The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Read online

  Only when he’d reached the T at the very end did Marty start to see light. Only a little, and far to his left. A strip of flicker-less yellow under the bottom of a closed door. He waited until the next round of rattling. The murmuring that accompanied it. It was coming from right there. Breathing through pursed lips as though that might slow his heart, Marty moved toward the light. He stopped outside the door.

  The sounds weren’t actually intermittent. Not here. There were constant sliding noises, clicks and taps. Very occasional muttering. Marty flung the door open.

  As one, the three Chinese men leapt to their feet, Mah Jongg tiles spilling off their holders and scattering across the table. All these men were older, old in fact, two in jeans and neatly tucked button-up shirts, plus the white-robed man who’d let Marty into the funeral home. The surprise on that man’s face looked completely incongruous, brand new, and almost lost, as if it had wandered onto the wrong face by accident.

  “Mister Burn…” the man started, then corrected himself. “Marty. Mr. Marty. Did you need something?”

  Behind and above them, another wail bloomed. Much closer. Much harder to listen to, from here. Operatic in its anguish.

  Marty waited until it finished. The men still stood, staring. All he could think to ask was, “What are you guys doing?”

  Though he couldn’t have been sure, Marty thought the look they all exchanged had amusement in it. Certainly, it was kind.

  “The same as you, I think,” said the white-haired man. “In our way.”

  “Shomer-ing?”

  “That is not what we call it. But…”

  “It’s not what we call it either,” Marty said, slipping into an exhausted, lonely smile. “I don’t think.”

  The wail again. Again, Marty waited until it passed.

  “She’s with you, isn’t she?” he asked.

  The old guy on the left nodded. He had a red ribbon pinned to his shirt, and some sort of outlandishly large belt buckle. “She is performing her part. We perform ours.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” said Marty.

  “We are sorry for yours.”

  “Need a fourth?” he asked, earning himself a set of strangely satisfying startled glances. The only way the moment might have been better would be if El had taught Marty the game. But that had been his grandfather, years and years ago.

  The white-haired man smiled. “You know how to play?”

  “I’d need a card.”

  “Card?” Then understanding dawned on the white-haired man’s face. He shook his head. Again, he looked kind. “Ah. Of course. Jew Mah Jongg. Entirely different game.”

  His companions were nodding, too. The guy with the belt buckle said, “Completely different. Very frustrating. So few ways to win. So many to lose.”

  Yet again, Marty felt tears well in his eyes. His uncle’s absence seeping in. “Yep,” he said. “Sounds like a Jewish game, alright.”

  He left them to it. Not until he reached the T and turned into the dark corridor did he hear the rustling. Much louder, now, even though it was coming from way down at the end of the hall. From the closed room where he should have been sitting. Where El lay helpless. Ignoring the dark, the coffin on the wall, the warnings shooting off in his brain, that grip again seizing both his arms, Marty shot down the corridor.

  When he reached the door to the Shomer room, he paused for a split second. Long enough to make sure. To hope he’d been wrong again. But there was no mistaking it, this time. The rustling. He pushed open the door, half-expecting full dark, but the light was as he’d left it. So was the couch, the open Tanakh, the Elijah glass on its table, his sketchpad with El’s half-formed face. Of course it was. Because El wasn’t in here. He was back there. Unguarded, where Marty had abandoned him.

  Marty strode straight to the other side of the room, reached over the bookcase, twisted the doorknob—which was cold, like a fistful of ice—and shoved at the door, scrambling atop and over the bookcase as he pushed. Then he really did freeze. Stopped scrambling, blinking, breathing. He held absolutely still.

  Or…let himself be held. Later, when he had time to think about it, he decided that was more accurate. Because he really could feel that grip on his arms. And around his waist. Even more, he knew that grip. But he couldn’t let himself process it yet.

