Beneath the Trees

by Laurel Saville

  Brayden watched her speak, his face as blank as an empty cookie sheet.

  “I asked you before if you wanted me to tell you this in private or with all of us around to support you, right?”

  Brayden nodded.

  “You still want us here?”

  Again, he nodded.

  “OK. You gave your old man quite a crack on the noggin. However, he has recovered, and it seems you may have knocked some sense into him. He does not want to press assault charges. Being in a coma for a few days, lying in the hospital, all that, I guess, made him reevaluate. He walks with a limp now but is basically OK. His wife stayed by him. Nursed him along. He has not confessed to anyone in law enforcement, of course, because that could send him to jail. However, he has become an ardent churchgoer. So hopefully, he’s confessed to the big, bearded guy upstairs and got himself right with eternity. He’s stopped drinking and goes to recovery meetings, too.”

  A few tears found their way out of Brayden’s eyes and down his cheeks. Colden watched a droplet fall on Daisy’s big, square head. She opened her eyes and began licking his face.

  “You ready for more?” Sally asked him.

  Brayden settled Daisy, wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand, and nodded.

  “It seems the old man wants to see you. And your sister. He has no idea where you are, but he wants to make amends, I guess. We have no idea what that means. Maybe he just wants to apologize. Maybe he wants to try and rebuild the family. Who knows. The point is, it seems you don’t have anything to fear from him. Or the law. And because you are eighteen, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

  Brayden methodically stroked Daisy’s head.

  “I am not in any way, shape, or form making any suggestion or recommendation about what you should do, Brayden. I’m just telling you what I learned. Do you understand that?”

  He mumbled something. Sally asked him to repeat himself.

  “I don’t want his apology,” he said. “It will just make him feel better and do nothing for me.”

  Drew blew air from his cheeks and nodded. Then he leaned forward to speak.

  “Brayden, you also need to decide if you want to press charges against him. There are a couple of things to consider. One is, do you want to go through the legal process? I’m not going to lie—it takes a long time, is very complicated, and you’ll have to testify, which means telling all the things that happened to you in a room full of strangers and to a lawyer who is going to try and trip you up and make it seem like you’re lying. If we win, your dad will go to jail for a long time. However, you need to know that we may not win. Or the judge may decide he’s no danger anymore and let him off. It’s up to you if you want him to face punishment for what he did.”

  Brayden mumbled something again. Everyone waited. He didn’t repeat himself.

  “I’m sorry, Brayden, what did you say?” Sally asked.

  “He won’t do it again,” Brayden said, without lifting his head. “It was just me and my sister. He won’t do it to anyone else. It was just because we were there. Because we weren’t really his.”

  Everyone in the room stiffened as Brayden spoke. Then Sally let out a long-held breath. Dix rubbed his forehead. Colden fought back tears. Drew chewed the inside of his cheek. Janet stared off into the distance outside the window.

  “I don’t want revenge,” Brayden said, his voice gaining strength. “I don’t want punishment. I don’t want to speak in court. I don’t want to talk about this stuff. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want his apology. Maybe my sister would feel different. I don’t know.”

  “Well,” Sally said, drawing out the word. “Speaking of your sister . . .”

  Brayden’s head popped up, his eyes finally eager for news.

  “She has been looking for you.”

  Tears began their slow travel down his face, again.

  “Apparently, she did get to Canada. Not for a boyfriend. She was looking for a distant relative. Someone she found on social media. She’s living there now. She gave one of her friend’s contact information. I have that for you.”

  “Does my father know?”

  Sally shook her head.

  “I can call her? I can see her?”

  Sally nodded.

  “If I go to Canada, can I come back? I mean, do I have to live there, too?”

  “Only if you want to,” Sally said.

  “You can stay here as long as you want,” Dix said.

  “I like it here,” Brayden whispered.

  “We like having you here,” Dix said.

  “We sure do,” Janet said. “And so do the animals.”

  Brayden’s eyes got soft even as the muscles in his face tightened. Colden saw his lip begin to quiver. She noticed that his fingers, where they rested on the dog, were trembling. Daisy began to lick his hands.

