Magnolia Virginiana, Sweetbay - for lea_hazel
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junetideTitle: Magnolia Virginiana, Sweetbay
Gift for:lea_hazel
By:wojelah
Gift type: Fiction (8500ish words)
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: PG
Warnings: None.
Summary: “My full name is Magnolia Virginiana Sweetbay, which is why botanists should never be allowed to name their children. Most people call me Ginny. My grandmother calls me Magnolia. The first time another kid tried that, I bit him. I've gotten better at playing nicely with others. When I have to. Mostly, I stick to plants.”
Giftcreator's notes: Written for the prompt, “the angst and drama of the world of competitive horticulture, as seen from the outside by a world-famous horticulturist's estranged teenage daughter. Also were-unicorns or something.” Produced subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
“Bay?” Jake was looking for me. Too bad for him, I was up to my elbows in a recalcitrant rosebush and whatever it was, it would have to wait.
My full name is Magnolia Virginiana Sweetbay, which is why horticulturalists should never be allowed to name their children. Most people call me Ginny. My grandmother calls me Magnolia. The first time another kid tried that, I bit him. I've gotten better at playing nicely with others. When I have to. Mostly, I stick to plants.
“Bay?” Jake MacAllen rounded the corner of the house, jeans muddy and damp to the knee, a spade in one hand and a pair of holey, filthy gardening gloves in the other. “Why the hell didn't you answer?”
A trailing branch of Joseph's Coat wriggled free, leaving bright red scratches along my left arm as it fell. Serves me right for wearing a tank top to work, but Maryland in July is a swamp. I swore around the hammer in my mouth. “Bit busy.”
Jake tugged on his gloves, snagged the escapee, corralled the remainder, and held them back while I replaced the last board in Mrs. Mulvaney's previously decrepit trellis. He waited while I grabbed a handful of ties out of my pocket and secured the sneaky bastards onto the wood, branch by branch. Job done, we both stepped back.
The ruddy orange blossoms nodded at me, caught by a tiny wisp of otherwise ineffectual breeze, and I smiled. “You look better already,” I told them. The branches seemed to curl upwards - the plant equivalent of a grin - but that was just my imagination. Or possibly heatstroke.
“It's good work.” Jake pulled the gloves off again. You can still see the tiny crescent scar where my six-year teeth broke his seven-year old skin. He hadn't cried, or run. He'd just said I didn't look like a Ginny. I'd told him I wasn't any stupid Magnolia. We'd compromised on Bay.
“It is, actually.” I was hot and tired and ready as hell for a shower, something cold to drink, or a swim, in no particular order. I looked over at him. “Why the hell do you look like you've gone wading?”
He snorted. “Mrs. Mulvaney's convinced there's frogs mating in her koi pond.”
“Has she seen the size of her koi? Any smart frog would be too damn scared to screw in there. You're lucky you didn't lose a finger.”
“Or a toe. Do frogs screw?”
I shrugged. “I skipped that part of biology.” I had. Frog behavior went with frog anatomy went with frog dissection. I’d permission-slipped out and spent my time in the environmental science classroom, figuring out why the terrarium was dying.
“Anyway. You done?”
I took a look around the front yard, prying my hands out of my own sweaty gloves. We'd been working here for a solid two weeks, ever since Janet Mulvaney came home from a month-long business trip and found out that her husband and thirteen-year old son were not exactly gardening as per orders in her absence. July wasn't exactly the month I'd choose to overhaul a garden, but I wasn't looking a gift paycheck in the mouth. “I think so.”
“Good. Because Mrs. Mulvaney thinks so too, and I've got the check to prove it.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a damp, crinkled check, laughing when I grabbed at it. “Easy.”
“Oh, shut up.” I checked the amount and had to look again. “Jake - “
He broke into a full-on grin that matched my own. “I know, right? An extra two hundred apiece, 'for working so hard in such hot weather.'”
“Holy shit, Jake.” I stared at the check. “You know what this means?”
“My mom's going to jump for joy when you finally pay my dad for the work on that old beater and drive it out of her backyard?”
I laughed, I couldn't help it. “Something like that.” I resisted the urge to run around cheering, pocketed the check, and stooped to pick up the extra pieces of trellis. “Come on,” I said. “Let's get out of here. There's a snow cone with my name on it at Charlie's.”
We've been doing this for three years, Jake and me, and we've got a good routine. Packing up didn't take long; driving over to the empty lot where Charlie sets up his snow cone stand five months of the year took even less. We didn't hurry – we didn't have to – we had a whole three days before we were supposed to start up at our next job. We just sat on the tailgate and swung our legs and ate cold, sweet ice chips as the sun got lower and the sky a little dusky. Eventually, when even the drips were gone, we called it a good day and climbed back in the cab, and Jake drove me back to the house.
There was a sedan in the driveway, all pristine black and chrome. The snow cone turned to sludge in my stomach. My father was home.
“Aw, shit, Bay.” Jake parked the truck at the end of the long, curving drive. “I'm sorry.” Jake MacAllen has been my best friend for eleven-almost-twelve years, and my partner in extracurricular yard work for three, and it's kind of nice to have somebody around who just gets it and doesn't need an explanation.
I yanked at the truck door, scowling when it jammed. “I gotta go.”
“Just hang on,” he said, getting out and walking around to open it from the outside.
I took a few steps up the drive and stopped, my back to him. “Look – I'll call you tomorrow, okay? About the Martin job? We'll need to hit the nursery before we head over there.”
“Yeah, fine,” I heard him sigh, followed by the slam of the truck door. I stared at the house and shoved my hands in my pockets, had an epiphany, and jogged back to him. He hadn't started the engine yet. “Here,” I said, and stuck the check in through the open window. “Cash it. I'll get my share from you later.”
“Hey,” he said, frowning.
I shrugged him off. “I – it's okay. I'll call you.”
“Don't do anything dumb,” he said. Jake’s known me a long time.
I made a face, trying for some kind of humor. “Whatever.”
He just looked at me, sighed, and started the truck. I turned away as he backed out the driveway and I started the long trudge up to the house.
My father's name is the relatively pedestrian John Robert Sweetbay, III. I never met John Robert II, but three of the azaleas that bloom by my grandmother's front door every spring are his cultivars and my grandmother has three kinds of orchids in the greenhouse that he named after her - to thank her, apparently, for all her help in his laboratory. Grandmother’s not exactly a slouch either: she’s one of the first Master Gardeners in Maryland, female or otherwise, and her flowers won so frequently at the state fair that they finally asked her to judge so somebody else would have a chance. John Robert III has his share of hybrids and is responsible for a new method of grafting that is apparently revolutionizing the cultivation of genetically modified fruit trees.
Basically, Sweetbays are horticulturists, period. If you’re a Sweetbay, or you marry a Sweetbay, it’s what you do. It’s what Sweetbays have done as far back as Elizabethan England, and they’ve kept the family records to prove it. Unfortunately, they’ve haven’t been nearly as good at animal husbandry. My father is an only child, just like his father before him. Just like me. And I’m a girl.
When my mother was nine months pregnant with me, my father stole a tree. I don’t know why he stole it, but it wasn't just any tree, it was a newly developed hybrid belonging to the U.S. Agricultural Research Service. When I was three, the authorities finally caught up with him, and sent him to federal prison for ten years, two off for good behavior. Six months after his incarceration, my mother left my grandmother's house in the middle of the night and never came back.
When I was eleven, my father came home and started to rebuild his reputation as a premier horticulturalist - not easy to do when you’re a convicted felon, but all those generations of Sweetbays apparently counted for something. Between research junkets and speaking engagements and guest lecture stints, he wasn't all around all that much more than before. At least, not that I noticed.
When I was almost fifteen, Melinda, Jake's mom, asked my grandmother if I could help with her backyard, and offered up Jake as free day labor. By then, Grandmother had me well-versed in everything needed to keep her own yard precisely groomed, and it hardly took me all day, so she gave her blessing and off I went. I didn’t do much more than mulch and install some timers on her sprinklers, but Melinda liked it, and I liked it, and Jake liked that I split the cash with him. After a few phone calls from Melinda’s neighbors asking for similar jobs, we went to Kinko’s, printed up some flyers, and JB Yards got going. Grandmother wasn’t thrilled, but it kept me out of trouble and busy on the weekends, so she let it continue. Almost three years later, we had work year round, borrowed Jake’s little brother Joe when we needed extra hands, and had to turn jobs away.
When I was seventeen and a half, I told my father I'd gotten into Maryland's Landscape Architecture program. He told me landscape architects were hacks who couldn't appreciate the beauty of horticulture if they tried. I told him that in my experience, horticulturists were insulated academic inbreds who didn't care about anything beyond the confines of the lab and the greenhouse. My grandmother informed us both that if we continued squalling at the table like ill-mannered children, she'd send us both to bed without supper. Since Victoria Regina Sweetbay, nee Whitford, ruled over her housekeeper and her family with a fist of iron and could, as a result, enforce that decree, we subsided. My father was gone the next day - another back-to-back research expedition and lecture tour or something. Same old, same old. We hadn't spoken since.
Now, six months later, his car was in the driveway, shiny and slick and expensive,
I went in through the window. My room is on the second floor, but faces out the back, toward the woods, and there’s a very big, very old, very climbable oak with a very conveniently placed sturdy branch. It was more convenient when I was twelve and clocked in at under a hundred pounds, but I’m tall and kind of scrawny, so it’s still a useful alternative. And about three years ago, I realized that there's a fork in the branches about a foot higher than my head, when I'm standing, that's the perfect size to hold a standard-sized cashbox wrapped in a plastic bag.
It's not that I have a lot of secrets. I don't keep my diary there or anything. But my savings are there – not the bulk of it, but the part of it that I've been setting aside to buy Jake's dad's old clunker, because that's a savings goal of which Grandmother would not approve – and my scholarship letter, and a picture of my mother and father from just before I was born, and a few other things I'd prefer snooping eyes didn't find. The Ziploc seems to have been enough to stave off rust and squirrels, and nobody else but me is going looking for anything in that oak. It's a good old tree.
