The Boys in the Trees (4 page)

THREE PEOPLE LOVE
me in this world, and that should be enough. One is my mother, and I will never leave her. One is my sister, who is the best of us, the hope of us. Like in the garden. The last is my father, who takes care of us, but doesn’t always see.

There are families in church with children like steps on a stair, and babies, and grandmothers in black bonnets. And there are people who have no one at all. No one could love the tattered woman who mumbles outside Malley’s tavern, and Mr. Envers used to set down his mug of tea and tell my mother it was a terrible thing to outlive everyone, to be all alone. When we first came to this town Rachel had to write an essay for Miss Alice, about her family. Parents and grandparents, where they came from, what they did. There was a silence at the dinner table and then my father said,
That’s no one’s business; no one has any right to ask that
. Rachel said that she had to, that it was an essay, and he gave her
a look that he didn’t often give, and was silent for the rest of the meal. Later, in the kitchen, my mother told about her own parents, and what she knew of theirs. A ship our great-grandfather had owned, and how he was lost. A curved sword someone had brought back from war. She said it was all true but her voice sounded like a story, like the stories she used to tell when she pulled the covers up over us, smoothed them with her hand.

Wednesdays at eleven o’clock I go across the road to Dr. Robinson, and I see the week like a hill now, sloping up to a peak and then sliding down again. At first it was like waves building and crashing over my head. People on the street, the dark hallway, the unfamiliar room and the questions. He asked my mother things, asked me things, that were so private I didn’t even have words for them. But now I know what things look like, behind the gleaming door. Dr. Robinson examines my tongue, touches my face with his clean fingers, pulling down the skin beneath my eyes. Holds my wrist and counts without seeming to count. He told my mother that she didn’t always need to come with me, that he could send for her if need be, just across the road. The first time I went alone she watched me from the front porch, and each time I looked back she waved her hand. When I returned she was still there, sitting on the outside chair. She smoothed my hair back and gave me her sad smile and I told her it was fine, that the laughing girl had been there for a little while.

They were there as long as I can remember, there in the room where mist trailed by the window, in the darker, noisier room. The jumping boy and the laughing girl. Not every moment, not every day, but enough to be without surprise. Sometimes I talked to them but they never answered, and I don’t know that they even saw me. The way I saw them hard to explain, something like a thought that ravels away when you try to catch hold of it. Sometimes words came into my head and I spoke them out loud; once my mother said,
Who are you talking to, Lily? Are you talking to someone?
When I said,
The jumping boy
, she dropped the plate she was holding; it smashed with a terrible sound and bits lay jagged on the floor. Her voice when she spoke so slow and careful, but with something humming beneath. She asked, and I told her how the boy jumped straight in the air, so high, his light hair flopping. How the girl sometimes had smudges where she’d touched her cheek with her fingers. I was still in the bed and though my mother’s voice was slow and soft, it frightened me a little, something did. Just the two of us there; maybe I was very young, Rachel not yet born. I wanted to tell her about the children and yet I didn’t, and I worked my finger in the hole in the brown blanket, making it bigger, but my mother didn’t tell me to stop. I had never questioned, never thought before that maybe
they were only mine. The jumping boy, the laughing smudgy-cheeked girl, and sometimes the other who was just a streak of color at the edge of my looking.

My mother asked me questions, in the soft voice that soothed, with the hum beneath that frightened. What did they look like, what were they doing, were they happy or sad. When I asked, she said they were children she knew once. And when I asked where they were now, she just said,
Gone
. And then she did a strange thing. She walked toward the bed, the broken shards crunched beneath her feet, and with all her clothes on, even her shoes, she crawled under the bedclothes and put her arms about me, and we both fell asleep again, even though it was already day.

The graves in the churchyard are marked by straight standing stones, and although the church is not old, there are so many. Mothers and fathers and children, whole families, sometimes, buried together. Rachel and her friends play a game, hold their breath when they walk by on the way to the gaping doors of the church. When I fainted there on the steps it was just like the other times, the buzzing getting louder, muffling the voices around me. The yellow mesh becoming denser and denser before my eyes until it closed in completely, blotted everything out. My mother felt the tug on her arm as I started to slide down but she wasn’t strong enough, and when I opened my eyes I screamed at
all the faces, bending over me. Dr. Robinson put his fingers on my wrist and asked if this had happened before, and I heard Rachel say that it happened almost every day, but I forgave her. That is how I came to sit on a chair in his office the first time, the scratch of his pen and everyone seizing on the word that he gave me, as if it said everything, as if it could hold every part of me, each dark part. Now I sit in that chair every Wednesday and things are checked, and then we talk. I’ve told him about the pebbles I carry in my mouth, but not about the other things.

