Just Under the Clouds Read online

  White pine, I write in the dark. I add it to my tree map of Ennis House. For a minute, I think of giving it a name—like I gave the vomit tree a name—but white pine sounds just fine.

  Daddy labeled his pages with Latin names and photographs. Like Ailanthus altissima, the last thing he studied. He told Mom it was his favorite tree because it can grow in the worst conditions. It can grow anywhere. I looked it up in a reference book at the school library and it’s got a nonscientific name, too: tree of heaven.

  I turn to the first page of Daddy’s tree of heaven notes. A photograph. Then he tracks the tree, page after page, in charts. Every day for months and months until the numbers fall off and slip away.

  The last page was written the day he died and now it’s worn and loose and hanging on to the notebook by a thread. It’s labeled Ailanthus altissima, March 21. There’s one note on temperature in his scratchy scrawl.

  It’s the last thing I have from the person he used to be.

  Daddy always said a tree has a vascular system, just like a person. It transfers water and food like blood. If a tree doesn’t die of some catastrophe, it can rot away, like a disease to the heart that no one knows is coming. In Daddy’s case, he died because his heart grew too big—so big, it couldn’t pump blood and it lost all its rhythm. It doesn’t seem fair for anyone to die of a too-big heart, but he was gone before anyone could even try to get it beating right again.

  I look out the window. If you can get into a tree around here, you can see far away, over the green ick of the canal, and there are all these little water towers like tiny stilt houses on top of houses. I’ve always thought that if we could each have one little tower, me and Adare and Mom, right next to each other, we could make up our own spaces just the way we want them.

  I close my eyes and dream our towers. An open-roof tower for Adare so she can look straight to the sky for her crows. Blank canvas walls for Mom to paint the way she used to before she had to spend all her time making money at the store. Mine, all glass, with yellow light flooding in, so I can grow things everywhere. I’d have my own sink and toilet and a toothbrush holder like we used to have on Hoyt Street, the kind where your toothbrush dangles like it’s sitting in its own little inner tube.

  Sookie does this sigh thing where her belly puffs out into a mini hot-air balloon, and before I know it, my belly’s the opposite, empty and soft, and the dream of my tower is warm and sweet, and I feel like I’m floating until I realize what I’ve done.

  I push the blankets and gut-punch Sookie with my heel without meaning to. She does this hiss-whimper thing and Adare moans and my underwear’s soaked right through to the faded flower sheet. Twelve years old and I peed myself like a little kid.

  I can’t believe it. I’ve always been able to hold it. I sit up and wriggle my underpants to my ankles so I’m in only my lace tank top. I leave them there, with Sookie prowling underneath the covers. Adare rolls over, closer to the big old wet beet-pee stain. I can see she’s awake, her eyes like two shining stars in the dark. She rubs them until she’s up and sitting and I see her mouth slide down into a frown. I shush her real fast.

  “You’re dreaming,” I say.

  But I wish it was me who was. I could crumple the sheets, burn them with a match I don’t have. I could say I spilled my tea after our boxed macaroni-and-cheese dinner and I think of running to get a mug real quick. But they’re stacked in the drying rack. Mom cleared it all before bed.

  Adare hates being woken up. She starts this steady yelping pout and I try to shush her again, but I hear Mom rustle on the beanbag chair. She murmurs, “Adare?”

  Then, before I know what I’m doing, I yank at Adare’s polka-dot underwear. She squirms and cries out. I wrestle the underwear to her feet and jump out of bed. My bare toes hit the cold wood floor and I rush to the dresser, rummaging in the dark through socks and shirts. “It’s okay,” I call out to Mom and Adare. I wrangle my legs into a soft, clean pair.

  Adare’s crying real tears now and Mom’s awake and fumbling for the light-bulb string dangling in the middle of the room.

  The light is an angry blast. I hold up Adare’s polka-dot underwear in the air and call out, “I have a clean pair for you.”

  Mom’s eyes are hazy. She looks around, adjusting to the light.

  “She peed herself,” I whisper.

