The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Read online

  “What?” he says now, turning around to glower at her.

  “Speed, speed, speed,” she chants.

  He glowers some more. But after a few seconds, he nods.

  “Yay,” says Chloe.

  They can barely see the playing cards, which makes the game even more fun. Plus, the piles won’t stay straight because of all the vibrations, which frustrates the Miracle but makes Chloe laugh even more as their hands dart between each other’s for cards and tangle up and slap and snatch, and finally the Miracle’s laughing, too, tickling her, Chloe’s shrieking and they’re both laughing until their father snarls, “Kids, Goddamnit,” and both of them stop dead. Her father sounds growly, furious, nothing like he usually sounds.

  Because he’s trapped up there with Mom, Chloe thinks, and then she’s horrified to have thought that, feels guilty, almost starts crying again.

  “Sorry,” she whimpers.

  “Just…sssh,” her father says.

  It’s the move, Chloe thinks, chants to herself. She lies back flat, and the Miracle stretches as much as he can stretch beside her.

  “The Pony Man” is on again, so the same CD has played through twice, but only Chloe seems to have noticed. She’s listening very closely, like the song says, so she’ll hear the Pony Man if he comes. But all she hears is their station wagon’s tires shushing on the nighttime road, which she imagines to be black and wet, like one of those oil puddles birds get stuck in on nature shows. She’s fairly sure she can hear her father’s thumbs, too, drumming the beat on the steering wheel, and if she closes her eyes, she can see his stain-y Show Me! shirt and the wonderful, white prickles around his happy mouth. He has told Chloe he’s secretly a cat, and the prickles are whiskers he keeps trimmed so Mom won’t know.

  He’s been shaving more closely lately, though. Smiling less.

  Then she realizes she can hear her mother, crying now. Even the cry is new, a low-down bear-grunt, and Chloe turns toward the Miracle’s back and pokes it.

  “Tomorrow I’ll be half as old as you,” she whispers. The Miracle doesn’t respond. So she adds, “The next day, I’ll be more than half.”

  The Miracle still doesn’t respond, and she wonders if he’s sleeping. His back is hard and curved like an armadillo shell.

  “Catching up,” she tries, a very little bit louder, and as she speaks she glances into the seatback above her head, as though she could see through it, through the cartons to her parents. As though they could see her.

  “You’ll never catch up,” the Miracle murmurs, just as quiet, and Chloe thinks she sees his head tilt toward the front, too.

  “I can if you wait.”

  “Will you just go to sleep?” he hisses, and Chloe startles, squirms back. The Miracle’s whole body drums to the road or the steady beat of her father’s thumbs. But when he speaks again, he’s using his nice voice. “It’ll make the drive go faster.”

  Chloe almost tells him she doesn’t want it to go faster. She likes the way-back, always has. Shut in with her brother, Gordyfoot’s voice floating over and among them, her parents close but not with them, the stars igniting and the hours stretched longer and thinner than hours should be able to go. Silly Putty hours.

  Chloe doesn’t remember falling asleep, has no idea how long she sleeps. But she dreams of bird-feet hands. Hands, but the fingers too thin, yellow-hard. Her hands? Reaching through the bars toward the frantic, fluttering thing, all red and beating its pathetic little wings…

  A bump jolts her awake, or else the cold, that old cold, she almost cries out, wraps herself in her own arms, blinks, holds on, drags her brain back to itself. Air-conditioning, it’s just her father blasting the air-conditioning to stay awake, it’s not in her chest, there are no hands in her chest. Chloe’s eyes fly all the way open, and just like that, she knows.

  She knows.

  They’re not my parents.

  She knows because “The Pony Man” is on again, the CD repeating, how many times, now? She knows because her father’s isn’t tapping the steering wheel, which he always does, always always always, especially to Gordyfoot. She knows because her mother would never let it get this cold, her mother can’t stand the cold, they always wind up fighting about it on night-drives and then swatting each other off the temperature controls and laughing and sometimes, when they think Chloe and the Miracle are sleeping, talking love-talk, very quietly.

