Okay, that’s good…” Orla shouldered the kitchen phone and wrote down everything on a notepad while resisting the urge to ask for correct spelling. “Is that bad?…Should we do more testing?…Okay.”
Shortly after the phone rang, Eleanor Queen had left the table, where she’d been doing schoolwork, and wandered to the back door. She lingered there, gazing out, her breath fogging up the glass window.
“You’re sure? You’d feel safe having your own kids drink it?…Okay, thank you…We will, thanks again, bye.” She hung up. “Shaw?” she called out toward his studio. He didn’t respond, but Tycho bounded in carrying a coloring book. He joined his sister at the back door, standing on tiptoes to see out the window.
“Shaw?” Orla called again, though her attention had been diverted from delivering a message to her husband to investigating the object of her children’s interest. “What are you guys doing?”
“Looking, Mama,” said Tycho.
“What are you looking at?” She peered through the window over their heads. Tycho, apparently unsure of the answer, turned to his sister. “Eleanor Queen, did you finish your chapter?” Orla asked.
“Can we go out there?” her daughter said, pointing.
Orla had yet to venture into the thick woods behind the house; after Shaw’s misadventure their first day, she’d been trying to pretend it didn’t exist. Barely twenty-four hours ago Shaw had almost run her over. She wasn’t keen on visiting new terrain. “I don’t know…”
“We won’t get lost,” said Eleanor Queen, reading a portion of her mind. “We’ll just go visit the tree, it’s lonely. It’s right there.”
“We’ll visit the tree, Mama.”
“What’s out there?” Shaw asked, bustling into the kitchen, seeing his family huddled at the door. His fingers were speckled with orange and red paint. He elbowed the refrigerator door open and grabbed a fresh bottle of water.
“Hey.” Orla stepped over and leaned her hip against the fridge. “Just talked to the water guy. He reports…” She consulted her notepad. “No coliform bacteria—that’s the main thing they look for, he said. They did find trace amounts of arsenic but he wasn’t concerned, said it—”
“Yeah, there are trace amounts in a lot of water. So that’s all good?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Okay.” He seemed neither pleased nor relieved. Orla, uncharitably, would have described him as impatient and a little distant, the same mood he’d woken up in. She’d heard him get up and go downstairs in the middle of the night. “Just checking on something,” he’d said upon returning to bed. All morning he’d had the lack-of-sleep grumps.
“We’re going out to the big tree,” said Tycho. “Right, Ele-Queen?”
“Okay, well, have fun.” Shaw started to head back to his studio.
“Wait.” Orla was growing weary of Shaw’s disciplined-artist routine; it seemed more like self-consumed avoidance. “Did you want to come with us? The kids want to check out—”
“I’m working.”
“Okay, so.” She was certain that if he needed anything, it was a nap, not more time holed up in his studio. “Do you think it’s safe?”
“We’re not going to get lost, Mama, I already told you.” Eleanor Queen sounded peevish.
“Thank you, Bean, I appreciate your confidence, but we don’t know everything about…” Orla didn’t finish. Did they—she—know anything about what was out there? She wasn’t a thousand percent sure that trace amounts of arsenic couldn’t cause some sort of problem, but Shaw wasn’t bothered by it, and the water guy wasn’t bothered. And the more days they were there, the more the idea settled in her bones: this place existed outside the realm of other places she had been, and there were gaping holes in her understanding of natural phenomena. The logic she’d previously applied to living in a city couldn’t be relied on here.
“You’re probably better off if I’m not there,” Shaw said. “I’ll stay inside.” He strode out of the kitchen with his precious bottle of water and his wounded ego. Orla didn’t have the patience to deal with his self-pity, even if he was, on some level, acknowledging both the potential for future strangeness and a concern for their safety. Between her husband’s distraction and her daughter’s annoyance, Orla wished she could retreat to her room, where she could shut the door and scream for a moment.
“The water’s safe!” Orla announced to one and all. “No more boiling.”
“Yay!” Tycho cheered.
“Well, I’m glad someone’s happy about that.” She poked her head into the living room and shouted louder than was necessary at Shaw’s back. “So we don’t need to be wasteful with the bottled—”
He shut his door, ignoring her.
She should’ve knocked, on principle. But instead, she stormed after him and entered his studio. “Doors are not for shutting in people’s faces.”
“Get out!” He reeled, startled, trying to block his second easel with his body.
“Why are you so crabby?”
“It’s not finished, I don’t like people to see—it’s not right yet.”
Since when had he cared about her seeing his unfinished work? But she wasn’t interested in that painting. It was the one on the other easel that made her grimace. It depicted a stand of trees, shorn in half by what could have been a tornado—or a giant with a machete who’d whacked his way through the forest. But instead of woody pulp where the branches had been cleaved, the limbs bled. Bones poked through. They looked like sharp, severed human limbs.
“That’s—”
Shaw moved to stand in front of the painting. “It’s just an experiment.”
“It’s disgusting—no offense. No wonder you’re in such a bad mood.”
He softened. “It’s not part of…it just came to me.”
“I’m thirsty!” Tycho galloped into the room.
Orla immediately hoisted him up and spun him around so he faced the door. Shaw, displaying good sense, picked up the offending painting and turned it toward the wall. Orla snagged Shaw’s bottle of water from his chair, handed it to her son, gave him a gentle push out of the room.
“You’re going to scare the kids,” she hissed under her breath.
“See? Good reason to keep the door shut.” He gestured toward it, inviting her to leave.
“Nap. You need a nap, not more hours sniffing turpentine.” She marched out, and the door clicked shut behind her.
Hands on her hips, Orla considered her options. At the end of her rope and in need of fresh air—some space, some movement—she marched back into the kitchen. “Okay. Boots, snow pants, the works. Let’s go visit our friend the giant tree.”
“Yay!” both children cheered.
Eleanor Queen’s eruption of glee soothed some of Orla’s disgruntled edges, though a part of her was still tempted to call through Shaw’s door and tell him to send a search party if they didn’t return in T minus sixty minutes. She was being overly dramatic. And vindictive? And she was determined to be the less disturbed parent. Bleeding trees? They were only going in a straight line—there and back—not trying to survey the property with a map and a malfunctioning compass. Nothing to be afraid of.