The Lightning Tree, page 10
“What would bringing Fauna there do?”
“It’s hard to explain,” I say, “but I think it could be our answer.”
“How?” Aaron wants to know, still skeptical.
“Well, it’s as if there’s a piece of her still in the tree, and if we bring her to it, I might be able to connect with her. Or with the tree. Or both.” Excitement pulses through me. “Maybe I can talk to her, ask her why the trees are doing this.”
Aaron stares at us wide-eyed. “Your sister? I thought she didn’t speak?”
“She doesn’t.” I hesitate. “Well, not with words. But she speaks to me in other ways. In flowers. In acorns.”
I shoot Carl a please help me look.
“It’s not as crazy as it sounds,” Carl says.
Aaron snorts. “It couldn’t sound any crazier.”
“Here.” Carl pulls out his phone. “Read this.”
Aaron reads the title of the German scientist’s article out loud, then gives us a cynical look.
“Just read it,” Carl urges.
While Aaron digests the article, Carl leans closer and takes my hand. “Will they let you bring Fauna home, just like that?”
“I don’t know.”
The warmth of Carl’s hand is like fire warming my entire body. He rubs the back of my hand with his thumb and shivers shoot up my arm. Like the trees, I think. The way my lightning scars tingle and burn when I touch them, or am even close to them. It is similar to Carl’s touch, yet completely different—like two different languages, or like the difference between spoken words and sign language.
“Do you have any ideas?” Carl wants to know.
“Not yet. But I’ll think of something.”
“I’m sure you will.” Carl winks.
“Okay.” Aaron plunks the phone down on the table. “I get it. Trees talk.”
“And they warn each other of danger.” Carl lets go of my hand and pulls off the Phillies cap. “And they attack.”
Aaron sees the scratched X, dried and crooked, for the first time and his face turns gray. “Oh, man. Does that mean you’re . . . next?”
Carl gingerly puts the cap back on. “Believe me, that’s what I’ve been wondering. But why Seth and Tyke? And why me?”
“Chief Batista told me that all three of them—Jack, Seth and Tyke—tried to harm our oak tree the night of the party. They all got marked. But only Jack died that night.”
“But the trees got to them later anyway,” Aaron says.
“But why me?” Carl repeats. “What did I do?”
“Maybe the trees saw you fighting with Seth and Tyke, and—”
Carl interrupts me. “Saw?”
“Okay. Maybe sensed.”
Aaron swipes his hand across his forehead, like he’s making sure no X is there. “So, what do we do?”
“I need to get Fauna out. If the staff won’t let me, we’ll have to find a way.”
Carl turns to Aaron. “If I keep not showing up at Math Wizards, they’ll be suspicious.”
Aaron is still fingering his forehead. “Don’t worry, I can cover for you again.”
“Thanks, man.” Carl turns to me. “I’ll help you.”
Aaron clears his throat. “We should tell the police.”
“Are you kidding?” Carl blurts. “They would interrogate Flora for weeks, and then they’d hand her over to people who’d conduct awful experiments on her.” He picks up his phone. “You gotta see this.” He taps the screen and I recognize the voice.
Aaron swallows. “Who’s that?”
“It’s my dad,” I say. “He’s a scientist, a botanist.” It feels surreal to talk about my dad as if he’s part of my life. “He just posted this video yesterday.”
Aaron shakes his head, like it’s all too crazy to take in. When the video ends, he looks at me. “What if it’s happening now? This revolution?”
“Then this is just the start.” The moment I say it, I realize I sound like my dad.
I suddenly notice how dark it’s gotten and jump up. “Crap. My phone’s dead. What time is it?”
“Almost 9:00,” Aaron says, checking his watch.
I cringe. “I’ve got to get home.” I hurry to the front door and the boys follow.
“I can walk with you,” Carl offers.
“No. You have to be careful and stay out of sight. Can you stay here tonight?”
“Yeah,” he says, and I mouth thank you to Aaron.
