Garrison lived in one Chicago suburb and worked in another, so that the freeway between the two was as familiar to him as his own face in the mirror. He knew its moods, its good days and bad, its haggard mornings and tired nights. In summer, veils of heat haze and pollution draped across the sky. Sunlight reflected in blinding metal smears. In winter, the windshield wipers dragged through layers of churned-up brown slush, and taillights lit the early dusk. If Garrison was lucky the drive took forty-five minutes. If luck was against him it was an hour or more. On the drive to work the skyline of downtown Chicago was fastened to his windshield, its impossibly massive towers rendered light and floating by distance. Of course there were occasions when he went into the city for one reason or another, but it was hard to connect the pretty mirage he saw while driving with the actual place.
He drove a ten-year-old Lexus, built back before they began loading them up with too many overcomplicated features. He maintained it immaculately, changed the oil himself and took the car into the dealer at the first sign of vibration or imbalance. The Lexus had an excellent sound system. He carried with him a variety of music, jazz and classic rock and, for days when he had to muscle through fast-moving traffic, opera. He had all manner of equipment designed for his comfort and safety: a compass mounted on the dashboard, a cupholder for his coffee, and a hi-tech insulated mug his daughter gave him for Christmas. There was a special stand for charging his cell phone and a sheepskin seat cover to ease his back. The trip could be measured out in miles, minutes, landmarks, other people’s bad driving, fatigue. He was used to it and didn’t complain overmuch, since complaining never got you anywhere.
One evening in early spring, Garrison drove home aware of a dangerous lack of concentration, an extra effort required to keep his eyes and hands and reflexes focused. It had been a bad and numbing day at work. He was a division head for one of the large health insurance companies, or, in the preferred terminology, a health care provider. The first two floors of the building were taken up by the call center, at least what was left of it after much of the work had been routed to a group of Indian subcontractors specially trained in colloquial American speech. The rooms contained dozens of computer screens, each of them glowing with the blue of aquariums, another mirage that momentarily distracted him.
An elevator took him past the actuarial and payment processing departments and up through the corporate layers, auditing and human resources and support staff, until he arrived at his own precincts. Garrison’s division oversaw the financials from three different regions. Garrison reported to a vice president for national revenues, and the vice president to the CEO. In this way money traveled upward, against gravity, like water forced through pipes.
Garrison was good at his job, which was different than enjoying it. At one time he would have said he enjoyed it, found it challenging, relished the problem solving he had to do and his small and large successes. But in the last year or so, the minor annoyances, things he had previously ignored or shrugged off, had begun to catch at all his worn-down spots. He found it an effort to maintain the jokiness and small civilities the office required. More often than not he would have preferred to be left alone.
The corporation, like all corporations, was relentless in its need for more and more of everything: income, productivity, growth, happy stockbrokers. More and constant pressure on the money-carrying pipes. Aside from the ritual congratulations to those who had met this or that benchmark (designed to make those who had not done so anxious), there was seldom any sense of a job well done, or even completed. This was the nature of the beast, it was what it was, and any staleness or exasperation Garrison willed away through sustained and diligent bouts of work. He was a believer in the virtue of work itself, of activity and honest effort, which would pull you through a bad patch when nothing else could.
This day’s routine had been disrupted by a meeting involving two of the assistant managers who were at war with each other. One of them was a woman who had worked there longer than Garrison but had never advanced beyond this first managerial rung. Garrison knew she believed this to be due to sex, and now age, discrimination. Garrison couldn’t honestly say she was wrong, even though she had been told by Human Resources, and presumably by other people, that her complaints were not actionable. There was a certain type of female personality, fussbudget, Garrison labeled it, which overreacted and over-personalized, took offense too easily, nursed grudges. She would have been fine running an antique shop or bookstore, somewhere she could bully a couple of employees and wallow in gossip. Here she undermined herself at every turn. There had never been any reason to promote her, nor any real reason to let her go, except for her own unhappiness. She’d hung on all this time and seemed determined to end her days here, mostly out of spite.
She was already seated alone in the conference room when Garrison came in. He felt a familiar fatigue, measuring out the effort it would take him to handle her. “Good morning Loretta, how are you?”
