by Jon Cohen
Young Harry mourned quietly, high up in its branches. If there were tears, he never let Wolf or his mother see them. Staring out over the leafy tops of neighborhood maples, pines and hickory, he imagined himself a dweller in a serene place he called Harry’s Trees. Floating in the sea of green, safe among friends, some of whom had wonderfully strange names like fire cherry, pignut hickory, shagbark hickory. When he was a teenager, too old for climbing, Harry would still sit in the branches, the childhood names giving way to a deeper understanding. The American beech was Fagus grandifolia. The pine in the Lanfords’ yard was a Pinus strobus. The perpetually bark-shedding sycamore beside the Smiths’ garage was a Platanus occidentalis. By high school, he knew everything about trees. Harry pondered the biology of taproots, boles, crowns and radicles.
“Hey! Asshole in the tree!” Wolf would call from a window, when the phone was for Harry or it was time for supper, before their mother gave up cooking supper, before Wolf dropped out of high school and moved to an apartment in North Plover.
By the time Harry went off to college, the branch above those carved initials had snapped off in a windstorm. An injured tree undergoes a healing process called rapid callus production. JC was calloused over, but it would always be there.
Harry and Wolf carried their childhood personas into adulthood. Craving stability, Harry married young and went to work for the Forest Service, a place where time peacefully accrued, like the rings in a tree. Peacefully, that is, until he realized he had wandered deeply into a forest that had no trees. But he was unable to accept Beth’s offer of escape, insisting on his own, less risky plan for change—betting their future on a weekly lottery ticket. What harm could possibly come from a one-dollar lottery ticket?
Wolf took jobs where you had to push and shove. You imagine the thugs of high school all end up dead or in prison, but they don’t. Most of them become salesmen—unsettled, belligerent, always needing to convince, to dominate. Civilized wolves. In the twenty years since high school, Wolf had sold appliances, real estate and insurance, all aggressively and well. Wolf chased money, often caught it, and just as often lost it. The hunt, the devouring, then back on the hunt. The restless cycle of risk and unquenchable appetite.
Now the two brothers stood staring at each other in the cold dawn of middle age, Harry a widower, and Wolf—what exactly? Harry sniffed at the air between them, an old habit, trying to take the measure of his alpha brother so that he might prepare an appropriate defensive posture. Wolf lit another cigarette. Harry waved away the smoke. “I’m going inside,” he said, maneuvering past Wolf to unlock the front door. Harry hoped that when he turned to close the door, Wolf would be walking down the sidewalk and away.
Wolf followed him in and surveyed Harry’s disheveled living room. “That Turk that cleaned for you,” he said. “They deport her or what?”
Harry didn’t answer. Why was Wolf here? Not to comfort, certainly.
Harry placed the plastic bag that had held Beth’s ashes in a desk drawer in the den, for what reason, he did not know. To pull over his head one long night after a fifth or two of vodka and a bottle of sleeping pills? He eased the drawer closed and turned to his brother, who was shaking his head and pursing his lips.
“You back to work yet?” Wolf said.
“Tomorrow. Everything back to—” Harry choked on the next words “—normal tomorrow.”
Wolf positioned himself in front of Harry and looked him in the eye with a sudden and dangerous focus Harry had seen too many times. “We need to talk,” Wolf said.
Harry didn’t meet that gaze, he never did. “I’m really tired. Can it wait?”
“No, because we have an appointment at ten in the city.”
Harry gripped the back of a kitchen chair. “Oh?”
Wolf reached out to touch Harry’s shoulder. Harry leaned back. Wolf’s flick of a smile showed teeth as he let the hand drop. He shrugged. “Okay, obviously we’re not exactly close. But we’re brothers, Harry. And I always protected you.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“Hey. You ever get beat up in school? Ever? How many guys get to go through high school without getting smacked around?”
“Most, actually.”
Wolf shook his head in pity. “You just don’t get the world, Harry. You never have. You don’t understand about pushing back. That’s why I’m your big brother. To watch out for you because you don’t know how to watch out for yourself.”
“I’ve done all right.”
Wolf let out a snort. “Yeah? I hate to be brutal here. But they just stole your life.”
Harry inhaled sharply.