“But tomorrow . . .” I abruptly realize what I’m asking of him. “It might be too risky for you to help me.”
“I have to try,” he says. “I can’t let the bravest girl I know face that care facility all alone. You’re going to need an accomplice.”
I smile. “Thanks, partner in crime.”
Did he really just call me the bravest girl he knows?
Carl gives me a quick hug and his hands linger on my waist. “Just keep away from trees, flower-girl.”
“I’ll do my best,” I say.
THE STREETS ARE strangely deserted—no cars on the road, no one walking their dog. The houses are stately in this part of town with their lush gardens. A giant maple tree up ahead stretches its limbs over a thick bamboo hedge, the dark branches swaying against a pale moon. There’s barely a breeze, just the sticky night air against my skin.
But then I feel it: the tingling growing stronger in my lightning marks.
I brush up against a pointy bamboo leaf and hear cut, cut, cut, just like in the forest. I take off running, my sneakers slapping against the pavement. In the distance, a cat lets out a long wail.
As I approach the corner of the hedge, I’m panting but I think I hear faint voices.
I come to a hard stop. “Hello?” I say.
“Who’s there?” It’s a man’s voice, loud and deep. I recognize it, but I can’t quite place it.
“It’s me. Flora Reed.”
The next thing I know, the gleaming barrel of a gun is pointed at me. I freeze. The man holding the gun slowly appears from behind the hedge. His dark eyes fix on me, and a group of men, all carrying guns, materialize behind him.
“Mr. Dunne?” I begin taking a tentative step forward, but Mr. Dunne backs up. “It’s me, Flora,” I say.
“Stay where you are,” he commands.
“It’s Ava’s girl,” someone mumbles.
In my peripheral vision, I could swear I see the maple tree bending its branches toward us.
“You shouldn’t be out here!” I warn, my lightning marks burning.
“Are you threatening us, girl?” I recognize the voice of Vice Principal Harrison, his cap pulled so low it nearly covers his face. And next to him is Mr. Owen, his hand on the gun in his holster.
“Please,” I urge, “I’m warning you.” My heart is racing, and my mouth is so dry, the words taste like dust.
“No, I’m warning you.” Mr. Dunne takes a step closer. “If you see something, if you hear something—”
“You have to go home, all of you,” I plead.
“Mike.” Mr. Owen reaches for Mr. Dunne’s shoulder. “Let her go.”
Mr. Dunne lowers the rifle and I sprint past the men, past the whispering trees, to my street six blocks away, all the while wondering if seeing that maple tree move was truly only in my imagination.
32
FAUNA
“Not Flora,” I beg them.
“Please, not my sister.”
We still grow side by side. One with roots, one without.
I can feel her every breath, her frantic footsteps, her fear seeping into the darkness.
“Please, please, not my sister.”
33
FLORA
I SLAM THE DOOR BEHIND ME, MY HEART BEATING like it wants out of my chest.
“There you are!” Mom says. “I was really worried.” Her hands hug her favorite tea mug, the one I painted in fifth grade with happy face flowers. “Why didn’t you answer my calls or messages?”
“Sorry.” I throw myself into a chair. “My phone died.” I rest my elbows against our pine kitchen table and it’s like I’m seeing it for the first time. It’s been here for as long as I can remember, but now the lines and knots in its rugged surface seem to speak to me—of times even farther back than my childhood, of days before I was born.
Mom sighs, with that wrinkle between her eyes. “I was worried sick. You need to let me know where you are, especially now.” She gestures to the dark window. “The mayor’s ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew until the people responsible for these atrocities are arrested.”
“Oh. Is that why there were men out with guns?”
Mom frowns. “So you saw them?”
I decide not to mention that I had one pointed at me only minutes ago and just utter, “Mm hm.”
“Chuck Owen came by and told me they were rounding up people for a neighborhood watch committee.”
“Oh yeah?”
The creases return to Mom’s brow. “I hope they catch the culprits soon.”
