A Crooked Tree Read online

  Dedication

  for

  my mother

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The night we left Ellen on the road, we were driving north up 252 near where it meets 202 and then crosses the Pennsylvania Turnpike. To the west were open fields, stretches of golden prairie grass and butterfly weed, the final line of sun splintering light through them; to the east, King of Prussia—gray industrial sites cast in dusk, cement trucks, cranes, and a maze of highways and expressways. The Blue Route was somewhere over there, too, like an amputated limb, started in 1967 but fourteen years later still unfinished, the pavement ending at a line of overgrown grass and trees where the money had run out. Teenagers learned to drive on it or partied there late at night. The road to nowhere, we called it. We drove. Cars switched on their headlights and straight ahead the hills of Valley Forge had become shadows, the trees already dark silhouettes.

  The six of us were in the car, Marie up front in the passenger seat, Ellen between me and Thomas in the back, and Beatrice lying in the wayback, with all our school bags and work folders from the year spread around her. It was the last day of school, and we were officially on summer vacation. My mother was driving. Erratically. She hit the brakes, accelerated, revving high in first gear before shifting. She was angry. I could feel it in the car’s sickening motion, and from the seat behind I could see it in glimpses of her jawline, how it moved and twitched under the skin, even when she wasn’t speaking. She and Ellen had been arguing, Ellen pestering her about going to an art camp that summer.

  “I told you no. That’s enough.” She called it promotional blackmail, sending home brochures in school bags, and it infuriated her. “I have enough to handle as it is.”

  I was dreading the coming summer.

  I pressed my forehead against the window and looked toward that final thread of light. Sage would be working at the mall, waitressing in J. C. Penney’s diner. For the summer they’d offered her full-time. I’d spent almost all my summers with her. I thought about forging my mom’s signature to get working papers. At fifteen, I could officially work, but I knew I wouldn’t be allowed, that she needed me to look after the younger ones when she was at the hospital. Her job was admissions receptionist in the ER at Paoli Memorial. Sage said I was lucky. She complained about the other waitresses in their support hose and orthopedic shoes, splashing coffees on the counter for other geriatrics who sprayed tester perfumes in the morning over their eggs and toast. But I envied her real job, with regulars and tips and people who stiffed her and the stories she told. One customer in her nineties drank half-and-half from the white porcelain creamer left on the counter every morning, leaving behind a sloppy lip print in bright orange. It wasn’t about money or work—I had my Friday-night babysitting job for the Bouchers. I was afraid of all the days ahead of me alone.

  Thomas was reciting the periodic table in a low whisper on the other side of Ellen. “There’s holmium, hafnium, erbium—”

  “Stop,” she said.

  “—phosphorus, francium, fluorine, terbium.”

  “Shut up. Just shut up!” Ellen put her head down on her knees and crossed her arms over her shins. She was crying. A throbbing pain that started in my neck had moved across my skull into my forehead. I wanted them both to shut up.

  “You’re annoying everyone, Thomas. Just stop,” I said.

  “Did you know tears contain glucose, sodium, and potassium?”

  “Shut up, you weird science freak.” Ellen kicked his shins twice with her heel, shoving the driver’s seat, which she’d gripped for support.

  “Stop it this instant. Do you want us to crash?” My mother was furious.

  “Tears contain a natural chemical painkiller, enkephalin,” Thomas whispered. “You’ll feel better afterward.”

  “Make him stop.” Ellen’s voice was muffled.

  Her whine and his murmurs made me want to hit him or someone. Ellen’s head was back on her knees. I reached across her and pushed him hard on the shoulder with my knuckles.

  “Shut up, Thomas. What do you know about tears?”

  I said it and wished I hadn’t because there was something wrong with him, the way he didn’t cry after all that had happened to us, how he just disappeared into himself and his room. Right then, teasing Ellen, he was more like the old Thomas.