  “I like it here,” he said again, fear rising into his voice.

  “She can come here,” Sally assured him. “You don’t have to leave here. Not until you are ready. We’ll have her come right here. She’ll visit you here.”

  Brayden nodded, slowly. Daisy stared up at him.

  “OK,” he whispered. “I just . . . I don’t want to go outside the fence. I like the fence. The gate. I just don’t want to have to go outside the gate.”

  Janet sniffed and wiped her nose on a crumpled tissue she pulled from her sleeve.

  “You won’t,” Sally assured him. “You stay right here, right inside the fence.”

  Dix stood. Sally, Colden, and Drew did, too. They all tiptoed out of the room. Sally wrote a phone number and a name on a piece of paper and left it under a magnet on the refrigerator, alongside several pictures of smiling people squatting next to newly adopted pets. She and Dix looked at each other significantly, he wrapped an arm around her shoulder, and they left together. Colden motioned to Drew, and he followed her outdoors. She wandered over to one of the pastures and leaned against the fencing.

  “That poor kid,” Colden said. “He’s in shell shock.”

  “He’ll recover,” Drew said. “We’ll get him some therapy when he’s ready. There are new techniques they’re using to effectively address trauma. He’s bruised but not broken.”

  A horse limped over to them. Colden plucked some strands of long grass and held them out. The horse’s thick lips tickled her fingers, and his bittersweet smell wafted to her nose.

  “So, tell me about this place,” Drew said. “I think your dad said something about it once belonging to your mother’s family?”

  Where to begin? Colden wondered, silently. So much to say.

  “Yes, it was my mother’s family’s summer home,” she confirmed.

  Then she kept talking, and talking, and talking. Colden had never told this story to anyone, and until she did, she hadn’t realized how much she actually knew, how many details she had accumulated over the years. She’d thought that her sparse knowledge added up to no more than a rough sketch. And yet, as she spoke, she created a full picture for Drew about Miranda’s life as a restless and directionless young woman after college: the death of her brother and his friend in a car accident after drinking at a concert; her father’s death in a thunderstorm when he insisted on standing beneath a groaning tree, and a huge branch split off and killed him instantly; her mother’s slow decline into depression and alcoholism and the series of strokes that disabled and eventually killed her.

  Colden told Drew how Dix and Miranda’s romance had started and ended. She described Darius, the preppy boy turned self-styled, back-to-nature guru who enticed lost women to his commune in a beat-up farmhouse in a damp, overgrown, godforsaken hollow, which was once owned by Sally’s grandmother. She told him how Miranda was, unknown to Dix, pregnant; how she tried to hide her condition from Dix; and how, when he found out, he’d assumed Darius was the father. How Miranda had undergone some strange cleansing ritual that involved lots of cold water, outdoors, in the middle of winter, and gone into premature labor and died a few da
ys after giving birth to Colden. Then, the final chapter, when Sally found Dix and helped him get custody.

  It felt good to tell it. All of it. It felt like she was telling herself, even more than Drew, the whole story. They stood in the silence left behind when she stopped talking. She listened to the horse’s teeth grinding up grass.

  “Wow,” Drew eventually whispered. “That’s some, um, origin story.”

  “I’ve never talked about it much before. Didn’t think it mattered. I have Dix and Sally. I didn’t think I even needed to know about all that other stuff.”

  “Is the commune, the Source, place still there?” Drew asked.

  “I guess so. I mean, the commune is closed. He was sent back to Jersey or Connecticut, I guess, to his parents and his life. I think he eventually went to law school. Made a mint on Wall Street. Ran for office as some hard-core right-winger all reformed from his previously errant ways.”

  “Of course,” Drew said.

  “But the old farmstead is still there. Sally never sold it. Haunted. Cursed. Who’d buy it? They left it to rot back into the ground, I guess. So many bad memories. Once in a while, she gets a call from the cops when they have to run off squatters.”

  “You ever been out there? Ever gone looking for ghosts?”

