Chapter 19
Nyetta

April has given up asking about Lark. Now she wants to know all about the divorce and how it affected me, and if my parents used to fight. I tell her not really, which is the truth because I’ve decided not to lie about my family life. Only about my ghost life.

“But for a while my mother went crazy,” I say, then I go on to tell her how once my mom woke me up in the middle of the night and drove me to Hallie’s house to tell my dad to come home because the divorce wasn’t final. It was cold and she forgot my robe, and I was shivering when I rang the bell and waited on the step. My mother sat in the car with the motor running. I could see the silhouettes of my father and a woman sitting at a table through the window. I didn’t know Hallie then. She didn’t invite me inside. Instead she called my dad to the door, and he told me to tell my mom to take me home.

“Get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

So my mom drove home, then she sent me to bed, but I didn’t go to sleep. Instead I took out all my dolls from the closet and set them up like groups of sisters and mothers, aunts and daughters, in kitchens and schools and living rooms where they would read books and draw pictures or teach one another the alphabet or how to play an instrument. My entire room became their dollhouse. They slept under the armchair because that’s where it was dark. My desk was the music room and the second-floor study. The shoe boxes in the closet were kitchen counters. I drew knobs and rings on one to be the stove.

April puts down her pencil. “What your mother did was very unfair to you. You didn’t want to go to Hallie’s house at night. She did. And then she made you be the one to ask him to come home.”

“But I didn’t,” I said. “I couldn’t. I just stood there on the porch.”

“Do you feel guilty about not doing what your mother asked?”

“Kind of.”

“What she asked you to do was inappropriate. Adults shouldn’t tell their children to do things they can’t or won’t do for themselves.”

Why not? I wonder. It seems to me parents do this all the time. They want their children to make them happy and proud. Lark’s parents wanted her to get a gymnastics scholarship to college because it was the next best thing to being in the Olympics. I could tell she felt sad she wasn’t good enough for that.

April interrupts me.

“Next time your mother or father, or any adult, asks you to do something that’s inappropriate, you can say no.”

Her advice floats by. I think about how serious Lark was. I wonder if it made her happy or sad to be like that. On the outside, she was happy, but some people keep things to themselves. Sometimes her knee hurt so bad, she limped.

April watches me the way you watch the weather change in the sky. “It can be difficult to learn how to say no,” she says. “We can practice next week.”

At night Lark decides to drop by for one of her visits. She’s dirty, like someone who’s been spending too much time outdoors. She’s not asking me to look at her wound anymore. Mostly she wants me to see how she’s turning into a tree. It’s sort of a guilt trip.

Little buds of leaves are growing between her fingers, and her hair is wild and full. She lowers her head, and I can see tiny strands of ivy growing out of her scalp.

“My heart is wood now,” she says mournfully.

“That doesn’t happen.”

“It has to me.”

“No,” I say. “You still have feelings.”

“Not really.”

“Then why are you here?”

She sighs. Tears cut through the dirt on her face. “You’re right,” she says. “I hate being dead.”

Poor Lark. She loved having a body. It was her favorite part of being alive. “I’ll try harder,” I tell her.

Lark brightens, then she starts to lift her dress, but I turn away.

“Look at me!” she yells, pulling at her hair and pushing up her sleeves. Her arms are rough and brown. “It’s happening! Right now!”

The door to my mother’s office creaks open. Her footsteps pound down the hallway.

“My mother’s coming,” I whisper.

Lark scowls back. “She can’t hear me.”

“Be quiet!” I whisper.

“I won’t! What’s the big deal about a stab wound? Don’t you realize what’s happening to me? Don’t you know that the only thing worse than what that man did to me is turning into a tree? You’re not worried about your mother. You’re putting me off because you’re a coward.”

“Stop!” I say.

“And you’re selfish! So what if you have a few more nightmares? I’m about to lose my body forever! I’m about to turn into a tree!”

But it’s too awful to see, too terrible to see the cut in her side, the place where the knife went in. I can’t do it without fainting or getting sick or so scared that I might never come back from being afraid.

“I can’t,” I say. “I will later. I promise. I want to help, but I can’t right now.”

Lark shakes her head. “Forget it. You had your chance. I’m never coming back here. I’m going to find someone else.”

Outside the wind picks up. It thrashes the trees and shrieks through the neighborhood. Shingles lift off roofs and gates clatter. Lark opens my window and slips out, legs first.

“Good-bye.”

The curtains billow and snap in a riot of anger and frost. A gust of cold wind blows into my face. When I open my eyes, she’s gone.

“Lark!” I lean out the window, calling after her. “Come back!”

The clouds break and a sleeting rain falls. I’m pelted in the face, and my wet nightgown sticks to my skin. The rain is so cold, it stings. I leap to the ground and run through the gate at the edge of my yard. Broken branches pull out the hem of my nightgown. Fir trees rattle their dry cones. I fall and pick myself up and run into the woods. Eyes flash in the dark, eyes of dead girls caught in trees.

“Little Night! Little Night!” they sing bitterly, mocking my name, hating me for failing Lark. “You’re too late. She’s like us now!”

The rain turns to ice. The sky collapses in snow. I cross the creek, cracking paper-thin ice, cutting my feet on sharp stones. Lark waits on the other side, so white she is almost blue.

“I’m here. I’m ready now,” I say. And I am. I’m tired of being afraid. I don’t want to be the one who fails her in the end.

I stretch out my hand. Before my eyes, her fingernails extend into thin roots that wrap around my wrist and pull me into her.

“Too late, too late, too late,” she says, sounding both mournful and pleased. I don’t know what she is now. Ghost or tree? Girl or wood?

I try to draw back my hand.

“Let me go,” I cry. I dig my heels into the cold earth and struggle against her.

Behind me I hear running footsteps and someone yelling. It’s my mother. She pulls me away from the tree, and I fall into her arms. I hear the panic in her voice as she tries to help me stand. Finally she scoops me in her arms and carries me home. The trees shake their branches at me. They would like to tangle my hair and scratch my skin. All Lark wanted was someone to see what happened to her, but I’m only a girl, too afraid to look.