I was born in Halifax, where the ship first docked; my mother says there was no money to go any farther. She says there was one tiny room, that we lived there for years, maybe three, maybe four, but I don’t remember. Only swirls of mist and the sound of gulls, and maybe a game that we played, my mother sitting with her face in her hands. My father worked in an office on the docks, but he had to leave. We sailed up the river to Montreal, and those same gulls wheeled around our boat.

In the evenings Rachel does her lessons at the kitchen table, and when she’s finished she sometimes draws pictures of houses,
of trees, on pieces of paper my mother saves for her. My father brought home a blotter, tucked under his coat, for the surface of the table is uneven, scarred and gouged by people we’ve never known. Rachel has made up stories about them, the families who walked through the rooms that are now ours, who ate their meals here, sat in these chairs. One family she calls the Whippets; they have two wild boys named Joshua and David. The deepest gouge on the table was made by David Whippet, with a pocketknife he was given for his birthday, and he was sent to his room for twenty-one days. Now when something is broken or spilled, my father says,
Which Whippet did that?

I wonder about the families, the real families, and where they’ve gone. Marks of their anger, their errors, the only things we have to know them by. Walking toward the mouth of the church we have to pass the standing stones and I think how they may die before me, my father and my mother. Rachel must have her own life, tend our memories but nothing else. Mrs. Toller went to bed with a bottle of laudanum; I heard my father tell my mother. And a man named Meyer was found hanging in a barn. When I open my eyes in the morning there’s always a moment when I wonder if it’s a good thing.

Dr. Robinson counted my pulse, checked my heart, looked in my eyes, my mouth. He asked questions, so many questions.
When I slept, what I ate, about my monthlies. All these my mother answered. Then he said that I had a condition, that there was a name for it. The name was
chlorosis
, and he wrote it down on a thick piece of creamy paper. The scratch of the pen drowned out by a raised voice from beyond the door, a woman’s voice, chiding a servant. Sound of something that might have been a slap. He looked up at that but said nothing. Passed the paper to my mother and leaned back in his chair, hands on the edge of the desk. Loose threads, a button missing on his vest.

He told my mother that he’d been reading about this green sickness lately, that it was not uncommon in girls my age, that there were things that could be done. I meant to listen, but found I hadn’t. Realized, when he stood up, that I’d been staring, just staring at the dangling stray threads, the place where a button belonged.

And is it better or worse, to know that there’s a name? Things I felt long before I knew the words for them. Things change when you put a name to them, but they don’t disappear. Just change.

My father seemed pleased with the word, asked each day if I’d walked, if I’d rested, if I’d taken the Blaud’s pills. He said if it was to be meat every day then I should have it, and my family sat around me with their pale plates, potatoes and cabbage, a slice of bread. My mother knew how hard it was; meat, if I must eat it, I like burned black, hard like a stone in my mouth, bitter like the taste of Rachel’s charcoal stick. A bit of chicken I could bear, not easily, but I could bear it, but the bloody taste of beef was an agony, though I cut the pieces as small as I could, made motions with my jaw and tried to swallow them straight down. They sat at the table day after day, my plate half full while theirs were wiped clean. Telling their bits of news over my bowed head
as if there was nothing else they needed to do, nowhere else to be. The three people who love me in this world.

My mother’s hands are always red and sore and with all the cleaning and washing when we came to the new house they got worse, her fingers covered in raw spots where the swollen skin had cracked and split. Some days I had to do her buttons. Before she went to sleep she smeared her hands with a thick grease, and then she had to lie on her back with her arms straight, palms up outside the covers. Once my father came home with a little pot of cream he’d bought at Mr. Marl’s pharmacy and he sat across from her in the kitchen, working it in, kneading from her wrist to the tip of her fingers, stroking her palm, pressing her knuckles.

Her sore hands made my father angry. He said we should hire a servant; he said she shouldn’t have to do so much, with only me to help, but she just said,
Oh, William
. Money was still owed to someone for something; I’d heard them talking about that behind their closed door. And even I knew that if Rachel’s only dresses were mine made over, if we had to use the tea leaves twice, and sometimes twice again, then there was no money to hire a servant. But my father said soon there would be, said this was a town where he could climb higher and higher. Already in charge of the Sunday school, and there’d been talk of him joining a club. He said that we should go out more, make calls; he
said that was how things worked here, how connections were made. And my mother said she would, but just now there was so much to do.