The Almanac Branch (10 page)

She stared because she wasn't too sure she wanted to be an apricot tonight, since usually being an apricot meant that it was going to hurt. So she worked on making up fire-animals that flickered off the logs. A bark ember in the fireplace popped against the screen there, then fell to the hearth where it paled from peach to white, and shrank until it was no longer an independent glowing bulb but a fragment of char. It reminded her first of the gills of a fish, the osprey's pike's gills, the gills on the salmon that Faw had caught on the river in Maine and brought back with him packed in ice. Now the ember became a shrew's tooth, like the one her uncle Vernon had given her with instructions not to make more than three wishes on it, lest it turn back into a real shrew that would come and get her. For safety's sake she had never bothered to make any wishes on the tooth, and doubted its miraculous powers, anyhow, since Uncle Vernon was a practical joker, as Faw always said, and because it looked more like just a person's tooth, stained yellow and chipped. Then she saw the ember turn into a monkey's face and, last, black as a poppy seed. Faw in the chair by the bed hadn'twitnessed any of these occurrences that had reshaped the room in which he was sitting. Smelling nothing, ignoring the monkey-face fire, he went on reading aloud to Grace, even as she closed her eyes, and left the dying fire behind, and decided that since she wasn't sleepy enough yet, she would take the apricots away with her into another story, a very different one, all her own.

“That's all for tonight,” was what her father said. It always startled her when he spoke again in his regular tone of voice, and not in the storytelling tone.

“No, more, please read more,” she pleaded, from a pocket in the megrim.

“You're sleeping through the whole story.”

“No, I want more.”

He read another half-page from the “Tale of Ali bin Bakkar and of Shams al-Nahar.” Shahrazad's voice rose back into that of her father, or so it was she perceived it, and she closed her eyes once more, and heard “… I know that I am about to be lost past recourse, and the cause of my destruction is naught but love and longing and excess of desire and distraction,” and as Ali bin Bakkar beseeched Allah to deliver him from his perilous predicament, Grace swooned, or thought she did (her father heard her merely snore, which made him smile a little as he closed the volume of
The Arabian Nights
and placed it on her bedside table).

He ran his palm over her forehead, and watched her lids flutter and race over the fluctuations of her moving, dreaming eyes. He whispered goodnight to his daughter and turned her lamp off. Finding himself distracted in the room, he stood listening to her breathe, and used the rhythm of her lungs as a frame in which he might bring himself back from the voice of the story to the preoccupations of his own incautious dealings. A pale, unconcentrated light split through the branches of the tree out her window, entered, and coaxed patterns out of the wallpaper; eunuchs, the caliph, Ali and Abu al-Hasan, graven gold and sherbet. The clock struck down the hall. He left the room.

And then it was once upon a time, and the wasps came, as unable to recognize her for the girl she was as to resist that apricot perfume which emanated from her skin. With the shimmery needles that dangled from their abdomens they pricked her along her neck and temples, causing her to feel sick to her human stomach. It hurt to wince. She tried to stay calm and quiet and pure of mind. There was an instant of tumbling down a set of marble stairs that weren't the stairs in Scrub Farm. These cold stairs had been polished, for the feel of the veined stone treads as they rippled under her and kneaded the backs of her thighs, one step after the other, was like razors.

On looking closer it became clear the stairs were not marble, but were fashioned of brilliantly sparkling wasps. As they stung her she got bruised, and then she began to wonder whether the wasps were not wasps, were not stairs, but were fragments of light carried in the arms of a summery wind. Wind like those sandy mistrals or williwaws or siroccos she read about in school, wind like Shahrazad's desert wind, astringent wind that bore these dead wasps and chips of electricity shaped like wings in its wake.

What followed was the vertigo. Where the wasp-wind was hard to see, whirling and piercing in the apricot tree, the vertigo was, as an agent of changed perception, impossible to see. It was not that Grace was dizzy. Grace was central, was in the middle of it all, and she wasn't moving. The room was what was in a twirl. Grace's head, cradled in her pillow, lay still, while the walls, the fireplace, the bureau, the ceiling, grew dense until in a lavish silent explosion they broke off into a kind of marine plant life that was (as with everything) composed of light.

