After Alice Fell(29)

“What am I supposed to—”

“Here.” He touches a dark line a few feet from the base, a gnarled scar. “And there.” The next tree, and then the next. There’s a glint of color in the knot closest to me. A bit of pearl lodged in the wood. A round red bead. The teeth of a key. I move from tree to tree. Buttons and hairpins. Jewelry clasps and cufflinks. The green glass wing of a dragonfly.

“I thought I’d lost that,” I say.

“We were doing a new tree,” Toby says and leads me to a sapling. “Mama gave me a penny for candy, but I put it here.” The gash is recent, not seeping, the curve of the coin just peeking out. “You need to put something here.”

I take a breath. This is Alice as she really was. Teaching a boy magic and how to keep safe.

“Do you have something?” he asks. “It’s very important to give something to the tree.”

“Yes. Yes.” I grab at the buttons on my shirt, twisting one on the cuff until the thread snaps.

Toby pulls a pocketknife from his vest pocket and clicks it open. He stabs the tip to the tree trunk and digs out a hole. “Alice promised we’d do those four trees too. And the one in front of the house, but Mama had it cut down because it was rotten, so we didn’t.” He smoothed the edge of the hole, closed the knife, and pocketed it. Then he set his hands on his hips and looked up at me. “You’ll need to put it in yourself. That’s very important too.”

My hand shakes. I close my fist tight, the button warming in my palm. Then I push it to the wood. My thumb is sticky with sap. I rub it along the bark. I want to ask him when Alice changed, when she began to frighten him. Why she held him out the window and did she threaten to let go. Why she took a torch to the glass house. Why she stopped making rings of protection, as she did so long ago for me and so recently for him.

I want to grab him by the shoulders and ask him if he remembers his mother, if there is some amorphous image of Lydia sitting on the edge of his bed at night and kissing his forehead. Someone he called Mother. I want to tell him I know what it was like to be motherless, to watch your mother struggle for air, mouth twisted in desperate agony and a look not of fear of imminent death, but fear of her life hanging on. I want to tell him I could not save her. That I failed Alice, and that I owe her a voice.

I want to say:

My sister didn’t kill herself. She loved bees and black-eyed Susans and little boys and china teacups with painted landscapes and shoe buttons and whippoorwills, and when she laughed it sounded like bells.

I want to say:

I am rudderless.

“You have sap on your chin,” I say instead.

And he keeps his hands to his hips and nods. “There might be a treasure in Alice’s trunk. For the tree. We’ll look together. We’ll bring it here.”

He pats the tree and then my arm, and we walk through the clearing again. He scales the log and helps me over, then hands me the bow. “Do you know how to shoot?”

“Yes.”

“Is Mama a better shot?”

“Cathy?”

He shifts his jaw. “Yes. Her.”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Will you teach me?”

“If you wish.”

With a shift of weight, he’s got the quiver strapped across his chest, the feathers on the arrows peeking out from behind his shoulder. He steps through a tangle of browning vines that snap and break as he kicks and twists his boots. “We’ll need more Sentinels. They stand guard. So no one gets taken.” A finger cocked to the sky. “Come on.”

The bow grip is smooth leather. I hold it tight to my thigh and follow Toby under the canopy of trees and through a mire of rocks and roots before we reach the flat stones and sleeping dead again. The flowers have wilted in the heat, the leaves a dull green, petals faded yellow, the center florets purple-black and bulging.

Toby reaches for an arrow, fingering the feathers on each. He chooses an arrow with turkey feathers, pulls it free, and sets it amidst the flower stems on Alice’s grave. “She might need that.”

A blue jay toes along a maple branch, cocks its head to look down. Its eye is beaded glass, curious and then not. It lifts away with a heavy push to the limb, makes the sky with a flap of wings, and settles on the top of another tree.

There’s a brush of movement on the periphery of the gravesite, a darker brown than the bark and the brush. Not the delicate snap of twigs from a deer. Heavy steps that slow and stop. A man holding a rifle, barrel hung to the ground. I grab for Toby’s shoulder to hold him still. “Who’s there?”

But the man remains still. His straw hat is stained dark at the rim, his hair worn long, tucked behind his ears and touching his shoulders. He peers out at us, his eyes a flat, muddy brown. His boiled-wool vest is shiny along his chest; his canvas trousers bag and pool at his boots. He shifts the rifle.

“Who are you?”

He lifts a hand as if to greet us, then drops his arm. “Just looking for work.”

“There’s none here. You might try Widow Humphrey, up the road.”

“I might,” he says. But he doesn’t move.

“Come on.” This time, Toby doesn’t lead. He wiggles his hand into mine, his thumb as tacky with sap as mine, and we take the path side by side back to the house.

“Was that a bad man?” he asks.