“Doesn’t everyone?” She walked ahead, into the trees, as if she weren’t afraid of the darkness there, the branches that might cut her.
He only let her lead the way for a few seconds, and then he moved in front of her. As with Sailor in the Spikes—The Forms, she told herself again—Micah somehow knew his way through this dense forest. If you looked hard enough, if you were willing to step over bushes and dead trees, you could discern a path.
“Is August coming from this direction?” Frida asked.
He shook his head. “He can’t get the carriage through, so he has to go around.”
Micah was wearing the same green Polo shirt he’d had on the day they’d arrived, and Frida tried not to look too hard at it. It would only bring back that first day again, and she couldn’t revisit that. If she did, she might lose her footing or stop speaking or hyperventilate. Sometimes breathing wasn’t natural. Instead, she kept her eyes on a piece of loose straw, flapping from the brim of his hat. Perhaps because she couldn’t see Micah’s face, she felt emboldened to ask him questions.
“So August told you I was out here,” she said.
“He returned from the last trip and said, ‘You won’t believe it, Mikey.’”
“Did you? Did you believe it?”
Micah didn’t reply, and she couldn’t even guess what his reaction had been. Before, she’d been hurt that he hadn’t come to see her, but now she felt angry. She deserved answers.
“This way,” he said, and pointed up.
She thought for a moment that he was asking her to shinny like an animal up a tree trunk and was about to tell him she didn’t have the upper-body strength for such shenanigans, when she saw pieces of wood had been nailed into the trunk. A little ladder. Someone had built a wooden platform in the tree.
Micah made a basket with his hands and knelt. “I’ll give you a boost.”
“Is this the clubhouse?”
He stood up and sighed. “No, Frida, this isn’t the clubhouse. It’s just where I go to clear my head.” He held out his hands again. “I just thought you might like to see it.”
The wood steps were smoother than she expected, as if some Land member had buffed them before nailing them into the trunk. If Micah had been the kind of little brother who liked sports and played war and broke bones and heads off Barbie dolls, this might have felt like a return to their youth. But as a kid, Micah had preferred to be alone, preferably indoors. Sometimes he could fall into a stormy mood, but if you left him be, he’d cheer up eventually. He liked to read books and take apart the toaster and post videos on the Internet about their bathtub. At eight he read about the sixteenth-century seaman Martin Frobisher, who discovered Canada and later fought off the Spanish Armada. Micah became obsessed with him and for months asked everyone to call him by that name. Nobody did, not even Frida, who usually put up with him. Hilda just laughed it off and said, “My children: the greatest mystery of all.”
While Micah was being a nerd, Frida would roam the neighborhood, hiding in people’s backyards, pretending she’d run away. Once she’d broken into the yard directly behind theirs, just for kicks, and had accidentally stepped on a tortoise. The house was a freakin’ menagerie, Dada said later. The animal’s shell was warm against her bare feet, and solid, but there was the knowledge of a soft body beneath it, and Frida had screamed. Micah happened to be in their own backyard at the time, and when he heard her, he stuck his head over the fence and said, in the beleaguered voice of Hilda, “Come now.” He had just turned six.
Micah’s grown-up tree house was an open wooden platform with the trunk in the middle and a single railing around the edge, as if fighting off the branches. Frida had never been on a boat, but she felt like this was what it must be like, standing at the helm, the water beckoning and teasing and scaring below. She didn’t think she was afraid of heights, and this tree wasn’t very tall, but it had been a long time since she’d been above anything, even a canopy of leaves, and she held on to the railing with both hands.
They sat on two collapsible camping chairs, and from a plastic toolbox, Micah pulled out a cloudy glass bottle and two creased Dixie cups. The cups had begun to collapse in on themselves, and Frida could tell they’d gone from soggy to stiff and back again multiple times.
She nodded at the bottle. “What’s that?”
“I’d call it whiskey, but then you’d be disappointed.”
“You guys make liquor here?”
He shook his head. “We traded for it.”
“Who makes it?”
He raised an eyebrow and poured the alcohol into the cups, which sagged with the weight of the liquid. “Please don’t give me the Cal treatment, Frida. All day, people are asking me questions, wanting my advice, asking for solutions. And then, on top of all that, your husband comes along with an endless questionnaire. I just want to relax.”