The Age of Miracles

25

The eucalyptus first arrived in California in the 1850s. Imported from Australia, the seeds crossed five thousand miles of open ocean before reaching the soil of our state. The trunks were supposed to be a miracle wood, perfect for a hundred different purposes, railroad ties especially. But the wood turned out to be useless. It curled as it dried and split when nailed. The state’s eucalyptus industry went bust before it ever boomed.

But the trees remained—and they spread. They were everywhere in my youth, and in my grandfather’s youth, too. Their slender silhouettes once swayed along the coastal canyons, the beach bluffs, the soccer fields. Their long leaves floated in the swimming pools and the gutters. They drifted along the banks of saltwater lagoons. For over one hundred and fifty years, the eucalyptus thrived in California, surviving every calamity: earthquake, drought, the invention of the automobile. But now the trees were suffering en masse. The leaves were losing their color. Orange sap oozed from openings in the trunks. Little by little, they were dying.

On the morning of my twelfth birthday, I was lying awake in the dark, recalling in detail all the moments of the previous day’s events: the way Seth squinted in the sun as we walked through the canyon, the tenderness in his hand as he petted the backs of the whales, the sound of his voice at the end of the day, and those words—see you later—as he turned and jumped on his skateboard, pushing off hard with one foot and then sailing sideways down the hill, his white T-shirt rippling in the wind behind him. I had to remind myself again and again that it had really happened: He had invited me.

My room was dark. The house was quiet.

In a few hours, I’d see Seth at the bus stop, and I wanted to say the exact right thing when I did, to divine whatever the words were that would lead to a second afternoon at his side.

That was when I heard it: a loud crash from outside. I remember the breaking of glass and the screeching of car alarms on the street. I rushed to my window and looked out: The tallest eucalyptus on the street had sliced through Sylvia’s roof and crushed one corner of her house.

Over time, I have come to believe in omens. But I wonder if I might have developed a more strictly rational mind had I lived in a time before the slowing. Perhaps in some other era, science instead of superstition might have sufficed.

My parents rushed outside, my mother in her bathrobe, my father without a shirt. It was a dark night, cloudy, no stars. The tree lay diagonally across the yard, blocking Sylvia’s front door. The roots were exposed, hanging in the air, like a molar wrenched from a gum. One section of Sylvia’s roof had collapsed.

All along the street, lamps flashed on in bedrooms, doors swung open, the voices of neighbors rose from front yards. Sylvia’s house stood dark and silent. Some of the men jogged toward it in pajamas, but my father was first, dashing through the side gate, out of sight. My mother stood with her arms crossed in the middle of the street. I stood beside her, shivering in my nightgown.

“She should have had that tree cut down,” said my mother.

Two of ours had been removed already. There were stumps all over the neighborhood, and crews of men in reflective suits worked constantly along the roads, felling trees one by one and then carting the pieces away.

“We should cut the rest of ours down, too,” said my mother.

She took a few steps closer to Sylvia’s house, stood on tiptoes, angling for a better view.

“Where is he?” she asked.

I used to think my mother knew at least as much as I did about Sylvia and my father and that every question she asked was code for something else. But maybe she only sensed it.

She kept her own secrets too. She was hiding a massive new store of emergency supplies in the closet of the guest room. She was hoarding hundreds of cans of food and hiding them from my father. And she had placed an order for a greenhouse without telling him.

Finally, my father emerged through the side gate. Sylvia was with him, draped over his shoulder but walking, barefoot in a short white nightgown.

My father guided her to our porch, where she sat with her head in her hands.

“She’s okay,” he said. “She’s just shaken up.”

My mother brought her a glass of water, though she kept her distance as she handed Sylvia the glass.

Sylvia’s nightgown left her whole back exposed. In the front, the shape of her small breasts was apparent through the thin cotton. She sat for a long time, hunched on our steps like a girl. You see only a few adults cry the way she did on that night, open, abiding, unashamed.

“It hit the piano,” my father said softly.

“This was not an accident,” said Sylvia, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

The other neighbors had trickled back into their houses. The lights were switching off. It was five in the morning on a dark night.

“The tree was sick,” said my father.

“No,” said Sylvia. She shook her head. She had the thinnest, most swanlike neck. The knobs of her spine surfaced as she turned her neck. “Someone did this.”

Sylvia was the last real-timer left on our street. The Kaplans were gone. Tom and Carlotta were gone; a young family had moved into their house and begun remodeling.

“I’m telling you, Joel,” said Sylvia. The way she said my father’s name was not the way one neighbor speaks another neighbor’s name. My mother heard it, too. She glanced at my father and pulled her bathrobe closed at the neck. Sylvia continued: “They’re trying to drive me out.”

Later, I tried but mostly failed to sleep the last hour before my alarm clock sounded. Meanwhile, my parents argued through their bedroom door. I could hear not what was said but what was expressed, the anger radiating through the door.