I jimmied open my window and gave the branch a pat as my feet hit the floor of my room. I stood there a minute, blinking at the tree - I’d have sworn it just.shivered under my hand, like a dog enjoying a pat. My grandmother’s voice drifted up the stairs and I shook myself back into motion. There wasn’t any point antagonizing Dad by showing up in my work clothes, and I had maybe ten minutes before Eva, the housekeeper, called us for dinner. I slid into my chair just as Eva brought in the food.
‘Magnolia,” Dad boomed. “Happy birthday!”
I blinked at him and did a quick mental calendar check. “Um,” I said. “It’s not till tomorrow?” I hadn’t forgotten, exactly. It’s just that birthdays aren’t really a big deal in the house of Sweetbay. The MacAllens usually invite me over for dinner and cake and ice cream sometime around the actual date, and Grandmother always leaves a formal card wishing me “many good things in the coming year,” but that’s about it. Dad being home is unusual enough; Dad being home and enthusing about my birthday is just weird.
“The proper response is ‘thank you,’ Magnolia,” Grandmother said, not pausing as she served the salad.
“Thank you,” I said automatically, and managed to bite my tongue on the “Magnolia.” I tried a smile at Dad, who was still beaming at me.
“So,” he said. “How shall we celebrate?”
Okay, look. Dad loves me. I get it. Just like I get that some part of him feels guilty about being gone so much. He’s my father. I love him, I guess - in a sort of vague distant way that would be really upset if something happened to him. But we hardly know each other. And the last birthday I spent with him, I was eleven, and he’d just gotten out of prison. We’d spent the day at the National Arboretum. It’s just - I’m not eleven anymore. After birthdays twelve and thirteen, I just stopped expecting. “You’ll be here?” I asked.
Dad frowned, and dimmed a little. “Of course. It’s tomorrow. I’ll leave for Costa Rica on Saturday.”
“Great,” I managed.
“Magnolia,” Grandmother said sharply.
“Sorry.” I tried to smile back at Dad. “Maybe we could go gunkholing.” Not that anyone on the Chesapeake other than a Sweetbay would call what we used to do gunkholing. We take a dinghy, for starters, not a sailboat. And we spend most of our time paddling close to shore, looking at the foliage - and the undergrowth, and the herbaceous shrubs - you get the idea. “I - I have to meet Jake in the afternoon at the nursery, but we could go out in the morning, before it gets too hot?”
“Excellent! I’ll hunt up the old binoculars.” Dad went back to full-wattage, Grandmother relaxed marginally, and I tried not to wonder what the hell we were going to talk about.
The rest of the evening was pretty much uneventful. Dad and Grandmother discussed his upcoming trip and his schedule for the rest of the year, pausing only when I excused myself to go rope Jake into Friday afternoon’s plans and starting up again as I headed upstairs.
“Bay,” he groaned. “We don’t have to be at the Wilsons’ till Monday.”
“I know, I know.” I rolled over on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “Please, Jake? I just - I don’t know how long I can avoid arguing. He hasn’t mentioned college yet, but...” Dirty pool, maybe, but true as hell.
Jake knew it, too. He’d been the first person I called, six months ago. He sighed. “You owe me.”
“I do.”
“I don’t mean in snow cones, either.” They’d been our summer currency of choice since we were old enough to get pocket money.
“Ledo’s,” I offered.
“Twice.”
“Twice,” I agreed.
He considered. “With all the toppings I want on the pizza?”
“Even the sweet peppers.” I could always pick them off.
“And you’ll be the one who talks to Mrs. Wilson about keeping Precious under lock and key?” That was playing hardball. Precious was Mrs. Wilson’s only child, in the form of a ten-pound teacup poodle with an unnatural affection for Jake’s leg. Jake, specifically. Everyone else, including Mr. Wilson, was subjected to death-by-ferocious-yapping.
“I promise,” I said.
“You’re being suspiciously cooperative,” Jake replied.
I gave up and played my trump card. “Jake. It’s my birthday and I’m desperate. I would promise you the actual, honest-to-God moon if I could swing it.”
He laughed and capitulated. “You win. And it’s your birthday, so I won’t even throw in the sweet peppers clause.”
“You’re my hero.”
“I prefer Jedi in shining armor.” It was true. I could quote Jake chapter and verse on the various flaws in the second Star Wars trilogy and the infinite superiority of the first three films.
“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.”
“When you put it like that -” Jake started, breaking off as Joe yelled something at him in the background. “All right, all right,” he shouted back. “Sorry. It’s my week to take the trash out. Where and when?”
“Pick me up here? At, say, noon?”
“Deal. See you tomorrow.”
“Night, Jake.” I hung up and lay there a minute, thinking about nothing in particular beyond a general sense of relief. Down the hall, the stairs creaked, and I got up and bustled into my bathroom, just in case it was someone wanting to talk.
I washed my face, brushed my teeth, tugged on a t-shirt, and paused with my hand on the light switch, studying myself in the mirror. Brown, curly hair, hazel eyes, sharp cheekbones,a chin more stubborn than most, and freckles everywhere. Nothing remarkable. It was weird to think I turned eighteen tomorrow. I was done with high school. I was going to college in just under a month, come hell or high water, even if I was going to have to commute. I had a successful sort-of business that had made me enough money to buy a car, even if it was a clunker. I had to be able to handle three hours in a boat with my father. Surely.
I turned off the bathroom light and went to bed.
As it turned out, I didn’t really have to worry. Not about Dad, at least.
I woke up around seven when the birds got too damn loud to ignore. I shoved my head under the pillows for awhile, but eventually it became clear that sleep just wasn’t coming back any time soon. With a groan, I rolled out of bed and managed to shove myself into a hot shower, planning on a good, long drenching.
I loved hot water. Or at least, I had. This morning, though - I had the dial in the same place I always did, but for some reason, it felt scalding. Flattened against the side of the shower, I managed to turn it down to something just on the warm side of cool. That felt better - much better, like aloe on a sunburn. Weird, but whatever - I’d spent most of yesterday out in the sun. Maybe I’d gotten more than I thought.
Weirder was the birthmark on my ankle. It was brown and vaguely leaf-shaped, if a leaf had been drawn by a kindergartner with Picasso’s sense of proportions, and I’d had it forever. Towelling off, though, I brushed over it and swore - that had hurt. It wasn’t red, but it was puffy. Maybe there’d been spiders in Mrs. Mulvaney’s rose bush. I scowled and stuck a band-aid over it. I’d have to keep an eye on it.
It wasn’t till I went out to get dressed that the really strange thing happened. I was sitting on the bed, and when I leaned down to tie my shoe, the precise contents of my nightstand were: my clock, my phone, a hairband, two quarters from my jeans pocket, a book, and a lip balm. When I sat back up and glanced at the time, I stopped, looked again, and reached out for the tiny box now sitting atop the novel.
It was the length of my thumb, give or take, a little round cylinder that looked like it had been made from a twig, bark and all. It rattled when I shook it. A little scrutiny revealed a thin line; tugging at it, I found the cap came off easily in my hands. Three berries fell out, and a rolled up scrap of rough paper - thick and soft, like the kind I’d learned to make at art camp when I was nine. I smoothed it out along my leg.
“Magnolia,” it said, in a spiky scrawl, “happy birthday. Come to the tree. Love, Carrie Ann”
I just stared at it - and stared, and stared, and deep down, felt a quiet spark of anger begin to grow. Whatever this was, it was in poor taste at best or cruel at worst. My mother, Carrie Ann Sweetbay, has been gone for fifteen years. She walked away without a warning, without a word, and for fifteen years, she’s been nothing but an absence. Dad at least came home. He knew I was alive. I knew he was alive.
It’s always been easier to just assume my mother was dead.
A knock thundered on my door and I jumped, grabbing at the box and the berries and the note and shoving them under my leg. Dad burst in, booming, “Happy birthday, Magnolia! Oh good - you’re up and ready to go. Time to grab some breakfast and head out - I’ll see you downstairs in -” Dad paused, really looking at me for once. “Magnolia. Are you feeling all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I swallowed and tried on a smile that felt strange on my face. “I’m fine. You just - you just startled me. That’s all.”
Dad just stared at me for a moment; then his gaze flickered to the floor, where one red berry sat next to my foot. Something in him stilled - that was the only word I could find to describe it. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Well. I was excited, and I’m sorry. Can you be ready to go in fifteen?”
“Sure thing. Meet you at the boat?”
“Meet you at the boat,” he agreed, and closed the door gently behind him. Only when I heard him walk away did I bend over and pick up the berry. “Come to the tree,” the letter said. I didn’t have to ask which one. Just like I didn’t have to think about what I did next. No way was I going without backup. I rolled everything back up, stuck it in the little wooden twig, and shoved that into my pocket.
I reached for the phone, punched in a number, and waited. “Jake,” I said, over his sleepy hello, “change of plan. Can you meet me at the dock?”
My grandmother’s house sits in the middle of a thick patch of woods bordering a tiny little arm of Mill Creek, a smallish tributary that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. A lot of Mill Creek is good harbor for sailboats - people with waterfront property made a decent sum renting out slips to weekend and summer sailors living further inland. Grandmother’s patch of creek was too shallow for most, though, and she’d have hated the intrusion. Still, we had a dock, though it was a good ten minutes’ tramp through the woods to get there, and we had a beaten-up, old-as-dirt, but still watertight dinghy. Dad had it out from the tarp and in the water by the time I got there.
“Oh, good,” he said. “Climb in and push off.”
I obliged. Dad had the oars and seemed content, and the walk from the house had continued this morning’s Twilight Zone-esque set of experiences. I kept catching things out of the corner of my eye - flickers of movement, faces in the midst of what I knew to be branches and leaves - and an occasional sense like I was missing a conversation happening just at the edge of my hearing. If it weren’t for the fact that I felt entirely, physically fine, I’d have chalked it up to getting sick and begged off. It was weird, even if it was just my imagination. I’m not that kind of person, not usually. I keep my hands in the dirt and my feet on the ground. I’m not usually a daydreamer.
