The Light Through the Leaves Page 5

  She tried to think what to say. It had been a long time since a man had given her his number. And she didn’t know what it meant in such strange circumstances. Was he offering her his number as a park authority who was worried about her or as a man who wanted to have a drink with her?

  She felt like she’d been looking into his eyes for too long. Not because his brown irises were beautifully colored or anything like that, but because they had to be the warmest eyes she’d ever seen.

  She looked away and took the card.

  “You stay safe now.” He walked away.

  “I will,” she said to his back.

  He waved before getting in the truck.

  As the ranger’s truck rumbled out of the campground, Ellis entered the tent and cleaned up with cloths, soap, and water she’d stored in jugs. She detangled her hair as best she could. Since she’d been with Jonah, she’d worn her hair short the way he liked it. Now she was growing it. She hadn’t cut it since early in her pregnancy, and it was already down to her shoulders. But it was thick and wavy, would be too difficult to care for while camping. She should cut it off.

  No. She wanted to keep growing it. She didn’t want to see the woman who’d been deceived by Jonah every time she looked in the mirror.

  She went outside to the spigot and washed it. The temperature was in the thirties, and her head felt like a block of ice beneath the frigid water. But the shock of it was oddly satisfying. Strengthening.

  She was ready to go home.

  8

  Ellis had last seen Forest View Trailer Park the day she scattered her mother’s ashes in the river behind the trailer. Sam had stood watching, silent as always, his rigid expression betraying nothing of how he felt about his daughter’s death. Afterward, they got in his truck, packed with Ellis’s few belongings, and left for Youngstown.

  The end of her drive was the same route the school bus had taken. She knew it well, but a lot had changed. A new gas station. A strip mall where a woodlot had been. Her favorite ice-cream shop had become a nail salon.

  She stopped the car where the entrance to the trailer park should have been. There was a new sidewalk and bus stop with a glass-sheltered bench where the potholed road used to be. Three tall apartment buildings rose up beyond the bus stop.

  Ellis drove on until she found an entrance. RIVER OAKS APARTMENTS. STUDIO, 1, AND 2 BEDROOMS AVAILABLE. BEAUTIFUL RIVER VIEWS. PETS WELCOME. COME TAKE A TOUR OF YOUR NEW HOME!

  She wanted to believe she was in the wrong place. It couldn’t look this different.

  She turned the car into the apartment complex, following the curved road to an asphalt parking lot next to Building One. Where had her trailer been? Where was the forest?

  She saw distant bare oaks beyond a large expanse of mowed lawn. The thin strip of trees grew in a sinuous line. That had to be the river.

  She drove to the end of the asphalt, parked, and got out. The lawn was planted with a few young trees bound with ropes and stakes. Forest View was really gone. Even the forest. And Edith and Ed, who’d often fed Ellis when she was hungry. Libby and her two little boys. Larry, the Vietnam vet who had a ramp to his trailer for his wheelchair. He used to dump a whole bowl of Halloween candy into Ellis’s bag every year. Where had they all gone?

  She stepped into the short, snow-dusted grass. She had to see the one thing they couldn’t erase. The river.

  She walked across the long expanse of mown grass. She didn’t understand why they hadn’t left more of the forest. A big lawn was expensive to maintain. She supposed the developers had worried the forest would look too wild. Too scary. A place with snakes. A place where criminals might hide.

  Ellis almost cried when she saw how few trees the developers had left around the water. They had been removed on the opposite side of the river, too. More lawns, parking lots, and apartment buildings. Over there, the buildings were a different color, probably built by another company.

  The river looked much smaller than it had when she was a girl. It was shallow, as it often was in the winter. The water that coursed through the middle of its flat exposed banks was more like a stream than a river. The weak trickle over the rocks sounded sad to Ellis. As if the river knew what it had lost.

  She climbed down the bank into the riverbed. The trash was worse than when she’d lived there. More beer bottles and cans. There was more algae on the rocks from pollutants. She walked downstream, hoping to find the place where she’d poured her mother’s ashes. A bend to the left, a big log.

