A Crooked Tree

by Una Mannion

  Ellen took a deep breath. Her voice was steady; she wasn’t making any crying noises but tears fell from her eyes.

  “When the car was getting closer to the covered bridge, I said, ‘You can just pull over and I’ll get out here,’ but he didn’t say anything back. He kept going. And I knew then he wasn’t going to let me out. So when we started into the bad corner just before the bridge, when he had to really slow down, I jumped. I already had my hand on the door handle, and I just pushed it open and jumped, and I stumbled a bit and then fell and rolled on the road.”

  I thought I might pass out; black specks and silver flashed on the edge of my vision. When I spoke, my own voice sounded very far away.

  “Were there other cars coming?”

  “No, but his car stopped just ahead of me. I could see the red from his brake lights on the road. He got out. I thought he was coming for me, but I think it was to shut the car door. I got up and ran across the road toward the creek. I went down the bank and straight into the water near the bridge. It was only waist-deep, and I tried to run through it, but it was like I was going in slow motion, and I kept falling. The rocks were covered in slime.” She looked down at the skirt of her pinafore. I could see the track of the creek water and the mud on her socks. “When I got to the other bank, I ran as fast as I could through the woods, even though I knew then he wasn’t behind me.”

  “Why didn’t you go back down to Yellow Springs to one of the houses for help?”

  Ellen shook her head. “I don’t know. I just kept running in the woods. I was going up the side of the mountain, and I knew that he would never find me in there. I tried to just keep going. And finally I saw lights. Someone’s house at the back of Hamilton Drive.”

  “You were almost home. Why didn’t you go home?”

  Ellen shrugged. “I remembered you’re here on Fridays. Mom would kill me if she found out I hitchhiked.” Ellen wiped her nose with the back of her wrist on her good hand. “And plus I still hate her.”

  4

  It was early morning, and in the shadow of the trees the air was still cool. I paused and breathed in the smell of loam and damp earth. In the distance a chain saw hummed a discordant scale, pitching high and low, and somewhere a lawn mower started. It was Saturday, the first day of summer break from school, and the familiar woods and the routine of work in the world seemed reassuring, even if just for a moment. I hadn’t slept. Shafts of light fell diagonally through the trees, and dust glittered and floated in front of me. I walked through them, deeper into the woods.

  I’d told Sage to meet me in the Kingdom as soon as she could, and told her what Marie said we needed: antibiotics and Valium. Sage would need time to sneak it from her dad’s clinic without being seen. Grady Adams was a physician and ran a practice next to the house. Sage’s mother, Charlotte, worked as his secretary. They were both southern. Sage referred to them by their first names when she spoke about them. “Grady and Charlotte had a dinner party last night, and Mrs. Nelson was drunk and trying to play footsie with Grady while Charlotte and I were right there in plain view.” Sage spoke like this, recounting little dramas that always made her family seem interesting. She spoke about them like they were characters that she was friends with. I envied it. When I thought about them, Grady, Charlotte, Sage, and her brothers, it was always through a haze of happiness, their bright lives, even when Sage said differently.

  Spots of early-morning sun broke through in patches on the forest floor, lighting clumps of resurrection fern and dense tufts of moss. I tried to slow down and think. Mom wouldn’t find out. She’s taken Thomas to swim practice. Beatrice went with them. Marie’s with Ellen. She’ll be okay. But I was scared. Ellen wasn’t right. She hadn’t slept at all. This morning she was weak and dizzy, and Marie said her heart rate and breathing were both too fast. Marie said it was probably shock, and we needed Valium to help her body calm down and antibiotics to prevent the cuts from getting infected. I still worried about the injuries inside her that we couldn’t see.

  I walked down the Horseshoe Trail toward the Kingdom, a secret fort Sage and I had made several summers before. Ahead of me was the crooked tree, our marker for leaving the path to circle into the Kingdom from the back, a routine we had so that there would never be a trace of track or footfall for anyone else to find. We imagined that the crooked tree was one of the ones Indians had used as signposts along trails to signal where there was good hunting or soft ground for shelter. It was an oak that had started to grow upright, but suddenly the trunk made a complete right angle for two or three feet and then grew up straight again. Before the Kingdom even existed, Dad showed me the tree. He said it might have been a marker, but it could also have been caused by a bigger tree falling on the oak when it was young, and then over time the bigger tree rotted and fell apart. The young tree survived but was left with this strange shape.

