk to Joseph. When she reaches the edge of his property, she sees a woman sitting on the porch across from Grant, her long legs neatly crossed, her dark bob haircut perfectly manicured.

Grant is holding her hand.

The sight knocks the wind out of Echo. A small cry escapes from her lips. At that moment, Grant sees her. She quickly turns around and speeds off, even though she can hardly see through her tearing eyes, telling herself she is too late, and that Grant Shongo is not running after her.

M
AYA
E
LLIS HAS SPENT
the last several years living in a place other than her mother's house. This wasn't at all what she had imagined for her life when she was just a little girl of eight, arms outstretched, jumping across from her own bed to her sister's, soaring back and forth across as though she could fly. She had once imagined that she and Melanie were princesses and that Luke was a prince. Luke. Three children had been a triangle, holding each other together. Now when she remembers him, her mind shuts down.
Don't think about the past. You know what can happen when you think about it.
As long as Maya is alone, she can control what she thinks about, what she hears and what she sees. White cement walls. A wooden bed, not much bigger than the one she had as a child. A small bureau on which to keep her tiara, which she stares at for hours. The only future she thinks about is tomorrow, what she will have to eat, and what scheduled activities she is going to do. There is a wonderful predictability in this. Each morning she has group therapy, where she says only enough to pacify the therapist, phrases like
facing my fears
and
trust in myself
. Tuesday and Thursday nights there are movies in the main hall. A dancer
from a local college comes every Wednesday to teach ballet. Art therapy is offered each morning to those who can be trusted with paint. She knows she is lucky that Dr. Shongo pulled some strings to get her into Cheever, whether her mother appreciated it or not. She knows the ins and outs of this place, how to get what she wants from Sebastian the orderly, who sneaks her sticks of gum and brings her perfume on occasion. Most of the time she eats only morsels of food at mealtimes, only enough to satisfy the counselors in the small dining hall. She likes how not eating numbs her mind. She doesn't like to feel anymore. Everyone knows what happens when she has to feel. Her body and mind simply cannot handle it. Something happens that is very bad.
Post-traumatic catatonia
. The rigid stance that overtakes her limbs. The trance-like state that captures her mind. It's her mind protecting her, the doctors have explained. Still, she doesn't like it. She's safer like this, in control, aware but numb enough. Terrible things happen when she has to feel.

She is so thin that her bones actually hurt when she is in her chair, sitting like this in her room. Sometimes she imagines the chair is an old canoe. Sometimes she dreams of sitting in that canoe, and everyone wonders why she is rocking herself back and forth like the waves. She could spend hours staring at the same spot on the wall. Sometimes when she wants something, she lets the orderly kiss her and she imagines her mouth is metal. She imagines her lips are steel and her tongue is silver so she feels nothing. She can exist this way, without a desire to leave much of the time.

“Maya, you have a visitor.”

She grabs her robe and slippers. She is walking down the hall to the visitation room, expecting to see Melanie or her mother. As soon as she turns the corner, she sees him sitting there. Her stomach lurches. The tips of her fingers begin to tingle. It
is happening again. The blackness siphoning her mind.
No
, she thinks.
Feel the floor under your feet. Notice the temperature in the hallway. Look at the color in his eyes. Stay in control of your thoughts
. Somehow she gets from here to there, to the table by the window where he is sitting. She has not seen her father in all these years. He has that same smell, the scent of dried blood, which she thinks of whenever she sees birds. He still has greasy hair, but now it has turned from black to gray, and a stubbly gray beard. His blue eyes are bloodshot, and the creases in his face make him look like he has been sleeping for days. His black jacket is rumpled, as though he has slept in it. She listens to him speaking, aware that the muscles in her legs are tightening, of the rigidity that is crawling up her legs, inch by inch. Her heart skips a beat as she grips the edge of the table, listening, wondering if she'll be able to stand up or to run.

He wants to take her to a place where Melanie is so they can all be together. “Don't you want to come with me?” he asks, sitting there. She can hear him tapping his black boot against the leg of the table. She is trembling. The feeling is overwhelming. In her silent terror, she has pissed herself; she is certain of it, can feel the urine running down her leg. The sight of her father is bringing it all back. He smells like death. His eyes are shadows. She is afraid. She knows this is bad. The orderlies notice the puddle on the floor beneath her and take her back to her room. As she stands in her shower, steam rising off of her clothing and burning her skin, she thinks of her sister. Her father. Danger. That much of the past she remembers. She needs to find her mother. She knows she has no choice but to leave.

When she pays Sebastian in silver kisses to let her out of Cheever for a few hours, to sneak her out the back kitchen door and cover for her by saying she is in her room sleeping off a cold, she tries not to think of the future, of how the catatonia
could grab her halfway there. She could become like a statue in the middle of a forest and die before they even notice her missing. Still, she must go to the only person who has ever made her safe. To her mother.