“Fine. Thanks.” She spoke as if she had dipped a bucket into some vast reservoir of hurt feelings, meaning to convey that she wasn’t at all fine, and this was in some way Garrison’s fault, but she hardly expected him to care. In this, at least, she was right.
Garrison said, “Let’s see, we still need Rob, Mindy, Chris, and Derek.” Loretta made a particular face at Derek’s name. She should try not to do such things. Garrison couldn’t recall why or how she and Derek had started feuding. Probably one of them had broken the other’s crayons.
He asked her a question about one of the report sections, to draw her attention to the matter at hand. She bent over her files, and Garrison saw that she had a bald spot the size of a fifty-cent piece at the top of her head, and that the hair along her part was thinning.
She found the section Garrison needed and looked up. “What?”
“Nothing.”
Loretta opened her purse and extracted a tin of mints, shaking it at Garrison to offer him one. He said no thank you. She popped a couple in her mouth and crunched them. “Got to have something. I still get the cravings. Smoking,” she explained, since Garrison wasn’t getting it.
“Ah.” He was pretty sure she’d told him before about quitting smoking, and he hadn’t remembered it. He wished the others would get here.
Loretta said, “Look, maybe I shouldn’t say anything . . .”
You shouldn’t, Garrison thought. Don’t.
“… but I’m having problems getting Derek to respond to my emails. He just ignores them. Then I find out that when he sends his updates, he copies everyone but me. It means that some things just aren’t getting done right.”
“What does Rob say?” Rob was their immediate supervisor. It was not a happy job.
Loretta’s mouth had deep, hinged lines on both sides, like a marionette’s. “Oh, he thinks Derek can do no wrong. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“I’m sure that Rob wants everyone to do their best work.” She didn’t really expect him to say anything different, did she?
The marionette jaw worked up and down, then quivered. “I know everybody around here thinks I’m old and whiny and don’t have to be taken seriously. But every day I come into this office, I give it a hundred and ten percent. I bust my poor old whiny ass.” She tried to offer this last in a humorous, self-mocking tone, which made it even worse.
“Of course you do, Loretta. People respect your effort.”
“Oh do they? It’s hard to tell, what with all the eye rolling.”
The others came in then, milling around with coffee mugs and making their cheery noise. “I brought doughnuts for everyone,” said Derek, holding the box aloft. It was such a Derek thing to do. Garrison didn’t like Derek any better than he did Loretta. He just found Derek easier to deal with. Derek was sleek and well-barbered, all transparency and ambition. Derek was the one you could count on to salute the flag once it was run up the flagpole, laugh at jokes when laughing was required, fetch the stick when it was thrown. Garrison could never decide if he was a smart person playing dumb or if dumb came naturally to him. Derek would go far, but never as far as he’d think he deserved.
Loretta had retreated into abrupt, curdled silence. Derek stopped presiding over the doughnuts and gave her a searching look. “Hey, did you do something different to your hair?”
The day wore on. An irritated sensibility grew in him and he couldn’t settle into his usual working pace. He was losing some capacity for simple human response. It wasn’t just Loretta. Other people too launched themselves at him, demanding his attention, sympathy, response, active interest, and it all dropped away from him as if he were a wall. He wished he could fall asleep where he sat.
A little before five he gave up on accomplishing anything of substance and headed home, tired from doing nothing. The freeway was already moving slowly and he resigned himself to a long trip. He’d only managed a couple of miles when his wife called, asking if he’d run into the bad weather yet. He said, “What weather?” just as he looked up at the looming sky.
This was March and early for tornadoes, but that was his first thought when he saw the strange banded clouds extending the length of the western horizon. He told his wife he had to go, and hung up to attend to his driving. The sky was still bright above him but that wouldn’t last. A front was moving through, visibly demarcated with strips of clear and dark sky. Garrison calculated that they were moving toward each other on a direct heading, although it was hard to tell just where they would intersect. The cars coming at him on the other side of the highway had their headlights on but no windshield wipers. He switched on the all-news radio station and waited through a restaurant review and an advertisement for used photocopiers. There was a severe thunderstorm warning, a storm moving in from the northwest. Cautions about floods and damaging winds, nothing about tornadoes, at least not yet.
