Nest
I followed Willa back up the steep hill where I’d been secretly trailing her—or thought I had—minutes earlier, and we reentered the thick inland woods.
She moved slowly this time, so I could catch up and find my footing on the sharp slope, but I was afraid of losing her again and stayed close, my eyes fixed on her skirt’s gold sequins. Hundreds of them glittering in the dark, twinkling from waist to hem. I was a sailor navigating by synthetic stars. But still she disappeared; she abruptly snapped her flashlight off.
“Willa?” I whirled, reaching out blindly, my fingers finding only leaves.
“I’m up here...just a second...stay right where you are...” Her voice came from up high again. Branches rustled and scraped, the sounds rising, growing fainter. Then a circle of light appeared at my feet: she’d flicked her flashlight back on.
I followed the beam up, up, up...to Willa, who sat, casual as anything, fifteen feet above me, in a tree.
“Come up!”
“How?”
“It’s easy, look.” She shifted her flashlight to show me where she sat: a wooden platform about seven feet square, nearly hidden by leaves, built into the U-shaped cradle of the tree’s fat upper branches. She spotlighted the way up: a long white rope hanging near the trunk, knots spaced every two feet. It ended at my waist and was still swinging gently back and forth from Willa’s climb.
I wasn’t afraid of heights. I was afraid of human error. The rope ladder could be rotten, frayed, attached to a flimsy branch. But Willa waited, eager for me to join her in the air, her It’s easy so matter-of-fact I couldn’t question it.
I reached, grabbed the rope with both hands, and clamped my thighs around the lowest knot. As I dangled, my hips and butt took turns slamming the tree trunk, but the rope held, and I grunted my way up to the next knot.
“What was that? Are you all right?” she called down to me.
“Sure,” I panted.
Twirling and swaying back and forth, scraping my knuckles on bark, and feigning more confidence than I felt, I climbed up to my cousin. Willa had grown up scrambling around these seaside hills, while my exercise routine had consisted entirely of turning seductively during The Hustle at Teena’s DreamTraxx and pounding Space Invaders buttons in the Fillmore Street corner arcade.
“You’re doing great! Almost there!”
Willa would love Vaughn Academy’s indoor PE days. When it rained, Ms. Binny relied heavily on the gym rope climb. I’d never ascended more than a couple of feet, while other kids shimmied up like monkeys in purple polyester uniforms, dinging a little brass bell on the ceiling. I was only ever rewarded, once I’d slid down and thudded on the basketball court in defeat, with Ms. Binny’s delusional “Good effort, Pierce!”
“Just a little more!” Willa called.
She’d tied the top of the ladder to a large branch. No bell here: only my cousin’s outstretched arm. I clasped it, held on for dear life, and let her drag me to safety.
“It’s nothing once you get the hang of it, right?” she asked, standing over me.
“Nothing.” I was limp and sweaty, facedown on plywood. “How much weight can this thing hold?”
“Oh, I don’t know. But we can’t be much more than two hundred together.”
Cautiously, I rolled onto my back. Willa bounced, laughing, circling her flashlight above her head so it illuminated wood, leaves, a length of spangly scarlet fabric draped on branches.
“Can you not do that?”
Anyone else would have laughed. Jumped higher. Willa stopped immediately. “Sorry.”
She sat, setting her flashlight beam-down on the wood so it softened into a night-light.
“So, what is this?”
“It’s sort of...my secret place. I come when I want to get away.”
So, like her mother, Willa sometimes needed to separate herself. But maybe that was why she always looked so tranquil. Even when her home was overrun, she knew that her hideaway waited for her.
“Did you build it?”
She shook her head. “I found it when I was seven, the year we moved in. It was already here.”
“Kate must know about it. She doesn’t miss a trick.”
“Kate never hikes this high on the hill. She says anything past the garden is too steep and uncultivated for her old-lady knees.”
I stood and explored, tentatively at first. Holding on to a branch for safety, I peered through the leaves on the coast side where we’d entered. There was Angela’s curving glow stone path in her garden, two bright upstairs windows. Beyond that, the lantern down by the pool. Someone was having a night swim.
“You can see all the way down to the pool.”
“Oh...you can see way past that.” Willa came to my side, leaning forward to look out, fearless. “You can see headlights in the parking lot, over that way.” She pointed down the hill. “And when the fog burns off in the afternoon, there’s a long triangle of ocean right there. My dad’s waterfall is behind those trees.” She nodded at a spot left of the house, on the southern ridge. Then she pointed to the right, north. “And you can see people hiking up to the Flying Swing over there.”