It was quieter out on the water, at least. Our little creek doesn’t get much traffic, Dad kept up a pretty continual stream of conversation about the changes he was seeing in the plant cover along the banks, and I slowly started to relax. It was, in fact, much less stressful than I’d anticipated.
The morning turned grey and humid and hot, the kind of sky that glares at you and makes your eyes hurt. Around eleven thirty, as we rowed back toward home, I stuck my hand in the water, and all the whispered conversations rushed back, overlapping and jostling for space, like a bunch of different radios playing through underwater speakers. I jerked my hand back out like I’d been burned.
Dad didn’t miss a thing. “You okay?”
This was not a conversation I was having. “Just - got nibbled by a fish. Startled me.” I smiled at him, but it didn’t seem to help the little frowny crinkles at the corner of his mouth.
He didn’t say anything for a minute or two; when he finally did, I’d been staring at the creek bank, wondering if Jake would be there by the time we got back. When he did speak, what he said was so far from what I’d been expecting that it felt like a shock. “I loved your mother, you know.”
“What?” I said, intelligently.
“Your mother. Carrie Ann.” Dad sighed and shipped the oars, letting the current carry us nowhere fast. “I did love her.” I didn’t say anything. What could I have said? “I love you, too. And so did she.”
I shifted on the hard fiberglass seat. “Dad.” I looked away from him, down toward the mouth of the creek, wondering what on earth was going on. “I - I know. It’s okay.”
“Is it?” I’ve never heard my father sound regretful before. “We barely know each other, Magnolia.”
Now I did look at him. “That’s not my fault,” I said.
“No,” he answered. “It’s not.”
“I’m not the one who kept leaving.” It was hard to say, but saying it felt good. Like I’d been waiting to say it for years.
“No,” he said again. “But I did have reasons.”
“Were they worth it?” I demanded.
Dad met my eyes from across the boat. He’s a tall guy - I get my height from him. His hair used to be blond; now it’s mostly faded to grey, but he still has the same brown eyes that crinkle at the edges. Folded up into the dinghy, he looked all legs and arms and knees and elbows. And he looked tired. And maybe worried. “They seemed like it, at the time. I love my work, Magnolia. I won’t apologize for that.”
“You loved it more than my mother, you mean.” It’s hard to turn away from someone when you’re face-to-face in a very small boat, but I managed.
“You’re wrong.” Dad’s voice went hard and flat.
“I know the story, Dad. You stole a plant. You loved your work so much that it meant everything to you. That you just went and took it without thinking about what would happen to Mom if you did.” Or me, I thought, but somehow, I couldn’t quite say it.
“Magnolia -” Dad started, stopped, and tried again. “Magnolia,” he said quietly, just loud enough to be heard over the sound of the creek and the trees. “I stole that sapling for your mother. We both knew what I was doing.” He sighed. “Your mother’s the one that convinced me to do it.”
I stared at him.
“Carrie Ann convinced me,” Dad said again. “And I knew precisely what I was risking.”
“Sure,” I said, taking refuge in sarcasm. “Sure you did. What did you risk, exactly?”
My father just watched me for a long time before he reached for the oars again. As he dipped them into the water, he said, “You had a rowan berry on your floor today. The rowan hasn’t fruited yet this year.”
I blinked. “So?”
He smiled, small and sad. “Ask me after you’ve gone to the tree.”
The boat bumped against the dock not long after Dad’s pronouncement; neither of us had said a word since. I looked up to see Jake standing at the edge, one hand held out for the bow rope. His eyebrows were raised so high they almost disappeared into his hair. I tossed him the line with a tiny little shake of my head; he frowned, but didn’t ask the question. “Mr. Sweetbay, sir,” he said instead. “Nice to see you.”
“Jacob,” my father answered, climbing out of the dinghy. “How are your parents?”
“Mom and Dad are great, thanks,” Jake said, tying off the line.
“Good, good.” Dad smiled absently and looked back to where I sat in the boat. “Magnolia, I’ll come down and put the boat away this evening. Just tie it up and leave it for now. I’ll - I’ll see you at supper.” It sounded like a question.
“Okay,” I said, and watch Dad walk back along the dock and back up the hill, through the trees, toward Grandmother’s house.
“Well,” Jake said, once Dad was safely out of earshot, “I didn’t hear anyone yelling.”
I looked down at my hands. “No yelling. Weirder than yelling, though. Definitely weirder.”
“Bay,” Jake said. Jake MacAllen is not a worrier. He takes things as they come and deals with whatever needs doing. I like that about him. But he sounded worried now. “You ever gonna get out of that boat?” was all he said.
“Um.”
“C’mon,” he urged, and reached out a hand.
I grabbed it and left him haul me out, and we ambled back towards the trees. When my foot left the deck plank and hit solid ground, though, that almost-whispering came back full force. I bobbled the step, grabbed for the last deck pylon, and hung on until I got used to the noise again.
When my head cleared, I looked up to see Jake leaning against the nearest tree, arms crossed, scowling at me. “What the hell is going on, Magnolia Sweetbay?”
“Careful,” I said, trying to smile at him. “I bite.”
“I’m not kidding, Bay. You look like you’ve seen a ghost, and you and your dad haven’t made it that long without an argument since we were twelve.”
“Thirteen.”
“Whatever.” Jake scowled. “Spill.”
I studied my sneakers carefully. “You’re not going to believe me. It’s weird.”
“Your family’s been weird my whole life. Why should that change now?” Something little and hard bonked off my head and I looked back up. Jake had acquired a handful of acorn caps. This time I actually did smile. “Okay,” I said, “but you’re gonna want to sit down.” And I told him. Everything. I showed him the box and the berries and the letter, and I told him what my Dad had said, and eventually I just ran out of words and stopped talking.
When I did, Jake was sitting at the foot of a hickory tree, his arms wrapped around his knees. He wasn’t looking at me - just staring out across the creek. I waited.
Eventually, he dragged a hand over his head, making his dark brown, stick straight hair stand up in ridiculous spikes, and met my eyes. “Bay,” he said, “you’re nuts.”
I stiffened.
“Oh, simmer down,” he said. “You’re nuts, and this is nuts, but that weird ass box exists, and everybody keeps telling you to go visit the rowan, so -”
“So?”
“So ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...’”
“Who’s Horatio?”
He groaned and thudded his head back against the tree trunk, eyes closed. “Remind me how you passed senior English?”
“I read a lot of Cliffs Notes.” I kicked at a little scuffle of leaves. “Jake. Seriously. You think this is for real?”
“Bay, I think this is nuttier than a squirrel in a Snickers factory. But everybody seems to think it’ll all make sense if you go check out that tree.” He opened his eyes. “And normally, I’d channel Mom and ask you ‘if everybody jumped off a bridge, would you go too,’ but I dunno.” He shrugged.
“If I don’t go, I’ll never know why.” I stared up into the canopy, listening to the whispers in the air. “And I’ll still be hearing and seeing things.” I frowned. “I don’t like doing what everybody tells me to, Jake. And I don’t like not knowing.”
He clambered to his feet, brushing off leaves and dirt. “There’s a shocker.” I rolled my eyes at him and he grinned. “Besides, you’re not exactly following orders, are you?”
I knew that look. I’m not the only one in our duo who gets dumb ideas. “What do you mean?”
Jake slung an arm around my shoulder and started pulling me off in the direction of the rowan. “You called me in as backup, didn’t you?”
Here’s your daily lesson in arboriculture: generally, Maryland isn’t rowan territory. Rowan likes damp, which we have in plenty, but it also likes the cold. Maryland’s just not far enough north, unless you’re at the western end of the state, out in the mountains. But ever since I could remember, there’d been a rowan tree growing not far from the dock, on a small outcropping that fell straight down to the water’s edge. Not just in my memory, either. Sweetbays had lived in that house for over a hundred years, and in every aging photograph, every written description, that anomalous rowan had been there.
The rowan’s little patch is pretty open, actually - a tiny little clearing on the edge of the woods. It’s lovely in the spring, foamy clusters of white flowers that spill over the leaves. It’s even more amazing in in the fall, fire-bright yellows and reds. But my favorite is in the winter, when it deigns to snow, and the berries are bright red against the white ground and the grey-black branches. I don’t go there often - it’s a little bit of a tramp, and I’m kind of leery about how stable that outcrop actually is - but every so often I’ll stop at the edge of the clearing and admire it. I’m a plant geek. It’s what I do.
Jake and I stopped at the tree line, looking out. “I don’t see anybody,” I said.
“Me neither,” he agreed.
The whispering was getting louder - a sort of buzzing, now. A very definite part of me was suggesting that this was a terrible idea. “Let’s just watch a minute. Maybe someone will show up.”
Fifteen minutes passed.
“Bay,” Jake said quietly. “I don’t think anybody’s coming.”
He was right. I knew he was right, just like I knew what I was supposed to do here - I just didn’t know how I knew, and it made me balk. “We should just go.”
Jake’s gaze was steady. “If you want to.”
“We tried. I mean, we came, right?” I did not want to get closer to that tree.
I was so busy worrying about what would happen if I did what my gut was telling me to do, that it caught me totally off-guard when Jake dissolved into laughter. “Seriously, Bay? You’re really gonna give me that opening?” I smacked him on the arm, but he just kept laughing.
When he’d managed to subside a little, I glared at him. “You are so not helping.”
“Sorry,” he spluttered. I could see the corner of his lips still twitching. “But come on. We tried? That’s your line?”
I crossed my arms and glowered.
Jake grinned, then sobered, reaching out and taking me by the shoulders, looking me straight in the eye. “‘Do or do not,’ Bay. ‘There is no try.’” And he cracked up again.
“You are so lucky I like you.” I resisted the urge to bang my head against the nearest tree.
Eventually, he stopped. He walked over to where I was standing and just stood there for a bit, before nudging me with an elbow. “Seriously, though. You really think that coming and standing here is enough?”
I looked over at him - it was an honest question. “No,” I sighed. “I think I’ve gotta go take a closer look at that dumb tree.”
“Look,” he said. “I’ll stay here and keep an eye out for mysterious strangers. You can let me worry about the uninvited guests part, and just focus on whatever happens next.”