He’d never seen such a sky. He kept resting his eyes on it, then jerking them back to the roadway, the kind of driving he cursed in other people. The leading edge of the front was the color of soot, and the layer behind that was steel, and the body of the storm a bulging purple. As he and the front drew closer together, he saw whorls of clouds embedded throughout it, places where some upper-level vortex swirled. They looked exactly like the clouds in science fiction movies that billowed and boiled and disgorged alien spacecraft.
By the time he reached his exit he was entirely beneath the purple canopy. Buildings glowed, luridly backlit. The rain itself held off until he was a few blocks from home, then it came hammering down. In a few moments the gutters turned to shallow lakes and the wind pushed waves across their surfaces. The same wind strove against him head-on. He slowed to keep control of the steering and to avoid the worst of the standing water. He didn’t want to wash out his brakes. At the same time he had to keep up enough momentum, without hydroplaning, so he wouldn’t stall out.
Garrison made the turn into his own driveway and the automatic garage door opened to receive him. He’d never doubted that he’d make it home safely, so it wasn’t nerves, the aftermath of nerves, that caused him to sit in his car for a long minute once he turned the engine off. He was trying to remember the exact way the sky had looked, fix it in his mind’s eye.
Garrison’s wife was waiting for him in the kitchen. She reached up to give him a quick, hard hug and asked him if he’d had the rain all the way and he said he hadn’t. She said there were power lines down in scattered places, she was worried he might run into a downed line, and he said she shouldn’t worry about things like that. She got a beer from the refrigerator for him and told him it would be just a little while longer until dinner, and would he go check the battery on the backup sump pump?
Garrison stood in the den, drinking his beer and looking out the patio doors to the backyard. The rain was still sheeting, driving sideways, but already the worst had passed and the wind had slackened. The yard was deep and extended beyond the patio and his wife’s dormant flowerbeds to a clear space raggedly edged with shrubs and then to some full-sized trees along the lot line. If he’d been there alone, he would have gone outside and let the rain soak him to the skin. He put his fingers to the glass and they hummed with the small vibration. His wife called him for dinner and he turned away, feeling heavy-headed.
His daughter was away at her expensive college but his son still lived at home, and so it was the three of them who sat down at the table. There was a casserole of ground beef and rice and a salad with bottled dressing and the frozen potatoes that his son ate at almost every meal. His wife said that the television news was all about the storm, flooded streets and power outages and planes at O’Hare dodging lightning strikes, mass transit delays and people stranded. She said that they’d been lucky here so far but tomorrow she was going out and stocking up on batteries, lanterns, bottled water, all the things you were meant to have on hand in an emergency.
“That’s probably a good idea,” Garrison said. He finished his portion of casserole and put a few of the frozen potatoes on his plate. He cut into one and steam rose from its white, overprocessed interior. He put his fork down. “How can you eat these things?” he asked his son, and the boy, that incurious consumer of so many suspect commodities, shrugged and said that french fries were french fries.
The next day after work, Garrison slid open the patio doors and stood at the edge of the paved border. New grass was only beginning to come up and the bare spots in the yard were still muddy from the drenching rain. Garrison walked carefully out into the yard. The trees at the back were a mix of things he’d planted years ago when they were new to the house and had been ambitious about landscaping, along with some older, preexisting hardwoods. There were flowering crab, redbuds, an apricot that had never fruited, as well as a hackberry, a couple of silver maples, and one big oak that made the other trees grow in lopsided ways around its borders.
Garrison walked up to the oak, tripped over one of its above-ground roots spread out in knotty ridges. You could never mow around the things. He tilted his head back and looked along the trunk to the central canopy where the main branches began to spread, about fifteen feet up, he calculated. The tree had not yet leafed and some of last year’s leather-brown leaves still hung on in patches. He wondered how old the tree was, how old oak trees lived to be. He felt stupid not knowing.
When he came back inside his wife asked him what he’d been doing out there and Garrison said he was checking for wind damage.
That weekend he went to the big home improvement store near his house. In the lumberyard section he picked out the oldest employee, a gray-haired man with heavy shoulders, and waited until he turned his way. “Help you?”
