Up High in the Trees Read online

  I can’t fall asleep with the fire so bright and lights still on all over the house.

  Mother was going to have a baby girl. We were going to name her Sara Rose. Two names like one.

  I think of the baby’s name like this: Share a rose. Sir, a rose. Is air a rose.

  I never got to meet her. She’s with Mother. She was there on the night that Mother died and now they’re still together.

  Dad’s not in his sleeping bag anymore when I wake up.

  Dad, I say as loud as I can.

  In here, he says.

  He’s up on a ladder in the kitchen, pulling spiderwebs off the ceiling. The ceiling’s dark wood and the spiderwebs are like thin clouds.

  I need to write a letter, I tell Dad.

  Just a minute, Sebby, he says.

  I stare up and watch him work. In my head, I count to sixty. Dad, I say, it’s been a minute.

  He comes down the ladder and looks at me.

  A letter? he asks.

  I nod.

  Dad starts looking through all the drawers in the kitchen. He brings me the red colored pencil and two dirty pieces of white paper that both have a bunch of numbers added up on one side and nothing on the other side.

  This is all we’ve got for now, he says.

  I lie down on my stomach and start coloring over all the numbers until I make that whole side red. Then I turn the paper over. I think first about what I want to write because the red pencil doesn’t have an eraser.

  I write, Dear Katya. It takes me a long time to think of what else to put. Then I write, I’m sorry that I bit you and made you cry. I draw her a picture of a boat floating in the middle of an ocean to fill up the rest of the page. Above the boat, I draw a big red sun in the sky. Since there’s another piece of paper, I write another letter.

  Dear Ms. Lambert,

  I want to write you a letter.

  Mother grew up in this white house. I like the white house, but there are closets and drawers that I still need to look in. I have to see where everything is so when I close my eyes, I can see it all in my head. I don’t know what room was Mother’s room.

  Here is a picture of the house. Do you like it?

  Bye, Sebby

  The shed in the backyard is the same white box shape as the house, only smaller. I slide open the door and inside is dark with a smell of cold leaves and gasoline. I like the gasoline smell. It’s a metal taste all the way in the back of my throat.

  I find a lawn mower, a rusty toolbox, and a plastic Christmas tree. Against the back wall, there’s a yellow bike with purple streamers in its handlebars.

  I reach my hand out, but I have to step closer to touch the bike. It feels wet-cold.

  In here is the kind of quiet that makes you want to touch something or make something move.

  Really fast, I grab on to the bike’s handlebars and push it out of the shed. Then I let go.

  The bike falls sideways on the grass and a bell on the handlebar rings.

  I run away, back inside the house.

  In the kitchen, through the window above the sink, I can see the shed and the yellow bike with the handlebars twisted, pointing up at the sky. I can see the dock, too, the one that goes all the way out to the ocean, but you can’t walk on it because it’s blocked by an orange and white road sign that says, NOT SAFE.

  Dad wanders around the house with his cup of coffee.

  All day, he’s been walking around like this, moving furniture, setting up everything. I follow him to the room at the very end of the hall upstairs.

  You can sleep in here, Dad says. It used to be your grandfather’s study.

  We look at the room together from the doorway.

  Dad put my blue and yellow sheets on the small bed that’s pushed into a corner. On the wall there’s a painting of a sad old man holding a dead bird in his hand.

  What do you think? Dad asks.

  It’s okay, I tell him. I’m looking at the painting, so Dad looks at it, too.

  Your Grandpa Chuck loved birds, Dad says. He had a pigeon coop in the backyard.

  Oh, I say.

  I go downstairs, back to my sleeping bag in the fireplace room, where I left my letters for Katya and Ms. Lambert. Katya’s letter has turned softer from all the red coloring on it. I touch it to my face and breathe in the pencil smell.

  Dad, I call to him. I want to mail my letters.

  I listen to his feet coming downstairs. He’s wearing socks, so his feet make a quiet thump on each step.

