Beneath the Night Tree (4 page)

Several yards into the thick of the grove, there was a small clearing where my grandpa’s ancient John Deere tractor sat in a grown-over heap of rusted neglect. I had scrambled all over it when I was a kid, and now the boys used it for their imaginary games. I loved this spot, and it was here, in the shadow of a sugar maple that would blaze crimson by autumn, that Michael stopped.

He let go of my hand and leaned against one of the tractor’s giant metal wheels. Now that we had achieved our destination, Michael seemed suddenly hesitant, even shy. Moments alone were few and far between, and usually we filled them with furtive kisses, private whispers, fingers, arms, bodies twined. But he pulled away from me and cupped his neck with a slender surgeon’s hand. Looking off into the trees, away from my curious stare, he cleared his throat once. Twice.

My heart tripped over itself. “Michael?” I asked, taking a step toward him because I was sick with a sudden panic. But as I watched, his eyes snapped to mine and then just as quickly away. There was no apology in his gaze. No indication that he was on the verge of saying a different kind of good-bye—the kind that was much more permanent. Instead, his eyes were cloudy with something that made him fearful and hopeful at once.

And just like that, I knew.

I stepped back. Not because I was afraid. But because I couldn’t believe that after five years, after all this time, he was finally ready to ask the thing that I had hoped for after our very first date.

That night was clear in my memory, the emotions bright and smooth-edged like little seeds I carried in my pocket and still fingered from time to time. I took them out now, those raw hopes that had planted themselves in my life when Michael curled his hand around mine. As we sat side by side on the steps of the porch all those years ago, my fledgling wish for us was simple, immediate:
Stay.
I wanted him to linger, to sit back beneath the stars for another hour, maybe two. But it didn’t take long for me to want more.
Stay forever.

“Julia . . . ,” Michael began.

“Yes?”

He sighed hard and looked me full in the face. Then, dropping his hand, he crossed the space between us in a single stride and caught me about the shoulders. His grip was firm, unwavering, as if he knew that he had to hold me up or I would find myself sitting among the wild bergamot that sprang like pink confetti from the tall grasses at my feet.

I closed my eyes. Waited for the words I had imagined him saying a hundred different ways.

“Julia,” he whispered, “come with me.”

“Come with me”?
I squinted at Michael, sure that I had heard him wrong. Wasn’t he supposed to say,
Marry me?
Wasn’t he supposed to be on one knee? I snuck a peek at the breast pocket of his vintage plaid shirt and couldn’t stop my nose from crinkling when I realized it was flat. Empty. No jewelry box.

I swallowed, tried to talk.

“No.” He put a finger to my lips. “Just listen, okay? I want you to come to Iowa City with me. Well, you and Daniel—and Simon if he wants to. I’ve arranged for you to house-sit for a while. One of my professors is in Cambridge doing continuing ed, and I told him about you—about us. You can live in his house until Christmas.”

I managed to squeak out, “You want me to move to Iowa City?”

“Yes.”

The desperation in his gaze was so intense, so earnest, that for a moment I actually considered the possibility. What would it feel like to leave? to just pack a bag and go? From there, it wasn’t much of a leap for my mind to imagine the impossible: What if it were just the two of us? No worms in the bathtub, worries about Simon, or working long hours for a measly paycheck that barely allowed us to make ends meet. I could act my age. Drink coffee at some corner Starbucks and talk about politics, religion, the world beyond the walls of my suddenly stifling home.

I took a shaky breath. Those were dangerous, deceptive thoughts that pulled like quicksand. I couldn’t entertain such illusory demons. Ever.

“Iowa City,” I repeated. “Why?” The question escaped my lips before I had a chance to gauge how he might hear it.

Instantly Michael’s face fell. “Because . . .” He floundered. “Because I want you near me. I think it would be good for us to figure out if . . . if this long-distance thing can be done . . . closer.” He fit himself around me and brushed his lips against my forehead.

“A trial?”

“I don’t see it as a trial. I see it as a prelude. Maybe we’ll come home at Christmas with a ring. A reason to celebrate.”

Michael had said it: a ring. But somehow it felt second-rate, cheap.
Maybe.
I struggled to keep my composure and had to cough before I could trust my voice enough to say, “Simon and Daniel are already signed up for school. They start in a week.”

“There are schools in Iowa City. I can call the district today. They’ll be on the class rosters by this afternoon.”

“I can’t leave my job.”

“You work at Value Foods, Julia. It’s no big loss. Besides, maybe you could pursue your dream. You know, take some photography classes at the university.” He tapped the camera that still hung from my shoulder.

“I’m already taking classes.”

“At the tech school.” It seemed to me that there was an edge of disdain in his voice.

“I like my program,” I said through my teeth.

“Early childhood development? You can work at a day care or teach preschool. Is that really what you want?”

Though I had wondered that myself a hundred times, I bristled at his casual dismissal of my choice in education. “Yes,” I stated decisively.

Michael’s arms slackened. He pulled away. “I thought you would be happy about this. We could be together.”

“I can’t leave Grandma,” I told him because I couldn’t tell him the truth:
I can’t come with you under these circumstances. Not like this. Not without a promise, something more than
maybe
.

The grove seemed unnaturally quiet. No breeze stirred the leaves; no songbird trilled in the trees. I shifted on my feet and heard the soft crunch of broken grasses, bent stems that would turn brown because of my careless trampling. It made me unaccountably sad.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I love you.” It was what I had wanted him to say to me.

