The Understory (6 page)

“Where exactly am I?” I asked my snake of a train as she slithered her way through moss and buttress roots.

She hissed her answer. “The greatesssssssst place on earth,” she said. “Jussssssst look around. There issssss life everywhere.” Then she pointed her forked tongue toward a small hill abuzz with birds and insects.

“What do you do here?” Besides develop speech impediments, I thought.

“I sssssearch for sssssun,” she said as her strong muscles contracted and she maneuvered us between tall grasses.

“Do you ever get lost in the shadows?” I asked.

She paused, then let out a brief hiss. “Sssssometimes it’s necessssssary to find onessss-self in the dark.”

I worried that her lisp might affect her forest reputation. “Have you considered using words without the letter ‘s’?”

To my surprise, she let out a small chuckle riddled with the letter “s,” and then continued her hiss-lecture. “True happinesssssss can only be found when you let go of your fear and recognize the beauty of both light and dark.”

I loosened my grip so I wouldn’t hurt her, but I wasn’t ready to see the glamorous side of darkness just yet. “If the forest is full of life, what about death?”

“Ah, death. The beginning of life.”

I ducked my head to avoid a low-lying branch. “Beginning?” The lack of sun was impairing her judgment.

“Yesssssss, beginning. Death alwaysssss makessss room for more life. It issssss nature’ssss way,” she said.

“Hey, is this about that spotted killing machine I’m supposed to watch out for? Are you trying to tell me something?”

“Ssssssshhhh. That’s not until darkness comes.”

“Geez, thanks,” I said. “I feel much better.”

She stopped, lifted her serpent-head, and turned back to look at me. “Remember, firssssst the treasure box, then the moonflower.”

“Do they teach you guys that phrase in rainforest school?” I said. “You’re all in on this together, aren’t you?”

“Ssssymbiosissssss, my dear.”

But before I could figure out what that meant, she flung me off her back like I was an annoying parasite, and as I flipped mid-air, I hollered, “You should know I have three library books due today, and if I don’t get back home in time, I’ll be sending the rainforest a bill!”

I landed with my face planted in a wild orchid, and when I tried to get up, I came face to face with another kind of bill, striped and multi-colored.

“Get up!” it squawked. “Get up! It’s time to fly.”

W
hen you wake up in someone else’s shoes, it’s hard to be yourself, which is why Story woke up that Tuesday morning feeling courageous. But when she undid the straps on the high heels and put them back in the closet, she felt like her old self again—a wayward, unwanted visitor. The night before, Story had conceived of the bold and admirable goal of helping Cooper Payne, not only because she really liked him, which was a rarity in itself, but also because she knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. But in the process of tidying the bed, it took Story one full minute to recall this ambitious goal, and then another five seconds to reject it.

She actually whispered, “Sucks to be you, Cooper Payne,” as she put on her slippers and prepared her getaway.
The sooner you realize there’s no magic treasure box, and the sooner you realize that life is one giant crapshoot, the better off you’ll be.
After all, the shattered dreams of Story’s youth had made her stronger—capable of not dreaming at all.

The digital clock read 8:33, which meant she’d overslept. A lot. On her
sleepovers,
she tried to be out before six. Luckily, Cooper and his mother had probably already left the house for school. She started walking down the hallway toward the stairs, but stopped in front of Cooper’s open bedroom door. Something lured her inside, and within a few seconds, she was looking around his room at the things Cooper deemed important. There was a model airplane hanging from the ceiling, and in the corner was a ratty, stuffed puppy dog, too juvenile to be on display, but too special to be discarded.

Story snickered when she saw a Socra-Tots® collector’s book set titled
Why Do Manners Matter?
sticking out from under the bed—there was no escaping her mother. On a white bookshelf sat a signed baseball in a clear plastic box, and next to it was a framed picture of Cooper and his father, laughing, his face turned to the side, trying to wipe ketchup off his son’s. Beside that was an older, yellowed picture, Cooper’s father in hospital scrubs, splotchy-eyed from crying, standing next to a clear bin and holding the tiny Cooper Michael Payne.

As Story continued to peruse the room’s contents, she made frequent glances back at the picture of Cooper and his father, as if she were being watched. She approached a bulletin board with the word D-R-E-A-M hanging above it in big wooden letters. Tacked onto the corkboard were three things: on the top left, a foam cutout of a giant number one; on the bottom right, a banner which read,
If You Can Imagine It, You Can Do It
; and finally, at dead center, a ripped-out coloring-book picture of a pirate’s treasure box lying underneath a palm tree.

On his bedside table sat a snow globe, an encapsulated winter wonderland foreign to the sun-lovers of Phoenix. Story picked it up and shook it until tiny white flakes flurried about, settling on the shoulders of the miniature Santa. When Santa was almost completely covered in snow, she tapped the plastic enough to free him, and Story found herself lost in a long-ago Christmas memory.

She was five years old, lying under her covers on Christmas Eve, her green eyes beaming with a sense of want and wonder. Two hours earlier, she’d placed a plate of warm cookies, a glass of milk, and a bundle of carrots by the fireplace, and she couldn’t sleep thinking of Santa bringing her cherished and requested gift—her very own magic kit, complete with a shiny magic wand, a red silk scarf from which to pluck a goldfish bowl, a deck of cards, several mini-cups for concealing small objects, and finally, a purple, velvet magician’s robe with silver stars.

