Telephone of the Tree, page 3
“Did that grow there?”
If Kiri were here we wouldn’t be able to look at each other, we’d be trying so hard not to laugh.
“Trees grow leaves,” I say. “And branches and roots and seeds. But they don’t grow telephones.”
Gentleman nods. Just keeps standing there.
“What’s it doing in your tree?” he says, after a while.
“I don’t know. It just appeared.”
“There has to be a reason.”
“I guess so people can use it,” I say, so he’ll stop talking. “If they want to, I mean.”
“To call someone?”
I nod.
“Who?”
“Whoever they want!” I say, louder than I meant to. Gentleman’s used to his yelling parents, though, so he doesn’t even blink. Which makes me feel bad.
“Can I call Sweetheart, then?” he says.
Oh geez.
“Gentleman,” I say. “Sweetheart’s dead. Right?”
“Yeah.”
“So,” I say, “you can’t—”
call a dead lizard on a telephone in a tree, is what I’m about to say. But I don’t finish the sentence. Because again, Gentleman’s just a little kid.
“This is a magic telephone,” he declares. “You can use this telephone to call anyone you want. But only if they’re not alive anymore.”
I stare at him. Where did that come from?
Then I think, maybe from the same place that This is a magic telephone came from.
First me and Pops, now Gentleman.
“If I can call anyone I want,” Gentleman says, “then that means I can call Sweetheart!”
I don’t point out that Sweetheart isn’t an anyone, she’s a lizard, because again, he’s just a little kid. And also, what do I know about this telephone?
Nothing.
Behind me, in our house, Pops is whistling “You Are My Sunshine.” That means he’s making coffee. It might mean he’s also making pancakes. If I smell melting butter, that means he’s definitely making pancakes.
I sniff. Sniff again.
Definitely.
I’d rather think about Pops’s pancakes than the strange appearance of a telephone that might possibly be magic. Also, I happen to know that Gentleman loves pancakes.
“You want some pancakes, Gentleman?”
“Before I call Sweetheart?”
It’s not going to do you any good to call your lizard, I almost say. Along with That telephone’s not connected to anything, and besides, lizards don’t talk on telephones.
But I think of what Pops said, about just in case you want to call someone, and I stop myself.
“Sure,” I say. “Pancakes before telephone calls.”
Pops is making not just regular pancakes but corn pancakes. His specialty.
Gentleman and I sit at the kitchen table and watch him slice off long rows of corn kernels from ears he holds steady with one hand.
Pops adds the corn to the pancake batter and scoops spoonfuls into the sizzling butter.
“How’re things, Gentleman?” Pops inquires.
“Not very good. Sweetheart died.”
“Your gecko? I’m very sorry to hear that, little man.”
Gentleman nods. “I’m going to call her after these pancakes. On the telephone of the tree. Because it’s magic. And you can call anyone you want on it.”
Pops just nods, as if that makes sense.
Which it doesn’t.
“He’s going to call his lizard on the telephone,” I say to Pops, hoping he’ll pick up on the weirdness.
But Pops just keeps making pancakes.
I beam my thoughts to Pops: He thinks he can actually talk to his lizard on that telephone.
But Pops just turns around and slides corn pancakes onto two plates, one for me and one for Gentleman.
“Sounds like a good plan,” he says to Gentleman.
Gentleman’s mouth is too full of corn pancakes to answer.
“Kiri was always a fan of my corn pancakes too,” Pops says.
“Is,” I correct him. “You’ll have to make more as soon as they get home.”
“Are you going to call Kiri on the telephone, Ayla?” Gentleman says.
“No!”
I stop myself from saying a whole bunch more, like How dumb and Why would I do that? and Don’t talk about Kiri as if they’re the same as your stupid lizard.
Dumb. Stupid. I feel so bad even thinking those words. Gentleman is just this tiny little kid whose lizard died. It’s not until Pops puts his arms around me that I realize I’m crying.
“It’s okay to cry, Ayla,” Gentleman says. “That’s what Sweetheart used to tell me.”
I feel even worse now. Poor little kid, thinking his lizard used to talk to him. But Gentleman jumps up and runs out of the kitchen.
“I’m gonna go talk to Sweetheart now!” he calls back.
“Pops!” I say when he’s gone. “His lizard is dead! That telephone isn’t connected to anything!”
Pops wipes his hands on the dish towel. It’s as if he doesn’t even hear me.
I give up and sneak out on the porch, and then onto the front steps, and then right up to my tree, so I can observe Gentleman.
Observe is the word Kiri and I use for what others might call spying.
Gentleman glances up at me, receiver in his hand.
“Ayla, help. I don’t know what Sweetheart’s number is,” he says. “I don’t know what number to dial.”
