The Infinite Onion

by Alice Archer

  Late that night, I huddled in my sleeping bag on the couch, muscles cramped from how long I’d carved on the throne. In my dreams, my arms ached from how tight I held myself as I floated face-up in a stream.

  Rain began during the night, a patter of white noise pressed against the house.

  I woke to grim daylight, waded through the murk to root through my bedroom dresser for a sweater. After I’d turned on the heat and eaten a muffin and an apple, I felt better by a few degrees, prepared enough to venture down the rabbit hole of the mural again.

  For a fresh perspective, I left the bright lights off, turned on a bedside lamp, and walked around to stand on the far side of the bed to resume contemplation of my next move.

  I was a very good painter—that had been inevitable, considering how I’d been raised and by whom—but the mural stirred something new within me, brought forward a phantom I hadn’t meant to paint, sinister and unnerving.

  A few swipes of my palms down my thighs didn’t brush away the fear, and my body went cold, even in my sweater. I sat cross-legged on the floor to watch the mural with the bed between us.

  Nothing moved.

  I turned my head away and caught sight of Grant’s contract on my dresser, closed my eyes.

  Darkness.

  Keep my eyes closed.

  The dark space in the back of my mother’s car. City sounds far removed. Smooth seats. A man drives in front, behind a wall of glass. My heavy head against Dad’s strong shoulder.

  “I cannot believe you’re serious about this,” Dad says.

  I make my arms and hands wet noodles so Dad and my mother won’t know I’m awake. Dad pets my hair just the way I like it, rests his big, warm hand on my head.

  The chill deepened and I began to shake, in spite of the heating vent’s blast of warm air against my back.

  Those few seconds of somewhere else carried the stink of a memory trying to rise from the dead. I don’t want it. I moved to lie on my stomach on top of the heating vent, pressed my cheek against the floor under the edge of the tarp covering the bed. Out past the shadows, the boy’s pale hand drooped onto the bottom edge of the mural.

  I closed my eyes tight, fell asleep half under the bed.

  When I woke, I found my phone and sent texts to Freddie and Talia to set them in motion toward me. I didn’t tell them why I wanted company.

  Thank god, Talia texted back. I’ve missed you.

  I scrolled up and saw texts she’d sent over the past week. I hadn’t seen them. Or maybe I’d ignored them.

  Friends on their way meant a shuffle to the kitchen to cook for them. What meal would be appropriate? I didn’t know. The scrap of memory I’d had and the dark day had stopped time. I stood in limbo at the kitchen sink, watched the leaves on Granddad’s cherry tree bounce in the rain.

  Car tires on gravel.

  A knock on the front door.

  Voices.

  Chapter 56

  Grant

  All day Wednesday, I explored the area where I’d seen Oliver with his van. I dedicated myself to the task as if I’d never get to roam free in the woods again, finally retreated to my tent at the end of the day with a miserable, achy groan.

  After a rainy night, a fitful sleep, and a slop around my campsite Thursday morning, I knew I had to get somewhere dry for a while or I’d risk getting sick, so I slogged through the woods to Oliver’s workshop to do my self-portrait assignment.

  With a hammer, a roofing nail, and a scrap of wood from a bin of cast-offs, I got busy on a self-portrait of nail holes—time-consuming, but I didn’t have anything better to do. Well, I did have better things to do, like worrying about Jill’s dad showing up and writing the workshop proposal, but I convinced myself I could ponder my life situation while I hit the same nail with a hammer over and over—my one-man interpretive dance entitled If It Doesn’t Work, Do It Again.

  There wasn’t a good place to hammer in the bathroom. I studied my face in the mirror over the sink, trudged back to the worktable and hammered in a few more holes.

  It would have been a great project to do with the kids. Penelope had sent a text to say it was too rainy and they wouldn’t come by after art camp. I missed them. Their presence made things seem more real.