  He turned toward the window and didn’t say anything back. It would have been better if he got angry. I tried to undo it, remembering a joke. “Hey, Thomas, if you’re boring and a moron, guess what that makes you?”

  He turned to look at me, waiting. “Well?”

  “A boron.”

  “Very funny, Libby, but you don’t even know what boron is. You’ve just admitted that I’m supernova material, not even of this earth.”

  “All of you stop,” Marie said from the front, and she looked back at us over the seat. Her hair on one side was dyed black and spiked out like Siouxsie Sioux’s. She’d pierced her cheek and shaved the other side before the graduation mass at school, and it was growing back in blond stubble. Both Thomas and I went quiet. Marie was almost eighteen, only a year older than Thomas, but we listened to her, especially since she was giving away the rock albums she didn’t want anymore. She’d left Who’s Next on my pillow after I stayed home with Beatrice while she snuck out to a party, and Thomas got Quadrophenia for winning the highest GPA in his class. We both wanted Tommy. Thomas said he should get it, given his name and all. I didn’t want to point out further similarities, like a dead father, a mother with a secret boyfriend, and not being allowed to say anything. Neither of us even had a record player. Marie had a portable turntable, and we all used that.

  Outside, dogwoods lined the understory where the woods met the fields, and even in the falling light I could see they were stripped of their bloom. Cornus florida. Oval leaves with primary veins that curve upward along smooth, wavy margins. Clustered flowers surrounded by bracts that people mistake as the petals. My father had bought me The Field Guide to the Trees of North America the last Christmas before he died. I’d read and reread the book, committing to memory every tree fact I could. I’d started a tree notebook, identifying all the trees I saw with descriptions of them in different seasons. I sketched them, took bark rubbings, pressed their flowers.

  His gift had arrived in a package with a postmark from New York City, where he’d gone to live, working with a cousin, an Irish immigrant like himself. He’d gotten us each a card. For me, a forest of spruce, one tree separated out in front with a star on top. His handwriting was small and uneven, as if he weren’t used to signing cards, which I guess he probably wasn’t.

  “For Libby, always in a tree. Merry Christmas. Love, Dad.”

  I don’t know if I spent so much time with trees because I loved them or because of how much he loved me loving them, and I cannot separate these things. When I was maybe six, and he still sometimes lived with us, I’d come home at the end of a day in the woods, barefoot and filthy. Once he sat me on the washing machine, turning on the tub next to it, and w
ashed my feet. He lathered up the soap and gave them a vigorous scrub, even using a nail brush on my heels, where dirt was embedded deep in the calluses.

  “There’s copperheads in those woods, Libby—you have to wear sneakers. You can’t keep going around barefoot.” Jagged scabs scored my shins from climbing trees and crawling under laurel and rhododendron thickets.

  He took my hand and pulled my finger across the ridge of a particularly bumpy scab.

  “See that? You’re already turning into a tree. Your legs are becoming bark.”

  The furrowed scab was raised and dark. I traced it with my fingers and ran my hand up both my shins, feeling the crusts.

  “I think I am,” I said. I looked up at him, happy, and he laughed and towel-dried my feet and shins, even between the toes, and then slipped socks over my clean feet.

  “Now you can go up to Her Ladyship and not be in trouble. And keep your feet clean.” But I knew he loved my black feet.

  He had picked a book for each of us that last Christmas. Even now I think of him in that bookstore in New York City, selecting the books we would like, choosing our cards, deciding on the paper, then wrapping the gifts: folding, tearing tape, and tying ribbons with his thick fingers, more conditioned to working machines or hauling cinder blocks. For Marie, he had bought the two-volume set Rock On: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock n’ Roll, the Modern Years. I’d lost hours looking through the pictures. It covered 1964 to 1978 and pretty much all my favorite bands. Thomas got The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Space, which he kept in its original wrapping paper and wouldn’t let us touch. Ellen’s book was on art history and came with a watercolor set and brushes; for Beatrice he’d bought a book on breeds of dogs, with stickers. I wondered now if he’d told the person at the cash register they were for his children. I imagined him with his bag of presents on the subway back to the Bronx, sitting among the other Christmas shoppers, and there in the car I suddenly felt like I couldn’t breathe. I wished I could tell him how each book had become a cipher for us, how we couldn’t lose the picture he had of us or stop trying to fill it.