It was tradition among the girls at my school to bring each other a balloon on the day of each girl’s birth. It was always the same variety of balloon, the shiny Mylar kind you buy at the party store. You carried it around with you all day or fastened it to your backpack, letting it float behind you, fat and lovely, through math, English, life sciences, PE. Weighted by a tiny beanbag, each balloon bobbed above the sea of heads in the halls, a buoy marking the precise location of a happy and well-liked girl. This tradition had not been interrupted by the slowing.

The year before, Hanna had brought my balloon—but that was a past life, or someone else’s, an earlier, uncomplicated spring.

I tried not to look at Hanna that morning at the bus stop, the way she was sitting against the fence, her phone pressed hard to her ear. She didn’t even say hello.

This year I knew my birthday would go unmarked at school.

I stood at the edge of the crowd at the bus stop, waiting in the darkness for Seth to arrive. I had spent a long time choosing what to wear, settling finally on the cream mohair sweater I’d worn for picture day and a knee-length jean skirt.

The stars glowed. Headlights flashed. Kids trundled in on foot from various directions. Some emerged from the passenger sides of running cars, backpacks swinging from their arms. Seth was not among them.

Minutes passed. I began to shiver.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and then discovered, to my horror, that the hairs on my legs were glittering under the streetlights. I was suddenly embarrassed standing there, just a few feet away from Michaela’s smoothly shaved calves, which were right at that moment standing attractively in a pair of heeled black sandals as she laughed into the ear of one of the eighth-grade boys.

Finally, there came the sound of plastic wheels grinding asphalt in the distance, the rattle of a board scraping the curb. My heart began to race. There he was: Seth Moreno.

He stepped off his board. He tucked it under one arm.

I wanted to tell him that I’d heard about another group of whales beached a few miles farther up the coast. But I wasn’t sure how to start. This was new to me, the special communications that tethered boys to girls.

The bus heaved up to the curb, and kids began to climb the stairs, but I lingered on the pavement, waiting for Seth to show me how things would be. Our eyes met. Seth nodded slightly.

I’d been rehearsing this moment for hours, and I had outlined a hundred different scenarios. Mr. Jensen once tried to tell us that there existed somewhere a set of parallel universes, unreachable but real, where every possibility came true; whatever didn’t happen here happened somewhere else, each option unfolding in a separate universe. But in this one world, at least, the outcome that morning was reduced finally to just this one version.

Seth stood on the sidewalk for a moment, averting his eyes from me. He didn’t smile. He didn’t speak. Then he walked right past me and kept going, as if the two of us were strangers. He stepped onto the bus and didn’t look back.

I don’t know how much time passed after that—thirty seconds, maybe longer—but I became aware eventually of the bus driver yelling down at me from his seat.

“Hey you,” he called over the hum of the engine. “Are you coming?” All the other kids were on the bus by then. A few were staring down at me through smudged windows, snickers forming on their faces. I was a girl standing alone in the dirt in a cream mohair sweater and a stupid jean skirt. It was hard to breathe.

It occurred to me too late, after I’d stepped onto the bus and sat down in the front, fifteen rows from Seth, that I could have disappeared into the canyon and no one would have noticed.

I spent the break between classes in the bathroom. I spent another lunch period in the library. Diane was there, as usual, the gold cross around her neck glittering beneath the fluorescent lights. Trevor clacked the computer keys, busy with the game he always played; he held all the high scores. Mrs. Marshall was returning books to the shelves—we could hear the whine of her cart as she wheeled it over the carpet, the crinkle of the cellophane book jackets as she slid each one into place. Every time the door squeaked open, I hoped it would be Seth Moreno—come to apologize or explain.

A bleak thought had begun to bubble in my mind: Maybe he didn’t want to be seen with me at school.

Through the windows simmered the muffled squeals of the other kids, running loose on the quad. Those kids never traveled anywhere alone.

Christy Casteneda swanned past the library window—it was her birthday, too, and not one but two balloons swayed from her delicate wrist, each one signed on the blank silver side in loopy, loving cursive.

I pretended to read. The clock ticked. Seth did not appear.

On dark days like that one, the library windows looked lit up like an aquarium, the inhabitants on display for all the other kids to see: here the most exotic fish, the lonely, the unloved, the weird.

By evening Sylvia’s eucalyptus had been cut into pieces, and the pieces lay stacked like cleaned bones in the driveway. White plastic sheeting covered the hole in the roof, rustling whenever the wind blew. The sun had yet to rise.

My father spent a long time that night inspecting the last eucalyptus in our own yard. Half of it produced leaves, but the other half was dead, and the death seemed to be spreading. He called a tree removal service before we left for my birthday dinner.

My mother came home with a present for me: a pair of gold ballet flats with a crinkled finish. The other girls at school had been wearing them for months. I slipped them on. They squeaked on the tile.

My father gave me a book.

“This was my favorite book when I was about your age,” he said. On the cover was a series of mountains, a valley, a moon. The pages smelled like dust and mildew. “It’s about a kid who’s all alone in the world. He’s really lonely for a long time. But then, well, you’ll see.”

I remembered that book passing through our classroom two or three years earlier. I hadn’t read it, but I was too old for it now.

“Thanks,” I said, and pressed it to my lap.

