ASH
PENNY TOLD HERSELF that the fire had been a blessing, a cleansing: all that junk she’d meant to sort through and discard, all the books she knew she’d never read, the letters and Christmas cards she’d never reread. Oh, she wasn’t a hoarder; it hadn’t been as bad as that. But she’d had file drawers that had gone unpurged for twenty years, because she’d tried to clean them out and been stopped dead in her tracks by things no one else would ever want that were simply too precious to discard: the short story she’d written in French and illustrated in colored pencil in eighth grade, with her teacher’s ecstatic “A+! Merveilleuse!” in red marker; her long-dead mother’s birth certificate; files of papers holding ideas for essays and articles she’d never write now that she’d retired from the university. And suddenly, everything had to be kept.
She’d thrown out plenty of other stuff: teaching files, old magazines (even the ones she’d meant to read and never had), her seminar papers from grad school. She needed to do more, but felt paralyzed.
And so the fire was a blessing. It happened when she was on vacation, visiting a friend in Seattle, the cats—thank goodness—safely boarded at the vet’s. Some kind of short, the firefighters thought, wiring gone bad in the walls, although Penny could have sworn she’d turned everything off. Maybe shorts could happen anyway. She didn’t know.
She left Seattle early. When she got back, there was only a stinking, charred heap where her house had been.
Insurance paid enough to entirely rebuild the old house, which had been much larger than she needed. Instead of replacing it, after she had the charred stuff carted away—she’d paid off the mortgage years ago and the lot was lovely, surrounded by mountains but still close to town—she had a tiny cottage built, much farther from the street than the old house. It was one story with a living room, one small bedroom, a full kitchen and bath, a wood stove for heat and solar panels for electric. Not counting her small front porch, just the right size for one rocking chair, the whole thing was 600 square feet. Her bedroom window no longer looked right out onto the neighbor’s patio; her greater distance from the curb dampened traffic noise. It felt like a different world.
Penny settled down happily to a less encumbered life. All her books were on her Kindle now; none cluttered the house. She had the clothing she’d brought back from Seattle and a few necessities she’d bought, but she found herself happy with a very limited wardrobe. It wasn’t like she needed nice clothing for work. The two cats would have preferred more room, but they were getting older now, too, and once she bought them a new cat condo, they claimed it as their perch and were content.
She missed amazingly little: some family photographs, a cherished set of dishes, her extensive jewelry collection, scattered in the soaked and smoldering ruins from which she’d salvaged almost nothing. She hadn’t been able to bear to sift through that reeking blackness. Sometimes she woke at night with a start, aching from a dream of something she’d never see again; but always she told herself that she’d just seen it in her dream, hadn’t she? All those things lived in her memory, where they were safest from the ravages of the world. She didn’t need the physical objects.
And then, her first autumn in the new house, the tree outside began to bear fruit.
*
The tree had been the only thing growing in her yard before the fire. Penny wasn’t a gardener; she’d never had the skill or patience for it. She always forgot to water plants and didn’t want to spend even the minimal time and money to put in a drip or sprinkler system. But a previous owner had planted this mountain ash, which grew quickly and tolerated drought, thriving even in the desert.
Penny liked the tree, which asked nothing of her and gave good shade. Sometimes in the old days she had sat under it, reading in a lawn chair. In late spring it decorated itself with clusters of white flowers. From late summer to late autumn, bunches of red berries drew enthusiastic attention from birds. By late October, the leaves turned yellow and orange, a pleasing palette, and then fell.
The tree had been some yards from the back of the old house. Penny had the new one built much closer to it, for shade; some of the branches almost reached the porch now. One warm August morning her first year there, she glanced outside to see a flash of silver and blue on the porch. Blinking, she put on slippers and went outside.
On the cedar planking of the porch rested an earring. She bent, her joints complaining only a little, and picked it up. It had been her mother’s, a set of three hinged turquoise squares set in silver. She had thought it lost in the fire.
Throat tight—these had been her mother’s favorite earrings, and Penny had worn them at her funeral—she sat in the rocking chair and cradled the earring in her palm. The earring must have been buried in the ashes and escaped being carted away. Maybe a ground squirrel had uncovered it and deposited it on her porch.
This seemed improbable even as she thought it. She sighed, scratched her head, and squinted up at the tree, rustling in the late-summer breeze that already carried cooler undertones, the promise of fall. On a branch near her dangled another turquoise and silver earring.