  On a gurney, in the center of a blank, tiled, windowless, featureless room, under a single white sheet that covered neither his face nor his feet, lay Uncle El. Frigid air poured down over him, a fall of faintly glowing blue, like an iceberg calving. The blue swept and swirled around him, nuzzled along his chest, as though cuddling up, or sniffing for signs of life. Constantly, it washed away, but then reformed in the air. Marty hovered in that doorway for barely a blink, less than a second, just long enough to realize that air, no matter how cold, doesn’t glow, or have any sort of head, let alone that long, wolf-like, sniffing thing atop El’s chest. And that whatever lights there were in this room, they weren’t on. And that the blueness hunched on El’s chest was turning now, right toward Marty.

  Then he felt himself yanked backward, falling over the bookcase and landing hard on his ass on the floor of the Shomer room, the door swinging shut—had he done that?—as he scrambled to his feet, turned to run, turned back, thought of his uncle, nearly collapsed in a flood of guilt and then grabbed for the couch as the guilt drained out of him, as quickly as it had come. He could feel that grip on his shoulders again, turning him toward the hallway, could feel the push in his back, the weight so familiar. El’s hands.

  Staggering forward, he threw open the door and ran smack into Robbie the Blank, who had just reached it, the Chinese man in white flowing behind him.

  “In there,” Marty babbled, shaking, pointing, as his overweight and preternaturally becalmed cousin drew him to the couch, sat him down. “It’s in there.”

  “Of course it is,” Robbie said, as though he knew.

  “Of course he is,” said the Chinese man. “You did not go in, did you? It’s so cold, to protect the body.”

  Marty started to argue, wanted to protest, to grab them both, to scream. But the understanding he’d already had was spreading through him, now. No—nothing so grand or certain as understanding. But he knew what he’d seen. He could hear it in there, still, though he was sure the Chinese man would say it was simply the sound of the air. He let Robbie pour him a glass of water, and drank it. The liquid tasted tepid, flat, so plain and of this world, and warmed him like whiskey.

  Robbie even gave Marty his car keys, saying he’d arranged for his own ride home. Moments later, Marty was out in the still-drizzly gray of early morning, watching the wet drip off the poplar trees. He sat for a long time in Robbie’s car, thinking of Robbie down there in that room. Of El in the room beside him. Standing guard.

  Because that was it. Wasn’t it? Maybe. It made a sort of sense. How Jewish, really, to provide an opportunity for one last mitzvah, performed not for the dead, but by them, for the living. During the week of his grandfather’s shiva, Marty had asked every one of his older relatives why all the mirrors had been soaped over. And he’d gotten a different answer every time. ‘Because we should not be thinking of ourselves this week.’ ‘Because we can no longer see what your grandfather saw.’ It was Robbie’s father, Marty realized, who had said, ‘Because the Angel of Death was just here. And he might still be close. And you don’t want him to see you.’

  He’d said that winking, but not quite as if he were kidding. And if Marty was right, and really had seen what he’d seen in that room, then the blue thing—Angel of Death, or whatever it was—was right where it was supposed to be, because El was keeping it there. And away, therefore, from anyone else whose grief and pain might draw it. No wonder immediate family couldn’t be Shomrim. Their wounds were too raw, too easily detected. The dead would be too weak to hold the Angel’s attention.

  But a nephew, perhaps, or a friend. Someone at risk, but not quite as much risk. Someone the dead, or the memory of
them, might still be able to help, to push for just a little longer out of harm’s way…

  Marty’s tears were quiet ones, now. Not bothering to wipe his face, he set Robbie’s car in motion and drove through the empty streets to El’s house, where the first well-wishers had already arrived, and where they’d all spend the next week eating kugel on paper plates, gathering in quiet corners, telling El stories all day long, under mirrors carefully soaped to spare his uncle’s loved ones, for those first, awful days, their first true glimpse of the world without him in it.

  Miss Ill-Kept Runt

  “My mother’s anxiety would not allow her to remain where she was… What was it that she feared? Some disaster impended over her husband or herself. He had predicted evils, but professed himself ignorant of what nature they were. When were they to come?”

  Charles Brockden Brown, Weiland

  Chloe comes clinking out the front door into the twilight, pudding pop in one hand and a dragon in the other. The summer wind sets her frizzy brown hair flying around her, and she says, “Whoa,” tilting up on one foot as though anything less than an F5 twister, a tag team of grizzly bears, a fighter jet could drag her and the fifteen pounds or so of bead necklace around her neck off the ground. The plastic baubles and seashell fragments and recently ejected baby teeth bump along her chest as she tilts, then straightens.

