Windfalls: A Novel (43 page)

“Worthless fruit?” Anna asked, her toothbrush halfway to her mouth. “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

“Trees produce less as they age. It gets to where it’s not worth the work of harvesting them. Besides, most of those old orchards grow old varieties. They might taste great, but they probably don’t transport well. Until someone decides to develop the land, it’s cheaper just to ignore it.”

“But those trees were loaded with blossoms. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many flowers.”

“They tend to do that, when they’re stressed or dying—set more blooms. And they’ll burst early, in a warm spell.” He gave a bitter chuckle, “You could say it’s just another gift of global warming.”

Anna asked, “How old would an orchard like that be, anyway?”

“Hard to tell.” Eliot jutted his chin toward the mirror, stretched his lip up over his teeth, and ran his razor down his taut chin to his Adam’s apple. Relaxing his grimace, he added, “Untended, they can start looking bad pretty fast. Some plum trees’ll live a hundred years or more, though I doubt an orchard big as yours would be that old. Maybe back to the Depression, pre-World War II. That’s a long time, even so.”

“You know how many trees like that there are around here, once you start to look?” Anna asked.

Eliot rinsed his razor and tapped it against the side of the sink. “Sure,” he answered. “Lots.” He turned and grinned at her, holding her gaze so long that the irony in his expression had melted into tenderness by the time he added, “There’s plenty of fruit on this planet that goes to waste.”

It became a kind of quest, to find those trees while they still bloomed. In the bits of time she managed to steal from the rest of her life, Anna roamed the countryside, seeking them. Driving slowly and braking often, she scoured the back roads, searching for the apples and plums and pears and figs that had been planted years ago for the years to come, planted by people who lay in graves long gone while their homes and barns and fields sank back into the earth, until now only those old trees remained, like messages sent by strangers or gifts left by ghosts. Disregarding fences, signs, and dogs, she hiked through the hills and draws as though she owned them, and back in her darkroom, each new print made her hungry for the one that would follow it.

The last Sunday in March, Anna left the girls with Honey and headed south, wandering down roads she chose at random until she found herself at last in a land far beyond where she had ever been, a windswept place of vacant hills so broad and steep and rocky they seemed almost like mountains. She parked by a break in the barbed-wire fence that edged the road. Shouldering her camera and carrying her tripod, she set off, hiking up the hill beneath a sky filled with massy clouds. When she reached the top, she looked west, down into a land so big and empty it seemed almost unearthly, a place of rocky soil, sparse grass, and solitude.

The radio had warned that the weather was changing, and she could feel it as she hiked, that gathering tension that meant a storm was coming. She could see it in the creamy strangeness of the light. The terrain was rough, her equipment was heavy, and after a while she became so thirsty that her mouth ached for water. But despite the lack of trees, something drew her on—the desolation of the landscape, maybe, or maybe just the joy of being so alone, of being a solitary body and a single mind wandering through those open, empty hills.

Late in the afternoon, as the western sky grew smooth and fierce beneath the menacing clouds, she came across one lone tree. Halfway up another hill, it stood exposed to the oncoming storm. Some ancient mishap had split its trunk in two, and one half of it rested like a fallen snag along the ground. The cavity where its heart had been was black and gaping, although the damage was so old, the edges of the hole had healed as smooth as lips.

Despite every outrage, it was in bloom. Overhead the clouds were heaped and dark, but beneath them the low-set sun burnished the broken wood and set each frail petal afire. There was something so savage about it that it almost frightened her, that lonely tree glowing beneath the threatening sky. She reminded herself it was only a trick of light that caused that doomed tree to blossom one last time, only a trick of light that made it appear before her now like a kind of earthly glory. But even those ironies could not diminish her awe.

The wind was rising. Her hair stung her cheeks, and her eyes filled with cold tears. She knew a photograph of that tree would never save or change a thing. But she no longer cared. There wasn’t much time. The light continued to deepen, and just as quickly it would be gone. Opening her tripod, she planted it on the rocky soil so that the tree loomed above her, luminous against the roiling sky. She had time for one exposure before the wild light slipped away.