He squeezed my shoulder. We left for dinner.

“It’s lucky I’m not sick on your birthday,” said my mother as we drove east toward my grandfather’s house. We were picking him up on our way to my favorite restaurant. I was looking forward to seeing him. His voice had a way of cutting through everything else.

“I still think we should’ve had a party,” said my mother. “We should be celebrating the good things.”

“We are,” said my father. He glanced at me in the rearview. “This is what she wanted.”

The landscape outside looked less alive each time we did this drive. It wasn’t only the grass and the eucalyptus trees. There were subtler signs, too. I was certain the banks of the lagoon were browner than they used to be, the cattails and the reeds less abundant than before. We avoided saying it out loud—we had the greenhouses and the sunlamps to keep us fed for now—but it was hard to ignore the way the plants were quietly slipping away, a creeping devastation. God knows what was happening on the less fortunate continents. But the golf course, when we passed it, looked better than ever, more lush and more pristine than it had ever looked in life. All the old greens had been replaced with highend artificial turf, and now golf carts trundled slowly over the hills: the golf course in afterlife.

“I don’t know why we couldn’t invite Hanna,” said my mother. She turned toward me in her seat, the seat belt cutting into her neck. “You two used to be such good friends.”

“Well, we’re not anymore,” I said.

My grandfather’s property looked worse than usual. He had refused to cut down any of his eucalyptus trees. Some stood leafless and grim against the sky. Others had fallen to the ground. But the pines, at least, were persisting and still kept his house hidden from the road and the surrounding development.

We pulled into his driveway. I jumped out onto the gravel, ran up to the door. My parents waited in the car, engine running.

He didn’t answer the door, so I rang the bell again. I knocked. A group of gnats was circling the porch light. Behind me, the black sky was fading, turning ever so slightly light. A slow sunrise was beginning. I tried the doorknob: It was locked.

I went back to the car, my ballet flats crunching hard on the gravel.

“He’s not answering,” I said.

“Maybe he forgot to put in his hearing aid,” said my father.

He turned off the car and followed me back up the walk to the house. My mother cracked the car door for air.

My father had keys to the house. He unlocked the door, and we stepped inside.

“Dad?” said my father. The house was hot and quiet. The only sound was the ticking of clocks. The only light was the overhead in the kitchen. “We’re here.”

The windows were closed, and the shelves were as bare as they had been the last time I visited.

“Where is everything?” asked my father. He ran one finger along a vacant shelf. He peered through the glass front of a mahogany cabinet, empty of its guts of china and crystal.

“On New Year’s,” I said, “he was kind of sorting through his stuff.”

“What do you mean?” said my father.

We took my grandfather out to dinner most Sundays. He was usually waiting on the porch for us, ready to get in the car, insisting we were late.

“He was also putting some of his stuff in boxes,” I said.

“What?” A spark of concern flickered across my father’s face. “But I just talked to him last night.”

The boxes were gone. The table was clear. Everything of any value had vanished. We checked his bedroom and found the bed empty and unmade. We opened the closet: At least half of his clothes were missing, maybe a few pairs of shoes.

In the kitchen we discovered a stack of obscure newsletters and leaflets. A small newspaper was dominated by this headline: WHAT THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: THE TRUTH ABOUT CLOCK TIME. To the refrigerator was clipped a political cartoon in which people wandered the street, eyes glazed. The caption read: THE CLOCK ZOMBIES.

My mother wandered in behind us.

“Where is he?” she said.

“I don’t know,” said my father.

“Oh, God,” said my mother. “This place looks like it’s been robbed.”

“Julia says she saw him packing.”

Something was bubbling in my father, a fast current running beneath ice.

“Not exactly packing,” I said.

My mother turned to me, frantic.

“You need to stop keeping secrets, young lady.”

Outside, my father called my grandfather’s name, shouting into the dawn light: “Dad, are you out here?” Through the window, I watched my father search the old stable, the backyard, the dying woods at the edge of the property.

My grandfather could no longer drive. He did not even own a car. He could not have left on his own. He relied on us and on Chip, the teenager who lived down the road, to help him with groceries and rides.

“He’s too old to be living alone,” said my mother. “We should have known.”

I felt tears coming to my eyes.

My father jogged down to Chip’s house, which was one of the new ones in the regular development.

My mother began calling the phone numbers that were posted on my grandfather’s refrigerator. They were mostly members of his church, the phone tree, the carpool. The house still smelled like my grandfather, like Listerine and old paper. An antique clock chimed seven times in the living room. My mother’s voice cracked as she talked, leaving her cell phone number in case he turned up.

My father soon returned to us with news: Chip had dropped out of high school and moved away.

“Moved where?” said my mother.

My father rubbed his forehead and blinked a slow blink. A sliver of sun had peaked above the horizon and was shining through the windows, illuminating the dust that floated everywhere in that house. Back then a certain euphoria usually accompanied the arrival of sunshine after so many hours in the dark, but we barely noticed it that night. We all just squinted in the brightness.

“His mother says Chip went to that place in the desert,” said my father. “Circadia. He left last night.”