Wolf softened his tone, but only for effect. “Isn’t that what happened? If you think about it?”
It was exactly what had happened. Harry could not have put it better. Life had been stolen from him.
“Beth dying the way she did,” Wolf pressed. “We gotta do something about it. We gotta act.”
Harry’s stomach lurched. Wolf was about to complicate his life in some unstoppable way. The mighty force that was Wolf was about to unite with the staggering death of Beth. At ten this morning.
“Listen to me,” Wolf said. “You’re this, I don’t know, this decent, quiet guy. A thinker, not a doer. You count trees. Harry—this is not a moment to count trees. Okay? This is a moment to take an ax and cut them the fuck down.”
The ferocity of Wolf’s words dazzled, like a blow to the head.
Expert salesman that he was, Wolf threw another changeup pitch, his voice coming over the plate soft and low. “What I’m saying is, in that quiet life of yours, amazingly, you managed to achieve one great thing. And it was called Harry and Beth.”
Harry sat down hard on a kitchen chair. Wolf saw the truth of it, with merciless clarity. Amazingly, Harry had achieved Beth. And without her—his one great thing—he was nothing.
Wolf circled behind the chair and leaned over his brother’s shoulder. “Harry and Beth. Beth and Harry. And you know what? You’re not going to believe this. But I wanted that, Harry. I wanted what you had. I wanted the great thing that you guys were. You guys were always there for each other.”
Wolf and his three wretched marriages, doomed heir to his father’s restless search for “something else.” Wolf’s domestic crime? Serial divorce.
But Harry? He had turned his own marriage into literal ashes.
“Wolf,” he said. He fingered the hidden lottery ticket, opened his mouth, again ready to confess. But Wolf plowed over him.
“No kids, guess you were shooting blanks or something, but still, you and Beth were a family.”
Actually, it was Beth’s hormone levels, but when they found out they couldn’t have children, and then the failed attempts at the fertility clinic, Harry had been secretly relieved. His father’s shadow was long—Harry was afraid of children. Afraid that he would fail them. It was enough that he had found the gumption to marry Beth. She was his family, his home, his everything. And he had swung a wrecking ball through it.
Wolf leaned even closer, his voice in Harry’s ear. “They took away your life. They snatched away Harry Crane’s life. They killed it.”
Harry blinked and saw the demolition crane buckle, the steel beam twirling through the air. He jumped to his feet. “I’m really tired and—”
Wolf shot out a hand and gripped Harry’s wrist like a pair of handcuffs. “We’re gonna get them, Harry. We’re gonna make them pay.”
* * *
Wolf stepped back to let Harry out of the elevator first, holding the door open for him. Harry stared at the huge gold names on the burled walnut wall behind the pretty receptionist—McWilliams, Torrey & Conwell—each angular letter glowing powerfully as if forged from some fierce god’s personal stash of lightning bolts.
The attorney’s name was Jeremy Toland. He sat knee to knee with Harry, dangerous with empa
thy. Sitting in the background, Wolf seemed diminished in Toland’s commanding presence.
“Tell me something wonderful about Beth, Harry,” Toland said in a basso profundo voice so encompassing it seemed without a point of origin. The room itself was speaking to Harry.
He leaned back as Toland leaned forward.
“It’s flooding over you, isn’t it?” Toland said. “You are at this moment flooded with thoughts and images of Beth. Shall we run through a few? Beth’s hair in the sunlight.”
Light golden brown hair, Harry instantly thought, scented with honey-almond shampoo.
“Her laughter.”
Constant, Harry thought. Like a meadowlark. And when she laughed it washed over you in glorious waves.
“How much she liked nature.”
Loved nature. Trees. Grass. Crickets. Sunlight. Wind. Rain. Lions. Penguins. Mountains, valleys, deserts. Harry’s mind racing. Sunset sunrise moonrise night day—
“Your twentieth wedding anniversary.”
Harry almost fell off his chair.
Toland’s eyes flared. “Exactly, Harry. Right? You were married only fourteen short years. They took Beth away from you in ways you can’t even begin to describe. Well, we will certainly describe it to the jury, not that at this juncture and relative to what I’m hearing in a preliminary way in terms of OSHA citations and violations vis-à-vis Carlisle Demolition Company, do I believe it will ever come to that.”
