Are You Alive? Chapter 10

You don’t bury a rowan

Chapter 10
“Don’t let him leave,” Arianna read out loud.
She said it slowly, the way you read a math problem that you already know is going to have fractions in it.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Silver.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s dust.”
“I know.”
“He’s all over the kitchen. He’s on the fridge. He’s on me.” She held up her sleeve. “How are we supposed to not let dust leave? Close the windows?”
We both thought about that for a second.
“We don’t have a kitchen window anymore,” I said.
“Right,” said Arianna. “Yeah. That’s a problem.”
* * *
Then my phone started ringing.
Not a text. A call. Mom across the screen, and the little picture of her from last summer with dirt on her nose, holding up a tomato like it was a trophy.
I stared at it.
“Answer it,” Arianna whispered.
“I can’t.”
“Silver, answer it.”
I pressed the green button with the side of my bandaged thumb and held the phone up to my ear, and I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.
I had a whole sentence ready. Mom, something happened. Four words. I could not get even one of them past my throat.
“Silver?” Her voice was crackly. She was driving. I could hear the road under the tires, and the blinker going, and the radio turned down so low it was just a hum. “Sweetheart? Are you there?”
I made a sound. It wasn’t a word. It was the smaller, worse sound from the kitchen. The road noise stopped. She had pulled over.
“Okay,” my mom said. Her voice changed completely. Calm. Very calm. The voice she used when I was seven and fell off the shed roof and she carried me to the car. “Okay. You don’t have to talk. Just listen to me. Can you do that?”
I nodded, which is useless on the phone, and she seemed to know anyway. “Is anyone hurt?”
I looked at my hands. I looked at the grey on the floor.
“…Yes,” I whispered.
A long silence on the other end. I could hear her breathing.
“Is Rowan there?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how to answer. Yes was a lie and no was a lie and there was no word for what he was.
“Silver. Is Rowan there?”
“Kind of,” I said, and then my voice broke in half and I couldn’t say anything else.
My mom didn’t ask what kind of meant. That’s the part I keep thinking about. She didn’t ask. She just made a small sound, like someone had pressed on a bruise, and then she was calm again.
“I’m coming home. I’ll be there by morning. Is Arianna with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Keep her with you. Stay together, stay inside, and stay out of the basement.”
Arianna, who could hear every word, looked at the mudroom. The hatch was still wide open. The flashlight was still lying at the bottom of the stairs, pointing into the hole in the wall.
“Little late for that one,” she whispered.
“And Silver?” my mom said.
“Yeah?”
“Whatever happened.” Her voice wobbled, just once. “It’s not your fault. Do you hear me? I love you. I’m coming.”
The call ended.
I sat there holding the phone against my ear until it went dark.
* * *
We were going to sweep him up.
That was the plan, anyway. It was midnight and my mom had said don’t let him leave, and the only thing either of us could think of was not letting the wind carry him out through the hole in the wall.
Arianna went to the mudroom for the broom.
She didn’t come back.
“Arianna?”
“Silver,” she called. Her voice was very quiet and very high. “Come here. Slowly. Don’t step on anything.”
I went.
She was standing in the mudroom doorway, holding the broom against her chest like a shield, and she was looking at the floor.
The dust was moving.
Not blowing. There wasn’t any wind. It was sliding. A thin grey line of it was coming out of the kitchen, across the hallway, along the floorboards, the way water runs downhill, except our floor isn’t a hill. It went around the palm trees lying in the hall. It went around our feet. It went past the open hatch without even slowing down.
It went into the palm tree pot.
The big one. The one that had cracked when the hatch blew open. The palm tree itself was lying in the hallway looking offended, so the pot was empty except for a little old dirt at the bottom, and the dust was pouring into it, slow and steady, like sand through an hourglass.
We watched the whole thing. Neither of us said a word.
It took about ten minutes. The kitchen emptied out. The counter went clean. The top of the fridge went clean. Even the dust on Arianna’s sleeve lifted off and drifted down the hall after the rest of it, and she held her arm out very still and let it go.
When it was done, the only thing left in the kitchen was the knife in the wall. We had silently agreed that the knife was a tomorrow problem.
“He picked the pot,” Arianna whispered. “Silver. He picked it.”
“Maybe it’s the plants,” I said. “Maybe my mom’s plants did it.”
“The plants don’t have hands.”
“The vines locked the front door.”
“…Okay, fair point.”
We both looked at the pot.
Then every plant in the house moved.
Not a lot. It wasn’t like the vines in the hallway, or the palm trees rolling in their pots. It was small. Every plant in the house just shifted, very slightly, the way people in a room turn their heads a little when somebody comes in late.
They stopped pointing at me.
They pointed at the pot.
Arianna grabbed my arm.
“I hate that,” she whispered.
“You said that already.”
“I’m going to keep saying it until it stops happening.”
I knelt down next to the pot, very carefully, and held my bandaged hand over the top of it. It was warm.
Not hot. Not like my hands had been. Just warm, the way a rock is warm after sitting in the sun all day, like something in there was still holding on to a little bit of the afternoon.