“I hope so. I want to build a treehouse.”
“Ah. For the kids?”
“Grandkids.” Garrison paused. “Not that I have any yet.”
He waited to see if the man would turn stony or uncomprehending, but he laughed. “An investment for the future.”
“You might say that.”
“Ever build a treehouse before?” Garrison shook his head. “Why don’t you start with telling me about your tree.”
Garrison spent forty minutes talking to Dave, that was his name, about the different strategies of treehouse structures. Supports could be built from the ground up, or the foundation could be anchored to the tree itself. There were such things as fixed and flexible joints, and you needed flexible, since trees moved and treehouses moved along with them. Was he going to put in windows? Garrison thought so. Sure. He could get them prehung, all you had to do was install the frames.
When he left, Garrison had a sheaf of sketches, a list of supplies, and some helpful booklets. He stopped in the hardware department and bought a twenty-foot extension ladder, and, at Dave’s suggestion, a ladder leveler so he could set it up on uneven ground. He arranged for it to be delivered and spent another few minutes browsing the saws, planes, nail guns, and drills, calculating what he already had at home, what he’d need to add or replace.
The ladder arrived two days later. Garrison had them bring it inside the back gate, then he loaded it on a yard cart to get it to the far end of the lot. He bought a lawn chair from the patio so he could sit and read all the safety instructions. It pleased him that even a ladder had so much in the way of information attached to it, things he would have to learn.
His wife and son weren’t home, so he managed the ladder by himself. That was just as well. He wasn’t yet ready to answer a lot of pestering questions. Once he had the ladder up and resting against the tree, he worked the rope and pulley until the extension locked into place, pulled the base away from the tree at a thirty-degree angle, and began to climb.
He was cautious at first, testing the footing, but then he allowed himself to trust it. When he was a good twelve feet up, his head reached the level of the first branch. He looked around, trying to imagine it. The day was chilly and a sharp spring wind rattled the old leaves. In every direction a tracery of bare, overlapping branches enclosed the space. It was fine. It was more than fine.
He made several more trips to see Dave and together they came up with a set of working plans. The foundation would be bolted to the tree, but would extend out past the trunk and there it would be supported by a couple of cement-anchored ground posts and struts. They would edge the platform with sections of rubber tire to protect the bark from rubbing. “Where would you be without the tree,” Dave said.
Garrison said he had that right and apologized for taking up so much of his time. Dave said that somebody was sure as hell going to take it up, and it might as well be him. Dave said that if Garrison wanted, he and his boy could by some Sunday and give him a hand with setting up scaffolding and getting the biggest pieces in place.
Garrison, a little surprised, said he’d appreciate it, thanks. He could manage the basic carpentry himself, if only barely; he didn’t mind if the finished product turned out more shack than house. He already had a house, a place to keep all the equipment of his life, and the lives of his family. This would be something else.
The day he and Dave agreed on was the last Sunday in April, warm enough to work up a sweat, but still cool enough that sweating felt good. “Real nice place you got,” said Dave politely. “Thanks,” Garrison said. He knew the house didn’t really interest either of them. Garrison allowed himself to envy Dave’s panel van, which was all business: the loops of power cord fastened to hooks in the side, the heavy-duty toolboxes with their array of saw blades, drill bits, wrenches, fittings, bolts, and fasteners, the row of ten-gallon buckets, splashed and stained with paint and primer, holding work gloves, shop rags, files, switches, coiled wire. They unloaded what they needed and got to work. Right away Garrison saw how out of his depth he was, how impossible it would have been to proceed on his own. He sucked it up and made himself useful.
Dave’s grown son turned out to be an ace at tree climbing, balancing in unlikely perches. (Garrison’s own son sulked in the house, refusing to come outside.) Bracing the ground posts was what gave them the most trouble. Garrison had set the cement for the bases a few days ago, and in spite of his cautions the forms had shifted one side off plumb. He felt like an idiot. “Ah, we’ll git her done,” said Dave, and so they did.