It wasn’t really what I was worrying about - I didn’t really know what I was worrying about - but it was something. I reached out and hugged him. “Thanks.”
He squeezed back hard. “Go on. Do whatever it is you think you’re supposed to do. Then get the hell back over here so I can go claim my first pizza.”
I turned around and walked to the center of the clearing, right up to the rowan’s trunk. She wasn’t quite at her best - the spring flowers were just beginning to disappear and the berries weren’t quite formed - but she still looked lovely. Pausing under the branches, I took the cap off the little twig box and pulled out the paper. “Um,” I said, as I unrolled it, “so. Hi. Here I am.” I laid a hand on the silvery gray bark, and heard a violent rustling. Then felt the world explode in a flurry of red and white and green and grey and brown.
It’s hard to explain exactly what happened next.
I couldn’t see. I remember being extremely freaked out about that. I couldn’t see, but I could hear rustling and crackling and snapping, louder than ever, full of words but not words I knew or understood. I felt leaves brush over my skin; felt smooth bark under my fingers, felt damp, cool soil between my toes. I tried to shout, and the wind stole my breath. Something burst on my tongue, eye-wateringly astringent, and I felt my whole body give an almighty reach, stretching up to the sun and down to the earth. Then, suddenly, thankfully, there was quiet.
I still couldn’t see. But I could hear, now - and feel. I still can’t describe what it was like, as if a whole new set of senses had come into being. It’s like describing blue to someone who’s been blind all his life. I could feel the water running beneath me, underground, feel the slow seep as the water table met the creek, taste the tang of the runoff and the far away salt of the bay. I could feel the sun, shining down on a hundred of my arms, warm and heavy and bright. I could feel the stir of the wind and taste the afternoon thunderstorm that was already brewing. I could hear the words in the rustling of leaves - the idle, slow conversations of a summer day and the quicker ones stirred by a passing breeze.
I reached, and heard my leaves rustle. I felt the stillness and the quiet and the gentle affection of someone else long rooted in the soil, someone whose leaves brushed mine, and whispered at me, called me “daughter.”
I can’t explain it, not unless you know why it feels good to spend the day in a garden, to settle a plant in the ground or prune a sickly branch or soak a thirsty bed and let the sun bake you full of the smells of earth and mulch and green, growing things. It felt like that, compounded and multiplied and expanded, like I’d finally found a place I could settle and be still and breathe. It felt like that. It felt like home. And I wanted it. I let myself stretch, felt myself settle deeper into the dirt, and said hello to my mother, Carrie Ann. CarrieAnn. Caorthann. The rowan tree.
< hr>
I don’t know how long it took. I don’t know how long I stood there, learning to be a tree. Time doesn’t pass the same way. But the air was cooler, the sun farther off, when I felt something slap against me, felt something take hold of my branches and shake me, hard, felt vibrations of sound shiver along my bark. I felt my mother’s whispered alarm; I felt her gather herself and shape power; I felt her heave the earth till the short, branchless person fell away from me, calling out and wincing when he tried to stand. I felt her gather power again, readying herself to reach out and convince the grass and vines and bind him down, and then I could hear him again, hear him like a person hears, and I knew it was Jake, and suddenly, with a wrench, I wasn’t a sweetbay magnolia, I was me, back in my own skin, Magnolia Sweetbay.
Jake grabbed at my wrist, eyes wide, face white. “You were gone,” he said. “You were gone, and there were two trees, and -
“What happened?” I demanded, instead of attempting to answer the question he hadn’t quite asked. “You’re hurt - what happened?”
He winced, but shook his head. “I stumbled,” he said. “Or the earth moved. Who the hell knows, today. It hurts, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a sprain.” He sat up and took my shoulder. “Bay. What the hell is going on?”
I stared at him. “Would you believe me if I told you my mom’s a tree?”
“Your mom’s a tree,” he said flatly. “Specifically, that tree?”
“Um. Yes, apparently.” Around Jake, the grass was starting to writhe. A strand of honeysuckle vine was inching closer. “And, um, I think she’s kind of worried, at the moment.”
“That vine is moving,” Jake said, alarmingly matter-of-fact.
“Yes.”
“Toward me.” Jake was actually processing a lot faster than I was.
“Yes.” I could hear my mother’s grief and alarm and confusion. I could feel her moving power through the earth and plants and water. I couldn’t seem to do anything but feel it. My mother was a tree. It was kind of hard to process, now that I had that kind of brain again. It had been a lot easier to cope with when I was Kingdom Plantae.
“The person who made you stop being a tree.”
“Yes.”
“Magnolia Sweetbay,” Jake said, extremely reasonably, with only a little tremor in his voice, “could you please pause in your internal freakout and explain to your mom, the tree, specifically that tree over there, the one shaking despite the fact that there is basically zero wind, the concept of ‘we come in peace?’ For a value of ‘we’ specific to ‘me’? Because I don’t really want to get turned to compost today. You still owe me pizza.”
I looked at the vines, and I looked at Jake, and felt my head shift back into gear. One hand on Jake, one hand on my mother’s bark, I reached down into myself and thought, “Stop.”
Nothing happened. I reached down harder, and pushed out. I felt my ears popping, and a thin sheen of green sprang up between me and Jake and the encroaching vines. “Please,” I said out loud. “Jake’s a friend.”
My fingers tingled where they touched the rowan bark, and I dropped my hand, but I still felt my mother’s thoughts, sending me a picture of the two of us, twined together as trees, still and quiet and reaching to the sky. “I know,” I said. “That was beautiful.” It had been. I felt her tug at me, felt the same sense of stretching, and had to pull back. “It was beautiful,” I said again. “But I can’t be a tree. I’ve never been a tree. You know that. You’ve been here the whole time.” I didn’t mean it to come out that bitter.
She paused then, and suddenly the images came thick and fast. It felt like a bedtime story, told at the speed of thought:
Once upon a time, there was a lonely tree, who’d stood alone in the woods for many years. She watched the stars move and the seasons change and the river flow, but she was the only one of her kind, and no trees grew near her.
Once upon a time, too, there was a lovely young man, who loved books and plants and the feel of the soil, and he would come and sit under the rowan, and read his books aloud to her, and so the rowan fell in love.
The young man left, and the rowan mourned, and when he returned in the summer he was sad to see her leaves so pale and her branches brittle. He spent his days worrying, bringing her cool water and dark earth, and the rowan revived again. And when he told her he had to leave again, the rowan gathered herself and stepped forward as a woman, the green of leaves for her eyes, the red of her berries for her lips, and the white of her flowers for her dress. He stood amazed, but he was a wise young man, and he knew how to listen, and when she told him she loved him, the young man held the rowan to her and promised to love her always.
He did love her, that young man, in the quick and warm way of rootless things, and they were married. And one day, the rowan came to the young man and stood before him, her eyes wide and hands clasped, and when he opened her hands, he found in them a seed, and they both rejoiced.
But the seed struggled to grow, and the young man and the rowan despaired, for the sapling’s leaves drooped and its bark grew thin and flaked away. Long nights they watched and worried, until both agreed that the young man should take the sapling to his laboratory, where he could tend it with the best of all things, and the rowan might come to visit them both. And for a time, they were happy again, as the sapling began to thrive.
Then the time came for the sapling to come home, for it was part of mother and father alike, and to be a baby was in its nature. The young man tried to bring it away, to no avail, for he was told it was a cultivar unlike any other, and must be kept and sheltered away from the world. The young man told the rowan, and the rowan wept, for if the sapling stayed a tree, its spirit would never quicken, and it would remain deaf and dumb for all its days. And so the young man stole the sapling home, and to all the world, it seemed that he and the rowan were thereafter blessed with a lovely young daughter.
The threat of discovery hung low over the family, and one day, they arrived at the door and took the young man away, leaving the rowan and the child behind. He went without protest, for he had done the thing they said, and the rowan turned her face to the woods and wept.
The seasons changed and the child grew and the rowan’s spell, without the young man to sustain it, grew old and brittle. She waited and delayed, but every day grew harder, and the young man’s mother, who lived with them and helped care for the child, did not know their secret. Early one morning, the rowan woke and found herself faded and grey, and knew that she could wait no longer to return to her tree. She went to the child’s room, and kissed her once on each eyelid, and walked away into the woods, leaving behind only a small message, a tiny spell, to be given to the child when she came of age.
And so the rowan returned to her tree, and slept deeply, wearied after so many years. At length the young man, no longer so young, came home and found the rowan gone from his mother’s house and her tree deaf to his pleas, and he found he could not stay. But he watched the child from a distance, and loved her, and knew that she would one day find her mother’s tree. And both the young man and the rowan loved, and feared, and wondered which of them she would leave, when the time came.
A year, my mother said. You have a year to choose.
“Bay.” Jake’s arm was around my shoulders. “Hey. Magnolia.”
I swiped at my eyes. “Seriously. I will bite you.”
He squeezed. “Fine. Just - are you okay?”
“I don’t know.” The woods were murmuring in my ears. My father’s face flicked across my vision. And next to me, under my hand, my mother waited for me to leave. “I don’t know, Jake. I’m supposed to choose.”
“Choose what?”
“I - “
He saw my face and shook his head. “Never mind. You can try and explain it later.”
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“At the beginning. Duh.” I whacked his arm halfheartedly and he smiled at me. “C’mon. I’ll let you help me home.”
I could still hear it all. Still taste it. Still feel it. Jake, next to me, leaning on my shoulder as we navigated the woods with three functional ankles and one that was definitely sprained, though probably not broken, was more of a mystery than the trees - and Jake was no mystery at all. When we made it back to the yard, my father was there, standing by the greenhouse door, and I finally understood the expression that played over his face as he stooped to take Jake’s weight off of me.
“Dinner’s ready,” was all Dad said. “Eva made your favorite. Your grandmother has a card. I’ll see to Jacob’s ankle.”
Jake didn’t make a sound - just watched the two of us.
“Thanks,” I said back. “Mom says hi.”
We went inside.
My full name is Magnolia Virginiana Sweetbay. My best friend calls me Bay. My father’s a horticulturist. My mother’s a tree. Today was my eighteenth birthday. I have no idea what happens next, but it’s going to be interesting.
