Rooted
There was a rumor going around Brockfield Elementary School of an illness that turned children into trees. The spectacle began when Jimmy Chapman, a petite 5th grade boy with flaming red hair and a knack for puzzles, discovered an article in his father’s office. The article in question detailed a curious medical investigation in which school-aged children slowly transformed into trees. The article was passed around at lunch as children slurped on juice boxes and ate sandwiches cut into neat triangles, and by early afternoon a meeting between the principal and Jimmy’s father, a botanist, had already been arranged.
Anabella Stone was a 4th grade student at the time, and on that particular afternoon in late March, children filled the hallways with anxious whispers. When they asked their teacher, Mrs. Smith, whether the rumor was true, her lips formed a hard, tight line that accentuated the wrinkles on her pale, middle-aged face.
“Now now boys and girls,” she said with cheerful scorn, reminding Anabella of the time back in December when Katrina Granger asked why they had to read a book about Hanukkah when no one in their class was Jewish.
Soon the class was re-engaged in their lesson on spelling, and Anabella wondered if there was a word to describe the peculiar mix of fear, enchantment, and curiosity she felt that afternoon. Thirty minutes before pick-up, an email was sent out to parents informing them of “potentially triggering” information their children were exposed to while at school, accompanied by a list of “helpful tips and tricks for having difficult conversations with elementary aged children.”
That afternoon as Anabella walked home with Lucy, her third-grade neighbor, she took more notice of the redwood trees on either side of the footpath in their quaint Marin County suburban town. Anabella’s mother, Marie, was cutting watermelon in their stainless-steel kitchen when Anabella returned home. Her mom had her light blonde hair up in a messy bun as she sliced perfectly ripe watermelon while Sonos speakers played soft indie music in the background. Their nanny played with Anabella’s four-year old sister Emma outside, chasing her around the big oak in the backyard.
“How was school sweetie?” her mom asked, hanging up the LL Bean backpack Anabella had tossed carelessly on the white living room rug. Her mother seemed unfazed by the frightening news of the tree-transforming illness. She didn’t bring it up until Anabella mentioned the rumors while eating her fourth piece of watermelon, the pink juice dribbling down her chin.
“Oh honey, now don’t you worry about that. That would never happen to a child like you,” her mom said, with the same air of annoyed inconvenience as when Emma’s report card suggested the possibility of ADHD. “We’ll have family game night tonight to take your mind off all this madness,” she said, fixing Anabella’s braids and kissing the top of her head.
Her mother was neat and practical. She gave up her job as a lawyer shortly after Anabella’s older brother Tommy was born, but she was anything but unoccupied as president of the PTA. In fact, it seemed that all of Anabella’s friends’ parents knew her mother, who still dressed like a businesswoman for morning school drop-off.
Later that night, as Anabella laid in bed imagining what it would feel like to have tree trunks as legs and leaves for hair, she heard her mom on the phone with Lucy’s mother.
“I mean seriously, for everything us parents do for that school you would think they would be more mindful of sheltering the children from such horrible stories…yes of course I’ll start a petition.”
“Sometimes I really regret not putting the kids in private school,” Anabella could hear her mother say gruffly to her father, John.
“They’ll probably all forget about it tomorrow,” Anabella could hear her dad murmur.
They did not forget about it. The next day at school during morning meeting, Johnny Singer raised his hand to share that his mother said the rumors of the tree illness were true, to which Katrina Granger said her father told her that “only bad kids turn into trees,” to which little crybaby Olivia Fenton’s face turned red and splotchy with tears as she wailed about not wanting to turn into a tree.
This exchange resulted in Mrs. Smith bringing back the “morning meeting norms chart,” and they spent the next 10 minutes discussing appropriate and inappropriate morning meeting announcement topics. No one brought up the tree illness again in Mrs. Smith’s class, and while the children still whispered about it in the hallways and at lunch, soon there were more important matters like which 5th graders kissed at recess, the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 movie premiere, and the slow roll towards a carefree summer.
That summer was filled with camping trips to Samuel P. Taylor State Park, where Anabella, Emma, and Tommy slept in an REI tent surrounded by redwood trees. At night, she would unzip the rainfly from their tent and gaze at the trunks of the redwoods that stretched upwards towards the sky as if grasping for the stars. In the morning, she watched as the sun lit up the redwood trunks into a scorching red hue and listened as the trees rustled in the wind, gossiping about the humans who slept blissfully beneath them. The summer of 2011 was one of discovery for Anabella: planting a vegetable garden in the backyard with her mother, playing in the neighborhood pool with Lucy, and building pitch boats with her cousins on their annual family reunion to Oregon. The pitch boats had become a tradition where they built little boats made entirely out of nature. They used tree bark for the base of the boats, sticks for masts, leaves for sails, and glued the boats together with sap. For the final touch, they decorated the boats with wildflowers and inhabited them with pinecone people who set sail down the rapids of the local creek. Anabella kept a notebook where she fantasized about the lives of these pinecone people, writing about their adventures to new land on their crafted ships. She felt like the world was a giant book of possibility, its rigid leather binding opening to accept her into its soft pages. In contrast, fifth grade was a year of changes: shifting friendships, body hair that sprouted under her arms, and poor eyesight that went three months undetected before Anabella sheepishly admitted she couldn’t see the board.