  “I told you to get in pajamas,” says her father from the side of the station wagon, where he’s still trying to wedge the last book and pan boxes into the wall of suitcases and cartons separating the front seat from the way-back, where Chloe and her brother the Miracle will be riding, as always.

  “These are pajamas,” Chloe says, lifting the mass of beads so her father can see underneath.

  Sweating, exhausted before the drive even starts, her father smiles. Better still, the Miracle, who is already stretched in the way-back with his big-kid feet dangling out the open back door and his Pokemon cards spread all over the space Chloe is supposed to occupy, laughs aloud and shakes his head at her. In Chloe’s world, there are only a few things better than pudding pops and beads. One of them is her older brother noticing, laughing. The baby teeth on her newest necklace are mostly for him; she actually thinks they look blah, too plain, also a little bitey. But she’d known he would like them.

  “Miss Ill-Kept Runt,” her brother says, and goes back to his cards.

  She’s just climbing into the back, enjoying the Miracle’s feverish sweeping up of cards, his snapping, “Wait” and “Don’t!” at her, when her mother emerges from the empty house. Freezing, Chloe watches her mother tighten the ugly gray scarf—it looks more like a dishrag—around her beautiful dark hair, linger a last, long moment in the doorway, and finally aim a single glance in the direction of her children. Chloe starts to lift her hand, but her mother is hurrying around the side of the station wagon, eyes down, and Chloe hears her drop into the passenger seat just before her father wedges the Miracle’s feet inside the car and shuts the way-back door.

  “Stan,” her mother says, in her new, bumpy voice, like a road with all the road peeled off. “Let’s just go.”

  It’s the move, Chlo. That’s what her father’s been saying. For months, now.

  Her father’s already in the driver’s seat and the station wagon has shuddered to life under Chloe’s butt and is making her necklaces rattle when her mother’s door pops open, and all of a sudden she’s there, pulling the back door up, blue-eyed gaze pouring down on Chloe like a waterfall. Chloe is surprised, elated, she wants to duck her head and close her eyes and bathe in it.

  “Happy birthday,” her mother says, bumpy-voiced, and reaches to touch her leg, then touches the Miracle’s instead. He doesn’t look up from his cards, but he waves at her with his sneaker.

  “It’s not my birthday yet,” Chloe says, wanting to keep her mother there, prolong the moment.

  Her mother gestures toward the wall of boxes in the back seat. “We’ll be driving most of the night. By the time I see your face again, it will be.” And there it is—faint as a fossil in rock, but there all the same. Her mother’s smile. A trace, anyway.

  It really has been the move, Chloe thinks, as her mother slams the door down like a lid.

  “Say goodbye to the house,” her father says from up front, on the other side of the boxes. Chloe can’t see him, and she realizes he sounds different, too. Far away, as though he’s calling to her across a frothed-up river. But right on cue, she feels the rev, rrruummm, rruummm; it’s reassuring, the thing he always does before he goes anywhere. She bets he’s even turned around to give her his go! face, forgetting there’s a wall of cardboard there.

  Then they are going, and Chloe is surprised to find tears welling in her eyes. They’re not because she’s sad. Why should she be, they’re moving back to Minnesota to be by Grammy and Grumpy’s, where they can water-ski every day, Grumpy says, and when Chloe says, “You can’t water-ski in winter,” Grumpy says, “Maybe you can’t.”

  But just for a moment, pulling out of the drive, she’s crying, and the Miracle sits up, bumping his big-kid head against the roof and squishing her as he turns for a last look.

  “Bye, house,” she says.

  “Pencil mouse,” says the Miracle, and Chloe beams through her tears. It’s her own game, silly-rhyme-pencil game, she made it up when she was three to annoy her brother into looking at her, and it mostly worked. But she couldn’t ever remember him playing it.

  “Want to do speed?” she says, and the Miracle laughs. He always laughs now when she says that, but only because their father does. Her father has never said what’s funny about it, and she doesn’t think the Miracle knows, either.

