The Language of Trees (26 page)

N
O ONE IS AT
Grant Shongo's cabin when Echo returns there. There is only the scent of perfume lingering in the air. Echo's fingers brush the arm of the wicker chair on the porch, stopping where Susanna's fingers rested. Echo had ridden home through the fields to check on Joseph. When she arrived and broke down, she had surprised herself. She had Clarisse's words in her mind, couldn't push them out no matter what else she tried to focus on. Words about regret. She thought of Joseph and his story about Two Bears. After making sure Joseph was okay, asleep, Echo had headed back to Grant's. For the first time in her life, she had gone back to what she feared, back into something that made her feel vulnerable and afraid. She had forced herself, spurred on by the voices of those who had never given themselves a chance, those who had made bad choices. Or no choices at all.

Now she takes a seat in the wicker chair. As though asserting her very right to the air, Echo inhales deeply. If nothing else, she will tell Grant about his father, convince Joseph to come with her, and then drive back to Boston. Her eyes are tired. Even the trees look exhausted, their branches falling toward
the ground. Echo falls asleep. Her sleep is full of thoughts of a woman with hair so shiny it looks like glass.

She awakens to the chug of Grant's muffler. The old Fleetwood pulls up and he gets out, haggard. His hair is tousled, his beige sweater torn across the shoulder. His jeans are caked with mud.

“Jesus Christ, I've been looking everywhere for you,” he says, dragging his feet up the steps. What are you doing out here? It's cold.”

“Hunting wabbits,” Echo says, pulling her coat tightly around her.

He smiles weakly and sits down in the chair next to her. “I'm glad you're okay.”

She thinks of Joseph. “I'm pretty far from okay,” she says.

But so is Grant. She notices he has a hollowed-out look, his cheeks, moist, cavernous, his chest sunken beneath his fisherman's sweater. He leans over and kisses her on the top of her head. “I know why you ran. It wasn't what you thought.” He tells her he'd gone looking for her. That he'd chased Echo through the fields but he couldn't catch up with her. “I stopped by the Feed and Grain but no one answered the door. I figured you were all asleep. But here you are.”

Echo gets up. “Did you ask Susanna to stay?”

He reaches out to take her hand. “Are you serious? Christ, you're freezing.” He blows on her fingers, rubbing them in his hands.

Echo gently pulls away from him. He sits back, surprised.

“She was on her way to Rochester,” he says, taking a stick of basswood from under the table. He positions it between his knees, and grabs a knife from a box under the table. “She sold the house. Needed my John Hancock. That's all it was. I just signed away my old life.”

Echo sighs, looks out at the trees. “I hate caring so much for you.”

He is not at all the person he thinks he is. He is so much more. She knows she must tell him now, before they say anything else. But looking at him, she feels terrible. He hasn't slept in more than twenty-four hours. She should leave him alone. She's not sure he can handle what she has to tell him.

He begins to slick the blade over the stick in careful strokes. A spiral of shavings crawls up from the end of the stick. “Apparently I'm a difficult person to be in love with.”

“Look, I just wanted to talk to you. I don't want anything from you,” she says. “I'm going back to Boston tonight.” She hasn't felt this much emotion in years. And she knows she isn't as strong as she was at seventeen.

He puts his carving down and sits back. “Don't do this,” he says, his green eyes piercing her. “You're willing to walk away again?”

“What am I walking away from?”

He stares at her, shakes his head.

“Tell me,” she says. She is so practiced at endings, and he, so practiced at holding on. When the wind picks up, Echo watches a few wood shavings cartwheel down the steps. Her mind is so full of thoughts, she could fill the entire lake with them. One thing Grant has never been is a liar. But the manicured glamour of Susanna is a revelation. How could he still want Echo, in all of her scattered ways? Her coins fall out of her pockets almost daily. She loses her Jeep in parking lots, even when she's made a mental note. Up until Echo was almost ten, she screamed whenever someone tried to cut her hair. She still hates it. And the feel of long manicured nails that keep the world from her touch. She's just not that sort of person. The sort of person Susanna is, at least.