  They are talking now, but not that way. And in their changed voices. Her mother’s bumpy, grunty and low. Her father’s a snarl. Someone else’s snarl.

  Most of all, she knows because her mother’s eyes—her real mother’s eyes—are green, not blue. She very nearly screams, but jams her fist in her mouth, holds dead still. But the realization won’t go away.

  They aren’t my parents.

  It’s ridiculous, a bird-feet hands dream. She wiggles furiously, trying to shake the realization loose.

  But in the front seat, the new people—the ones that were her parents—are grunting. Snarl-whispering. And Chloe’s mother’s eyes are green.

  At least “The Pony Man” finally goes off. But the next song is the “Minstrel of the Dawn” one. Another song about someone coming.

  Stupid, Chloe insists her to herself. This is stupid. She feels around for the snack bag her father has let the Miracle stow back here, even though they’ve already brushed their teeth. The spiny, sticky carpet of the way-back scratches against her palms, and the engine shudders underneath her. Her hand smacks down on the paper bag, which makes a little pop. Chloe quivers, holds her breath, and up front, the grunting and the whispering stop.

  Chloe doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe. Neither does anyone else in the car. They are four frozen people hurtling through the empty black. Even the CD has gone silent—because her parents have shut it off, Chloe realizes. It is so quiet inside the car that she half-thinks she can hear the cornfields passing, the late-summer stalks looming over the road like an army of aliens, an invasion that didn’t come but grew, their bodies grasshopper-thin, leaves heavy, fruit swollen fat and dangling.

  “Chlo?” says her not-father, in his almost-snarl.

  Nearly faint from holding her breath, Chloe says nothing. After a second, she hears rustling, but whether from the corn or up front, she can’t tell.

  “See?” her mother whispers. “I told you. I told you, I told you, I—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” says her father. “Five years of this. Five years. You can’t really bel—”

  “But I can. And so do you. You always have.”

  “Just shut up, Carol.”

  “He’s coming.”

  “Carol—”

  “He’s coming. Face it. Face it. He’s—”

  “Shut up!”

  The CD blares to life, and Chloe almost bangs her head against the seatback in surprise. Her breathing comes in spasms, and she can’t get it calm. “The Pony Man” is playing again. Why, she wonders? And why is she minding, anyway? According to her mom and dad, this is the first song she ever knew. The one they sang her to sleep with when she woke up screaming when she was a baby.

  Then Chloe thinks, Shut up? Her fingers grab so hard at the carpet that she pulls some out, little quills like a porcupine’s. When has her father ever said that, to anyone?

  And why is her mother laughing?

  If that is laughing. It’s mostly grunt. Panic breathing.

  What Chloe wants to do, right now, is wake the Miracle. She can’t believe he isn’t awake already, but he hasn’t stirred, still lies there with his back curved away and his scar smiling at her. If she wakes him, she knows, she’ll have to tell him. Explain, somehow. And she’s worried they’ll hear.

  Instead, she lifts herself—so slowly, as silently as she can, matching her movements to the shush of the tires—onto her elbows again. Turns over onto her stomach. Raises her head, then raises it more. Until she’s above the seatback.

  She’s hoping she can see. One good glimpse, she thinks. Then she’ll kno
w. Then she can decide what to do.

  But her father has packed the boxes too tight. There aren’t even cracks between them. The only empty space is at the very tiptop. Pushing all the way up, Chloe straightens, and her beads clank.

  This time, she very nearly throws herself out the back window. She’s ready to. If they turn...if they pull to the shoulder and stop…she’ll grab the Miracle and yank him awake, and they’ll run.

  But the car neither stops nor slows. The CD player continues to blare. The “Minstrel of the Dawn,” who’ll say your fortune when he comes. If her parents are talking, they’re whispering so low that Chloe can’t hear them. Apparently, they haven’t realized she’s moving around. Not yet.

  Stretching, gripping her beads to keep them still, Chloe tries to get her eyes level with the opening at the top of the boxes. The little crack. But all see can see is the dark inside dome-light, the tiniest sliver of windshield, at least until a truck passes going the other way, its lights flooding the car and shooting shadows across the ceiling, but the shadows could be corn, seatbacks, surely her parents aren’t that thin or that long. It’s all Chloe can do to keep from burying her head between her knees in the tornado-position they taught her in kindergarten.

