Angelina's Oak

by Jesse Reiss

Chapter 9

  Angelina's cell phone alarm woke her up at six thirty a.m. and she crawled from her mother’s bed and went to her room to shower and put on some makeup. She was about to dress in her school uniform when she realized it was Saturday and that she would have the day to herself. She decided right then that she was going to go back to that tree and see what other surprises it had in store for her. She didn’t fear it now — she was more intrigued and curious.

  Her mother worked on Saturday—usually a productive day in the shop — with celebrity wives idling around town and wanting to spend their husbands’ wages. Before leaving Paula handed Angelina a small pepper spray vial and instructed her that if she left the house for any reason she was to have it on her, as well as her cell phone. Angelina agreed. Paula pulled out of the driveway and down the road.

  Angelina spent the first couple hours of the morning watching TV and then cleaning the house from top to bottom. She thought there must be an aberration with her for enjoying cleaning, as she derived satisfaction from an hour spent scrubbing a bathroom from top to bottom and walking out, knowing not one bacterial microbe could have survived her onslaught of chemicals and sponges. Her mother asked that she clean as while doing so she could tell if everything was in its place and further confirm nothing had been stolen by whatever intruder(s) had entered the house the day before.

  She had Beyoncé dancing between her eardrums on her iPod at full blast and was on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor in tune to the music when she felt a tap on the shoulder.

  She freaked and spun around on her rear, sending soap suds spraying across the kitchen drawers.

  It was Cassie, who laughed and smacked her gum loudly. “Sorry. You didn’t hear me knock, so I let myself in. Sure gave you a fright.” She had her hair up and was wearing her torn-up Joe’s Jeans and Skinny Bitch tank top.

  Angelina pulled off her headphones and sat up. “How did you get in?”

  “You gave me a spare key months ago, remember?”

  “Right.” Cassie lived in an apartment down on Franklin Blvd and stayed over at their house so regularly, she was practically a sister.

  “Damn, girl, you are uptight today. What’s happening?”

  “We had an intruder in the house yesterday. Someone broke in. Nothing stolen it seems. But it has me on the edge.”

  “Oh, that’s sucks,” Cassie said, pulling purple gum out of her mouth in a long strand and then chewing it back in. “You checked that none of your underwear was stolen?”

  “No.”

  “Could be some sex perv. You know the kind that dresses up in kinky underwear. Maybe you have a stalker. I’ve heard of these guys. They don’t want any underwear that they could buy themselves at Fredricks. No, they want yours. They want to get into your underwear. Sickos.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “This is Hollywood, what can I say,” she said shrugging her shoulders.

  “Yeah. Well, they went through the drawers in every room and seem to have left everything intact.”

  “Got to be a sex perv then. Nothing else to account for it,” Cassie decided without any doubt in her voice.

  “Get lost.”

  “Allow me,” and she stepped onto the kitchen floor and walked over to the fridge, opening it to help herself. “I’m gonna get lost in here.”

  “I just cleaned that floor,” Angelina complained.

  “You’re always cleaning. It’s Saturday morning and you’re cleaning. Only a freak cleans on Saturday mornings. You must be like germaphobic or something.”

  “That’s not a word.”

  “Well, what is the word that describes you Howard Hughes types?”

  “Very funny. The word, which I’m not going to say, doesn’t describe me.”

  “Okay, fine,” Cassie said, helping herself to a glass of OJ. “Brad and I are going down to Third Street Promenade tomorrow to hang out and maybe go for a dip in the ocean. Wanna come?” Brad was Cassie’s surfer boyfriend who drove a Jeep with the surfboard rack permanently fixed to the top and with whom Cassie bragged about having been sexually active with all summer long.

  “Love to, but gotta babysit tomorrow.”

  “Come on! This is probably the last weekend before the weather turns. You do that confidential babysitting job like every week. Give yourself a break.”

  “No can do. Besides, it’ll be hot for another month or so. You’ll have to go without me.”

  “You’re no fun sometimes, you know that? Cleaning. Babysitting. You’re young. Gotta live your life while you’re still free.”

  “Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

  “Sure.” Cassie downed the last of her OJ and placed the glass in the sink. She gave Angelina a hug and left the house. Angelina sighed and bent back down to complete the kitchen floor.

  An hour later she finished and admired her work. She fixed herself a ham and cheese sandwich and ate on the back porch, looking into her neighbor’s backyard and the hillside, which had various houses on stilts at odd angles. She felt restless. Something Cassie had said made it feel wrong to stay home all day. It was definitely too pleasant a day to stay inside, she agreed. Her thoughts kept returning to the tree and the mysteries inside it. She packed her backpack with a snack and headed out, double-checking the doors and windows were locked.

  ◊

  Half an hour later she was climbing the mountain trail, enjoying the hot sun and sounds of nature. A few times she looked back on her path and was certain no one was following her. This trail was an obscure one. Other trails in Griffith Park were more heavily populated. From the Observatory one could climb a large trail that was more a well-trodden dirt road that wove to Mount Hollywood’s peak. At any hour during the day hundreds of families with kids and dogs were making their way along this path. The trail she took started from well into the park, up an entrance from the street where she lived, which was rarely travelled. The only predators she ever saw were rattlesnakes, which were easy to avoid if you kept your eye out for them and coyotes, which only came out at nightfall and made a point of avoiding people.

  At the oak she circled around once to be sure no one else was there and went under its canopy to the trunk. She began to climb, excited to meet up with her new friends again in a world as real as her own.

  Reaching the bough, she stepped forward and braced herself for the change, which occurred like it had before. She took note of her surroundings and saw for the first time no one was there to greet her.

  She yelled out “Hello!” and heard her voice echo among the great limbs, which stood out above her, reminding her of the multiple walkways and escalators joining the many floors of the Beverly Center mall complex. Only the quiet rustle of the tree’s leaves greeted her back.

  She walked along the great big bough for a few minutes, turning the corner this way and that, peering behind the large branches and leaves and trying to remember the way she had come so she didn’t get lost. The massive trunk was hard to lose sight of, so she wasn’t that worried.

  She began to notice that rather than the bough getting smaller and branching out into many smaller twigs and leaves, it seemed to go on and on, connecting to other boughs and trunks that seemed to go off in other directions, like it was one interconnecting maze. She continued on, increasingly curious as to where it would lead her.

  She came eventually to a large trunk where the bough ended and looked down. It wasn’t the same tree she had come up. She felt herself panic when she looked down. She was looking down into someone’s backyard in the Hollywood Hills, far from the site where she had entered the oak tree in the park. The house was large and elegant with bay windows and terra-cotta tiles and clearly owned the top of a rise that from the backyard had a close-up view of the Hollywood sign. She saw a swimming pool that was fed water by a small rock garden and waterfall on the side. A girl and a guy were in the pool, up against a cocktail bar that was built into it. They had stem glasses in their hands and were cuddling eac
h other. She felt embarrassed to be spying on them and turned away.

  “Romantic couple, aren’t they?” a voice said quietly behind her.