The House That Wasn't There Read online

  The kitchen was warm with cooking and music—Alder had set one of Canary’s records to spinning—by the time Alder’s mom pushed through the door just after six o’clock. “Alder,” she called, “are you cooking?”

  Oak heard the clickety-clack of Alder’s mom’s clogs as she crossed the living room and entered the kitchen. She wore a big bright smile; a lavender scarf looped around her neck, clashing prettily with her light-red hair, which fell in waves across her shoulders.

  My aunt, Oak found herself thinking, and her face split into a big dumb grin.

  “Oh,” Alder’s mother said, faltering, when she saw Oak standing in her kitchen. “Alder, I didn’t know you had a friend over.”

  “Hi, Mom,” Alder said. “Remember our neighbor, Oak? She and her mom are coming over for dinner.”

  Oak noticed that Alder had made it a statement rather than a question.

  “O-oh,” said Alder’s mom. “Hello.”

  “Hi,” said Oak. She stuck out her hand to shake and then noticed that some of the cheese she’d been grating for the potatoes was stuck to her fingertips. She wiped her hand on her jeans and then stuck it out again.

  Alder’s mom shook it, and her face softened into a smile. “I should have invited you over sooner. I’m glad my son is more . . . neighborly than I’ve been.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” said Oak.

  “No, it’s not,” Greta said. “I really should have introduced myself to you and your parents—your mother?—sooner.”

  “My dad is moving down pretty soon,” Oak explained. “He had to stay back in San Francisco for work, so Mom and I moved first, because of her job and so I could start school with everyone else.”

  “Oh, I see,” Greta said, and then, “Alder, can I help with anything?”

  There was a knock at the door. “I’ll get it,” Oak said. “It’ll be my mom.”

  And it was—still wearing her suit and heels from the office. She hadn’t even stopped to take off her earrings. “Oak,” she said. “What’s going on? You left me a note?”

  Oak opened the door more widely, as if this was her home. There was, she noticed, a patch of lavender paint on Mom’s wrist, left over from yesterday’s project. It was exactly the shade of Alder’s mom’s scarf. Maybe it was a sign. Maybe it meant something. “Mom,” she said. “Hi.”

  Behind her was the sound of Greta’s clogs, and then there was Greta. “Hello,” she said to Oak’s mom. “Won’t you please come in?”

  Oak’s mom hesitated, and for a brief moment Oak was filled with sick dread at the thought that she might rudely refuse. But then her mom put on her work voice—the tone she used when someone from the architecture firm called—and she said, “Thank you so much for the invitation. I’m Olivia. It’s lovely to meet you.” She crossed the threshold and held out her hand to shake.

  Oak felt as if the room was spinning. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go—they were supposed to recognize each other. She looked toward the kitchen to find Alder in the doorway, looking as confused as Oak felt.

  “I’m Greta,” said Alder’s mom, and she gestured to the kitchen. “It seems our kids made us a meal. Shall we?”

  And Oak and her mother followed Greta through to the next room, where Oak’s mom introduced herself to Alder, and the four of them filled their plates. As they did, the moms asked each other polite questions about what they did for work.

  “I . . . I don’t think they’ve ever met,” Alder whispered to Oak as he speared a cheese-covered baked potato half.

  “Clearly,” Oak whispered back, piercing the other half and plopping it on her plate.

  The four of them went into the dining room, where Canary’s croon filled the space, and the cats meowed and purred and wound in and out of the table legs.

  They all sat down, and Oak’s mom and Greta laughed about what a coincidence it was that they’d adopted sibling kittens. This, Oak decided, was as good a segue as they were going to find.

  “Mom,” she blurted, “do you have any siblings?”

  “Don’t be silly, Oak, you know I’m an only child.”

  “Me too,” said Greta. “I’d always hoped for a brother, but no luck.”

  “To only children,” Oak’s mom said, raising her water glass.

  “To only children,” Greta echoed, raising hers, and Alder and Oak had no real choice but to follow suit.

