Out on a Limb (3 page)

“But what was
his
reason,” I asked.

“I don’t know. Great-grampa never said. He tended to keep his past to himself. And he never, ever talked about family. The rift was Great-grampa’s big secret.”

About the only secret we’d ever had in my family was where the leftover Halloween candy was hidden, so the idea of an old, important secret intrigued me.“But why do you
think
,” I asked.

“I don’t know, Rosie,” Dad said. “This is not one of those things that I know but won’t tell you. It’s a complete mystery to me.”

“Great-grampa Tavish married Isobel pretty young, didn’t he?” Mom asked. “Maybe Magnus didn’t approve of the marriage.”

“Could be,” said Dad.

“And then didn’t he leave the country for years and years and design theatre costumes in England?” Mom said. “Maybe Magnus thought that was a dumb career choice for the son of a lumber baron.”

“Maybe.” Dad stood up. “Come on, we’ve got another full day here tomorrow. We should go back to the apartment and get some rest.”

The days leading up to June 30 sped by. We measured the treehouse, and took notes, and made trip after trip to Home Depot. On June 29 we had a yard sale. It was weird to see our toaster and our television and our computer monitor on the grass outside of our apartment building, blinking at the daylight. It was weird to watch strangers walk off with my ice skates and Tilley’s Barbie Dream House. It was necessary, though, to get rid of most of our stuff. There’s not much storage space in a treehouse.

The day after the yard sale was demolition day. The foreman of the demolition crew stood in his hard hat in our apartment while Mom knelt on the floor, taping up cardboard boxes. “So how are we doing here,” he asked, his voice bouncing around our emptied-out living room.

“Good. We’re out of here.” Mom straightened and held a cardboard box out to him. He looked a bit surprised, but he unfolded his arms and took it. I looked around our apartment one last time, but there wasn’t much to see. Nothing was left but the wire coat hangers pinging in the closet. I picked up my cardboard box and followed my family. We all stepped over the yellow tape that surrounded our apartment building. DANGER! DO NOT ENTER! it said.

“Thanks for your patience,” Dad said to the foreman. “No problem,” the foreman said, taking his cardboard box out to our car. We all loaded our boxes into the trunk. The demolition crew sent a German shepherd through our apartment building to make sure there was no one still in there, unconscious in a bathroom or something. Then they sounded a big horn that was enough to make anyone jump out of his skin, unconscious or not.

We watched the demolition from across the street, which was as close as the crew would let us get. The wrecking truck lumbered closer to our building, manoeuvred its boom into position and swung its wrecking ball. There was a surprisingly delicate sound of shattering glass. Our living room and bedroom windows were gone, and other windows too. The wrecking ball swung again, and this time the sound was more the sort of major crashing you would expect. The stucco, whose glass bits we had picked out so patiently, fell away in big slabs. The wrecking ball swung again and again. Our side of the apartment building wobbled, then hesitated, then collapsed into billowing dust. The home I’d lived in all my life was gone.

We drove toward the woods and parked. We transferred everything from our car trunk into four rented wheelbarrows. Pushing all our worldly possessions before us, we set off on the path to our new home.

NOTEBOOK: #4

NAME: Rosamund McGrady

SUBJECT: Ripped to Shreads

It was a long way
to push a wheelbarrow. Roots the size of boa constrictors got in the way.Then there was the plywood ramp we had built to get over the stone wall that surrounded Great-great-aunt Lydia’s woods. I pushed my wheelbarrow up the ramp with all my might, but the force of gravity pushed right back. I couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been getting our stove over it. Then there was the stream. We’d bridged it with planks but I got my wheelbarrow too close to the edge. It flipped itself into the stream and took me along with it. Water flowed up my nostrils. I blinked to see Tilley’s pink pyjama top swimming in the current. “After them,” Mom pointed, and I waded downstream, slipping over river rocks. I snagged the pyjama top and flung it in an arc of droplets to the meadow. Then I went after her pyjama bottoms, her hoodie and her undies. “My triceratops sweatshirt!” Tilley yelled, hopping as though it were a drowning child. “It’s getting away!” It looked as though the sweatshirt would slide away in the rapids, but a tangle of twigs snagged it. When I sloshed up to the sweatshirt I saw something else clinging to the criss-crossed twigs. It was a long, ragged strip of blue paper, covered with handwriting. The ink had blurred, but the torn-up words were still readable.

e McGrady

t confess it w

d forgotten th

afraid th

hope you w

ives. It turns

possessed a

tree house i

It turns o

you are who

it turns ou

e forgive m

welcome I’

e old bones

h ground.I

ation fo

someday soon

The writing was shaky, but fancy too, as though the writer had taken special handwriting lessons.