He didn’t leave.
My mom told me not to let him leave, and I didn’t do anything, and he didn’t leave anyway. He came down the hall and climbed into a flower pot all by himself, like he was trying one last time to make this easier for me.
I didn’t tell Arianna that part. I didn’t know how to say it without it sounding like hope. * * *
Arianna called her dad and told him she was sleeping over for a school project. “Technically true,” she said after she hung up. “I’m learning so much.”
We didn’t sleep, not really. We lay on the couch under the same blanket with the lamp on, because neither of us was going to turn the lamp off, and the pot sat on the floor where we could both see it. Every few minutes one of us would look over at it, just to check.
I don’t know what we were checking for.
At some point Arianna fell asleep with her mouth open and her feet in my face, which is how she has slept at every sleepover since we were five.
I stayed awake with the watch.
I held it up in the lamplight and watched the second hand go backwards. I tried counting how long it took for the minute hand to move. It was slow. Much slower than a normal minute. I did the math three times and got three different answers, which is a normal amount of times for me to get math wrong, but I could tell one thing for sure.
It was not going to reach twelve tonight.
It was not going to reach twelve for about three weeks.
I put it face down on my chest so I couldn’t see it, and I listened to it tick against my heart, and at some point, I don’t know when, I stopped hearing it.
* * *
I woke up because the vines were moving.
The lamp was still on, but the room was grey with early morning. Outside, a car door shut. The vines across the front door were unwinding.
Slowly. Carefully. The three thick ones peeled away from the doorknob one at a time, like fingers letting go, and pulled themselves back up the wall toward the ceiling where they belonged. The big one that had been lying across the floor lifted itself up and hooked itself back onto its hook.
Like a dog getting off the couch because it heard its owner’s keys.
The door opened.
My mom stood in the doorway.
Her hair was a mess. She was still wearing her travel jacket, and there was a leaf stuck to her sleeve, and she looked like she had been driving all night, because she had. She looked at the living room. She looked at the palm trees lying in the hall. She looked past them, toward the
kitchen, and I watched her see the wall, and the black marks going up to the ceiling, and the grey light coming in through the hole where the window used to be.
Then she looked at me.
She didn’t say anything. She dropped her bag on the floor, crossed the room in about three steps, and grabbed me off the couch so hard that Arianna fell onto the floor.
“Ow,” said Arianna, from the floor. “Hi. Welcome home.”
My mom did not let go.
She smelled like car seats and coffee and lavender. She was shaking. I didn’t know if she was crying or not, because my face was stuck in her shoulder, but I could feel her breathing, and it was the kind of breathing people do when they are trying really hard not to.
“You’re okay,” she said into my hair. “You’re okay. You’re okay.”
I had been planning what I was going to say to her all night.
I had a whole speech. I had the envelopes in her closet and the six letters she had read until the paper went soft, and every single time she sat on the edge of my bed and told me he’s out there somewhere, sweetheart. I was going to be calm about it. Cold. Like a detective at the end of a movie.
Instead I started crying so hard I couldn’t breathe.
* * *
It took a while.
When I finally stopped, she held my hands in hers, very gently, and looked at the bandages. Her jaw went tight. She didn’t unwrap them. She just held them.
“Who did this?”
“Me,” I said.
She closed her eyes.
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “He came up out of the basement and he was walking toward me and my hands just — they started — the whole kitchen—”
“I know.”
“You don’t know.”
“Silver—”
“You don’t know, because you weren’t here,” I said, and it came out way louder than I meant it to. “And he was trying to tell me something and I didn’t let him and I threw the knife and it went right through him, Mom, and he turned into — and now he’s—”
I pointed at the pot.
My mom turned and looked at it.
For a long time, she didn’t move.
I have seen my mom sad. I have heard her through a bedroom door at two in the morning. But I had never seen her face do what it did right then, when she looked at a cracked palm tree pot full of grey dust on our living room floor. It was like watching something fold in half.
“Oh, Rowan,” she said, very quietly. “Oh, you idiot.”
She didn’t say it like she was mad. She said it the way you’d say it to somebody you had known for a very long time.
* * *
Arianna made coffee.
We don’t have a coffee maker anymore, because it was on the counter under the window, and now it was in the yard. So she boiled water in a pot on the one burner that still worked, and poured it through a paper towel, and brought my mom a mug that tasted, according to my mom, “like a swamp, thank you, sweetheart, you’re an angel.”
We sat on the living room floor around the pot. All three of us.
“You knew,” I said.
My mom was holding her mug with both hands.
“I found the envelopes. In your closet. Six of them.” I made myself look at her. “I didn’t open them. But you knew he was alive. The whole time. You told me he was out there and you knew.”
“Yes,” she said.
I was ready for her to argue. I had been ready all night. I wasn’t ready for her to just say yes.
“I knew your father didn’t die in that truck,” she said. “I didn’t know where he was. I still don’t. He wrote to me six times the first year and then he stopped. I told you he was out there because it was true. I didn’t tell you the rest because—” She stopped and started again. “Because I was hoping you’d never need it.”
