The Boys in the Trees (21 page)

It couldn’t have been the same day, but he wondered if his brief visit to Emden was connected to another memory, one that was so enclosed, so without any kind of context, that it might even have been a memory of a dream. He was in a car again, maybe the same car, driving through open country on a day filled with misty rain that wasn’t really falling, but still saturated the air. He was in a car, driving through a pale, sodden day, and he was suddenly overwhelmed. Eased the car onto the shoulder, pulled the brake, opened the door, all those sounds registering, but without meaning. Then he was walking through long grass, the air around him filled with more water than it could possibly contain. He stopped in the misty field, his eyes on the far-off, hooded trees, and he felt as if he was trying to fill himself up, to somehow fill himself up through his eyes, through all his senses. It might have been a very long time that he stood like that, long minutes before he noticed that his eyelashes were beaded with water, before he became aware of his soaking feet, the unpleasant feeling of wet cloth wrapping his shins. He wasn’t quite released, had to make himself turn, his feet slow at first, carrying him back toward the glistening black hump of the car at the roadside, the pale shapes that were the worried faces of his family, pressed against all the windows.

That was where it ended, this memory that might have been a dream. He believed it real only because it was so quiet, so complete, and because it brought with it a feeling of great peace,
everything simply what it was and nothing at all lurking just out of sight.

•  •  •

Brenda came every few days and moved noisily through the house, crashes and bangs and the clatter of broken crockery. She vacuumed and dusted and left casseroles in the oven, did his laundry once a week and he had long since gotten over being embarrassed by things she might see. Before she left she carried in mugs of coffee, sat down in the other armchair with a great sigh. Sometimes they talked about the world but more often her no-good husband, her sons and nephews who weren’t angels, she’d be the first to say, but not guilty of half the things they were blamed for. He told her about a friend he’d had once, said that although he had no idea how things turned out, he always pictured him on a cantering horse, mountains behind and an oiled rope coiled over the saddle horn.

Sometimes, of course, Brenda’s boys really had done the things they were blamed for. Nothing too serious yet, but she worried all the time about where they were headed. Every day more sullenness, more swagger, their good hearts harder to find.
But they’re mine, Mr. R
, Brenda always said.
I wouldn’t change them for anything, not even if I could
. Eaton thought about that, and thought about how it was the kind of remark that might once have slipped into his ears and right out again, only a little niggle as it passed. Something like the pang he used to feel, watching his young sons swing from branches in the backyard, a feeling he thought he’d try to pin down one day, but now that there was time, nothing but time, he was no closer to understanding. No closer to really knowing why he needed to puzzle
over it. He only knew that he kept drifting back to Emden, as if there was something there, something that he couldn’t really have forgotten.

Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this nagging feeling, this sense that there were things he had to know for himself, only for himself. He knew, of course he knew, that a life wasn’t anything like one of those novels Jenny read, that it stumbled along, bouncing off one thing, then another, until it just stopped, nothing wrapped up neatly. He remembered his children’s distress at different times, failing an exam or losing a race, a girlfriend. Knowing that they couldn’t believe him but still trying to tell them that it would pass, that they would be amazed, looking back, to think it had mattered at all. He thought of himself, thought of things that had seemed so important, so full of meaning when he was twenty, or forty, and he thought maybe it was like one of Jenny’s books after all. Red herrings and misdirection, all the characters and observations that seemed so central, so significant while the story was unfolding. But then at the end you realized that the crucial thing was really something else. Something buried in a conversation, a description—you realized that all along it had been a different answer, another person glimpsed but passed over, who was the key to everything. Whatever
everything
was. And if you went back, as Jenny sometimes did, they were there, the clues you’d missed while you were reading, caught up in the need to move forward. All quietly there.

Sometimes, sitting up in bed beside him, Jenny would close her book with a bang and say,
For Heaven’s sake, I knew that on page twenty-three
. Or complain about what annoyed her even
more, a twist at the end that hadn’t been prepared for, that made no sense, given what had gone before. The pleasure seemed to depend on a delicate balance, on letting yourself be fooled, so long as in the end you could see how it had been done. He wasn’t as devoted a mystery reader as Jenny had been but he usually finished the ones his neighbor brought from the library. Sometimes there were ancient crumbs trapped between the pages, a sepia stain that might have been from a cup of coffee Jenny had been drinking, years before. Once a hard crust of something that looked like flour and water paste and made him think of the two of them in the kitchen, long past midnight, working on a papier-mâché mountain range someone had to take to school. Their fingers thick with the newspaper mess, and Jenny’s forehead crusted where she kept pushing back her hair.
Do you think they’ll even remember any of this?
she said.

His first thought was of course they would, remembering the tears of frustration, the vast relief on the face of the child who had gone sleepily up the stairs. But then he thought of rocking a crying baby to sleep, of plates of brownies and sequins sewn on costumes, stories and walks and the endless unfunny jokes and riddles.
Think what you remember
, Jenny said.
What do you really remember, of when you were five, or eight, or ten. Would it be what your parents thought you would remember? What they wanted you to?
And in the paper-strewn kitchen in the middle of the night they talked about how strange it was, that the person you were was perhaps formed most by all that you had forgotten.

