So, if Olive is out of batteries, our walkie-talkie days are over.
“Morse code?” I propose. “Telegraph?”
Olive giggles. “How about semaphore flags?”
“Carrier pigeon!” I say. “Smoke signals.”
“We could just yell,” Olive points out. “It isn't
that
far.”
“We
could
put a string between our houses, and zip-line notes to each other.” I'm serious this time.
“A laundry line would do the trick,” Olive muses.
“No.” I grin. “I've got an idea. Let me surprise you.”
“Okay.” Liza plucks an apple from a branch and takes a noisy bite. She frowns. “Sad news about Richard, huh?”
“Yeah,” I say. “It's weird. He just sat there and never talked. You would think you wouldn't miss him. But it feels so big, so
loud
, that he's gone.”
Olive nods. “I know. Mom says he made us anxious in a good way. He reminded us how lucky we are to have a warm home.”
“Maybe,” I say. “I just wanted
him
to be warm, in a little apartment somewhere, and not always on public display.”
“Well, he's not on public display now,” Olive deadpans.
“That's for sure,” I say. “He has vanished. Disappeared.”
I remember the feeling I had in the park. “Where
do
you think he is?” I ask.
“Nowhere,” Olive says. “We're just a mass of electrical impulses, Liza. Without our bodies, we're like a DVD without a DVD player. There's no picture, no sound, no story. The only life after death is the worms that feast on your body and the plants that shoot up as you rot away.”
“Ugh, Olive! Fat worms and a crop of tulips?
That's
life after death?”
“What do
you
think? That Richard's an angel, floating around looking down on us? Or that he's”âshe puts on a spooky voiceâ“a ghost?”
I try to think up an answer. Then the tree house groans. It sways, and then boards tear from each other with a screech, leaving raw edges and bent nails waving in the air.
Olive and I freeze. We stare wildly into each other's eyes. We're half smirking, as if it's funny, and half terrified. Suddenly, the entire tree house skids down the tree trunk, scraping off bark and snapping branches. I protect my eyes with one hand and grab the windowsill with the other. Olive screams.
Thenâ
whomp
âit stops
.
My tailbone throbs
.
Olive moans and rubs the back of her head. We sit for a few moments. Then, slowly and without a word, we ease ourselves out the little doorway and leap to the ground. We run like mad, yelping and laughing. We fall onto the lawn, clutching each other.
There's a wide circle of yellow caution tape around the apple tree. Actually, it's a yellow streamer. My enviro-mom doesn't like plastic, but she didn't want to pay for biodegradable caution tape. You have to buy it in bulk. “Let's hope we
never
need five hundred feet of caution tape,” Mom told the hardware store clerk.
Silas made a sign:
Tree Ailing: Do
Not Climb
. The entire tree is on a slant.
“Like the leaning tower of Pisa,” Silas comments at breakfast.
“Tilting,” Mom says, launching our family game.
“Listing,” I say.
“Lurching,” Silas says.
“Diagonal?” Leland says.
“Sloping,” Mom says.
“Off balance,” I say.
“
I
'
m
off balance.” Leland pouts as he sadly stirs his cereal.
I am too. Our apple tree was the first tree we climbed. Every fall, the kitchen shelves fill with jars of applesauce. If our generous tree is going to tilt, then our lives will too.
“Our tree has had a long life,” Mom says. “It's been growing for over a hundred years, long before this house was built. I asked John Allans.”
“The dude with the top hat who gives ghost tours?” I ask.
“That
dude
,” Mom chides with a smile, “is a local historian. He says our apple tree was part of a huge orchard. This land was once all farmers' fields. I've called an arborist to come over and give a diagnosis. And when I'm in Duncan next week, I'm taking some of our apples to a pomologist.”
Mom's going to Duncan to help the museum put a dollar value on their collection. There's a pile of butter churns, chamber pots, saddles, even tractors from a farm that is being razed to make room for apartment buildings. Mom is an art historian. She helps museums and auction houses figure out what they've got and what it's worth.
“How's a palm reader going to help?” Silas asks.
“Pomologist. Think
pomme
. French for apple,” Mom says. “A pomologist studies fruit. She's going to tell us what kind of apples we've been eating all these years. The arboristâher name is Imogenâis a tree doctor.”
“She'll say it has to be cut down,” Silas says gloomily.
“Yes, she might,” Mom agrees.
“That would leave a big empty space,” Leland grouses. He is stirring his cereal into sodden mush.
“Yeah,” I say. I feel close to tears. “You might as well yank my heart out.”
“Hey!” Leland cries. “An apple is probably the same size as your heart. It's even shaped like a heart.” Then he goes quiet. We all do. None of us finish breakfast.
<
<
<
<
<
The “lovers' phone” works! I made it with two tin cans and some fishing line. Now, that's technology! I hammered a hole through the bottom of each can, poked the line through and knotted it. If we hold the line taut and it doesn't touch anything, the vibrations of our voices travel down the string. They enter the can on the other end and swirl into our ears. When I want to talk, I just yank on the string. Olive hears her end clang against her windowsill and “answers” her tin.
Making stuff helps me relax. I mend the broken, rescue the forgotten and invent what's needed. I've turned T-shirts into pillows, stitched juice Tetra Paks into wallets, and made a self-watering plant pot from a pop bottle. It's called DIYâ Do It Yourself.
Imogen, the arborist, leaps down from her battered pickup truck. She is wearing faded jeans and work boots. I guess she's in her twenties. Her long reddish hair looks alive. Her T-shirt proclaims
God is just an abbreviation
for Goddess
.