Penny stared. She stood. Straining on tiptoe, she reached for the earring; she had to tug to free it, although it came away cleanly. And now she saw, among the red berries the tree always bore, other things that shouldn’t have been there: flashes of gold, the gleaming edge of a favorite coffee mug, a square of paper with blurry blotches she suspected would resolve into a photograph, like a Polaroid developing in the air.
She recognized all of them. She knew they weren’t yet ripe, weren’t ready to be harvested. She carried the earrings inside.
By late October, when the tree stopped producing fruit, the new house was fuller than it had been. A few especially cherished books, mostly from childhood—Tolkien and Lewis and Aiken, T. H. and E. B. White, Bradbury—graced a shelf in the living room. A cloissone box, a souvenir from the Victoria & Albert Museum gift store in London, sat on Penny’s dresser, and inside it were several more pairs of earrings and also a particularly beloved silver bracelet. Framed family photos and small paintings by a cousin hung on the walls; the favorite coffee mug had been joined by two delicate Limoges bowls from her father’s family.
The tree was fecund. Penny didn’t keep everything it produced. Other books, the unread ones, went in the library’s donation box. She tossed a flurry of letters and Christmas cards and went to Staples to shred old bank statements. Why had the tree thought she wanted those?
But trees couldn’t think, could they? Perhaps it was only dumb luck that so many of the things it gave her were ones she wanted. She had a hazy idea that the tree was absorbing, through its roots, the ashes of her burned belongings, and reconstituting those small enough not to overwhelm it.
She was careful not to let the new things overwhelm the house. Losing so much had taught her to let go of what there was no room to keep. She was grateful for what she had.
Her belongings returned to her in improved, but not mint, condition. The books, still softened by age, had been healed of their coffee stains and cat-chewed covers. The jewelry was polished only to a soft glow, not a brilliant glare. The coffee mug no longer had the hairline crack she had fretted about, but no one would have taken it for brand-new. These were precious things in their prime, as Penny liked to believe she herself was, even with her arthritis and silver hair.
She wondered for a while if the tree’s odd fruit would ripen and rot as ordinary fruit did, but as autumn wore into winter, and then early spring, everything stayed solid. It all appeared to be back for good.
She told no one what was happening: not the women in her knitting group, not university acquaintances she saw at concerts or in stores, not her friend in Seattle. She didn’t want them to think she was delusional. She didn’t want them to think she wasn’t, didn’t want the authorities to find out and send people to examine the tree, to dissect it and analyze it and try to plant copies of it somewhere else. She was perfectly content to accept what she couldn’t understand.
The next summer, she sat on her porch and smiled at the tree, at its bright clusters of white flowers. She wondered what they’d turn into, come fall. She found herself mentally cataloging the contents of the old house, thinking of things she wanted back, speaking aloud to the tree to see if she could influence it.
“Tree, I had some tiny glass bottles. They sat in my bedroom window when I was a little girl; they made rainbows on the wall. In the house that burned, they made rainbows in the kitchen. They could make rainbows here, too, and they’re very small. They shouldn’t overtax you. Do you think I could have just one or two?
“Tree, if you could manage it, I’d be very grateful to get my red and yellow handknit socks back. They’re the first pair I ever made, and they’re so comfortable. I’m making some others now, but could you possibly see about those, too?
“Tree, I had a framed photograph of my father in his Coast Guard uniform. I really love the photos you’ve returned so far, especially the one of me with the kittens when I was a child and the one of my cousin Brenda with her husband; she died two years ago, and I miss her, so that’s a comfort. But that picture was a lovely one of Dad, and it would mean the world to me to see it again.”
She worried that she was growing greedy, but reassured herself by making long lists of all the things she hadn’t asked for. She wondered if she should offer the tree something in return, but because she’d always had such terrible luck with plants, she was afraid that anything she might do would only hurt it instead. And anyway, she didn’t know how this magic worked. She didn’t want to blunder in and break it.
So she left the tree alone, except for her polite requests. She knit the new socks, thinking about those old ones, how warm they’d been and how soft. She treasured the photographs she had, telling herself that she’d be all right if she didn’t get the Coast Guard shot back—her father so young and hopeful and handsome, his bad investments and bad back and hideous cancer still decades in the future—but yearning for it anyway. She stood at her kitchen sink, imagining the counter lit with the soft glow of sunlight through colored glass, trying to believe that her ability to picture the soft hues would sustain her.