“I love you, too,” Michael echoed, too late. He checked his watch and ran a sun-browned hand through his hair. “Tell you what. Think about it, okay? I know I just dropped this on you. You haven’t had any time to process, to think of the possibilities. . . . Just promise me you’ll give it some serious thought.”

“Okay.”

Michael straightened and stretched as if the conversation had exhausted him. Then he smiled at me like there was no tension between us. But I saw the lingering shadows in his eyes. He kissed me hard on the mouth. “Think about it. I’ve gotta go, but I’ll call you from the road.”

“Okay.”

“You going to be all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, too.” And without waiting for me to follow, Michael turned from the clearing and loped back toward the house, his car. I waited until I heard his engine catch and his tires crunch gravel on their way back to the highway.

It was only then that I let myself cry.

Dreams

I didn’t sleep that night—or for many nights thereafter.

When Michael called me from the road like he promised, and when he phoned every evening following that, we acted like the conversation in the grove had never happened. He didn’t ask me if I had made a decision and I didn’t offer one. It was as if I dreamed up the whole encounter. But I knew that it was real. I could feel the tension between us in the pauses between words, in the moments when he took a breath and I opened my mouth to say something at the exact instant that he did. There was a subtle awkwardness between us that made my heart ache.

I wanted to talk to Grandma about it, but I couldn’t make my tongue form the syllables, the phrases and sentences that would change everything. They were hard words, cut from metal that had the potential to reshape our lives in ways that would inevitably feel violent.
Leave?
To me, that one small verb had many synonyms:
divide
,
split
,
sever
.

So instead of wrestling with Michael’s bewildering offer, I buried it in some corner of my mind and tried to ignore it. Of course, it was like trying to disregard the proverbial elephant in the room, but at least I could deal with it alone. It was me against myself. My own feelings warred in silence.

I was grateful that no one seemed to notice my personal combat. Daniel was protected by the cheerful oblivion of early childhood, Simon seemed absorbed in his own mild angst as school approached, and Grandma bustled through her day with little time for herself, much less occasions to observe the struggle behind my polished exterior. And I kept my armor as spit-shine sparkly as I could. It was something I had become very good at.

Thankfully, the final week of summer freedom before Simon entered his fifth-grade year and Daniel became a kindergartner was so busy, I didn’t have much opportunity to agonize over Michael’s offer. Our days were filled with work, last-minute excursions, and photography appointments.

I had made a modest name for myself as an amateur shutterbug, and a few people called me regularly to do on-location portraits of their kids. Some families liked to use their own backyards or homes, but I had also accumulated a list of great sites for photo shoots that included an abandoned barn, an old train bridge, and a little-known corner of the local park. I lugged an ever-growing pile of junk with me and used my imagination to position the kids in charming, unusual ways. I loved it.

Simon, on the other hand, claimed that he hated every minute of it, but that didn’t stop me from dragging him along to my photography sessions. He was a huge help, and the kids loved him even though he didn’t solicit their attention or affection. Simon was simply magnetic that way.

“You’re coming with me tomorrow, right?” I asked him the night before I had my least favorite clients scheduled.

He sighed dramatically, but twelve hours later I was watching out of the corner of my eye as Simon inched a little closer on his knees and jammed the sticky wand back into the purple plastic bottle for another go-round.

“I need more bubbles, Si!” I called before disappearing behind the bulky camera. My Canon was outfitted with an impressive zoom lens, even though I was up close and personal with my young subjects. “I want it to look like they’re swimming in bubbles.”

“You need a machine,” Simon sighed, blowing carefully into the saw-toothed circle. A flood of iridescent froth surged from the wand and cast dozens of rainbow-sparkled bubbles across the cheeks of the little girls in front of him. The younger one, a curly-haired carbon copy of Thomas at two, giggled and reached for the magical spheres. The camera made a series of rewarding metallic clicks.

Simon blew again.

Click-click-click-click-click.

“Come on, Angelica,” I coaxed, drawing out every syllable of the older girl’s name. “You look so pretty in your dress. Aren’t you having fun?”

“No.”

“Carlye’s having fun.”

“She’s two. I’m
four
.”

Simon blew another long string, then leaned on one elbow and peered around the jubilant toddler who was blocking his view. Angelica, the sulky preschooler whose almost-comical scowl threatened to ruin my attempt at portraiture, was standing with her arms crossed, her expression so sour that Simon couldn’t stop himself from laughing. But a lightning-fast look from me wiped the smile off his face. He dipped his wand with a dutiful flick of his wrist and whispered more bubbles to life.

“Are you too old to play with bubbles?” I asked, twisting the camera in my hands to change the angle of the shot. Off center, at a slant, with the parchment blue sky framing the soft halo of their child-fine hair.
Click-click-click.
“You can’t be too old to play with bubbles. Look at Simon. He’s ten and he still plays with bubbles.”

Simon snorted and broke the perfect film of liquid that would have been another deployment of soapy orbs.

I turned from the viewfinder long enough to toss my brother a playful wink. “You’re never too old to play with bubbles, right, Si?”

He fixed me with a vicious glare, but instead of distressing me, he made me laugh. Angelica, who was watching the exchange, let the corner of her lip pull up into the slightest of smirks, a little edge of indication that she was, despite her every effort to convince us otherwise, having fun.

Simon caught her look and scowled at me, making sure that he was so caught up in our mock battle that he let his hand tip just enough to spill a fine drizzle of liquid in his own lap. “Look what you made me do!” he cried, his voice lush with artificial horror.

Angelica giggled.

Click-click-click-click.

“Keep ’em coming,” I muttered between my teeth, loving Simon for his selflessness, for his willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty to help me out.