---
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Gift for:
lea_hazelBy:
wojelahGift type: Fiction (8500ish words)
Genre: Fantasy
Rating: PG
Warnings: None.
Summary: “My full name is Magnolia Virginiana Sweetbay, which is why botanists should never be allowed to name their children. Most people call me Ginny. My grandmother calls me Magnolia. The first time another kid tried that, I bit him. I've gotten better at playing nicely with others. When I have to. Mostly, I stick to plants.”
Giftcreator's notes: Written for the prompt, “the angst and drama of the world of competitive horticulture, as seen from the outside by a world-famous horticulturist's estranged teenage daughter. Also were-unicorns or something.” Produced subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
“Bay?” Jake was looking for me. Too bad for him, I was up to my elbows in a recalcitrant rosebush and whatever it was, it would have to wait.
My full name is Magnolia Virginiana Sweetbay, which is why horticulturalists should never be allowed to name their children. Most people call me Ginny. My grandmother calls me Magnolia. The first time another kid tried that, I bit him. I've gotten better at playing nicely with others. When I have to. Mostly, I stick to plants.
“Bay?” Jake MacAllen rounded the corner of the house, jeans muddy and damp to the knee, a spade in one hand and a pair of holey, filthy gardening gloves in the other. “Why the hell didn't you answer?”
A trailing branch of Joseph's Coat wriggled free, leaving bright red scratches along my left arm as it fell. Serves me right for wearing a tank top to work, but Maryland in July is a swamp. I swore around the hammer in my mouth. “Bit busy.”
Jake tugged on his gloves, snagged the escapee, corralled the remainder, and held them back while I replaced the last board in Mrs. Mulvaney's previously decrepit trellis. He waited while I grabbed a handful of ties out of my pocket and secured the sneaky bastards onto the wood, branch by branch. Job done, we both stepped back.
The ruddy orange blossoms nodded at me, caught by a tiny wisp of otherwise ineffectual breeze, and I smiled. “You look better already,” I told them. The branches seemed to curl upwards - the plant equivalent of a grin - but that was just my imagination. Or possibly heatstroke.
“It's good work.” Jake pulled the gloves off again. You can still see the tiny crescent scar where my six-year teeth broke his seven-year old skin. He hadn't cried, or run. He'd just said I didn't look like a Ginny. I'd told him I wasn't any stupid Magnolia. We'd compromised on Bay.
“It is, actually.” I was hot and tired and ready as hell for a shower, something cold to drink, or a swim, in no particular order. I looked over at him. “Why the hell do you look like you've gone wading?”
He snorted. “Mrs. Mulvaney's convinced there's frogs mating in her koi pond.”
“Has she seen the size of her koi? Any smart frog would be too damn scared to screw in there. You're lucky you didn't lose a finger.”
“Or a toe. Do frogs screw?”
I shrugged. “I skipped that part of biology.” I had. Frog behavior went with frog anatomy went with frog dissection. I’d permission-slipped out and spent my time in the environmental science classroom, figuring out why the terrarium was dying.
“Anyway. You done?”
I took a look around the front yard, prying my hands out of my own sweaty gloves. We'd been working here for a solid two weeks, ever since Janet Mulvaney came home from a month-long business trip and found out that her husband and thirteen-year old son were not exactly gardening as per orders in her absence. July wasn't exactly the month I'd choose to overhaul a garden, but I wasn't looking a gift paycheck in the mouth. “I think so.”
“Good. Because Mrs. Mulvaney thinks so too, and I've got the check to prove it.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out a damp, crinkled check, laughing when I grabbed at it. “Easy.”
“Oh, shut up.” I checked the amount and had to look again. “Jake - “
He broke into a full-on grin that matched my own. “I know, right? An extra two hundred apiece, 'for working so hard in such hot weather.'”
“Holy shit, Jake.” I stared at the check. “You know what this means?”
“My mom's going to jump for joy when you finally pay my dad for the work on that old beater and drive it out of her backyard?”
I laughed, I couldn't help it. “Something like that.” I resisted the urge to run around cheering, pocketed the check, and stooped to pick up the extra pieces of trellis. “Come on,” I said. “Let's get out of here. There's a snow cone with my name on it at Charlie's.”
We've been doing this for three years, Jake and me, and we've got a good routine. Packing up didn't take long; driving over to the empty lot where Charlie sets up his snow cone stand five months of the year took even less. We didn't hurry – we didn't have to – we had a whole three days before we were supposed to start up at our next job. We just sat on the tailgate and swung our legs and ate cold, sweet ice chips as the sun got lower and the sky a little dusky. Eventually, when even the drips were gone, we called it a good day and climbed back in the cab, and Jake drove me back to the house.
There was a sedan in the driveway, all pristine black and chrome. The snow cone turned to sludge in my stomach. My father was home.
“Aw, shit, Bay.” Jake parked the truck at the end of the long, curving drive. “I'm sorry.” Jake MacAllen has been my best friend for eleven-almost-twelve years, and my partner in extracurricular yard work for three, and it's kind of nice to have somebody around who just gets it and doesn't need an explanation.
I yanked at the truck door, scowling when it jammed. “I gotta go.”
“Just hang on,” he said, getting out and walking around to open it from the outside.
I took a few steps up the drive and stopped, my back to him. “Look – I'll call you tomorrow, okay? About the Martin job? We'll need to hit the nursery before we head over there.”
“Yeah, fine,” I heard him sigh, followed by the slam of the truck door. I stared at the house and shoved my hands in my pockets, had an epiphany, and jogged back to him. He hadn't started the engine yet. “Here,” I said, and stuck the check in through the open window. “Cash it. I'll get my share from you later.”
“Hey,” he said, frowning.
I shrugged him off. “I – it's okay. I'll call you.”
“Don't do anything dumb,” he said. Jake’s known me a long time.
I made a face, trying for some kind of humor. “Whatever.”
He just looked at me, sighed, and started the truck. I turned away as he backed out the driveway and I started the long trudge up to the house.
My father's name is the relatively pedestrian John Robert Sweetbay, III. I never met John Robert II, but three of the azaleas that bloom by my grandmother's front door every spring are his cultivars and my grandmother has three kinds of orchids in the greenhouse that he named after her - to thank her, apparently, for all her help in his laboratory. Grandmother’s not exactly a slouch either: she’s one of the first Master Gardeners in Maryland, female or otherwise, and her flowers won so frequently at the state fair that they finally asked her to judge so somebody else would have a chance. John Robert III has his share of hybrids and is responsible for a new method of grafting that is apparently revolutionizing the cultivation of genetically modified fruit trees.
Basically, Sweetbays are horticulturists, period. If you’re a Sweetbay, or you marry a Sweetbay, it’s what you do. It’s what Sweetbays have done as far back as Elizabethan England, and they’ve kept the family records to prove it. Unfortunately, they’ve haven’t been nearly as good at animal husbandry. My father is an only child, just like his father before him. Just like me. And I’m a girl.
When my mother was nine months pregnant with me, my father stole a tree. I don’t know why he stole it, but it wasn't just any tree, it was a newly developed hybrid belonging to the U.S. Agricultural Research Service. When I was three, the authorities finally caught up with him, and sent him to federal prison for ten years, two off for good behavior. Six months after his incarceration, my mother left my grandmother's house in the middle of the night and never came back.
When I was eleven, my father came home and started to rebuild his reputation as a premier horticulturalist - not easy to do when you’re a convicted felon, but all those generations of Sweetbays apparently counted for something. Between research junkets and speaking engagements and guest lecture stints, he wasn't all around all that much more than before. At least, not that I noticed.
When I was almost fifteen, Melinda, Jake's mom, asked my grandmother if I could help with her backyard, and offered up Jake as free day labor. By then, Grandmother had me well-versed in everything needed to keep her own yard precisely groomed, and it hardly took me all day, so she gave her blessing and off I went. I didn’t do much more than mulch and install some timers on her sprinklers, but Melinda liked it, and I liked it, and Jake liked that I split the cash with him. After a few phone calls from Melinda’s neighbors asking for similar jobs, we went to Kinko’s, printed up some flyers, and JB Yards got going. Grandmother wasn’t thrilled, but it kept me out of trouble and busy on the weekends, so she let it continue. Almost three years later, we had work year round, borrowed Jake’s little brother Joe when we needed extra hands, and had to turn jobs away.
When I was seventeen and a half, I told my father I'd gotten into Maryland's Landscape Architecture program. He told me landscape architects were hacks who couldn't appreciate the beauty of horticulture if they tried. I told him that in my experience, horticulturists were insulated academic inbreds who didn't care about anything beyond the confines of the lab and the greenhouse. My grandmother informed us both that if we continued squalling at the table like ill-mannered children, she'd send us both to bed without supper. Since Victoria Regina Sweetbay, nee Whitford, ruled over her housekeeper and her family with a fist of iron and could, as a result, enforce that decree, we subsided. My father was gone the next day - another back-to-back research expedition and lecture tour or something. Same old, same old. We hadn't spoken since.
Now, six months later, his car was in the driveway, shiny and slick and expensive,
I went in through the window. My room is on the second floor, but faces out the back, toward the woods, and there’s a very big, very old, very climbable oak with a very conveniently placed sturdy branch. It was more convenient when I was twelve and clocked in at under a hundred pounds, but I’m tall and kind of scrawny, so it’s still a useful alternative. And about three years ago, I realized that there's a fork in the branches about a foot higher than my head, when I'm standing, that's the perfect size to hold a standard-sized cashbox wrapped in a plastic bag.
It's not that I have a lot of secrets. I don't keep my diary there or anything. But my savings are there – not the bulk of it, but the part of it that I've been setting aside to buy Jake's dad's old clunker, because that's a savings goal of which Grandmother would not approve – and my scholarship letter, and a picture of my mother and father from just before I was born, and a few other things I'd prefer snooping eyes didn't find. The Ziploc seems to have been enough to stave off rust and squirrels, and nobody else but me is going looking for anything in that oak. It's a good old tree.
