The Janus Tree: And Other Stories Read online

  “But he was cheerier that morning. Just not about the car. I always hoped…” The sudden turn of my mother’s head catches me off-guard. Headlights from a passing car sweep her face, and her eyes flare like fireflies in the gloom. Guilt blows through and past me, faint and salty.

  “Well,” says my mother. “I just hope his daughter knew that. Somehow, I got the impression maybe she didn’t.” Shadows have settled back over her face, but I can still feel her eyes on me. Another one of those near-smiles flutters across her lips without landing there. “For a long time, Mr. Busby and I just looked at his car. Once, he said, ‘Watch this,’ and then he jumped from one side of the bumper to the other, then pointed into the paint job. ‘You see that?’ he said. ‘There’s a pink me in there.’ I was about to go inside when he asked, ‘You figure she’s awake? The old bat?’

  “I told him I didn’t even know what time it was.

  “‘Sun’s up,’ he said. ‘She’s super-old. And I don’t hear moaning, do you?’ When I shook my head, he said, ‘Right. Let’s go see what we can do.’

  “I was too surprised to do anything but follow. And…I remember the air, right then. It was so clean. Like it never is here. There were hummingbirds beating around the bougainvillea. And bees buzzing. You could actually see the outlines of all the trees and cars and people, without that haze around them, you know? Everything just seemed so substantial, or something. Like we were really here, for once. If that makes any sense.”

  “I actually know exactly what you mean,” I say quietly.

  This time, for one moment, that smile actually lands. Beats its wings on her lips. Lifts away again. I want to reach out, snatch it back. But it’s too late already. Again.

  “We got upstairs, and Mr. Busby banged on Evie’s door, and he was right, she was up, dressed, had her hair out of her curlers. I think she maybe forgot herself, because she just threw the door open, then shut it halfway real fast, but not fast enough. That’s when I realized Stan was still in there.”

  Now it’s my turn to stare. My mother’s staring, too. But at the building, not me.

  “Mom. What?”

  “It’d been eight days. Maybe longer, I don’t know. I just caught a glimpse. The hospital bed, the i.v. stand with the tubing wrapped around it for disposal. And Stan. He was half-curled up in the sheets. This little cocoon husk she’d been married to for 63 years.”

  “Wait. You mean his body? She kept it?”

  “‘Oh my God,’ I remember saying. I tried to elbow Mr. Busby out of the way, but he wasn’t going.

  “‘Is that Stan?’ he kept saying. ‘Mary Mother of God, woman, is that Stan?’

  “She tried to slam the door on us. But Mr. Busby wedged himself in the frame and wouldn’t let her. I think she hit him. He didn’t budge. She looked terrible. Bloated and pale and patchy. Maybe it was the light, but even her skin had gone gray. She was practically transparent. Like a column of dust motes you could scatter with one hand.

  “‘Oh, Evie,’ I told her. ‘Come downstairs. Let me take care of this for you.’

  “She didn’t put up much fight. She hit Mr. Busby a few more times. Then she said she’d appreciate that. But that she’d wait up here with Stan.

  “So I went down and woke you and showered and looked in the Yellow Pages and found an undertaker who said he’d come. And then I went to work. When I got home, I knocked on Evie’s door, just to check on her, but no one answered.

  “And then you got the mumps. And my work went crazy, and I almost lost my job because I kept having to take off to care for you. And your dad got himself thrown in jail again. And the spiders got into everything. And somehow, weeks passed…”

  This time, instead of muttering, she goes completely still. Sits there in the grass. Until, with a shriek, she scuttles backwards on her hands, smacking at her legs and jabbing her hands up the sleeves of her summer blouse and raking downward with clawed fingers. Welts well up in her skin and boil over. I try to grab her wrists, but she claws me, too, then scrambles all the way to the sidewalk and stands up.

  All this time, she’s kept her eyes glued to the upstairs windows. My tears surprise me. I’m not even sure what they’re for. It’s not like this is atypical behavior.

  “Mom,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I brought you here. I didn’t mean to.”

