A Heart-Shaped Tree
an excerpt

Chapter 1:

Ryan was late, as usual. Susan was beginning to angrily stab at her salad, irritated that Ryan had insisted on meeting in the middle of the day. Her mother-in-law was the only sitter she could find, and she could only imagine the things that were being said about her, her house, how she organized her pantry, and anything else the woman could find fault with and harp on about in front of her toddlers. She glanced around the small cafe, taking in the randomly scattered groups and pairs, chatting happily over their meal. She was the only person sitting alone. Mentally she added one more thing to chide Ryan on when she finally showed up. Susan hated dining alone. She was always certain that the other diners were watching her, commenting on her lack of companion. She took one more peek at her watch. Ryan was almost twenty minutes late. She was just about to call Ryan's cell phone when the door clanged open and a willowy figure in a long black skirt and sunny yellow shirt came breezing into the restaraunt.
“Sorry,” Ryan said breathlessly, as she came rushing in, strands of electric blue hair falling out of the messy pony tail she’d pulled her hair into. “Traffic.” She then sat down, picked up her own fork, and helped herself to one of Susan's croutons. Susan noticed that if the other people in the restaraunt weren’t staring before, they were now, but she didn't have time to consider them. After all, Ryan owed her an explanation or two.
“You insisted we meet, and then you don’t bother showing up?” Susan's question was rhetorical. Ryan always had some excuse or another, each more creative than the last, for the way she was. Susan knew that most of it was because Ryan got caught up in her work, polishing some article on living a glamourous life in the cities she’d never even visited, frantically researching each sentence for accuracy, before sending them off to glossy magazines for women who liked to pretend they, too, needed to know how to survive black tie dinner parties. Susan was always amused by the articles Ryan wrote; she took them very seriously and wrote them as though they were truly informative pieces, despite most of her readers being tired housewives like Susan, devouring the articles for the air of fantasy they leant to their otherwise hectic, but repetitive, lives. While Ryan's world was one of deadlines, she rarely had appointments, and very few responsibilities that adhered her to any sort of time schedule. It was a common joke between them that “Ryan Time" was about half an hour behind the rest of the world, although she was also known to appear hours early for events almost as often as she was late.
Ryan made her living with words, and yet she seemed to be struggling with finding the right ones to answer Susan’s question. Her hands flapped in the air in front of her as she struggled to compose her thoughts. Susan waited patiently, watching the graceful hands flutter. She and Ryan had been friends for over almost twenty years. She was used to this particular quirk of Ryan's. Finally, Ryan blurted out, “I need to borrow one of your kids.”
Susan choked on the sip of water she’d just taken. “Excuse me?”
“I need to borrow one of your kids. The older girl. Um... Sarah.”
Susan struggled to compose herself. “First off, her name is Samantha. You should know that, being her godmother. Second, what do you need to borrow a kid for? This isn't one of your hare-brained attempts at finding a boyfriend again, is it?”
Ryan shook her head so vigorously that tufts of ebony fell from her ponytail to join the blue. She opened her mouth to explain, and was interrupted by a waiter. Impatiently, she told him, “Get me whatever she had.”
Despite being flustered by Ryan's request, Susan was composed enough to say, “Sir, she’ll have the veggie lasagna, with a water, no lemon.” She pointed at her own salad and clarified for Ryan, “Meat.”
Ryan waved a hand at Susan in dismissal. “I gave up the vegetarian thing a few weeks ago, but thanks. I don’t mind the lasagna.” The confused waiter slid back from their table before the two women could confound him more. “Anyway,” Ryan said, “Sorry about that. I’m having one of those days where I forget my own name. I need to borrow Samantha because Mom's sick again.”
Susan's face fell, and she honed in on Ryan's news about her mother rather than the bizarre request. “How bad is she?”
Ryan sighed. “Bad. They finally figured out why that lung keeps collapsing. She's got lung cancer, Suse.”
