The Nelligan Review

A book tumbled from Evelyn’s lap, falling open on its spine beside the cushioned seat of the bay window. She flung the front door open. The doorknob slammed into the wall behind it.
 

She rushed to the fallen tree.
 

If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

But this was hardly a forest.

 

She heard the low cracking of the weeping willow before a deep groan originated in the tree’s hollow spaces, and announced the finality of the fall. Now, the long tendrils of its branches reached out to embrace the grass.
This weeping willow stood as the front yard’s grand centerpiece, bearing the arduous test of time, rooted in decades of weather and witness. As luck, or fate, or chance would have it, Evelyn’s witness of the tree’s collapse sent her mind plummeting to the depths of memories. Just how the tree’s trunk caved in to stuff its hollow insides, memories rose within her. Scenes of things past, vivid images and raw emotions, laid themselves out like the willow’s flowing yellow branches splayed across the front lawn.
Evelyn sat next to the horizontal tree. Her fingers traced the long lines of slender branches. Then, she lay down beside it, strands of her brown hair mingling with the mess of languishing leaves. The cool ground seeped through the back of her shirt, chilling her.

 

She remembered.
 

Years ago, under the weeping willow’s verdant branches, small hands reached up to catch a bright yellow butterfly. It was the kind of butterfly with black stripes like whiskers on the fringe of its wings. She stretched from her grandmother’s blue patchwork quilt and missed. The butterfly fluttered away, free from grubby four-year-old fingers. Evelyn could still feel the hurt of the earth when she chased after it tripping, falling, just as the willow tree fell on unforgiving ground. Her father held her. He brushed off her knees. “You’ll be okay.”
She believed him, then. It was around this time the man in the gray house took Evelyn’s older sister down to his basement. If they were good listeners, he would teach them how to play his gray house games. Before he took Rebecca’s hand, he tossed an entire bag of lollipops to Evelyn. The bag tore open so candy scattered wildly across the floor. “Stay here, Evie. Have as many as you want.”
He laughed when she gasped, dropped to the living room floor to gather all of it. All for her. The little pictures on the wrappers told their flavors. She fumbled to open a wrapper with pictures of strawberries, and popped it in her mouth. She scooped up handful after handful, placing the lollipops on the seat of a brown wingback chair.
 

Evelyn paused her work with the candy when she heard her sister’s cries. She ran to the top of the basement stairs. Evelyn knew her sister was afraid of the basement, but she wasn’t supposed to follow them. He said she might fall. She was a good listener. Evelyn thought of the lollipops. She decided to separate the candy into piles. Her favorite flavors went in one pile. The other pile was for Rebecca’s favorites, but when she tried to count the lollipops in each group, Evelyn kept losing track. She grabbed a handful of lollipops when the man and her sister came upstairs. “These are yours.” Rebecca examined the wrappers and managed a small smile. “My favorites.” Evelyn noticed Rebecca’s eyes were cloudy, reddened. Her cheeks streaked, still wet in places. Rebecca hugged her too tight and for so long, Evelyn needed to wiggle out of the hug. Their weeping willow had been hollowed out for as long as Evelyn could remember. That first spring, a stealthy mother calico climbed inside and birthed five kittens. The incessant meowing kept the girls up at night. Evelyn worried the mother cat was lost or hurt. She stood beside her window, refusing to sleep until her mom could tell her when the cat would be back to help the kittens. At age seven, Evelyn didn’t understand there was no way her mom could give an answer, calm her worry. Yet, the mother cat returned each night. Sometimes, Evelyn caught a glimpse of the cat’s fur in the moonlight when the mother calico slipped into the hollow of the tree, tail disappearing last. She was finally safe at home.
 