That expectant summer was like waiting for Christmas in the wrong season. Every morning she sat on the porch and gazed up at the flowers, trying to guess from the shapes of the clusters what they might become. She concentrated on her three wishes, hoping they wouldn’t overburden the tree. Even if it gave her just one of the things she’d asked for, she’d be happy.
But the tree gave her something else entirely.
It took longer, this year. Through August and September, the tree formed its usual berries, but crane her neck as she might, Penny didn’t see them turning into anything else. Perhaps the previous year’s odd fruit had been a one-time gift after the fire. She girded herself for disappointment, but still scanned the branches every time she went outside. She invented extra errands—oh, she’d forgotten to take this parcel to the Post Office, and it couldn’t wait until tomorrow—so she’d be able to study the tree more often.
One windless morning in early October, she glanced up at the tree and saw a hint of movement, something that looked like fur. The fur was black and white, so it wasn’t a squirrel, and surely skunks couldn’t climb?
The patch was too high for her to reach. Looking up at it hurt her neck. She drove downtown to REI, that huge space full of high-tech camping and climbing and kayaking equipment, and made her way among muscular young shoppers dressed in hemp and Gore-Tex, and bought a pair of binoculars. When she got home, she leaned as far back as her rocking chair would go and trained her vision on the patch. It had grown larger while she was gone.
And it got larger every day, as the lump in Penny’s throat grew larger, too. Here was a tail. Here were ears. And two weeks after she had first seen the patch, her most beloved of all past cats detached himself from the bark of the tree, and washed his ears with his paws, and climbed down into her arms. “Porridge,” she said, stroking him as he purred.
Of course. She’d scattered his ashes in the yard.
He’d died terribly, in pain, throwing blood clots after routine dental surgery, but here he was in his prime, long-haired and glossy, mewing imperiously for cat food.
One of her current cats had known Porridge. One hadn’t. Both hissed when she brought him inside; Porridge hissed back. Three cats in this tiny house would have been too many even if they’d gotten along, and for several weeks they didn’t. On many evenings, as yowling and snarling filled the house, Penny considered staying in a hotel room, or finding another home for one or another of the cats. But she couldn’t. She loved them; they were hers.
By a month after Porridge’s resurrection, peace reigned in the house again, more or less. Each of the cats had staked out private turf—the bed, the sofa, the cat condo—and instead of fighting, they retreated to their high ground when they were annoyed. By Christmas, Porridge was once again grooming Muffin, the orange tabby, who’d been younger than Porridge in the previous house but now seemed older.
Penny fretted about the vet. Porridge was certainly overdue for shots, and she was desperately curious what an exam would uncover about his health. But the old Porridge had been microchipped, and the tree had already reconstituted metal objects. Her vet of many years had loved Porridge as much as Penny did, had wept with her when he died. She couldn’t tell the vet that Porridge was alive again; Dr. Brun had sent his body to the crematorium. She might be able to say that she’d found a stray who looked just like Porridge—long-haired black and white cats weren’t uncommon, after all—but then Dr. Brun would scan for a chip, and the number would come up in the registry, and Dr. Brun would know it was the same cat.
She took Porridge to a new vet. She said he was a stray she’d adopted from the pound. The new vet, a pleasant young man who looked no older than twelve, found the cat in perfect and unremarkable health. “This kitty could live forever!” he told her.
Penny thought about what else had been in the old house and watched her hands, resting on top of the carrying case, begin to tremble.
That winter, she watched Porridge obsessively, but as the vet had said, nothing was amiss. The cat ate, drank, slept, used the litter box, played with catnip mice, purred on her lap, and alternately chased and ignored the other cats. No one, she believed, would have been able to tell that he had grown from a tree.
She worked at not thinking about what might happen in the fall. On the winter solstice, when other people were getting ready to sing carols and unwrap presents, Penny went outside, shielding a lit candle from the wind, and spoke to the tree.
“Tree, thank you for all you’ve given me. Thank you for the jewelry and dishes. Thank you for the books and the photos and the artwork. Thank you, especially, for my beloved Porridge. Tree, you must be exhausted. You can rest now. Make nothing but your own fruit. I don’t need anything else. I release you.”
She felt silly. She feared this was presumptuous. She hadn’t bound the tree, so how could she release it? The line sounded like something from a bad vampire movie. And anyway, it would probably do no good. She’d never had any sense that the tree heard her or paid attention to her wishes.
She went back inside and dangled a piece of string for Porridge.
