Homesick

by Nino Cipri

  “Dad?” she said, sitting down on the stripped bed.

  “I’m with her now,” her father said.

  “If you still want to talk to her.”

  “Is she...” Anjana trailed off, not sure how to finish. Is she even there? She remembered her last conversation with her mother, in this same room, only three days ago.

  “I’ll hold the phone to her ear, as long as she’ll let me. She might not. We’ll see what happens.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Anjana said, and then added, “I’m sorry I shouted before. I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Here’s your mother.” And then, quieter, he said, “Taslima? It’s Anjana. It’s your daughter. She wants to talk to you.”

  For a long second, Anjana only shut her eyes and listened to her mother’s breath, a sound as familiar as the house used to be. In, out. Pause. In, out. Anjana breathed with her and thought of the work her mother had put into the house: cleaning it and decorating it and inviting others into it, making it warm and welcoming. She’d set down the tiles in the master bathroom, sanded and varnished the dining room table, put together the shelves in Anjana’s bedroom. All of them gone.

  “Mom?” Anjana said, and then cleared her throat. “Mom, it’s me. It’s Anjana.”

  Just her mother’s breath. Was that all that was left of her?

  “There’s something happening in the house. To it, I mean. I can’t—” She lowered her voice, wondering if her father was listening in. She didn’t want him to hear. “I can’t find parts of it. The basement is gone. So is the linen closet and the kitchen nook and my bookshelves. It’s disappearing. Oh, Mama,” she said, and choked on the sound, the name of the first home any child ever knew.

  “I don’t know what’s happening,” she cried. “I’m not crazy, but I don’t know where it’s going.”

  She was in her parents’ bedroom, a room once as familiar as her own. She’d slept in here when she was a baby, in a crib next to her parents’ bed. She’d crawled in here when she felt ill, and read books inside a cocoon of blankets on the bed. She’d peeked in her parents’ dresser, trying to find the hidden aspects of them. And she had burrowed deep into the armoire, touching her father’s suits to her cheek, opening shoe boxes, rubbing her mother’s dresses and scarves between her fingers.

  And now, even the way sounds echoed and air moved was different. Was wrong.

  “Mom, I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I can’t tell Dad or Chitra. But I don’t know how to stop it. Tell me what to do.”

  Her mother said nothing. Anjana might as well have been speaking to the empty house.

  She couldn’t stand it. She stumbled down the stairs and outside onto the cement block that had insinuated itself where the patio should be, sat down on the bottom stair, and cried. It took her a few minutes to notice her father’s voice calling her name.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry, Dad. I’m all right. I just—”

  “She’s trying to say something,” he said, cutting her off. “I don’t know what, but...”

  “Put her on again,” Anjana demanded.

  There was a low murmur of sound. Anjana shut her eyes, listening, desperate to hear whatever her mother might say, even as she told herself that it might be nothing, or it might be nonsense.

  “Mom?” she said softly. “Mom, I’m here. I’m listening.”

  The murmur persisted.

  “Did you hear? She said your name,” Dad said. “Taslima? Do you know who you’re talking to?”

  Inhale, exhale. Pause. “Anjana. Baby Jana.”

  Anjana shut her eyes and took her own shaky breath. “Hi, Mom. I miss you.”

  “Where did you go?” Mom asked. “Miss you too.”

  ***

  Half an hour later, Anjana finally said her goodbyes to her father, who had cautioned her—and himself—not to get their hopes up. A single instance of clarity didn’t mean she was getting better.

  “I wish Chitra could have heard her,” Dad said. “I wish...”

  “I know,” Anjana said. “Me too.”

  When they finally hung up, Anjana dropped the phone on the cement deck beside her and buried her face in her hands. Her long dark hair hung over her eyes, shutting the rest of the world out. When she lifted her head, the sun had nearly set, and it was getting dark.

  She sighed and glanced back at the house. It looked so normal from out here. It almost gave her hope that the inside would be restored and whole again, that the same magic that had momentarily brought her mother back would bring the house back as well. She got up, feeling sore and wrung out from crying, and let herself back inside.