  Dad gives me money to buy stamps and envelopes. He says I can walk into town by myself because it’s not far. It’s the same way we walked yesterday to buy groceries.

  The post office is painted brown, he says. You’ll find it. Please, Sebby, says Dad, I need some quiet.

  But we’ve been quiet all day.

  Go ahead, Dad says.

  I step outside and then turn around to look at him.

  I’m just going to lie down, Dad says, I’ll feel better by the time you get back.

  I walk fast. I’m watching my feet on the sidewalk, but I have to look up if I want to find the post office, so I slow down and look.

  I see the brown building with a sign that says UNITED STATES POST OFFICE in blue letters. It’s right next to a park that has four swings, a merry-go-round, and a jungle gym with a clown’s head on top. The clown is smiling and has a black hat with a yellow flower on it. I don’t like him, because his big eyes are looking at me.

  I run to the glass doors and go inside the post office.

  Hello, says the lady behind the counter.

  I take Dad’s money out of my pocket and hand it to her. She has dark pink fingernails and lips. When she smiles at me, I see some of the pink from her lips is smudged on her teeth that are yellow, not white like Mother’s teeth.

  I want stamps and envelopes, I tell her.

  She keeps smiling.

  Well, she says and puts Dad’s money away in the cash register. I can give you ten stamps and a pack of twenty envelopes.

  Okay, I say.

  Then she gives me back a handful of change and puts the stamps and envelopes in a bag for me to carry. Outside, I sit down on the sidewalk to get the letters ready and when I look at one of the blank envelopes, I know I can’t mail the letters because I don’t have the addresses.

  Now the only thing to do is walk all the way back to the white house. I think about the yellow bike from the shed. Dad said he’d help me fix it up. I walk slowly with Katya’s letter in my hand. Even though I’m by myself, I pretend like Katya’s watching me. I do a skip-walk for her.

  Dad’s taking another nap.

  I can’t find any scissors, so instead I look for a knife in the silverware drawer. I pick the biggest one. It has wood on the handle part where you hold it.

  I take the knife outside with me to the yellow bike. I know purple streamers make it look like a girl bike, so I try to cut them off. I have to cut one at a time and when I’m done, there’s still short pieces of purple poking out like stupid, purple whiskers.

  Wind blows the streamers all over the front steps and the grass and everywhere. I just let them go.

  Since I don’t know how to ride, I hold on to the handlebars and take the bike for a walk with me. The faster I go, the louder the bike squeaks, so I have to walk slowly.

  Hey, says a voice from somewhere up high.

  I look around. In a window all the way at the top of a tall, blue house, I see a boy waving.

  Hey, the boy says again. He leans forward so his head’s all the way out the window. I can tell that he doesn’t have a shirt on.

  Listen to this, he says and he plays a harmonica. The way he plays doesn’t sound like a song to me.

  Then the boy goes away and the window’s empty. I stand there watching, waiting for him to come back. I count slowly in my head. If I get to sixty, I’m going to leave.

  I count all the way to thirty-four and then the boy comes back to the window with a girl. She waves at me and this time
I wave back.

  The boy plays his harmonica the same way—not like a song.

  Then he says, What’s your name?

  I don’t want to tell him my name, so I don’t say anything.

  Hey, the boy says, what’s your name?

  The girl waves at me again. She’s wearing a red shirt and she has red curly hair like a clown.

  What’s your damn name? the boy asks.

  I start to walk away and push the bike along with me. I hold on tight to the handlebars. I hold on so tight that my hands go white and I can’t feel my fingers. I keep looking back at the boy in the window.

  He throws a shoe and it lands behind me. It’s a small, white buckle shoe.

  My shoe, my shoe, yells the girl with red hair.

  I walk a little bit faster and the bike squeaks louder. I want to drop it and run, but my hands won’t let go.

  I run with the bike screaming at me. I run all the way back to the white box house, where purple streamers are still blowing all over the grass. I must not have closed the door all the way because now it’s blown open.

