The Wishing Tree

by Marybeth Whalen

  He reached out and traced his fingertip across her cheek, making her shudder, her skin burning in the path he had traced. “Didn’t mean to embarrass you,” he said, his voice husky, thick with something she recognized as desire.

  “It’s okay. I just—I mean, I—” She held up her hands. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I never do things like this.”

  He rested his palm against her face, his fingers caressing her hair. “I bet you say that to all the boys.” A teasing smile filled his face.

  Exasperated, she argued. “I don’t! I swear!”

  “Would you believe me if I said I never do either?”

  “Huh! No, I wouldn’t believe you.”

  He shrugged. “Ask around. You’ll find out. I’ve never done this.” He looked into her eyes and removed his hand, leaving her cheek exposed, cold. “Never wanted to. Never felt … drawn to someone. Like I was to you.”

  “Me either,” she confessed. She looked down at the carpet, black with tiny tan stripes. She needed to go, while she was still in the place of being able to explain all this away, dismiss it as a fluke. But if he kissed her …

  “I should really go.” She faked a yawn. “I’m really tired and I was hoping to hit the slopes today, not sleep the day away.”

  Instead of arguing, he looked around the hall, as if realizing where he was. “Yeah, and I’ve got to be at work in a few hours.”

  Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, gosh! I’m so sorry! You stayed up all night and now you have to work!”

  He reached out and pulled her hand from her mouth, squeezed it. “It’s fine. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend last night any other way. I can sleep anytime. And I know this is all rather fast and I’m being awfully bold, but …” His voice trailed off. Their night was ending, but it was obvious neither of them wanted that.

  Unwittingly, her eyes filled with tears at the thought of what came next. She was scaring herself with the depth of her emotions. She couldn’t remember the last time she cried at the thought of parting from Michael. “Look, I’m gonna go. This isn’t ever going to be easy, so I’m just going to rip the Band-Aid off. Okay?” She looked at him, not afraid to show him the tears in her eyes.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said, his face serious.

  She laughed. “Is that your way of avoiding the inevitable?”

  He pressed his lips into a line and shook his head. “Nope. Just stating the obvious.”

  “So you think we’re going to see each other again?” Her heart soared at the thought, then plummeted with guilt over what a terrible person she was to do this to Michael.

  “I think any two people who can’t tear themselves away from each other after staying up all night talking are destined to see each other again.”

  “I don’t believe in destiny.” She’d said that too quick and his face showed it.

  “Then I guess that’s my charge—to prove to you that some things are just meant to be.” He reached for her hand and tapped on her ring. “Even when there are obstacles in the way. I’m sorry for whoever he is, but I can’t ignore what’s been happening between us. I hope you won’t either.” He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek.

  He turned and ambled away as she stood in the hall and watched him until he disappeared into the elevator, resisting the urge to chase after him. Only after he was gone did she go inside her room, flinging herself on the bed and letting the tears she’d been holding back flow into the hotel pillow, her mascara leaving angry black smudges on the pristine white pillows. She’d never met anyone who made her feel so crazy. The feeling was like nothing she’d ever experienced and everything she’d never known she’d wanted. She’d fallen asleep as the sky filled with light, wondering how she was going to make these feelings go away and how she was ever going to forget Elliott Marshall and go on with the life she had planned.

  Ivy left the bakery at noon. Back home, she parked her car in the driveway and strolled over to the mailbox out of some old force of habit. She grabbed the bundle of mail inside and wandered up the walkway, absently sorting it. One envelope caught her attention. Someone had already responded to her request for wishes for the wishing tree. She ripped into the envelope with the excitement of a child, extracting the tag and a note from the sender.

  Stepping into the house, she examined the tag, finding a Bible verse scrawled in some old woman’s arthritic handwriting, a friend of Owen’s family who was apparently so on top of things she’d turned around and sent the tag back the very next day. Along with the tag was a note bearing her regrets for the wedding. She’d written that her husband was terminally ill and she was caring for him in his final days. She said that she wished Shea and Owen the same happiness she’d had with her husband for over fifty years.

  Ivy’s eyes filled with tears and she hurried up to her room before anyone saw her crying over a wishing tree tag. That would raise some eyebrows.

  She sank down on the bed, still clutching the tag and note. The words swam in front of her. She wasn’t prepared for how hard it would be to read the wishes. She and Elliott, despite her former hopes, would never celebrate their fiftieth. They’d never grow old together. In hindsight they hadn’t had what it took to go the distance. Her family had been right. She’d made a mistake, and based on how Michael had responded to her, she could no longer count on him as her backup plan either. She stared up at the ceiling. She’d made a mess of things and now she had to face it, alone.

  She turned the wishing tree tag around and around in her hands, studying the verse, “Let marriage be held in honor by all,” Hebrews 13:4. This woman had obviously had the kind of marriage that was held in honor. It was hard to think that, at one point, she and Elliott had believed in that too. They’d planned to take on the world together, no need for anyone else. That was how she’d let go of her family so easily. As long as she’d had Elliott, she’d had all she needed, often quoting another Bible verse, the one about leaving and cleaving. She’d done that in spades, for a time. But she couldn’t ignore the nagging feeling that she hadn’t honored her marriage. Not really. She’d put it last—after her work and her longing for her family and the million little stresses that became their life together. She’d started out so strong, so resolved. And as the resolve had faded, so had their love.