He looks at her. “You don't get it, do you? I kept hoping your Jeep was going to come barreling through the trees. Then I saw you. I went after you, Echo.”

“She's beautiful, Grant, really,” Echo says, her voice dropping off. “She's perfect.”

“I think you're perfect.”

She shakes her head. Her neck is moist, the hairs at the base of her neck curling up. He reaches over to touch her cheek. Echo glances at the tips of the blue spruce. Ragged patches of sky pass above them, and then slowly merge into an innocuous yellow haze. It reminds her of Joseph's eyes. It reminds her she is running out of time.

Under the blearing sun, she inhales the sweet scent of pine, and the soft burn of a dying bonfire, but she can't tell if it's coming from up shore, or from the earth simmering below her feet.

The energy between them swirls all around. He looks down at his dirt-stained hands. “I was going to carve you something. Had this dream the other night about carving something for you.”

“How about her name in my arm?” She smiles, holds out her arm.

“You show no mercy,” he says.

She laughs. “Sorry.”

“I had always imagined what I would do when I saw her. What I would say. A marriage becomes a living thing. My instinct has always been to help things grow. Not to let things die. But I couldn't keep it alive. For the last year I've felt like it was the biggest failure of my life.” He puts down the wood and knife.

“What about now?”

“I think I failed Lion and Melanie,” he says, his face somber,
his eyes distant. A mayfly buzzes around his head and he waves it away with his hand.

“Listen to me,” she says, taking his face in her hands. “I've never met anyone who tries to help people the way you do. You don't fail anyone.”

“I failed you,” he says, resolute.

She feels raw, able to feel the scrape of his gaze, the burn of smoldering coals in her lungs. She wants to dive into water so black it makes even the boats disappear, just to feel their sting on her skin. “I'm still here, aren't I?” she asks, defiantly.

“I don't know if you are,” he says, looking out at the lake, which is a smooth jade stone now. He turns to her. “Are you?”

She takes a deep breath, ready to tell Grant all that she has come here to say.

Then he gets up and walks away, toward the shoreline. She is about to call him back but she stops, watching as he dips his hands into the crystal water and splashes the water over his face. A nearby heron shakes the water from its wings and utters several squawks. Grant motions slowly toward the bird, calmly, quietly. It steps away, then advances and repeats the dance, refusing his proposal.

When he walks back to Echo his face is pallid. His eyes are cold, having absorbed all the cold in the lake.

“You ripped me open once,” he says, standing in front of her, arms crossed.

She looks down. “I never wanted to do anything like that.”

He won't avert his eyes even though he is struggling with himself to maintain the connection with her. “What you did was more than I was prepared for.”

“Grant, I was seventeen years old.”

He shakes his head. “You threw me away. You lied to me.”

“I was protecting myself.”

“How do I know you won't do that again? How can I trust you?”

“It's all different now. Everything has changed,” she whispers, turning away, even though she is not sure that he has heard her, or that he is even trying. How could she have thought that they would just pick up where they had left off? That there wouldn't be any scars. That there would be nothing insurmountable. That he would forgive her.

Grant picks up the stick and chucks it into the canopy. A swell of blackbirds erupts into the air. “Lets go for a walk.”

“Now?” she asks.

“I just want you next to me. Will you come with me?” He is too tired to sleep, he says. He wants to stay connected to everything. That's how he had felt about his marriage: If he left, everything would crumble. He couldn't separate the marriage from the house itself. That's why he stayed there, sleeping on the bare mattress for over a year. Now he tells her he's afraid that if he goes inside the cabin and closes the door, everything will disintegrate. “You understand what I mean?” he asks.

She nods, and follows him down the steps and across the lawn. Her heart is racing. She finally gets up the nerve to say it. “You can't save everyone, Grant. Do you know you get that from your father? I need to tell you something. Then you'll understand.”

He stops and stares at her. “What are you talking about?”