  The lie is at my stomach, sitting there sick and hunched.

  Mom goes to Adare and wraps her up in the cloak of her arms, and I know if it was me, she wouldn’t be so kind. “It was an accident,” she assures her.

  And Adare is as she always is, falling into our embraces, trusting that she is who we say.

  The next morning, I walk into Mrs. Belz’s class, still thinking about the accident, how we stripped the sheets, washed my skivvies in dish soap, and hung them to dry.

  Meredith Crane watches me with a stink in her eye. She already thinks everything I do is babyish. She’s always watching me as I drag Adare around after school, climb trees, and carry a giant backpack instead of a shoulder bag. She makes fun of me when I braid my messy hair or make fortune-tellers out of notebook paper. It’s like she can see straight through to the wrong underwear and know I’m the baby who wet the bed.

  I slip my backpack from my arm, slump into my cold blue metal seat. I used to talk to kids, but with the way we keep getting yanked around Brooklyn, tossed out like useless weeds, I keep my mouth shut. What would be the point?

  Mrs. Belz’s class is about as strict and boring as it gets. It’s not like my art class, where you can talk and laugh and work on anything that puts you in a creative frenzy, as Mrs. Folaris likes to say. Mrs. Belz is already slapping her chalk against the board, thwacking it like hail pellets. She draws long formulas, looped in parentheses, with a’s and b’s squared and plus-signed and looking rude.

  The bell rings, fast and shrill. Sabina Griffin’s annoying rubber boots screech across the floor like always and Mrs. Belz is all Settle down, settle down. The chairs scratch the tiles, Meredith Crane fiddles with a pink eraser at her desk, and I’m bored already, so I let my eyes wander to the window to keep track.

  There’s one patch tree past the courtyard and there’s a cherry blossom, short and bushy, its branches sticking out in a perfect oval. It’s budding early this year and the sun cuts across it, slicing it in half.

  I reach down to my backpack and pull out my Tree Book. I smooth out the soft pages and write in quick pencil scratch: Cherry blossom. Buds. Mid-March. In addition to making tree maps, I mark all the beginnings and endings of a thing growing. I write tiny, using every available inch of blank space. I never want the pages to run out.

  I look out the window, like I do every day from this seat, studying the rows of trees.

  I mark them in code. The Callery pears are pear-shaped. The honey locusts are like fat, squat bears. And the pin oaks stand in skinny, straight lines.

  To anyone else my map probably looks like a jumble of pencil scratches, but to me it’s a walking path. There’s an order to it. It follows my feet to all the places we’ve ever lived. I scrape the sidewalks, look up, then send the life of the city back down to the pages. It holds on to me. It keeps me. And I need a way of staying.

  I glance at Mrs. Belz. She looks pleased that I’m taking notes.

  Before I got to middle school, math was easy, but now I try to make sense of every number and letter, how they’re all arranged. I don’t understand why there’s a number after the equal sign and why we don’t need an answer but the missing piece of a question instead. Mom says when it clicks, it clicks, and I keep waiting for that moment. But it just doesn’t come.

  I go through class this way, from the window to the board, mixing tree and sky and the way the clouds wisp out in paintbrush strokes with all the numbers and Mrs. Belz, who talks in staccato. Each. Word. Separate. From. The. Last. She marks every word with shar
p chalk smacks. I scroll through my Tree Book to an earlier page, when I didn’t even know this school yet, and I see in the corner, all neat, because that’s how you write when you start school: Pin oak. Fruit. September.

  I turn away from the window and realize too late that Mrs. Belz’s voice has stopped its steady pinprick. When I let my eyelashes flutter up, I see she’s staring straight at me, waiting for the answer to a question I never heard.

  “Can you repeat the question?” I ask, polite, the way Mom taught me.

  “We’re looking for a.”

  I see the long scribbled rows on the chalkboard, feeling eyes all around me. I’m the girl with no real place to live, too old to be wetting the bed, who doesn’t know her algebra.