I swallow hard, not knowing what to say.
Mom opens the fridge and pulls out a slice of casserole on a plate. “You hungry?”
“Starved.”
She pops it into the microwave and crosses her arms.
“Have you . . .” She draws out the word, like she’s reluctant to continue. “. . . heard about the two other boys?”
I nod.
“Did you hear they were found not far from here?” Tears well in her eyes.
A part of me wants to cry too, wants to tell her everything. But she’s dealing with enough as it is. When the microwave dings, I notice her hands shaking as she pulls the plate out and sets it in front of me.
“Yeah, I heard.” I don’t dare mention I saw them too.
“The whole town’s talking about it . . . the ‘tree-jackings,’ they’re calling them.” She shakes her head. “Who could do such horrible things?” She fetches a fork for me, a glass of water. “Those boys were just kids. Same age as you.”
Mom’s macaroni casserole is my favorite, but the knot in my stomach is back, along with the haunting memory of Seth and Tyke in the birch tree—their empty eyes, the branches wrapped around their necks, the bloody X’s in their foreheads. I push the plate away. “Sorry, Mom. I don’t know how I can eat . . . with everything going on.”
Mom sits opposite me and pats my hand. “You need nutrition. You can’t just run on empty.”
“I know.”
“You need your strength, especially with all of this.”
“I know.”
She gives me her “motherly concern” look and I take a reluctant bite of the casserole.
She manages a sad smile, then brings her fingers together, interlacing them like a spiky roof. “And I hate to bring this up now, but I have to ask: Why didn’t you tell me that Abigail quit?”
I swallow my bite and take a deep breath.
“And the geraniums?” She holds her hand over her head. “They were up to the ceiling! I’ve never seen anything like it. They were almost . . . otherworldly.”
I realize I can’t keep hiding things from Mom. She’s seen some of these weird occurrences with her own eyes now. I wasn’t planning to tell her anything tonight about what Carl and I discovered online, or what happened to him in the woods. But since I have every intention of bringing Fauna home from the care facility tomorrow, I don’t think I can keep her in the dark any longer about my theory.
“Mom, I think . . . I think there might be a connection of some sort . . . between Fauna and plants.”
Mom’s eyes widen.
“Living things . . . nature. And I . . . I can sense it too.”
Mom’s face goes blank and she shakes her head slowly, like she sees a ghost behind me. “No, no, no . . . this can’t be happening.” She jumps up from the table and starts pacing and wringing her hands. When she stops and turns to me, she actually looks frightened. “Tell me you haven’t inherited your father’s lunacy.”
I flinch. My father’s lunacy?
“I couldn’t bear it, Flora. You’re the only one I have left.”
I cross my arms hard over my chest. “I am not crazy.”
My defiance seems to shake Mom out of her momentary frenzy. “I’m sorry,” she says. “This has all just been too much.”
I get up and put my arm around her shoulders. “I know . . . all of us are freaked out. But I need to tell you what I think’s going on.”
I guide her back into her chair and sit next to her. “Mom, Fauna talks to me. Not in words, but with . . . things.”
“What do you mean? What kind of things?”
“Acorns. Flowers. I think she can communicate through nature.”
I can see that Mom is having a hard time hearing this, but I go on anyway.
“I heard her calling for me. In the oak tree.”
Tears fill Mom’s eyes. “Don’t do this, Flora. Your dad suffered from similar delusions. He would go on and on, obsessed with the ‘awakening of nature.’” She pronounces the last words like they taste bad in her mouth.
“But you saw the geraniums,” I say.
“I know, but . . .” She shakes her head, and tears spill down her cheeks. “I can’t do this. Just stop, okay?”
“But Mom, the tree-jackings, you must see how—”
“Flora! I asked you to stop.” She goes to the sink, her back to me. With sharp movements, she starts doing the dishes. Her silence brings me back to the fearful nights of my childhood.