  The Kingdom was an enclosure about four feet above the trail and set back in a natural ring formed by a stand of red oak and thick mountain laurel. Inside, deep-green moss provided a natural carpet. Sage and I had dug a deep trench to bury a large suitcase filled with supplies: flashlights, batteries, canned food, sleeping bags, and pillows—our own nuclear bunker. The hole had taken us a month, slicing through and around the network of roots. We’d told no one but Ellen, and even then only because I was in charge of her the day we hauled the suitcase. I had one of Dad’s tarps that he used for raking leaves, which had a waterproof side and punched holes. We’d hammered hooks in the oaks around us so we could give ourselves a roof should we ever need it. We’d covered the suitcase bunker with a board, leaves, and moss. It hadn’t been opened for several summers, and roots had started to track across it. We had other stashes, shallow holes for cigarettes and matches or beer. In the Kingdom we talked, smoked Charlotte’s Kent menthol cigarettes, and on a few occasions drank lukewarm bottles of Yuengling or Rolling Rock, stolen from Grady’s refrigerator in his downstairs den. This far down the trail, neighbors didn’t pass, just hikers, and from within the Kingdom we could see them coming first and duck to stay hidden. If we ever had to run, no one would catch us—we knew every root and ridge. I could run the trail barefoot at night.

  Inside the Kingdom, I sat down against the trunk of a large red oak and pulled my knees into my chest and waited, peeling thick moss off the earth in sections and rearranging it in patterns. It was strange how it could grow without roots. I brushed my hand across its gentle purple spores on their threadlike stalks.

  It was Sage who had brought Ellen home. I’d called her and asked her to come up and bring a change of clothes. When she arrived at the Bouchers’, it was nearly midnight. She was wearing her cutoffs and a faded Rolling Stones T-shirt with the tongue on the front—the Stones were her favorite band. Sage had long wavy gold-blond hair cut in layers and a spatter of freckles across her nose. Her two front teeth turned in slightly, an imperfection somebody else would have fixed with braces. She liked her teeth. “It’s character,” she said.

  With Sage there, I’d felt safe. We told her what had happened, and she listened, the whole time holding Ellen’s hand. She knew what to do. She had Ellen move all her limbs to make sure they weren’t broken. Then she asked her questions I would never have asked.

  “Ellen, I know this is hard, but did the man touch you inside your underwear?”

  Ellen shook her head no.

  “Are you certain? Did the man make you touch him at all?”

  Again Ellen shook her head.

  “Is there anything you haven’t said that you’re scared about?”

  “No. I’m sure.”

  Then Sage told her everything was going to be fine, and I felt for a moment like it was. Ellen put her head on Sage’s shoulder.

  “There’s no way she can walk home, Libby,” Sage said. “Either you tell Mrs. Boucher when she gets home, or I’ll get Charlotte to come.”

  “No. No parents. It will just make everything worse. Give me a minute.”

  I called home,
and Marie answered right away. “It’s me,” I said.

  “Mom just left,” Marie said. “She must’ve gone out to look for her.”

  “Ellen’s here.”

  “What? Oh thank God.”

  “Yeah. But listen, something’s happened. She’s okay, but she won’t be able to walk home.”

  “I’ll get someone. Have her ready.”

  We’d been waiting less than twenty minutes when headlights started down the driveway toward the house. I panicked. What if it was Mrs. Boucher? How would I explain Sage and Ellen in the house? A car door slammed, but the headlights stayed on and a dark bulk moved toward us. A man. He tapped lightly on the door. I looked out. He was broad. I recognized the dark hair and suede leather-fringe jacket. It was Wilson McVay, with his dad’s Buick. Ellen was ready in Sage’s clothes, and Sage was carrying Ellen’s uniform. I opened the door, and Wilson stood at the threshold, looking at us.

  “Well, you must be the Florence Nightingales,” he said.