What? Harry thought. His eyes flicked toward Wolf, who gave him a nod and said, “He’s saying it’s an open and shut case.”
“Nothing is open and shut,” Toland said. “But yes, this is as open and shut as it gets. Res ipsa loquitur. Which is a legal term that defines this case in its purest sense, Harry. Res ipsa loquitur—the thing speaks for itself. Put simply, the harm would not have occurred absent someone’s negligence. A fourteen-foot steel beam does not snap loose from the center of a demolition crane and hurtle into a beautiful human being. Unless someone failed to properly inspect said demolition crane. Or worse, declined to inspect said demolition crane.”
Harry sat there, rigid.
Toland kept his gaze steady. “Now, Harry, in this office we do a terrible thing. We put a price on a loved one. Every second that you will never again enjoy with Beth, is priceless. We put a price on priceless. Carlisle Demolition Company and the City of Philadelphia—we will make. Them. Pay.”
“You’re goddamn right,” Wolf whispered, behind Harry.
“Unfortunately, it can’t be an eye for an eye, which in a perfect world is what we’d argue for,” Toland added.
Toland’s voice echoed inside Harry’s head. He gripped the arms of his chair.
“You’re pale, Harry.” Toland hit a button on his desk and an assistant slid into the office with a glass of water and a napkin. She handed them to Harry and slid away again. The napkin was embossed with McWilliams, Torrey & Conwell, and in discreet print at the bottom, a toll-free number.
Harry gulped the water and mopped his forehead with the napkin. “Wolf, can’t you take charge of this?”
Toland shook his leonine head. “No, he can’t. Your brother’s done a fine thing, guiding you to the best attorneys in Philadelphia. But Harry, we need you, legally and spiritually. There’s a Zen quality to a lawsuit. I firmly believe that. For your grief to subside, you must transfer it to others. The defendants must directly feel your pain.” Toland stood up, gripped Harry’s shoulders and looked him in the eyes. “From you. Through me. To them. We’re going to Zen the hell out of these bastards.”
They were in Toland’s office for another hour, but from that moment on the meeting, for Harry, was distant voices in a distant room. It was all a blur—the meeting, the arrival back home. When Wolf at last roared away in his car, Harry sat bolt upright from the living room sofa, lurched into the powder room and vomited, body and soul, into the swirling abyss of the toilet.
And so began Harry Crane’s endless year.
3
The way Amanda Jeffers’s endless year began? Impossibly.
Amanda stood at the kitchen sink rinsing her coffee mug, pondering the rules of life and death as she looked out the window at the line of sun-grazed morning trees dense at the end of the backyard. Amanda was a nurse, and therefore a philosopher. The woods are beautiful, she thought, but they are not without risk. Right now, someone out there among the trees was about to sustain a didn’t-see-it-coming injury. A cut from a saw, a broken bone from a fall. Or maybe a young dairy farmer driving one of the gravel back roads that cut through the woods would glance down to check a text message, swerve his truck into a sugar maple and lump his forehead on the steering wheel. Yes, in the woods, on the twisting roads, in the pastures and out in the barns, business was starting to pick up.
Five days a week, Amanda worked in the ER of Susquehanna Hospital in the Endless Mountains, a stretch of the rolling, time-worn Appalachians in the far corner of northeast Pennsylvania where she’d lived all her life. Rural accidents and mishaps in the wild—that was the way of the world.
A kitchen chair creaked heavily behind her. The dry rush of cereal cascading into a bowl. The sound went on and on, half the box emptied. She smiled. Amanda was a clear-eyed and unswervingly practical woman who understood the indisputable rules of life and death. But she believed, absolutely, that they did not apply, could not apply, to her husband, Dean Jeffers. He was too big for mere rules.
Dean was six foot four and weighed 235 pounds. He could cut a cord of wood in an afternoon and raise the front of his pickup truck with his bare hands if it was stuck in the mud—at least it seemed possible. When he had repaired a tumbled-down section of the old stone wall along the perimeter of their backyard, he’d lifted bear-sized fieldstones.