  “To only children,” they muttered, and the four glasses tinkled as they all brought them to the center of the table and clinked them in a toast.

  Chapter 29

  It was a perfectly nice dinner. Oak’s mother even apologized to Alder’s mom for cutting down the big tree without talking about it first.

  “I can get a bit overzealous with my plans,” she said. “I don’t always think about how the things I do might affect other people.”

  Alder noticed that Oak nodded a little when her mom said this, and he knew that she was thinking about their move to Southern California, and everything that had meant to Oak.

  Alder’s mom apologized to Oak’s mom for not being neighborly. “I should have brought you cookies or offered to help you get to know the neighborhood,” she admitted, “but honestly, I was just so angry about the tree. And sad. It was like a member of the family.” She nodded to the portrait hanging on the wall.

  All four of them turned to look.

  “That’s my dad,” Alder explained. “He died when I was little.”

  “Oh,” said Oak’s mom. Her eyes widened as if now she understood better about the tree. She turned away from the portrait, back toward Alder and his mom. When she spoke again, her voice was quietly serious. “I was wrong to cut down that tree without speaking with you first,” she said. “And the other day, when Oak said something about me cutting it down—well, it hit me then how awful it was of me to make such a decision all on my own. Just because the tree grew on our property didn’t mean that it really belonged just to us. I was only thinking of myself. I hope you can forgive me. Both of you.”

  The apology wouldn’t bring the tree back, of course. The past can’t be changed. But Alder was glad when his mom reached over to hug Oak’s mom, when she said that she was forgiven. It made Alder feel proud, the way she did that. And then the two moms agreed to have a fresh start, and by the end of the meal the two of them were laughing together about the big pothole up on Silver Spur Road, wondering what it would take to get it filled.

  “Oak and I will do the dishes,” Alder offered when everyone had finished eating.

  “Yeah,” Oak agreed, jumping up. They began gathering the plates and silverware.

  “Well, thank you, Alder,” said his mom.

  Of course, Alder wasn’t only being polite. He wanted to talk to Oak, away from their mothers’ ears. “I don’t understand,” he said, his voice low, as they stacked dishes in the sink.

  “Maybe there’s something wrong with the test results,” said Oak.

  Alder filled the sink with warm water and squirted in dish soap to make bubbles. “Maybe,” he said. He didn’t want that to be true. He wanted Oak to be his cousin. He wanted family.

  In the dining room, he heard his mom get up and flip the record to the other side. It was one of Canary’s albums; When Alder had put it on earlier, he hadn’t been thinking about everyone listening to it. But it didn’t bother him, the way it once would have, to have the music playing. Instead, it felt comforting, as he dipped his hands into the warm, bubbly water, to hear his father’s crooning voice floating through the house. “We’ll figure it out,” he said to Oak, and hope rose in him like a bubble.

  She nodded. “You wash, I’ll rinse,” she said, and then they fell into a rhythm—Alder rubbing each soapy dish with a sponge, then passing it to Oak, who ran it under fresh water and set it in the drying rack on the counter.

  Suddenly, the kittens, who had been curled into one of the yarn baskets in the corner of the dining room, both leaped up and began meowing. They trotted into the kitchen and wound in
and out of Oak’s and Alder’s legs, rubbing their heads against them, their meows becoming more like yowls.

  “What is it, kitties?” Oak asked. “What got you so excited?”

  Their tails, Alder noticed, were puffed up, as if by electricity.

  And then the doorbell rang.

  Oak and Alder froze, dishes in hands, cats between feet.

  “It couldn’t be Mort,” Oak hissed. Somehow, that was the exact thing Alder had been thinking.

  Maybe it was Mort, though, Alder thought. After all, stranger things—or equally strange things—had happened.

  He grabbed a dish towel and dried his hands on the way to the door. His hand reached for the doorknob and hesitated, hovering, for a long moment before he grabbed it, turned it, and opened the door.

  Mort was not standing on the other side.

  But a man was, one who looked oddly familiar.

  “Hello,” said the man, smiling. “I’m looking for my family.”