  Weary of the trip to the bathroom and back when all I wanted to do was sit, I went free-form and gave myself wilder hair. I enjoyed the sound and tempo of the hammer on the nail, a counterpoint to the steady rain on the roof and the jerk-squeak when I pulled out the nail.

  I thought I might understand Oliver’s attraction to his chisel and mallet.

  When I ran out of wood for more hair, I tapped in a final nail hole and checked my phone. I’d texted Oliver to ask about using his computer, but he hadn’t responded. I tucked the scrap of wood under my shirt, pulled on my rain poncho, and dashed across the yard to the back porch. It took a few knocks before Oliver opened the door.

  “Here.” I shoved my self-portrait at him so I could take off my clammy poncho and hang it on a hook to drip on the porch.

  Oliver stared down at the silly thing I’d made. And stared some more.

  Something seemed to have flipped Oliver’s sign to Out to Lunch. He blinked but otherwise didn’t move.

  “Back up.” I gave Oliver’s chest a light shove so I could get inside and close the door. He wore the pants with the fern drawings on them, from the day at the ditch, and new drawings covered his arms. Blackberry vines spread up past Oliver’s forearms to disappear into the blue sweater he wore. Wreaths of thorns, barbed leaves, juicy berries. They made me want to lick him.

  “You okay there, bud?” I asked Oliver.

  He nodded, but I wasn’t at all convinced.

  Low voices floated over from the living room area. I looked up to see Talia and Freddie on the couch. Ugh. Not my ideal circumstances for writing a proposal.

  “Hey, Grant.” Talia walked over to stand beside Oliver. “Whoa.” She pointed at my self-portrait. “Check that out,” she said. “It’s you.”

  “Yeah,” Oliver said in his faraway voice. “It is.”

  Freddie barged in to look over Oliver’s shoulder. “Let me see.”

  “Won’t win any prizes,” I said.

  Their little huddle of focus on what I’d done made me roll my eyes. “That’s enough.” I snatched the wood out of Oliver’s hands, walked it to the art supply shelves, and shoved it on top of a bin of crayons. “Can I use your laptop?” I asked Oliver.

  None of them had moved.

  “Oliver?” I waved my hands. “Hey. I need to type stuff or my noggin’ will self-destruct.” I took my journal, full of notes and ideas about the assignment, out of my back pocket and waved it at him. He didn’t take the bait of my wink, which tried to convey my awareness of his fancy shenanigans with my journals when he hadn’t actually been to town.

  Oliver’s dazed look told me he was in no shape to catch subtleties.

  I sighed and turned my back on them all. To make space for my journal on the desk, I had to relocate a bottle opener in the shape of a hand, a wire head massager, and two books—The Encyclopedia of Color for Oil Painters and Frogs of the Pacific Northwest. Oliver’s sleek desktop booted up without a password.

  “Is he always like this?” Talia asked. “Like he thinks he lives here, when he actually doesn’t?”

  “Pretty much,” Freddie grumbled.

  That made me smile.

  Oliver’s visitors seemed unaware of his altered state. They asked Oliver more questions when he hadn’t answered the previous ones. Oliver didn’t need Freddie to badger him about going to Whidbey Island “for a practice run.” Even with my back to them, I could tell Oliver needed to be around people without having to interact with them. If I’d been an actual friend of any of those jackasses, I might have said something. Instead, I withdrew my attention.

  After
I typed up my journal notes and organized things a bit, my proposal for a fort-building workshop began to feel real. I cruised the internet for tips and stories about outdoor forts, hooked on the photos I found of kids’ faces and the same expressions of transformation I’d seen during our bramble adventure.

  My fingers froze on the keyboard.

  Transformative play.

  I opened my journal and wrote in small, careful letters, WORK + NATURE + KIDS + TRANSFORMATIVE PLAY.

  No way could I—with barely a high school education and approximately one and a half clues to my name—rise from rock bottom to make that career happen before I reached retirement age. Contemplating it made me feel like loser crap, so I returned my focus to the proposal.