  I catch Sabina Griffin’s eye. She started in the middle of the year, while I started at the beginning. So she’s the new girl, the girl nobody knows anything about, and for a second I think she’s trying to show me what I can’t find. Her hands are sprawled across the desk and a few fingers are curled under, but then she looks away, places her hands beneath her big puff skirt, and I think I must be imagining things. I look down at my notes and up again, hoping some answer will rise up in me.

  All I can think is that a is already there. That a is a is a and nothing more.

  “I don’t know,” I say, and it’s like the whole room exhales. Meredith Crane’s eraser starts flip-flopping again and Sabina Griffin waxes her huge rubber boots against the floor. Mrs. Belz shakes her head and reaches for the pages of her own notebook.

  She makes a mark with a red-pen slap, and just as the bell rings, she snags me back. “Miss Quinn, let’s talk.”

  Meredith snickers as she slides past.

  “Things aren’t picking up.”

  By things Mrs. Belz means me.

  “I’m trying—”

  Her hand goes up. “I’m putting in for a transfer for you to remedial math.”

  “Remedial?” Something in me falls.

  “We’re three-quarters of the way through the year. And you’re—” She hesitates, softens. “Laps behind.”

  “Oh.” I think of Adare, who gets yanked out of classes for special help. Is that what it’s going to be like? “Can’t I make it up, somehow? What if I pass the next test?”

  She sighs, knowing we’ve been through this before.

  “Not just pass. Ace,” I say.

  “You’d have to ace it in order to stay on track.”

  “One last chance,” I beg.

  “One last chance.” Then she circles her desk, still looking for a.

  Ever since we moved to Ennis House, we have to meet Mom at the nearby park after school. Where Mom says it’s safe. Because Ennis House isn’t. Not with its broken locks and Old Lou on the steps and people grunting and yelling and shuffling in and out.

  I have to walk a few minutes to pick up Adare, who waits at the steps of my old elementary school with her bright blue backpack at her feet. Kids spill out and some of the girls play Miss Mary Mack slap games while the others shout and wave. I wonder if there will be a day when Adare’s got a friend, so I won’t find her alone, like always.

  She doesn’t see me at first because her gaze runs up the streetlamp and stays there. I reach for her hand, and when it matches up with mine, she breathes in fast, like she just remembered she was alive.

  “Hi.” She grins wide. This is always her welcome, big and bright and too in-your-face, even if she doesn’t say much after that.

  Then she holds my hand tight and I feel something sad in the pit of me. I shouldn’t have lied.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “It was me who wet the bed.”

  “Yeah.”

  But her grin stays the same. Warm and pretty and hers. In all the years I have held Adare close, I know nothing about how she really feels. I wish for one minute she’d snap out of who she is and become someone like the rest of us so I could know. As soon as I think the thought, I push it away. Adare is who she is, Mom always says. But I wonder every day who Adare really is.

  Sometimes I go climbing around the neighborhood and drag Adare with me, but today we walk across the street and go straight to the park to wait for Mom. I drag Adare along the crisscross path and make my way back to my favorite spot. A pin oak. I’m waiting for spring to give it its leaves.

  Adare sits at the roots and I take a look at the gray-brown bark. I make sure my backpack’s tight on my shoulders, pull my sleeves down low, then hug the trunk with my elbows and thighs.

  It was Daddy who taught me to climb, who told me the rules. His accent was full and wet, like Irish rain. Mom called it his brogue.

  Always think in threes, he said, and you’ll never fall. Two feet, one hand. Two hands, one foot. He said that was all I needed to know.

  Daddy knew about growing things. He worked in Brooklyn’s gardens and came home dirt-stained and red-cheeked, slipping the radio to AM with its staticky old ballads. He’d reach for Mom’s hand and spin her beneath his raised arm. He said Brooklyn dirt became his own sweet soil on the day he met her. While he studied plants and trees, she painted murals in community gardens—the art she did before Daddy died and she had to work long hours at the store. Because of her, he said, Ireland might have been my home once, but America will be my home forever.

