Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

“What I said about you going back out there alone, I know I wasn’t making a lot of sense.”

“It’s okay, Constance. Really. Don’t worry about it.”

“But I want to try to explain,” she said, and I opened my eyes. “I don’t like people thinking that I’m scared, but it’s worse when they think I’m crazy.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I said, and she lifted her finger off the cover of the library book and glared up at me, looking more confused than anything else. “You know what I meant,” I said, and there was undoubtedly more exasperation in my voice than I’d intended there to be.

“I know what you said.”

“I say too much. You’d think anyone lives this long, she’d have figured that out by now. Regardless, you don’t need to explain anything to me. I don’t think you’re crazy. I was half asleep and just mouthing off.”

“I never should have come back here,” she said. “I should have stayed in Los Angeles.” And this time I didn’t reply. I lay there on the sofa, rubbing my eyes and waiting for whatever it was that she would or wouldn’t say next. There was a noise outside, the wind or an animal poking about, but nothing unusual. Still, Constance turned her head away, turning towards the direction from which the noise seemed to have come. It wasn’t repeated, and after a while, she asked, “Have you read the whole thing? All of it?”

“Lord no,” I said, assuming she meant the library book. “I’ve hardly started it. Frankly, I don’t know why the hell I brought it home. Good House keeping in the age of Cotton Mather.”

“I wasn’t talking about this, ” she said impatiently, and tapped the cover of the library book with her knuckles. “I mean Chuck Harvey’s manuscript. Have you finished reading it ?”

“He didn’t even finish writing it,” I replied.

“Yeah, I know that, but have you read everything he did write?”

“No,” I told her, sitting up, and wondering if she’d be up for a drive to the beach, thinking it would do us both good to get out of the woods and away from this house for a little bit. Hell, I even thought about volunteering to spring for a room in Stonington or Mystic (because, after all, that’s what credit cards are for). “I haven’t. I’ve read, I don’t know, maybe half of it.”

“But you do intend to finish it before you take it to that woman at URI, right?”

“Maybe it would be better if I didn’t,” I sighed, not sure where she was headed, but already pretty certain she’d say no to a night away from the house.

Constance had gone back to drawing her invisible curlicues on the cover of the library book. “Well,” she said, “that’s up to you. But I need you to promise that you won’t get rid of it before you let me read it all.”

“You think your answers are waiting in there somewhere?” I asked, trying to remember if we had anything for dinner or if I’d have to drive into town.

“Just promise me that, alright?”

“Sure. No problem. I promise, cross my heart and hope to die,” and after that, she seemed to relax a bit.

“Scout’s honor?” she asked.

“Not fucking likely,” I laughed and had a go at combing my hair with my fingers.

“Oh, I was a Girl Scout,” Constance said. “Troop 850. I had my first taste of weed on one of the camping trips.”

“No shit? The Girl Scouts have a marijuana merit badge?”

She laughed, but we didn’t talk very long, and after a while she vanished into her garret again, saying that she wanted to get back to work. She came down for dinner (Velveeta grilled cheeses and Campbell’s Soup; at least I didn’t have to go to the store), but didn’t stick around long afterwards. Maybe I’ll do the beach thing by myself tomorrow, and hope that the tourists aren’t as bad on Mondays, that their numbers have declined since the Fourth.

Earlier today, I was going through one of the boxes of books I brought up here with me from Atlanta, one of the few that didn’t go directly from the old apartment into storage. Comfort books, I call them, a hodgepodge of familiar volumes that I’ve read again and again and again, some of them since childhood. My personal take on Linus van Pelt’s blue security blanket, I suppose; the bookworm’s dog-eared solace. So, I was sorting through the box, only half remembering having packed most of what was in there, and at the very bottom was a big hardback, The Annotated Alice, with all Martin Gardner’s marginalia and John Tenniel’s illustrations. It was a Christmas gift when I was only eight years old, and I guess that would have been 1972. Yeah, ’72. I didn’t own many books as a child, and certainly not hard-backs. My father, a high-school dropout, said it was a waste of good money, paying for books when there was a library right there in Mayberry (though I suspect he himself never set foot in it). Anyway, my mother found a used copy of The Annotated Alice at a yard sale sometime in the autumn, and then gave it to me for Christmas that year. You can still see where $1.25 was penciled in on the upper-righthand corner of the title page, and she tried unsuccessfully to erase it. The book was printed in 1960, so it was already, what, twelve years old when she gave it to me. And Jesus, how I loved that book. There are long passages that I committed to memory, that I can still recite.

Today, I lifted the book out of the box, and it fell open to pages 184-85, a little more than halfway through, just past the beginning of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There . On page 184, the Tenniel woodcut shows Alice entering the mirror above the fireplace, and on the opposite page, she’s emerging from that other mirror in the reversed world of the Looking-glass House. Hidden in between these two pages — and Alice’s act of passing from one universe into its left-handed counterpart — was a folded sheet of wax paper, and pressed between the two halves of the wax paper were five dried four-leaf clovers, and also a tiny violet. I removed the wax paper and closed the book, setting it aside. Seeing the pressed clovers and the single faded violet, there was such an immediate flood of memories. I don’t know how long I sat there holding those souvenirs and crying. Yeah, crying.

Amanda and I used to joke that it was her superpower, finding four-leaf clovers. I’ve never been any good at it myself, but she could stand over any given patch of clover, and, within only a minute or two, without fucking fail, spot at least two or three. And here were five from some spring or summer afternoon that I could not recall, only that she had found them for me. I picked the violet. I can’t even remember now what led to the preservation of these particular clovers. I mean, if I’d saved every four-leaf clover Amanda ever found and gave to me, I’d have hundreds of the things. I didn’t even put them in the book, so I can only assume that Amanda did. For some reason lost to me, or never known to me, these were special. Maybe if Amanda were still alive, she’d know why. I could have picked up the phone and called her, and she would have laughed and told me, would have described that morning or evening, the circumstances that made these matter so much more than all the others.

I’ve spent so much energy casting Amanda as the villain, even though I know perfectly well that’s bullshit. It’s easier to recall the constant bickering, the minute wounds we inflicted upon each other, her low blows and my cheap shots, and incidents like her taunting me outside the Morewell Tunnel, than to tell the truth. The truth is so much more inconveniently complicated. But here were these five clovers and the violet stashed inside this book I’ve cherished since I was a kid, undeniable evidence that it wasn’t all hurtful, no matter how “toxic” her therapist might have deemed our relationship. Here was proof that a moment had existed when she loved me enough to put these tokens of good luck, which came so easily to her, but always eluded me, where she knew I would always have them.