Among the Trees

Among the Trees

“We have plenty of time.” Your voice is warm, an almost palpable touch of heat gently caressing my ear.

I smile. I can tell you are too, sitting beside me. My leg is cramping. Ten hours on the road is a long time, and the road still lies long ahead, stretching to an endless dark horizon.

“That’s, yeah, that’s what I’m worried about.” I laugh. I try stretching my leg without removing it from the gas pedal. I think of how nice it would be if the old Chevrolet was of the self driving sort, the sort that takes you to where you need to be, without need of your hand, without error.

“I could take over if you want,” you say. You take your hand and lay it on my shoulder, rubbing gently. I relax into your touch.

“No. It’s all right.” With my right hand I roll down the window, careful not to shift too much lest I lose your touch. The cool night air streams into the car, and I take a deep breath, feeling its pleasant crispness within.

“I wonder if it’s going to snow.” You pull your hand. I try not to voice my disappointment. Your voice grows distant for a moment, drifting away. “I miss the snow.”

You had mentioned your liking for the cold New England winters you’d left behind when you moved with me to Mississippi. I appreciated that there was no resentment in your voice when you reminisced about your building snowmen, tobogganing down hills, defrosting bitten fingers in warm water after digging your car from the snow and drenching the not quite waterproof gloves. You were reluctant to move when I got the job at the University hospital at Baton Rouge, and yet you did, never holding it against me, embracing the good of the looser life down south.

“Your father sounded so excited when we told him we were coming for thanksgiving.” I laugh. “It’s as if they thought they would never see you again, when you moved.”

You laugh too, not so much at the humor in my words as in sympathy with my own laughter. “He can be funny like that.” I hear your chair creaking a bit as you shift. I think of how I’d intended to sell away the old car to get something better now I was no longer in school and could afford more than an old hand me down. “You know,” your voice is pensive, almost sad. “When I told them I was leaving, it’s as if he felt I was leaving them forever, rather than just moving. Like I would forget my parents, being far away.”

I stiffen up a little. I know it was not a criticism, and yet cannot help feeling a little guilty. Guilty at knowing I had been the one to tear you away from your home. From where you grew up. From family, old friends, a whole life left behind forever.

As if sensing my thoughts, you reach again for my shoulder. I lean forward a little, letting you reach behind. My whole body feels a little stiff from the long drive, almost aching in its creakiness.

“We could stop somewhere,” I hear myself saying. “For a drink. Some food. Find a nice roadside diner.”

You laugh. “There’s not going to be anything over here.” You lean back to the back seat, reaching for your bag. “I have sandwiches,” you say. “Tuna, cucumber and cheese, some peanut butter.”

I shake my head. “Nah. It’s ok.”

You put the bag back. I guess you are not hungry either, nor thirsty. We may have some tea left. You packed it in a long metal thermos, sweetened with honey.

“It’s weird, going back home, after all this time,” you say. “Like a different universe.” You breath in. “Even the air down here. It’s different.”

“Do you miss it?” I say. I can hear the hesitation in my own voice.

You lean over, kiss my cheek.

“Look. I thought about it, and I think, I think maybe when I finish my residency, well, we don’t have to settle down there. Just a couple more years. I could, I could look somewhere up North, and you, I mean, doing design, you could do that from anywhere. So.”

“It’s all right.” Your warm voice is a stark contrast to the cool night air. “It doesn’t matter now.” You stroke my cheek. “I’m with you. I’m ok.”

For a while we say nothing. I press the radio on, turn the knob. There is only crackle, white noise. Usually on long road trips, wherever you were, you could catch something on the airwaves. At the least, you’d get religious talk radio. Some country music. But out here among the darkened trees, there is nothing. A hum and a crackle, a soft and all pervasive crinkling of sound. The sound is almost melodious in its amorphousness. For a moment I find myself drifting, something deep within my mind reflecting on the shapes and patterns to be found in the noise.

You press the button, laughing. “Don’t fall asleep,” you say. “Not yet.”

I look at the lights kneading their path on the blackness of the road ahead, highlighting its small breaks and imperfections, random pictures in a dance of asphalt. On both sides of the road, an endless stretch of trees surrounds us, tall, sturdy, ever green. An endless stretch of trees, all eerily similar to each other, as if part of a single entity endlessly refracting its identical facets across the world.

It was always odd to me, how some trees flourished in their green even in the dead of winter. How now, in the peak of fall, some trees gradually shed a yellow and orange foliage, and some seem frozen in place and time, eternal in their staid, stolid existence. It is as if for them time did not matter, while to us it mattered so much.

I shudder with a sudden gust through the window. When I exhale my breath is a white cloud, dissipating into air.

“We could close the window,” you say.

I shake my head. “Unless you’re cold.” I shift in my seat, trying to make blood course through my stiffening muscles. “I find it suffocating, being in the car for such a long time. Like being in a submarine, or a closet.”

“Or a coffin.” You laugh. I stiffen, then release. It’s not funny. You know I don’t like it when you are morbid.

“Right.” I lick my lips. They feel dry, and suddenly I feel a hunkering for a cup of hot tea, with honey, ginger, fresh mint from our yard – one of the advantages of our country home.

You tap an old song that sounds vaguely familiar. You hum in perfect harmony with the tapping. I reflect on how effortlessly musical you are, how I could not carry a tune even under cover of warm shower waters, while you seem as if music simply channeled through you from the universe. I wonder if you were truly happy in Haven. I have suspected for while that, while you deny it, you may not be happy there. I wonder if your friends in choir were the equals of those in Burlington. Do you compare them, I wonder, or simply relish them for who they are, as you tend to do. To try.

“How long do you think we’ve got?” I ask. I look up at the dashboard clock, glowing in its faint light. Too faint. I kept meaning to replace the lights, kept delaying it thinking that I would soon replace the car in any case. Now the clock, in its dim pool of ghostly light, seems frozen in time.

You don’t answer. You hum again. That same familiar tune.

The play of light and shadow on the road creates alternating textures. On the border of the light and the dark mythical creatures seem to gather in a long and seething parade.

You finish the song. I notice the silence of the engine. I notice that the wind, too, is silent. My legs, both, seem to have tightened, growing rigid within. I flex my muscles, tensing and releasing them.

The chill of night seems to soak into my bones.

“How long do you think we’ve got?” I ask again.

Your tune plays in my head. Now there are instruments added to your voice, a soft guitar strumming. A gentle and melodic piano. A repeated bass line. I remember the song. Remember it playing over the radio, the singer’s silky voice talking of the stars in the night sky and the whispers of the wind.

I remember, too, you telling me about your father’s disease, how he’d told you over the phone. How you paused, then told me that you wanted to, had to, move back. I wasn’t angry. I was tired, and calm, and understanding.

“How much time do we have?” I ask you, and my voice seems frozen in the sharp wind coming silently from the open window.

You stay silent for a moment. When you speak, your voice is calm, warm and reassuring. “Don’t worry,” you say. “It was an accident.”

I lick my lips. I can taste the saltiness of the now dried blood. I remember the song, Dream a Little Dream of Me, playing when we hit the tree. I see us there among the trees within the twisted metal skeleton, a composition in twisted broken flesh in an impromptu frame.

I stare at the dark road ahead. The lights of the old Chevrolet appear ghostly on the Asphalt stream stretching endlessly into an unseen horizon. You stroke my hair, and without my saying anything, shush me, as you do sometimes when I wake up from a nightmare. Your lips, when they connect with my cheek, are frozen cold.

“Don’t worry.” Your soft and silken voice caresses me. I realize it speaks in silence. “We were never going to make it.”