  The biggest glitch would be convincing the parents to pay. I was terrible with parents. I was too big and too gruff. I tended to loom and glower and say rude things to adults when I wasn’t in The Zone. Plus—minor details—I was unemployed, had no credentials for working with children, and, I suspected, was unemployable. Also, I lived on someone else’s property without permission, in a one-person tent I shared with a giant backpack. Massive parental nightmare.

  Before I had a panic attack, I grabbed my phone to call Mitch, the only parent I knew personally. Overachiever that he was, Mitch answered on the first ring.

  “Hi. Got a minute?” I asked

  “No,” he said.

  “Well, why did you answer?”

  “What do you want?”

  “When are you coming over? I want to talk to you too.”

  “We could do Sunday. Two o’clock.”

  “Great,” I said. “Jill’s dad hasn’t shown up. I’m relieved. I’m not ready.”

  “They had guests. Probably distracted him.”

  I didn’t say anything for two seconds, which, in Mitch’s world, meant we were done. “I’ve got to go,” he said, and hung up.

  I could have called Mitch back, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask him.

  I swiveled in the desk chair as I thought. I couldn’t justify asking Oliver for help. I’d loaded enough of my problems on him. Freddie and Talia wouldn’t help. I based that assessment on their frowns telling me to leave them alone.

  Oliver sat on the edge of the stage. His stiff posture and spaced-out expression made me think he was in the midst of an out-of-body experience. Back bent in a slouch, he nodded at what Freddie and Talia said… and said. Jesus. Couldn’t they tell Oliver wasn’t listening?

  The stage made me think of Clementine. I stood to take my phone out of my front pocket.

  “Do you have something to add?” Freddie asked in his sarcastic voice from his spot at the end of the orange couch closest to me.

  I took a couple of steps so I could loom over him. “You bet.” I made my voice boom to fill the large room, to annoy Freddie even more, and to give Oliver a little comic relief. “The rubber needs to meet the road before the shit hits the fan.” It was the first thing that came to mind—something I’d written in my journal.

  Oliver’s lips lifted in a quick smile, there and gone.

  “That’s all for now,” I said. “Thanks so much for asking, Freddie.” I walked away and tuned them all out again to call Clementine, using the phone number on the card she’d handed me the day she drove me to the blackberry bramble.

  I told her about my workshop idea and invited her to help, curious to see if the prospect of spending time with tweens would be a hard limit after whatever had happened to her son. “I’m most concerned about the parents,” I admitted. “I thought maybe you could help me with that part? If you want to.”

  “I would love to.” Clementine sounded quiet but strong. “I could stop by after work today.”

  We made a plan to meet in Oliver’s workshop. Back at Oliver’s computer, I emailed my draft of the proposal to Clementine and to myself, so I could access it on my phone, then closed down the computer.

  “Bye, everyone,” I called out as I headed for the back door.

  They all ignored me.

  On the dartboard hung a piece of paper on which a thick infinity symbol had been painted. I leaned close. A faint, penciled crown hovered above the loops of black paint.

  “I’m not a very good example of a parent,” Clementine said from the stool beside me in Oliver’s workshop. “But I’d like to help. If I can. I can try.”

  By the end of the conversation that followed, I’d decided to wait to do the workshop until after I had a job, a place to live, and some official volunteer experience working with kids.

  “Bummer,” I said. “Waiting seems right, but that means next summer.”

  “Have you thought about looking for work on Vashon?” Clementine asked. “If you were here, maybe the workshop could happen sooner.”

  “Yeah, but… Kai.”

  Clementine nodded. “You want to be in Seattle.”

  “I want to be around for him in case school sucks. I think I understand him in a way his family doesn’t, or doesn’t yet.”

  Clementine nudged my cell phone on the worktable. “I think you’ll be great at doing this workshop, even if it takes a while.”

  Chapter 57

  Grant

  I woke on Friday energized enough to continue my exploration of the western woods. The clouds had lost their heft overnight and the rain had tapered to a drizzle. I ducked into my poncho and set out on the borrowed bike. Wet ferns and salal crowded the edges of the paths and soaked my legs and boots.