“Come on, Rosie,” Dad called. “Let’s get going.”

“Just a second,” I called back. “I’ve found something weird. I think it’s a letter. Part of one.”

“A letter ?What would a letter be doing in there?” Dad asked.

I waded upstream, the current tugging at my ankles. “I think Great-great-aunt Lydia wrote it,” I said, carefully handing the torn blue strip to Mom.

“I doubt it,” Dad said. “The Manor is downstream from here. More likely somebody upstream wrote it.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It says our name. And it mentions the treehouse.”

Mom smoothed the torn strip. “It says welcome,” she read, showing it to Dad. “It’s a letter of welcome.”

“A letter of welcome, ripped to shreds,” Dad said.

“How come she ripped it?” Tilley wanted to know.

“I wonder,” said Mom. “Maybe this is a practice copy?”

Dad looked doubtful. “And instead of putting the practice copy in the garbage or recycling, she threw it in the stream?”

“That’s bad for the environment,” Tilley said.

“Maybe the scrap is a puzzle she wants us to figure out,” I said.“

But how could she possibly know we’d find it?” Dad objected. “If the clothes hadn’t fallen in the stream, we never would have.” We all looked at each other, waiting for improved theories. Our brains were whirring away, but coming up with nothing. “Well,” said Dad, “let’s get the rest of this stuff across the bridge.” I threw Tilley’s drowned sweatshirt to the meadow and took the torn blue strip back from Mom. Folding it carefully into my wallet, I waded off to look for the rest of the letter. “I can’t find any more pieces,” I reported to my family.

They were sitting with the wheelbarrows at the meadow’s edge, dangling their feet in the stream, and passing a water bottle. I sat beside them and squirted water down my throat.We all kept looking up at the mansion, hoping for our very first glimpse of Great-great-aunt Lydia. But there was no movement.

“Okay,” Dad said. “Let’s be on our way. Last one to the giant oak is a rotten egg!”

“‘Rotten egg’ is such a lame insult,” I said, but I grabbed my wheelbarrow anyway and ran across the meadow. I reached the giant oak before anyone else, so I saw it first.

“What’s this?” Mom said, as she came barrowing up behind me. At the base of the oak tree was a big pink and yellow flower arrangement. It would have been amazing, except that it had been destroyed. It was smashed sideways on the hard ground between the oak roots. I knelt down and turned it right side up. The stems were all bent, as though every single flower had had its neck snapped.

“They must be from Great-great-aunt Lydia,” said Mom. “She must have brought them as a housewarming present. They must have fallen off the root where she left them.”

“Maybe,” said Dad.

“Well, what else,” asked Mom.

Dad shrugged. “They sure had one hard landing.”

“Well, flowers are delicate,” Mom said. “They can’t have been here long, that’s for sure. They aren’t even withered. We can probably save some.”

I helped Mom pull the broken stems out of the florist foam. I pulled out a clear plastic stick with a clip at the end. “There’s one of these things that you stick a note into,” I said. “But no note.”

“Because it’s been ripped up and thrown into the stream,” said Dad.

“Maybe a raccoon ripped it,” said Tilley. “’Cause I’ve seen raccoons at the stream, and they have real hands just almost like people.”

“Yeah, maybe Tilley,” said Dad. We all nodded, unconvinced. Once again we stood around, waiting for a good theory to materialize out of the summer air.

“Who knows,” Dad said finally.

“Can’t say I get it either,” said Mom. “Let’s unpack.”

I put a cardboard box of dishes in the dumbwaiter, climbed up to the porch and winched them up. I brought my box inside the arched doorway, into the kitchen we had made. We’d put up a whole bunch of shelves above and below the windows. In one of the six corners, we’d made a tiled counter around the giant oak branch. On the counter was a big water container with a spigot. It was going to be our kitchen tap. Right next to it was the plastic washbasin that was going to be our kitchen sink.