By noon the first long boards of the platform were in place, making it possible to stand upright in the tree’s leafy center. Garrison climbed up and took his first cautious step. It was the damnedest feeling, this untethering from the ground, even if it was only by a dozen feet or so. Dave stood on the scaffold below him and levered a board over the platform’s edge. Garrison bent to receive it. It would be easy to lose your balance. Or give in to the perverse impulse, take a step off the leading board. He understood why someone might do that, just for the sensation, that instant of green flight.
Dave and his son worked stolidly away, and Garrison put his head down and tried to match their pace. He found the rhythm of swinging a hammer, and little by little it steadied him. These days he felt strange to himself, as he knew he must seem strange to others. It quieted him to guide his muscles, hit his mark, move on to the next one. Mindless work, people called it, and that was exactly right. Mindlessness was what he wanted. But you couldn’t go after it straight on. You couldn’t even really want it. You had to sneak up on it, forget all about it, and if you were lucky it showed itself, like a rare bird. He drove another nail home and then another and another.
At the end of the day they sat in the lawn chairs, drinking beer and contemplating the neat, 8’-by-12’ platform, braced and level, ready to receive walls, windows, door, and roof. Dave said, “Another thing about a treehouse, you can keep adding on. Go into the next tree if you wanted, say, a rope bridge leading up to a whattyacallit. Crow’s nest.” Garrison agreed that this was something to think about. He knew he’d have to do the rest of the work himself, just to keep it his.
Garrison’s wife tried to make sense of the treehouse in different ways, once she was convinced he was “serious” about it, meaning, she was unable to talk him out of it. “But why?” she kept asking, reasonably enough, and when he couldn’t provide much of an answer beyond he felt like doing it, she grew silent, injured, as if he were withholding some part of himself from her. Which he guessed he was, although not in any way he could have helped. He knew she had discussions with her women friends, as she did about all other aspects of their life together, a committee of females evaluating him at every step. She turned ironic and tolerant toward him. He was, after all, a man of a certain age, and all sorts of blundering misbehaviors might be expected of him. No doubt the friends had told her that a treehouse was harmless, such a transparently juvenile thing. Much better than an affair, or even a sports car. After all, he was right there in the backyard where she could keep an eye on him.
For a time she brought lemonade and sandwiches out to him as he worked, and asked questions to show she was interested. “Why did you leave all those cracks between the boards? I can see right through them.”
“So that rainwater can drain.” He was using a power sander to shave the top edge of a wall panel, and he had to turn it off in order to talk to her. When she looked like she was done, he started it up again.
His wife covered her ears and once he paused to take another measurement, she said, “I’m surprised the zoning laws let you do this. I mean, what if everybody on the block went around putting little houses in their backyards?”
“As long as it’s not rental property, they’re fine with it.” He gripped the panel and laid it flat on the hoist he’d rigged to get the heavier lumber up to the platform. He was pleased with the hoist. A sling of canvas with grommets was threaded through with nylon rope and attached to a donkey, a Y-shaped branch he’d pruned out and carefully cut to size. The donkey was fastened to a higher branch and when he’d winched the donkey, turn by turn, to take up the slack rope, he tied the sling off to the platform.
“What color are you going to paint it when it’s done?” his wife asked.
“I haven’t decided.” He hadn’t thought about painting it. It hadn’t occurred to him.
“You could do it white and green trim to match the house. So there’d be the real house and the miniature version.”
“Yeah, that would be nice.” He finished securing the panel in the canvas and was ready to climb.
“I wish you’d wear a safety harness when you’re working up there. What if you slipped? Or had a dizzy spell or, God forbid, a heart attack?”
“I’ll get one if it would make you feel better.”
“You mean, you’ll promise anything if it will make me go away.”
“I didn’t say that, Janine.”
“You don’t even see me anymore. I’m just this object you have to avoid running into.”
“I’m sorry you’re unhappy.” And he was. He was sorry for all the unhappy people in the world. “Maybe you could start playing tennis again, you used to play a lot of tennis when the kids were growing up. You were really good at it.”
“Do you know how long it’s been since we made love? Huh? Do you even remember the last time?”
“We can do that too, if you want.”