  His family. Alder opened his mouth, but nothing came out. The man wore a lustrous beard, red tinged. His hair, dark blond, thinning, was brushed back from his brow. There were long wavy wrinkles across his forehead and branches of smaller wrinkles in the corner of each of his brown eyes, which were framed by square brown glasses. He was tall and thin, much taller than Alder. He wore a green T-shirt that was torn slightly at the neck and stretched out as if it was an old shirt, a favorite. He had on light blue jeans with paint spatters on the thighs; one of the knees looked about worn through. On his feet were orange sneakers.

  As if by way of explanation, he held out a piece of paper he’d been holding. “My family is here?” he asked.

  Alder recognized Oak’s handwriting—the note she’d left her mom. Tears filled his eyes, and as he blinked, they spilled over, wetting his cheeks, catching in his eyelashes and making the whole world sparkle.

  “Yes,” Alder said, and he opened the door wide. “Your family is here. Please come in.”

  Oak’s father stepped across the threshold. Oak was still in the kitchen, and the moms were still in the dining room. The kittens trotted over to the man and purred as they rubbed against his legs. He laughed, squatting down to pet them.

  “Well, hello there,” he said, and just then the song that was playing—Canary’s song—rose into a crescendo, his warm, rich voice filling the whole house, as if someone had suddenly turned up the volume:

  Wandering down the railroad tracks away from my sweet home

  Wondering on the railroad tracks where I next will roam

  Whispering on the railroad tracks why the wind has blown

  Wandering down the railroad tracks away from my sweet home

  Kneeling, Oak’s father froze, one hand holding the note, the other on a kitten’s head. His head was tilted up, his eyes blind, as if he searched for a face he could not see.

  No one moved—not Alder, not the man, not the cats. Not on the outside. But as Canary’s voice wailed and cried out about home, about leaving home, Alder felt his insides shifting. As if they were making room for something, as if a pocket he hadn’t known was there was pulled wide open.

  “Is that—” Oak’s dad began.

  “It’s Canary Madigan,” Alder said. “Your brother.”

  Time, Alder learned, really can stop.

  The man who was his uncle knelt, and Alder stood, and to their right, on the bookshelf, Mort silently watched. The air fell still. The kittens made no sound. And Canary held one note, the last note—“home.”

  It could have been a second. It could have been a minute. It could have been forever. But it wasn’t forever, because the last note ended, and the kittens purred, and the man stood.

  “Are you . . .”

  “Your nephew,” Alder said. And he nodded.

  There were footsteps coming from the kitchen.

  “Alder,” said Oak, “what are you—” She broke off suddenly, and Alder turned to see her expression. It was shock, first, when she saw who had come to the door; it froze her in place for a long moment as her brain made sense of seeing her father right there in front of her, when Alder knew she hadn’t expected him to arrive anytime soon.

  And then, joy. A wide happy grin, a chirp of glee, as she rushed across the room and threw herself into his arms, which opened to catch her.

  “Dad,” she said, and then her words were muffled into her father’s shirt, and he laughed and lifted her up off the floor.

  “I decided to surprise you,” he said, and his voice was rough with emotion.

  “You grew a beard,” Oak said.

  “I sure did,” he said.

  More footsteps—the moms this time.

  “Carter?” said Oak’s mom as she rounded the corner, and then again when she saw him, “Carter.”

  Then it was the three of them hugging—Oak and her dad and her mom, Oak squished between her parents, and Alder felt a flash of something—of yearning—as he watched, but then his mom came over and pulled him close into her side.

  The cats purred so loudly it seemed there was a motor running somewhere; they purred and they rubbed everybody’s legs and they circled around until one of them nipped the other’s neck playfully, and then they pounced and rolled and kicked their hind legs like bunnies.

  At last, Oak and her mom and her dad broke apart, and she turned to Alder and said, “Alder, I want to introduce you to my dad.”

  “Your name is Alder?” her dad said. “Like the tree?”

  Alder nodded. Words, it seemed, had escaped him.