  “It wasn’t real,” she says again, spitting the words. “You need to know I know.”

  “Okay. I know you know.”

  “No you don’t.”

  I close my eyes. “Okay, I don’t.”

  “Maybe you want to know what I saw. Maybe you should. Maybe then you’d stop looking at me like that.”

  “I’m not looking at you like anything,” I sigh, standing to start negotiating her back toward my car.

  “That’s what I mean,” she says, starting to cry. “So I’m going to tell you.”

  We’ve attracted attention, finally. A curtain has stirred in the apartment next to our old one. Mr. Busby’s old place. And across the side-street, a stoop-backed old woman with a basket on her wrist and a long, white cane has emerged onto the sidewalk. Her hair is some crazy L.A. old-lady color, practically fuschia in the twilight. She has a hand shading her eyes, as though even the echoes of orange in the west are too bright for her.

  “Hey, Mom? We should probably go. I think it’s time to get you home. Simon Cowell and the gang are waiting.”

  “I don’t know what made me call them,” she says. “The undertakers.” The sky has gone royal blue, and even the blue is draining away as though it’s being siphoned. The breeze has developed a bite, too, and the old woman across the street has made her way to the crosswalk, and now she’s inching in our direction. She’s thin, all in white, her stoop so pronounced that she almost looks likes a cane herself, for the shadows to lean on.

  “Mom?” I say, with even more force than I intend. “I want to go, even if you don’t.”

  “I hadn’t seen Evie in a while. I went up and knocked a few times. Mostly, there was no answer. I thought she’d finally gone away to see her sister or something. But then sometimes I’d hear her through the door. She sounded so small. I could hardly understand her.

  “Mr. Busby tried a few pranks. “Going to lure her out,’ he’d say. ‘Get her blood going. Leyton knows what the ladies need.’ He’d stop every Jehovah’s Witness and Mormon missionary he saw and direct them to Evie’s door. One night around midnight, he came out on the grass with a ukulele and sang ‘Tiny Bubbles’ at the top of his lungs, except he kept saying ‘Tiny Evie’ instead. But she never appeared at the window. We had this possum family that took up residence by the dumpster, and he made a trail with orange peels and lettuce right to her door and got the whole family to camp outside it. But as far as I know, she never saw them.

  “And then one day…you were still so sick. I was so worried about you. I’d spent all my summer pay to bail out your dad, and my reward was having him call in a drunken stupor every night to tell me either that he was going to make it up to me, somehow, or that he was going to kill me. Depended what he’d been drinking. I think it must have been the possums that made me even think of it, because to be honest, I didn’t have time or energy to worry about Evie. She’d stopped moaning. But instead, she kept prowling around up there, every single night, at any hour. I think she was barefoot, at least. I could barely hear her. Just these little scratches. Little slides. Back and forth, in little lurches. All blessed night. Just enough to keep me awake. It also made me even more sad. And tired. I’d never been so tired in my whole life. This went on and on.

  “Until that one day. The last day.” She takes a huge breath and holds it, as though trying to cure hiccoughs. She does that for so long that her knees start to wobble.

  “Mom, come on,” I say.

  “I came home.” Her voice shakes. “And I saw the possum family at the top of her steps. And the spider webs all up and down the stairwell, as though no one had used it for years, which was ridiculous. The mailman w
ent up there every day, for one.

  “But something about it gave me this weird feeling. And it set me thinking. I hadn’t been invited to Stan’s funeral. Evie hadn’t said anything about it whatsoever. I was sure she would have invited me, or talked to me. I went inside and found the number of the undertakers, and I called them.

  “And that’s when I found out. They’d come, alright, on the day I’d summoned them, and knocked at the door. Evie had answered them through it. She said everything was taken care of. And the undertakers said okay and left.

  “I hung up. I had no idea what to think. Then you started crying. And your father called. Then he called again. And you cried some more. And I started crying. I think I just switched on the TV and left you in the living room with a popsicle and a blanket and ignored you when you yelled for me. I locked myself in the bedroom to try to get some sleep before Evie started pacing again. I think somehow I must have got some, too. Because this time it was the screaming that woke me up.”