“If I want? If I want?” His wife’s shoulders shook, although the shaking had begun somewhere else, in her clenching hands, perhaps. She turned and ran across the yard to the house. Garrison waited until she’d gone inside, then he climbed the scaffold and maneuvered the wall panel upward, taking care not to let it swing wide and hit the trunk.
By now he had four walls and the trusses for the roof in place. He lay on his back on the floorboards and looked through the open spaces to the interlacing leaves, still new and unfurling, red-veined on their undersides. The sky between them was the blue of a watercolor. The trick was to forget what you were looking at, forget that those things had names, leaf or sky, green or blue. Forget that there was such a thing as a name. You had to try not to try. His breathing slowed. He was not asleep; his eyes were open. A space of time passed, or rather it did not pass, since he was not aware of it. Something roused him, a noise in the street, and brought him back to himself. “Wow,” he said out loud, what a silly word, and so he laughed and said it again, “Wow.”
He wondered if he could figure out how to put a skylight in the roof, decided regretfully against it.
At work he managed well enough, turning on his business self as if with a switch. It was like driving, a set of reflexes he could rely on. Once in a while, in conversation, he was aware of leaving a gap where words should have gone, or of people giving him measuring sorts of looks. But on the whole, it was remarkable how little of his attention and energy it took to keep his work life in motion. The smallest push from him sent it wobbling about the track.
Loretta was out sick for two weeks, then the word came that she had lung cancer and wouldn’t be coming back. A card made the rounds for everyone to sign. Even for people no one much liked, there was always a card. Garrison lingered over it for a long time, looking at the messages his coworkers had already inscribed, their expressions of sympathy and encouragement—Hang in there!—the festoons of exclamation points and hearts. Finally he wrote, “I hope you have peaceful days.” He drew in a breath and let it slip out again, all sweet air.
One evening his wife said to him, “Your car is dirty.”
“Yeah?” He looked out to the driveway. The Lexus’s windshield showed a clear half-moon where the wipers had cut through the dirt. “I better take care of that.” He felt bad about the car. It deserved better from him.
“What are you going to build next?” his wife asked. Her newest approach to him was to remain very calm, as if she were dealing, professionally, with someone of diminished capacity.
“Next?”
“When you finish your treehouse. I thought you’d probably start a new project.”
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“I thought you liked building things. The hands-on part of it.”
“Sure.” She’d followed him into the kitchen, where he’d gone to make a sandwich. She was always doing that now, tracking him through the house. “But that doesn’t mean I have to keep on doing it.”
“I am trying very hard to understand this, Brian.”
“I know.” She was waiting for him to say something else. He put the top on his sandwich and cut it in half. He said, “I saw one of those announcement boards in front of a church. You know the kind I mean? It said, ‘Life Handed Us Our Paycheck and We Said, We Worked Harder Than This.’”
His wife nodded. “You’ve always been a hard worker. I can see why it spoke to you.”
“I thought it was more about, just, life. What life’s supposed to be.”
“Would you be happier in a different job? We could manage. Get by on less. There are these people, career coaches. They’re supposed to help you figure out what you really want to do.”
Garrison knew he was explaining things badly. “I don’t mind my job. It just doesn’t seem as important as it used to be.”
His wife looked past him, as if some aspect of the cabinet behind him arrested her attention, the way she might if its surface had arranged itself to resemble the face of Christ. “Am I still important?”
“Of course you are,” Garrison said, but he didn’t say it fast enough, and she turned and walked from the room.
The roof was a struggle. Even though his carpentry skills had improved over the course of the project—they almost couldn’t help but improve—he gave himself about a C+ for the roof. He tar papered and shingled over the center seam and hoped for the best. Then he thought, so what if the roof leaked? He could lay himself down where the rain came through, let his skin fill up with it.
He made one more trip to see Dave and get the lumber for the permanent, anchored ladder. It would consist of half-round pine logs, sanded down to show the grain of the wood, like an extension of the trunk. He and Dave shook hands. “How’s life in the trees?” Dave asked, and Garrison said it was coming along pretty good. “You should stop by and see the finished production sometime,” he said, meaning it, but knowing Dave wouldn’t do so without a fixed and specific invitation.