  She stepped ankle-deep into the water, letting it soak into her hiking boots. The frigid water on her skin felt good. She was with her kin.

  The river felt like a father to her. Her firstborn son was named for him. Jonah didn’t know how Ellis had chosen the boys’ names. He wouldn’t have understood. Jasper was named after the only mother that had felt true to Ellis, the wooded earth around the river, especially the stones of the riverbed. So often she had touched, collected, and meditated on those varicolored stones.

  Ellis looked around as she walked, hoping to glimpse any of her favorite plants that might have survived the first freezes of the year. She especially wanted to see the heart-shaped leaves of the violet species that used to grow there. There had been purple, lavender, white, and yellow. In college, she’d learned the genus of violets was the beautiful Latin word Viola—the only name she’d considered for her daughter.

  Jonah had loved the name, too. He’d associated it with the protagonist in Twelfth Night, one of his favorite Shakespearean plays. He’d gladly given Ellis full responsibility for naming the boys, as well. His parents had expected their firstborn male would be Jonah IV, but Ellis and Jonah hadn’t wanted another child named for the legacy of intolerance associated with the two elder Jonahs. When Ellis had chosen the names River and Jasper, Jonah’s parents had been incensed. Mary Carol even caused a scene in the hospital the day Ellis filled out the birth certificates. She’d said Ellis had coerced her son into abandoning family tradition for “her ridiculous hippie names.” Ellis hadn’t minded taking the blame. She’d told Mary Carol, “If their names upset you, you know where the door is.” A nurse had high-fived Ellis when Mary Carol strode out of the room.

  Ellis couldn’t find any violet plants. They’d gone dormant for the winter or had perished with the removal of the forest.

  She’d come to a left bend. She was quite sure that was where she’d scattered her mother’s ashes, though the log that had marked the location was gone. She sat down in the river stones and took a few in her fingers. She looked at the river’s curve, seeing her first note sail out of sight. Please come back.

  She thought of Viola, who would never come back. Ellis knew it was true. She would never see her daughter again. No one returned once they disappeared around that bend. Zane had been the first to show her that. From him, she’d learned to be careful of how much she loved anyone.

  Ellis didn’t remember much about her life before Zane. Before she was in school, he visited the trailer but never stayed overnight. He was a chef, one of her mother’s many restaurant friends who came over for parties. But back then, Ellis mostly saw him as her favorite babysitter. A group of friends—six or more—used to take care of Ellis while her mother waitressed, but Zane was the only one who knew how to make the magic.

  “What shall we do today, my queen?” he asked when her mother left.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know when there are a zillion cool things we can do?”

  “What cool things?”

  “We can live in the Sahara Desert in a tent. We can go on a safari riding a zebra. We can sail a ship on the stormy Atlantic . . .”

  “Okay,” Ellis said.

  “Which one?”

  “All of them.”

  And so they did. The Sahara was a tent they made with sheets in the backyard. Safari by zebra was her riding on his shoulders as they walked the neighborhood looking for birds and squirrels. And sailing the stormy Atlantic was littl
e boats they made and pushed around in rainwater that collected in the big ditch out front.

  Her mother was angry when she came home and saw how muddy Ellis was. “What the hell, Zane? I’m dead tired and those were her last clean clothes. Now I have to go to the Laundromat.”

  Ellis didn’t understand why she said that. Usually she let Ellis wear dirty clothes for weeks.

  “I’ll take the laundry over,” Zane said.

  Her mother lit a cigarette, inhaled the smoke deep. “I’m sure you have better things to do on your day off after you watched my kid all day.”

  He got very close to her. He did that a lot. “I don’t,” he said. “And when I come back, I’ll bring a pizza for all of us. Go put your feet up.”

  Her mother put her feet up and drank whiskey. Ellis sat on the steps, waiting for Zane to come back. She was afraid to go near her mother when she was in a bad mood. But when Zane returned, he’d make her happier. He’d say, “Come here, gorgeous,” and massage her sore feet while they watched TV. Sometimes she took off her shirt and he rubbed her back.