  “Play speed,” he answers, grinning, maybe to himself but because of her, so that doesn’t matter. “In a minute.” And he glances fast over his shoulder toward the wall of boxes and then turns away from her again temporarily.

  But Chloe has noticed that his grin is gone. And when she settles onto her shoulder blades and stretches out her legs to touch the door while her head brushes the back of the back seat, she realizes she can hear her mother over the rumbling engine, over the road bumping by.

  “Oh, freeze,” her mother is whispering, over and over. Or else, “cheese.” Or “please.”

  It isn’t the words, it’s the whispering, and Chloe realizes she knows what her mother’s doing, too: she’s hunched forward, picking at the hem of her skirt on her knees, her pale, knobby knees.

  Knees? Is that what she’s saying? No. Please.

  “Bye, trees,” Chloe whispers, watching the familiar branches pop up in her window to wave her away. The blue pine, the birch, the oak where her father thinks the woodpecker always knocks, the black-branched, leafless fire-trees the crows pour out of every morning like spiders from a sac. After the fire-trees comes the open stretch of road with no trees. The trees after that are ones she doesn’t know, at least not by name, not to say hello or wave goodbye. Then come brand new trees.

  “Please,” comes her mother’s voice from the front seat.

  “Dad, Gordyfoot,” the Miracle all but shouts.

  “Right,” comes her father’s answer, not as shiny as usual but just as fast. Seconds later, the CD’s on, and Chloe can’t hear her mother anymore.

  Fire-trees, Chloe is thinking, dreaming. Fire on a hillside with no grass, in a ring of stones, but not warm enough. No matter how close she wriggles, she can’t get close enough, she’s been out on this mountainside with the gray rocks and gray snakes for too long, and this cold is old, so old, older than daylight, older than she is, she could jump into the fire and never be warm…

  Jerking, Chloe struggles up onto her elbows, almost laughing. She has never been camping, not that she can remember, the snakes she knows are green and slippy-shiny except when they’re dead and the crows have been at them, and the only cold she’s felt the last few months is the lily-pond water from the Berry’s backyard.

  On the CD, Gordyfoot is singing about the Pony Man, who’ll
come at night to take her for a ride, and out the window, the sky’s going dark fast with the sun gone. Chloe thinks it’s funny that the Miracle asked for this CD, since he says he hates Gordon Lightfoot now. But she also understands, or thinks she does. It’s hard to imagine being in the way-back, in the car with her parents, and listening to anything else. They keep the entire Gordon Lightfoot collection up there. Also, if the CD wasn’t on, they’d have to listen to their mother. Freeze. Please. Pencil-bees.

  For a while—long enough to get out of their neighborhood and maybe even out of Missouri, half a CD or more—Chloe watches the wires in her window swing down, shoot up, swing down, shoot up. It’s like starting and erasing an Etch A Sketch drawing, the window fills with trees and darkening sky and the thick, black lines of wire, then boop—telephone pole—and everything’s blank for a second and then fills up again. Gets erased. Fills up again. Gets erased. Abruptly, it’s all the way dark, and the wires vanish, and Venus pounces out of the sky. It’s too bright, has been all summer, as though it’s been lurking all day just on the other side of the sunlight.

  With the Miracle coiled away from her and his head tilted down, she can see the semi-circle scar at the base of his neck, like an extra mouth, almost smiling. Chloe has always thought of that spot as the place where the miracle actually happened, though she’s been told that’s just where the clip to stop blood flow went. The real scar is higher, under the hair, where part of her brother’s skull got cut open when he was five years old. Of course, she’d been all of a week old at the time and doesn’t remember any of it. But she loves the story. Her mother curled on the waiting room couch where she’d been ever since she’d given birth to Chloe, expecting the doctors to come at any moment and tell her that her son was dead. Her mother erupting from that couch one morning and somehow convincing the surgeons who’d said the surgery couldn’t work that it would work, just by the way she said it. By the way she seemed to know. And it had worked. The pressure that had been building in the Miracle’s brain bled away. Two days later, he woke up himself again.