Out on a Limb (5 page)

Because of Dad’s determination to be totally legal, we didn’t have any campfires our first month at the treehouse. City by-laws forbid open fires on residential property. However, Mom and Dad’s friend Clarkson researched a loophole. On July 23 he told us that Grand Oak was an exception to the by-law. The grounds of Grand Oak Manor were so big that they counted as rural acreage, and therefore open fires were allowed. We made a big campfire that night to celebrate. Campfires became my passion. After Clarkson’s legal opinion, I made one every single night.

One evening late in July, Mom and Dad came riding home to the bald patch of ground by the stream where I was just starting our nightly campfire. Dropping her bike, Mom asked the same question that she asked every night. “Any sign of Great-great-aunt Lydia?”

I was down on my knees, blowing into my teepee of kindling. “Mom,” I said. “As if I wouldn’t mention it.”

“Still not, eh,” Mom said. She sat on a stump beside me. “Well, you know, I think it’s time somebody broke the ice. I think we should invite her for dinner.”

“How are we going to invite her to dinner?” Dad asked, getting off his own bike. “She’s a senior citizen. She’s not going to want to scramble up that ladder to the treehouse.”

“Dinner doesn’t have to be in the treehouse,” Mom said. “We could entertain her down here on the ground. Do what we’re doing tonight. Make a campfire. Roast hot dogs. Marshmallows.”

“I don’t know if that’s Great-great-aunt Lydia’s style,” Dad said, putting his bike down.

“We don’t know her style one way or another,” Mom said. “But we could do something fancier, if you think that’s better. Rosie’s birthday is coming up.We could have a party.”

I liked this idea. I had been warned not to expect a birthday party this year because:

a) Most of our cash had gone to fix up the treehouse, and we had to really watch our spending until Mom and Dad got their new student loans in September;

b) All my friends lived across town, and it would be hard to get them to the treehouse. (I thought this was a lame reason, for people as resourceful as we were.); and

c) I was going to be twelve years old, and was therefore, according to Mom and Dad, too mature for birthday parties. I felt a pang when they told me this, but I didn’t want to argue that I was not too mature.

“I think inviting Great-great-aunt Lydia is an excellent idea,” I said. If we invited her, we’d buy lots of treat food. Plus, she would give me a really good present. Something worthy of a rich, eccentric aunt. Something expensive and unusual. But mainly, I was curious to meet her.

“I don’t know,” Dad said.

Suddenly I thought of something. I got the torn blue strip from my wallet.

“Great-great-aunt Lydia wanted to invite
us
,” I said. “That’s what she means by ‘ation fo someday soon’. I think she’s talking about an
invit
ation someday soon.”

Dad took the torn letter, then handed it back. “Lots of words end with ‘ation,’” he said. “And if she wanted to give an invitation, she wouldn’t have ripped it up.”

“I know!” I said. “She wanted
us
to invite
her
. She was hoping for an invitation someday soon. But then she realized that wasn’t polite, and that’s why she ripped the letter up! And she’s been hoping to hear from us ever since. And she’ll be so, so, so happy to get invited to my birthday party!”

“I don’t know,” Dad said again. “So far she isn’t making any trouble for us. Maybe we should leave well enough alone.”

“You think a birthday party invitation is going to cause her to make trouble for us?” Mom asked. “And your reasoning is ...?”

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Dad shrugged. “If she comes face to face with us, she might decide to drive us out.”

“Why would she decide that?”

“Because of a long history of family conflict.”

“Family conflict that doesn’t involve you or me or the girls. Family conflict from years before we were even born. Honestly, David, I don’t know why you insist on thinking of her as an enemy! She’s a lonely old lady living all by herself with no family of her own. She’ll fall in love with the girls at first sight. One look at how cute they are and that family conflict will be history. She’ll be serving them tea in the turret three times a week.”

“You really think so,” Dad said.

“I really do.”

“Okay.” Dad sighed, but he seemed careful not to sigh too hard. “So we’ll invite her.” He picked up the axe and began chopping wood.

We planned my birthday party as we roasted hot dogs over the campfire. “We should send a written invitation,” Mom said, rotating her alder twig to brown her hot dog evenly. “That’s more respectful than telephone.” After dinner, Mom got a pen and paper and returned to the campfire. As the rest of us toasted marshmallows she wrote a letter requesting the pleasure of Great-great-aunt Lydia’s company. At the bottom she put RSVP.