Susan felt tears rush to her eyes, and her vision blurred slightly. Her own mother had been largely absent when she was younger, and she’d spent many evenings at Louise's house. At one point, Louise had joked that she had never had a second child because she knew that Susan would come along eventually, to give her daughter a sister that she actually liked and wouldn’t fight with. She swallowed the lump in her throat and said, “What are they going to do for it?”
Ryan shrugged. “Chemo. They say they can’t do radiation on the lung. It’s not very big, so they’ll see what they can do for it first, but she’ll lose her hair, get the pukies, all that. So I need to borrow Samantha every now and then.”
Susan shook her head. “I don't see where Sammie comes into all of this.”
Ryan sighed. “Can you just trust me with your kid, and leave it at that?”
Susan gave Ryan a stern look. “You know how protective I am of my kids, Ry. Even from you. Especially from you. Last time you spent an afternoon with them, Sammie announced she was going to dye her hair green so you two could make a rainbow, and the twins said Santa was bringing them a drum set for Christmas.”
Ryan grinned. “Santa is bringing them a drum set for Christmas. It is still four months until Christmas. Who do you think Santa is this year?”
Susan sighed. “You’re missing the point. Deliberately, I think.”
Ryan’s smile faded. “Will it help if I tell you I'm dying my hair back to its natural color? And that I’m not doing anything dangerous?”
“Actually, I’m more worried if your plans involve hair dye. Especially if you think you have to suddenly conform to spend time with Sammie. Where exactly do you plan on taking her?”
Ryan sighed, and took a sample bite of the lasagna the waiter had just slipped in to set in front of her. “Just the nursing home, Suse. Nothing major. Maybe the park after. Can you please just trust me?”
Susan let out her own sigh. It wasn’t often that Ryan was distressed or unhappy. Self-absorbed, yes. Eccentric, yes. Disorganized and flustered, yes. But never, never, unhappy. “For one thing, I still need to know what's going on in case my husband asks. For another, I'd really have to do some fast talking to get Sammie excited to go to a nursing home, even with you. Could you just trust me enough to tell me what's going on?”
A hurt look crossed Ryan's face. “It has nothing to do with trust.”
“Then just tell me what's going on!”
“Okay, fine.” She took a drink of water, and Susan noticed a quaver in her hand as she set the glass down. It tilted precariously as she set it Susan's wadded up napkin, and Susan tried to be as nonchalant as possible as she righted it. Ryan nibbled at one nail before saying, “Grandma Maye doesn’t know Mom’s been sick. Mom has all her calls forwarding to me right now, and when Grandma calls, I pretend to be Mom.”
Susan's jaw went slack for a second. Quickly, she composed herself and asked, “Wouldn’t she notice the age difference?”
“No,” Ryan said, avoiding eye contact with Susan.
Susan thought for a moment, and realized how little she knew about Ryan's grandmother. She knew she was an artisit, and that Louise and Maye did not get along. She knew that a few years ago, Maye had raised quite a fuss about going in a home, but she'd quickly quieted down. Susan wasn’t sure she’d ever even seen pictures of Ryan's elusive grandmother, despite spending half her adolescence in Ryan’s home. “There’s something you're not telling me about Maye, isn't there?”
Ryan sighed. “She has Alzheimers. For a couple of years now she gets confused when Mom and I are there at the same time. She sometimes recognizes Mom, sometimes not, but when both of us are there, she gets really, really worked up. For a while now, I've been going in on my own, and half the time, she thinks I’m my mother and asks about me.”
“What about the other half?” Susan asked sympathetically.
“The other half, she doesn’t know who she is, herself.”
Susan figeted with the remains of her salad for a moment, pushing bits of lettuce and chicken across her plate, before once again broaching the subject of where exactly the loan of her eldest child fit into the equation.
Ryan bit at the cuticle of her thumb hard enough for Susan to wince, and then said, “When she asks about me, she thinks I’m seven. And she's really getting mad that I won’t bring me.”
“So you want to have my daughter pretend to be you? That’s so ridiculous, I don't know where to begin, Ry.”
“Look, I know I don't look like I'd be a good mother, and I have no idea why Grandma thinks I'm my mother, what with this blue hair and all-”
“What’s she say about that, anyway?”