Oh crud. That look on his face again. Those eyes, asking me for help.
Right then and there, I decide to lie.
“Any number will work,” I say, just making it up. “All numbers will go straight to Sweetheart as long as you’re the one calling.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
He sticks his pointer finger in the dial and begins turning.
Kiri doesn’t have a telephone where they are, so I haven’t talked to them since the day they left. No post office, either, so I can’t even send snail mail.
For one second, I feel jealous of Gentleman.
Gentleman twines his index finger in the telephone’s twirly cord. He looks like a miniature old man.
“Hey,” he says. “You there, Sweetheart?”
And that’s how the telephone of the tree begins.
You hungry?
Gentleman’s voice is a whisper.
Remember that time we locked the door on them and wouldn’t open it?
They’re still yelling, you know.
And once, so low I can barely hear him:
Sometimes I get so scared.
Finally, Gentleman hangs up. He stands there for a minute with his hand on the old telephone. Then he turns, looks straight at me, and gives me a peace sign.
Yup, a peace sign.
His little five-year-old swaggering self is back.
That old telephone glints at me from its crook in the tree. I stare back at it. Why did it have to appear in my tree? Why not someone else’s tree?
I’m not about to make a call on it.
But something tells me I shouldn’t move it, either.
So I lean back and
lalala
lalala
lalala
lalala my way right out of my thoughts and into my tree instead.
quiet myself—
breathe slow and deep—
look up at the leaves fluttering in the breeze, my tree and its leaves, my tree and its leaves, my tree and its leaves, until—
thrum
thrum
thrum
“Ayla?”
“Hey Ayla?”
Argh! More voices!
It’s Geneva and Rowan.
The two kids who live in the duplex down the block. They’ve lived there since they were babies. Weeping willow Geneva and Rowan.
“Do you want to . . . walk to middle school with us?”
“When it starts, we mean.”
Rowan and Geneva. Best friends whose parents are also best friends.
Geneva and Rowan, who run up and down the stairs and in and out of each other’s apartments without asking, without thinking, just like Kiri and I run in and out of each other’s houses—
“Well, Ayla? Do you?”
Stop it! Go away!
That’s what I’m thinking.
The problem is that it comes right out of my mouth.
“Stop it! Go away!”
They stare at me, then look at each other.
“Whoa,” Geneva says. “We were just asking if you wanted to walk to school with us.”
“Yeah,” Rowan says. “I mean . . . geez.”
“It’s middle school,” Geneva adds.
Like I don’t know that? They peer in at me through the leaves and limbs of my tree. What am I, some kind of animal in the zoo? I hate the zoo. I hate people staring at me. I hate Geneva and Rowan.
Even though I don’t really hate Geneva and Rowan. I’m just jealous of them. They have each other. Neither has to deal with the other being far away.
“Thank you,” I say. “But I’ll wait for Kiri to get home.”
Again they just . . . look at me.
“Well,” Geneva says after a minute. “Um . . .”
“Let us know if you change your mind,” Rowan says.
The telephone glints at me again, so calm in the crook of my tree. I will it to go away, but it just stays there.
I lean back against the trunk of my tree, but the thrum is gone.
Help me.
Please help me, tree.
But just then a car goes up the street in the wrong direction and Mrs. S comes tearing out of her house, waving her arms and shrieking.
“WRONG WAY!”
Our block is a one-way street. Everyone drives in the same direction, everyone parks in the same direction. But sometimes a car hurries the wrong way up our one-way street and Mrs. S yells and yells and yells.
“WRONG WAY!”
“WRONG WAY!”
“WRONG WAY!”
The car just keeps zipping along, going the wrong way. Mrs. S used to get angry and shake her fist at wrong-way cars, but things got even worse when Kiri went away.
Now Mrs. S just keeps yelling until the car is out of sight. These days she’s always on the lookout.
Always, always look both ways when you cross the street, all the grown-ups say. Better safe than sorry.
They’ve been saying this since we were tiny.
And we do look both ways.
Almost always.
Almost.
The almost always thing, the Kiri still not back home yet thing, the Geneva and Rowan walk to middle school thing, the Gentleman and Sweetheart thing, the telephone appearing in my tree thing.
None of it is what I want to think about, but the lalala and the don’t think don’t think don’t think are getting harder and harder.
So is sleeping.
I keep having the nightmare. Over and over: wind, storm clouds, lightning, and that roar.
Sleep is easy when Kiri’s around. Even when we have a sleepover and stay up late talking and laughing and whispering so Mom and Dad and Pops won’t hear us.
I like to wake up when Kiri’s sleeping over.
I listen to their soft breath.
I watch them and wonder if they’re dreaming.