I jimmied open my window and gave the branch a pat as my feet hit the floor of my room. I stood there a minute, blinking at the tree - I’d have sworn it just.shivered under my hand, like a dog enjoying a pat. My grandmother’s voice drifted up the stairs and I shook myself back into motion. There wasn’t any point antagonizing Dad by showing up in my work clothes, and I had maybe ten minutes before Eva, the housekeeper, called us for dinner. I slid into my chair just as Eva brought in the food.
‘Magnolia,” Dad boomed. “Happy birthday!”
I blinked at him and did a quick mental calendar check. “Um,” I said. “It’s not till tomorrow?” I hadn’t forgotten, exactly. It’s just that birthdays aren’t really a big deal in the house of Sweetbay. The MacAllens usually invite me over for dinner and cake and ice cream sometime around the actual date, and Grandmother always leaves a formal card wishing me “many good things in the coming year,” but that’s about it. Dad being home is unusual enough; Dad being home and enthusing about my birthday is just weird.
“The proper response is ‘thank you,’ Magnolia,” Grandmother said, not pausing as she served the salad.
“Thank you,” I said automatically, and managed to bite my tongue on the “Magnolia.” I tried a smile at Dad, who was still beaming at me.
“So,” he said. “How shall we celebrate?”
Okay, look. Dad loves me. I get it. Just like I get that some part of him feels guilty about being gone so much. He’s my father. I love him, I guess - in a sort of vague distant way that would be really upset if something happened to him. But we hardly know each other. And the last birthday I spent with him, I was eleven, and he’d just gotten out of prison. We’d spent the day at the National Arboretum. It’s just - I’m not eleven anymore. After birthdays twelve and thirteen, I just stopped expecting. “You’ll be here?” I asked.
Dad frowned, and dimmed a little. “Of course. It’s tomorrow. I’ll leave for Costa Rica on Saturday.”
“Great,” I managed.
“Magnolia,” Grandmother said sharply.
“Sorry.” I tried to smile back at Dad. “Maybe we could go gunkholing.” Not that anyone on the Chesapeake other than a Sweetbay would call what we used to do gunkholing. We take a dinghy, for starters, not a sailboat. And we spend most of our time paddling close to shore, looking at the foliage - and the undergrowth, and the herbaceous shrubs - you get the idea. “I - I have to meet Jake in the afternoon at the nursery, but we could go out in the morning, before it gets too hot?”
“Excellent! I’ll hunt up the old binoculars.” Dad went back to full-wattage, Grandmother relaxed marginally, and I tried not to wonder what the hell we were going to talk about.
The rest of the evening was pretty much uneventful. Dad and Grandmother discussed his upcoming trip and his schedule for the rest of the year, pausing only when I excused myself to go rope Jake into Friday afternoon’s plans and starting up again as I headed upstairs.
“Bay,” he groaned. “We don’t have to be at the Wilsons’ till Monday.”
“I know, I know.” I rolled over on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “Please, Jake? I just - I don’t know how long I can avoid arguing. He hasn’t mentioned college yet, but...” Dirty pool, maybe, but true as hell.
Jake knew it, too. He’d been the first person I called, six months ago. He sighed. “You owe me.”
“I do.”
“I don’t mean in snow cones, either.” They’d been our summer currency of choice since we were old enough to get pocket money.
“Ledo’s,” I offered.
“Twice.”
“Twice,” I agreed.
He considered. “With all the toppings I want on the pizza?”
“Even the sweet peppers.” I could always pick them off.
“And you’ll be the one who talks to Mrs. Wilson about keeping Precious under lock and key?” That was playing hardball. Precious was Mrs. Wilson’s only child, in the form of a ten-pound teacup poodle with an unnatural affection for Jake’s leg. Jake, specifically. Everyone else, including Mr. Wilson, was subjected to death-by-ferocious-yapping.
“I promise,” I said.
“You’re being suspiciously cooperative,” Jake replied.
I gave up and played my trump card. “Jake. It’s my birthday and I’m desperate. I would promise you the actual, honest-to-God moon if I could swing it.”
He laughed and capitulated. “You win. And it’s your birthday, so I won’t even throw in the sweet peppers clause.”
“You’re my hero.”
“I prefer Jedi in shining armor.” It was true. I could quote Jake chapter and verse on the various flaws in the second Star Wars trilogy and the infinite superiority of the first three films.
“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.”
“When you put it like that -” Jake started, breaking off as Joe yelled something at him in the background. “All right, all right,” he shouted back. “Sorry. It’s my week to take the trash out. Where and when?”
“Pick me up here? At, say, noon?”
“Deal. See you tomorrow.”
“Night, Jake.” I hung up and lay there a minute, thinking about nothing in particular beyond a general sense of relief. Down the hall, the stairs creaked, and I got up and bustled into my bathroom, just in case it was someone wanting to talk.
I washed my face, brushed my teeth, tugged on a t-shirt, and paused with my hand on the light switch, studying myself in the mirror. Brown, curly hair, hazel eyes, sharp cheekbones,a chin more stubborn than most, and freckles everywhere. Nothing remarkable. It was weird to think I turned eighteen tomorrow. I was done with high school. I was going to college in just under a month, come hell or high water, even if I was going to have to commute. I had a successful sort-of business that had made me enough money to buy a car, even if it was a clunker. I had to be able to handle three hours in a boat with my father. Surely.
I turned off the bathroom light and went to bed.
As it turned out, I didn’t really have to worry. Not about Dad, at least.
I woke up around seven when the birds got too damn loud to ignore. I shoved my head under the pillows for awhile, but eventually it became clear that sleep just wasn’t coming back any time soon. With a groan, I rolled out of bed and managed to shove myself into a hot shower, planning on a good, long drenching.
I loved hot water. Or at least, I had. This morning, though - I had the dial in the same place I always did, but for some reason, it felt scalding. Flattened against the side of the shower, I managed to turn it down to something just on the warm side of cool. That felt better - much better, like aloe on a sunburn. Weird, but whatever - I’d spent most of yesterday out in the sun. Maybe I’d gotten more than I thought.
Weirder was the birthmark on my ankle. It was brown and vaguely leaf-shaped, if a leaf had been drawn by a kindergartner with Picasso’s sense of proportions, and I’d had it forever. Towelling off, though, I brushed over it and swore - that had hurt. It wasn’t red, but it was puffy. Maybe there’d been spiders in Mrs. Mulvaney’s rose bush. I scowled and stuck a band-aid over it. I’d have to keep an eye on it.
It wasn’t till I went out to get dressed that the really strange thing happened. I was sitting on the bed, and when I leaned down to tie my shoe, the precise contents of my nightstand were: my clock, my phone, a hairband, two quarters from my jeans pocket, a book, and a lip balm. When I sat back up and glanced at the time, I stopped, looked again, and reached out for the tiny box now sitting atop the novel.
It was the length of my thumb, give or take, a little round cylinder that looked like it had been made from a twig, bark and all. It rattled when I shook it. A little scrutiny revealed a thin line; tugging at it, I found the cap came off easily in my hands. Three berries fell out, and a rolled up scrap of rough paper - thick and soft, like the kind I’d learned to make at art camp when I was nine. I smoothed it out along my leg.
“Magnolia,” it said, in a spiky scrawl, “happy birthday. Come to the tree. Love, Carrie Ann”
I just stared at it - and stared, and stared, and deep down, felt a quiet spark of anger begin to grow. Whatever this was, it was in poor taste at best or cruel at worst. My mother, Carrie Ann Sweetbay, has been gone for fifteen years. She walked away without a warning, without a word, and for fifteen years, she’s been nothing but an absence. Dad at least came home. He knew I was alive. I knew he was alive.
It’s always been easier to just assume my mother was dead.
A knock thundered on my door and I jumped, grabbing at the box and the berries and the note and shoving them under my leg. Dad burst in, booming, “Happy birthday, Magnolia! Oh good - you’re up and ready to go. Time to grab some breakfast and head out - I’ll see you downstairs in -” Dad paused, really looking at me for once. “Magnolia. Are you feeling all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I swallowed and tried on a smile that felt strange on my face. “I’m fine. You just - you just startled me. That’s all.”
Dad just stared at me for a moment; then his gaze flickered to the floor, where one red berry sat next to my foot. Something in him stilled - that was the only word I could find to describe it. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Well. I was excited, and I’m sorry. Can you be ready to go in fifteen?”
“Sure thing. Meet you at the boat?”
“Meet you at the boat,” he agreed, and closed the door gently behind him. Only when I heard him walk away did I bend over and pick up the berry. “Come to the tree,” the letter said. I didn’t have to ask which one. Just like I didn’t have to think about what I did next. No way was I going without backup. I rolled everything back up, stuck it in the little wooden twig, and shoved that into my pocket.
I reached for the phone, punched in a number, and waited. “Jake,” I said, over his sleepy hello, “change of plan. Can you meet me at the dock?”
My grandmother’s house sits in the middle of a thick patch of woods bordering a tiny little arm of Mill Creek, a smallish tributary that feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. A lot of Mill Creek is good harbor for sailboats - people with waterfront property made a decent sum renting out slips to weekend and summer sailors living further inland. Grandmother’s patch of creek was too shallow for most, though, and she’d have hated the intrusion. Still, we had a dock, though it was a good ten minutes’ tramp through the woods to get there, and we had a beaten-up, old-as-dirt, but still watertight dinghy. Dad had it out from the tarp and in the water by the time I got there.
“Oh, good,” he said. “Climb in and push off.”
I obliged. Dad had the oars and seemed content, and the walk from the house had continued this morning’s Twilight Zone-esque set of experiences. I kept catching things out of the corner of my eye - flickers of movement, faces in the midst of what I knew to be branches and leaves - and an occasional sense like I was missing a conversation happening just at the edge of my hearing. If it weren’t for the fact that I felt entirely, physically fine, I’d have chalked it up to getting sick and begged off. It was weird, even if it was just my imagination. I’m not that kind of person, not usually. I keep my hands in the dirt and my feet on the ground. I’m not usually a daydreamer.
It was quieter out on the water, at least. Our little creek doesn’t get much traffic, Dad kept up a pretty continual stream of conversation about the changes he was seeing in the plant cover along the banks, and I slowly started to relax. It was, in fact, much less stressful than I’d anticipated.