  The words are out of her mouth almost before she’s thought them or had time to plan.

  “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  For a second, she just sits, horrified, clutching her beads.

  But she had to. She needs to see. She’s smushing her beads against her chest and holding her breath again, as though any of that matters now.

  There is no response. Nothing at all. The car plunges on into the dark, and out her window the corn stalks twist their grasshopper-shoulders to squirm even more tightly together, denying any glimpse of field or farmhouse behind them, so that Chloe’s vision is blocked on three sides. The only way she can see is behind, the road that leads back to the home they’ve left.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says again, meaning to be louder but sounding smaller.

  This time, though, the CD shuts off, and that silence wells up from the floorboards. Chloe has begun to cry again, and this makes her angry. It’s stupid, she thinks, this is stupid. Or the world is a nightmare. Either way makes her angry.

  Then comes the sigh, long and explosive, from the front seat.

  “I thought I told you to go,” growls not-Dad.

  “Sorry,” Chloe says. “I did.”

  All too soon—sooner than she thought possible, and she’s seen no exit sign or prick of gas station light penetrating the leafy, squirmy blackness of the fields around her—Chloe feels the car start to slow, hears the CLICK-click, CLICK-click of the station wagon’s blinker. In her mind, she can see it so clearly, that little green triangle-eye winking at her from the dashboard. “It’s where I keep the frog,” her father has always said, patting a spot right above the blinking turn-signal, and they’d watch it blink together, and he’d say, “Ribbit” in time with the clicking. Until now.

  It happens all at once, the corn parting like a curtain and the station appearing, its light so bright that Chloe’s eyes water and she has to look away. The Miracle mumbles and rolls over. The light sweeps across the old-mannish wrinkle on his forehead as he dreams. Chloe knows that wrinkle like she knows the frog in the dashboard, her father’s cat-whiskers, “The Pony Man.” A wave of affection so wide and deep rushes through her that it is all she can do not to throw her arms around her brother’s neck and bury her face there.

  Then, all at once, she goes rigid again. She hasn’t heard any doors opening, they’ve barely stopped moving. But the silence has gone just that imperceptible bit more still. Her parents—both of them—are out of the car.

  Chloe whirls just in time to see the face fill the back window, black and scarfed, too big, the doors yawn open and she can’t help it, she scurries back, pinning herself against the seat and the boxes with her hands raised and her mouth open to scream.

  But her mother is already gone, stalking across the blacktop toward the light, the mini-mart inside the station. She doesn’t look back, doesn’t wave Chloe on or call to her. But for one moment, the set of those shoulders—the stoop and shake of them—is almost enough.

  That is my mother, Chloe thinks. That is my mother crying.

  She is half out of the car before she realizes she has no idea where her father is. Whirling, she bangs her head hard against the top of the door, expecting him to be right on top of her, with new long arms that open like wings and bird-feet hands. At first, she still doesn’t see him, and then she does.

  He’s at the edge of the lot, right on the lip of the road where the cornfield devours the light. Like her mother, he has his back to her, and abruptly Chloe wants nothing more than to call out, lure him here. He and Mom have been fighting, she thinks, rubbing the back of her head, making herself breathe. That’s all it is. It’s the move, Chlo. Ribbit..

  Something red flickers in his fingers. Chloe has leapt from the station wagon and is backing across the tarmac after her mother before she realizes it’s a cigarette. Fast on the heels of that realization comes another. She has never seen her father with a cigarette before. But he’s been smoking lately. That’s what that smell has been.

  Stopping by one of the silent pumps, Chloe bathes in the bright light, willing herself to cut it out. Beyond her father, the cornstalks, barely visible, wiggle their leafy antennae in the not-breeze, rattle their bulgy, distended husks. By tomorrow—maybe by the next time she wakes—her family will be at their new house. By tomorrow afternoon, she will be on Grumpy’s boat, the rubber boots on the red kid-skis gripping her ankles and the Donald Duck lifejacket wrapping her in its sloppy, damp embrace.