  She sat up. No sense mulling over her disaster of a marriage. Nothing she could do about it now. So she left the room, carrying the tag down to put it on the tree. Shea would whoop and holler when she saw the first tag, yell for their mom to come see, and thank Ivy for making it happen. Ivy couldn’t wait for that moment, her single victory for the day, but a significant one. She couldn’t put her marriage back together, but she could have a relationship with her family again.

  She propped up the note where Shea would see it, her thoughts wandering back to Michael standing on that scaffolding looking tanned and toned, his face familiar yet mysterious. She looked forward to working with him today. She might even manage a relationship with him again, if she was lucky.

  She stepped back and studied the tree with its lone tag, imagined it full at the wedding, guests stopping to admire it between dances. Then she imagined dancing with Michael, laughing as his arms held her in that easy way of his, secure without being suffocating, loving without letting go. She’d had it good once upon a time. Just maybe she could have it good again.

  Thirteen

  She showed up that afternoon, as promised, dressed in clothes that had belonged to her before she left—clothes that hadn’t been worth taking with her when she moved to Asheville, for obvious reasons. She’d tried to make the work clothes look cute but opted instead for looking efficient—someone who’d come to get some work done, to actually help. Michael stopped working long enough to give her instructions, but that was about all. He’d either lost his social skills in the last five years or he was still pretty mad at her. She had to hand it to him, he was giving her a chance, not avoiding her altogether as he’d probably been tempted to do. With a little work and
determination, she could fix things between them.

  She climbed the scaffolding next to Michael’s and looked at the row of boards she was charged with pulling away. “No,” Michael said as she was deciding how much time this was going to take. “You move down there.” He pointed at the last scaffolding, the farthest away from him. “We’ll work from the outside in.”

  Okay, so with a lot of work and determination, she could fix things between them. With a sigh she hoped he heard, she hopped down and walked to the other end of the house, scaling that scaffolding. When she looked back at Michael, he had his earbuds in his ear and was bobbing his head in time to some music she couldn’t hear. She hadn’t thought to bring her iPod, foolishly thinking they’d spend the day catching up, mending fences even as they mended the house.

  She shook her head, reached for a board, and began to pull, surprised at how easily it gave way. How something that looked so sturdy could really be falling apart. It reminded her of Elliott’s last tweet: “When you left, it all came tumbling down.”

  Her mind wandered as she worked, thinking about what he’d been tweeting and how she shouldn’t even be looking if she really didn’t want to hear from him. She mainly wished he’d stop retweeting the things other people were tweeting about him. The women saying that he sounded sincere and she, Ivy, should give him the chance to explain. The ones who said they’d give anything to hear what he was saying from their husbands, that many women never got an apology or so much as a backward glance, that she, Ivy, didn’t know what she had.

  She snuck a glance at Michael. Maybe there was some truth to that. There had been before.

  There were also men tweeting to him. Telling him that he shouldn’t grovel, that he should look for another woman—one who would appreciate him. Some were complimentary, saying that he had inspired them to reach out to women they loved and make amends, or try to. Whatever they all had to say, there was one thing that was certain, with each passing day her husband was picking up followers like a snowball racing down a mountain, growing in size and momentum. He was causing quite a stir in the Internet world. But he still wasn’t getting what he wanted. She wondered if all this attention was a good substitute, if he could be happy with reaching everyone but her.

  She wished Michael would take off his earbuds and turn to talk to her. She wanted to ask him questions. Things like “What have you been doing for the last five years?” “Are you seeing anyone?” “Why’d you decide to renovate the McCoys’ house?” “Are you happy for Shea and Owen?” And even: “Do you wish it was us?”

  Instead he never looked at her, flint-faced as he pulled the boards off and tossed them into the now-cluttered yard.

  A little later, he climbed onto the next scaffolding, a bit closer to her. “That’s more like it,” she said aloud, assuming he couldn’t hear her with those earbuds in his ears. “What?” he asked her.

  She looked over at him, shocked. He must’ve turned his music off.

  “Oh, nothing. I just had a board that wouldn’t come off. I got it off. I said, ‘That’s more like it’ because I got it off. Wasn’t talking to you.” She turned back to her work, grimacing dramatically as she did.

  “You’re not moving very fast over there,” he shouted.

  “I’m a girl. And I work for free. You can’t fire a volunteer.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He laughed. “Stupid me, I thought having you here would actually speed things up.”

  She stopped and crossed her arms for emphasis, staring at him until he stopped working and looked back at her. “What?” he asked.

  “Maybe I should go home, then. If I’m no help at all.” Her hands and arms hurt from pulling and she had a few splinters. She was dirty, she was hot, and she was tired from getting up early to work at the bakery. She didn’t need to be there at all, and that was becoming more and more apparent.