The morning turned grey and humid and hot, the kind of sky that glares at you and makes your eyes hurt. Around eleven thirty, as we rowed back toward home, I stuck my hand in the water, and all the whispered conversations rushed back, overlapping and jostling for space, like a bunch of different radios playing through underwater speakers. I jerked my hand back out like I’d been burned.
Dad didn’t miss a thing. “You okay?”
This was not a conversation I was having. “Just - got nibbled by a fish. Startled me.” I smiled at him, but it didn’t seem to help the little frowny crinkles at the corner of his mouth.
He didn’t say anything for a minute or two; when he finally did, I’d been staring at the creek bank, wondering if Jake would be there by the time we got back. When he did speak, what he said was so far from what I’d been expecting that it felt like a shock. “I loved your mother, you know.”
“What?” I said, intelligently.
“Your mother. Carrie Ann.” Dad sighed and shipped the oars, letting the current carry us nowhere fast. “I did love her.” I didn’t say anything. What could I have said? “I love you, too. And so did she.”
I shifted on the hard fiberglass seat. “Dad.” I looked away from him, down toward the mouth of the creek, wondering what on earth was going on. “I - I know. It’s okay.”
“Is it?” I’ve never heard my father sound regretful before. “We barely know each other, Magnolia.”
Now I did look at him. “That’s not my fault,” I said.
“No,” he answered. “It’s not.”
“I’m not the one who kept leaving.” It was hard to say, but saying it felt good. Like I’d been waiting to say it for years.
“No,” he said again. “But I did have reasons.”
“Were they worth it?” I demanded.
Dad met my eyes from across the boat. He’s a tall guy - I get my height from him. His hair used to be blond; now it’s mostly faded to grey, but he still has the same brown eyes that crinkle at the edges. Folded up into the dinghy, he looked all legs and arms and knees and elbows. And he looked tired. And maybe worried. “They seemed like it, at the time. I love my work, Magnolia. I won’t apologize for that.”
“You loved it more than my mother, you mean.” It’s hard to turn away from someone when you’re face-to-face in a very small boat, but I managed.
“You’re wrong.” Dad’s voice went hard and flat.
“I know the story, Dad. You stole a plant. You loved your work so much that it meant everything to you. That you just went and took it without thinking about what would happen to Mom if you did.” Or me, I thought, but somehow, I couldn’t quite say it.
“Magnolia -” Dad started, stopped, and tried again. “Magnolia,” he said quietly, just loud enough to be heard over the sound of the creek and the trees. “I stole that sapling for your mother. We both knew what I was doing.” He sighed. “Your mother’s the one that convinced me to do it.”
I stared at him.
“Carrie Ann convinced me,” Dad said again. “And I knew precisely what I was risking.”
“Sure,” I said, taking refuge in sarcasm. “Sure you did. What did you risk, exactly?”
My father just watched me for a long time before he reached for the oars again. As he dipped them into the water, he said, “You had a rowan berry on your floor today. The rowan hasn’t fruited yet this year.”
I blinked. “So?”
He smiled, small and sad. “Ask me after you’ve gone to the tree.”
The boat bumped against the dock not long after Dad’s pronouncement; neither of us had said a word since. I looked up to see Jake standing at the edge, one hand held out for the bow rope. His eyebrows were raised so high they almost disappeared into his hair. I tossed him the line with a tiny little shake of my head; he frowned, but didn’t ask the question. “Mr. Sweetbay, sir,” he said instead. “Nice to see you.”
“Jacob,” my father answered, climbing out of the dinghy. “How are your parents?”
“Mom and Dad are great, thanks,” Jake said, tying off the line.
“Good, good.” Dad smiled absently and looked back to where I sat in the boat. “Magnolia, I’ll come down and put the boat away this evening. Just tie it up and leave it for now. I’ll - I’ll see you at supper.” It sounded like a question.
“Okay,” I said, and watch Dad walk back along the dock and back up the hill, through the trees, toward Grandmother’s house.
“Well,” Jake said, once Dad was safely out of earshot, “I didn’t hear anyone yelling.”
I looked down at my hands. “No yelling. Weirder than yelling, though. Definitely weirder.”
“Bay,” Jake said. Jake MacAllen is not a worrier. He takes things as they come and deals with whatever needs doing. I like that about him. But he sounded worried now. “You ever gonna get out of that boat?” was all he said.
“Um.”
“C’mon,” he urged, and reached out a hand.
I grabbed it and left him haul me out, and we ambled back towards the trees. When my foot left the deck plank and hit solid ground, though, that almost-whispering came back full force. I bobbled the step, grabbed for the last deck pylon, and hung on until I got used to the noise again.
When my head cleared, I looked up to see Jake leaning against the nearest tree, arms crossed, scowling at me. “What the hell is going on, Magnolia Sweetbay?”
“Careful,” I said, trying to smile at him. “I bite.”
“I’m not kidding, Bay. You look like you’ve seen a ghost, and you and your dad haven’t made it that long without an argument since we were twelve.”
“Thirteen.”
“Whatever.” Jake scowled. “Spill.”
I studied my sneakers carefully. “You’re not going to believe me. It’s weird.”
“Your family’s been weird my whole life. Why should that change now?” Something little and hard bonked off my head and I looked back up. Jake had acquired a handful of acorn caps. This time I actually did smile. “Okay,” I said, “but you’re gonna want to sit down.” And I told him. Everything. I showed him the box and the berries and the letter, and I told him what my Dad had said, and eventually I just ran out of words and stopped talking.
When I did, Jake was sitting at the foot of a hickory tree, his arms wrapped around his knees. He wasn’t looking at me - just staring out across the creek. I waited.
Eventually, he dragged a hand over his head, making his dark brown, stick straight hair stand up in ridiculous spikes, and met my eyes. “Bay,” he said, “you’re nuts.”
I stiffened.
“Oh, simmer down,” he said. “You’re nuts, and this is nuts, but that weird ass box exists, and everybody keeps telling you to go visit the rowan, so -”
“So?”
“So ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...’”
“Who’s Horatio?”
He groaned and thudded his head back against the tree trunk, eyes closed. “Remind me how you passed senior English?”
“I read a lot of Cliffs Notes.” I kicked at a little scuffle of leaves. “Jake. Seriously. You think this is for real?”
“Bay, I think this is nuttier than a squirrel in a Snickers factory. But everybody seems to think it’ll all make sense if you go check out that tree.” He opened his eyes. “And normally, I’d channel Mom and ask you ‘if everybody jumped off a bridge, would you go too,’ but I dunno.” He shrugged.
“If I don’t go, I’ll never know why.” I stared up into the canopy, listening to the whispers in the air. “And I’ll still be hearing and seeing things.” I frowned. “I don’t like doing what everybody tells me to, Jake. And I don’t like not knowing.”
He clambered to his feet, brushing off leaves and dirt. “There’s a shocker.” I rolled my eyes at him and he grinned. “Besides, you’re not exactly following orders, are you?”
I knew that look. I’m not the only one in our duo who gets dumb ideas. “What do you mean?”
Jake slung an arm around my shoulder and started pulling me off in the direction of the rowan. “You called me in as backup, didn’t you?”
Here’s your daily lesson in arboriculture: generally, Maryland isn’t rowan territory. Rowan likes damp, which we have in plenty, but it also likes the cold. Maryland’s just not far enough north, unless you’re at the western end of the state, out in the mountains. But ever since I could remember, there’d been a rowan tree growing not far from the dock, on a small outcropping that fell straight down to the water’s edge. Not just in my memory, either. Sweetbays had lived in that house for over a hundred years, and in every aging photograph, every written description, that anomalous rowan had been there.
The rowan’s little patch is pretty open, actually - a tiny little clearing on the edge of the woods. It’s lovely in the spring, foamy clusters of white flowers that spill over the leaves. It’s even more amazing in in the fall, fire-bright yellows and reds. But my favorite is in the winter, when it deigns to snow, and the berries are bright red against the white ground and the grey-black branches. I don’t go there often - it’s a little bit of a tramp, and I’m kind of leery about how stable that outcrop actually is - but every so often I’ll stop at the edge of the clearing and admire it. I’m a plant geek. It’s what I do.
Jake and I stopped at the tree line, looking out. “I don’t see anybody,” I said.
“Me neither,” he agreed.
The whispering was getting louder - a sort of buzzing, now. A very definite part of me was suggesting that this was a terrible idea. “Let’s just watch a minute. Maybe someone will show up.”
Fifteen minutes passed.
“Bay,” Jake said quietly. “I don’t think anybody’s coming.”
He was right. I knew he was right, just like I knew what I was supposed to do here - I just didn’t know how I knew, and it made me balk. “We should just go.”
Jake’s gaze was steady. “If you want to.”
“We tried. I mean, we came, right?” I did not want to get closer to that tree.
I was so busy worrying about what would happen if I did what my gut was telling me to do, that it caught me totally off-guard when Jake dissolved into laughter. “Seriously, Bay? You’re really gonna give me that opening?” I smacked him on the arm, but he just kept laughing.
When he’d managed to subside a little, I glared at him. “You are so not helping.”
“Sorry,” he spluttered. I could see the corner of his lips still twitching. “But come on. We tried? That’s your line?”
I crossed my arms and glowered.
Jake grinned, then sobered, reaching out and taking me by the shoulders, looking me straight in the eye. “‘Do or do not,’ Bay. ‘There is no try.’” And he cracked up again.
“You are so lucky I like you.” I resisted the urge to bang my head against the nearest tree.
Eventually, he stopped. He walked over to where I was standing and just stood there for a bit, before nudging me with an elbow. “Seriously, though. You really think that coming and standing here is enough?”
I looked over at him - it was an honest question. “No,” I sighed. “I think I’ve gotta go take a closer look at that dumb tree.”
“Look,” he said. “I’ll stay here and keep an eye out for mysterious strangers. You can let me worry about the uninvited guests part, and just focus on whatever happens next.”
It wasn’t really what I was worrying about - I didn’t really know what I was worrying about - but it was something. I reached out and hugged him. “Thanks.”
