The Family Tree

by Sheri S. Tepper

  She gasped, “You won’t make me do anything, Jared. I’m divorcing you.” She put her hand on her gun but didn’t pull it, preferring a weapon less dangerous, less fatal. “I…have a new boyfriend. He’s a professor at the university. He likes trees. All this greenery doesn’t bother him.”

  Jared’s face, already gray, became ashen. “Do you…have you…does he come here?”

  “Of course he comes here!”

  “Does he sleep here?”

  “Yes,” she said, shouting the lie, making it more vehement. “He does. All the time.”

  He stepped away from her, mouth working as he mumbled: “That’s it. You’ve spoiled it. Too late now. You can’t do it now. I’ll have to find someone else.” He walked to the gate, opened it, stood for a moment framed by the side timbers, looking back at her over his shoulder. “I’ll make you sorry for this, Dora. You shouldn’t have moved out. You betrayed me. I needed you there and you betrayed me. You could have gone on living, but now you’ll die with them….”

  The gate swung to behind him, closing with a solid clang. Behind her, a tree rustled, just one, then others, the movement extending from her little garden out into the woods and away west.

  “What was all that?” she whispered. “What in the hell was all that?”

  Was the man sane? Had he ever been sane? She stood shivering, her whole body shaking uncontrollably, hugging herself, holding herself together, shutting her eyes, taking deep breaths, trying to think of something, anything but Jared. Her scalp still hurt, and she rubbed it again. He’d pulled some hairs out, for sure. After a time she heard birdsong and realized it had been going on for a while, which meant he was gone. How she knew this was a mystery she did not want to bother to pursue.

  She let herself in, carefully locking the door behind her, stepping between boxes and over crates to be sure the large overhead garage doors were locked as well, thinking as she went up the stairs that no one could get through the bedroom or bathroom windows, overgrown as they were.

  “Someone might put a ladder up against the big living room window,” she told herself from the top of the stairs. “And break the glass.” She stood in that window, looking out. This window was the weak point. Someone could get in that way. Not just someone, anyone, but Jared, who said he would kill her. And why in the name of heaven did he want to kill her? It was crazy!

  She dropped into a chair beside the table, dug her notebook out of her purse, opened it to a clean page and wrote down everything she could remember of Jared’s maundering. She had spoiled what? She couldn’t do what? He would have to find what? Why? He’d fallen apart when she said she had a boyfriend. When she said the boyfriend slept over. At that point he’d stopped insisting she move back and instead he’d accused her of…whatever. Betrayal. Which meant…which meant that having a boyfriend somehow changed her own…status? Qualifications? For what?

  He needs a virgin, an inner voice said. Dora, he needs a virgin. He thinks a virgin can get rid of the greenery.

  She put her head into her hands as she heard her own voice making sounds, half giggle, half scream. She was imagining things. My God, what did she think he was going to do? Sacrifice her to the Tree? Use her blood as weedkiller? Jared needed a cook-housekeeper, that’s all. It didn’t matter who she was, so long as she kept everything clean, cooked that damned vague tomato food and kept her mouth shut.

  She didn’t like having made up the story she had. Lies could be dangerous. They could blow up in your face. Would he recognize the story for what it was? If he hung around out there, if he watched the house, and if he saw no one here…. He could lie in wait for her. Now that forest covered everything, there were so many hiding places. But…maybe…maybe she could arrange for it to be more than a mere story.

  She went into the bedroom and pulled out the top bureau drawer, the little one, meant for keeping handkerchiefs or gloves, dumping it on the bureau top. She had put Abby McCord’s card away among old receipts and odds and ends of makeup and a few bits of jewelry. She had promised to tell him about Harry Dionne, so she had a perfect excuse for calling him.

  The phone rang six times before he answered. “McCord.”

  She cleared her throat. “Abby, it’s Dora Henry. I told you I’d let you know when I spoke with Harry Dionne. I had breakfast with him recently. Would you like to come over for a drink? I’ll tell you about it.”