Around midnight, she heard noise in the living room, so she snuck out to see if it had arrived. She tiptoed out of her room in her yellow footy-pajamas, down the hall toward what she knew would be the present that would change her life from ordinary to extraordinary. But when she got to the living room, the Christmas tree lights were off, and the treetop’s bright star was dim and barely hanging on. Story’s mother, with her perfect blonde bob and immaculate makeup, sat in a rocking chair next to the fireplace, not rocking, but instead chomping on Rudolph’s carrot and dismembering a Santa doll with a seam ripper. And as Story watched in horror, her mother continued attacking St. Nick’s seams, focusing on his stubborn groin. Without looking up, she said, “Young lady, you’re supposed to be in bed.”

With a gentle hand, Story placed the snow globe back down on the table, careful to preserve the fragile, innocent world inside, and walked over to an open closet. On the top shelf, Story saw several board games stacked on each other in a teetering pile. Without thinking, she lifted down the ouija board, the first in the stack, took the lid off, and crouched down next to it. As a joke, Story took the three-legged pointer in her hand, and asked it an important question: “Is Elvis really dead?”

With both hands clutched in a firm grip, she moved the pointer to
YES.
She laughed to herself, thinking of people who actually believed in this crap, and then asked another question high on her list of curiosities: “Does swallowed gum really take ten years to fully digest?” The pointer “magically” made an immediate move to
NO,
and she snickered some more, pleased with her little game.

Just as she was about to put the game away, she looked over at the picture of Cooper and his dad, and with a compulsion stronger than she’d ever felt before, asked a question that seemed to come from someone else: “What will save him?”

Then the pointer moved on its own. Story, shocked, first stared at the board in complete disbelief, and then turned around to see if she was alone. It appeared that she was, but the silence was unnerving, so she forced the pointer to a stop, cleared her throat, and closed her eyes.
Imagination’s haywire today—too much damn sleep,
she thought.
When I open my eyes, everything will be back to normal. One. Two. Three.

But when she opened her eyes, the pointer took her hands hostage and began to move on its own again. First it went to “S.”

“Ah!” Story meant to scream, but it came out a whisper.

The pointer moved, in order, to “T,” “O,” then “R” and all the while Story repeated the mantra,
This isn’t real . . . This isn’t real . . . This isn’t real.

Finally, the pointer landed on “Y.”

At first, she took a moment to catch her breath, wondering if it was finished, but shortly after, she had no choice but to try to decipher the message from beyond.

The rainforest story?
she wondered.

The pointer then moved to “U.”
You
.

She shook her head in defiance, trying hard not to look over at the picture that still seemed to be watching her every move.
Me?

“No, no, no,” she said.

But when Story looked at the coloring-book picture hanging on the bulletin board, she suddenly remembered sitting cross-legged on the shag carpet, coloring Scooby-Doo and sharing jumbo crayons with her dad. He had brought her a small bouquet of yellow daffodils from his garden out back, and tucked a perfect golden one behind her ear. Although she didn’t realize it until that very moment, it was the last memory she had of him before he died. The smell of his aftershave flooded back, and as she recalled the way his gentle smile looked when he said, “It’s okay to go outside the lines,” she felt a pronounced change come over her.

She missed his voice. She missed his laugh. She missed feeling accepted, as if she had a place in the world. There had been no chance for goodbye, and no chance to finish anything they’d started. Lots of dreams were left blank, uncolored, dead. The rejection and hopelessness she’d felt ever since losing him now announced themselves as something far from okay—the kind of something no child should have to endure.

So now, when she stepped back from the bulletin board to examine the treasure box picture, it looked less like a cartoon and more real, as if she could reach out and touch the carved wood, as if it really did hold secrets. And when she held the number one foam tightly in her hand, she remembered the advice she’d received via fortune cookie:
Everyone gets one chance to do something great. Yours is coming soon.

And that’s when Story Easton knew that this would be her story. She would prove her mother wrong, and finally accomplish something that mattered. She took one last look at the picture of Cooper and his dad, and before she could leave them, before she could break her gaze, she made the promise she knew she had to make.

But mid-promise, she heard a loud banging sound coming from downstairs, which shook Cooper’s wall of dreams, sending the giant number one and the ripped-out picture of the treasure box floating end over end, until they landed like feathers on the carpet. Story picked up both the giant number one and treasure box picture and promptly tacked them back up on the bulletin board.

And with a sudden sense of purpose, Story Easton tore out of the room a transformed woman, only to run into a solid man standing in the hallway.

“Shit!” she screamed.

“Shit!” he hollered. “You okay?” He extended his hands, as if to catch her.

Knocked back, Story took a good look at her victim. As it turned out, he wasn’t a victim at all, but a thirty-something man, who managed to be handsome and scruffy at the same time. Dazed, Story caught herself staring at his strong forearms, his lean frame, and then, so as not to let him notice her ogling, his eyes. But they were no help. Pale blue, they were the color of the ocean on a gray day, beautiful and stormy.