The soil was rich, a dark, dark brown
that reminded Rowan of coffee grounds.
She dug her hands into it, feeling the
moist earth sift through her fingers and against her palms. The smell
of coffee in her memory mingled with the earthy smell; she could see
the cup of it in Noah's hand, and the blankets in the other, the
streetlights casting stark pools of light in the parking lot. He had
smelled of coffee, he always did. She had held onto to him tightly,
inhaling his scent, desperately trying to cleanse herself of that
sterile white smell that clung to her like a disease.
Her hands tightened around the earth
and she drew back, touching the leaves of the small potted aspen next
to her. To the left out of the corner of her eye, the large oak
loomed. She tried not to look at it.
The park was abuzz that day; families
flocked to the huge green of Tamarack with baby trees in their black
plastic pots. Mothers held the hands of little toddlers who clutched
green toy buckets and shovels, and fathers pushed back the brims of
their baseball caps while they toted trees and tools, looking up at
the sun as it climbed in the sky. The park's Arbor Day celebration
every year was a huge event in Terry, and it teemed with trees of
various ages planted every year at the end of April. To Rowan, it was
as large of a forest as she could find in eastern Montana, and she
knew the best oaks to sit in with a book. “Your own little urban
forest,” her Dad always said, his eyes twinkling.
When was the last time they had done
that?
Penny, who was six, was next to her,
arms pushed into the ground all the way up to her elbows, watching
her older sister. Her wide blue eyes blinked, red hair blowing around
her face in the breeze. Her little willow sat beside Rowan's aspen –
the tree their mother had selected for her. The one her mother had
asked her to plant on her behalf was a small cottonwood – funny,
Rowan thought wryly, that she'd picked a cottonwood, what with her
allergies and all. She used to fill burlap sacks with all the cotton
that piled up under the patio table and in the corners of the fence
to make pillows for her stories until Momma had apologetically thrown
them, sneezing as she did.
Momma hadn't come today, and neither
had Dad, who had muttered he didn't want a tree and had gone into the
garage. Penny and Rowan had left both of them near the driveway,
where Shawn had always worked on his pickup.
Rowan swallowed hard and stood,
reaching to the fold-up shovel she'd thrown in the pack. The sound of
the shovel slicing through the earth was softened, as though the
ground was hurrying to muffle it. The white noise of the people
around them grated on her nerves. Couldn't
they all hear it? That horrific boom that the trees had done nothing
to muffle?
Sometimes she
thought she could hear his neck snap, like a sharp clap of thunder
during the lightning storms he loved. That wasn't possible.
Penny
pulled both fists out of the dirt, itching at her cheek and leaving a
smudge across the her face; warrior stripes on an angel. “Can we
plant mine first? Please Rowan?”
She smiled a half
smile and nodded, tucking loose strands of auburn hair behind her
ears. “Yeah, love. We can do that.”
The rosebud of
Penny's mouth saddened a little as she watched her big sister dig.
She wished she'd hum again while she worked, singing under her breath
the way she always used to when she'd load the dishwasher or pull
weeds in the garden.
Rowan stuck the
shovel in the ground and got down on her knees, taking the willow and
gently pulling it from the plastic pot it rested in.
Shawn had teased
her for how much she loved trees almost as much as she poked at him
for obsessing with machinery. He had always been in the garage,
tinkering with whatever broken pickup or car was parked in the left
side of the garage that Dad had designated “the Shop.” Putting a
lift on his pickup had been the latest thing, though they'd sold it
to someone in Forsyth last month.
Rowan
ran her hand over the thinness of it's branches and it's tiny trunk,
looking at the white roots that ran through the small bit of attached
soil. They looked like veins, pale and stark against the brown. She
hurried to cover them, patting the soil in place quickly. The veins
in his arms had been green and purple, vivid through his still,
translucent skin.
Penny patted the
soil, the dull thud of her little hands packing the tree in place.
She smiled. “Next?”
The two sisters
worked on their knees, until the three little ones stood newly
grounded, cottonwood, aspen, and willow in a perfect line, facing the
big oak.
They were so
little, Rowan thought, and so young. Their branches were thin, their
bark still supple, and they all reached for the sky in a child-like
stretch that Rowan watched Penny do before running off to join the
other younger kids spinning on the axis of the blue and white
merry-go-round.
To this day, she
didn't know where the scream had come from. She'd looked at the
accident, the mangled front end of the gray dodge accordioned into
itself, the bits of glass crunching under her feet and sparkling
obscenely in the ambulance light. She'd seen the open door of the
ambulance where she glimpsed the matted fluff of her brother's black
hair and heard her father saying, “I'm the father it's ok” to the
paramedic in the white latex gloves – she hated those powdered
gloves so much – who was trying to stop him, and saw Penny's face
pressed against the window of the car where she'd been told to stay,
her face red in the neon lights that wouldn't stop flashing, casting
the scene into a bloody pall.
None of it was
real. None of it could be – this was a scene from the movies she'd
watched, these were the bad things that happened to other people on
the evening news at night, while she was tucked away under the pages
of her current book and the songs on her tongue.
In the real world,
Shawn would be sitting next to her on the grass right now, waiting
for them to be done planting and for Penny to be done playing and for
Momma to be done talking to all the people she knew from church and
for Dad to finish reading his book in the shade.
They would be
staring at the rough bark of Rowan's favorite oak's trunk, wrinkled
like the corners of the eyes of a wise old lady. She would be teasing
him, and he would laugh that funny laugh where his voice would
disappear that she'd been hearing for the last twenty years of her
life, and his eyes would crinkle until he would say, “Ohhh man
that's funny.” Fun-nay – that's how he said it. But this wasn't a
real world anymore, and it hadn't been for a year now.
Because Shawn had
fallen asleep at 2:30 am on April tenth, at the wheel of Dad's Dodge.
He had driven off
the road and slammed into that oak.
He had gone
through the windshield and his neck had broken.
And he had never
woken up in that white bed in the hospital where he'd been hooked up
to all sorts of tubes and wires, his paper thin eyelids covering his
big brown eyes that none of them would ever see again.
All this left her
staring at the trunk of the oak, the huge spot where the pickup had
torn it's bark away and slashed deep scars into it's wood. It'd been
a year, so the color of the exposed part had darkened and deepened as
though it was trying to camouflage the damage, but the scars were
still as sharply horrific as Rowan remembered seeing that night.
She closed her
eyes against the sirens and the flashing lights and the colors.
“Rowan?”
She felt the touch
of Penny's hand on her shoulder. Turning her head, Rowan saw her baby
sister run her fingers through the little round leaves of the aspen,
so green. “Hmmm?”
“I don't feel
much like playing anymore.”
Rowan knew that
face. She knew that blank stare, the one that was warding off
whatever was surfacing in her memory. Her little sister's chin
wobbled. “R-r-rowan...”
“Come here baby
girl,” Rowan whispered, and Penny curled up on her lap, tucking her
face in the crook of her neck. Rowan held her tight.
They sat there,
the two girls and the young trees and the old trees.
They stayed until
the roots of their legs let go, and they left the park, carrying the
past in their pockets and under their nails.
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