She takes a deep breath. “Your father wasn't who you think, or he was more than you think he was. All his coldness toward you, the way he made you feel so badly about what you could do, about who you were. It wasn't you, Grant.” Suddenly it is all spilling out of her. She tells him Joseph's story about Two Bears, and as she speaks, she watches a shadow cross his eyes. He is beginning to sweat, the water beading up on his upper
lip. He listens, rakes his fingers through his hair, and then she watches his hands ball into fists. His face is flushed, and he looks angrier than she has ever seen him. But she continues because she knows she may never have this chance again. “He was trying to protect you.”

“From what?”

“From being like him. From failing. From turning your back on who you are and what you can do. From being a secret.”

“Jesus,” Grant says, looking at his hands as though they were foreign objects. “And Joseph never told me, all these years.”

“Joseph made a promise to keep it from you. To protect you. But when I told him how I felt about you—”

“What did you tell him?” he asks defiantly.

She looks away, her eyes welling up suddenly. “That I loved you. That I always have. Joseph told me for your sake. But mostly he told me for mine. He said he could see that not knowing was hurting you. It scared your father, seeing the ability in you. You reminded him of what he'd lost, or maybe what he wished he still had faith in. He didn't want the medicine or the ability to fail you, too.”

“This is complete bullshit,” says Grant, the waves of anger rising up inside of him. He wonders what he could have done with the knowledge all of these years. How his life might have been different. What about Susanna's miscarriages? Could he have changed the course of their lives? Could he have done something?

“You know you can help more than just birds,” says Echo.

He recalls one evening after dinner when he was eight. He had been climbing one of the willows when he heard the loud
wick wick wick
of a young northern flicker that had fallen onto the roof. He climbed up and let the bird watch him through its hazy eyes, its tail feathers stuck out, oily, wet. Its light-purple-
spotted chest pumped in and out as Grant edged toward it. Finally, he was so close he could see the tilings on the curved beak, the yellow undersides of the wings. Its feet were light on his finger as he cupped the body. Grant braced himself against a branch and climbed down, the bird resting in his shirt pocket.

“What's that you've got?” his father suddenly called from below. Grant panicked, felt the wings flap impatiently against his chest. He tried to quiet the creature as he climbed down. “Nothing, Dad,” he answered. “Show me,” his father demanded. Grant reluctantly opened his hands in the grass. The bird shook out its feathers, limped a few steps as though dazed, and then flew away. Grant watched it until the sick feeling in his stomach disappeared.

His father watched it, too. “How many times that happened?” his father wanted to know. “How many!”

“I just helped him a little. Nothing happened,” Grant had whispered, paling under his father's stare.

“Don't play around with me, son. You tell me right now.”

Grant admitted he had helped five or six birds.

“Whatever you think you can do, you can't. You hear me? This isn't meant for you,” Dr. Shongo warned. “This is the last time. You understand? Don't ever let me catch you doing that again. Not to a bird. Not to a person. Never again.” He put his hand on Grant's head and then walked him toward the house. “And don't ever talk about this to your mother.”

“Thirty-three years of silence and now this?” asks Grant. “No. It's too goddamn late.”

“It's not too late, Grant.”

He walks away as it all comes back to him, the sound of his father pacing all those nights after losing his mother. Didn't Grant know the feeling of not being able to save someone whom
he loved? He would have understood it when he was younger. He would have forgiven his father if only his father had given him the chance.

He closes his eyes, kneels, and runs his hands across the grass. He grabs a handful of dirt and lets it fall through his fingers. It is as though he is absorbing the knowledge.

Grant looks up at the regal pines, survivors that hold the wisdom of wood, knowing that they can never be burnt down entirely, that certain minerals in the wood refused to unite with air. This meant that even if you burn a village down you can never really make it disappear.

He turns around and faces her. “You can't change me, Echo. You never could. I'm still the same screwed-up guy you knew when you were seventeen.” He is thinking about how his father wanted to change him, how Susanna did, and now even Echo. He has spent years beating himself up for what everyone else wanted him to be.