“I’m glad you did,” she said.
I looked at her.
“If you’d called the police,” she said, “I’d have gotten a ticket. Or a fine. And I’d have paid it. And I’d have sat at my window every morning hating you. And your boys. And I’d have died an angry old woman staring at a tree I couldn’t stand to look at anymore.”
She reached over and put her hand on my arm.
“Instead,” she said, “you made me come across the street. You made me sit on your curb. You made me tell you about Bernard.” She smiled. “Nobody’s asked me about Bernard in eight years. Not one person.”
“Why didn’t Joel ever tell me?” I asked. “About the tree. About Bernard.”
Mrs. Whitmore thought about it.
“I asked him that once,” she said. “After the funeral. Bernard’s funeral. Joel came. He sat in the back. Afterward, I asked him why he never told anybody. About planting the tree. He could have. People would have thought he was a hero.”
“What did he say?”
Mrs. Whitmore smiled.
“He said, ‘Mrs. W, it’s not the kind of thing you do for people to know about. It’s the kind of thing you do so somebody can see something beautiful when they need it most.’”
I looked across the street at the tree.
At the six ghosts glowing in the dark.
At Joel and Bernard. Holding hands with a piece of orange yarn.
“That sounds like him,” I said.
“He said one more thing,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “He said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, you watch over Laurel and the boys. You’ve got the best view on the street.’”
I turned and looked at her.
She was crying again. Quietly.
“And instead,” she said, “I sat at that window for two years after he died and watched you three grieve. And I never once came across the street. I watched you hang up those ghosts every October. I watched Max take them down by himself on that ladder in February. I watched you sit on your porch steps and cry. And I never came over.”
She shook her head.
“I was so busy looking at the tree,” she said, “I forgot to look at the people under it.”
The boys had stopped sorting their candy.
They were sitting on the porch steps, listening.
Theo stood up. He came over to Mrs. Whitmore’s rocking chair. He climbed up into her lap. In his ghost costume. Bedsheet and all.
Mrs. Whitmore froze. Then she put her arms around him.
“You can watch us now,” Theo said. “From your window. Every morning. We’ll wave.”
Mrs. Whitmore put her face in the top of his bedsheet.
“That would be nice,” she whispered.
We took the decorations down on November first.
Like I promised.
All of us. Mrs. Whitmore held the ladder. She insisted.
But we didn’t take everything down.
We left one thing.
Hanging from the highest branch we could reach, near the top of the tree, where it would catch the wind. Where it could be seen from Mrs. Whitmore’s front window every single morning.
Two small ghosts. Made from scraps of the same bedsheet. One with glasses. One with a red cap.
Holding hands with a piece of orange yarn.
Max tied them up there himself. He climbed higher than I wanted him to. He was careful. He used a double knot. Joel taught him that.
“They can stay all year,” he said, climbing down. “Like a reminder.”
“A reminder of what?” Mrs. Whitmore asked.
Max thought about it.
“That they’re still friends,” he said.
That was a year ago.
Mrs. Whitmore comes over every Saturday in October now. She sits on the living room floor with us and makes decorations. She’s terrible at cutting milk jugs. She’s surprisingly good at tombstones.
HERE LIES MY DIET. IT WASN’T JOEL’S FAULT. IT WAS THE CIDER.
She brings the cider every week. Bernard’s recipe. With cinnamon sticks and cloves and a little orange peel.
She plays Sinatra. We play the Monster Mash. We argue about which is better. She always loses.
She’s taught Theo to play cribbage. She lets him win sometimes. She says Bernard would be horrified.
She comes to Max’s soccer games. She sits in a lawn chair on the sidelines in her gray coat and yells at the referee.
On the anniversary of Joel’s death, November third, she came across the street at six in the morning with a mason jar of cider and sat with me on my front porch steps until the sun came up. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.
On the anniversary of Bernard’s death, November ninth, the boys and I went across the street with a pumpkin pie. Joel’s grandmother’s recipe.
This time she opened the door.
Every morning, she sits at her front window with her coffee. In Bernard’s chair. Looking at the red maple.
And every morning, on their way to the school bus, my boys stop at the end of our driveway and wave.
She waves back.
Sometimes, when the wind blows just right, the two little ghosts at the top of the tree swing out together. The one with the glasses and the one with the red cap. Still holding hands. A year later. Faded and weathered and tied with a double knot.
And sometimes, if I’m standing at my own window at just the right moment, I can see her lips moving. Across the street. Behind the lace curtains.
Talking to Bernard.
And I like to think that maybe, somewhere, Joel’s sitting next to him.
Drinking a beer he’s not supposed to have.
Watching the tree turn red.
People ask me sometimes about that day.
The neighbors who saw it. Mrs. Kowalski from two doors down, who watched the whole thing from her kitchen window. The high school kids who drove by and saw the ghosts in the tree and posted about it.
They ask why I didn’t just call the police. She trespassed. She destroyed property. She called my kids brats. I had her on camera.
I tell them the truth.
I was going to.
I had my phone in my hand. I’d typed the nine and the one.
And then I looked up at Joel’s tree. And I thought: he planted this so somebody could see something beautiful when they needed it most.
I didn’t know, then, who that somebody was. I didn’t know about Bernard. About the hospital bed by the window. About the stump.
I just knew that Joel never once in his life answered cruelty with more cruelty. He answered it with a shovel. In the rain. At six in the morning.
So I didn’t call the police.
I hung some ghosts in a tree instead. Out of spite. I’m not going to pretend it was anything else.
But it worked.
Not the way I expected.
It made her scream. It made her come across the street. It made her sit on my curb and cry and tell me a story nobody had asked her about in eight years.
And it turned out that the woman who stomped on my boys’ ghosts was carrying a ghost of her own.
She’d been carrying him for eight years. Alone. At a window. Talking to a tree.
And all that time, the man who planted the tree was carrying something too. A promise. To watch over us. From the best view on the street.
He just didn’t get to keep it.
So she’s keeping it for him.
Every house needs a tree that turns red in the fall.
So you always know it’s home.
Bernard Whitmore said that in 1962.
Joel Pierce said it in 2016, standing in the rain with a shovel.
I say it now. To my boys. Every October. When the maple starts to turn.
And every October, across the street, an old woman in a witch hat sits at her window with a cup of cider.
Watching the ghosts dance in the branches.
Waving back.
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