After school each day, Evelyn and Rebecca tossed their backpacks on the driveway and raced to the willow tree. Of course, this was after they stopped over to play the gray house games. They stood on the step stool their dad placed against the tree trunk. Evelyn and Rebecca took turns presenting their eager faces to the hollow space, calling to the kittens. Soon, kitten after kitten replied with frantic meows, clambering up toward the friendly voices. The girls lifted each kitten from the tree’s opening. Tiny paws stuck like burrs to the girls’ t-shirts. They pulled the kittens from their shirts and held them close. The kittens climbed around their legs while the girls sat cross-legged next to each other on the grass. With persistent meows, each kitten begged for their turn for more attention.

 

It was that way at the gray house, too. Evelyn and Rebecca took turns with the games, forced to wait and see who he chose. Evelyn wished to be chosen first. It wasn’t fair he picked Rebecca most often. “He likes your hair best,” Evelyn once said. She ran a section of Rebecca’s thick blond hair through her hands. “It’s got nothing to do with my hair. Yours is fine.” But Evelyn knew her dull brown hair was much thinner than her sister’s, and it tended to become tangly.

The day he finally chose Evelyn first, she grinned at Rebecca and the other girls who happened to be at the house. The pride of being the first one chosen washed over her, a warm tingly feeling that began in her chest and radiated through her like sunshine. Afterward, she expected to feel beautiful like he promised. Hadn’t he said that would happen after she played the games, even just once? Evelyn wondered if the other girls felt beautiful. Did Rebecca? None of the girls looked any different, any more beautiful. At home, Evelyn stared at her freckled face in the bedroom mirror. Her brown eyes tracked each  movement as she turned her head slowly side to side. Even though they went to the gray house whenever they were told, sometimes several times a week, there wasn’t anything better, nothing different, about how she looked. Not yet.
 

One day after school, Evelyn and Rebecca ran to the tree, and found it silent. Empty. Rebecca cried. Through her sobs, she insisted the kittens must have died, that even the mother cat must be dead. Evelyn didn’t believe it. Something that awful couldn’t happen to the kittens. It wouldn’t be fair. Evelyn was sure the mother cat wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her kittens. When their dad came home from work, Evelyn and Rebecca insisted he check the tree. Maybe he would discover the kittens were hiding deep inside. Maybe they were asleep. He peered into the tree only to step away, confirming the tree’s vacancy as he wiped his hands on his black work pants. Evelyn was sure their dad was right when he told them the mother probably moved her kittens due to the girls’ constant pestering.

 

Rebecca cried. “Now the kittens might not have a safe home. We scared them away!”
 

“No, they liked when we played with them,” Evelyn insisted.
 

Just as Evelyn knew the kittens enjoyed being played with, Evelyn couldn’t help but like the gray house games. The games were their secret. Plus, he promised she would be beautiful like her sister, if she did exactly as he said. If she didn’t complain. He reminded her. “Stop complaining, now. Just play the game, Evie, and you’ll be beautiful like the other girls who listen.”
 

The problem was, she wasn’t good at not complaining. That’s what her mom always told her, anyway. Like, when she complained she had a sore throat or a stomachache, her mom would say, “Okay Evie, how about you tell us when your throat doesn’t hurt anymore?”

 

The following spring, the same calico cat returned to the willow tree. They must not have scared her away after all. The girls grinned as six new kittens poked their heads up from the hollow of the tree. Evelyn noticed a white kitten with gray ears, a bit smaller than the rest, wasn’t able to climb as easily as the others. She reached in to lift him out of the tree, and showed Rebecca.
 

Rebecca giggled. “Blue eyes! So cute.”
 

The girls fell in love with the kitten’s high-pitched meow. Evelyn lay awake in her bedroom listening to the chorus of meows at night. The kittens were always waiting for their mother. One night, the meowing didn’t stop. Evelyn and Rebecca urged their dad to check if the mother had come back.
 

“She’s there,” Evelyn said. “We just didn’t see her come back.”
 

“Bet they’re all asleep inside the tree, cuddled around each other.” Rebecca agreed.
 

Their dad looked inside, reporting the six kittens were in the tree, but they were alone.
 

The girls begged to bring the kittens inside. “They’ll be scared at night without their mother.”
 

“Leave them be,” their mom said. “What would the cat will think if she came back to find the tree empty?”
 