  “No, stay.” He said it halfheartedly before he turned back to his work. “But I’ll have two-thirds of the house done before you have your little third down there done.” He looked so smug she wanted to shimmy over there and hit him upside the head like she used to do when they were little and got in fights. Though the physical brawls stopped when they grew up, the feelings behind them never did. In part they had always acted like siblings, or cousins. So familiar with each other, they were family by default. That’s why the decision she’d made five years ago had had such far-reaching ramifications.

  In some ways it had been like cutting off a body part. A useful part, something she’d once relied on and had to learn to do without, still reaching for the missing limb out of habit, still feeling the phantom pain even though she knew it was gone. Elliott had been her therapy, her rehab, helping her learn a whole new way of life apart from them all, letting her lean on him as she took those first halting steps away. And then he’d betrayed her, let her fall. And now she was discovering that the limb really was … gone.

  She spun around angrily, knocking over a barrel she’d been stuffing the rotten boards into. The barrel started to fall over the side and she reached for it, realizing as her hands flew out that there was nothing for her to grab hold of. She screamed as her hands flailed, then blessedly grabbed the side of the scaffolding. Though it wobbled dramatically, she stayed put. The barrel, however, slid over the side of the scaffolding and landed in the yard, spilling the boards within it.

  She looked over, panting, to find Michael watching with a horrified expression on his face. She was gripping the rail of the scaffold with white knuckles, her eyes wide with fear as they locked on his. And there, for just a moment, was that trace of concern that she’d hoped to see the whole trip. But then he grinned and flashed her four fingers.

  The signal was an old joke between them that had started when they were kids. That school year he’d learned roman numerals and had discovered that the roman numeral for four was IV. From then on, he’d called her, simply, “Four.” When she entered her gawky, clumsy adolescent stage, and he’d taken up golf, he’d learned that fore meant an out-of-control golf ball might hit someone else. He’d then changed her nickname from “Four” to “Fore,” meaning “You better stay out of her way or you might get hurt.” Everyone got a good laugh out of it. And to this day, if she did something clumsy, she could hear his voice saying “Fore” to her.

  She smiled back, her heart filled with the rich memories of their shared past. He could act mad, or distant, or past their past, but there was no way he could be. It was too much to get over, too much to ignore. She would find a way to tell him that, to make him understand.

  There on the scaffolding, she took a bow and he clapped. When she turned back, she was smiling and feeling more hopeful, in spite of her brush with serious injury.

  They worked steadily into the afternoon. After making a spectacle of herself, she got serious and got into a rhythm, enjoying the release of yanking the boards out with violence. She felt powerful, in control, a force to be reckoned with. Her hands were a bloody mess, she stunk from sweat, and she was sure she looked a sight. But she put all of that out of her mind and just focused on the satisfaction that came from tearing something apart.

  When she climbed down the scaffolding and looked at the house laid bare, she saw a resemblance to her own life.

  Michael came down and stood beside her silently as they both surveyed the house. “Looks pretty bad,” he finally said.

  “I’ll say. We tore it up good.” She couldn’t keep the pride out of her voice. He had no idea what she was thinking, what this exercise had really meant to her.

  “Well, sometimes you have to destroy something in order to restore it,” he said. “Want something to drink inside?” He nodded toward the house, and she, struck dumb by his words, nodded her answer before following him into the house, the place where she once had tea parties and drank lemonade and dreamed of a future that looked so different from the one she was living.

  She gazed around as they entered the kitchen. Not a thing had changed. Everything was as she had
remembered it: pictures on the wall, furniture, everything. Hadn’t the McCoy kids wanted any of it?

  Michael handed her a bottle of water from the cooler, and she pressed it against her cheek before opening it, the icy water dripping onto her face with refreshing coolness. “Ah,” she said. “Perfect.”

  The expression on his face was one of amusement. “You’re supposed to drink it,” he said, using his best “duh” voice. She remembered it well from their childhood.

  “I’m getting to that.” She rolled the bottle across each cheek and down her neck. He turned away to look out the window. “It’s just so hot,” she continued talking as if he were listening. “If it’s this hot in June, what is it going to be in August?”

  “Dunno” was his only response.

  She rolled her eyes. So much for progress. She cracked open the water and took a long sip, the water cooling her from the inside out.

  He turned from the window. “You’ll be gone by August anyway. I’m sure that it’s cooler where you’re going. So no worries.”

  She knew a veiled dig when she heard one. This was his way of bringing up their situation without seeming to, his way of pointing out that she was married to someone else, living somewhere else, bringing up the situation just so she knew he remembered. Yet never really saying any of that.

  “I remember now that being passive-aggressive was your specialty.” She closed her eyes. She hadn’t meant to blurt that out. She could hear her mother instructing her when she was younger: Just because you think it doesn’t mean you have to say it. She should’ve learned her lesson.

  He whirled around, anger flashing in his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he yelled.

  This wasn’t the man she knew five years ago. That man was sweet, soft-spoken, agreeable. The worst thing he ever did was subtly manipulate her into what he wanted. But she could hardly remember him raising his voice to her. Even at the end, even when she betrayed him like she did. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that. Really. I was way out of line.”