The Birthday Room (7 page)

“Hi!” Ben shouted, running, closing the gap between him and the Deeters.

Kale and Elka moved toward Ben with their arms outstretched, as if they were guarding something. They stopped, firmly planted in protective stances. “Don't look at the tree,” said Kale. His bony eyebrow ridges came to attention.

Impulsively Ben glanced up.

“I said
not
to look. Now you know our secret,” Kale whined. His arms collapsed in defeat; his face crumpled.

“I don't know anything,” said Ben.

“You have to promise not to tell,” said Elka. A colorful paper chain was draped over her shoulders. Her fingers were wrapped around a red plastic stapler.

“You have to swear it,” said Kale.

Ben had no idea what they were talking about.

Kale and Elka tugged on his shirt. “Promise! Promise!” they chanted.

“Okay, okay, I promise,” he told them, chuckling.

Satisfied, the twins darted back to the base of the tree and busied themselves, and then Lynnie was right beside him. “I'm glad you came,” she said. “I'm glad you didn't have something better to do with Ian and your mom.”

“Well . . .” Ben began. “Yeah.” He left it at that.

“I'll explain their big project to you, now that you're sworn to secrecy,” she told him. She laughed gently and led him to the tree.

About five feet from the ground, the trunk of the tree split four ways. The divided stem cradled a huge gray tangle of brittle limbs and branches, some of which cascaded toward and touched the weedy grass. The whole thing looked like the nest of some prehistoric bird mashed down onto an odd, deformed pole.

“The tree's going to be their gift for Ian and Nina's baby,” said Lynnie.

“The
tree
?” said Ben.

“The tree.”

The closer Ben got, the more sense it made. He hadn't noticed from afar the ways in which the tree had been altered. Silver tabs from the tops of aluminum cans were hanging from the bottom branches on pieces of yarn. Additional tabs had been slipped directly onto the thinner twigs, like rings on the fingers of infants. In all, there must have been hundreds of the tabs, and when Ben moved his head a certain way, some of them glinted in the sun.

A bald, moonfaced baby doll was wedged firmly into the crook formed by a particularly twisty branch. The doll's doughy torso was made of cloth; the arms, legs, and head were plastic, the color of butterscotch.

Green and yellow pushpins held dozens of apple leaves from other trees to the craggy bark. Ben tried to see some pattern in the placement of the leaves but couldn't.

Lynnie picked at the point of one of the pinned-on leaves. “At first, they wanted to bring the tree back to life. They really thought they could. But it's been dead for a long time.” She kept her voice quiet, so that the twins couldn't hear her, Ben guessed. But that didn't seem to be a problem; the twins were completely consumed, huddled over a beat-up metal cooler, making paper chains. “They dragged bottles of water out here every day in my grandma's rickety garden cart to try to revive the tree. When they finally gave up on that idea, they decided to decorate it.”

“Why the tree?”

“Well,” said Lynnie, moving over to where her beach towel lay, “partly because it's big. They have this notion that they want to give the baby a present that will be bigger than anyone else's present.”

Ben grinned. “I think they'll win that contest.”

“And my mom suggested they make something, rather than buy something.”

Lynnie lifted a corner of the towel off the ground and pulled the towel behind her. Her book bumped along, then slid off the towel. Ben picked it up. Following her, he turned the book over in his hands. It was a copy of
Little Women
that appeared to have been read a thousand times. A small distance away, out of earshot of Kale and Elka, Lynnie found a suitable place—level ground, temporarily shaded by a cloud. She smoothed out the towel and sat. Ben sat, too, placing the book between them, facedown, the way he had found it.

“It's a neat tree,” said Ben. “Looks ancient.”

“The tree was planted even before my grandpa was born,” said Lynnie. “It was the last of its kind in the whole orchard. It's called Seek No Further.”

“
Seek No Further?
You're kidding.”

“I'm serious.”

“You mean, like Mcintosh or Granny Smith?”

“Yep.”

“No lie?”

“No lie.”