“Need what?”
She looked at my hands.
“That,” she said.
Nobody said anything for a while.
“It runs in his family,” she said finally. “Not every generation. I prayed it would skip you. I watched you every birthday. Every single year, I’d stand in your doorway after you fell asleep and I’d think, maybe not this year, maybe not ever.” She laughed, but not the good kind. “You set the curtains on fire when you were two. Did you know that? I told myself it was the candle.”
“Was it the candle?”
“There was no candle, Silver.”
Arianna very quietly raised her hand.
“Sorry,” she said. “Is this a bad time to ask about the plants?”
My mom looked at her. Then she looked at the ceiling, where every vine in the living room was hanging perfectly still, like it was listening.
“That one’s mean,” she said.
“I knew it,” said Arianna. “I knew the fern had opinions.”
“The fern has a lot of opinions,” my mom said. “Most of them about Silver not watering it.” * * *
I took the photo out of my pocket.
It had ash on it now, and one corner was folded. My dad in front of the red bridge. Rowan beside him, with his hand on Dad’s shoulder. I turned it over and held it out.
DON’T.
“What does it mean?” I asked. “Don’t trust him? Or don’t hurt him?”
My mom took it from me. She ran her thumb over the word like she was surprised it was still there.
“Neither,” she said. “It’s for me.”
“What?”
“I wrote it the night after the crash. When the police left. Rowan came to the back door with you asleep on his shoulder, covered in mud, and he told me what your father had become, and where he’d gone.” She was quiet for a second. “And I wanted to go after him. I had the car keys in my
hand. I was going to leave you with Rowan and drive to that bridge and walk into the Blackwood until I found him.”
She turned the photo back over, so the two men were smiling up at us.
“So I wrote that on the back of the last picture I had of them together and I put it in the box. Don’t. Don’t go. Don’t look for him. Stay with her.” She put it in my hand and closed my fingers around it, careful of the bandages. “I read it a lot, the first year.”
I looked down at it.
Don’t trust him. Don’t hurt him. Don’t go.
Three ways to read it, and I had only thought of two.
* * *
“The palm trees,” I said suddenly.
My mom winced.
“His letter said you moved the palm trees. And not to let you move them again. And the delivery guy put them right on top of the hatch and I—” I stared at her. “Mom. Were the palm trees a lock?”
“…They were a lock,” my mom admitted.
“You bought PALM TREES as a LOCK?”
“Palm trees are very heavy and very stubborn, and they don’t like being told what to do. They’re excellent at sitting on things.”
“I moved them!”
“I noticed.” She pointed at the hallway, where all three of them were lying on their sides. “So did they. They’re sulking.”
“They’re sulking?”
“You threatened to turn them into firewood.”
“How do you know that?”
My mom just looked at me.
Behind her, very faintly, the fern rustled.
“Unbelievable,” I said to the fern. “You snitch.”
Arianna laughed so hard she spilled swamp coffee on the carpet, and then my mom laughed, and then I did too, a little, in a way that hurt my ribs and felt like it might turn back into crying if I wasn’t careful.
It was the first time anything had been funny since the knock.
* * *
When we stopped laughing, my mom got up and went to the mudroom.
She came back with her watering can. The green metal one with the dent in the side, the one she has had my whole life, the one she has never once let me use because I “water like a firefighter.”
She knelt down next to the pot.
“Mom,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“His name is Rowan,” she said. “Do you know what a rowan is?”
I shook my head. Arianna shook her head.
“It’s a tree,” said my mom. “Old people used to plant them by their front doors. For protection. To keep things out that shouldn’t come in.” She tipped the watering can, just a little. A thin stream of water ran down into the grey dust and disappeared. “You don’t bury a rowan, Silver.”
She tipped it a little more.
“You plant one.”
The dust got dark where the water hit it. It soaked in. For a second, nothing happened, and I felt stupid for holding my breath, and I kept holding it anyway.
Then the dust moved.
Not a lot. Right in the middle, where the water had gone in first, the surface cracked, the way dirt cracks in a garden in spring. Something pushed up through it.
It was green.
It was tiny. Barely as long as my fingernail. Two little leaves, folded together like hands, still damp.
Nobody said anything.
The watch in my pocket ticked backwards. The fern held perfectly still. The vines on the ceiling leaned in so close that one of them brushed the top of my mom’s head, and she didn’t even notice.
“Is he—” Arianna whispered. “Is that—”
She set down the watering can.
“Yes, yes it is”
* * *
I leaned down close to the pot, so close my nose was almost touching the rim. The dust smelled like rain now. Like the Blackwood after a storm.
I had asked the same question into the dark every morning for ten years. I had asked it last night to an empty patch of floor. Nothing had ever answered. Nothing was ever supposed to.
But I asked it anyway, because I’m me.
“Are you alive?”
The two little leaves unfolded.
Slowly. Carefully. Like someone who had been asleep for a very long time, waking up and opening their hands.
And then the tiny green shoot, the smallest thing in a house full of plants, turned all the way around in its pot until it was facing me.

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