  I pull the bike up the steps with me, into the house, and I slam the door shut with my foot. Then my hands let go of the handlebars and the bike flops over onto the floor.

  Dad, I yell.

  In here, he says.

  Dad’s sitting at the kitchen table with a big bottle of Coke and a box of pizza.

  I’m cold and my teeth are chattering. I want to go sit on Dad’s lap.

  Don’t slam the door like that, he says, you’ll give me a heart attack.

  I tell him, Sorry.

  I ordered us a pizza, he says.

  Dad, I say. I try to tell him what happened. I got really cold, I say.

  He stands up and walks over to me. His face looks different, skinnier, because his beard is shaved-off.

  Sebby, says Dad and I start crying. Dad pulls me closer. He rubs my shoulders with his hands to make me warm.

  You’re okay, Dad says and he walks me over to the sink. Dad holds my hands under the warm water. My teeth stop chattering and I feel better.

  Shhh, Dad says, you’re okay.

  I look up at him.

  Your glasses are filthy, he says. How can you even see out of those?

  I shrug and let him take my glasses. He washes them for me. When he reaches up for a dish towel, there isn’t one, so he pulls off his gray T-shirt and dries my hands with it and then dries my glasses. His chest has curly black hair. Down low on his stomach there’s a scar that’s whiter than his skin and it’s from having his appendix taken out.

  Dad holds up my glasses and looks through the lenses.

  Much better, he says and puts them back on me.

  How’s that? he asks.

  The yellow bike squeaks, I tell him. I don’t like the sound.

  I’ll look for something to spray it with, Dad says. He rolls his gray shirt into a ball and then sets it down on the counter.

  Your beard is gone, I tell him.

  I know, says Dad and he touches his hand to his smooth face.

  Listen, after dinner, you need to take a hot bath, he says, and no more going outside without your coat.

  I have a puffy green coat for when it’s cold, but I don’t like to wear it. It zippers all the way up to my chin and feels too tight around my neck.

  Dad opens the pizza box and lets the steam out. He pours two glasses of Coke—one for him, one for me.

  We don’t need plates, Dad says, they’ll just be more dishes to wash.

  So we eat out of the box.

  I don’t know if I should drink my Coke or not. I only take two sips. Mother didn’t let me drink Coke because then I wouldn’t grow, but she drank it in the morning when she woke up. She put chocolate syrup in her Coke and every time before she took a sip, she stirred it up with a long spoon and the spoon made clinking noises against her glass. I liked to stir it for her and make the clinking noises myself. Sometimes she let me have a sip. Leo said that Coke is bad because it has acid in it. I can’t remember the name of the acid, but Leo said that it was bad for Mother to drink. Mother said that Leo was being silly, but Leo said he was telling the truth and he put a nail at the bottom of a glass and then he filled it up with Coke. After four days, the nail really was gone, but Mother still drank her Coke in the morning. Leo said that when there’s an accident on the highway and they need to clean the blood off the road, they use a big bottle of Coke. That’s enough, Mother told Leo and then he stopped.

  In the bath, I lie all the way back so my ears are underwater. There’s the sound of my heart beating and the humming sound of blood going through me. Drips from the faucet land in the bath. They’re loud and heavy sounding.

  I remember, at the swimming pool I didn’t want to put my head under. The swimming teacher said I had to. I held on to my blue foam kickboard. I liked to bite into the blue foam when she wasn’t looking. The swimming teacher put on her frog goggles that said SPEEDO across the noseband in white letters and she showed me how to go under. I watched the bubbles coming up out of her nose.

  I wouldn’t do it.

  Mother helped me out of the pool and dried me off with one of the scratchy, white pool towels.

  She whispered, That’s okay, my son, you have years and years to put your head underwater. Her breath in my ear made me shiver. Mother held me close.

  I try to hear Mother’s voice now under the bathwater, but I can’t. Her voice is gone. I sit up fast and slide forward and then back again, forward and then back again, and the water moves with me, like waves. When I stop sliding, the water keeps moving and it pushes me back and forth, back and forth.

