Mother had changed into a pair of blue shorts.
But the piano was wider than the doorway.
Dad at work, Mother inside, me sitting on the upper branches, prying shingles off with a stick.
Mother wearing dark sunglasses much too big for her head.
My head where the window used to be.
And yet.
My feet in the doorway.
Myles could’ve made a thousand new copies, as many as he wanted.
Even especially things we’ve grown attached to.
I just don’t understand: it’s as if the tree house is shedding shingles. Quote unquote.
Leaving the front door unlocked behind her, Mother getting behind the wheel and driving off with the mechanic singing.
I should have brought an extra layer.
The yellow shorts she didn’t stop me from removing one summer afternoon when we were sixteen.
A different pair.
Maybe the mechanic was only listening?
For grinding, whining, knocking?
Recitals.
Sound, again, and its memories.
Sliding off the roof, twisting to the ground, some landing flatly, others on their corners, bending, snapping.
I nail them back in place, and then it happens all over again. Quote unquote.
And what does it all amount to?
A scorn for acquiescence.
Leaving the greasy rag on the driveway.
A test drive, merely?
Maybe it’s the tree trying to tell you something, I said.
At which they frowned.
Why didn’t Myles just burn another copy?
Strumming, drumming, cooing.
In my memory, only music and singing.
At the time all my reasons seemingly sound.
A final concert.
And every Saturday him climbing up the ladder and nailing the shingles back into place.
Up perplexedly and back down smiling, self-congratulatorily.
Leaving the greasy rag in the driveway, where Dad would find it several hours later.
A rag to wipe greasy fingerprints away.
All those years living with that bag, Myles never once asking what was inside.
While I watched from my tree.
Performing for the parents.
Even on the lake the awful noise.
Music, supposedly.
In thanks for footing the bill.
The blue sheets and blankets.
Grade-schoolers playing free jazz.
Sitting in the tree, watching Dad examine the mechanic’s rag.
This side, that side, all of it greasy.
Teenagers shrieking off-key concertos.
The pianist playing this key, that key, all of them sour.
Until finally I buried his hammer in her flower bed.
By September, this time of year, half the tiles having disappeared.
Looking and looking for the disk, until Myles finally gave up.
Keeping the little window open rain and shine.
Especially rain.
Motivations never having thought to question.
Removal of screws from the hinges of the little door.
And me never letting on I’d watched his video once, let alone a hundred times.
Only a few a day, clandestinely, so as not to arouse their suspicions.
Inside the little door, a little straw mat the color and shape of a sunflower.
The barricade, the riot cop, and the girl, her turquoise shirt with the giant daisy.
New, never having been stepped on.
A need to believe in the attainment of ideals.
The riot cop and the girl, and their embrace.
Rain.
Rotted, having been rained on.
And then the cop’s violent shove.
By the end of the month, the little shutters, loosened, blowing off.
All winter, from my bedroom, my childhood furniture, watching the little tree house fill up with snow.
The little curtains, white with daffodils, rotting.
In the spring, rain coming through the little windows.
Barefoot.
The embrace.
Dad and his ladder and an armful of shingles.
And a new hammer.
The shove.
Rotten particleboard crumbling.
Shingles sliding off by themselves.
Floorboards beginning to warp and rot.
The embrace.
Destruction being a form of dissection.
Inside, a little three-legged table with two little pale blue chairs.
The shove.
Now, all these years later, no trace the house was ever here.
Except for the nail holes, grown over, filled in.
The embrace.
A fluorescent green dog to guard my keepsakes.
And certain things I will continue to believe.
The shove.
Inside, the little walls all one color.
Blue.
Twenty-Seven
He’d always said her nose was her mother’s. Her forehead too. Her mouth, her chin, her cheekbones, all her mother’s. But Garland hadn’t seen her in so long that he was surprised, after all this time, by her unexpected resemblance to himself. He couldn’t have explained why, but it made him smile, such a superficial thing. And he couldn’t pinpoint exactly where he saw the similarity. Not in specific features. Her eyes didn’t come from him, but neither did they come from her mother, though perhaps he could see traces — the same walnut shade of brown, the same alertness. Nowhere in the family albums was there anything like them, so big, so round, like a pair of orbiting moons. Always one to take control of an uncomfortable situation, her mother had been the first to declare her a positively ugly baby, and with such insistence that she would challenge anyone — Garland included — who stubbornly insisted upon finding her cute. She had always been a bright girl, and he thought her moon eyes lent her a sort of omniscience.
Around the table they approached the meal from whatever direction best suited their disposition: Garland caught himself meeting every forkful with a contemplative tilt of his head; Muriel chewed slowly, glancing distractedly around the table, as if afraid of missing something important. She prodded skeptically at the food on her plate, although she had cooked most of it herself. As always, Garland had made the salad dressing, his own special recipe. In between bites, his daughter’s eyes were surveillance cameras, sweeping every object in the room, every move of her parents’, every stain in the carpet. Had she not been his daughter, Garland might have thought she was casing the place. He marveled that she seemed so relaxed, as if the years between them had simply been erased now that she no longer had a use for them.