  “Hey, Wilson,” said Sage. She started walking with Ellen to the door.

  “Yeah, hi,” I said.

  “This is Ellen,” said Sage.

  “Hey there, Miss Ellen,” Wilson said, slightly bowing. “Your taxi’s ready.”

  Ellen broke a smile. Wilson smelled of leather, cologne, and a hint of alcohol. Ellen and Sage followed him out to the car while I fanned the door in and out to make sure the smell of him was gone before Mrs. Boucher came home.

  I watched the taillights disappear through the trees. How had Marie managed to get Wilson, and how had I just let Ellen into his car, after everything that had happened? In the bathroom I cleaned the sink and floor, put the bath mat back, and threw the towels we’d used into the washing machine.

  It was close to two, later than usual, when Mrs. Boucher came home. She drove me to the top of my road without saying anything. She seemed tired and preoccupied, driving with the window down while she smoked.

  “Are you okay for next Friday?” she asked when I was getting out.

  “Yeah. That’d be great. Thanks.”

  The back door was unlocked. I tiptoed up the steps. In our room, Marie and Ellen were still awake. Sage and Ellen had gotten out of Wilson’s car at the top of our road and walked down to the house together. Marie had met them at the back door and taken Ellen inside, and Sage had gone back up to where Wilson was waiting. Marie had brought Ellen upstairs and put her into bed. I crawled onto my half of the trundle, and we all lay there in the dark.

  “Does Mom know Ellen’s home?” I asked.

  “She must have heard us, because after we’d turned off the light, like twenty minutes ago, she came in. She stood over Ellen’s bed, but she didn’t say anything.”

  “She pulled my blanket farther up,” said Ellen.

  I looked down at Ellen’s trundle. In the dark I could see the glow of her forehead, the shape of her face, but I couldn’t see that she was hurt. None of us spoke for a few minutes.

  “What a fucking creep,” Marie said. “He should be castrated. Did you see any of the license plate, Ellen? Was it Pennsylvania?”

  We never slept. I could sense us all awake in the dark, and every hour or so Marie or I would ask, “El, you still awake?” or “Does anything else hurt?” I thought about the art camp and the letter Miss LeBlanc had written.

  “Ellen, why didn’t you tell Mom about Miss LeBlanc’s note? I don’t think she understands how good you are.”

  “It wouldn’t have made a difference. She wouldn’t have let me go anyway.”

  In the Kingdom, all around me, the laurel was in bloom, the flowers like wide-open cups, and I pulled one from its cluster on a branch. The white petals were pink-tinged and speckled with deep burgundy dots. The flowers and pollen of laurel are poisonous, but the leaves can be medicinal. The Cherokee used the leaves on cuts for pain relief and rubbed them against skin for arthritis.

  I heard a low whistle. Sage. Her silver bracelets jangled as she walked, and I watched her coming down the trail through a small gap at the top of the embankment. She turned at the crooked tree and came around the back and into the ring. Before she sat down, she pulled a ziplock bag with two cigarettes in it from her knapsack. She put a Kent in her mouth and lit it, then handed me the bag. I shook my head. Sage pulled the smoke into her mouth first, then breathed it in deeply, the way she always smoked. Charlotte smoked the same way.

  “How is she?”

  “Marie thinks she’s in shock but that she’ll be okay.”

  Sage exhaled. I breathed it in; the smoke was cool and fresh. Jack Griffith had told me and Sage that menthol cigarettes had fiberglass in them and were the worst ones to smoke. He and Thomas caught us smoking behind the house two summers ago. “What a nerd,” Sage had said when they’d walked away. Sage was the same age as Thomas and Jack, and she and Jack were in the same class. Sage thought he was annoying. “Smugly virtuous,” she said.

  “Does your mom know yet? I hope she feels like shit.”

  “Oh my God. No. She can’t find out. She’d kill Ellen for hitchhiking in the first place. We’ve all agreed not to breathe a word.”

  “‘I was raised by a toothless bearded hag,’” Sage recited.

  “‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’” I said. Sage was obsessed with Mick Jagger, and we had an ongoing joke using Rolling Stones lyrics when they fit our situation. They were coming to Philadelphia in September. Sage was going.