  Long silence. “Can I get there? Can I find the place?”

  “You can drive as far as the avenue. I’ll meet you at the corner. It’s only half a dozen blocks.”

  He wrote down the landmarks she gave him and told her he’d be there in thirty minutes. She took twenty of them to straighten up the place, check that there was beer in the fridge, and get out some chips and salsa. She had wine, too, if he’d rather. She’d bought herself half a dozen bottles as a housewarming gift. As she was about to leave, she turned back and got two steaks out of the freezer and put them in the microwave on thaw. Maybe he’d stay to dinner.

  Wind chased her bicycle, scudding her like a leaf beneath the overhanging branches. She had thought she might be late, but it was almost twenty minutes more before Abby’s little red car showed up, the convertible top raised against the threatening sky.

  Dora motioned him to come over and park next to the tree that minded her bicycle for her. When he did so, she spoke to the tree, conscious of his eyes on her. “This is my friend, Abilene McCord. This is his car. Will you watch it for him, please, until he comes back?”

  Branches lowered protectively. She turned to find him staring at her, brow furrowed in concentration. “It’s all right,” she said, fighting the laughter that threatened to erupt. “The tree won’t let anyone fool with your car.”

  He backed away from the tree, watching, finally turning to walk beside her as she wheeled her bike down the curving path that had once been a quiet residential street.

  “After what you showed me the other day, that shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Why haven’t the trees invaded the campus? They’ve let the campus mostly alone.”

  Dora nodded. “Also the football stadium, and the baseball park and the parking areas around them. They’ve left the city park fairly open, as well, though a lot of trees have come up in the zoo, in the enclosures and along the paths. Highways aren’t bothered. Railways aren’t bothered. The airport is still wide open. Downtown parking lots are open, just like the downtown streets. But the suburbs…” She shook her head.

  “Doesn’t it all imply motivation?”

  She wiped a lone raindrop from her nose, squinting up at the lowering clouds. “I stopped by the library the other day to look up some articles I sort of half remembered. All over the world, cities and highways have been eating up the best land—I mean, the most fertile land, the best for growing things. Maybe the trees want to take it back.”

  “By making it difficult for suburban housing and streets? Why are they taking it easy on cities and public transportation?”

  Dora grinned, remembering Grandma. “Maybe they don’t want to kill us, just teach us a lesson.”

  He made a doubtful noise in his throat. “What did you find out from Harry Dionne?”

  “Wait until we get to my place,” she said. “Then I’ll tell you all about it.”

  She put out beer, salsa and chips on the table by the window and pulled out the two leather chairs so they could look out at the grassy swale that led away to the clear line of sky between mountains and cloud. From long habit, she got out her notebook and went over the conversation she’d had with Harry Dionne, including the bits about Jared and the girl, but leaving out Harry’s reference to women’s “kernel of wildness.” If she still had some wildness floating around, that was her business.

  “Phil told me about your ex-husband,” Abby remarked when she had finished. “Phil said he was a stick.”

  “In all the time I’ve known Jared, he’s been almost completely unemotional,” she admitted. “Though when he was here tonight—
”

  “Tonight?”

  “He was waiting for me outside when I got home from work. He thought I would be able to remove the ‘greenery’ from around his house, the one we lived in.”

  “Why on earth…?”

  She shrugged, uncomfortably. “He got stung, and I guess I was responsible for saving his life. The only logical explanation I can come up with for his attitude is that he misinterpreted my saving him. It wasn’t that I had any power over the growth, it’s just that I knew CPR. And considering how he looked, I think the poison has affected his mind.”

  “Phil says he works for Pacific-Alaskan. If I were a tree, that would make him enemy number one. I’m not surprised he got stung.”

  She dipped a chip and munched it slowly. “You questioned motivation a few minutes ago. Are you now implying that the trees might know who Jared works for?”

  “If they’re aware enough to guard my car because you ask them to, or to provide me with a cutting because I ask them to, then, yes, they’re aware enough to know what we do for a living. At least those of us who might prove to be threatening.”

