The Suffering Tree by Elle Cosimano

Author:Elle Cosimano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2017-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

When they got home, Tori’s mother hovered in the kitchen near the cutlery drawer, and Tori could feel her worrying, watching, waiting for Tori to run upstairs and shut herself in her room. The pressure was building in her chest, so she told her mom she was going out for a walk, and then she took off into the woods. She jogged to the barn, calling Nathaniel’s name as she threw open the door. It echoed in the hollow space. The ashes had been swept from the fire pit, the barn cold and empty as if he hadn’t been there for a while. Her blanket and pillow lay folded on the straw, and a handful of rusted and battered tools rested neatly on a table fashioned from two old sawhorses and a sheet of warped and splintered plywood from the shed. Breath held, she picked up a small nail and ran her finger over the point. She wondered how long he’d been gone and when he’d be back. She tucked the nail in her pocket, a seed of worry burrowing inside her as she wondered where he could be.

Nathaniel wasn’t at the river either.

She ran the whole way back to the house. Then to the shed, seeing no sign of him. And then she heard it…a dull pat-pat-pat, coming from the cemetery. Tori took the path briskly, pausing halfway down the trail as something strange caught her eye. A large evergreen—or at least she’d thought it’d been green yesterday—stood brittle beside the path, its needles as dry as straw and the color of winter hay. She looked past it, toward the cemetery, where the blighted finger of dead, brown grass seemed to have begun stretching this way, leaving a pattern of lifeless undergrowth in its wake. The trail ahead of her was spotted with desiccated trees.

She hurried past them to the cemetery, only slowing again when she caught sight of Nathaniel’s crisscrossed back between the trees. He stood hunched over the hole. His hole. Only it wasn’t a hole anymore. He used the back of an old shovel to pat the last few mounds of dirt in place, then dropped it beside another pile of rusted tools from her shed. He wiped the sweat from his forehead before putting her father’s turtleneck back on.

Tori started toward him, then paused when Nathaniel bent to retrieve Emmeline’s figurine from the ground. He brought it briefly to his lips. Then, with his eyes closed, he held the doll over a small opening left in the dirt. Something inside Tori stirred. Breath held, she waited, watching, expecting him to drop the figurine in and bury her. Nathaniel held Emmeline suspended over the hole until his hand began to shake. Finally, with a muttered swear, he closed his fist and shoved the doll deep in his pocket.

Nathaniel grabbed a rock from the dirt over his grave and pitched it hard at the tree. It smacked into the trunk and Nathaniel grunted. His hand flew to the back of his head.

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