  Dad comes in with a blue towel. It’s my blue towel from home.

  I found some WD-40 out in the shed, Dad tells me. I can spray the bike so it won’t squeak.

  Yes, I say.

  Okay now, he says, let’s get you out.

  I don’t want to stand up, because then I’ll be cold, but Dad says it’s time. He’s still not wearing a shirt. I look at the place where his appendix came out.

  Dad holds the towel, ready to wrap me up. I stand up fast and reach out with my finger to touch Dad’s bumpy, white scar. I touch it, but I can’t really feel anything because my finger is all shriveled from being in the water so long.

  Will it be there forever? I ask Dad.

  Yes, he says.

  I wrote Mother a very important note and taped it to the mirror in her bathroom.

  The note said:

  To Mother,

  Please wake me up. I want to go with you.

  From, Sebby

  I was sitting on the floor in my room, making a tower out of blocks. Mother sat down and helped me build the tower. She gave me back the note.

  I miss you too, sweetheart, Mother said. Then she left.

  I thought about how she wasn’t alone because there was the baby, Sara Rose, in her stomach. Sara Rose was a part of her, listening to the outside through Mother’s skin. They were together at night, when Mother ran.

  A big envelope comes in the mail from Ms. Lambert. I like how my name looks in her perfect, teacher handwriting. Up in the corner is Ms. Lambert’s name with the school address underneath. I’m happy because now I have a place to send my letters.

  Inside the envelope is a packet of homework that I have to do, so I sit at the kitchen table with my red pencil. I skip the fraction page and turn to the part where I have to look at the sentences and underline nouns. I know nouns are people, places, or things, and that makes them easy to find.

  The phone rings and I jump. I run over to where it’s hanging on the wall and pick up.

  Sebby? says Cass’s voice.

  You scared me, I tell her.

  Sorry, she says. How’s Dad? Is it cold there?

  I’m wrapping the phone cord around and around my finger. Teacher sent me homework to do, I tell her.

  That’s good, Cass says. Is it snowing? she asks.

  No, I tell her.

  It’s s
nowing here, she says.

  Since I know I can walk to the post office by myself, I leave Dad and the bike in the white house and I go. I’m wearing my green coat and it’s so puffy I can’t feel the envelope that I put in the front pocket. I have to keep touching it and then I know it’s still there. The envelope has the letters for Katya and Ms. Lambert and also my homework page with the nouns underlined.

  I stop when I get close to the blue house and listen. I know that the boy without a shirt and the girl with red hair live inside of it, but they don’t know which house is mine. The blue house is quiet. Its windows are dark and empty. I walk a little closer and stop again. On the ground, there’s the white shoe that was supposed to hit me.

  I keep walking, but then I turn around and go back to the white shoe. I look at it and what I think of is the picture of the old man holding a dead bird in his hand. I know I can’t leave the shoe all alone, so I hide it inside of my coat, and cross my arms tight. I walk faster now because what if someone’s watching me from a window? I look back at the blue house again and then I run.

  At the post office, I don’t need to go inside because they have a blue mailbox in front. Through the glass doors, I can see the same lady working behind the counter. She sees me and waves without smiling and that’s good. I don’t like how her teeth look when she smiles at me.

  I take the envelope out of my pocket and look at how I wrote Ms. Lambert’s name and Katya’s name and also the address where my school is. Maybe when Katya reads my letter she’ll be my friend again.

  I pull on the handle and the blue mailbox opens up like a mouth. Really fast, I reach inside and drop the envelope. It doesn’t make any sound when it lands. I try to look inside the mailbox, but it’s just dark, like the letters are already gone.

  On the way home, I don’t want the shoe anymore, because it belongs to the girl with red hair. Even if the shoe is sad like a dead bird, it was still mean to take it away and I want to put it back. I walk fast all the way to the blue house. I know where the shoe was and I can put it in the same spot so nobody will know that I took it.