“Sometime,” Dave agreed, and they talked awhile longer about the best way to fit the ladder treads, and what kind of stain or varnish he could use to protect any wood that wasn’t pressure-treated. They shook hands again when Garrison left, and he thanked Dave once more for his time and help. “Happy to oblige,” Dave said, then turned to assist the next waiting customer. Garrison, walking away, thought that he could do worse than to be like Dave, mild, knowledgeable, patient. But it would be too easy to let himself be lured in by that universe of equipment, all the sharp and shining busy-making things.
His daughter came home for a few weeks between her summer adventures. Her little red car pulled into the driveway one Sunday afternoon. She opened the car door and stretched out her thin, tan legs. Then her mother appeared on the front walk and the girl waved and squealed and ran to embrace her. Garrison, watching from an upstairs window, felt his heart tear like paper.
Dinner that night was made into an occasion, with a cloth laid on the table and drinks served in stemware. His daughter was a vegetarian now, like many other daughters, and so there was a mushroom sauce for the pasta, and a more elaborate salad than was usual, and an attempt at an eggplant dish. His son fixed himself a hamburger, ostentatiously rare, which he ate with considerable smacking and chomping. “That is so not cool,” his daughter said. “Why don’t you just feed him from a dish on the floor?”
“Wow, sophisticated college humor.”
“It’s his way of saying he’s missed you,” said Garrison’s wife.
“Oh yeah, like a dog misses fleas.”
“How’s his housebreaking going?” asked his daughter, with such a serious, concerned expression that they all started laughing. The boy made a comic face, like a dog begging at the table.
When they’d settled down and were once more working on their food, his daughter said, “So Dad, tell me about your treehouse.”
Garrison took the time to chew his bite of salad and swallow it. He saw that their earlier light and silly talk had been a kind of script, performed in the shadow of the central problem of himself. He took a sip of water. “What do you want to know?”
“Why didn’t you build us a treehouse when we were little, huh? That would have been awesome.”
“We would have had to worry about you falling.”
“That’s just a big fat excuse. You didn’t want us to have any fun.”
“That’s right,” said Garrison, with a heavy attempt at playfulness. “Fun, bad.”
“So why are you doing it? I mean, why now?”
His wife refilled her iced tea glass. “Anyone else?” she asked, holding the pitcher aloft. Garrison imagined the kind of information and complaints that she’d passed on to their daughter. He didn’t like to think of it. He said, blandly, “I guess I wanted a hobby. I thought it would be a challenge.”
His daughter pouted. “That’s not a very good answer.”
“You want a different answer, ask a different guy.”
Garrison was mildly surprised to realize that neither his son nor his wife had ever asked to see the treehouse. He wondered if they went up there while he was at work, if they stood in his spot on the bare boards, looking for clues to himself he might have left behind. “Sure. How about tomorrow, after I get home?”
The next day Garrison changed out of his office clothes and told his daughter to put on some shoes she could climb in. The extension ladder and scaffolding was still the only way up. “Careful,” he told her, standing on the ground, bracing the ladder. She worked her way up faster than he could have. “Hey,” he heard her say from up above him. He followed her to find her standing at the window of the small room, her face lit with the green, reflected sunshine of the canopy of leaves. The air was summer-warm. Cicadas buzzed around them. “This is great, Dad.”
“Glad you like it.” He unfolded the camp stool and deck chair he’d brought up. “Have a seat.”
She chose the stool, hugging her knees up to her chest. She’d been growing her hair out. The ends of her ponytail were sun bleached gold. “So what’s the deal here, is this your secret clubhouse, no girls allowed?”
“Except for you.”
“You’ll teach me the password and the secret handshake, huh?”
“Sure.” In spite of his best intentions, he felt fatigue creeping over him. He rallied against it. “You look like a surfer girl. Like a Beach Boys song.” She made a face; geezer music. “It was a compliment, honey.”
“Mom thinks you don’t love her anymore.”
Garrison considered this. “I don’t not love her.”
“That’s not so good, Dad.”
“No, I guess it’s not.”
“What’s wrong? Don’t say ‘nothing.’”
Garrison shook his head. There were words inside him somewhere, too heavy to dredge up.