  She pulled out a tube of ointment. “Neosporin’s for her cuts and scratches. It’s the same stuff we used last night.” She handed me a small brown pill bottle. “These antibiotics are the ones I got for the burn. It’s the second dose I didn’t end up taking, but I know they’re good for skin and infection.” Last October, up at the water tower, Sage and some others had tried to start a small campfire. Sage helped pour gasoline on the woodpile, and some of it splashed on her down jacket. When she went to strike the match, a small explosion erupted in her hands. There were flames, and someone put them out straightaway, but nobody went for help. Sage walked home with her hands and arms burned, and her dad took her to the hospital. Her hands healed perfectly, but she had puckered scars on the soft underside of her forearms, where her jacket had melted onto the soft skin. For Sage, it was like her crooked teeth: she didn’t see the scars as a blemish but as experience written on her body, marks that added to her story about herself. She didn’t want braces, and she liked her scars.

  “I couldn’t find Valium. I looked everywhere. I don’t know if you should give it to Ellen, anyway. I still think we should tell Grady. He could look at her.”

  “No, Sage. Please. You can’t tell anyone. Ever.”

  “Jesus, Libby—Ellen looks like she’s nine. That guy who picked her up. We should tell someone.”

  I didn’t want Grady Adams to know. He already didn’t like things about my mom and I didn’t want him to know more. I loved Sage’s dad. He played classical music and collected jazz records. He had a downstairs den with a bar in it, and I’d seen him through the door, levered back in a leather swivel chair, his eyes closed, listening to music. He had a soft southern drawl and always spoke to me like he was interested in what I had to say. He never seemed quite part of everything. Charlotte was the opposite, nervous and elegant. She was blunt in her opinions and loved a good story and wasn’t afraid to exaggerate to make it more colorful. Sage called her dramatic. My mother said Charlotte Adams could land airplanes, the way she talked, swinging her arms and moving her hands.

  “No. We’re not telling anyone. Please, Sage. Promise.”

  Sage stood and reached out her hand and pulled me to my feet. “Let’s go see Ellen.”

  We walked back down the trail, sunlight falling through the canopy all around us. Fallen trees lay collapsed across one another, the bole completely broken on some, leaving upright jagged stumps like open wounds. I held the ointment and pill bottle in my closed fist. I thought about my mom driving the empty roads, looking for Ellen. I wondered if she had waited at
her window, looking out, whether she had seen Sage bring Ellen home, how she had tried to tuck Ellen in. Even though I was angry with her, it hurt to think of her like that.

  5

  Wilson McVay was in my bedroom. He was leaning against our clothes drawers by the window, as relaxed as though he were a regular visitor. He was wearing heavy black boots, black jeans with a black Harley-Davidson belt, and a black T-shirt. Sage and I sat on the lower trundle. Ellen was behind us, propped upright against the wall with pillows all around her. She was still very pale, and the area around her lips was shadowed dusky blue. Marie sat cross-legged on her own bed in a black skirt and T-shirt; a single strand of rhinestones dangled from one ear.

  Aside from Marie and the Siouxsie and the Banshees poster on the wall behind her, our room was mostly pink. Wilson was totally out of place in it. Maybe he was nineteen or twenty, but he already looked like a fully grown man, someone who would have to shave every day. His presence in our room changed it, as if something dark and looming had cast its shadow straight into the heart of us. I wanted him gone.

  They were listening to a tape Wilson had brought for Marie, and I realized that they had punk in common. They must have met at a show. Or maybe they had gone to one together. Did Wilson take her to those places? He didn’t look anything like a punk rocker, but I could see how the music might appeal to him, the angry parts. On the mountain, everyone listened to rock or heavy metal, and where you stood between Creedence Clearwater and Black Sabbath said something about who you were and who you hung out with. My sister was the only person I knew who was into punk. Girls at school thought she was a freak. Now Marie and Wilson were talking about bands they knew or had seen that Sage and I had never even heard of: Flipper, Killing Joke, the Stick Men. She told Wilson she had gone to see some band in a DJ’s basement in West Philly, and that she had had to stand on a washing machine to see them. They talked about being at The Hot Club.