“Flying Swing?”
“I’ll take you.”
I inched closer to the edge. We were at the top of the Kingstons’ sprawling property. It was the perfect lookout. “It’s incredible up here.”
“My mom told me when I was little that these woods are like walls, holding back time. She’s the one who found this land. My dad wanted to live in the city.”
This surprised me; my uncle seemed so much a part of this place, so in charge of it. “It seems like it’s grown on him.”
I crossed to the other side of the treehouse, facing inland, and Willa followed.
“That’s our closest neighbor on this side, down the east hills,” she said. “The goat people.”
I peered into the darkness. “Goat people. Satyrs?”
“They aren’t goats; they used to raise goats. But we can call them satyrs. You can just make out their barn light down there, see?”
In the charcoal light I picked out a distant, orangey glow.
“I wish they were satyrs... They don’t like us much. The little boy is cute. He comes over here sometimes to watch us, like our own little fan club. But Kate says the parents don’t like the idea of us—of Daddy’s friends. And my mom’s plants.”
“The neighbors behind us in the city filed a complaint because my stepmother had the gardener prune too many branches from their gum tree. They were blocking her greenhouse.”
“How weird, to live in a city,” Willa said dreamily. “Don’t you feel trapped?”
“I never thought about it.”
“Daddy said you’re rich... But you probably think the way we live here is boring.”
“No.” I meant it. Willa had room to ramble and explore. I had lived, I realized, an embarrassingly compact life compared with hers. Grand-looking from afar, but narrow. My narrow, elegant home, my narrow, prestigious school. The walls between households, between the grown-up world and my own, were so high back home. I’d tried to scale them, with my messing around and my disco nights. But my attempts now seemed childish.
I picked up a pine cone from the plywood floor and tossed it out into the night, waiting a second for its faint thud.
“Oh, no, Mr. Bill!” I cried.
“What?” Willa looked at me, baffled.
“Mr. Bill.”
“Who’s Mr. Bill?”
“It’s a joke. You know, from Saturday Night Live? He’s that little clay man who’s always getting dropped off cliffs and...” Nothing. “Willa, have you really never heard of Mr. Bill?”
“We don’t have a TV,” she said, simply. “I’ve never watched it. Look up.”
So that’s why my campfire act had been a dud, why Willa called my impressions “stories”; no one had a clue what I was doing up there. In that case, their laughter wasn’t stingy, but charitable.
I was still trying to process the TV thing, pitying my Saturday Night Live– and Mork and Mindy– and That’s Incredible!–deprived cousin, when the view above stopped me short.
Stars, framed by leaves. A sight that put the butter-yellow portable RCA TV set in my bedroom to shame. Willa didn’t pity herself. She couldn’t, not here.
We stood side by side, silently looking up at the sky, for a long time.
Something happened to me then, next to this relative I barely knew. A girl I’d have dismissed as spacy or immature a week ago. In that stretch of still, quiet minutes—I couldn’t say if five or fifty passed—I felt calmer than I had in a long time.
“Hey,” I said quietly. “Thanks.”
“For what?” she asked, eyes still on the sky.
“For inviting me up here.”
“You’re family.”
I didn’t know how to respond to such a simple, generous proclamation. But I stored it up to savor later. I would think about those two words many times over the years. Long after Willa vanished from my life.
Noises came from below—the scrape and burst of a match, then the short, barking coughs and breaks in conversation that meant people were sharing a joint. It sounded like they were right under us.
“I hate to say it, man,” Graham said, his voice tight. A long pause, then, full and relaxed: “The heart’s missing from that one. I think it’s dead weight. Here.”
“Thanks,” a woman said. Silence, a drawn-out exhale. “I hear you. And it’s your dime, but...” Cough. “What does that leave me with?”
“Maybe we can thicken it up, I don’t know...”
“This is amazing,” I whispered.
“Don’t worry, they can’t hear us,” Willa said. “They wouldn’t unless we yelled. Sound carries up here, but not the other way.”
So she’d tested this—I liked her all the more for it. My cousin and I were different in almost every way, but we had this one secret, taboo pleasure in common.
I said it with complete understanding and admiration: “Willa, you spy!”