“Well, let's just say I’ve learned a lot about my mother’s teenage years,” Ryan explained, “but for the most part, I try to keep it hidden under a hat or scarf. Anyway, when both Mom and I are there, she’s always devastated to realize she's lost my entire childhood. And we go through it every single time. Every time we're there together, we have to break Grandma’s heart. As much as Mom doesn’t like her, it does bother her to do it.”
Susan nodded slowly as she began to catch on to what Ryan was dancing around. “You think that pretending to be the Louise Maye remembers is kinder than having her realize what she's forgotten, don't you?”
Ryan bobbed her head in a sort of half-agreement. “Yeah, for the most part. Actually, it’s more to spare her from the ‘my only child is dying’ bit. Usually she remembers when she's reminded.”
“Isn’t it a bad idea to convince her that she's still stuck in the early 80’s? I thought you were supposed to encourage brain development and memories, not repress them.”
“Well, think of it this way: she’ll forget that Mom pretty much hates her, too.”
Susan shook her head. “Your mother does not hate your grandmother.”
Ryan snorted. “That’s what you think. I can’t tell you how many times I heard my mother comment when I did something wrong that she didn't know how she’d screwed up with me so badly, because at least she wasn’t raising me the way her mother raised her.”
Susan sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you, then. But I’m still not sold on the idea of you trying to pass Sammie off as your own. You two don’t even look alike.
Ryan shrugged. “I figured Grandma hated my dad so much, it would make her that much happier if I showed up with a kid that obviously wasn’t his. I can just say that Sammie looks like her dad, which isn’t far from the truth, anyway.”
Susan nibbled at her lip for a moment, as if trying to decide what to do. Finally, she said, “Sammie would never go for it. She won't call you Mom, and that’ll blow the whole thing.
Ryan grinned. “I’m sure I could convince her. After all, I told her I might convince you to let her use that temporary hair gel-color stuff, and you went for it.”
Susan tossed her hands up in exasperation. “I only did that because she wanted to dye it!”
Ryan laughed. “Where do you think she got the idea to convince you to let her use the stuff? She told me she wanted her hair like mine, and I told her use the gel. She said you'd never go for it. So I told her how to convince her that it was a good idea.”
Susan picked up a cracker packet from the table and threw it at Ryan playfully, joining in her laughter. “You mean you convinced her to trick me into saying the stuff was okay to use?”
Ryan smiled slyly. “Yup. Which means she thinks she owes me one. She's a smart girl. Besides, she thinks it’ll be fun.”
“You already talked to her about it?!”
Ryan tossed the cracker packet back at Susan and quipped, “Whose idea do you think it was to meet you for lunch? It wasn’t mine!”
Susan shook her head again. She was still laughing, but there was a hollowness to it, and she was spinning her wedding ring on her finger while she thought about what Ryan was proposing. Finally she sighed, and said, “Fine, take Sammie with you to see your grandma. It’ll be good for her to spend time with someone from a different generation. But there's one hitch.”
“What’s that?” Ryan didn't seem surprised that Susan was offering a condition to her assent; she acted as though she'd expected one.
“You pay for lunch. And I'm getting dessert,” Susan said, as she flagged the waiter. She tried to hide her misgivings from Ryan, as she halfway listened to the young man before her rattling off the day's specials. She had a feeling this was not going to end well, but there was no amount of convincing in the world that would change Ryan's mind, and she was terrified who else Ryan had in mind to “borrow” a child from if she said no.

Chapter 2:
Colors skimmed across the canvas, swirling together, dancing one way, waltzing another, before parting ways, sometimes sadly, sometimes violently, before clashing together to mate again. Maye stood away from the canvas for a second, before turning to face her daughter, perched on a burnt-umber chair, arms crossed.
“This is it, Louise. My best painting ever!” Maye wiped a stray strand of long, blonde hair from her face, leaving behind a streak of crimson. For a moment, Louise fantasised that it was blood streaking her mother's forehead. She rolled her eyes at her mother's assessment, and said in a surly tone, “You said that about the last four paintings, and they're all gathering dust in some crappy little gallery nobody ever goes into.”