  The kitchen was stripped and empty, lit only by a bare bulb. The living room was the same, cleared of furniture, shrunken and shriveled like a fruit left to dry in the sun. Anjana swallowed down a scream, suppressed the urge to run back outside. She climbed the stairs that were narrow and steep. Upstairs, the hallway was cramped and tight, and all the doors stood ajar, peeking into small, barren cells.

  Except in her parents’ room, where the armoire still stood. It was covered in dust, as if it had been abandoned years before. A silent witness, a warning.

  Where did you go, her mother had asked. Anjana shut her eyes. Her fingers found the latch of the armoire and turned it. The hinges squealed. The inside was the way it had always been, full of her parents’ clothes, smelling of varnished wood, muslin and silk, shoe polish.

  Her grownup body was not too big to fit inside, or maybe the armoire was shifting and stretching to accommodate her. Perhaps she was shrinking. She burrowed to the very back, behind her father’s suits and her mother’s many scarves, the wood creaking under her weight as she settled in. The armoire stretched and grew around her, growing as big as the house had once been.

  The door to the armoire closed, shutting out the gray light. The latch clicked.

  “Come and find me,” Anjana whispered.

  LET DOWN, SET FREE

  Dear Bobby:

  I figure you’ll be the first person they’ll call. The ink’s barely dry on our divorce papers, after all, and you’re still listed as my next of kin. Hell, the state hasn’t even sent me the new house title yet, the one with only my name on it, all by its lonesome self. In some bureaucratic parallel universe, we’re still living together in wedded bliss.

  Now, I told myself that this letter wouldn’t be bitter, but that’s probably a lie. I told myself that it would be straightforward, and then laughed at the audacity of that fib. You always liked to accuse me of talking around things, and I never could disagree with you. But that’s the nice thing about a letter: it provides a captive audience. No interruptions, no impatience, no eye rolling. You’re going to damn well let me tell this story in my own time.

  So here’s the first thing: the floating trees. Have you been following this story? I wasn’t, though I know more about them now, obviously: big-ass seedpods that look just like a milkweed fluff, with a network of flat, feathery branches, dense as a cloud and just as light. More of them after every full moon, like inflatable oak trees floating through the air with the greatest of ease. They’ve been spotted everywhere from the Carolinas to Florida, but nobody’s sure exactly where they’re coming from or what kind of plant they grow into.

  Personally, I was too busy being miserable to pay much attention. Getting a divorce didn’t leave much room for other concerns. When you see the rest of your lonely life stretching out ahead of you like rusty railroad tracks, everything else sort of fades into the background. Until this afternoon.

  I still take my walks up to the cliffs by the river every day, just after lunch. It clears my head. The house is too quiet now that nobody’s playing godawful hillbilly music by some hack that should be shot for his crimes against the mandolin. Anyway, I was on the part of the trail that butts up against the Morgan’s property when I spotted a floating tree in one of their pastures. Some of the branches were caught in the fencing wire. It had thoroughly spooked Nancy’s quarter horses,
who had fled to the far side of field, snorting and eyeballing the invader.

  I had to let Nancy know. It was only neighborly, after all. I know I’m not much of a neighbor, but Nancy’s been sending her grandnephew over to mow the front yard, since it became apparent I wasn’t going to do it after you left. Half the neighbors avoid me, like having your husband run off with one of his interns is a contagious disease, while the others keep offering to set me up with bachelor cousins or uncles. Nancy just sends over a fine-looking college boy to mow my lawn bare-chested once a week. Bless that woman.

  Nancy opened the door, and after exchanging the necessary pleasantries about the lovely spring weather, I told her, “There’s one a-them floating trees in your east pasture. The horses are pretty spooked.”

  “Oh, sugar,” said Nancy. “Let me get my boots on.”

  We walked together back to the pasture, chatting amiably about her grandnephew and the price of gasoline and what-all else. I do still love the way Kentuckians talk, sweet and smooth like their whiskey.

