“I remember,” I said. She seemed reluctant when she had to leave me alone. I wasn’t sure if that meant she was worried about me, or if she was worried I’d break her house. “I’m just working on a paper,” I said.
“Good.” She went to the front door, and hesitated. “...How are your grades?”
This was the one thing I could be positive about, so I smiled. “Great. I should make the honor roll. Ms. Miller thinks I could take AP chemistry next year.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s good. Well...keep up the good work.”
The instant she left the house I pulled my mother’s journal out from under my textbook. I’d treated all the pages with ammonia, and I’d been poring over it every night, trying to decipher it. There was very little in it that was actually written down - most of it was drawn out. I flipped through pages of sketches of castles, thrones, and elaborate jewelry. There were sketches of people, with bewildering notes. Young drawings of my father, carefully inked. He was smiling, which I had never seen him do much of. One of Charlotte, haphazardly penned in a corner, noted boring. Several tagged John, drawn in harsh, jagged lines, as if in anger. Problem or solution? was noted on the page.
The one that particularly stood out - the one I kept coming back to - seemed to be a map of the orchard out back. There were very realistic sketches of apples in the margin, so I was assuming it wasn’t just a random piece of forest. On the facing page was an even more beautiful drawing of an apple tree, that mirrored one in miniature on the map. With Bea out of the house for several hours, I’d decided now was the time to try to find it. I had considered going out at night, but the forest in the dark was more than a little terrifying to me, so that impulse had quickly died.
Nevertheless, it was a grey day, overcast and with a hint of a coming chill. I pulled the hood of my jacket up around my ears and held open the journal. There was a structure marked Graham House on the bottom edge of the map. Supposedly I just went forward in a straight line, and I would find the tree. I steeled myself and started the trek through the grove. The trees closest to the house were tame and orderly, if a little overgrown, and mostly bore pecans. As I progressed deeper into the treeline, though, it began to look as if the forest were trying to reclaim the land, grafting onto the orchard with resolution.
A raindrop hit the side of my nose. I looked up. The sky had turned a deeper grey and I hadn’t even noticed. I zipped the journal into the interior of my jacket. The leaves above me took up a chorus I could almost hear words to.
I hurried between the gnarled tree trunks, hoping to not get caught in a sudden downpour. You would think a New Yorker would always have an umbrella handy, but someone had told me the south wasn’t like that and so mine was buried at the bottom of a bag in my closet. I felt exposed without it. Dead leaves crunched under my feet and I heard what might have been a squirrel leaping across branches overhead. I caught my breath for a moment under what appeared to be another of my grandmother’s pecan trees, judging by the shell casings scattered around the base. I’d seen pecans before, but never in their shells. I was surprised by how pretty they were – smooth and pale with little stripes.
Then came a whoosh that usually preceded a subway train – but this time it was followed by a downpour. I pushed away from the pecan tree, going further into the orchard. My new goal was to find something with a large enough canopy to shelter me.
In the early twilight that the clouds brought, I could no longer see very far into the distance. Not that I’d been able to see terribly far through the trees to begin with. The rain was beginning to disorient me, but I didn’t want to pull out the journal for fear of the rain blurring the drawings.
Then I saw it, looming ahead of me – a huge tree with apples still clinging to its boughs. I hurried forward and huddled against the trunk and breathed a sigh of relief. It was almost completely dry here. I tried to peer in the direction of the house, but saw only a haze. The earth was still warm from the past few days, so it had evaporated most of the rain and spit it back up already, making it almost foggy.
I leaned back against the trunk and stared up into the boughs of the tree. Was this it? I didn’t think apple trees grew this rotund - the others around certainly were more spindly. This one was almost like an oak tree that happened to have fruit attached to it - it had to be at least five feet in diameter.
I brought the journal out from the dry interior of my jacket and checked the tree against the sketch. Yes, the one my mother had drawn was just like this. My heart beat faster, even as rain poured around me. Was she trying to tell me something? A tiny heart had been drawn onto the sketch. I closed it and stowed it back in my jacket. It had to be here on the real tree as well.
I circled the tree, carefully inspecting the bark as I stepped over its knobbly roots.
There. I spotted it. I laughed out loud. It was real. There, carved into the bark, as with a pen knife, was a heart. Inside were initials - SG and KH. I wanted to cry. This was proof, real, tangible proof, that my parents had been in love. It was like proof that I existed. I hadn’t known I’d wanted proof of that, but at this moment, it was indescribably comforting.
Did I dare to hope that my mother had left the journal just for me, to lead me to her after all this time? I didn’t know why she’d left. I didn’t know if she’d wanted to take me with her or not. Maybe she had, maybe Dad hadn’t let her. What if my real home was with her, wherever she was?
Deep down, I always thought I would see her one day. That somehow, I’d get a phone call, or a letter, or just an address. And I would stand in front of some foreign door, both terrified of and desperate for what awaited on the other side.
I placed my hand over the heart, imagining the tree as a door, and the carved initials as the bell. Rain pattered softly. Who’s there? I imagined her saying.
“It’s me,” I murmured, with my forehead on the bark. “Can I come in?”
I fell forward. A section of the bark had swung inward, throwing me off balance. On my hands and knees, I looked up in shock. There, inside the hollow of the trunk, stood a mirror.
The mirror stood a little taller than me, so it had to be close to six feet. The frame was a delicate design of twining thorny vines and roses in silver. And there was not a spec of dirt anywhere on it – no dust or corrosion of any kind. The glass of the mirror was absolutely pristine. It seemed to glow.
I climbed back to my feet, gaping at it in wonder. I saw my reflection – my hair sticking to the sides of my face, rain dripping from my chin and my fingers – as I reached to touch the delicate silver branches and flowers that arched from the mirror’s frame. Who in their right mind would hide something this beautiful? I thought. Is this what my mother wanted me to find?
Then my finger pricked on something and I pulled back, shaking my hand reflexively. It must have been one of the thorns. A drop of my blood hit the mirror.
Against all laws of logic and nature, the surface of the mirror rippled on the droplet’s impact, waves undulating out to the mirror’s rim. The surface began to darken and dim. It seemed to dissolve, until I was no longer looking at a mirror, but a silver-rimmed hole in the back of the trunk. But it did not show the orchard on the opposite side. I beheld through the rose frame a darkened stairwell, leading upward.
It did not even occur to me to step away. I reached out my arm, testing to see if the glass was really gone or if it was an illusion. My hand passed right through, and I swear it even felt cooler on the other side. I pulled my hand back and stared at it, marveling. I had to. I had to go. Zipping the journal safely into my jacket once again, I stepped over the mirror’s rim into the stairwell. I shivered as I passed through, a tingle running through my nervous system that faded as my feet found purchase on the stone floor.