  Inside the station, she spots her mother crouching by the peanut butter cheese crackers. She is in profile, but the scarf hides just enough so that Chloe can’t see her eyes.

  “Going to the bathroom,” she says. Her mother doesn’t turn.

  She dawdles a moment in the candy aisle, running a finger across the silvery Chunky wrappers, the boxes of 10-cent Kisses along the bottom shelf. She has almost reached the bathroom when her mother says, “Need help, sweetie?”

  Chloe wants to dance, turn around and race at her mother and jump into her arms. Then she does turn, and something prickly and old-cold rolls over under her ribs.

  Her mother’s face, smiling softly down. Tears streaming from her blue eyes.

  “No, thank you,” Chloe whispers, and shuts herself in.

  The toilet has poop in it, and a mound of tissue. Chloe doesn’t actually have to go. Sinking into a huddle by the door in the ugly yellow light, she tries to hold her breath, but her chest prickles and she bursts out coughing. Crying again.

  She can’t stay here, the smell is too much. But she doesn’t want to go back out. She’s terrified to think what else might have changed by the time she opens the door. Each new breath of putrid air triggers a cough, each blink fresh tears.

  Run, she thinks. Sneak past the Kisses, bolt out the door, find a way to Grumpy’s.

  Except that the only place to run is into the corn. In the dark. Chloe can’t imagine doing that.

  And then she realizes she doesn’t want to. She already knows the safest place. The only place that hasn’t changed, that’s still hers. She needs to get back to the way-back, where the Miracle is.

  She has just gotten the heavy door partway open when she hears them. Bumpy-voiced Mom, growly Dad, whispering just out of sight in the next aisle.

  “You see?” her father is saying. Halfway snarling.

  Her mother sobs.

  “I told you.”

  “You did. It’s true.”

  “You dreamed it, Carol. And no wonder. I mean, those nights. When we both really thought we were going to lose him…”

  “But we didn’t,” Chloe’s mother whispers, her voice seeming to twitch back and forth now. Chloe’s mother/changed-mother/Chloe’s mother.

  “Because of you,” he
r father whispers. “Because of your unshakable hope.”

  “Because of him. Because he came. Because he—”

  “Because of you. You saved him, Carol. You saved your son. You do see that now. Right?”

  Soft sob. Silence.

  Then footsteps. Chloe pushes hard at the door, but by the time she gets out and hurries down the candy aisle after them, they are already at the pumps, arms around each other, halfway to the car. Her father goes straight to the driver’s side, dropping his cigarette to the tarmac. It is her mother who waits by the way-back doors and touches Chloe’s hair as she climbs in beside her brother.

  “Is it my birthday yet?” Chloe asks, not quite looking at her mother’s eyes. She doesn’t want to see anymore. Doesn’t want to think.

  She hears her mother gasp, glance at her watch. “Not yet,” she whispers. “Oh, shit, not yet.”

  The door drops down, and the car starts, and up front her parents are snarling and whispering again. Chloe crouches low, curls into a ball with her knees just touching her brother’s back. If he wakes and feels that, he’ll be furious. But if she’s sleeping when he does, he won’t mind. Sleep, she commands herself. Pleads with herself. Sleep.

  She dreams cold. Old-cold. Green eyes. Bird-feet hands that aren’t her hands—weren’t—aren’t—reaching for the beating-wing bird. Straw into gold, hillsides of stone. Old stone. Grasshopper-cornstalk squeezing in the window, slithering through it, crouching over her in the empty dark with its antennae brushing her face, and its husks, its dozens of husks hard and bumping against her chest, her legs. Those hands prying into the cage, reaching through the bars. Ribs. Toward the red and beating thing.

  Chloe wakes to a silent car, bright sunlight. She is flat on her back, but she can feel the Miracle’s heat against her forearm. He is moving now, stretching. Out the window, there are trees overflowing with green, shading her from the brilliant blue overhead. Minnesota lake trees. Somewhere close, there’s a hum. Motorboat hum. Chloe is halfway sitting up when she hears them.