All 46 Brockfield 5th graders graduated elementary school without any children transforming into trees.
Middle school felt like wading through thick molasses. Anabella shot up like a weed and her clothes fit poorly on her lanky body. She grew out her beloved strawberry blonde bangs, traded in glasses for contacts, and became resentful of her mother. The world was changing as rapidly as the leaves on the maple tree in their front yard, which her father raked on Saturdays. When Anabella was a sophomore in high school, a landscaper informed them that the maple was diseased with a rare pathogen. The day that the tree cutters came, Anabella drank cheap beer disguised as soda in an empty playground with people she called friends in order to escape the tree execution.
Tommy was in college, at Yale, as her mother indiscreetly reminded acquaintances every chance she got. He was a pre-med biology major, and one Saturday night he called Anabella to tell her the tree illness was real.
“I found a new article about it tonight, in the library,” he whispered, slightly out of breath. “It’s crazy really, there’s been so many attempts to erase it from medical history. It starts with a sort of rash on a kid’s skin and next thing you know the skin hardens into bark and — ”
“Tommy slow down,” Anabella said. “You don’t actually think that stuff is real, do you?” She said this with confidence while her stomach churned and she watched the shadow of the oak tree outside her window sway in the wind.
“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said, louder this time. “Listen, even the professors don’t like to talk about it, but I have this one professor who told me where to find more information in the library and it’s just so interesting in the most horrifying way. After the skin turns into bark the kid’s hair falls out and grows back green and then their legs stiffen and morph together and then — ”
“Don’t you have a party to get to or something?” Anabella asked, imagining her brother holed up in a library cubby at 2:00 am.
They didn’t speak for five months after that.
In June, 45 members of the Brockfield Elementary School 5th grade class successfully graduated from high school without turning into trees; 45 because Madeleine Spark disappeared in 7th grade while hiking with her uncle, which no one liked to talk about except to say how things like “oh how tragic.”
The summer concluded with the annual family reunion to Oregon before Anabella started college at USC. There, Tommy went on strike from the pitch boat tradition, trying to convince younger cousins that peeling bark off trees for the sake of their own entertainment was cruel, which prompted an argument about whether or not trees had feelings. Tommy insisted they did; Anabella thought he was being ridiculous, but mostly just wanted him to be wrong.
Her freshman year was filled with new experiences: a roommate from New York City who listened to nonstop Broadway musical soundtracks, the boy down the hall, the smell of moldy bread from a forgotten box under her dorm bed. She was homesick but avoided calling her family. After all, her brother had “thrived in college” as her mother repeatedly reminded her whenever they did talk. She spent her free time between classes crafting short stories in a leather-bound notebook under a sycamore tree outside her dorm, dreaming of becoming a writer and living in LA. In her sophomore year she planned on declaring Creative Writing as her major before her mom talked her out of it, insisting she choose something more “practical.” She became a business major instead, and on a camping trip that spring she tossed pages from her journal carelessly into a roaring campfire, watching paper curl in on itself and slowly devolve into ash.
Anabella got a starter job at a consulting firm after graduation and moved to a three-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. She loved the city, with its steep hills that burned her calves, multitude of parks, and hole in the wall cafes where she could tuck herself into a corner and pretend to write while sipping on iced chai lattes that made her heart pound. She met Roger at a bar on Polk Street one Saturday in November. He had chestnut eyes and didn’t laugh when she told him about her fantasy of quitting her job for something more creative while they sipped on overpriced cocktails at 1:00 am. He was in law school at Berkeley, and the summer after he graduated, they were engaged. A year after their wedding, Anabella was promoted at the job she had grown to despise. One week later, she found out she was pregnant with their daughter Haley and they moved out of the city to a house in the suburbs, ten minutes from her childhood home.
When Haley turned one, they went on their first trip to Oregon as a family of three, Anabella’s first time in five years since her family abandoned the tradition. On the final evening of their trip, she told Roger that she was going to collect materials for Haley’s pitch boat. He looked at her like she had two heads.
“You know she’s only one, right?” he said. “It’s not like she’s going to remember these traditions until she’s older.”
“I’ll be back by dinner,” Anabella said curtly, leaving Haley with her flustered husband and heading up the road behind the cabins to a thicker neck of the woods.
It took her longer to find the right tree by herself without the help of her siblings and cousins, resting her hands gently on the bark of the Douglas-fir trees. She sunk down to sit beneath the chosen tree, the memories of her childhood rising up inside her like sap. It was there that she began to cry, the tears rolling down her cheeks hot and heavy, nostalgic for a time where the world seemed filled with an abundance of choices and possibility. She stood up and began peeling the bark off the wounded tree, first slowly and gently and then more violently, severing the bark from the trees as the sap oozed from the insides. She heard something cry out, and for a moment she thought it was the tree itself before realizing it was her own cry as she kept ripping at the tree until she had a pile of bark. Her fingers bleeding, she collected the sap next, using a stick to gather discharge from the splintered tree. Pine needles fell like her tears. She couldn’t muster the energy to collect the pinecones and leaves; she felt rooted to the earth like the tree who watched her sit quietly with its scattered remains. She sat there for what must have been an hour before she heard Roger’s voice snaking through the trees, calling her name. He sounded frightened; what would people think of a man whose wife had gone missing in the middle of the woods? It was starting to get dark, the shadows of the trees thinning and lengthening. Anabella stood up to meet him, brushing the tears off her cheeks with sticky fingers.