B
Y THE END OF
M
ARCH THE FAIRGROUND WAS FULL OF SQUATTERS
.

The first residents had been as furtive as Cerise herself, hiding even from each other, ducking around corners, squirreling their possessions out of sight. But as the days lengthened and the evening air grew balmy and their numbers increased, those new occupants seemed to be gaining an audacity that worried Cerise.

One Thursday night in early April, after she’d eaten her little dinner and climbed beneath her blankets, she could hear people gathering in the open space behind her barn, and she cringed to hear how clearly their voices carried in the dusk air, shuddered to smell the smoke from their bonfire. She lay beneath her blankets in the last dim light of evening and wished she had the courage to remind them not to call attention to themselves.

She finally went to sleep to the mutter of many voices, although her sleep was shallow and shifting. Sometime around midnight a crescendo of hard laughter punched her awake, and afterward she lay unsleeping for many hours while the whoops and curses of strangers echoed between the buildings. At first she was only worried that the police would come to rout out the revelers or that the revelers would tire of each other and go looking for people like herself. But as the night dragged on, she finally admitted to herself what she’d been fearing all along—this little haven, too, was coming to an end.

As soon as it was light enough to see, she bundled up her things and slipped away, gliding past the people sprawled around the blackened trash barrel. The sky east of the city was reddening with the coming day as she crawled through the fence and hiked into the dawn.

She devoted the morning to doing laundry and trying to figure out where she could spend the coming night. But when the time came for her to head to Anna’s, she still hadn’t thought of a safe place to sleep. She hid her belongings in a thicket halfway down the steep ravine that ran behind the houses on Anna’s street, and for a moment she even considered sleeping there, but the hillside was too steep and rugged, and she didn’t want to bring her real life that close to Anna’s.

Anna’s face was glowing when Cerise arrived. “I just put Ellen down,” she said as she let Cerise into the house. “But she isn’t quite asleep.”

Cerise nodded and followed Anna down the hall. She wondered if Anna had seen her scrambling out of the ravine. But Anna said, “I’ve got good news.” Her voice was bright with excitement. “I just got a call from a woman I met last fall—the wife of the man who had Eliot’s job before he got it. She wants to see my portfolio.”

Cerise kept her face still and waited until Anna explained, “She’s interested in buying some of my new photographs.”

“That’s nice,” Cerise said shyly.

“It is,” Anna answered. “It’d be great to sell something to such a good collection, especially right now, when I’m still half a year away from a new show. I just wish—” A shadow crossed her face, and for a moment she looked as though she were thinking very hard. Then she tossed her thought away with an apologetic shrug and smiled directly at Cerise. “Anyway,” she continued, “I wanted to ask if you would mind staying with Lucy and Ellen while Eliot and I went over there for dinner tonight. I can come back after my seminar, and help you feed the girls before I go. Of course we can give you a ride home afterward.”

Home, Cerise’s mind gulped, thinking of her empty stall at the fairground, of her blankets in the ravine. “Okay,” she said, to mask the complications in her head.

Anna was looking at her fondly. “You’ve helped me so much—you’ve helped all of us. We owe you a great, great deal.”

It flustered Cerise for Anna to be talking that way. It almost frightened her. But in the middle of her confusion, she mustered up her courage and said, “Could I see them, too?”

“See them?” Anna echoed.

“Your pictures,” Cerise suggested shyly.

“Oh,” Anna answered, looking vaguely bemused. “Of course I’d be glad to show them to you. It’s nice of you to ask.” Glancing at her wristwatch, she added, “I’ve still got a few minutes before I have to leave for campus.”

Anna led Cerise into the kitchen, where a flat black case lay on the table. It was thick as a book, and so long and wide it would hold an unfolded newspaper. Anna was just beginning to unzip it when the baby monitor on the counter crackled to life, filling the room with fretful mumbles and the little sounds of Ellen shifting in her crib.

“I guess I tried too early,” Anna said. “Looks like you’ll have to put her back down a little later.” She lifted the top flap of the portfolio to reveal a stack of prints in mat-board frames. “Anyway, you’re welcome to look at them while I get her up.”

