The Light Through the Leaves(16)

Ellis was eight when her mother started using a new drug she put in her arm with a needle. Zane didn’t want her to, and the fighting got even worse. Ellis was afraid Zane would leave for good. He stopped saying, “I love you, baby.”

“You need to get help with this,” Zane said when he found her mother sprawled in a stupor in her bed.

“With what?” her mother said.

“You know what! You’re killing yourself with that shit! And you don’t even pretend to take care of Ellis anymore!”

She staggered to her feet. “Get the hell out if you don’t like it.”

“No, don’t,” Ellis said, pulling on Zane’s hand. “I can take care of myself. I made strawberry Jell-O and put peaches in it. Come see.”

He was too upset to look. He gripped her hand and said, “Come on. Let’s get a hamburger.”

“I didn’t say you could take my daughter,” her mother called as they went out the door.

Zane muttered curses. He didn’t try to make Ellis feel better like he used to. He just stayed quiet and drove her to get food at the drive-through.

“Zane . . . ?”

“What?”

“Are you coming to my play at school tomorrow?”

He paid the woman in the fast-food window. He didn’t answer.

“I’m a flower that talks about why people should compost. Are you coming?”

“I don’t know, Ell.”

“Please?”

His heavy sigh felt like a weight on Ellis’s heart. “I’ll try to be there,” he said.

The next day, Ellis almost couldn’t say her lines when she saw Zane wasn’t in the audience. She didn’t care about the play. She was afraid Zane was gone for good, and all she wanted to do was cry. Her mother wasn’t among the smiling parents either. But she’d expected that.

Zane stuck around for another month. A few days after Ellis turned nine, after one of the biggest fights ever, Zane left and never came back. He didn’t say goodbye, not to Ellis or to her mother. He just disappeared. Ellis had to listen to her mother say every mean thing she could think of about Zane. Ellis didn’t want to hear those things, but her mother never stopped hating him until the day she died.

Her mother died the last month Ellis was in seventh grade. On a Sunday in May, the best month in the Wild Wood. That was when the wildflowers bloomed, and leaves, birds, frogs, and everything else came back. Ellis took a baggie of cereal to the river for her breakfast that morning. As the clouds from the overnight rain cleared away, the rising sun slanted through the newly leafed branches, casting misty shafts of golden light all over the forest. Ellis was too old to believe in magic anymore, but for a little while, she did again. She sat very still and focused. She wanted to make a picture of the sunbeams in her mind. It was all too perfect to forget. When she went home an hour later, her mother still hadn’t gotten out of bed. Ellis peeped into her bedroom to ask if she should make a pot of coffee. Her mother lay still and gray in her bed. Dead. Next to her, an empty heroin syringe gleamed in a pool of sunlight coming in through the window.

Ellis sorted through the river stones while reflecting. The one in her hand looked like a face. An old wizened woman, her eyes sunken into folds of skin, her nose grown globular with age. Ellis carefully set down the crone, one of many stones to mark the spot where her mother’s ashes had been poured.

She stood and returned to the reality of her missing forest. Her piece of earth, her one true mother, had left her, had disappeared around the bend with everything else. With the ashes. With her paper notes. With Zane and everyone else.

The Wild Wood would never come back, maybe not even Viola striata, the common white violet with purple stripes that had been her favorite. All that was left was river and stone. She had named her boys well. They would endure. They would persist without her.

Ellis had one last note to give her woods. She took her phone out of her pocket. She’d planned to bury it under a log or large rock near where she’d poured her mother’s ashes. But there were no more logs or big rocks.

Ellis opened her photos. The last one she’d taken was a close-up of Viola’s face. Two months old. Then one of Jonah holding her. And River and Jasper cradling her between them on the couch.

She had to stop. If she kept inflicting pain on herself, she might sink too far into it. She might want to disappear down the river, too.

With a touch of her finger, the screen turned black. The glass reflected her face and the few trees that were left to witness her last message. She chose a large rock in the middle of the streaming water. She lifted it and wedged the phone into the bottom of the streambed. She watched water course over the phone, little bubbles dancing like stars on the black night of the screen. Then she dropped the rock, and it disappeared.

She was not one to pollute waterways, but she didn’t see it like that. It was a water burial. The closure of her family. Of her past. Of the future she used to see. Everything she’d ever lost was forever merged in this one piece of earth she’d loved. Even that piece of earth, and her love for it, was now buried there.

She climbed up the riverbank. She was acutely aware of the absence of who she’d been, and the sickening, visceral emptiness expanded with every step away from the river. She was like a cavernous tree, dying from the inside out.

A fortyish woman in a blue beret walked briskly toward her with a dog on a leash. “I saw you come up from the river,” she said breathlessly.