The Light Through the Leaves(14)

She stopped the car where the entrance to the trailer park should have been. There was a new sidewalk and bus stop with a glass-sheltered bench where the potholed road used to be. Three tall apartment buildings rose up beyond the bus stop.

Ellis drove on until she found an entrance. RIVER OAKS APARTMENTS. STUDIO, 1, AND 2 BEDROOMS AVAILABLE. BEAUTIFUL RIVER VIEWS. PETS WELCOME. COME TAKE A TOUR OF YOUR NEW HOME!

She wanted to believe she was in the wrong place. It couldn’t look this different.

She turned the car into the apartment complex, following the curved road to an asphalt parking lot next to Building One. Where had her trailer been? Where was the forest?

She saw distant bare oaks beyond a large expanse of mowed lawn. The thin strip of trees grew in a sinuous line. That had to be the river.

She drove to the end of the asphalt, parked, and got out. The lawn was planted with a few young trees bound with ropes and stakes. Forest View was really gone. Even the forest. And Edith and Ed, who’d often fed Ellis when she was hungry. Libby and her two little boys. Larry, the Vietnam vet who had a ramp to his trailer for his wheelchair. He used to dump a whole bowl of Halloween candy into Ellis’s bag every year. Where had they all gone?

She stepped into the short, snow-dusted grass. She had to see the one thing they couldn’t erase. The river.

She walked across the long expanse of mown grass. She didn’t understand why they hadn’t left more of the forest. A big lawn was expensive to maintain. She supposed the developers had worried the forest would look too wild. Too scary. A place with snakes. A place where criminals might hide.

Ellis almost cried when she saw how few trees the developers had left around the water. They had been removed on the opposite side of the river, too. More lawns, parking lots, and apartment buildings. Over there, the buildings were a different color, probably built by another company.

The river looked much smaller than it had when she was a girl. It was shallow, as it often was in the winter. The water that coursed through the middle of its flat exposed banks was more like a stream than a river. The weak trickle over the rocks sounded sad to Ellis. As if the river knew what it had lost.

She climbed down the bank into the riverbed. The trash was worse than when she’d lived there. More beer bottles and cans. There was more algae on the rocks from pollutants. She walked downstream, hoping to find the place where she’d poured her mother’s ashes. A bend to the left, a big log.

She stepped ankle-deep into the water, letting it soak into her hiking boots. The frigid water on her skin felt good. She was with her kin.

The river felt like a father to her. Her firstborn son was named for him. Jonah didn’t know how Ellis had chosen the boys’ names. He wouldn’t have understood. Jasper was named after the only mother that had felt true to Ellis, the wooded earth around the river, especially the stones of the riverbed. So often she had touched, collected, and meditated on those varicolored stones.

Ellis looked around as she walked, hoping to glimpse any of her favorite plants that might have survived the first freezes of the year. She especially wanted to see the heart-shaped leaves of the violet species that used to grow there. There had been purple, lavender, white, and yellow. In college, she’d learned the genus of violets was the beautiful Latin word Viola—the only name she’d considered for her daughter.

Jonah had loved the name, too. He’d associated it with the protagonist in Twelfth Night, one of his favorite Shakespearean plays. He’d gladly given Ellis full responsibility for naming the boys, as well. His parents had expected their firstborn male would be Jonah IV, but Ellis and Jonah hadn’t wanted another child named for the legacy of intolerance associated with the two elder Jonahs. When Ellis had chosen the names River and Jasper, Jonah’s parents had been incensed. Mary Carol even caused a scene in the hospital the day Ellis filled out the birth certificates. She’d said Ellis had coerced her son into abandoning family tradition for “her ridiculous hippie names.” Ellis hadn’t minded taking the blame. She’d told Mary Carol, “If their names upset you, you know where the door is.” A nurse had high-fived Ellis when Mary Carol strode out of the room.

Ellis couldn’t find any violet plants. They’d gone dormant for the winter or had perished with the removal of the forest.

She’d come to a left bend. She was quite sure that was where she’d scattered her mother’s ashes, though the log that had marked the location was gone. She sat down in the river stones and took a few in her fingers. She looked at the river’s curve, seeing her first note sail out of sight. Please come back.

She thought of Viola, who would never come back. Ellis knew it was true. She would never see her daughter again. No one returned once they disappeared around that bend. Zane had been the first to show her that. From him, she’d learned to be careful of how much she loved anyone.

Ellis didn’t remember much about her life before Zane. Before she was in school, he visited the trailer but never stayed overnight. He was a chef, one of her mother’s many restaurant friends who came over for parties. But back then, Ellis mostly saw him as her favorite babysitter. A group of friends—six or more—used to take care of Ellis while her mother waitressed, but Zane was the only one who knew how to make the magic.

“What shall we do today, my queen?” he asked when her mother left.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know when there are a zillion cool things we can do?”