  “Jesus,” rasps the old woman in white, right next to us, and I jump forward and whirl around. How is it possible for something that slow to sneak up?

  She’s got a crooked, stumpy hand in my mother’s hair. Holding on to her braid, like a child grabbing a cat’s tail.

  “It really is you,” she rasps, her voice so honeycombed that it might be the wind talking.

  Even then, several stunned seconds pass before I recognize her. And my mother ignores her completely. She just rambles on, as though the woman isn’t even there.

  “I hurtled out of bed and came racing out the door. I thought it was you, even though it sounded nothing like you. I just felt so bad. So guilty. About so many things.” Tears stream down her face. To my astonishment, she lays her head on the old woman’s shoulder. The woman strokes her braid.

  “Madolyn?” I gasp. While thinking, where’s the rest of you? The shapeless dress drops without interruption past her waist. The sight is horrifying to me. Incomprehensible. Sad. Wrong. New York without the Trade Centers.

  “It took me a minute to realize the screams were coming from outside. From the driveway.” My mother burrows deeper into Madolyn’s collarbone, which looks bony, now, and can’t be comfortable. “I raced around the building. And there was Mr. Busby, standing by what was left of his Jag.”

  Madolyn still holds onto my mother’s braid. I have to stifle an urge to grab her wrist, shake her loose. It’s like my mother is a child’s pull-toy, and as long as Madolyn keeps yanking her hair, she’s got no choice but to keep talking.

  “I never thought you’d come back here,” the old woman rasps. “Either one of you. You look good, Ry. Like you made it. I thought you might.”

  “They’d broken every single window,” says my mother. “Bashed the windshield to pieces. Stolen all the tires. Knifed the seats.” She speaks faster and faster. One of her hands has snared itself in Madolyn’s dress. “On both sides, into that beautiful pink paint, they’d keyed the words Black Fag.”

  I blink. “What? Who?”

  “Leyton was just shaking, when he wasn’t shouting. I felt awful. I tried to say something comforting, but he wasn’t having it. I didn’t even hear what he was saying at first. That he was actually accusing Evie of this. And even if I had, it was so crazy. But how could he not be crazy, after that? ‘Oh, Leyton,’ I told him.

  “‘Too far,’ he was shouting. ‘Too far, Old Bat. Not funny. Way too far.’ And then...” my mother twitches in place, and Madolyn gives a gentle tug on her braid. “Then…” Again, the twitch and tug. Like she’s stuck.

  “Mom,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “He started for the stairs. He was still screaming ‘Old Bat’ at the top of his lungs, and—”

  “Come on,” I snarl, yanking her away from Madolyn. A shudder ripples from her neck all the way down into her feet, and she stumbles against me and then straightens up.

  She’s holding my hand. Standing tall. Somehow, I’ve forgotten that my mother is taller than me. She’s blinking furiously. She reaches up and at least smears the wetness flooding her face. Only then does she seem to see Madolyn.

  “Oh,” she says. “Hello.”

  Madolyn eyes her up and down. Her skin is tanning-bed orange, her brow surgically lifted so high that it seems pinned to the crest of her head. She looks like a doll, a Madolyn action-figure, denuded of its most characteristic elements. Sanitized.

  “You, on the other hand, don’t look so different from the night you left. I’m sorry to say.”

  My mother tries a laugh. As if Madolyn were kidding. “I was just telling Ry the story. It seems so silly, now.”

  “Silly,” says Madolyn.

  The urge to get my mother away from here, and from this woman, has become overwhelming. I’m way past questioning it. I start to pull her toward the curb. But she digs in her feet and won’t budge.

  “I just thought she should know.” She’s practically chirping, trying so hard to sound like an ordinary, comfortable person that it breaks my heart.

  “I agree,” says Madolyn. “She should.”

  “You know,” my mother says, forces a laugh, waves an airy hand. “What caused me to…it seems so ridiculous, in retrospect. What I thought I saw.”