  Next to me, Ellen was still bent over, the bumpy bones of her spine visible beneath her school pinafore. “A little sprite,” my aunt Rosie had said when she came from Ireland for my dad’s funeral. She’d sent us food packages and at Christmas a bottle of sherry to improve Ellen’s appetite. She said she, “wasn’t thriving,” a turn of phrase that had made us all laugh, as if she were talking about a farm animal. But she was right, Ellen was small. At twelve years old, she was just over four feet and only sixty-some pounds. Looking at her now, I thought she seemed so tiny and unhappy, and I tried to pat her back.

  “Get off,” she muttered and shoving me off she banged the back of the driver’s seat.

  My mom swerved the car toward the verge and back onto the road again, exaggerating the power of Ellen’s knock against her seat. “You could kill us doing that. Do you understand? That’s enough. You can vacuum the downstairs when you get home, and fold the laundry.”

  “No. I won’t,” Ellen said. “You should make Beatrice do something for once.”

  “Leave Beatrice out of this. I’ve had enough.” I could see my mother’s large hair bun and just one eye in the rearview mirror as she looked back for Ellen.

  “It’s okay. I don’t mind doing it.” Beatrice leaned forward from the wayback, fretting that she was somehow the cause of what was happening.

  “Thank you, Beatrice. If only Ellen could be sweet to others.”

  “You hate all of us, and you just love her. And your fat boyfriend.” Ellen was going too far. I elbowed her to make her stop.

  “One more word, and you’ll walk.”

  “It’s true. You hate us!” Ellen was shouting. “You hated Dad, and I hate you.”

  His name in the car punched the air out of us. We didn’t talk about him in front of my mother. The car skidded onto the shoulder, right where 252 crossed the turnpike.

  “Out. Get out.” My mom said it with her voice low, which let us know she meant it. Ellen reached across Thomas, opened the back door, and started to climb out.

  “You can’t leave her out here,” Marie said. “It’s getting dark. I’m going with her.” She started to gather her school bag from the floor of the front.

  “You’ll do no such thing.”

  “Wait,” said Thomas. He looked stricken, blaming himself for the teasing. Ellen was standing on the gravel verge of the overpass in her school pinafore, tennis shirt, and knee socks. Marie was opening her door when my mother threw the car into gear and accelerated forward.

  I looked back. Ellen was facing away from us, looking down over the bridge, where columns of cars funneled along the turnpike.

  “Mom, don’t. Please,” Thomas said, but she didn’t answer. We sped up 252 into the national park and then turned west toward Valley Forge Mountain, where we lived. Ahead of us, the sun had fallen below the fields.

  “You can’t leave her. It’s dark,” Marie said.

  We were still five or six miles from home. I hadn’t said anything to make my mother stop. We careened down the road, went through the covered bridge, past farmland and fences. Beside us, the shadows of dogwoods blurred in the dark as my mother kept driving, each tree hemmed in a halo of white where the bracts had fallen.

  2

  Valley Forge was best known for the winter that George Washington spent there with twelve thousand soldiers of the Continental Army, camped in makeshift log cabins, trying to survive. They were malnourished, half naked, and barefoot. Over two thousand died from exposure, disease, and injuries, and another three thousand were unfit for service. Miss Esposito, our ninth-grade history teacher, had said that Valley Forge was the turning point in the war, that it symbolized the revolutionary spirit and America’s sense of itself. I was the only one in my class who actually was from there. When I walked through the woods on the mountain, I thought about those freezing men who came up here to drag timber and fallen branches down to the encampment, who ran through the trees, deserting the army, or who may have crawled here to lie down and die. Some weren’t even men, only boys, Thomas’s age.