  Colden shook her head. Drew looked at her, incredulous.

  It did seem strange, all of a sudden, that she’d never been. It was only a few miles away. She’d driven past it, seen the rusted gate and listing mailbox. She had never felt compelled to turn up the drive and make her way past the copious “No Trespassing” signs, which were the only part of the property Dix maintained, and that was simply to protect against liability.

  “Yeah, never wanted to go, I guess. Didn’t seem important to me. Didn’t want to bring up painful memories for my parents.”

  “Do you think they’d really care?”

  Colden thought for a minute.

  “No, they’d probably be happy. Well, not happy, but relieved. I think they find my lack of curiosity about my birth mother a little weird.”

  “Well, we have to go,” Drew said. “I’ll come with you. I’ll hold your hand.”

  Colden stiffened. This was not on her agenda. For today or any day.

  “How about now?” Drew asked.

  “Now? Like now, now?” Colden asked, alarmed.

  “It’s a beautiful day. I have nowhere I need to be. Do you?”

  Colden was swamped with dread and foreboding. Drew was asking her to go to a graveyard. More than that, to a battlefield for a conflict she had somehow caused, yet not participated in. All the combatants were injured, dispersed, or dead, and she hadn’t gotten so much as a scratch. That’s what she’d always thought, anyway. The war had ended just as she arrived. She’d seemed immune to its ill effects. She was only now starting to consider the idea that there were likely latent scars within her—small, internal, invisible. And yet.

  “I don’t know,” she murmured.

  The donkey in the next pasture brayed as if to protest her cowardice.

  “My apologies,” Drew relented. “I’m being too aggressive on this. Not my business to push you.”

  Colden felt a surge of disappointment that he’d given up. Which made her realize that she did want to go. She’d always wanted to go. She just didn’t want to go alone, and she didn’t want to ask either of her parents to take her. Drew was here. He understood what it was to return to the scene of a crime. He’d offered his hand. She reached forward and took it.

  “No, you’re right,” she said. “I want to go. I’ve just been too scared. If you’re game, if you’re sure, let’s go. Let’s go looking for ghosts.”

  The day was perversely lovely.

  Nature was accustomed to trauma, Colden thought.

  Crisp sunshine and cool breezes flowed in through the open truck windows as she and Drew wended their way down increasingly narrow roads. Trees were dressed in the hot colors that foretold the coming cold season. Myth and memory combined to lead Colden directly to the driveway that took her to the house where she was born. The gate, askew on broken hinges, was almost completely hidden by undernourished and stunted scrub. Drew got out of the truck and yanked the recalcitrant metal contraption open. He got back in, slammed the door, and looked at her.

  “Ready?”

  She nodded, took a deep breath, and drove slowly up the weed-choked gravel until it petered out in front of a small farmhouse, brown from age and long-peeled paint, tilting severely to one side like an elderly person in need of a cane. They sat in the idling vehicle, unwilling to leave the confines of the truck, not ready to commit to the experience. A small movement caught Colden’s eye—the tip of a dark tail disappeared under the listing front porch. She swiveled her head to look around. The barn ridge and walls were still square, but the half-open door was askew on decayed rollers. A mold-and-moss-covered trailer, surrounded by several insistent maple and birch saplings, stood off to the side, seemingly being reabsorbed by nature. A muddy patch of ground held the skeleton of several hoop houses. A rusted children’s bicycle was abandoned in the muck. Drew’s face came into view, full of concern and sadness.

  “Do you want to get out?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Colden said quietly. “No.”

  A faded scrap of yellow police tape flapped and waved at them from one of the porch posts, a dubious invitation. It was the type of thing her father would normally have come out and cleaned up. But not here. Not this place. The whole place was one large, sad memento mori to her mother.