“Dad.”
“I’m all right. I guess this is”—he made a sweeping hand
gesture, meant to indicate the treehouse, and everything that had led up to it—“I just wanted a place where I could be . . . quiet.”
His daughter looked around the small space again. “You did a good job. It smells nice. All woodsy.”
“Thanks.” He thought, yes, he had done a good job. The corners were square, the door frame tight, the wall boards straight. Now he could rest.
“This would be a great place to read. That’s what I’d do. Bring a book and an apple and hang out.”
Garrison considered. “Maybe the apple.”
“Or music. You could bring your music up here.”
“Ah.” He shrugged. “I haven’t spent much time on music lately.”
She pursed her lips softly, as if to whistle. She had always been the talker in the family, the one who needed the sound of answers. “Are you doing meditation?”
“Meditation always makes me think of incense and naked guys sitting around cross-legged, chanting.”
“Then could you just tell me what’s going on with you, instead of making me ask all these stupid questions? Are you sick? Are you mad about something? Jeez.”
“I’m not mad. Not sick either. Maybe just tired.” She wanted the secret password, the explanation that would unlock him. “You wake up one day and you realize, you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, like you’re going someplace. But you’re not.”
She was visibly trying to understand, wrinkling her forehead. She said, “Where is it you want to go?”
“Nowhere. I want to stop right where I am. Right here and now.”
“Stop?” she said, doubtfully.
“Stop pushing so hard. Get rid of all my tired, worried, mean, sad parts.”
“You’re not mean, Dad.”
“I can be. I have been.”
“Then don’t be. Cut it out.”
“I want to be . . . more like a tree. I don’t want so much baggage. Opinions. Judgments. Moods, good or bad.”
“But you’re not a tree! That’s all human being stuff! Dad! You’re freaking me out!”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to.”
“If you’re depressed,” she began, determined to argue him out of what he was saying.
“I think maybe I was depressed. Before. Now I’m better.”
“Because you don’t care about anything anymore? Because you totally shut yourself down?”
“I like to think of it as opening myself up.”
“This isn’t normal. It’s not healthy. It’s stupid and horrible, it’s like you’re telling me I don’t even have a father anymore!”
If he was honest about it, he had always loved her more, and more purely. More than his difficult son, more than the wife who had worn him down over time. She would be the hardest to let go. She was waiting for him to deny it, reassure her, enclose her in the circle of himself, that empty circle. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
Then she was gone, a brief, blurred moment in his sight, the sound of her feet receding on the ladder, rung by rung.
The first night he spent in the tree was by accident. He had taken an old quilt and a cushion up there, a resting place for his head. He closed his eyes in the long summer twilight and opened them to darkness. The air was alive with all manner of night-speech: leaf and branch, breath of wind, and whatever small creatures hummed or whirred or called out to one another. There was no moon, but gradually the blackness resolved itself into the finest gradations of pale and dark. He wrapped himself in the quilt and slept again until the first birds woke him.
He thought he could get a small foam mattress up there, and, when necessary, some kind of heater, kerosene, maybe, as long as you were careful to vent it. There was always the bathroom in the house, and the occasional discreet pee off the edge of the platform.
The permanent ladder was finished, anchored and bolted into place, its beautiful grains and whorls standing out like sculpture. He disassembled the scaffolding and cleaned up his work space, stored the tools away in an orderly fashion. He liked the look of them now that they were at rest. The Bible verse came to him: Well done, good and faithful servant.
Well done, eyes and ears, mouth that tasted, pliant skin and steadfast, beating heart. How remarkable that his body had gone about its business all along, in spite of his inattention. He’d walked around inside it as if it was only another car that needed driving. Brake, steer, accelerate.
The world had grown too large, he could have told them, too cluttered with bewilderment and pain. Now he had made it small enough to fit inside himself. Through the open window of the treehouse he saw leaves showing their gray undersides, flattening out in an uneasy warm wind. The birds had gone still. A storm was setting up to the west. The sky was as green as a glass bottle. In the distance a siren started up. Somewhere in its warning hoon he thought he heard voices, his name turned into a shriek, a lament. He closed his eyes and waited.