It’s peaceful to be the only one awake on the block, and to know that Pops and my parents are just down the hall, and everything is quiet, and everything is safe, and everything will always be that way.
My hair is a mess.
My mom hasn’t braided it in a long time. Not because she doesn’t want to. Not because she hasn’t tried.
But because I won’t let her.
Braiding is a me and Kiri thing, something we do together. My mom sits one of us down in front of her knees, and then she sits the other one down, and we lean back against her knees while her fingers fly.
We love the feel of my mom’s fingers in our hair, the twist and pull. We love how she makes different braids each time and never asks us what we want because we know that whatever she does will look good.
Every day my hair is more matted. More twisted. It’ll be hard, when the day comes, to fix it.
I don’t care.
Except I do.
I do care.
I want my hair back the way it’s always been. I want my mom’s fingers threading through it, so fast and sure and soothing, Kiri next to me waiting their turn.
But I also don’t want my hair braided. I can’t. I won’t.
Not until Kiri comes home.
Don’t can’t won’ts are like lalalas. They stay down deep inside us, hidden like birds with folded wings—
folded wings that wait
and wait
and wait to
open
but don’t.
There are other don’t can’t won’t questions in my head. Things that have to do with Kiri going so far away.
Kiri, Kiri, Kiri.
Kiri, Kiri, Kiri
sings itself in my mind
like a cry
When Kiri comes home it’ll be the biggest relief in the world. Seventeen more days until Kiri turns eleven. Seventeen more days until cake and ice cream and eleven trick candles and one half-melted lucky candle to grow on.
In the meantime,
lalala lalala lalala
don’t think don’t think don’t think
I’m scared of the nightmare.
Maybe I’ll stay up all night.
If I stay up all night, it’ll be only sixteen days until Kiri’s birthday. I turn on the light and pull the wooden box of Kiri things out from under my bed.
I arrange them around me on my bed and send Kiri my thoughts.
Mostly my thoughts are one thought:
Come home.
Come home, Kiri.
Please come home.
On nights like this I look out the window at my birch tree, its branches outlined against the sky. My birch tree is always there.
My birch tree listens to all my silent questions and all my silent thoughts and all my silent wonderings, all of which are
LOUD
from all the silence
and all the
lalala
and
don’t can’t won’t
buried inside
I must have fallen asleep, because when Dad knocks on my door, the sky is beginning to lighten and my lamp is still on. I quick cover all my Kiri things with my blanket before he sees them.
“How’s my girl?” he says, sitting on the floor beside my bed.
“Okay. I guess. It was hard to sleep.”
“Do you miss Kiri?”
“I just want them to get home.”
“Yeah. We all wish Kiri could come home.”
Those soft brown eyes. Those tough brown hands, hard from work, that are only soft when he strokes my cheek or smooths my hair back or holds my hand.
“Maybe you’re nervous about school starting,” he says. “Seeing as it’s middle school.”
I shake my head.
“Maybe it’ll feel weird, being there without Kiri?”
I keep shaking my head. “Kiri’ll be home by then. Only sixteen days now.”
Dad gives me a puzzled look—sixteen days?—but I don’t say anything else. He can’t have forgotten Kiri’s birthday, can he?
Outside my window, across the street, over Mrs. S’s house and Gentleman’s apartment building and Rowan and Geneva’s duplex and the whole neighborhood and the whole city and the whole country, the sky lightens some more.
Streaks of pink and orange and red. Dad holds out his hand.
“Want to watch the sun rise?”
I like to sit in my tree at dawn and look out at our block, just beginning to wake up.
Dad knows that about me. So do Mom and Pops, but Dad gets up earlier than they do.
We both like to watch the block wake up.
Sounds of windows opening, a car rumbling to life, somebody with headphones on a morning run, feet thump thump thumping on the sidewalk, somebody else curving down the street on a bike, singing.
I like to watch the Spruce Café’s neon Open sign blink on and know that Mrs. S will soon emerge from her house to pick up her daily blueberry muffin. Once in a while she gets pumpkin raisin instead.
Sunrise is when I used to watch Kiri’s mom wander down the sidewalk with Junie For Short on a leash, so that Junie For Short could pee.
Sometimes Kiri’s mom was still wearing her pajamas.
Sometimes I’d wiggle my birch limb at her even though she doesn’t know the secret code.
I’m not doing any of those things now. I’m waiting until Kiri comes home and everything’s back to normal.
The air is cool. It doesn’t feel much like summer. School starts next month.
Middle school.
A new school.
But Kiri and I will be fine. We’ll have each other, like always.
We’ll walk to our new school together. No need for Geneva and Rowan. We’ll walk home together. We’ll sit in our trees. We’ll take care of the trees on the block. Everything will be back to normal.