  The area had become familiar enough that I was surprised to come across a patch of uncharted territory. I pedaled slowly up a gentle rise, followed the trail around a curve, and then had to walk the bike over a rocky stretch.

  I would have missed it if I’d glanced left instead of right.

  I rolled the bike back for a closer look.

  Someone had dumped a wooden step stool into a thick patch of undergrowth a few yards off the trail. A very nice step stool. I leaned the bike against a maple tree and waded through the ferns to investigate.

  It wasn’t a step stool.

  A circular staircase wound up around a massive oak. I craned my neck but couldn’t see what it led to. The branches of the maple blocked my view.

  The staircase suspended from ropes that seemed sturdy when I yanked on them. I straddled a maple branch and risked a first step. The entire staircase wobbled—and held. A banister began ten steps up, right when I needed it. I wrestled through vines and underbrush to climb above most of the maple tree, then paused to hug the oak’s trunk and look up. And up. Through leaves and branches, I glimpsed the underside of a platform. After that, the wobble intensified as I climbed higher, and I didn’t try to look up.

  Every ten steps or so, a heavy rope circled the tree to anchor the staircase, which nevertheless flopped and swung as I moved. I tested each step before I put my weight on it.

  The staircase ended high above the ground under a trap door. I gave one of the platform supports a shove to test for sturdiness and hauled myself up through the trapdoor to collapse on the… porch. A porch attached to a treehouse.

  The tiny house had been engineered to suspend from the higher branches. Clever metal gadgets and more ropes secured the house to the trunk. The gadgets looked adjustable, maybe to loosen the ropes as the tree grew. Fucking brilliant.

  I wondered if the treehouse was Oliver’s. If so, he’d ignored it for a long time. Dead leaves and bird shit covered the porch. I brushed spiderwebs from the wooden door and turned the handle.

  Locked. Dang it.

  A small window in the door at eye level succumbed to my ministrations with spit and the hem of my T-shirt until I could take a look inside.

  The interior space was about eight feet by four feet, furnished with a narrow bed along the wall shared with the porch. Built-in shelves at the head of the bed surrounded a window. One other windo
w, in the short wall to my left, completed the room’s spare perfection.

  I wanted in. And I wanted it bad.

  I spun to the left and braced my hands on the porch railing to support my weight while I leaned out to take a look around the corner of the house. The near edge of the window was maybe three feet away.

  Close enough.

  I pressed my chest into the corner of the treehouse so I could stretch out my left arm and grip the window to give it a push upward. It seemed locked, but my awkward position didn’t provide much leverage. After a moment of thought, I sat backward on the railing and leaned out sideways toward the window, which gave me better leverage. With a tight grip on the railing with my right hand, I pushed up hard on the window with my left arm.

  Yes.

  Another few upward shoves and I managed to raise the window all the way.

  With my feet back on the porch floor, I leaned forward again over the railing to judge the size of the window opening in relation to the size of my body.

  I really shouldn’t have looked down.

  My brain locked. I froze for a breathless few seconds before I jerked back and plastered my spine against the door.

  I could ask Oliver for the key. But if the treehouse was Oliver’s, its neglected state likely meant he considered it booby-trapped, like his workshop, and he wouldn’t want me nosing around.

  That only made me more determined to get in.

  I did it by not thinking. I put my brain, including the self-preservation lobe, on pause and lifted one leg then the other over the porch railing until I stood on the wrong side, facing the porch. Chest plastered to the treehouse, right hand tight on the railing, I grabbed the window edge with my left hand, swung my left foot inside, did the splits, and freaked out.

  I hung there for too long in a burning groin stretch, ass splayed over a dead drop.

  It was hella motivating.

  Deep breath. Don’t think. Lunge.

  My crotch took a beating and I bashed the top of my head on the window frame. I landed on the floor inside the treehouse in a heap, one hand pressed to my mouth. My other hand hovered over my crushed balls. My eyes watered from the pain.