•  •  •

He had promised his children that when the stairs became too much he would sell the big house they grew up in, would move into someplace more manageable, or maybe even into Ellie’s
spare room; now that he didn’t get around much it didn’t really matter what city he lived in. He had promised them and he might actually do it, although he found it hard to imagine. Maybe instead what he thought of as Jenny’s last gift, the nearly full bottle of pills rolled up in a pair of socks in his top dresser drawer. Maybe he would go to sleep one night deciding that he’d had enough. Fold his hands, close his eyes, and slide into a dream so deep that no sounds, no swaying shapes, would disturb it. He would leave a note on the outside door for Brenda, telling her who to call. Leave a letter for his children telling them not to mind too much. Telling them that he was glad that he had lived; he was glad for his life.

THERE ARE SMUDGES
on one of the pages that caused a few tears, but mostly she’s happy with it and she knows how pleased they will be, her father and her mother and her sister, turning the pages on Christmas day. The idea had just appeared in her mind, and once it did, it began to tumble and grow and she could hardly keep up, working on one picture with others already nudging at her, needing to be done. Joshua Whippet, the daredevil, swinging from the rough branch of a tree. David Whippet looking out through a window during his long confinement, plump Mother Whippet with her hands pressed to her mouth. She hoped that one would make Lil laugh.

The last page gave her the most trouble, the page of her own family; she wanted them just the way they had been at the photographer’s house at the end of the bridge, in the magic room with the painted mountains, the rugs and the ferns in pots, dishes of stones and colored glass. The photographer
had such wild hair, a scar or a dimple in one cheek, and the woman who helped him wore a dress the color of her green eyes and said all kinds of crazy things to make them smile while she moved their hands, their heads. Stepping backward out of the light she knocked a pedestal table; it fell with a bang that made them all jump and she called herself a great ninny, said they could call her that too if they liked, and that made even her father smile. They were so happy walking home that day, just happy, with nothing underneath. The photograph would have always reminded them but her father said it hadn’t turned out well, said he’d refused to pay for it, and there was something about the look of her mother’s mouth as she moved things around in the parlor, filled in the perfect space they’d made for it. There were things Rachel knew nothing about, things she tucked away. Like the day her father brought home a box of paints, sheets of fine paper that were rich beneath her fingertips. Her mother untied her apron and went to her room.

Miss Alice helped with the last picture, although she didn’t know it. That way she had of saying something that made you see things in a different way. It was something she said to Nina, who was trying to cut a shape out of folded paper; Miss Alice said something to Nina, and Rachel suddenly understood that the idea of the last picture was beyond what she could do, what she could do at this moment. That was all, and it didn’t mean that she had failed, it didn’t mean that she would never do it; it just meant that she had to change her idea, move her family out of the glowing studio that was so hard to capture, rearrange them so that the hands, which were giving her so much trouble, didn’t really show. She saw how much easier it would be, for
now, if she let herself do the things she could do well, and when the picture was finished she made the rest of the book, slicing pieces from a cigar box with Lil’s hidden knife for the covers, pounding holes with a nail in the yard behind the shed. She asked her mother for pieces from the rag bag and cut with the heavy scissors, close to the lamp in the center of the kitchen table. The glue pot was almost empty and she had to scrape around with the brush, the tang of it making her wrinkle her nose.
It’s something for school
, she said when her mother asked, and that was a lie but she thought not a terrible one, a lie for a good reason.

It was something like a lie that she told Eaton too; there were places she could have hidden the Whippet book, or she could have given it to Miss Alice until Christmas. But for some reason she wanted someone else to see it, someone who wasn’t her family or her teacher, someone who wouldn’t like it for those reasons. There was something about Eaton, the dreamy look in his eye and the way he didn’t tease or pinch, the way he sometimes said things, asked questions that were exactly in her own mind. In Sunday school, Miss Sarah said that even the kindest face could hide an evil heart, and maybe that was true. But if it was, then you couldn’t believe anything or anyone, and that meant Miss Sarah too, and that just made it all too complicated. So she gave the book to Eaton and she trusted that he would keep it safe, and in some way it was a gift for him too, and she thought that he would know that. The next morning there was something uneasy in the house but Lil plaited her hair for her, the way she always did, and the moment she stepped out the door the blue day claimed her. Her hair pulled at her scalp a little but it would loosen, and she could picture the bit of red ribbon Lil had tied.
There was a tingle in the air and a wonderful woody smell, and the wheels of a buggy spun as it creaked by, the
clop
of a horse’s hooves. Lines from a poem Miss Alice liked were running through her head.
My heart leaps up
, she said to herself.
My heart leaps up
.

HE WAS SUDDENLY
awake and there was nothing else to explain it. No shreds of a nightmare, no barking dogs, no sound at all from the house around him. He felt beneath the pillow for his father’s watch, checked the time in the thin slip of light that lay across his blanket. It was Drifter Dan’s method, the one that had helped him escape from the Indian camp in
The Black Rider
, that he had used again when he rescued Clara Brady from the outlaws. Repeat twenty times before sleep:
I will wake up at—