I opened the flaps of my box and unwound the newspaper bundles inside. I hung our mugs on our hooks, and put our plates on our shelves. Mom cut the stems of the brokennecked flowers and arranged them in a bowl on the table that folded out from the wall. I stood back to admire it all.

“Smell those lilies,” Mom said. “They’re so sweet.”

“Really sweet,” I said, breathing in.

“They make me feel sick,” Tilley said, covering her nose. It was true. The scent seemed to have gone from heavenly to poisonous in a few breaths.

“They are a bit much for such a small space,” Dad said, and we moved them to the great outdoors on the porch.

Back inside, we kept unpacking. We worked until the sunset coated everything in the treehouse with transparent colour, like apricot skin. “You kids must be famished,” Mom said, and she got a container of cold Kentucky Fried Chicken from the tiny propane fridge under the counter. Dad took out a bottle of champagne and brought it to the arched doorway. The cork flurried though oak leaves. He poured champagne for himself and Mom into Plexiglas goblets, and sparkling apple juice for Tilley and me. “A toast,” Dad said, raising his glass. “To adventure.” The four of us clinked glasses, or tried anyway. Plexiglas doesn’t clink all that well.

Long after the chicken was gone, we sat around on the treehouse porch, swatting mosquitoes and sipping our celebration beverages. The deer was back at the stream. Way across the meadow, lights were coming on in the turrets of Grand Oak Manor. So Great-great-aunt Lydia was there, I thought, even if we’d never seen her. We stared at the golden rectangles of light, hoping for other signs of life. There were none.

“Well, I for one am exhausted,” Mom said after a long silence. “Therefore, it is your bedtime.”

“Bedtime! Since when do I have a bedtime?”

“Since now that we all share a room,” Mom said, rummaging in a box on the porch. “Here. From the camping store. Our lighting system.” She handed me a sort of updated miner’s headlamp. I stretched its elastic band around my head until its compact light rested on my forehead like a third eye.

“Stylish,” I said, getting to my feet.

I’d complained about bedtime as a matter of principle, but actually I was looking forward to bed. As we walked through the arched doorway into the concentrated darkness of the treehouse, I switched on my headlamp and aimed it at the three bunks. Being grown-ups, Mom and Dad had picked the bottom one. Tilley wanted the middle to be close to Mom and Dad, so I got the top. I climbed eight feet up the wooden ladder and clambered onto my brand new foam mattress. On top of my quilt lay the green garbage bag that contained my entire wardrobe. There wasn’t much space to put my clothes away. My bunk had three drawers underneath, sort of like a captain’s bed. Like a lot of old wooden drawers, though, they were hard to open. I filled two of them but the third was jammed shut. I gave up on trying to open it and hung the rest of my clothes on the hooks that we’d screwed into the oak branches at either end of the bunks. We had put curtains around the bunks to make them all private, like the sleeping berths of trains. I pulled my curtain shut. I had enough headroom to sit up, so I changed the normal way into my pyjama top. Pants required a special method. I lay down, lifted my butt, wriggled my shorts to my knees, sat back down and pulled the shorts over my feet. Pyjama bottoms went on the same way, in reverse order. Before hanging up my shorts I took out my wallet and removed the torn blue strip of the letter we’d found in the stream. Maybe, I thought, Great-great-aunt Lydia is one of those people who can’t say anything at all unless they can think of the perfect way to say it. Maybe she’d ripped up the letter because its welcome didn’t quite match the welcome in her heart. Maybe it seemed too inky and papery compared to the welcome that she really wanted to give. I thought this was the best theory so far. I put the torn blue strip back in my wallet, and shut it in the little cupboard above my bunk. “Goodnight,” I called. I got under my quilt and switched off my headlamp.

That night I realized that what I’d always thought of as silence had actually been the buzz of the fridge and the hum of faraway traffic. The same thing for darkness. My street-lit version of darkness at the apartment was nothing compared to this. In my bunk I couldn’t see my own hand, not even when I touched it to my nose. The pure silence and total darkness of the treehouse were new to me. It was actually fascinating to see and hear absolutely nothing. I listened to the silence and I watched the darkness for as long as I could manage to stay awake.