He squeezed back hard. “Go on. Do whatever it is you think you’re supposed to do. Then get the hell back over here so I can go claim my first pizza.”
I turned around and walked to the center of the clearing, right up to the rowan’s trunk. She wasn’t quite at her best - the spring flowers were just beginning to disappear and the berries weren’t quite formed - but she still looked lovely. Pausing under the branches, I took the cap off the little twig box and pulled out the paper. “Um,” I said, as I unrolled it, “so. Hi. Here I am.” I laid a hand on the silvery gray bark, and heard a violent rustling. Then felt the world explode in a flurry of red and white and green and grey and brown.
It’s hard to explain exactly what happened next.
I couldn’t see. I remember being extremely freaked out about that. I couldn’t see, but I could hear rustling and crackling and snapping, louder than ever, full of words but not words I knew or understood. I felt leaves brush over my skin; felt smooth bark under my fingers, felt damp, cool soil between my toes. I tried to shout, and the wind stole my breath. Something burst on my tongue, eye-wateringly astringent, and I felt my whole body give an almighty reach, stretching up to the sun and down to the earth. Then, suddenly, thankfully, there was quiet.
I still couldn’t see. But I could hear, now - and feel. I still can’t describe what it was like, as if a whole new set of senses had come into being. It’s like describing blue to someone who’s been blind all his life. I could feel the water running beneath me, underground, feel the slow seep as the water table met the creek, taste the tang of the runoff and the far away salt of the bay. I could feel the sun, shining down on a hundred of my arms, warm and heavy and bright. I could feel the stir of the wind and taste the afternoon thunderstorm that was already brewing. I could hear the words in the rustling of leaves - the idle, slow conversations of a summer day and the quicker ones stirred by a passing breeze.
I reached, and heard my leaves rustle. I felt the stillness and the quiet and the gentle affection of someone else long rooted in the soil, someone whose leaves brushed mine, and whispered at me, called me “daughter.”
I can’t explain it, not unless you know why it feels good to spend the day in a garden, to settle a plant in the ground or prune a sickly branch or soak a thirsty bed and let the sun bake you full of the smells of earth and mulch and green, growing things. It felt like that, compounded and multiplied and expanded, like I’d finally found a place I could settle and be still and breathe. It felt like that. It felt like home. And I wanted it. I let myself stretch, felt myself settle deeper into the dirt, and said hello to my mother, Carrie Ann. CarrieAnn. Caorthann. The rowan tree.
< hr>
I don’t know how long it took. I don’t know how long I stood there, learning to be a tree. Time doesn’t pass the same way. But the air was cooler, the sun farther off, when I felt something slap against me, felt something take hold of my branches and shake me, hard, felt vibrations of sound shiver along my bark. I felt my mother’s whispered alarm; I felt her gather herself and shape power; I felt her heave the earth till the short, branchless person fell away from me, calling out and wincing when he tried to stand. I felt her gather power again, readying herself to reach out and convince the grass and vines and bind him down, and then I could hear him again, hear him like a person hears, and I knew it was Jake, and suddenly, with a wrench, I wasn’t a sweetbay magnolia, I was me, back in my own skin, Magnolia Sweetbay.
Jake grabbed at my wrist, eyes wide, face white. “You were gone,” he said. “You were gone, and there were two trees, and -
“What happened?” I demanded, instead of attempting to answer the question he hadn’t quite asked. “You’re hurt - what happened?”
He winced, but shook his head. “I stumbled,” he said. “Or the earth moved. Who the hell knows, today. It hurts, but I’m pretty sure it’s just a sprain.” He sat up and took my shoulder. “Bay. What the hell is going on?”
I stared at him. “Would you believe me if I told you my mom’s a tree?”
“Your mom’s a tree,” he said flatly. “Specifically, that tree?”
“Um. Yes, apparently.” Around Jake, the grass was starting to writhe. A strand of honeysuckle vine was inching closer. “And, um, I think she’s kind of worried, at the moment.”
“That vine is moving,” Jake said, alarmingly matter-of-fact.
“Yes.”
“Toward me.” Jake was actually processing a lot faster than I was.
“Yes.” I could hear my mother’s grief and alarm and confusion. I could feel her moving power through the earth and plants and water. I couldn’t seem to do anything but feel it. My mother was a tree. It was kind of hard to process, now that I had that kind of brain again. It had been a lot easier to cope with when I was Kingdom Plantae.
“The person who made you stop being a tree.”
“Yes.”
“Magnolia Sweetbay,” Jake said, extremely reasonably, with only a little tremor in his voice, “could you please pause in your internal freakout and explain to your mom, the tree, specifically that tree over there, the one shaking despite the fact that there is basically zero wind, the concept of ‘we come in peace?’ For a value of ‘we’ specific to ‘me’? Because I don’t really want to get turned to compost today. You still owe me pizza.”
I looked at the vines, and I looked at Jake, and felt my head shift back into gear. One hand on Jake, one hand on my mother’s bark, I reached down into myself and thought, “Stop.”
Nothing happened. I reached down harder, and pushed out. I felt my ears popping, and a thin sheen of green sprang up between me and Jake and the encroaching vines. “Please,” I said out loud. “Jake’s a friend.”
My fingers tingled where they touched the rowan bark, and I dropped my hand, but I still felt my mother’s thoughts, sending me a picture of the two of us, twined together as trees, still and quiet and reaching to the sky. “I know,” I said. “That was beautiful.” It had been. I felt her tug at me, felt the same sense of stretching, and had to pull back. “It was beautiful,” I said again. “But I can’t be a tree. I’ve never been a tree. You know that. You’ve been here the whole time.” I didn’t mean it to come out that bitter.
She paused then, and suddenly the images came thick and fast. It felt like a bedtime story, told at the speed of thought:
Once upon a time, there was a lonely tree, who’d stood alone in the woods for many years. She watched the stars move and the seasons change and the river flow, but she was the only one of her kind, and no trees grew near her.
Once upon a time, too, there was a lovely young man, who loved books and plants and the feel of the soil, and he would come and sit under the rowan, and read his books aloud to her, and so the rowan fell in love.
The young man left, and the rowan mourned, and when he returned in the summer he was sad to see her leaves so pale and her branches brittle. He spent his days worrying, bringing her cool water and dark earth, and the rowan revived again. And when he told her he had to leave again, the rowan gathered herself and stepped forward as a woman, the green of leaves for her eyes, the red of her berries for her lips, and the white of her flowers for her dress. He stood amazed, but he was a wise young man, and he knew how to listen, and when she told him she loved him, the young man held the rowan to her and promised to love her always.
He did love her, that young man, in the quick and warm way of rootless things, and they were married. And one day, the rowan came to the young man and stood before him, her eyes wide and hands clasped, and when he opened her hands, he found in them a seed, and they both rejoiced.
But the seed struggled to grow, and the young man and the rowan despaired, for the sapling’s leaves drooped and its bark grew thin and flaked away. Long nights they watched and worried, until both agreed that the young man should take the sapling to his laboratory, where he could tend it with the best of all things, and the rowan might come to visit them both. And for a time, they were happy again, as the sapling began to thrive.
Then the time came for the sapling to come home, for it was part of mother and father alike, and to be a baby was in its nature. The young man tried to bring it away, to no avail, for he was told it was a cultivar unlike any other, and must be kept and sheltered away from the world. The young man told the rowan, and the rowan wept, for if the sapling stayed a tree, its spirit would never quicken, and it would remain deaf and dumb for all its days. And so the young man stole the sapling home, and to all the world, it seemed that he and the rowan were thereafter blessed with a lovely young daughter.
The threat of discovery hung low over the family, and one day, they arrived at the door and took the young man away, leaving the rowan and the child behind. He went without protest, for he had done the thing they said, and the rowan turned her face to the woods and wept.
The seasons changed and the child grew and the rowan’s spell, without the young man to sustain it, grew old and brittle. She waited and delayed, but every day grew harder, and the young man’s mother, who lived with them and helped care for the child, did not know their secret. Early one morning, the rowan woke and found herself faded and grey, and knew that she could wait no longer to return to her tree. She went to the child’s room, and kissed her once on each eyelid, and walked away into the woods, leaving behind only a small message, a tiny spell, to be given to the child when she came of age.
And so the rowan returned to her tree, and slept deeply, wearied after so many years. At length the young man, no longer so young, came home and found the rowan gone from his mother’s house and her tree deaf to his pleas, and he found he could not stay. But he watched the child from a distance, and loved her, and knew that she would one day find her mother’s tree. And both the young man and the rowan loved, and feared, and wondered which of them she would leave, when the time came.
A year, my mother said. You have a year to choose.
“Bay.” Jake’s arm was around my shoulders. “Hey. Magnolia.”
I swiped at my eyes. “Seriously. I will bite you.”
He squeezed. “Fine. Just - are you okay?”
“I don’t know.” The woods were murmuring in my ears. My father’s face flicked across my vision. And next to me, under my hand, my mother waited for me to leave. “I don’t know, Jake. I’m supposed to choose.”
“Choose what?”
“I - “
He saw my face and shook his head. “Never mind. You can try and explain it later.”
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“At the beginning. Duh.” I whacked his arm halfheartedly and he smiled at me. “C’mon. I’ll let you help me home.”
I could still hear it all. Still taste it. Still feel it. Jake, next to me, leaning on my shoulder as we navigated the woods with three functional ankles and one that was definitely sprained, though probably not broken, was more of a mystery than the trees - and Jake was no mystery at all. When we made it back to the yard, my father was there, standing by the greenhouse door, and I finally understood the expression that played over his face as he stooped to take Jake’s weight off of me.
“Dinner’s ready,” was all Dad said. “Eva made your favorite. Your grandmother has a card. I’ll see to Jacob’s ankle.”
Jake didn’t make a sound - just watched the two of us.
“Thanks,” I said back. “Mom says hi.”
We went inside.
My full name is Magnolia Virginiana Sweetbay. My best friend calls me Bay. My father’s a horticulturist. My mother’s a tree. Today was my eighteenth birthday. I have no idea what happens next, but it’s going to be interesting.
---
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