The following summer was golden, extravagant. Her friends at the library and in her knitting group reported bumper crops of flowers, tomatoes, squash. They loaded Penny and each other down with the yield from their gardens. Meanwhile, the tree produced its usual bunches of white flowers, as if it had never given birth to crockery and a cat.
Everything would be fine, she told herself, stifling mingled dread and longing. It had to be fine.
And that fall, at first, everything did indeed seem fine. The tree produced its red berries; peer upward as she might, she saw nothing else. She began to relax. She sat on the porch, knitting socks, reading Victorian novels on her Kindle.
But then, in October, a bump appeared on the trunk of the tree, between two of the largest branches.
It was nothing, Penny told herself firmly. Nothing, or only an innocent something. Another coffee mug. Another painting.
For the next ten days, she didn’t look at the tree. Eyes averted, she walked past it to her car. She spent longer than usual away from home; she made a road trip to buy yarn in California, another to visit a tiny town in eastern Nevada, just because it was pretty. She distracted herself.
But at the end of that time, unable to stop herself, she looked at the bump, which had grown and changed and become exactly what she had feared.
Hands.
Human hands.
Two human hands, clasped. One had broad knuckles and a scar from a childhood fishing accident. The other was smaller, more delicate.
Penny went inside and threw up her lunch. Then, shaking as one does after vomiting, she rinsed her mouth and washed her face and made herself some tea. No: it was too much. The hands weren’t alive, couldn’t be alive. Nothing else would follow them. The tree wasn’t that big. How could it produce an entire human body, let alone two? Porridge, one small cat, had been last season’s only fruit. It was too late in the season for this impossible, ghastly thing to happen. The tree would stop now. It had to.
It didn’t.
The next morning, Penny went outside and saw that the hands had grown farther out of the trunk. The morning after that, the faint shapes of two more hands bulged beside them. And on the third morning, the first two hands had begun to move, the larger one caressing the smaller one in that movement Penny knew so well. Her father had always held her mother’s hand that way, his fingers moving lovingly over the back, the palm, his thumb stroking her thumb. He had held her hand that way on winter evenings when they sat together on the couch. He’d held her hand that way when they strolled through stores, when they sat in restaurants, when they sunned themselves at the beach. He’d held her hand that way as he sat beside her hospital bed while she was dying of a sudden, mysterious infection.
Penny had never scattered her parents’ ashes. She couldn’t bear to. They’d remained in simple cardboard urns on the top shelf of her closet. They’d burned, again, when the house burned.
She stood staring at the hands. How she wanted to touch them! How she wanted to feel her father’s skin, her mother’s pulse! These were the two people she had loved most in the world, and who had loved her. They were her first home, the one she still yearned for. No one had ever made her feel as whole, as valuable, as cherished as they did. They had been dead for ten years. She had never stopped missing them. She never would.
She turned away from the hands. She went inside. The rest of that day and all that endless night, she paced and wept and argued with herself, trying to see some way to make this turn out well, happily, a good ending.
She couldn’t.
How would three people, two of them married, live in this tiny house?
They’d be younger than she was now. Either she’d have to survive their deaths again, a daughter’s proper duty, or—more likely—they’d have to survive hers. They had feared losing her more than anything. She was their only child, their treasure. Some of their friends had lost children, and Penny’s parents had always shuddered, shaken their heads. “We couldn’t go on if anything happened to you.”
Their deaths had been legally registered with the state, with Social Security, with insurance companies and banks. They had no existence anymore. She could spend the rest of her retirement money on fake IDs, she supposed, but then what? Her parents would know who they were, as Porridge knew who he was. Her father had been an attorney, her mother a nurse; they’d want to work again. How could they, without proper diplomas and licenses? She believed both of them had been fingerprinted for various jobs. What if those prints were still on file?
How could she support them while they tried to fit in? She’d have to go back to work herself, with her savings spent on false identities. The mere idea made every bone in her body ache.
How could she tell them what had happened?
Penny paced. She wept. She entertained and discarded wild schemes; she plotted and prayed. But when dawn came, cold and gray, she knew what she had to do. She’d known it all along.
She made herself a hearty breakfast that tasted like bricks and charcoal, that sat like scorched iron in her stomach. She showered and dressed in jeans, sensible shoes, her favorite sweater.
When she left the house, she didn’t look at the tree.
She drove to Home Depot and stood in that vast, echoing space until a polite young man in an orange employees’ apron found her. “May I help you, ma’am?” A few aisles over, a child laughed.
Penny swallowed. “Yes, please. I need to buy an axe.”