Fauna’s silhouette would appear in the crack of my door, her small voice asking to stay with me. She would crawl into my bed and I would hum till she fell asleep, trying to drown out the sounds of our parents fighting. Then I would tiptoe out of my room, careful not to wake her. On the landing, I would sink to the floor, my chin against my knees, listening to their arguments in the darkness.
What I remember most after he left is the silence.
Mom never talked about his leaving. She just zipped it up like it never happened.
Mom’s voice pulls me back to the kitchen. Facing me with a dripping plate in her hand, she says, “There is always a natural explanation.” She waves the plate at me with fiery eyes. “Always!”
“Yes!” I blurt. “Exactly.”
She turns back to the sink. “Don’t be smart with me.”
I exhale audibly, then pick up the fork and take another bite of the casserole, suppressing a grin. A natural explanation. She said it herself.
When I’m finished, I take my empty plate to Mom and offer to help.
She doesn’t answer, just pulls the plate from my hands.
I grab a towel from the drawer and start drying the dishes in the rack.
“Mom?”
No answer.
“I want to take Fauna out tomorrow.”
She stops swirling the dishrag.
“Just for a little while,” I plead.
She shakes her head. “Absolutely not. It’s too risky. What if she has another seizure?”
“But I would be careful.”
“Careful,” she snorts. “If you’d been more careful, then maybe Fauna wouldn’t have—”
I immediately feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach.
She turns to me. “Honey, I didn’t mean . . .”
But it’s too late. I know what she meant, that she blames me for Fauna’s accident.
The glass I’m drying slips from my hand and falls to the floor, breaking into countless pieces. I don’t even try to pick up the jagged shards. Instead, I run upstairs to my room and curl up on the floor with my back against the door, like I can keep it all out if I press hard enough, wondering if Dad ever felt the same way.
34
FAUNA
I feel their pain and their confusion and their fear and their despair.
There’s nothing I can do.
I can only count them, as the struggle subsides. It comes to me through the roots: every last tremble, every last breath.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
35
FLORA
“FLORA.”
Dad wakes me, his forefinger over his lips. “Don’t say anything.”
I get up slowly, careful not to awaken Mom and Fauna sleeping beside me on a blanket under the oak tree. My little sister is just a baby, and she’s been fussing all night, keeping Mom up. Now they are in a deep sleep, Mom with her arms around Fauna, and Fauna with her ginger head on Mom’s chest.
Dad takes my hand and leads me through dewy grass that tickles my ankles. He kneels down by the door to the old shed, his eyes narrowed into a smile. “I want to show you something.”
He unlocks the door and together we enter the tilted building, lined with shelves of pots and jars, smelling like mold and dirt. Giant bags of soil stand in the corner, and a variety of garden tools rest against one wall. On a crippled desk propped up with a stool sit a dozen clay pots. Inside each one are green sprouts raising their arms like they’re greeting us.
“Look, Dad.” I smile and turn to him, but he isn’t there. The inside of the shed suddenly gets darker. Shadows seem to reach for me. “Dad! Where’d you go?” I spin around and look for him, but he’s gone.
I blink awake, my heart racing. I’m in my bed. The sun is peeking in and the birds are chirping outside my window.
I untwist myself from the covers and sit up. Was it a dream? But it was so real. I can still remember the smell of mold and dirt and my father’s hand around mine. It feels more like a vivid memory than a dream.
Your father’s lunacy. Mom’s words linger in my mind like an old wound split open. I reach for my phone. Still dead. Crap, I forgot to charge it. I crawl out of bed and plug it in. More of Mom’s words replay in my mind. If you had been more careful, then maybe Fauna wouldn’t have . . .
I close my eyes to shut out the bright summer morning and feel the air leave my lungs. At the end of the exhale is a pause, a floating moment where time stands still, ever so briefly, where I can empty myself of harsh words and heavy memories. And then I breathe in and open my eyes.
Today I will bring Fauna home. Mom can’t stop me.
