Phaethon

The soil was rich, a dark, dark brown that reminded Rowan of coffee grounds.

She dug her hands into it, feeling the moist earth sift through her fingers and against her palms. The smell of coffee in her memory mingled with the scent of earth; she could see the cup of it in her boyfriend's hand, and the blankets in the other, the streetlights casting stark pools of light in the parking lot. He smelled of coffee, he always did. She had held onto to him tightly, inhaling his scent, trying to cleanse herself of that sterile white smell that clung to her like a disease.

Her hands tightened around the earth and she drew back, touching the leaves of the small potted aspen next to her. To the left out of the corner of her eye, the large oak loomed. She tried not to look at it.

The park was abuzz that day; families flocked to the huge green of Tamarack with baby trees in their black plastic pots. Mothers held the hands of little toddlers who clutched green toy buckets and shovels, and fathers pushed back the brims of their baseball caps while they toted trees and tools, looking up at the sun as it climbed in the sky. The park's Arbor Day celebration every year was a huge event in Terry, and it teemed with trees of various ages planted every year at the end of April. To Rowan, it was as large of a forest as she could find in eastern Montana, and she knew the best oaks to sit in with a book. "Your own little urban forest," her Dad always said, his eyes twinkling.

When was the last time they had done that?

Penny, who was six, was next to her, arms pushed into the ground all the way up to her elbows, watching her older sister. Her wide blue eyes blinked, red hair blowing around her face in the breeze. Her little willow sat beside Rowan's aspen - the tree their mother had selected for her. The one her mother had asked her to plant on her behalf was a small cottonwood - funny, Rowan thought wryly, that she'd picked a cottonwood, what with her allergies and all. She used to fill burlap sacks with all the cotton that piled up under the patio table and in the corners of the fence to make pillows for her stories until Momma had apologetically thrown them, sneezing as she did.

She hadn't come today, and neither had their father, who had muttered he didn't want a tree and had gone into the garage. Penny and Rowan had left both of them near the driveway, where Shawn had always worked on his pickup.Rowan swallowed hard and stood, reaching to the fold-up shovel she'd thrown in the pack. The sound of it slicing through the earth was softened, as though the ground was hurrying to muffle it. The white noise of the people around them grated on her nerves. Couldn't they all hear it? That horrific boom that the trees had done nothing to muffle?

Sometimes she thought she could hear his neck snap, like a sharp clap of thunder during the lightning storms he loved. That wasn't possible.

Penny pulled both fists out of the dirt, itching at her cheek and leaving a smudge across her face; warrior stripes on an angel. "Can we plant mine first? Please Rowan?"

She smiled a half smile and nodded, tucking loose strands of auburn hair behind her ears. "Yeah, love. We can do that."

The rosebud of Penny's mouth saddened a little as she watched her big sister dig. She wished she'd hum again while she worked, singing under her breath the way she always used to when she'd load the dishwasher or pull weeds in the garden.

Rowan stuck the shovel in the ground and got down on her knees, taking the willow and gently pulling it from the pot it rested in.

Shawn had teased her for how much she loved trees almost as much as she poked at him for obsessing with machinery. He had always been in the garage, tinkering with whatever broken pickup or car was parked in the left side of the garage that Dad had designated "the Shop." Putting a lift on his pickup had been the latest thing, though they'd sold it to someone in Forsyth last month.

Rowan ran her hand over the thinness of its branches and its tiny trunk, looking at the white roots that ran through the small bit of attached soil. They looked like veins, pale and stark against the brown. She hurried to cover them, patting the soil in place quickly. The veins in his arms had been green and purple, vivid through his still, translucent skin.

Penny patted the soil, the dull thud of her little hands packing the tree in place. She smiled. "Next?"

The two sisters worked on their knees, until the three little ones stood newly grounded, cottonwood, aspen, and willow in a perfect line, facing the big oak.

They were so little, Rowan thought, and so young. Their branches were thin, their bark still supple, and they all reached for the sky in a child- like stretch that Rowan watched Penny do before running off to join the other younger kids spinning on the axis of the blue and white merry-go- round.

To this day, she didn't know where the scream had come from. She'd looked at the accident, the mangled front end of the gray dodge accordioned into itself, the bits of glass crunching under her feet and sparkling obscenely in the ambulance light. She'd seen the open door of the ambulance where she glimpsed the matted fluff of her brother's black hair and heard her father saying, "I'm the father it's ok" to the paramedic in the white latex gloves - she hated those powdered gloves so much - who was trying to stop him, and saw Penny's face pressed against the window of the car where she'd been told to stay, her face red in the neon lights that wouldn't stop flashing, casting the scene into a bloody pall.

None of it was real. None of it could be - this was a scene from the movies she'd watched, these were the bad things that happened to other people on the evening news at night, while she was tucked away under the pages of her current book.

In the real world, Shawn would be sitting next to her on the grass right now, waiting for them to be done planting and for Penny to be done playing and for Momma to be done talking to all the people she knew from church and for Dad to finish reading his book in the shade.

They would be staring at the rough bark of Rowan's favorite oak's trunk, wrinkled like the corners of the eyes of an old lady. She would be teasing him, and he would laugh that funny laugh where his voice would disappear that she'd been hearing for the last twenty years of her life, and his eyes would crinkle until he would say, "Ohhh man that's funny." Fun- nay - that's how he said it. But this wasn't a real world anymore, and it hadn't been for a year now.

Because Shawn had fallen asleep at 2:30 am on April tenth, at the wheel of their father's Dodge.

He had driven off the road and slammed into that oak, where he had gone through the windshield and his neck had broken.

And he had never woken up in that white bed in the hospital where he'd been hooked up to all sorts of tubes and wires, his paper thin eyelids covering his brown eyes that none of them would ever see again.

All this left her staring at the trunk of the oak, the huge spot where the pickup had torn its bark away and slashed deep scars into the wood. It'd been a year, so the color of the exposed part had darkened and deepened as though it was trying to camouflage the damage, but the scars were still as sharply horrific as Rowan remembered seeing that night.

She closed her eyes against the sirens and the flashing lights and the colors.

"Rowan?"She felt the touch of Penny's hand on her shoulder. Turning her head, Rowan saw her baby sister run her fingers through the little round leaves of the aspen, so green. "Hmmm?"

"I don't feel much like playing anymore."

Rowan knew that face. She knew that blank stare, the one that was warding off whatever was surfacing in her memory. Her little sister's chin trembled.

"Come here baby girl," Rowan whispered, and Penny curled up on her lap, tucking her face in the crook of her neck. Rowan held her tight.

They sat there, the two girls and the young trees and the old trees.

They stayed until the roots of their legs let go, and they left the park, carrying the past in their pockets and under their nails.