She dug her nails into his back. “What are you staring at?”
She had a girlish room, unembarrassed by stuffed animals. He realized he was looking for the ghost.
“Fuck me,” she said, surprising him.
He twisted awkwardly and slid off the bed. She sucked in a sharp breath. He bit his lips and felt for the pile of clothes with his foot in the darkened room. When she pulled the comforter over her head, he carried the pile into the bathroom.
He lay in his bed that night cursing himself.
The next day, Tee climbed over the railing in Vyšehrad and sat on the cliff above the Vltava. Sailboats struggled to tack against the wind. Back in the ruins, a little boy knelt in the prayer maze, eyes closed. When the boy left, Tee walked into the center. He found a tiny blue thimble, just big enough to catch a drop of rain.
III
The tree was a magnificent sugar maple at least a century old. “It makes the garden come together,” Katka had said, meaning garden in the British sense. The maple reached up from the middle of the yard like a many-fingered hand beneath the green glove of leaves. It was weeks after Pavel’s attack. A neighbor had called Rockefeller for help in the middle of a party, and all the guests had gone down to Malešice together. Katka balanced on a branch twenty feet above the ground, in the tree because of her husband.
Later she would tell Tee how Pavel had gotten the paintings out of the closet, somehow, and into the bedroom, how she had found him in the middle of them, as Tee had been months earlier. She had been cooking lunch. Pavel asked her to move his art into the kitchen. He often had strange requests for his work. She set the canvases in four rows, the painted sides to the wall, protected from the splattering gulaš. When she was done, he stood in front of her and kissed her.
Out of nowhere he lodged one cast against her chest, already holding her back, and with the other cast, he tipped the largest painting into the stove. When it caught fire, he kicked the canvases out of the house and into the wet grass. He was lucky he hadn’t burned down the neighborhood.
Beneath the tree, Tee didn’t know where to look: what was left of the paintings smoldered nearby; Katka’s white limbs shone through the leaves as she swayed in the sway of the wind; Pavel yelled below, stomping in a bathrobe; the other guests pulled bottles from pockets and predicted a storm; the neighbor stepped back, rubbing his cheeks; Rockefeller yanked his jacket off his wide shoulders and beat at the dying flames. Tee guessed a storm would only affect Katka’s grip. The art was beyond saving. The already damp ground had contained the blaze. The smoke itched in Tee’s eyes, and when he wiped them clear, there was a second glow at the base of the tree. For a moment he thought he had been wrong and the tree was about to light up. But then the glow became a foot, as if the tree had flipped upside down and was about to walk away. Tee wiped his hands on his shorts and stepped forward, and the foot disappeared. Tee reached for the lowest branch, putting the ghost out of his mind. He swung a knee over. Katka waited in the middle of the branches, one place Pavel’s casts could never reach her.
“How did you get so high?” Tee called up to her. “Are you okay?” Sap stuck to his skin. One off-move might send both of them falling. Her eyes shone clearly, even from fifteen feet above. She had tan shorts on, and her legs were scraped red by the bark.
Pavel circled the maple and yelled up in iambic English: “Stay out of it. It’s privacy. I told you never coming back here.” He tried to cross his arms, then remembered his casts and gave up. One of the guests asked if they should get a blanket for Katka to jump into. Pavel shouted that he would make Tee sorry. The wind carried his warning.
It was the first time since his uncle had died that Tee had felt the force of the wind. On the flight simulator on his parents’ computer, he had nosed down again and again, never able to save himself. Katka wrapped herself completely around her branch, shivering.
Rockefeller stomped toward Pavel, and the two of them shouted in Czech, arguing or threatening. Their voices grew, then softened. Tee focused on the climb, shutting out everything else. “Hold on,” he said. “I’ll help you.” He climbed another few branches before the voices drew back into the house. Maybe Rockefeller would get forgiveness after all, the thing he most wanted.
When Tee was four or five feet beneath her, Katka asked, “What do I mean to you, that you would climb up to me?”
He felt a strange mixture of anticipation and regret, as if the question of meaning was a mysterious box they’d been saving to open. I want to know something about you that no one else knows, she had said before she showed him the same paintings that now burned below them.
“Rain’s coming,” he said stupidly.
He managed to stand on his branch and get closer. The wind pulled at the threads of his balance. He waited for his container to give him weight, but he was light, emptying.
“He burned the paintings,” she said, “and all I could say was ‘fire.’”
Tee wrapped one arm around the trunk and pictured Pavel standing over the images of her, which he had made and then destroyed. Tee pictured Katka running past the fire to the tree, not knowing what she was doing. She hid herself where everyone could see her. Tee didn’t want her to feel more exposed.
“Remember The Giving Tree?” she said. “I gave everything to Pavel.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know where to begin.”
“Do not say you are sorry. Do not ever be sorry. The thing about pity is you can never take it back.”
“I wasn’t pitying you.” The sky seemed to close its jaws. Had she climbed the tree then because of that book? Once, while Pavel was painting in the bedroom, she had said that she wanted to love like the giving tree — without reservation. “Come down,” Tee said, fumbling upward. “Things will change now.”
She blinked and her eyes opened somehow bluer than before.
Below, a shout went up, and then Pavel sprinted across the lawn. Rockefeller close behind him. The air was full of static, like a TV channel had gone dead. Someone didn’t want to watch anymore, Tee thought. Katka coughed, or stifled a hurt cry.
“Get out!” Pavel shouted as he ran toward them. “Get out of Prague!”
The sky dropped as if drawn to the smoke from the paintings.
Rockefeller reached forward. But at the crack of thunder, Pavel leapt and threw his back against the trunk. Tee held on as the tree shuddered. He heard the hiss of the fire as water washed down the bark. He looked for Katka. For an instant, he thought of Pavel’s art, but it was black with ash, irrecoverable.
Katka shouted from her branch. Even in the chaos, Tee sensed she had more to say. He wished he could wait for her, forget the wind and the rain and the height. He wanted to listen without reservation. But he had lost his hold. Pavel and Rockefeller stood out like airbags, ten, eight, six feet below. Tee slammed into someone’s shoulder, and they collapsed together, in a heap. Tee’s ribs clanged like a bell. They lay on the grass, and the rain plunged into their eyes, tiny divers aiming for mistaken pools.
IV
The next day, Katka called to thank Tee for climbing after her. They met in a café in Karlín, an out-of-the-way basement Pavel and Rockefeller hated. A series of chambers extended underground. Tee dressed in a blue designer button-down, though with his usual khaki shorts and thong sandals. He wore the cologne his ex-girlfriend had given him, the only bottle he owned, though he didn’t know if this was a good idea. He got to the café early. He wanted, for once, to be waiting for Katka. He ordered a Pilsner to calm his nerves. Fifteen minutes passed. She might have changed her mind. Someone stepped down the stairs, then turned on one glowing heel and headed back up. Tee sprang from his chair, spilling his beer, and went after. He poked his head into the higher chamber. He heard the bartender behind him shouting about foreigners. Katka was nowhere in sight. Tee crossed the chamber, and just as he wondered what he had seen, he nearly knocked her over — in a short blue summer dress, inches taller than him in her boots. They sat at a nearby table, and she ordered a glass of wine and he another beer. “How are you?” he asked. “Any better?”