Their dad thought it was possible the mother might have gone hunting farther away than usual. She could be resting somewhere. “Give it time.”
 

Two days and two nights passed with no sign of the mother cat. Evelyn wondered if they should go search for her, but where? Had she gotten lost or hurt? The girls whined about the kittens being lonely in the tree without their mother. At last, their dad agreed to let them bring  only the smallest white kitten inside. This is the runt. See how he’s much smaller than the rest? He might not last long without his mother, but we’ll do what we can.” Their dad held the small white kitten against his chest. Despite the kitten’s gray ears, the girls decided to name him Snowflake. Rebecca found an old purple hand towel, and used it to line the bottom of a shoebox. The girls took turns holding a dish of milk to the kitten’s mouth, but Snowflake’s pink tongue never lapped the milk. Instead, he simply sat in the towel-lined shoebox, blue eyes blinking up at them, his diminutive chest moving up and down rapidly. As their dad expected, Snowflake died overnight. Evelyn and Rebecca watched as Snowflake’s white body was wrapped in the purple towel. The tip of one gray ear stuck out from the bundle. Their dad held out an empty shoebox. “Make it pretty, if you want.”
 

The girls decorated the shoebox with stickers, arranging colorful hearts and glittery stars all along the sides. Then, Snowflake was placed in the box. The lid closed over him. The girls stared as the shoebox coffin gradually disappeared beneath shovelfuls of dirt. Rebecca cried.
 

Their mom was the first to speak after the burial. “The garage sale’s this weekend. If the cat isn’t back, we’ll give the rest of the kittens away.”
 

Evelyn glared. “Why can’t we keep them? The tree is their home.” She stomped away.
 

The front door slammed behind her.

 

On the morning of the garage sale, the girls watched excited families choose each kitten until the last one was carried away in a stranger’s arms.
 

“Well, that’s that.” Their mom said.
 

By age ten, Evelyn stopped believing the gray house games would make her beautiful like he promised. It hadn’t worked. Not at all.
 

When Rebecca turned thirteen, they stopped going to the gray house altogether. Nothing about any of it made sense. Evelyn once dared to ask Rebecca about the gray house games. Rebecca’s eyes were empty, distant, as she claimed she didn’t know what Evelyn was talking about.
 

The years when Evelyn was between four and ten years old became shrouded in forgetting. Little by little, those strange gray house memories sank into the furthest places of her mind. Although, Evelyn knew the truth deep down, she chose to gravitate toward comfort, to grasp a feeling of safety that came with deliberate forgetting. Eventually, her mind refused the memories. Of course not. No. Never. Not once. Not us.
 

Eighteen-year-old Evelyn lay beside the fallen willow. She held on to sections of the tree’s slender branches. Childhood memories swarmed above her head. She waved her hand in front of her eyes as if to brush away dark clouds, and sat up to examine the marred tree trunk.
 

It occurred to Evelyn she should tell her mom.
 

She explained how the hollow willow had fallen far enough away from the house. There had been no damage.
 

Her mom sighed on the other end of the line. “That tree has always been a nuisance. We’ll deal with this later. Okay, Evie?”
 

She reclined on the window seat and considered the fallen tree. What about her and Rebecca?
 

If a girl falls and there’s no around to hear, to notice, is there a sound?
 

She glanced at the book she was reading before the tree fell. Leaves of Grass lay open to the middle of the poem, “Song of Myself.” She had read this poem many times before, never admitting she didn’t fully understand its meaning. Still, Evelyn enjoyed the sound of it. Somehow, the words of this section carried more weight than before: “One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
 

And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.”
 

She rested her chin on her knees. But why should she wait? Years passed without acknowledgement of how they were confused, tricked, by the gray house games, fallen prey to the promise they were being made beautiful. She spent years hiding within herself, denying the humiliation of it all, refusing the reality there were stolen pieces of her childhood.

 

But in this moment, Evelyn determined to come into her own, to come back to herself with cheerfulness.