  Colden turned the key, and the truck quieted. She opened her door, and Drew followed, both stepping softly, as if they were entering a room where a person slept. They left the doors open so as not to disturb the quiet. Or maybe in case they felt the need for a quick escape. Colden approached the barn first and peered into the dim doorway. The smells she was expecting, the treacle of grain and the sting of fuels, the tang of manure and the sweetness of hay, were absent, chased away by many seasons of harsh weather and long disuse. All she saw were dusty cobwebs and broken machinery. She looked toward the trailer. Its steps were now a pile of old lumber, fallen in on themselves in a heap. A sheet, once put up as a curtain, the faded images of some childhood cartoon characters still barely visible, blew slowly in and out of a window, its trailing edge tattered and torn by the sharp edges of the remaining shards of glass. Colden took a few tentative steps toward the farmhouse.

  “Careful,” Drew said, pointing his chin at the cupped and popped stair treads.

  She stopped at the foot of the steps. The dim interior, the bright sunshine, and the web-covered glass made it impossible to see through the windows. She noticed a dark, spreading stain on the porch floorboards, as if someone had spilled a pot of something murky and viscous.

  A disturbing memory, long buried, came back to her. Something she was reminded of almost every day, yet the connection between the present and the past had been severed somehow.

  “What?” Drew asked. “What is it?”

  How did he know that something new, something more, was wrong with her? She was touched by his attention, his sensitivity.

  “My dad. His bad arm,” Colden said. “You’ve noticed the stiffness, no doubt. It’s subtle, but it’s there.”

  Drew nodded.

  “It’s an old injury. Somehow, I see it every day and still have forgotten, or don’t want to think about, the cause. Honestly, I’m not even sure how I know this story. I can’t remember if Sally told me or my dad told me.”

  Colden let herself ramble. It was a strange sensation; she always tried for precision in communication, the scientist in her intolerant of vagaries and digressions. But it was also a relief.

  “Anyway. That guy. The guru guy. No one pressed any charges. No one had the stomach for a legal battle, and it wasn’t clear what exactly they could charge him with, there being no evidence of wrongdoing, no one who would say anything, who would testify against him. Him having rich parents. They’d just s
ay Miranda died soon after childbirth. So, he leaves. Everyone leaves. The place reverts to Sally. She and my dad come out here to check on things. I was just a baby. In foster care. Strange to say that. I forget I was in foster care at all. Me? Foster care? Anyway, turns out the guru guy wasn’t gone. He came out of the house. Dad and Sally tried to talk to him, but he was ranting and raving. And then he pulled out a gun.”

  “On your dad?” Drew asked, incredulous. “He shot your father?”

  “No, no. Not that. Not on my dad,” Colden insisted. “On himself. He was going to kill himself. He pointed the gun at himself. My dad tried to stop him. Ran and tackled him. The bullet hit his arm instead.”

  Drew seemed stunned into silence.

  “That stain there,” Colden said. “I think . . . I think . . . Well, it must be. My father’s blood. This is where it all happened.”

  “Your dad saved the life of the man who basically killed your mother.”

  “I’ve never thought about it like that, but yes. I guess that’s true.”

  “And got wounded in the process.”

  “Another wound, I guess. A physical one. The others were emotional.”

  Drew whistled low and soft through his teeth.

  “Well, at least he has you,” he said. “That’s pretty major compensation.”

  “Sometimes I’m not so sure about that,” Colden countered. “Sometimes I think I’m a reminder of the worst part of his life.”

  Drew shook his head.

  “You’re a great thing to come from a bad thing. That’s rare and wonderful.”

  A breeze gusted by, twisting something invisible until it caught the light and Colden’s attention. A wisp, a spiderweb. No, it was several strands of hair, twisted over and over by the winds onto the porch support. She reached up and rubbed the strands between her fingers. So familiar in color and texture. She knew hair took a long time to decompose. Here, under the porch overhang, protected from the weather, it could easily last twenty-five years. More. Colden thought of curls of baby hair kept in lockets for generations.

  She remembered her father telling her that the worst thing Miranda had done to him was cut her hair off. Colden knew that this was her mother’s hair. She recognized it at a primal level. Maybe this is where the cutting off happened. Maybe the hair got out here some other way. She thought of the many strands that had undoubtedly been taken away by birds and woven into nests over these past years.