Chapter Two
One of my earliest memories was of my brother promising me chocolate cake. It was my fifth birthday. Bear told me the cake was in the eucalyptus grove, and I believed him. So many wonderful treasures could be found in the grove; why not, among them, chocolate cake? I loved the grove as I loved all of Horseshoe Cliff, my home by the sea.
My father sat in his chair on the back porch, whittling one of his tiny houses, looking out from time to time toward the line where the land fell away. From the back porch, the ocean was an enormous silver sail pulled taut. The eucalyptus grove was on the other side of the house, closer to the road. My father couldn’t have seen what happened.
As Bear and I walked away from the house, the distant rumble of the waves seemed to rise up through the soles of my feet.
The grove was a different world from the sun-bleached coast. Above, fog clung to shaggy trees; below, my feet rustled a blanket of decaying, dagger-shaped leaves. At five years old, I already knew that my father worried over the grove duringlightning storms, that the oils in the trees and the dry footing of leaves could easily spread wildfire. But butterflies, orange-hued and polka-dotted, flitted through the grove, and I loved to chase them, imagining they were stars that would float into the sky at nightfall.
As Bear led me along a winding path through the ancient-looking trees, I searched for fairies in the shadows. I felt my stomach growl. The warm and minty air of the grove, its sleepy stillness, always made me hungry.
My father gave the pumpkins that we grew to our friend Rei from town, and sometimes Rei returned to Horseshoe Cliff with a pumpkin pie that had a whipped cream smiley face on top.Maybe,I thought,she’d taught Bear how to make that pie, and he planned to give it to me for my birthday.So what if it wasn’t really a cake? I would be happy with a pie. But I hoped there would be candles. I wondered if Bear would keep me company while I ate it. This idea excited me. My brother never wanted to play with me. I would gladly share the pie with him, I decided.
“Look, Merrow, there’s the cake.” Bear was ten years older than me and lately his voice had become strange, falling and rising and falling like a bat hunting something I could not see. He pointed at a canvas bag tucked into a nook among a tree’s roots. I called these nooks “tree pockets” and spent hours of my days hiding little treasures within them. More often than not when I returned, sure I’d remembered the right spot, I would find the treasures gone. I would press my hand against the cold dirt and wonder how I could have forgotten something so important.
I raced to the bag. Overhead, the trees shivered in a breeze that didn’t reach me. I looked in the bag and thought,Chocolate!But what I pulled from the bag was a fistful of black mud. A pale worm as thick as my thumb dropped onto the bare skin of my thigh. I yelped and fell backward. The ball of mud hit the ground beside me, writhing with worms.
Bear was laughing. “Did you really think I’d put a cake in a bag? God, you’re dumb. It was only a joke.”
My legs were streaked with mud. I looked up at my brother and began to cry. “I want Daddy.”
Bear’s face changed when he became angry. “‘I want Daddy,’” he whimpered, imitating me.
Something inside of me went still when my brother looked at me like that. A thumping sound began in my ears. I stood to walk back toward the house, but Bear grabbed my wrist and pulled. I fell and then he was above me, one knee on each of my arms, pinning me down. It was hard to breathe.
I already knew to be careful around Bear. He was more than twice my size, and you had to be alert around people and animals that were bigger than you because they could hurt you without meaning to. Like when my pony, Guthrie, whipped my eyes with his tail when he’d only been trying to get a fly off his back. Bear was like Guthrie, I thought. He had patches of whiskers around his lips that made his face always look dirty, and his hair hung around his neck like a mane. I admired how strong and brave my brother was, how he always had blood beading from some scrape on his arm or the purple stain of a bruise on his shin. I’d never seen him cry. He couldn’t helpthat he was so big, or that I so often ran into his hard elbow and wound up on the ground, or that his long feet clipped my ankles and made me fall. His eyes were always empty when he looked down at me, like he couldn’t even see me because I was so small. Bear was a horse and I was a fly, as difficult to see as any fleck of dust.
But now, something was changing. Bear looked right at me and he had knives in his eyes. “Stop crying,” he said.
“I can’t.” I twisted below him. My arms and my belly hurt. There was a sour taste in my throat, but I fought it, sensing how angry it would make Bear if I became sick.
“I’m not letting you up until you’re quiet.” He put his hand over my mouth. It smelled of the grove, this place that I loved, and the smell made me cry harder. I thought about biting him, but then I looked up into his narrowed eyes and couldn’t.
“Stop crying,” said Bear. “Stop.”
“You’re hurting me!” I managed to say beneath his hand.
My brother’s face was flat and hard. “I don’t care. You’re not allowed to cry. You know why.”
How did I know, suddenly, that the “why” was our mother? No one had told me when our mother had died, or why. It was a question that I carried around with me, always and never asking at the same time. It was what I was asking my father when I sat next to him on the porch and listened to his knife scrape against wood. It was what I was asking Bear when I followed him around the orchard, hoping he’d play with me. It was what I was asking Rei when I thanked her for that pumpkin pie.
Why is Mama dead? When will she be back?
“I want Mama,” I said, releasing the words quickly.
Bear’s knees pressed down on me. I could hardly see him through my tears, but I thought I heard him say, “It’s your fault she’s dead.” His knees dug into my arms.
I closed my eyes and thought of following butterflies as bright as stars. Something happened to time after that. When I opened my eyes, Bear was gone, and the light in the grove was fading. My arms ached. Bear had never hurt me like this before.
Later in my life, I would think of this moment often. It seemed to me that it was the first time I felt true fear. True fear was different from worrying over howling wind outside my bedroom at night. It was different from the feeling of looking at an empty plate after another meal that wasn’t quite large enough to satisfy my hunger. It was different from the hard ball of loneliness that rolled around in my heart from time to time. This fear did not feel like the sort of thing that came and went; it felt like something that was meant to last, like a rope with a double knot.
Still, I loved Bear. It was a strange and awful and confusing feeling to love someone I feared.
I found my father sitting on his chair on the porch just where I’d left him, but now he was asleep. The tiny house he’d been carving had fallen off his lap. So had his knife. I picked up the house and turned it on my palm. It was a miniature farmhouse with a peace sign carved into its tiny door and a cat curled on the top step. There were holes bored into the chimney so I knew that the house was meant to hold salt, andhe’d soon whittle a matching barn to hold pepper. Sometimes my father tied a red ribbon through a notch as small as a sliver and turned the house into a Christmas ornament. Other times he nailed tiny brass hinges below the roofline, and the house became a jewelry box. Our friend Rei sold the houses at the fairs she traveled to every month. The orchard had not borne much fruit that fall, and my father spent more and more time working on the houses.
I wondered where this one would end up. Not a single toothpick-wide spindle on the house’s tiny porch railing had broken in the fall from my father’s lap. I longed to keep the house for myself, to hide it deep in a tree pocket where I could play with it during the long hours of the day that I spent alone. But if I put it in a tree pocket, I would probably only end up losing it. I set it down beside my father’s chair.
The knife handle had smooth indentations the size of my father’s fingers. The blade curved like a fang from the handle. I turned the knife in my hand, studying it, wondering over the fluttery feeling that was released in my belly as I held it.