  The army hospital was set up at Yellow Springs, the other side of the mountain, so the sick and dying men must have come through our woods, along the trails, to get there from the encampment. Men with no shoes trudging through snow, sick, walking the same woods as me or being carried. What would they have seen from a stretcher in the winter, looking up, no canopy of leaves? Just bare black branches against a gray sky, thinking it might be the last time they were witnessing the earth, and the sun wouldn’t even show itself. Maybe they didn’t even see trees at all; I’d read somewhere that to keep warm and build their cabins, the soldiers had felled nearly all the trees.

  Valley Forge Mountain was not so much a mountain as a hill. Washington’s Headquarters was less than two miles from my house if I cut through the woods. In the 1950s the mountain was zoned for housing, but the woods were preserved as part of the park. Behind my house was the Horseshoe Trail, a hiking and bridle path that started in the park and went 140 miles until it met the Appalachian Trail in Harrisburg.

  The trail divided the mountain into two townships: Tredyffrin, where Sage lived, and Schuylkill, our side. Sage’s side of the mountain seemed more affluent—houses were bigger and better kept. Schuylkill’s main town was Phoenixville, an old ironworks and steel-mill town at the bottom of the mountain. While we were growing up, steel mills were downsizing, laying people off, closing. Phoenixville suffered. Marie said the town was caught in a time warp: the 1980s had started, but Phoenixville was stuck in the ’60s, and there weren’t many prospects there for young people. On the mountain, Schuylkill kids went to Phoenixville High School and those on the Tredyffrin side to Conestoga, one of the best public schools in the state. We didn’t go to either. We went to Catholic schools closer to Philadelphia.

  I spent most of my time on the mountain in the woods or walking down to Washington�
��s Headquarters. Thomas and I had tried fishing in the Schuylkill River, which ran alongside it. He said we could try for catfish or perch. We never caught anything, and the riverbank smelled like sludge, with hubcaps, old toasters, and other garbage visible in the shallows. On the mountain, off-trail, there were traces of old quarries in the woods, and at the bottom of my road, about a quarter of a mile in, was a deep ravine that used to be a quartzite quarry. They would mine the quartzite ore and bring it away to be crushed into sand. Quartz was everywhere on the mountain—giant glimmering rocks sitting on the surface of the earth and flashing edges jutting up from the ground, as if it were growing there. Dad had told me that in prehistoric Ireland, quartz was sacred and was buried with the bones of the dead.

  After we left Ellen on the road, we drove up the mountain in silence. I watched the car’s headlights hit the trees as we turned the corners. Each time the car downshifted and slowed, I hoped my mother might be changing her mind, that she would turn around, drive back, and take Ellen off the road, that none of us would be angry anymore because we would be so thankful to have her safe in the car again. But we drove on. Lying in the wayback, Beatrice was the only one to speak.

  “There’s no streetlights. How will she see the way home?”

  Nobody said anything.

  We pulled into our driveway, and Marie got out to open the garage door. The Walkers had switched on their lampposts across the road; under their light I could see our yard’s overgrown grass, knee-high and gone to seed. Things felt wrong. The house, the uncut grass, Ellen on the road, Dad gone. A few months earlier Mr. Walker had written a note, a barely disguised complaint about how the house looked. The card read “Thinking of You” on the front, and inside he’d sympathized with all we had been through in the past year, how we’d been on his mind. He said he and his wife Minnie had been praying for us, and then he ended the note, “We were thinking that it might help alleviate your burden if you had someone to cut your lawn this summer and do odd jobs for you. I know one of the De Martino boys is looking for that line of summer work. Let us know if we can be of any help.” He signed it “Your neighbor and friend, Harry Walker.”