California(59)

“He returned from the last trip and said, ‘You won’t believe it, Mikey.’”

“Did you? Did you believe it?”

Micah didn’t reply, and she couldn’t even guess what his reaction had been. Before, she’d been hurt that he hadn’t come to see her, but now she felt angry. She deserved answers.

“This way,” he said, and pointed up.

She thought for a moment that he was asking her to shinny like an animal up a tree trunk and was about to tell him she didn’t have the upper-body strength for such shenanigans, when she saw pieces of wood had been nailed into the trunk. A little ladder. Someone had built a wooden platform in the tree.

Micah made a basket with his hands and knelt. “I’ll give you a boost.”

“Is this the clubhouse?”

He stood up and sighed. “No, Frida, this isn’t the clubhouse. It’s just where I go to clear my head.” He held out his hands again. “I just thought you might like to see it.”

The wood steps were smoother than she expected, as if some Land member had buffed them before nailing them into the trunk. If Micah had been the kind of little brother who liked sports and played war and broke bones and heads off Barbie dolls, this might have felt like a return to their youth. But as a kid, Micah had preferred to be alone, preferably indoors. Sometimes he could fall into a stormy mood, but if you left him be, he’d cheer up eventually. He liked to read books and take apart the toaster and post videos on the Internet about their bathtub. At eight he read about the sixteenth-century seaman Martin Frobisher, who discovered Canada and later fought off the Spanish Armada. Micah became obsessed with him and for months asked everyone to call him by that name. Nobody did, not even Frida, who usually put up with him. Hilda just laughed it off and said, “My children: the greatest mystery of all.”

While Micah was being a nerd, Frida would roam the neighborhood, hiding in people’s backyards, pretending she’d run away. Once she’d broken into the yard directly behind theirs, just for kicks, and had accidentally stepped on a tortoise. The house was a freakin’ menagerie, Dada said later. The animal’s shell was warm against her bare feet, and solid, but there was the knowledge of a soft body beneath it, and Frida had screamed. Micah happened to be in their own backyard at the time, and when he heard her, he stuck his head over the fence and said, in the beleaguered voice of Hilda, “Come now.” He had just turned six.

Micah’s grown-up tree house was an open wooden platform with the trunk in the middle and a single railing around the edge, as if fighting off the branches. Frida had never been on a boat, but she felt like this was what it must be like, standing at the helm, the water beckoning and teasing and scaring below. She didn’t think she was afraid of heights, and this tree wasn’t very tall, but it had been a long time since she’d been above anything, even a canopy of leaves, and she held on to the railing with both hands.

They sat on two collapsible camping chairs, and from a plastic toolbox, Micah pulled out a cloudy glass bottle and two creased Dixie cups. The cups had begun to collapse in on themselves, and Frida could tell they’d gone from soggy to stiff and back again multiple times.

She nodded at the bottle. “What’s that?”

“I’d call it whiskey, but then you’d be disappointed.”

“You guys make liquor here?”

He shook his head. “We traded for it.”

“Who makes it?”

He raised an eyebrow and poured the alcohol into the cups, which sagged with the weight of the liquid. “Please don’t give me the Cal treatment, Frida. All day, people are asking me questions, wanting my advice, asking for solutions. And then, on top of all that, your husband comes along with an endless questionnaire. I just want to relax.”

“Oh, f*ck off, Micah. I just spent the last five years thinking you were dead. And here you are, playing king in a tree house. You don’t get to relax.”

Her brother looked skyward, as if a response might be written in the tree branches above. “You make a valid point,” he said, and handed her one of the cups.

She took the cup, but she didn’t drink. Just one sip wouldn’t hurt the baby, would it?

“A bouquet of lighter fluid and piss,” Micah said, and downed his.

She put the cup to her nose. Being drunk actually sounded wonderful, and the sharpness of the liquor was as pleasing as it was revolting. The burn traveled through her nostrils and into her throat.

But she couldn’t.

“I’d rather not,” she said.

“Seriously?” he asked. “You? Turn down a drink?” But he was already putting down his empty cup and taking hers. Between his fingers, the edge of cup folded into a triangle, threatening to spill its contents. Micah brought it quickly to his lips.

“I have so many questions,” she said.

“Ask them, then,” he said. “But up here, there’s no need to be a mouthpiece.”

“‘A mouthpiece’? You mean Cal’s?” She leaned back. “Don’t be typical, Micah.”

The phrase was out before she could even think about it. Hilda used to say it to him when he’d refused to eat dinner with them or put on shoes to go to the market. Or when he’d say something witty and cruel, his mouth curved mean and smug.

“I want to know just as much as my husband does,” Frida continued. “Why wouldn’t I? It’s only natural.”