  We crested the slight rise, and Nancy jumped a little when she saw the tree, caught against the fence.

  “Oh!” she said. “Oh, it’s so...”

  She couldn’t seem to think of an adjective, and neither could I, so I nodded and said, “It sure is.”

  Even though I can describe all the features of a floating tree, it’s hard to describe how this one made me feel. I’d seen footage of them moving through a landscape of blue sky and clouds, but the shots don’t give you any sense of their enormity, or how it was constantly in motion, straining to catch the smallest breeze. The tree had presence.

  “It’s lovely,” she said, and I could tell she meant it, that she felt the same way I did. “I didn’t know they were so...”

  “Me neither.”

  “It seems such a shame to burn it,” she said.

  “What? Burn it?” It seemed like blasphemy, Bobby. More than that, it seemed cruel.

  “Well, sure, honey. That’s what the government said to do if one landed on your property. Call it in to some hotline and then burn the thing so it don’t germinate.”

  It seemed like one thing too much. I could handle the divorce, the quiet of the days and nights spent alone. I could handle knowing I’ll probably die a lonely old woman, stuck in the house I won as a consolation prize for our failed marriage.

  But I could not stand to let this tree go up in flames just because the wind died in the wrong place. I’d have rather seen our house burn down—all the last reminders of the years we scraped some happiness together—than that tree.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t call it in. I’ll take care of it somehow.”

  Nancy looked at me, probably thinking that I couldn’t even take care of my own damned lawn without her help. But she put up both her hands and said, “Tell you what. I’m gonna move my horses over to the north pasture. Get it out of my fencing wire and then we’ll figure something out.”

  It took me twenty minutes to untangle that thing from the fence. The seed felt warm in my hands, probably from sitting in the sun. Its branches waved and rustled above my head. What would it be like, I wondered, to see it planted? What kind of soil did it need to set down roots? What would it grow into?

  My hands on the smooth, wrinkled casing of the seed; my fingers wrapped around the rough bark of the trunk. Tell you this, Bobby: it felt like touching a lover for the first time. Not in the heat of sex, but in that giddy flush when you realize you can touch someone, as much as you like. Now you’ve got permission, and you can run your hands over his shoulder or slap him on butt when he gets fresh while you’re cooking dinner.

  After I got it free, the wind picked up, and the seed nearly lifted itself out of my arms. I latched onto it, and it damn near pulled me off my feet.

  I suppose that’s where I got the idea. Where the seed of it germinated, you might say.

  (I always hated your puns, Bobby, but I find I miss them.)

  I looked up into the sky through those gray branches, with that seed pressing warm against my belly and chest, and I felt like—well, the way I’d felt with you, about a million years ago. Young and alive and ready to make some real questionable choices.

  “Melissa,” Nancy said from behind me. “You get that tree free yet?”

  I suppose I don’t have to tell you that I was a little embarrassed to be caught feeling up a floating alien tree.

  “It nearly got away from me,” I said.

  Nancy came and stood next to me. “I thought that was the idea.”

  I looked back up into the crown of the tree, feeling all jumbled up inside. “It should be free,” I said.

  “It’ll just set down in someone else’s yard,” Nancy said. She was carrying a leather lead in her hand, and she swung it against her leg thoughtfully. “Seems a shame.”

  “A damn shame,” I sighed. Then I confessed, “I’m getting an idea. A real dumb idea.”

  “Are you, now,” Nancy said. “’Cause I think I’m getting a similar one.”

  We looked at each other, two old women standing in muddy meadow. And after a second, we both grinned. Nancy handed me the lead, and I lassoed it around the trunk of the tree. Together, we towed it back to her barn.

  When Nancy offered me “Tea, or something stronger?” I took her up on the latter. We sat on her front porch, drinking her husband’s bourbon. We’d roped the tree behind her barn, hidden from the road, and I could just see the tops of its branches.

  “It’s picking up some,” Nancy said. “The wind.”

  I nodded. I’d noticed.

  “I got an old saddle I wouldn’t miss,” she added, like she was just making conversation.