  “Thought?” says Madolyn, very quietly.

  “It was just such a hard year for me, you know? Such a terrible time. Watching that poor old woman go completely to pieces. And Leyton stomping around his place and the yard, not knowing what to do with himself or how to go on, and you across the street—” she’s talking to Madolyn, almost accusing her—”in your little mausoleum to yourself, with all those pictures of you and a guy you don’t love on the cover of People or whatever, blown up to cover every inch of wallspace. And that moaning and pacing upstairs every single goddamn night.” She turns to me. “And you. My sweet, sweet daughter. Sitting out here by yourself day after day, with no one to look after you properly. With a turtle for a playmate. We were all so lonely. So, so lonely. I guess I got lonely, too.”

  “You become the neighborhood,” I blurt, and tear up again.

  “I guess it all just boiled over. Messed up my head. And when Leyton got up the stairs and started banging on that door, screaming for Evie to come out… When he kept banging and banging and banging, while I was screaming for him to stop…

  “That’s right, you were there, too, Madolyn. You saw it all happen. My big breakdown.” She laughs that laugh again; it’s horrible, like a CD skipping. “You were there when the door opened.”

  Madolyn has straightened over her cane. The Botox injections have made actual facial expressions impossible. But her eyes are ice-cold. “Yep,” she says.

  “She was there,” my mother tells me, patting my hand. “She helped me when I broke down. When I started screaming. When the paramedics came. You probably called the paramedics, didn’t you, Madolyn? She helped them get me in the ambulance. Made sure they knew about you. I never thanked you for that. How’d I even get that picture in my head, Madolyn? I still don’t know.”

  “The one you saw, you mean.”

  “The one I thought I saw. When Evie’s door opened.”

  “So you think you didn’t see it? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Mom, please.” My own voice starts to crack. I’m too late, I think. One more time.

  “You mean, giant spiderlegs scuttling out onto the landing?” The skipping laugh crescendos. “Grabbing Leyton and yanking him inside?”

  “That,” says Madolyn. “And those sounds. Like a cat being ripped inside out while it was still alive.” She nods her fuschia-haired, copper-skinned head. “Sounds about right to me. Pretty much what I saw and heard.”

  My mother stops laughing. Stops breathing again. Sways on her feet. “Stop it,” she says.

  With a shrug, Madolyn steps toward her. “I’m just saying your memory matches pretty perfectly with mine.”

  “Oh, you bitch.” My mother’s voice is a pig-squeal, now. She’s shaking a
ll over. “Stop right now.”

  “You better bring her inside,” Madolyn says to me. “She’s going to collapse.”

  “You cunt whore, stop,” squeals my mother, throws her head back, and screams.

  “Mom!” I try to grab her, but she jabs her elbows into my ribs, staggers away, and drops to her knees in the grass.

  “Say you’re joking,” she hisses. “Say it right now.”

  If Madolyn gets any closer to my mother, I’m thinking I will bowl her over. Drive her into the ground, cane, basket and all.

  “Get away,” I tell her.

  Instead, she plants the cane and sits. My mother folds into a little hump, then tilts sideways against the old woman, and lays her head in her lap.

  “There, now,” Madolyn says, and strokes my mother’s braid. And there they sit.

  It’s insane, the stupidest sensation of this stupid evening yet. But most of what I feel right then is jealousy. And guilt, for the last fifteen years. Especially the last few. I’ve been old enough to treat my mother differently for a long time, now.

  Abruptly, Madolyn lifts the lid of her basket, reaches inside, and pulls out the turtle. I gasp, folding down beside them. My mother lies in Madolyn’s lap and shakes and coos like a baby. Madolyn lays the turtle in the grass, where it begins to nose about. Head sideways. Eying the sky.

  “That’s him? Evie’s?” I stammer.

  Madolyn nods.

  “You saved him?”

  “Afterward. Yeah. When the police were done.”

  “Police…” I reach my finger in front of the turtle’s nose, the way one does with a kitten. The turtle pulls its head into its shell. Noses out again. Sidles sideways to get at more grass.