Maye sighed. Louise had heard a lot of those sighs since she had hit her teens, mostly because she had been moody, malicious, and morose. Her mother turned back to the canvas and signed it with a flourish, and then said, “Well, that was because I didn’t realize I had this particular painting in me. Now that it's out, it will change our lives.”
Louise snorted. “The only way that painting can change our lives is if people realize how incredibly ugly it is and ask for retribution for having to look at it.” She stood up from the stool her mother insisted she sit on while she painted, and started to storm from the room, tossing her hair for good measure.
“You come back here,” Maye said in a warning tone. “With that attitude, you’ll be lucky to get dinner.”
Louise laughed, a harsh sound that was almost more a bark than anything else. “With the way you paint, I’m lucky we can afford dinner. Why can't you get a job like normal people? Or a husband? I’m tired of being poor. I’m tired of being the only kid in school who can’t have friends over because there's no place for them to sleep and nothing to feed them for dinner. When my friends talk about going roller skating or to concerts on the weekends, I get to talk about boring art shows.”
Maye shook her head, and Louise noted that look of warning in her eyes that meant that she’d overstepped. Again. “Young lady, I do the best I can.”
Louise narrowed her eyes at her mother for a second, before saying in a challenging tone, “Did you do the best for Dad? Because if you'd spent more time taking care of him and less time painting, he'd still be around and we’d be able to afford things.”
Maye took a sharp breath. “Let's not go over this again,” she said, with an icy tone that suggested that she'd prefer this conversation end. Experience should have told her it would not, Louise thought. In her mind, it would never end, not until her mother apologized for her father leaving them and promised to get a new job.
“It’s your fault Dad left! I hate you!” Louise flung the words out with typical teenage drama. She debated throwing paint at her mother again, but last time she did that, her mother sold the paint-splattered canvas. It was the only painting she'd sold for notable amounts of money in years. Louise didn't want to give her mother the pleasure of having any benefit from her pain and anger again.
“Dad left because he didn't understand that marriage meant fidelity,” Maye said in controlled tones. Louise noted their evenness, and felt even more angry. Why was it her mother never lost control? She could be flailing about, screaming like a banshee, and her mother wouldn't even raise her voice. Instead of being soothing, the even, calm demeanor always made her angrier - at her mother, at herself, at the whole world.
“Dad left because you weren't a good wife to him!” Louise racked her brain for something to say that hadn’t been said before. They'd been having this argument since she was 8, and in five years it hadn't gotten any less volatile. Finally, she settled on her favorite argument: “Why didn’t you let me go with him, then? Why did you make me stay with you? I hate you and I love him!”
Maye’s eyes grew bright with tears. This argument always had that effect. She retorted with her most common response to this line of debate. “I don't care if you hate me, because I’m your mother, and no matter how nasty you get, I will still love you. Your father did not love you. I’m sorry I have to tell you that, over and over again. If he loved you, he would have come back. He would have visited.”
“You didn't let him!” Louise screamed. No matter how many times she heard her mother say it, she could not accept that her father didn't love her. A small pit grew in the bottom of her stomach each time she heard the words, but she refused to accept it. Of course her father loved her. After all, he hated her mother, and so did she, so they must have so much in common that he couldn’t help but love her, right?
Louise stormed out of the house and went straight for the tree in the back yard, a large maple. Years ago lightning had struck it and split the central trunk, causing half of it to bend away from the rest. Both sides had grown into the charactaristic domed top of maples. That, along with the carefully pruned bottom to allow a lawn mower under the wide expanse of brances, gave the tree a heart-shaped profile from a distance. When Louise had pointed this out to her mother some years ago, Maye had laughed and said, “Well, a broken heart, maybe.”