  Two feet, one hand. Two hands, one foot. I dizzy up the tree’s straight spine, one nudge at a time, hands scratching, sneakers rubbing, until I reach the first branch. Then I pull up with two hands and tuck one foot inside the crook of each little V, branch to trunk. Up and up and up.

  Daddy always said the best thing about a tree is getting in it. He said you might be able to stand over daisies, hold a rose in your hand, or look up at all the yellow suns in a sunflower field. But with a tree, you can sit in it and smell it and be in it. And maybe you can never put into words who or what it really is, but you can know it the way you can’t know anything else.

  That’s why of all the growing things out there, I love trees best. They’re someplace anyone can sit and stay, anytime they want.

  I rest against the tree’s back and let my thighs hug the thick branch. My sneakers sway above the earth. I scoot out to the edge and I don’t even worry I’ll fall. I don’t feel stuck or caught. I just feel the way I did before Daddy died, before we kept picking up and going from one place to the next. I feel tucked-in safe.

  We wait like this, longer than we ever have. Longer than we should. We wait until the sun falls down behind the harbor.

  We wait for Mom to come in her khakis, her black hair in a loose ponytail, wearing her red shirt and name tag from the store. For her to call out, Cora, Cora, come down.

  But she doesn’t come.

  One…two…three…I soar.

  When I reach the ground, it’s cold. It’s too late for us to be out. Too late for us to be alone. I know this. Adare’s back is against the tree trunk and her legs are spread out wide. She’s snaking her finger through the dirt and I huddle my arms around my chest.

  “She’s not coming,” I say.

  Adare is quiet, like always, smiling and swirling her finger like a magic wand.

  “It’s late and she’s not coming,” I say again. More to myself than to Adare.

  Wherever we’re living—doesn’t matter whether it’s Ennis House or Hoyt Street or on somebody’s old couch—Mom tells us where to be. She sets her hands on my shoulders and makes me repeat street names. We wait where she tells us to wait, and she shows up. That’s the way it’s always been.

  I start shivering and then my mind traces the streets toward Ennis House. I know Mom doesn’t like us to be there without her, but it’s the closest to a home we’ve got.

  “We have to get back to Ennis House.” I snatch Adare’s hand from the dirt and she startles, with this shocked look on her face, like I stole her right out of her dreams. “We�
��ve gotta go,” I say. “We can’t be here.”

  She takes her hand back and shakes her head, her whispered voice a slow breeze. “Where’s Mom?”

  I spin my arms around. “Not here. See? Not here.” And just saying it out loud makes the fact knock at my bones, and everything inside me pokes around in a jitter. Then I take her wrist in my fingers. Mom always says, with Adare we must be gentle but stern. “We have got to go,” I say, firm.

  She stands up straight and the dirt sticks to the sagging butt bottom of her polka-dot leggings. I watch the streetlamps glow orange inside the trees. The branches are battering up against the sky. It’s colder now. It’s dark. And I know the clock’s edging to late. We haven’t eaten since lunch.

  When I wrap my hand around Adare’s, she grabs on to my fingers the opposite way. It doesn’t feel right. It feels like when you’re forced into the buddy system on a field trip, how some hands don’t fit together, how you have to fight to hold on the way you want or give in.

  I give in, feeling caught up all wrong.

  We walk the bumpy sidewalk. We pass the sticking-up fence of the church and the fancy ice cream shop with the logo that looks like a blueberry bush plunked on top of a cone. I don’t look too close at anybody, just straight ahead, like I know I should, like nothing’s the way it isn’t supposed to be. The falafel shop has this smoky, charred, and golden smell and my stomach feels hollow and scared.

  Mom’s supposed to walk us and ask us about the day, how much homework I’ve got, what I drew on my hand, which I keep stuffed in my pocket, tucked safe. But if she’s supposed to walk us, I’m supposed to stay put. Maybe it’s me who messed up.

  We reach the train underpass and the dark pulls over us, straight and tight, like a new sheet. I walk fast and squeeze Adare’s hand, which clamps around mine. I don’t want anyone to see us. I wish I could just close my eyes, disappear, open them, and end up where we’re supposed to be.