“What’s my cell number, Rosie?” Mom asked. “I guess I should know, but I never give it out, and I never call myself.”

I had to think for a moment, because most of my calls to Mom were through the speed-dial on Dad’s cell. I told her and she wrote it down and folded the letter into the envelope. In her very best handwriting she addressed the envelope to Miss Lydia Florence Augustine McGrady, Grand Oak Manor, Number 9 Bellemonde Drive.

We talked about how to deliver it. We couldn’t get to her front door mail slot without either trespassing through the Manor garden, or scaling the stone wall that separated the estate grounds from Bellemonde Drive. Neither seemed like a good idea, so the next day Mom and Dad brought the invitation to the university, and mailed it back to the estate they’d just come from.

I was impatient for Great-great-aunt Lydia’s reply. “Check your voice mail,” I kept telling Mom, but whenever she did there was still no message from Great-great-aunt Lydia. “We did give her the right number, didn’t we,” Mom asked as she checked her voice mail three days before the party.

“Yeah,” I said, and I recited it.

Mom pushed buttons on her phone. “I hate to tell you this, Rosie,” she said, “but that’s not my phone number. You switched the seven and the nine.”

“I did?”

“You did.”

“Oh no. Oh Mom. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Rosie,” Mom said. “She knows where to find us. I’m sure if she wasn’t coming, she’d get a message to us somehow.”

We carried on with the party plans. In preparation for Great-great-aunt Lydia, we built a stone fire ring, to reassure her that we were not about to set her grounds ablaze. We rolled a hollow stump from far away in the woods, and chopped it into an armchair for her.

Two days before my birthday, Mom said “I guess we’d better go order a birthday cake.” We had a long tradition of homemade birthday cakes, with amateur rosettes and crooked writing and crumbs in the icing, but the treehouse had no oven. Mom and I set off on our bikes to custom-order a professional cake. After locking our bikes in the supermarket parking lot we went to the bakery counter. “My
God
these are expensive!” Mom declared. She sounded insulted. “And big! Look at that one, it must be a tenth of an acre! We’d only eat a corner. We couldn’t even fit the leftovers in our fridge. No, forget this.” Argument did not change Mom’s mind. We left the supermarket, cakeless.

The next afternoon Mom made an oven by tenting scrap aluminum over the fire ring, and she baked a birthday cake over the evening fire. Bits of ash stuck in the batter, and when the cake was turned out of the pan we saw that the bottom had been burned to pure black carbon. Knowing Mom, I expected her to say that it would be perfectly fine once it was iced. She didn’t though. Sensibly, she threw the whole cake onto the embers, like the chunk of fuel it was already well on its way to becoming.

The next day the sound of hammering woke me up. “Happy Birthday,” Tilley yelled when I peered out from my bunk curtain. She came up the bunk ladder with a present flopping in its gift-wrap. Mom and Dad stood with their coffee mugs, watching me open it. I unwrapped slowly to draw out the experience. I reached into the loosened wrapping. It was ... a fleece jacket. “A fleece jacket,” I exclaimed. I was exclaiming falsely, from pure politeness. This was a disappointing present.

“It’s kind of a practical present,” Dad apologized.

“But we have something else that’s not so sensible,” Mom said.

“And you’re gonna really like it.” Tilley tugged my pyjama sleeve. “Come and see!”

She led me out on the porch and pointed at the branch that rose through the trap door. Our ladder no longer ended at porch level: new wooden rungs continued up the branch and disappeared into the oak leaves above.

“My present is up there?” I asked.

Tilley nodded at high speed. “Go up,” she urged.

I climbed up the angled branch. Out beyond the porch banister I glanced down, and the distance between my top-stitched running shoe and the meadow was shocking. I made myself continue. This birthday ladder went higher and higher, and further and further out, until I reached a plywood platform. I climbed onto it. Behind and below me was the treehouse roof, which I’d never seen before. In front of me was a rope that hung from a higher branch. “Pull up the rope,” my family yelled from their cluster on the porch.

Hand over hand I reeled it in, watching it coil up on the platform. The rope seemed to go on forever, but finally I reached a plywood disk on a big knot.

“It’s a swing!” Tilley shouted out. I’d been afraid of that.

“Give it a try,” called Mom.

