TREE

By A.S. Aubrey

/ Fiction /    

I was determined to climb the tree outside my window—maybe because you told me not to. Knock-kneed bony and my oily unwashed hair in my face. Those Levis that made me look like a boy with the bulge at the zipper on my too-skinny body (Shelly and Sarah laughing at me on the playground, pointing), and my legs moving, into those limbs, panting with freedom. 

It was early morning, before cartoons, when you would lie in bed with your cigarettes, the smell from the door, not opening it when I knocked, for hours. (Finally open, you in that silk robe with flowers, wet under the arms and sweaty-faced, reading Bergdorf catalogues with an ice-filled glass of something, waving me away.)

Bright dawn and the cool of the air, as I climbed, scratching my face on the branches, feet slipping on rough bark, then righting. The top above the roof, so that I was higher even than your room, looking on that house like a place we lived and not a place I was trapped in, small and airless.

When you came out to get the paper, you stared up at the sky and found me, cradled on the widest limb, resting in its curved hug like a hammock. You didn’t call to me, didn’t come to get me. I saw you, seeing me. You called the police.

So that the neighbors came out, their doors and mouths open, with their mugs of coffee and the tv sounds behind them: Mr. Callahan, bald in his plaid pajamas. Mimi Whethers in her polka dot dress, preparing for church. 

I had just wanted to rest in that tree.

The men in their blue-black clothes with guns, waving their batons. “It’s time to come down, Summer,” they said, wrangling me. “If you don’t come down, we’ll have to come up there and pull you down."

What would happen if I said nothing, didn’t move? 

(I practiced this, in the mornings, in your rages; lying still under the dining table where it became too difficult for you to get me, to kneel, to grab me. Barely breathing in my wide-eyed rabbit-fear, my thoughts floating to skyless places, to Grandma’s bread-warmed house and her lap like a pool I could float in, letting my body sing like rain and fine air.)

Eyes on me, I scrambled down and fell, foot catching that final branch, face first. The thud of grass-mud ground. Those men running to me, squat on ground and kneeling to touch that twisted, tender ankle, checking it for pain. 

I grimaced while they held me under the arms, picked me up. They stared up at the house, your windows, looking for you. They knocked on the door. You never answered.

Then they put me in the back of their car, that smell of leather and their radio spouting emergencies, blandly urgent. “You’ve got a good sprain there,” one of them chided. “Let’s get you to the hospital.”

How did they know, to take better care of me than you did, back to your room with its too loud classical music, drowned in self? Did I see you, out that back window when I turned—did you even look to see?

* * *

Black dark. I often rise in the night, thinking of you dying. I wonder what it’s like in your skin, to stare in the pale night. That house around you like an old blanket and Lupe, bowed from your commands, defenseless and obedient.

* * *

The ways I’ve created peace: flowered wallpaper, a generous bedroom with a cashmere throw from my store on the chair, leaf-green and tasseled soft. A chair that waits to hold me. My home a hand, palm flat and opened to me, offering itself. 

Ragged-run from my own climbing, but calmed from it, I’m finally surrounded by things that are my own. I have a kitchen of cupboards where plates and glasses rest until I need them, nothing broken.

The day outside my window, daylight not a dread-thing but the hope of undone things awaiting me. Watching now, finally, the balance between push and rest, my body no longer running so hard from itself, from you.

* * *

When Lupe calls to tell me you want to see me, you must see me, her voice is broken and stumbles. ‘Please miss,’ she says. I can feel her breath. I can feel how you’ve hovered over her since she came to you at sixteen, her suitcase, the money she’s sent back to Mexico in exchange for never leaving your side.

I hold the phone and stare at it, feeling my fingers around its edges, away from my face. It is slightly cool, heavy, the screen of it bright in my quiet room.

“I’ll come.”

I say this more for her than for you: her scared bright heart, trying.

* * *

A cat in the night would howl. I remember this. How I would stare up at the filmy top of my canopy bed and feel it crying all the way down to my toes.

* * *

When I arrive, Lupe is in the kitchen, making you tea, but frantic and uncomfortable. “She won’t drink,’ she says urgently. “She’s not drinking anything.” At first I think she’s talking about alcohol; but no, of course, she means anything. She means you’re not drinking anything at all.

When she takes me into your room, the drapes are down, a heavy dark, and you’re too small in that bed, its carved wooden headboard, the brocaded spread burying you in Medieval reds, golds, vines. 

Your eyes are surprised. You’re searching me, like a child that’s done something wrong and is wondering if I’ve noticed, wondering what I will do. To have all that power in this room with you now is a strange reversal. 

Lupe’s brought a wooden chair next to the bed from the kitchen—how did she get it up the stairs, her squat body in its flower-printed cotton dress?—and I sit uncomfortably, inch near you. In the half-light blue of dawn you take my hand. Your breath smells sour and there’s a white crust around the edge of your mouth. 

Your hand: bony, veined, those long spider fingers grasping. I am not used to your touch, to you needing me. How did you find me, after all this time, a child yourself in this final, fierce longing? You are barely here, your breath a raspy chorus.

You close your eyes then, and your chest rises and falls, filling and emptying. One tear moves down your face, from your right eye, the closest to me. 

I realize this, now, is the closest thing I will ever get to an apology. 

* * *

Because then your brow furrows and sleep takes you—or are you pretending, so you don’t have to see me, to stay with this awkward phantom-space between us?—and the breath gets deeper and bigger, swallowing you. In the morning-cool dark of your big room, the silence is a strange cloak, the absence of your fury. 

I can feel my own long-absent tears like a storm cloud behind my eyes: that mixture of sadness, helplessness, terror I’ve masked, forgotten. My breath moves in and out, uneven, and I become aware of it: my own breathing, quieter than yours, but with a better chance of living.

* * *

It’s no surprise when Lupe calls, only days later, to tell me you’ve gone—or is it? Is it? How can I believe you, finally dead, no longer hanging over me like a dagger, that tense-gripped thing between us. You now floating in the sea of gone.

* * *

Two days later, I tell Alison at the shop that I’ll be cutting back on my hours, bringing in a manager to do the ordering. I can feel her wide-eyed awe, twenty-five, and wondering how a person makes a life. I want to tell her it’s different when it comes from this running, that it doesn’t feel like freedom. But then eventually it does, it can. If you run long and hard enough, you begin to feel your own strength like air, essential and enduring.

* * *

Safety lands like breath, my system rewiring itself to realize it’s over. I’m here in the blank blue morning, the sky just pink at edges. My English breakfast tea, that throw. A small and unnamed bird outside the window on the high-tree branch, eyes beady and small, head cocking, then bending, feeling its wings with its beak.