Imogen goes straight to our tree and climbs it with ease. Olive, the boys and I perch along the top of the fence and watch her poke at the bark and cut off a few twigs.
“You guys are sure glum,” she says after a while.
“I've been climbing that tree since before I could walk,” Silas says. “I even talk to it.”
“Me too,” Leland admits. “I lie on the ground and look up through its branches at the sky.”
“Trees make great friends,” Imogen says. “They're wise.”
“They're not just quiet,” Leland says. “They know
how
to be quiet.”
“Yeah.” Imogen stops for a moment. “Imagine how loud the world would be if there were no trees.”
“Mom says it was part of an orchard, like, a century ago,” I say.
“That's for sure,” Imogen says. “If you climb high up and look into your neighbors' yards, you'll see other trees from the orchard.”
“Can we really still climb it?” Silas asks.
“Just don't go under the tree house. And avoid this area.” Imogen points to a split in the trunk. “You should be all right if you climb that side. But your tree is likely infected with Armillaria, or honey fungus. It's a root disease that spreads to other trees. I'm sorry, kids, but it looks as though your friend will have to come down.”
My throat burns. Silas looks to the sky, trying to keep his tears from falling. They trickle toward his ears. Olive knits her eyebrows as if she can think herself out of this situation. And Leland? He slides down from the fence and stretches his arms around our tree's rough trunk. “It's okay,” we hear him whisper. “It will be all right.”
After Imogen leaves, Olive and I step branch to branch, climbing up, up, up. When we get as high as we can, we look across the neighborhood.
“There!” Olive cries out, pointing. Sure enough, there's an apple tree in the backyard of the house two doors down. “There too!” she says excitedly. We see tree after tree. The neighborhood unfolds before us. The trees may be separated by fences, but they're in a pattern.
“Wow,” Olive breathes. “We live in an orchard!”
It is amazing. All these years, these trees have been quietly growing apples and sleeping through winter. They are uncomplaining and patientâlike Richard.
Richard's funeral is today. Halfway through the morning, Mrs. Reynolds pages Silas, Leland and me to her office. Mrs. Reynolds is our new principal. She loves rules. Some of the kids call her Mrs. Killjoy. It's mean. She makes us feel mean. Our school was a happy place before she arrived. Since she took over, we're no longer allowed to use teachers' first names or make calls on the office phone unless it's a matter of life or death. We're not allowed to throw balls against the school wall or climb in the ravine behind the school.
When Mrs. Reynolds started as principal, she met with about forty students. She met with Abelius, who has impulse-control issues; in kindergarten, he squished a caterpillar we were all sketching. Another kid she called in was Janine, who's in my grade and still isn't reading. She met with this kid Max, who is super artistic but cries a lot, and Amelia, who is really, really large.
She called in all the kids who sort of stuck out, or weren't normal, whatever that means. That included me, Leland and Silas. She mentioned that we were late for school often and said something about how difficult life must be for our single mom.
“It's not difficult, it's fun,” Leland said.
“It must be hard not having a dad,” Mrs. Reynolds said.
“We
have
a dad,” I said, surprised by the anger in my voice. “He just lives far away.”
“I see,” she said snidely, as if our dad didn't want to see us, which is total bunk.
“We're usually late because I'm building with Lego and Leland is coloring and Liza is playing chess with Mom,” explained Silas. “We're late because we're happy.”
Mrs. Reynolds's mouth opened and shut and opened again. She looked like a trout.
“Mom works hard,” Leland said thoughtfully. “All single moms do.”
Silas and I tried not to laugh.
Leland looked at us. “Well, that's what Mom says!”
Silas and I shook with laughter. Leland laughed too. Mrs. Reynolds stood up to let us know we could go.
So now we're in her office again. It's totally tidy. The pencils in the pencil jar are all nibs up and perfectly sharpened. The three books on her shelf are about business management. The one plant is plastic. Nothing is out of place. Mom once said that Mrs. Reynolds was a “control freak.”
Mrs. Reynolds takes a stuffed owl down from a shelf and drops it into Leland's lap. I guess it's supposed to make him feel comfortable. “Your mom called to say she is taking you out of school before recess. Where are you going?”
My mouth locks. It's none of her business where we're going. Silas gazes out the window.
“To a funeral,” Leland answers.
“Oh. I'm sorry to hear that,” Mrs. Reynolds says with genuine sympathyâ I think.
“Yeah, it's not a
fun
-eral.” Leland snickers at his own joke. “Mom says Silas and I can stay in the car, but Liza's going into the graveyard.”
“Who died?” Mrs. Reynolds asks.
I close my eyes and frown. I'm trying to keep her out. Leland's too young to realize she's being nosy.
“A friend,” Leland says. “Well, a neighbor, kind of. But not the kind that has a house. He slept in the park.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Reynolds's head jerks back. “A homeless person?”
“Kind of.” Leland glances at Silas. Tears run down Silas's cheeks as he looks out the window.
“His name was Richard,” I burst out.
I stand to leave and motion to my brothers to follow. I want to get out of there. Only Leland says goodbye. Mrs. Reynolds says nothing.
We sit on the edge of a planter in the schoolyard and have our snacks. Mom drives up as I finish my carrot. There is no garbage can, so I ram the end of my carrot into the planter's soil. I leave the green end sticking out. “Liza!” Silas hisses. Then he shoves his carrot into the dirt too.