Dad was upset. At breakfast he kept saying, “Well, he finally did it,” again and again. Mr. O’Toole, the neighbor who Dad hated, cut down the beech tree, the last tree left in the yard from back when the lots were still forest, no houses. Mr. O’Toole said it was on his property line—it was his as much as Dad’s. The stump he left behind was cracked and mangled. When Mr. O’Toole killed the tree he must have been angry, as angry as Dad was now.
“Bastard did the same thing—”
“Pat, watch your language,” Mom said.
“—he did the same thing with the last chestnut,” Dad said, “on the other side of his property, on the line with the Stedmores. The very last chestnut tree for miles and miles. You know, a long time ago, Mirela, there were chestnut trees all over the place. Their flowers were white, and when they fell in the spring it was like a second snow. Now it’s just the cottonwoods, with the cobwebby kind of snow. You know those? Anyway, that imbecile went ahead and cut down that chestnut one day, needled and needled Bill Stedmore about it day after day, week after week, and Bill held firm, and even still, one day O’Toole went and goddamn did it.”
“Pat, come on with the language,” Mom said.
“He just went and did it. And then I guess it was my turn with the beech.”
Mirela told Dad that he should call the police on Mr. O’Toole. Mom and Dad laughed quietly like it was a funny secret.
“I should call the police, Mirela,” Dad said, “but I want to go easy on the guy.”
“You should call the police,” Mirela said, “and then they’ll send Mr. O’Toole to Colorado.”
And then Dad was looking at Mom like the light from his eyes could explode her and Mom was talking in a high, pulling voice about how heavy the cottonwood snow had been this past year and Mirela started laughing like they had been just a moment before, making noise to fill the dizzy space that had opened up between them.
She doesn’t remember much of Colorado anymore. Maybe she dreamed it. In the memory or the dream, they hold her down. The good thing about being held down was that it meant the day was close to finished—it was what they did when they were almost done with her. The last day of all was different because they started with holding her down. That was how she knew it would be a short day.
Now the beech was something that was destroyed and still lived. A beech needs a lot of space to grow, and maybe this one did not have enough space to die. The tree had ended, and then there were the beginnings of the same tree. Splinters and shards from the top of the stump had scattered, pushing outward into a crooked semicircle, like voles or stoats had begun stacking the fragments as cords of firewood. One corner of the stump was hollowed out like a cave, with crags of bark hanging down like stalactites and strung with lichens. Moss bloomed on the bark, and toadstools lined the entrances to a pair of rabbit warrens, dug in the soft earth. A teetering mushroom stalk shot up nearly to Mirela’s knee. A half-dozen green vertical shoots grew even taller, fanned with wide green leaves. These were the root suckers, like baby versions of the tree, copies, made out of a knot of tissue from the base of what had been the tree. You could almost kill the tree—basically kill it—and it would start itself over from almost nothing. You didn’t need a seed or a flower.
It was Dad who explained all of these things to her. His company was clearing some woods near Klein Road to build new houses, and some mornings, Mirela drove with him to the site in the red pickup truck. If they got up before anyone else in the house, arrived at the site by sunrise, they could usually see deer. Where their house is now used to be woods, too. You can tell which trees are the oldest because they are taller than the rest, and their branches start higher up, because they had to compete with so many other trees for space, reaching toward the sunlight and rain.
Dad knows all the names of the trees and plants and flowers and tells them to Mirela. She only has to hear each name twice, maybe three times, and then she remembers it always. You can learn all the trees, and you can also look at a leaf on its own, and then look up around you, and you’ll know which tree the leaf belongs to, because this one has round, heart-shaped leaves, or that one has slender leaves edged with little spikes, like teeth.
She likes kneeling in the soil in the morning, when it’s still dewy and her knees go cold. From the ground beneath the eastern white pine, Mirela gathers the pine cones and brings them home and glues them to construction paper, and she decorates them with paint and glitter. She gathers chestnuts and paints faces on them: smiling, sad, mad. Hickory trees have catkins, long droopy green flowers that look like caterpillars, and she brings those home, too. Same with the twigs of the eastern hemlock, which sprout blades of grass and look like tiny, doll-sized fans. They go in the big shoebox, the one that Mom’s winter boots came in, with the caterpillars and the pine cones.