Outside. Rain. She has feared the outside world for so long. But she must find her mother. Maya is running through the forest, raindrops that feel like a million needles striking her face, remembering what happened all those years ago, her father screaming at her mother about burnt bread, Luke and Melanie running out that night after the dog, running through the woods, running away from him. As she tears through the trees, the brambles catching in her hair and ripping her dress, she feels Luke behind her, running, too. She can hear his footsteps catching up with her, faster and faster, his feet slapping terror back into the earth. Her fear fills the sky like huge gray wings pushing down on her body, sparking everywhere as she looks to the right, then the left. The wind is spinning in the waves, just as it did on the last night she lost Luke. As she runs right into the sky, she believes she is getting closer, her skin wet with sparks that have begun to buzz around her. All she can do is run, run, run, until blood feels like it is coming out of her ears. She can hear the birds' wings flapping like words spoken too fast. Everywhere she goes there is blood rushing inside her arms and into her fingers, there are so many smells, everyone makes too many words, and she sees too many lights and now, her father's smell is everywhere. And then, she thinks of her father's orange hunting hat, hidden away in a box in her closet.

At that moment, the sky floor opens up above her, and the muscles in her legs seize up, and when she trips and falls, her knees crush like ice cubes under her father's fists. When she gets up she sees white-tailed deer everywhere darting into the
tall trees, leaving trails of falling stars. She forces her legs to recover and follows the deer, running faster than the rain chasing her. And everything is moving in the panic. Where is her house? If she cried, no one could hear her. The quiet is spilling out of her ears, and here, no one will find her. She had promised not to tell anyone when Victor hit Luke. She should have told. Why hadn't she known it would all turn out bad? Her feet are like rocks. She tries to imagine herself a deer, running with such fluidity of movement. If she can just reach her house. If she can just run faster. If she can just find her mother before her mind goes into a trance and her body freezes.

Maya is out of breath. She reaches the door to her house, which is walled off by the lilac tree. Her eyes follow its path, cascading over the rooftop, falling to the ground and lying in front of the door as though warding her away. Maya steps over it, rushes into the house without knocking. Her mother's car is in the driveway.

There in the kitchen, she sucks in her breath. Charlie Cooke is lying in a puddle of blood. Blood is spattered everywhere. Old Sally is covered with it. The dog runs over to Maya, her tail wagging, leaving smeared blood across Maya's bare legs. Maya watches the blood around Charlie's body dripping down the slope of the kitchen floor. Maya stands there, steeped in it. She looks down, realizing that the soles of her sneakers are bloody. It is happening all over again. Death. Sadness. Despair. Her body is gripped by it. The smell of blood is her father's scent. Memories of the past flood her mind. Stunned, she walks out into the backyard and sits down next to Luke's tombstone, the leaves and fallen lilac petals surrounding it. With her eyes, she traces Luke's name. It has been years since she has been this close to him, close enough to touch him. She hardly feels her limbs as she becomes engulfed in terror turned inward. She can
scarcely breathe as her body rapidly turns cold and her limbs seize up. She is now a statue. A glassy haze covers her eyes; she is blind. Her thoughts have disappeared.

When she hears the scream coming from inside, somehow her mind and memory ignite. The sound of her mother's scream echoes through the clouds, just as it did when Leila was told of Luke's death. Maya knows that her mother has found Charlie's body.

Leila rushes outside, throwing up in the bushes. When she gets up, she grabs the phone from the hallway and calls 911. Then she notices Maya sitting by the tombstone. Leila opens her arms, a sign that Maya is really here. Maya wants her mother but she is encased in steel. She can't move. She remembers the psychologist's words:
Focus inward. Find the
me
inside yourself. Hold on to it. Don't let it go.
Maya is struggling, forcing her mind to hold on to the part of her that is the
me
, to climb up and out of the abyss, but the
me
darts in and out, disappears like a small animal. And then she is breaking into bits of light, slipping down into the immeasurable darkness. The
me
resurfaces and disappears, resurfaces and disappears.
Watch yourself on a movie screen. Describe what you see: You are a girl sitting by a grave. There is soft grass beneath you. A white stone under your fingers. There is wind on your face. Don't try to stop the movie or worry about what happens. If you can describe it, you get distance and can separate from it
. She tries harder than she has ever tried in her life, feeling her will returning. She is breaking through steel. Slowly, she feels the
me
and holds on to it until it is separate from the statue that is her body. Her mind-space and the dimension of time re-emerge. She holds on and directs her thoughts.
Smell the lilacs. There are blackbirds chirping above in the branches. See the woman staring at you. She is your mother. Her eyes are blue. The sky is blue.
The ego and its
boundaries reappear. She feels a bathing glow surrounding her, tingling in her limbs. She experiences her body as warm and alive again. She is back.

Maya meets Leila's gaze. They stare at each other for a moment and then the girl trapped inside the metal statue breaks free. Maya rushes into her mother's arms.