“You mean, if I wanted an apple from this tree, I'd say, ‘I'd like a Seek No Further, please'?”

Lynnie nodded. “
And
my grandpa says he kissed my grandma for the first time under this very tree. And that's why he won't cut it down. So it'll just stand here until it disintegrates.”

“Hmm.” Ben knew that if his mother were with them, she would say something about how sweet and lovely that bit of family history was.

“I tried to explain to Kale and Elka that you can't really give a dead old tree in an orchard to someone as a gift. Especially when it's our grandpa's, not theirs to give. But”—she looked over at them, and quickly looked back—“they're just weird little kids with weird ideas.”

Maybe they'll grow up to give rooms as gifts, thought Ben.

“Seek No Further is probably the best apple name,” said Lynnie, “but Northern Spy and Winter Banana aren't bad either.”

“An apple called Banana—that's good,” said Ben.

They laughed together.

And they went on talking. Lynnie talked a lot, and easily. Ben talked more than he ever had to a girl (which wasn't a lot), and with some effort. Not because he didn't want to, but because talking to a girl, alone, a girl he had only met the day before, a girl who was thirteen and whose belly button he had seen, was something new for him.

She told him that
Little Women
was her favorite book and that she'd first read it when she was nine and that she had reread it at least twice a year since then. She recited several lines from memory. He told her that the Tintin books were his favorites and that he owned nearly all of them and that even college students bought them at his parents' store.

She told him that she often wished she were an only child as he was and that on nights when she couldn't sleep she made up elaborate stories about her life as such, complete with exotic vacations, a canopy bed the size of a bus, indulgences galore. He told her that he sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a brother, and that when he was angry with his parents he thought it would be helpful to have someone else on his side to even things out.

“You'd probably end up fighting a lot,” Lynnie said. “And why not a sister?”

Ben shrugged and ducked his head. “I don't know.”

She told him that her mother had wanted to start home-schooling them, but Lynnie had talked her out of it, begging, because she couldn't bear the thought of not going to her regular school and being with other people, couldn't bear the thought of being stuck with Kale and Elka all year long. He told her that
he
had been home-schooled, for two years, kindergarten and first grade, and that he didn't remember it very clearly, but that his mother said he had wanted to be with his neighborhood friends badly, and so she finally let him go to the public school a few blocks away.

She told him that Ian had been giving her art lessons, and that he sometimes baby-sat Kale and Elka to practice being a father, and that he picked fruit for her parents when they were short on help. He didn't tell her anything about his uncle because he didn't know what to say.

Ben realized that he never just sat around and talked like this with his friends back home. They
did
things. They rode bikes or played basketball or went swimming. Talking seemed so natural to Lynnie; she was good at it. Maybe all girls were that way. Maybe that was one of the ways in which girls were different.

“What are you thinking?” Lynnie asked.

“Nothing.” He zipped a glance at her.

“No, really. A few seconds ago, you had this look on your face like you'd just figured something out. Or something.”

“I don't know.”

After a moment's pause, Lynnie said, “I like you.” She said it simply, as if she had said, “I'm hungry,” and then she tightened her lips and blinked and hooked her hair behind her ears.

Ben looked straight ahead. Across the field, the leaves and fruit were suddenly limned in light and seemed ready to spring forth from the trees, to come right at him. Highlights were as sharp as glass, details as clear as those merely inches away.

“Our paper chains are ready!” shouted Kale, returning the world to normalcy just as quickly as it had become something else. “Help us put them on the tree!”

“Please!” yelled Elka.

“Should we?” Lynnie asked, rising.

“Sure,” Ben replied, wondering if his hearing was reliable.

 

8

T
HE PAPER CHAINS
hung from the lowest branches like strings of cursive writing. Ben wondered aloud about rain ruining the paper chains, but Lynnie said that it hardly ever rained during the summer, and there was no stopping Kale and Elka, regardless. When the last loop was securely attached, Kale and Elka decided it was time to put their nests on the tree, as well.

There were two nests, one from each of them, and they had been storing them in the silver cooler under the tree. Both of the nests were real, found in the orchard. Kale and Elka had filled them with small offerings.

