Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

“I’m not sure about the title, but it’s actually pretty good,” she said, and, deciding maybe it was easiest not to argue, I asked if the manuscript was still upstairs.

“Yeah,” she replied. “But I’ll bring it back down right after I finish my coffee,” which she did.

Seventeen onionskin pages, held together with a plastic paper clip, and most of them bearing corrections and proofreader’s marks in red pencil. My handwriting. And so now I’ve come full circle, and if there’s anything I’m forgetting, anything that matters, it’s going to have to wait until later, because I think I hear the car.

Helen opens a window, props it open with a brick, and in a moment I can smell the Chinese wisteria out in the garden. The first genuinely warm breezes of spring spilling across the sill, filled with the smell of drooping white blossoms and a hundred other growing things.The sun is so warm on my face, and I lie on the floor and watch the only cloud I can see floating alone in a sky so blue it might still be winter out there. She was reading her poetry to me. I’ve been drinking cheap red wine from a chipped coffee cup with an Edward Gorey drawing printed on one side, and she’s been reading me her poetry and pausing to talk about the field. At that moment, I still think that neither of us has been back to the field in years, and it’s surprisingly easy to fool myself into believing that my memories are only some silly ghost story Helen’s been slipping in between the stanzas. Not the vulgar sort of spook story that people write these days. More like something an Arthur Machen might have written, or an Algernon Blackwood, something more mood and suggestion than anything else, and I congratulate myself on feeling so removed from that night in the field and take another sip of the bitter wine. Helen’s been drinking water, only bottled water from a ruby-stemmed wineglass, because she says wine makes her slur.

I open my bathrobe, and the sun feels clean and good across my breasts and belly. I’m very proud of my belly, that it’s still flat and hard this far past thirty. Helen stops reading her poem again and squeezes my left nipple until I tell her to quit it. She pretends to pout until I tell her to stop that, too.

“I went back,” she says, and I keep my eyes on that one cloud, way up there where words and bad memories can’t ever reach it. Helen’s quiet for almost a full minute, and then she says, “Nothing happened. I just walked around for a little while, that’s all. I just wanted to see.”

“That last line seemed a bit forced,” I say. “Maybe you should read it to me again,” and I shut my eyes, but I don’t have to see her face to know the sudden change in her expression or to feel the chill hiding just underneath the warm breeze getting in through the window. It must have been there all along, the chill, but I was too busy with the sun and my one cloud and the smell of Chinese wisteria to notice. I watch a scatter of orange afterimages floating in the darkness behind my eyelids and wait for Helen to bite back.

“I need a cigarette,” she says, and I start to apologize, but it would be a lie, and I figure I’ve probably done enough damage for one afternoon. I listen to her bare feet on the hardwood as she crosses the room to the little table near her side of the bed.The table with her typewriter. I hear her strike a match and smell the sulfur.

“Nothing happened,” she says again. “You don’t have to be such a cunt about it.”

“If nothing happened,” I reply, “then there’s no need for this conversation, is there?” And I open my eyes again. My cloud has moved along an inch or so towards the right side of the window frame, which would be east, and I can hear a mockingbird singing.

“Someone fixed the lock on the gate,” she says.“I had to climb over.They put up a sign, too. No trespassing.”

“But you climbed over anyway?”

“No one saw me.”

“I don’t care. It was still illegal.”

“I went all the way up the hill,” she tells me. “I went all the way to the stone wall.”

“How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want to talk about this,” I say and roll over on my left side, rolling towards her, rolling away from the window and the cloud, the wisteria smell and the chattering mockingbird, and my elbow hits the Edward Gorey cup and it tips over.The wine almost looks like blood as it flows across the floor and the handwritten pages Helen’s left lying there.The burgundy undoes her words, her delicate fountain-pen cursive, and the ink runs and mixes with the wine.

“Fuck you,” she says and leaves me alone in the room, only a ragged, fading smoke ghost to mark the space she occupied a few seconds before. I pick up the empty cup, cursing myself, my carelessness and the things I’ve said because I’m scared and too drunk not to show it, and somewhere in the house a door slams. Later on, I think, Helen will believe it was only an accident, and I’m not so drunk or scared or stupid to know I’m better off not going after her. Outside, the mockingbird’s stopped singing, and when I look back at the window, I can’t find the white cloud anywhere.

This is not the night.This is only a dream of the night, only my incomplete, unreliable memories of a dream, which is as close as I can come on paper.The dream I’ve had more times now than I can recall, and it’s never precisely the truth of things, and it’s never the same twice. I have even tried putting it down on canvas, again and again, but I can hardly stand the sight of them, those damned absurd paintings. I used to keep them hidden behind the old chifforobe where I store my paints and brushes and jars of pigment, kept them there until Helen finally found them. Sometimes, I still think about burning them.

The gate with the broken padlock, the gate halfway between Exeter and Nooseneck, and I follow you down the dirt road that winds steeply up the hill through the old apple orchard, past trees planted and grown before our parents were born, trees planted when our grandparents were still young. And the moon’s so full and bright I can see everything — the ground-fall fruit rotting in the grass, your eyes, a fat spider hanging in her web. I can see the place ahead of us where the road turns sharply away from the orchard towards a field no one’s bothered to plow in half a century or more, and you stop and hold a hand cupped to your right ear.

“No,” I reply, when you tell me that you can hear music and ask if I can hear it, too. I’m not lying. I can’t hear much of anything but the wind in the limbs of the apple trees and a dog barking somewhere far away.

“Well, I can. I can hear it clear as anything,” you say, and then you leave the dirt road and head off through the trees.

Sometimes I yell for you to wait, because I don’t want to be left there on the road by myself, and sometimes I follow you, and sometimes I just stand there in the moonlight and branch shadows listening to the night, trying to hear whatever it is you think you’ve heard.The air smells sweet and faintly vinegary, and I wonder if it’s the apples going soft and brown all around me. Sometimes you stop and call for me to hurry.

A thousand variations on a single moment. It doesn’t matter which one’s for real, or at least it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not even sure that I can remember any more, not for certain. They’ve all bled together through days and nights and repetition, like sepia ink and cheap wine, and by the time I’ve finally caught up with you (because I always catch up with you, sooner or later), you’re standing at the low stone wall dividing the orchard from the field.You’re leaning forward against the wall, one leg up and your knee pressed to the granite and slate as if you were about to climb over it but then forgot what you were doing.The field is wide, and I think it might go on forever, that the wall might be here to keep apart more than an old orchard and a fallow plot of land.