  “Lord, Nancy.” I set my glass of bourbon down. “Are we really gonna go through with this damn fool idea?”

  “Not we, girl. Just you. God knows I can barely keep my seat on a horse these days, and they’re stuck on the ground. You’re young enough to make it work.”

  She didn’t add anything else, but I know what she was thinking: she had Tom to think of, and her kids, and the nieces and nephews and grandnephews and all. If I got killed, only you and Nancy would mourn me. The rest of my family would think it’s only what I deserved for running off with a balding hillbilly from Bumblefuck, Kentucky.

  (Mother’s words, dear. Not mine. I always thought your receding hairline made you look sophisticated.)

  I had nothing and nobody. And instead of feeling trapped by that thought, God help me, I felt freed by it.

  “I’ll fetch that old saddle soon as you’re done with your drink,” Nancy said. “You can get the wheelbarrow out of the barn.”

  I went home long enough to pack a little bag: granola bars, raincoat, wool blanket, all the rope I could find, and the emergency bottle of Pappy Van Winkle. If I was going to die doing this crazy thing, I sure as hell wasn’t going to die sober, nor drunk on the cheap stuff.

  The moon was coming up as we wheeled the seed up to the cliffs that overlook the river, the moon just a few days past fullness. It took ages to get there, trying to keep the tree’s branches from getting tangled up in the maples and oaks along the path. Each step we took, I tried to talk myself out of this stupid, dangerous plan. I’d likely kill myself. At the very least, I was probably breaking some law or another, and it was impossible to think nobody would notice. And yet, we kept walking, listening to the music of the hollow branches rustling.

  By the time we arrived at the cliffs, the moon was high above the horizon, and the sun was just sinking below it. Come summer, these cliffs will be populated with local teenagers. They’ll sunbathe, dare each other to jump into the water. Maybe some of them will sneak back here after dark to get drunk, fool around. You and I walked up here together when we were first looking at buying the house, and again just after we’d bought it: we made love just like teenagers, only with better booze and less fumbling.

  But it was never our spot. It was always mine, where I took my bad moods and suspicions and tears
. Now it was where I carried a strange invader, a tree-sized seedpod that even now was catching the strengthening wind.

  I set the seed down on the ground, only a few feet from the edge of the cliff, keeping one hand on the rope we’d lashed around the trunk like a pair of reins.

  “Ready?” Nancy said.

  “Like hell,” I answered. She held out her hand, and I took it. The old hag even had the gall to slap my butt as I got into the saddle we’d roped to it.

  We sat there, the tree and Nancy and I, considering the edge of the cliff.

  “I feel like a damn fool,” I said. I touched the tree for reassurance, trying to pull back some of the warm glow that had infused me back in the pasture. Lord, maybe this was why the government was telling people to burn the things. The trees got inside your head, inspired you to all kinds of foolishness.

  “Well, you look—”

  I never got a chance to find out what Nancy thought I looked like. A gust of wind picked the tree and I up and tossed us into the air.

  I screamed as we tumbled over the edge of the cliff. I shut my eyes, pressing my face into the seed’s trunk, the stiff fibers scratching my face. I might have peed myself the tiniest bit.

  Then I realized I wasn’t falling. I opened my eyes, still clinging to the trunk, and looked cautiously around. We were floating, a few dozen feet above the river, level with the canopies of all the earth-bound trees rooted below. As the wind picked up, the seed tilted, catching the passing breeze in its branches, lifting us higher. I sucked in lungfuls of the night air as we drifted, my weight apparently negligible in the strong wind.

  Nancy was whooping it up on the cliff, just like one of those teenagers. As I looked back and waved, she fell onto her butt, hands at her mouth. She got smaller and smaller, then disappeared entirely.

  I have never held to it when people say you should never look back. When we took off, the tree and I, I craned my neck until I could see our house—it’s still ours, even though that new deed is probably in the mail. It looked tiny from up here. All those times when I’d rattled against its walls like a marble in an otherwise empty box, they shrank in my memory as the house shrank in my sight, and eventually, they’ll both recede into nothing at all.