The other apricots fell from the tree and the wasps carried on williwaw calmed down a bit, and more nonchalantly began to take advantage of her as they burrowed up her nostrils, and snuggled, comfortable and menacing, into the depths of her ears. The vertigo, however, clipped her stem just like that, snip, just like a pair of good, sharp garden shears, and down she plummeted through the layers and levels of suckers, earning her nausea as she fell. At this point vomit restored dampness to her flying world and she, as girl-apricot, was wet once more, and full.

There was, down in her half-conscious, exhausted, thrumming self the hope of what she knew would next come toward her just as the ground comes rushing to the apricot that has dropped through branches of the tree to earth. The scent, the solitude, the wasps, the wind, the vertigo, were steps taken—descending—toward the aura.

What an adult word, she thought. “Aura.”

And if she were to look in the bureau mirror, having given up the game of the apricot tree, and the tales and notions of wasps and wind (which got her through the pains of it), she knew that what she would witness was just what she'd witnessed before. She got up quietly and looked. And she saw it, just as she thought she would—saw herself, saw her hair as a pink-blue halo of icicles and she had no face, no face in her head, and above all she understood as she had before that she had no
idea
that she ever had a face. Neither face as something forgotten, nor face as something possible.

It was horrible, it was beautiful. Her visual analysis of her room and of her body was being impaired even while her sensorium—there was a word she liked that she had learned from Dr. Trudeau, she liked it because it seemed majestic—was otherwise clear, and the megrim was on her and there was no going forward and no going back. Her hair was made of a kind of ice that would not melt because it wasn't even freezing, or anything. It was so pretty she wanted to comb it, the hair light, the rays, and she smiled a lipless smile knowing that it was all hers and she saw it, was the only person who could see it, with eyes that must have been hidden deep in the void at the halo center.

When her father had shut the door, stealthy as a country owl out her bedroom window the dead boy climbed a little higher in the tree and looked in on her. That tree was his tree, the tree where he had lived ever since he had fallen out of the house they'd made up there in the branches with planks of lumber filched from the building site down the road.

Grace didn't weep when Desmond died, for one reason: she didn't believe it was true—not that Mother would lie to her; it was just Mother didn't know the truth. None of them did. Death might have taken Desmond away from all of them, but not from her. His flight from the limb to the pavement had occurred without a scream, without the merest capitulation to fear. He was so brave, was Desmond. It was as if he went down to his destiny with mute exuberance, and when she meditated on what it must have felt like being at the center of such a deed, giving the body over to its quick journey from the reluctant branch through close night air to reach the earth, she found she could invent it up to the moment of impact.

All Grace could imagine was that impact meant coming into a sort of new freedom wherein the gist of what was human in him, his flesh and personality, was simply torn and shuffled, like a silhouette under scissors. In time she came to understand that death did not care for all her little metaphors, her little hopes and sorrows. It had no intention of giving him or anyone else back to life just like that, for free. Death was selfish as a miser, and strong as a bull. It broke Desmond, and it broke him, it seemed, for a reason. She might never know what that reason was, but for her to be able to visit him after that she, too, would have to break, or at least rend. It was a necessary exchange, and she was willing to do her part in making it take place.

The branches of the tree seemed to miss him, though not as much as she did, and when they scratched across the skin of the glass of her window under the force of the wind—the breath of Arabia cooled by the sea—she looked to see if he was out there again, tiptoeing over bark and rustling leaves. Sometimes he was, sometimes he wasn't. Sometimes she asked him to come, but he came in when he felt like it. She soon understood that her desire to commune with Desmond seldom coincided with his materialization. The one thing she did feel certain of was this: he depended in some enigmatic and profound way on the tree. Without the slightest fleck of proof she was steadfast in her conviction that without the tree Desmond would be disenchanted. He would be cut off from her forever. She wept with gratitude that she'd been able to talk her father out of having the tree sawed down.

The limbs groaned and gave tonight and here he was up in the tree again, naked except for his origami hat made of newspaper, ship-shaped, and she wondered how he lived in that wild cherry tree without freezing or starving—he never once ate the food she laid out in its branches for him, the warm chicken giblets in the tinfoil tray, the lamb chop she took from the kitchen—she knew that the cherries were inedible. Desmond had bird's balance in his body now, but he wasn't hungry. When she told him to eat, he stared at her and screwed his face into the most quizzical look. He didn't understand anymore what eating was. Tails flashing like plumes, the squirrels who bounded over from other trees were first to get to the pieces of bread she put out using long sticks lashed together. What the squirrels didn't want the starlings and jays carried away in their beaks.