They had not been kidding when they said this present was not so sensible. This present was insane.
What are you thinking?
I wanted to shout down at my family. Are you the same parents who always forbade swimming until after one full hour of digestion? The ones who never let me run with a popsicle? The ones who kept the cough syrup and plant food in a padlocked cupboard? And now that I’ve survived twelve years, you try to kill me?

“You’re not scared, are you sweetie?” Mom asked.

“Go Rosie! It’s so fun,” Tilley called.

“Just hang on tight and you’ll be fine,” Dad called. “Really.”

I tucked the disk between my legs, and then I just stood there for a long time, holding the rope and taking in the aerial view of the meadow. Jump, I kept telling myself. Sometimes I felt such a rush of determination that for a split second I’d think I actually had jumped, and then I’d realize that I was still just standing there on the branch. Then I did jump. I was surprised I’d done it, and I was sorry too. There was a long, sickening free fall. Then the rope snapped tight and I flew out across the meadow. Speed stretched my cheeks backward. Branches and clouds zipped around. I zoomed to the sky and hung in mid-air for a moment. Then I dropped and swung backward, my brain and stomach left behind in the rush. Then forward again, then backward, over and over, in arcs that were a bit smaller each time. When the swing was almost still, I jumped to the ground. It was the best birthday present I’d ever had.

Tilley and I spent most of the day on the rope swing. In the hot part of the afternoon we splashed around in our dammed-up pool. At five we got dressed and helped with party preps. By seven we were all set. The tree-stump armchair was nicely padded with all four of our bunk pillows. The table, made from a plank borrowed from our bridge, was set with a bedsheet tablecloth and a bouquet of flowers picked from the meadow. Nine shish kebabs were threaded onto alder twigs, ready for roasting. The vegetable plate was artistically arranged under a veil of plastic wrap, and so was the fruit. Bottles of root beer chilled in the stream, and a bottle of white wine too. There was nothing left to do but wait for Great-great-aunt Lydia, who was due any minute.

We tried not to wait too hard. We tried talking, but our sentences kept drifting into thin air, and our gazes kept drifting toward Grand Oak Manor. The meadow and the lawn and the mansion stayed as still as a poster. We watched the landscape for Great-great-aunt Lydia. Our expectation was so intense that at the first flicker of movement I nearly yelled that it was her, before I realized that what I saw was a coyote, three feet tall, with four legs and a tail.

At seven-thirty Mom uncapped the root beer. At eight she removed the plastic wrap. Eventually we lit the fire, and as the darkness settled we roasted the shish kebabs. No one sat in the comfy tree-stump armchair, which seemed occupied by Great-great-aunt Lydia’s absence. I tried to pretend that I was not disappointed that she hadn’t come. My birthday cake substitute was s’mores, but for Great-great-aunt Lydia alone, Mom had bought a single chocolate éclair. She and Dad took turns eating it. “I’m sure she wanted to come,” Mom said, swallowing her half of the éclair. “I can feel it. Something’s prevented her.” Dad said nothing.

It’s impossible to stick birthday candles into graham wafers, so we tucked them into little paper boats, one for each year. Mom lit the candles as Tilley launched the boats. The three of them sang ‘Happy Birthday’ into the pure darkness. I watched the tiny lights wiggle down the black stream, chased by the shimmer of their reflections. “Make a wish as the last candle disappears,” Dad said. “New tradition.” I did.

I wished super hard, the way you’re supposed to for wishes to come true.

As we were returning to the campfire I looked up to see eyes glinting in the distance. “Quick, the flashlight, who’s got it?” I whispered, but by the time I lit up the darkness, the eyes had gone.

We stayed at the campfire until Tilley’s eyelids began to close. As we climbed the ladder to the treehouse, stars spangled between the leaves. By headlamp, I got ready for bed, draping my clothes onto the loaded hook at the foot of my bunk. They hung there dutifully for a moment, then slid to the floor. I climbed down the bunk ladder to get them and on my way back up, I pulled on my jammed drawer.

For once, it slid open. As I went to stuff my clothes inside, something glinted in the thin beam of my headlamp. I reached into the dark drawer and felt a pair of scissors. As I drew them out I saw they weren’t ordinary scissors at all. They had gold handles in the shape of a bird, with long, silver blades for the beak. I brought them close and read the engraving. LFAMcG. Lydia Florence Augustine McGrady. The handles said 18 k, for eighteen karat gold. The silver blades were skewed, but they were razor sharp. The scissors were beautiful.