Anna hurried out of the kitchen, leaving Cerise alone with the stack of prints. She felt nervous about touching then, afraid she might accidentally stain or bend them, and she was worried she would still not be able to understand why they meant so much. While the baby monitor broadcast Anna’s murmurs and Ellen’s answering coos into the kitchen, Cerise tentatively lifted the first print from the portfolio. It was about the size of the photograph of Anna’s that hung in the living room, but rather than being a sweeping landscape, it was only a picture of a row of trees. They were not pretty trees, not the smooth symmetrical trees Cerise would have chosen to photograph. Instead, these trees were twisted and disfigured, broken and blackened and near-dead, though despite all their deformities, their branches were filled with glowing flowers.

One by one, Cerise studied the rest of Anna’s prints, letting her eyes roam and linger until finally her gaze disengaged, turned inward in a kind of aching rapture. The monitor filled the room with the intimate hum of loving voices, but Cerise was unable to tear herself away and turn it off. It seemed as though a limb she’d somehow forgotten was part of her body had fallen asleep and was now tingling, buzzing, stinging with the work of waking. It hurt, the yearning that was upwelling in her, and at the same time it seemed to contain the answer to her longing. Looking at those broken, blooming trees was like listening to the saddest music—it made her almost grateful that she was alive to feel such pain.

But when she reached the print at the bottom of the stack, her jaw dropped and she clapped her scarred hand to her open mouth to catch her moan. Her brain seized shut as though it couldn’t believe what her eyes were seeing, and still she could not stop staring. It was a photograph of a lone tree on a barren hillside beneath a stormy sky. Sundered almost in two, one half of its trunk lay draped along the stony ground. Of all the trees on earth, Cerise recognized it—though in Anna’s photograph it was ablaze with flowers.

“Sorry that took so long,” Anna said, entering the kitchen with Ellen riding on her hip like a round-eyed jockey. “I had to change her, too.” She was bending her head to nuzzle Ellen’s cheek when she caught sight of Cerise’s face and straightened up instead. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” she said, crossing the kitchen to stand at the table beside her. “Are you feeling all right?”

Tears were welling so thickly in Cerise’s eyes that for a moment tears were all she could see. “Are you okay?” she heard Anna ask, her tone teetering between tenderness and worry.

“I’m fine,” Cerise answered almost fiercely. She handed the last print to Anna. Gouging the tears from her eyes, she added, “I’m just—I mean, it’s nothing. I like your pictures.”

“You do?” Anna asked perplexedly. “Well, thank you. That’s nice of you to say.” She studied Cerise for a moment longer and added, “Are you sure that everything’s okay?”

I
T PUZZLED
A
NNA THAT
H
ONEY HAD BEEN CRYING
. D
RIVING TO CAMPUS
, she wondered if something had happened at the shelter that was troubling her. Despite herself, as Anna leaned forward to switch on the radio, she remembered Sally’s warning, and a little pall of worry descended in her mind.

She had almost reached the freeway when she heard the news. An au pair from Paris had killed the toddler she’d been hired to come to America to care for, drowning him in the bathtub while his parents were at work. There was a sound bite from a spokesperson who said the whole child-care industry needed increased regulation, and then the newscaster began a segment about the record-breaking heat. But instead of the sunny street that lay beyond the windshield, Anna saw Ellen, watching happily as Honey filled the bath.

A thick fear prickled in her chest. There was no excuse for what she had done—opening her home to a homeless stranger, hiring a woman to care for her children who’d lost her job caring for children. There were reasons people became homeless—Anna knew that. In some reluctant recess of herself, she’d known all along that Sally was right, that it must have taken more than simple bad luck for Honey to have sunk so far. She had known, too, that she hadn’t hired Honey in order to help her, hadn’t hired Honey in order to make Lucy feel better about the world. She’d hired Honey because she needed help so desperately that she was willing to take stupid risks. She’d hired Honey so that she could use her, and now she was going to pay for her selfishness.