  Zane first stayed overnight when Ellis was in kindergarten. That was when he started saying, “I love you, baby,” to her mother. Nothing made Ellis happier, because when he said that, he stuck around. He took Ellis and her mother for ice cream and to go swimming at the big lake. Sometimes he brought Ellis fun places when her mother was working, like the night they went to the county fair and rode the Ferris wheel.

  He started doing things her mother used to do. When he took Ellis grocery shopping, he let her put things in the cart her mother would never have allowed.

  “Oh, we’re having Bugles and Cap’n Crunch for dinner?” he’d ask.

  “Can we?”

  “Why not? That’s all the important food groups covered.”

  He drove her to school all through kindergarten because he said she was too little to ride the bus. One morning, Ellis overheard a teacher ask her kindergarten teacher, “Who is that?” when Zane dropped her off. Her teacher replied, “He’s sort of her father.”

  That had been one of the best moments of her life. To know someone else saw funny, sweet Zane as her sort-of father. From that day on, that was what he was. Almost her father. And that was more than enough for her.

  But everything started to change after the accident. When Ellis was six and a half, her mother fell down a stairway while waitressing, breaking her ankle and hurting her back. The restaurant manager fired her and wouldn’t let her claim workers’ compensation because he said she’d fallen because she was stoned. Ellis’s mother hired a lawyer, who said she fell because she worked in hazardous conditions. She carried big trays, and the stairs to the upper dining room were narrow and steep.

  The lawyer won, and her mother got money. She could stay home all the time if she wanted. At first, that had seemed good to Ellis. But within a few months, it was bad. Her mother drank more and did more drugs when she didn’t have to stay sober for work. She and Zane fought more than usual.

  “What did you do all day yesterday?” he asked, sorting through laundry, trying to find clean pants for Ellis.

  “You know my back hurts too bad to carry laundry baskets.”

  “But it didn’t hurt too much to drive to the liquor store?”

  “Are you accusing me of lying?”

  “She has no clean clothes, goddamn it! You’re home all day. I’ve worked five double shifts straight.”

  “I never asked for your help.”

  “I know. You just dump this dad shit on me every day!”

  Ellis wanted to cry. But if she did, he would get more upset when he saw he’d made her sad. He might leave forever. She clenched every muscle in her body to stop the tears.

  “Just get out if you don’t like being here!” her mother shouted. “Get out and don’t come back!”

  “Maybe I will!” he yelled. “I’m tired of this bullshit!”

  Those threats always made Ellis feel like her heart was falling out of her chest. She found dirty leggings under her bed and held them up. “I found clean ones, Zane! Will you drive me to the bus stop?”

  “Your mother just told me to leave.”

  “Don’t go!” Ellis said, tugging the dirty leggings up her legs. “I’m ready. We can go.”

  He shot a questioning look at her mother.

  “Just take her,” her mother grumbled. She wanted to get high rather than do it herself.

  In the beginning, her mother could control Zane with the threat of making him leave. He would apologize, nuzzling her, and he would stay. But after the accident, the more her mother got stoned and yelled, the more Zane walked out the door. Once he was away for nine days. But he came back, saying, “I love you, baby,” in her mother’s ear as he always did, and they went in the bedroom. Ellis heard them laugh and make those other sounds that were a relief, because that meant Zane would stay.

  Ellis was eight when her mother started using a new drug she put in her arm with a needle. Zane didn’t want her to, and the fighting got even worse. Ellis was afraid Zane would leave for good. He stopped saying, “I love you, baby.”

  “You need to get help with this,” Zane said when he found her mother sprawled in a stupor in her bed.

  “With what?” her mother said.

  “You know what! You’re killing yourself with that shit! And you don’t even pretend to take care of Ellis anymore!”

  She staggered to her feet. “Get the hell out if you don’t like it.”

  “No, don’t,” Ellis said, pulling on Zane’s hand. “I can take care of myself. I made strawberry Jell-O and put peaches in it. Come see.”