  She mused. “I know Jared is a neatness freak, but I never thought of him as anti-tree, in a general way. Trees are his business. He talks a lot about sustainable yield…”

  Abby snorted. “Sustainable yield means a single-species tree farm, which is about as far from a forest as you can get without paving it over. You know those ads Pacific-Alaskan runs on TV? The ones where the little girl asks if there will always be trees, and the company spokesman shows us his damn tree farm and says, Yes, Virginia, there really will be trees, as he walks down these endless beds of absolutely uniform seedlings. It’s a case where you can’t see the forest for the trees, because there is no forest! No birds, no wildflowers, no butterflies, no nothing but those rows and rows of absolutely uniform pines.

  “One thing I notice about the woods out there—” he gestured toward the window “—I can count fifteen distinct species from here. That’s just trees. Plus shrubs and grasses and various kinds of forbs. Harry Dionne was right to say other things than trees live in forests. I’d be amazed if there aren’t all kinds of birds and insects and probably small mammals….”

  “Birds,” she agreed. “The birdsong gets louder every day. I’ve given up using an alarm clock. I don’t know about small mammals. I haven’t really looked.”

  “Let’s look,” he said, rising, reaching out to take her by the hand. “Right now.”

  Bemusedly, she followed him down the stairs and out into the woods, through the narrow belt of trees beside the swale and then down the swale itself, away from the house. The last of the sun dropped beneath the blanket of muttering cloud to shine in their eyes. Looking back, Dora saw her window reflecting the sunset, shining like a golden mirror.

  “There,” he whispered. “Squirrel, up on that branch to your right.”

  She looked up to meet bright, black eyes peering down at her. The squirrel chattered and jerked his tail, making it flow in a sinuous curve. As he did so, something tiny and brown zipped across the grasses from behind one tree to another.

  “Mouse?” she asked.

  “Umm,” he replied. “Or vole or ground squirrel. Whoa.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Look. Through the trees. There.”

  She followed his gaze to see a procession in black-and-white, a large skunk followed by four little ones, the five animals strung out like a child’s pull toy, the line of them elongating, then clashing together, then stretching out again, tails waving, little feet trotting. The mother skunk took no notice of them as she crossed the swale and disappeared into the trees, her children following after.

  “What else?” she whispered, enchanted.

  “Oh, if we wanted to stay out, we’d probably see owls and maybe raccoons, and possibly coyotes. Some kind of cat, probably. Either a domestic cat gone wild or maybe a bobcat. It may be too soon for bobcat or deer to have invaded from the mountains, but I have no doubt they will. There! Look.”

  She saw a seemingly boneless form sliding up a slanting trunk. “What?”

  “Weasel, I think. Too small to be anything else. Not close enough to water to be mink, not big enough for fisher. Since you have so many birds, I could have predicted some predator on eggs and baby birds.” He stood staring into the treetops, ducking suddenly as a spate of huge raindrops splattered across his face. “I don’t see a nest anywhere, and it’s going to be too wet to look.” He grabbed her arm and began to run. “Come on. Back to your house. If there’s a restaurant within walking distance, I’ll take you to dinner.”

  “There is, but I don’t want to walk with it doing this! I’ve got steaks, and salad stuff….”

  He came inside after her, shutting the door behind them. “Isn’t that a great idea! If I’d known, I’d have brought wine.”

  Wordlessly, she got out the wine. They had more beer while the steaks finished thawing, then wine with the steaks, drinking so thirstily that Dora opened a second bottle. They ate to the scent of wet leaves, the sound of rain, which kept falling with a hard, steady drumming on the roof. When the food was gone to the last shred, they put the dishes in the dishwasher and Dora got out a frozen dessert, pastry and ice cream, and they ate that as greedily, finishing the whole thing.

  “It says serves six,” she commented, looking ruefully at the empty package.

  “Six midgets,” he remarked comfortably, leaning back on the couch and placing his saucer on his flat stomach, holding it horizontal with a relaxed finger while the other hand plied the coffee cup. “Good food, good wine, good coffee.”