Desmond watched her through the rippled old glass. You could see through him, but he wasn't a ghost. He was like an image superimposed in a film upon another image—that was how he looked; solid and palpable and real, but, well, a little translucent. For her part, she assumed that out there in the snow-tipped branches of his tree he felt sympathetic pains toward her suffering, but she wondered sometimes how could a person in his position—he must have powers, surely, living where he lived—sit by like an idle sovereign, while her face disappeared in those coffee-glitter lights, leaving a doughnut in the mirror, and nothing more, no eyes, no lips, no face.

Somehow, though she never told him in so many words of her feelings, he had changed. His attentions were not tendered in a way she might have wanted. She knew that tonight he would come to her, having been distant, unapproachable, and would burn clean through the glass, burn clear into her forehead, in a way the lights in the old ailanthus had never done.

Desmond bided his time until his sister—her skin flushed with megrim, her hair damp, her head dully pounding—was drowsy. Djuna locked, as always, the double-sash window, and while Grace could hardly stand she crept from the bureau mirror to the window, eyes closed against the icicle lights, and turned the latch. She wanted him to realize that even though she didn't know if he would come in or not, she was waiting. She looked at him across the night glass and thought she saw him nod. Sensing that if she didn't stand at the window and invite him he was more likely to join her, she went back to bed, and curled into a chrysalis of expectancy. He had developed an indefinable, contrary personality, had Desmond, and she knew that this was all she could do.

She waited for what seemed a very long time. A fluttery and scant breeze—where from?—cooled her forehead. And then he drifted, was the word, drifted rather than leaped or even flew from the branch where he lived, to the sill of the window.

The window drew up quietly, or seemed to. Had the breeze come from there? The light people had never been able to do that. As he came closer, she wondered how it must be for one who is used to living in a tree, the leafy-in-summer, barren-in-winter cherry tree, to be inside her room. She had read about the flying fish, and other beasts whose needs and habits took them from one world into another (what were we to make of the earthbound caterpillar destined to flutter away into the air with its painted wings?)—and what was Desmond's sense of coming from there to here? She would have asked him, but she knew that he wouldn't understand the question.

Grace opened her eyes and studied him as he knelt beside her, saw the details of his face, fine hair between his narrow eyebrows, the fanning wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, wrinkles that were more common in a man much older than he must have been. His boldness was unexpected. After brushing aside the comforter and sheets, he carried her from her bed and placed her on the old prayer rug by the dying fire, then raised her hips off the floor, pulled her pajama bottoms down to her ankles, rolled her over. At first she trembled pleasantly to the feel of the wool against her belly. When he ran the stiff bristles of the coal broom over her buttocks Grace's megrim crimped just like it was made of foil or curtain cloth and sprang right out of the side of her head, and she felt liberated all of a sudden from its dry, idiotic pain. She dared not move. The andirons stood like sentinels over her, smiling and knowing, and the poker and shovel and log forks she could see were instruments any of which might find their way into his hands. Inasmuch as they might, she knew that they ought to, in a way, ought to because she felt it was she who must atone for what happened; and since everything in life is first the discovery of balance versus imbalance, second the understanding of how absolution may come to pass, third the will to sacrifice—she knew he would never do anything to her that would be unmerciful. He had found balance she knew just by the way he was able to walk the branches of the tree like some seasoned acrobat. He had found understanding, she could just tell, by the way he'd carried her, and touched her, and by how he had seemed somehow to become a man, unlike the boy under the osprey nest who knew nothing. She was willing to sacrifice whatever he might want her to sacrifice, and knew that he wouldn't want something that she wouldn't happily be able to give him. He would never punish her, as such. This was a thought not made of words or intelligence, rather like a sensation that she kept before her as the boy spanked her with the coal brush, rather methodically, while at the same time caressing her cheek with his free hand. She kissed his hand and her pillow (how had she been moved back into her bed?) not caring which was which but just rejoicing in being able to touch him again and be touched by him. As she kissed, her experience became concentrated at the base of her spine. It was warm.