Amanda’s gaze moved from the trees to that rebuilt wall, sturdy and strong as Dean, clotted white with March snow. Behind her at the kitchen table, Dean poured cereal again. Shorter pour, smaller bowl. Oriana, their nine-year-old daughter, sitting down to breakfast.
“What do you see out there, hon?” came Dean’s voice. “Anything good?”
Amanda started to turn toward him but a remembered moment caught her, a summer memory of Dean hot enough to melt the snow on that distant wall. Dean, wearing one of his ever-present red caps, but shirtless on a July day. Shoulders as broad as the sky.
“Come here and admire my damn wall!” he had called to them, sweaty and triumphant. Amanda and Oriana were on the deck scrubbing off the moss with bristle brushes where it grew thick on the steps and railing every year because the house was shaded by three enormous sugar maples. Dean wanted to cut them down, but they gave good sugar in late winter. “We aren’t hurting for sugar maples around here, you know,” he’d say. Always wanting to cut something down or build something up.
“Come on, come here!” he called again, his voice booming, even from a distance. It echoed off the barn.
Amanda’s pleasures were uncomplicated. She walked behind him atop his rebuilt wall, eyeing the rippling muscles of his shoulders, growing aroused. She reached out and placed both hands on his shoulder blades. They were slick to the touch, which excited her further. In bed, she liked to feel the weight and heat of him, the steady slow beat of his mass.
Dean. The very definition of life.
Giving her coffee mug a final rinse, Amanda blushed—that she was having this memory with Oriana right there behind her at the kitchen table beside Dean. She glanced at her watch. Late!
“See you, guys,” she said, grabbing her coat as she rushed past them. She paused to give her daughter a quick kiss on the head. She did not kiss Dean. She would save those kisses, and more, for tonight.
* * *
Four hours later, Amanda got the call.
Franny the ER clerk paged her to the nurses’ station. Poking her head out of room 4, Amanda asked Franny to take a message. Amanda didn’t have t
ime for outside calls. But then she saw that Franny, ghostly white, was holding the phone at arm’s length like it was dangerous.
“Amanda, it’s for you,” said Franny. “It’s for you.”
Amanda instantly knew that somebody on the other end of that phone was about to tell her that Oriana or Dean was hurt. She hoped it was Dean, thinking like a nurse, pragmatically, that Dean’s big body could absorb a wound. Then she was certain it was Dean because he worked with every known type of god-awful dangerous machine. In her mind she heard screeching lumber-mill saws and pounding quarry jackhammers. He must have injured his hand. Her thoughts were spinning, she couldn’t remember—of her husband’s three jobs, was this the day he was at the sawmill, or was he at Empett’s quarry, or was he out on his tractor brush-hogging fields?
She grabbed the phone from Franny, who quickly stepped back. It was brush-hogging day. Amanda swallowed, thinking, His leg? The fields around here were hilly and filled with treacherous rock, so the tractor must have tipped and broken his leg.
Amanda realized how scared she was, because she had completely forgotten. Dean wasn’t brush-hogging—the fields were under a foot of March snow. He was doing side work, plowing roads for the county today.
“This is Amanda,” she said into the phone. Outside the hospital came the faint wail of an approaching siren.
Somebody on the other end of the phone coughed and in a frightened voice said, “Amanda, this is Ronnie.” A long pause, Ronnie trying again. “Jesus, I don’t know, I don’t know. Amanda, I don’t know how to say it.”
Amanda closed her eyes. Shiftless Ronnie Wilmarth. I hold you personally responsible for the words you are about to speak, because you’re a drunk and somehow you’ve gotten Dean hurt. “Ronnie, they’re bringing him in, I hear the siren, I gotta go.”
“No, wait, Amanda. He’s still here. Dean’s still right here. The EMTs are with him.”
Not working on him. With him. Amanda looked around and saw that she was encircled by the other nurses and LPNs. She felt like a gored bull stumbling in a ring. “Which EMT unit is it, Ronnie?” Because the EMTs out of Harford didn’t know what the hell they were doing, but the New Milford boys were good. The siren, closing in, became a scream, like in the medical thrillers she read. She’d always thought “scream” a melodramatic description of an ordinary sound, but now she understood. The screaming came up the highway.
