Beneath the Night Tree by Nicole Baart Read Free Book Online Page B

the steps and listened for signs of life from Daniel’s bedroom. All was quiet. The same was true for Simon’s room, though by the sliver of light that escaped from beneath his door it was obvious that he was reading by the glow of a flashlight. I shrugged. He was ten, after all. It had been my hope to get him in the school routine before a strident schedule was upon us, but a couple of late nights wouldn’t kill him.
    I left the house as quietly as I could, squeezing out a one-foot crack in the screen door because I knew it would squeak if I opened it any farther. Once on the porch, I breathed a little easier. At this one moment in time, I had no obligations, no responsibilities. Nobody was expecting me to do something or go somewhere. Nobody needed me. I popped the top on my Coke and drank half of it in one long swallow. I’d be up for the better part of the night since caffeine always did a number on me after supper, but I didn’t care.
    The sun had set while I was putting Daniel to bed, but the remnants of a late summer twilight still smoldered against the far horizon. As I watched, the fields that had been flush with crimson faded into a fierce, living obsidian. All was quiet, but the world seemed strangely animate. The fireflies that had decorated our midsummer nights were long gone, and the cicadas that had screamed their unearthly tune were silent. Yet the air around me lived. I breathed it in and took off down the steps.
    I wished I were the running type—or at least the sort of girl who had a goal in mind. Sometimes I felt if I could only decide on a destination, the journey would come easily. But I wasn’t nearly so farsighted. More myopic, focused on the now, the day-to-day. So instead of lacing up a pair of tennis shoes and sweating out my frustrations on a long, punishing jog, I slapped across the lawn in my worn flip-flops and took off down our gravel driveway at a snail’s pace. I wandered.
    The thought that Grandma was wrong about me made me sad, but it didn’t stop me from ambling down deserted gravel roads with aimless abandon.
    There was a farm about a mile from our property where the land cut away as if God had taken a scythe to the soil. It was the high point before the little river valley of the Big Sioux, a muddy, winding waterway that separated Iowa from South Dakota in my forgotten corner of our often-overlooked state. I felt like I could see forever from the ridge at the edge of Mr. Vonk’s property, and if the curve in the distance was merely the rolling of the prairie landscape, I never failed to pretend that it was the bend of the earth as it bowed away from me.
    Iowa City was at my back, the place where Michael lived and waited. My future home, if I wanted it to be. And yet, as I stared off into the shadows that still waltzed along the farthest reach of my cloudy vision, I had no desire to turn around and search the darkness for hints of my future. Maybe I was just stuck in the middle. Michael behind me; Grandma before me. And I was suspended in between. Alone.
    Wasn’t that exactly what I had always feared? When Janice left, when Dad died, when the father of my baby proved himself to be a coward and a deserter, the same track played over and over in my mind, a scratched CD repeating the tired refrain: You are alone; you will always be alone. . . .
    “That’s ridiculous,” I said out loud, startling myself. But it felt good to talk, and there was no one around to hear me raving like a lunatic. “You have a son who loves you, a brother who was returned to you, a grandma who sacrificed everything for you, a boyfriend who . . . wants you to move away with him . . .” I trailed off. The way I felt, Michael might as well have asked me to move to the moon.
    I looked up as if to find him there and realized that the only light left in the sky came from a waning moon that had been full only days ago. It was disappointing to see that pale sphere like a ruined fruit, its perfect