  He was too upset to look. He gripped her hand and said, “Come on. Let’s get a hamburger.”

  “I didn’t say you could take my daughter,” her mother called as they went out the door.

  Zane muttered curses. He didn’t try to make Ellis feel better like he used to. He just stayed quiet and drove her to get food at the drive-through.

  “Zane . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “Are you coming to my play at school tomorrow?”

  He paid the woman in the fast-food window. He didn’t answer.

  “I’m a flower that talks about why people should compost. Are you coming?”

  “I don’t know, Ell.”

  “Please?”

  His heavy sigh felt like a weight on Ellis’s heart. “I’ll try to be there,” he said.

  The next day, Ellis almost couldn’t say her lines when she saw Zane wasn’t in the audience. She didn’t care about the play. She was afraid Zane was gone for good, and all she wanted to do was cry. Her mother wasn’t among the smiling parents either. But she’d expected that.

  Zane stuck around for another month. A few days after Ellis turned nine, after one of the biggest fights ever, Zane left and never came back. He didn’t say goodbye, not to Ellis or to her mother. He just disappeared. Ellis had to listen to her mother say every mean thing she could think of about Zane. Ellis didn’t want to hear those things, but her mother never stopped hating him until the day she died.

  Her mother died the last month Ellis was in seventh grade. On a Sunday in May, the best month in the Wild Wood. That was when the wildflowers bloomed, and leaves, birds, frogs, and everything else came back. Ellis took a baggie of cereal to the river for her breakfast that morning. As the clouds from the overnight rain cleared away, the rising sun slanted through the newly leafed branches, casting misty shafts of golden light all over the forest. Ellis was too old to believe in magic anymore, but for a little while, she did again. She sat very still and focused. She wanted to make a picture of the sunbeams in her mind. It was all too perfect to forget. When she went home an hour later, her mother still hadn’t gotten out of bed. Ellis peeped into her bedroom to ask if she should make a pot of coffee. Her mother lay still and gray in her bed. Dead. Next to her, an empty heroin syringe gleamed in a pool of sunlight coming in through the window.

  Ellis sorted through the river
stones while reflecting. The one in her hand looked like a face. An old wizened woman, her eyes sunken into folds of skin, her nose grown globular with age. Ellis carefully set down the crone, one of many stones to mark the spot where her mother’s ashes had been poured.

  She stood and returned to the reality of her missing forest. Her piece of earth, her one true mother, had left her, had disappeared around the bend with everything else. With the ashes. With her paper notes. With Zane and everyone else.

  The Wild Wood would never come back, maybe not even Viola striata, the common white violet with purple stripes that had been her favorite. All that was left was river and stone. She had named her boys well. They would endure. They would persist without her.

  Ellis had one last note to give her woods. She took her phone out of her pocket. She’d planned to bury it under a log or large rock near where she’d poured her mother’s ashes. But there were no more logs or big rocks.

  Ellis opened her photos. The last one she’d taken was a close-up of Viola’s face. Two months old. Then one of Jonah holding her. And River and Jasper cradling her between them on the couch.

  She had to stop. If she kept inflicting pain on herself, she might sink too far into it. She might want to disappear down the river, too.

  With a touch of her finger, the screen turned black. The glass reflected her face and the few trees that were left to witness her last message. She chose a large rock in the middle of the streaming water. She lifted it and wedged the phone into the bottom of the streambed. She watched water course over the phone, little bubbles dancing like stars on the black night of the screen. Then she dropped the rock, and it disappeared.

  She was not one to pollute waterways, but she didn’t see it like that. It was a water burial. The closure of her family. Of her past. Of the future she used to see. Everything she’d ever lost was forever merged in this one piece of earth she’d loved. Even that piece of earth, and her love for it, was now buried there.

  She climbed up the riverbank. She was acutely aware of the absence of who she’d been, and the sickening, visceral emptiness expanded with every step away from the river. She was like a cavernous tree, dying from the inside out.