Kale had chosen the following things for his nest: three fat rubber bands from his rubber band collection, a Hot Wheels tow truck (“I've got doubles of this one”), the lucky penny he had discovered two days earlier on the seat of his grandfather's tractor, and a tooth—one of his own baby teeth.

Elka fingered and counted each item in her nest: a tiny glass Christmas ornament (“Because Christmas is my favorite day”), a yellow button (“Because yellow is my favorite color”), a robin's egg she had kept on her dresser for over a year, and a lock of her hair tied with a yellow ribbon.

“The hair and the tooth are the best,” said Kale.

“They're the most important,” said Elka.

“Because they came from us,” said Kale. He grinned to show the space where his tooth had been, a grin as wide as a jack-o'-lantern's.

“They really did,” said Elka, sending her eyes up toward her bangs.

Picking the perfect spots for the nests was not easy. Kale and Elka circled the tree repeatedly. They jumped. They parted the branches within their reach. They stood on tiptoe, peering. They hopped onto the cooler, raised their arms, and blindly investigated the knot of dead branches over their heads.

Ben and Lynnie stood among the fallen twigs beneath the tree and watched without speaking. Ben wasn't really paying attention. His mind wandered. He scooped up a handful of twigs and broke them into the smallest possible pieces. He became acutely aware of how the day had taken a turn for the better. Thoughts of his mother and uncle had been swept clean away. Ben smiled. Lynnie smiled, too.

Finally Kale and Elka settled on a dark hollow halfway up the tree trunk. Side by side, they placed the nests into the hole. It was a tight fit, but the nests seemed safe, snug.

“It looks good, you guys,” said Lynnie.

“Are you done with the tree?” asked Ben. “Or do you have other things to add?”

“We're done for right this minute,” Kale answered. “But we've got lots more to do.”

“We'll keep adding nice, beautiful things until the baby is born,” said Elka. She grabbed Ben's hand and held it.

“Well, I think the nests are great,” said Ben.

“If
you
had a nest for the baby, what would you put in it?” Elka asked Ben.

“Oh,” he replied, “maybe a two-dollar bill and a stone or a shell from the ocean.”

“What about the most important part?” Elka wanted to know. Her voice was so sincere, her eyes as clear as water. “Like my hair and Kale's tooth. The part from you.”

“Hmm.” His old blackened toenail came to mind, the one that had fallen off while playing basketball last year. He had saved it, hidden it away in the back of his desk drawer in his room. Something about it intrigued him, but he didn't want to mention it in case Lynnie thought it gross. “I don't know,” he said. “I don't think I have anything.”

“What about Icky Pee?” Kale asked.

“Icky Pee?” said Ben.

“Kale!” Lynnie whispered fiercely. “Be quiet!”

Ben's forehead wrinkled. He saw Lynnie curse Kale with her eyes. Elka's comment from dinner the night before raced back to him: “
Icky Pee is gone
.” He knew, with a stab of insight, before the explanation came, that it was his missing finger they were talking about, and the knowing made him slip his left hand into his pocket.

Elka was still holding his right hand. She broke the grasp and turned his palm so it was open, facing her. One by one, she pointed to Ben's fingers, starting with his pinkie. “This is Icky Pee,” she said. “And this is Penny Roo. And this is Mary Ossle. And this is Ollie Whistle. And this,” she said, ending with his thumb, “is Big Tom Bobbilee.” She couldn't help but smile. “Those are the names of the fingers. My grandma taught them to us.” She grabbed his hand again, to hold it, but he wiggled free, pulled his hand away, and scratched his head.

“You don't have your other Icky Pee,” Kale remarked.

“Do you know where it is?” Elka asked quietly.

“Can I see where it was?” asked Kale.

“What happened to it?” Elka whispered.

“You two—” Lynnie shook her head and exhaled noisily. “I . . .” She struggled for a moment. “I'm sorry,” she said to Ben, blushing, looking at his shirt, not his eyes.