  Oak’s dad shook his head, but not like he didn’t believe it. Rather, like he did believe it. “We said we’d name our kids after trees,” he said softly. “It’s one promise we both kept, I guess.”

  “Dad?” said Oak.

  He turned to her. “Honey, I’d like to introduce you to someone. My nephew, Alder.”

  Chapter 30

  “I should have told you about my brother,” Oak’s dad said. “But the truth is, I was ashamed.”

  They were sitting—all of them, Oak and her parents and Alder and his mom and the kittens—in Alder’s front room. Oak’s dad and mom were side by side on the pink velvet couch, holding hands. Alder’s mom sat in the tall blue chair.

  Oak sat with Alder on the floor across from the couch. She let her shoulder press into Alder’s shoulder so he would know she was right there. He was trembling a little.

  Her dad said, “Let me tell you about him now.” He blinked, staring off as if looking back in time. Then he said, his words rushing like water undammed, “My brother and I were like two strings on a banjo. Close as could be, and meant to be played together. He was my little brother. I was four years older. He was born with the same dark, wavy hair he had all his life. He was a chubby, milky baby with a smile for everyone. When he was little, he’d follow me everywhere I went, and he made the cutest chirping sound. That’s why we called him Canary at first. Later we kept calling him that because of the way he could sing.”

  From where she sat next to Alder, Oak could see the portrait that hung on the wall of the dining room. Baby Alder and his mom and his dad. Her uncle, who she would never get to meet. She pressed her arm into Alder’s again. He was warm, and solid, and right there.

  Her dad continued. “Our band, the one we planned to start one day—we called it Canary and the Coal Miners. I’d be one of the Coal Miners, on guitar, and we’d find someone to play bass, someone else to play drums, and Canary would sing and strum the banjo. That was the plan when we were kids. But then, you know how it can be, life . . . interfered. By the time I was in high school, those four years between us might as well have stretched to forty. I know Canary was disappointed in me. Angry too. I was busy with other things, and I didn’t make time for us to make music together.”

  Walnut hopped up onto Oak’s dad’s lap. He looked right at home.

  “And then I went off to college,” he continued. “There’d be time later, I figured, for us to make our music. Canary was still just a kid
. But soon, Canary wasn’t a kid anymore. And he never quit playing, even when I did. He called me once, when he was just about to graduate high school. He wanted me to join him on the road. He wanted to give Canary and the Coal Miners a shot, he said. A real shot.”

  Oak’s dad scratched Walnut’s head.

  “But I’d just finished college, and I was trying to find a job so I could start paying back those student loans. Our parents died that year, just a few months apart, and I felt this pressure to be a real grown-up. I couldn’t just take off and travel around like some dumb kid, I told him. I had responsibilities. I had a future.”

  Oak’s dad made a sound—a sort of laugh, a sort of choke, like he was holding back tears. Her mom laid a hand on his leg. Then he went on. “Canary didn’t say much to that, though I could tell I’d hurt his feelings. He hung up, and that was that. The thing about time is that it passes. And time passed. I don’t think we ever meant to stop speaking—not then. It was just that I was so busy, and then he was so busy. He made an album—no Coal Miners, just Canary. He’d changed his last name, too, to Madigan, and that felt to me like a real cut, like he’d severed himself from me.

  “The first time I heard one of his songs on the radio, I was on my way to pick you up for a date, Olivia. And then there was his voice in my car—so clear, so beautiful . . . well, I’m ashamed to tell you that it didn’t make me feel proud to hear my brother’s voice. It made me feel jealous.”

  Oak’s dad shook his head. He stopped petting Walnut. Oak watched her mom lace her fingers through her father’s. He cleared his throat, like something had gotten stuck, and then continued.

  “Little things can become big things, if you let them,” her dad said. “I let that little thing—my jealousy—become a big thing—a reason not to stay in touch. I had my life, and Canary had his. I heard he got married around the same time I did, but we didn’t go to one another’s weddings. After you were born, Oak, I did send a birth announcement to the last address I had for him. But it came back marked Return to Sender.”