Mirela wanted the red buds from the dogwood, but none had fallen yet. You can’t just take what you want off a tree—the tree has to decide to shed it first. The female cottonwood trees first make red flowers, like a dogwood, and then seeds with a cotton covering. She didn’t mind the cobwebs of cotton that blew around in May and June—Mom and Dad didn’t like how the cotton clogs the drains and gets in between the bricks on the patio. Mirela uses handfuls of cotton to keep her caterpillars cozy at night.
If you climb a tree, it will move with you—it shifts with your weight. If you slip on a tree, the branch will suddenly feel wider and denser than before; it will seem to sprout little knots and ridges, giving you more traction. It breathes with you and makes up for your mistakes. Your arms and legs start to feel a little harder, thicker, like you’re becoming a part of it. Sometimes she scrapes her hands and arms on the bark of trees, but it doesn’t hurt. The bark scrapes off like skin, and she doesn’t think it hurts the tree, either.
You can call a tree all different things. A canoe birch is also called a paper birch and a white birch. You can also call a tree by its scientific name, which is in Latin, a language for trees and animals. She could say the names as many times as she wanted, as loud as she wanted, and usually Dad didn’t mind. The American beech is Fagus grandifolia. The American chestnut is Castanea dentata. The eastern hemlock is Tsuga canadensis. The eastern cottonwood is Populus deltoides. Nobody else in her family knew Latin. No one can take it from her or tell her she’s doing it wrong.
When she was first learning her Latin tree names, PJ and Sean teased her about being a vampire from Transylvania. The names sounded to them like a curse in the Dracula movie they had on tape. There was a big orphanage in Transylvania, in Sighet, but that wasn’t where she came from—hers was Cighid, in Ghiorac, near the Hungarian border. Not Transylvania. She could prove it because she had it all on a map. And then there was another orphanage in Siret, in the northwest. Cighid, Sighet, Siret—in the ear of a silly American boy who had never been anywhere in the world, who never knew another language, maybe it all sounded the same. PJ and Sean had never even been to Colorado, and that’s in the same country. Mom sent away for the maps of Romania. Mirela learned the maps and tried to show them to PJ and Sean. “Cighid, not Sighet!” she said, but they didn’t know what she was talking about.
The bitternut hickory is Carya cordiformis. Bitternut gets its name because it produces nuts that nobody will eat, not even a starving squirrel.
Once, when they were looking at the maps together, Mom asked if she wanted to go back to Romania. A tantrum came over her because she thought Mom wanted to send her back to Cighid. And then Mom said she only meant to visit, but the only place they’d ever visited was Colorado, and she didn’t want to go back there, either. Finally she understood that Mom was asking if she wanted to go to Romania just for a few days—not now, and not to stay. She was still angry at Mom because she should have known how to ask this question right. When she was little, she had to look for words in two languages. Mom never had to do that, and so she doesn’t think as carefully as Mirela does about the right way to say things.
Mom didn’t want her to watch PJ and Sean’s Dracula movie because it was too grown-up, which didn’t make sense because PJ and Sean weren’t grown-up back then. They liked the bloody scenes and hated the kissing scenes, although some of the bloodiest scenes had kissing. Mirela did see a few minutes of the movie here and there. In one scene, hands in black gloves move over the fur of a white wolf. The thick white fur and the soft dark leather filled the whole screen, and a warm, deep cello played. She could feel herself going inside the fur, becoming another person, a movie-person. This other person could fall asleep in the dog’s fur, curl up inside a finger of the gloves, the cello making the sound that the gloves felt like, and no one could see her—she couldn’t see herself.