Louise sat on the cold ground, her back against the rough bark. An autumn chill rustled the branches and reached through her thin shirt to give her goosebumps, and she wrapped her arms around herself for warmth. She hated that she could never keep control when she and her mother argued. She hated that she couldn’t say two words to her mother without all the anger and resentment inside her bubbling out in an argument, even if the conversation had nothing to do with what she was angry about. There was a hot sting in her eyes as they filled with tears, and she looked up and tried to blink them away. Her vision cleared, and she found herself looking up the main trunk of the tree, and at the branches spiralling outward, each tenatively clinging to jagged, pointy leaves in a variety of greens, golds, and reds, not unlike the paintings her mother sometimes created. She wondered at the vastness of it, and tried to trace the path the branches took from each other. One branch at the bottom caught her eye. She rose to her feet and stood on tiptoe to run her fingers along the mostly-bare branch, until she reached a pale grey scar where the bark had been worn away and the exposed flesh of the tree had weathered. A twin of the same mark was about two feet away. Suddenly remembering where the marks had come from, Louise jerked away and sank to the ground, as if the marks had burned her.
Her father had been out all night again, and had come home smelling of ladie’s purfume. Maye had confronted him, and he'd confessed not to one affair, but several. It was the only time Louise had ever seen her mother lose her temper, and she hadn’t seen it since. Dishes flew and exploded against the floors and walls. Books were swept off the shelves. Angry words covered in spittle flew across the room as her parents battled. Louise had retreated to the one place she knew she could always find happiness: the swing in the back yard. She had just settled on the old, warping board suspended between twin chains when her father came storming out after her.
“Get up,” he’d told her. Louise had jerked up from her slouched position, delighted that her father would want to take her. She remembered the shock and betrayal she'd felt as he began snipping at the chains where they wrapped around the thick branch, without even waiting for her to get up off of the swing.
“What are you doing to my swing?” she'd asked desperately, as she felt the seat tilt beneath her and threaten to dump her on the ground. “Are you taking my swing so I can have it at our new house?”
Instead of replying in the affirmiative, he’d said, with more anger in his voice than she’d ever had directed at herself, “I said get up, girl. I’m taking this chain.”
Louise had finally understood what her father was saying, and began to cry. “Don’t go Daddy. Don’t go.”
“There isn't anything here for me anymore, Louise. Now get up before I make you get up.” There was a frightening look in his eyes, and Louise remembered being terrified to know exactly how he’d make her get up. Still, she’d had to try: “Take me with you, Daddy! You can put my swing up at our new house!” She clung tighter to the remaining chain as if it were a lifeline, and struggled to keep from sliding off the now mostly vertical board onto the ground below.
Her father turned to her, ruddy-faced, still angry from his confrontation with Maye, and said incredulously, “What do you mean, ‘our new house’? You're not coming with me, girl. You're staying here with your mother.”
Louise had begun to cry. “Please, Daddy, take me. You're taking my swing, take me, too!’
“I’m not taking your damn swing,” he’d said. “I’m taking this chain. You can kept that piece of shit plank and call it whatever you like. Maybe your Mom’ll get you some rope.” He began to snip at the second chain binding the swing to tree with a wirecutter he’d brought outside for just that purpose. “My girlfriend don't like kids. You stay with your Mom.”
Stunned, Louise let go of the chain and fell to the ground, before replying, “Why are you taking the chain off my swing?”
“I need it for my dog. Now get out of the way. If this chain drops and hits you in the head your mother will kill me. Go help her pack my clothes like a good girl.”
Louise began to cry in earnest at the memory of her father’s ultimate betrayal: taking her swing for a dog. Even though Louise had never discussed it with her mother, she suspected Maye knew. Every time the subject of a potential pet was broached, they never, ever mentioned dogs. Louise curled up at the base of the tree and began to cry, really cry, for the first time in years. She didn’t really hate her mother, but they were so different from each other that the thought of getting along was as much a fantasy as the thought of her father coming back one day to apologize for all the pain he'd caused. She tried to tuck herself into as small of a space as possible to conserve warmth. She was barely aware of her mother coming outside and lifting her as if she were little more than a baby. Blankets were tucked around her on the couch, and a cup of tea was pressed into her hands. She wasn’t sure how it happened, but she found herself tangled in her mother's arms, their tears mingling with the tea.