  “One of my few luxuries,” she said. “Grandma always loved her coffee, and she always bought the beans and ground them fresh.”

  “And you eat,” he remarked. “It’s great to see a woman eat. I get so sick of that dieting talk.” His eyes were fixed on her face, wholly approving.

  “I’m lucky,” she said, feeling his glance on her skin as though it reached through her clothes, like microwaves. “If I don’t do this too often, my weight pretty well stays down. I burn calories. My friend Loulee, she’s always dieting, but she doesn’t eat anywhere near as much as I do. She’s got fat genes. She can’t help it.” She flushed, aware she was babbling.

  “Dora?”

  “Ummm.”

  “You’re as nervous as a cat! Are you worried that Jared might come back?” There was concern in his voice, almost tenderness.

  Blankness. Here was a fork in the road. Did she take a step, or back off? Turn around, maybe, go somewhere else. Was she worried that Jared might come back? Well, wasn’t that the reason she’d asked him to come over?

  She swallowed and fought down the urge to run. “I guess. I mean, yes. Yes, of course. That was in my mind when I called you. I thought, if he came back, or if he hung around out there, he’d see I had company, and he’d go away.”

  “I can sleep on your couch. Quite frankly, I’d just as soon not go out in that downpour, if you don’t mind.”

  She blushed, feeling the heat move from her throat onto her breast.

  As though aware of her discomfort, he went to the window, turning his back to her, leaning against the glass and peering out at the downpour. “Do you realize it’s been only a century that we’ve been able to go from house to car to office to car to wherever, with the heater on, and the defroster on, protected from the rain and the cold? It hasn’t been much longer than that we’ve had lighting for streets. Think of all that darkness, all that world out there, all that mystery that we’ve turned into well-lighted concrete bunkers, safe and warm and dull.”

  She took a deep breath and got up to refill her coffee cup. Since she was on her feet, she went to stand beside him. It was almost totally dark. The woods could hide legions of shadowy attackers. The moon wouldn’t rise until the early morning, if the sky cleared. It was raining hard. It wouldn’t be polite to make Abby go out into the rain….

  “You can stay here, Abby. The couch is a sofa bed. It’s mo
re comfortable unfolded.”

  “Either way,” he said from close beside her, his lips at her ear. “Folded or unfolded.”

  Her heart drummed, she felt the beginnings of panic. Leaning away from him she pushed the casements farther open, letting in the night. A heavy fragrance came on the moist air, flowery, musky, with something else in it, something she remembered from her breakfast with Harry Dionne. That strong, not unpleasant odor which she identified suddenly as a rain-on-the-garden smell: moist leaves, fecund soil. She took a deep breath, and another, as though she could not breathe deeply enough. When she turned he was close, and his arms went around her, pulling her against him until she felt the heat of his body through the light shirt he was wearing, felt the strength of his arms gathering her in.

  Warm, and the smell of his skin, and the feel of his arms. If she just let go, maybe there’d be trumpets…. Oh, lord, she’d love some trumpets. Still…still!

  “Abby…” she murmured. “Please. It’s too…quick.”

  He gave her a quick squeeze and released her. “It’s okay, delightful Dora. You don’t need to worry about me. An invitation to sleep on your couch is not an invitation to anything else. I know that.”

  He moved away, began gathering up the glasses, grinning at her, striking an elder-statesman pose, left hand on chest, right hand raised as though taking an oath. “Though my virtues have not been fully developed without a good deal of effort, through long association with a good wife who took great pains with my enlightenment, I have become one of those rare and wonderful men who are able, with some degree of sincerity, to pride themselves on being unmacho about sexual matters.”

  She felt the little laugh that bubbled up in her throat. “Then you have lots of women friends, don’t you?”

  “The women I like well enough to get to know are my friends, yes. How did you know?” He took the glasses to the kitchen, rinsed them, glancing at her over his shoulder. “You’re thinking that we hardly know one another.”

  She nodded. “We’ve met twice.”