She asked Mom for a dog that looked like a white wolf, like in the movie. Mom asked if she wanted to do research on dogs first, like the research she does with the weather and the trees and the maps of Romania. She does want to visit Romania someday, but she needs to learn everything about it before she goes. She remembers some words: elefante, girafa, tigru, urs. In Romania there is only urs. Not the tigru—the lynx. The chamois, which is a cross between a goat and an antelope. And lots of wolves, like in the Dracula movie. The movie did get that right. When a grown-up mother wolf goes out to find food and comes back with a full belly, the baby wolves stick their snouts inside her mouth, trying to make her throw up into them. The wolves live in the Carpathians, the mountains where Dracula built his castle. She wishes she was from there but she’s not.
Lauren, PJ, and Sean are all from Buffalo, born at Children’s Hospital. There’s a picture of them in a fancy carved frame hanging in the den, of the last summer before Mirela came. They’re standing on green grass beneath a big blue sky, arms locked together, smiling into the sun. Long tan legs. They didn’t know anyone named Mirela. There are no pictures of her before age three. She watched herself mirrored in the glass, there beside her family.
It’s hard to fall asleep at night because you’re waiting in the darkness until you fall inside it, and you don’t know what will happen to you in there. Mirela rocks at night to tire herself out, so she can forget what she’s waiting for. She sits up cross-legged, wraps her arms around herself, and goes forward and back, forward and back. The bedsprings squeak and the bed moves around on the floor. She bumps her head against the headboard—not enough to hurt herself, no matter what Mom thinks. It crowds out the thoughts, the turning in her head, nothing else coming in, no memories no pictures no shapes no shadows no-Mirela in the room alone thump thump thump no room for anything but thump thump thump.
One morning at breakfast PJ said something bad about the sound of the rocking of the bed, something very grown-up, and Sean gasped and Mom went scary-quiet, and Dad raised his hand and Mom jumped up and caught Dad’s arm and PJ ran away, upstairs to his room. Then Dad threw his fork across the kitchen and it clanged against the dishwasher and he walked outside to his truck and Mirela went under the table. Ears ringing, room spinning, everything going fast fast fast too fast like she would break apart, and she wrapped her arms around her head to keep from flying off the floor. She rocked and hummed. She recited her tree names and the trees surrounded her. The alphabet letters in the names circled around her and she was safe inside them. The butternut tree is Juglans cinereal. The eastern white pine is Pinus strobus. The sweet birch is Betula lenta. Its caterpillar catkins are yellow, not green.
Everyone was gone except Mom, under the table with Mirela, not touching her, just there.
“I remember someone hit me,” she told Mom.
“Who?” Mom asked. “Who hit you, my love?”
“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
Mom’s voice was wobbly. “I’m sorry, Mirela. No one should hit anyone. No one will ever hit you.”
“Dad was going to hit PJ.”
“That was wrong. Dad should not have acted like that. Dad has never hit anyone in his life, and he never will.”
“Why did Dad want to hit PJ?”
“He didn’t want to—something came over him.”
“Why did something come over him?”
“PJ said bad words. It was mean, and PJ shouldn’t have said it. It made Dad angry. But it was no reason for Dad to act like that. Hitting is always wrong. Even wanting to hit is wrong.”
“I hit you.”
“No—you used to. You don’t anymore.”
“Sometimes I want to hit you.”
“I know. Something comes over you, like it came over Dad. But you fight it. You fight it and it makes you stronger until you’re so strong that you don’t ever feel that way anymore.”
What did Mom know? How could she say that she knew? She wasn’t inside.
“Can I give you a hug, Mirela?” Mom asks, and she knows she’s always supposed to say yes.
And then she says, “Are you ready to look at Mommy, Mirela?”
It was late October. Mom and Mirela were going to the Saint Mary’s playground to meet Mom’s friend and her new baby. Lauren was home from college even though she wasn’t supposed to be.
“Can I come, too?” Lauren asked. She wasn’t really asking. When Mom and Mirela came into the garage, Lauren was already curled up in the front passenger seat of the Jeep, knees drawn to her chest.
Mom asked Lauren how she was feeling, and Lauren didn’t answer. She was pretending to be sad and lonely. She’d been following Mom around all afternoon like she was on a leash.