“Anabella?” Roger asked, bewildered when he saw her. Her hair was matted, her clothes covered in pines.
“You’re right,” she said quietly, standing there as he walked forward to embrace her. “She’s too young for pitch boats.”
Anabella quit her job that November. Roger was promoted to Partner at work, they were trying for another baby, and as her mother told her, she had fulfilled her duty as a “working mom” for long enough. Her parents were downsizing to a smaller house three blocks from the home she grew up in, and at Christmas they insisted on her, Roger, and the baby moving into the house that held her childhood memories. She said they would have to think about it. Roger said there was nothing to think about, and they moved two months later. The day they moved in she stood in the kitchen alone, staring at the army of boxes that stretched into the living room, wondering how this house seemed even bigger and grander than when she was young and ate watermelon at the counter. That counter would become a refuge for many things over the next five years: dirty dishes spilling out of the sink, negative pregnancy tests, Haley’s preschool crayon drawings, the glasses of wine she drank when Roger worked late (which was frequent), Haley’s kindergarten class picture from Brockfield Elementary, the charcuterie board from the party the night she was elected as PTA president, and more negative pregnancy tests that ended up in the trash.
She was sitting in the living room one Thursday night, sipping her third glass of wine after putting Haley to bed and waiting for Roger to return from work, when a familiar name appeared on the TV screen as she absent-mindedly flipped through channels, the glow of the screen illuminating the dim living room. She recognized him almost instantly, his flaming red hair and geeky grin front and center above the caption “Rare childhood illness thought to be linked to contaminated water.” Her head began to pound. The front door creaked open and Roger walked in, dropping his briefcase on the kitchen counter as Anabella’s eyes stayed glued to the screen.
“Oh not more of this tree illness crap,” he said, agitated and rubbing his eyes, picking up the remote to click the TV off. He reached rather gruffly for the half-empty wine bottle, placing it in the fridge and turning the lights on brighter in the living room.
“You know about this?” Anabella asked.
“Oh yeah,” he scoffed. “Some lady in Ross tried suing the county when her daughter developed a rash after swimming in a public pool, but it turned out to just be eczema.”
“Oh,” Anabella said quietly, taking one last sip of wine.
“I mean you don’t believe this crap, do you?” Roger said. He came to sit down beside her, putting his arm around her and twirling her hair between his thumb and forefinger. “Trust me,” he said more gently, kissing her cheek, “the water in Ross and all of Marin County is completely safe.”
Anabella nodded, feeling slightly relieved. Later that night after Roger fell asleep, she found herself staring at Tommy’s contact on her cell phone, the light from the phone shining on her glazed eyes. She resisted the urge to call him, instead scouring the internet for articles about instances of the tree illness, finally dozing off into a relaxed sleep after finding an article that confirmed the safety of water in their town; they had nothing to worry about.
Anabella didn’t hear of the tree illness again until one month later on a particularly chilly evening in September. She was rushing to get ready for the first PTA meeting of the year, frantically writing up instructions for the babysitter while Haley played in her room. A text popped up on her phone from Linda, another first grade parent, asking whether parent concerns about the illness could be added to the agenda.
No time in meeting. Won’t affect our kids & Roger agrees it’s really nothing to worry about. Babysitter here, see you soon! Anabella chuckled, imagining the hysteria that would ensue if children turning into trees were an actual PTA meeting topic.
Despite the urgency of Linda’s text, however, the meeting went smoothly and there was no mention of the illness. Instead, they discussed the upcoming November pie eating fundraiser and the annual fall science fair. The other moms respected Anabella, looked up to her. She took the longer route home that night, speeding through windy backroads with her music blaring and a smile on her face as her headlights illuminated the redwood trees that surrounded her like silent giants. She was home before Roger, sliding into the driveway and cutting her car engine, sitting there for a minute feeling exhilarated before heading inside.
The babysitter greeted Anabella cheerfully, saying that Haley felt tired and had gone to bed sooner than her 8:00 pm bedtime. After she left, Anabella helped herself to wine, taking a swig right out of the bottle. She poured herself a glass, kicking her heels off and sinking into their plush living room sofa. Two glasses later, her teeth stained red, Roger texted that something “urgent” had come up at work, and he likely wouldn’t be home before midnight. Sighing, Anabella made her way upstairs, turning off the lights in the house one by one. The wine was making her drowsy and she tiptoed down the upstairs hallway on her way to bed. She rested her head against Haley’s bedroom door, placing her hand on the knob and turning it slowly before hesitating and moving along, not wanting to wake her sleeping daughter.
If she had in fact opened the door she would have found her daughter stiff and silently trembling — her skin coarse and hardening, the roots of her hair already turned green.