“Stop stop stop stop don’t be mean,” Mirela murmured to herself as Mom was backing the car out of the garage.
“Whatever it is, Mirela, stop beating yourself up about it,” Mom said, smiling at Mirela in the rearview. Like she could let herself inside Mirela’s head when she felt like it, poke around at her stuff, act like she knew where everything went.
“No, you stop!” Mirela screamed, kicking the back of Mom’s seat, and Mom halted the car in the driveway and folded her hands in her lap and counted aloud to ten, and Lauren turned in her seat away from Mom.
“It’s okay to get mad sometimes, Mirela,” Lauren said quietly.
Lauren was being fake—she was annoyed with Mirela, but she was fighting how she felt, pretending to be understanding. Mirela fought how she felt all the time, so maybe Lauren thought Mirela was fake, too. The one who didn’t fight was Dad. Dad felt how he seemed.
They got to Saint Mary’s as the sun was getting low in the sky. Mom’s friend was taking her baby out of a bucket swing. Mom’s voice went all high-pitched as she hugged her friend and asked to hold the baby. “Elise, she’s gorgeous!” Mom said. Lauren smiled at the baby and held her tiny foot in its pink sock.
“Hello, Mirela, it’s nice to meet you,” Mom’s friend said.
“Yes, thank you,” Mirela said.
“Ah, she wants your necklace.” Mom’s friend laughed as the baby pawed at Mom’s collarbone. But they didn’t really know what the baby wanted. Babies can’t say. Lauren held the baby while Mom and her friend stood around talking about what time the baby goes to bed and how the baby was learning to use a spoon. Mirela was angry because Mom was pretending to care about someone else’s baby—being fake, with her hooting laugh. When Mirela was a baby, no one ever showed her off to their friends, no one ever thought about her like they were thinking about this baby—it was like she was never a baby at all. None of it was fair.
She closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth like Dr. Delia showed her. From inside she asked to hold the baby, because that was fair. She wasn’t sure if they could hear her, but they did. She opened her eyes, and Mom and her friend were looking at her.
“Would that be okay, Elise?” Mom asked her friend, who nodded. The nod was a lie. It wasn’t okay with her. Mom’s friend was fighting how she felt. And Mom was anxious about it, too. Mirela smiled to reassure them, and also because she was glad they were anxious—they were wrong to feel the way they did, so it was right for them to be uncomfortable. It was fair. Mom asked Mirela to sit down on a bench, and then Lauren carefully laid the baby down on her lap, the back of the baby’s head nestled in the crook of Mirela’s arm. She concentrated. She smoothed the baby’s romper, which had pink and white checks. She adjusted the brim of the baby’s hat to make sure her face was in shadow. She nudged one finger under the strap of the hat to check that it wasn’t too snug beneath the baby’s chin.
The baby had big brown eyes and shiny black hair. If she had ever been a baby, she would have looked like this.
She held the baby and they looked at each other’s eyes and it didn’t hurt. She didn’t want to look away. She did look away to check on Mom’s friend. Her eyes were wide and her body was stiff. Mirela noticed this and she felt the twin pinpricks, the heat of the anger and the satisfaction at the same time—to know how others see her. She looked back into the baby’s eyes. Her thumb was in the baby’s hand. The baby furrowed her brow, pursed her lips in an interested way. She cooed and the sound curled up at the end. The baby was thinking hard about Mirela. Lauren and Mom and Mom’s friend faded, and now it was just Mirela and the baby, a robin peeping in the distance, a breeze petting the grass and tickling the hair on the back of Mirela’s neck and making the baby blink. She took the baby into her quiet place. They were alone in there. Like inside a tree. Or Mirela was the tree moving with the baby, shifting under her weight. She lifted the baby closer so she could smell her, pressing her nose to her neck. Honey and almonds. The baby smiled and kicked her legs. She reached up to touch Mirela’s face. Her fingers pressing on her cheek, her lips.
Alphabet letters circle around her, linking together. She is not afraid. She closes her eyes. She breathes in the baby and she hears the words.
You are safe from me.
I am safe from me.
The baby is me.