The Unsaid Good-Bye

Nic sat on the toilet in her great-grandmother’s house, staring at the shower wall mural that had creeped her out as a child, feeling very creeped out. She hated using the bathroom here, because there was nothing to do but sit and look at those creepy, sculpted people with their white, almond-shaped eyes and oversized hands, positioned around the trunk of a vast Yggdrasil of a pear tree, branches spread wide above the length of the tub and oval leaves ending in sharp barbs like wasp stingers drooped in silent menace. If a bathroom could be threatening, her great-grandmother had cornered the market.

It had been a decade since the family matriarch passed at the age of ninety, but this would always be Nic’s great-grandmother’s house. Nic had been a junior in college when it happened and unable to fly home for the funeral. Later, after too many drinks, her father had divulged that her great-grandmother had called for Nic, pleading for her to be brought home. She’d never forgiven him for telling her.

The place had become her father’s, and—ever a creature of habit—he had never remodeled the bathroom. In fact, he’d loved the dreadful mural that was its centerpiece.

Once, when Nic was a child, the tree people had frightened her so badly that she found herself frozen in front of the shower. She called to her father.

“You want me to come into the bathroom with you?” he asked.

“I’m done,” she assured him. “I need you to look at this.”

He came in hesitantly, probably worried that she’d gotten her first period. When she indicated the mural, his eyes grew wide, and as a child she had mistaken his relief for misunderstanding. He said, “You don’t like folk art.”

Even all these years later, Nic remembered that moment with incredulity. She remembered thinking, I don’t know what folk art is, but that’s not the problem here. It was the sideways people, painted in two dimensions despite existing in three. The textured mural existed in bold relief, faded paint adding eerie life to the trunk and branches, leaves and, yes, the tree people. Each was sculpted in profile with only one eye, and while their arms and legs had physical depth, they were shaped like paper dolls, as if they might curl up and blow away on any breeze.

Thanks, Dad, Nic tried to whisper, but she had no voice.

Some people inherit sums of money. Some people inherit a condo in New York. When an unexpected heart attack had taken Nic’s father, she discovered that he had passed down his grandmother’s house to her.

Thoughts of her father overwhelmed her, as they often did these last couple weeks. Her hatred of the mural collided with grief over losing one of her few remaining blood relatives, and tears welled. Powerless to stop them, she lowered her face into her hands and wept, the eyes of the tree people on her the entire time.

***

She washed up in the sink, and they continued to watch. She saw their unblinking gazes in the mirror, their pale red lips painted at an angle that implied a smile but belied some furtive, distrustful intent.

Nic whirled, intending to draw the shower curtain closed, but her hand hovered before the coarse yellow cloth. If she pulled it across, then she wouldn’t be able to see them, which would be worse than having their eyes upon her.

First thing Monday, she thought, I call the contractor fixing the roof, and I ask whether he does showers. This thing is going away.

She hesitated a moment longer, studying the leaves, which had grown darker over the years till they were almost black, as if all the pigment lost from the rest of the mural had somehow settled in them. The macabre stinger tips, the way the edges curled up as if each were a tiny battleship ready to sail shower currents into the tub below, helped her make up her mind. She wasn’t ripe enough to need a shower tonight. Tomorrow didn’t look good, either.

“Good night, you creepy bastards,” Nic said, and she left the bathroom.

***

Nic dreamed that a giant pear tree stood over the house, dropping boulder-sized fruit on the roof. Each struck with a sound like a detonation. Her great-grandmother’s house was sturdy construction, built to withstand anything from heavy winter snow to driving winds, but it couldn’t withstand a barrage like this.

She jolted awake in the room where she had slept on visits with her great-grandmother as a child, the echo still sounding in her ears.

What the hell? she thought. That had been real. Something had fallen inside the house loudly enough to wake her from a deep sleep. She lay still, listening for any hint that someone had found a way inside. She remembered her father saying that red squirrels had nested in the attic once upon a time. Could animals have caused a crash like that?

No other sounds followed. Get moving, she commanded herself. You know you have to.

Nic drew down the blankets. The threadbare carpet was rough as she padded to the door and peered down the hall. A single light burned.

Of course. It would be you.

Was it possible that she had left it on when she hurried out earlier? In the middle of the afternoon, with sunlight pouring through the windows, it was certainly possible that she’d overlooked the fact that the light was on. Wasn’t it?

She studied it, feeling chills race along the back of her neck and hair prickle along her bare arms. Then, as it had the day her father tried to diminish her feelings by saying she disliked folk art, her fear turned to rage. She wanted to leave, sleep in a hotel off the interstate, but instead she steeled herself. She thought, I will not be intimidated by you.

As she approached the bathroom door, though, the odor of rot became more noticeable, and she had to concede that she did, in fact, feel a bit intimidated. The smell was both familiar and utterly out of place. Nic realized that the light drawing her forward was yellow, like the old bulbs her great-grandmother had used. She didn’t think anyone sold bulbs like those anymore, unless it was a smart bulb programmed to replicate the old style.

A floorboard creaked, something scurried in the darkness, and Nic stumbled forward, momentarily more concerned by a red squirrel in the darkness (Thanks again, Dad) than she was of the stench emanating from the only well-lit space in the house. She ducked into the bathroom and then drew back in revulsion, regretting every step she had taken since leaving her bed.

Someone had filled the tub with pears. Dozens of them. Bushels, Nic’s great-grandmother would have said. They filled the tub, and they were not fresh. Gray blotches marred the topmost fruit. Below, black expanses of rot promised the bottom was little more than sickly sweet sludge.

Nic’s eyes worked their way up from the mound of fruit, and a shock so strong it was palpable washed over her. It smacked her cheeks, thudded against her forehead, left her nose cold and set her molars gnashing. A wave of hot panic tried to drive off the chills that had accompanied her through the hall, but the cold would not yield. She stood, paralyzed, gazing at the unnatural pear tree mural in alternating flashes of heat and cold.

Because the leaves were gone.

Sculpted leaves, part of the wall, had vanished as if they had never been. Behind them stretched naked branches from one end of the tub to the other, with no sign of damage. These were not branches from which leaves had been scraped away. These were branches left exposed in autumn after their leaves had fallen.

Nic could not accept it. Sculpted leaves, dropped from sculpted branches, and a mound of very real fruit piled in the tub where roots would stretch.

I’m dreaming, she thought, but she knew that just thinking it proved otherwise. Maybe some zen master who meditated eighteen hours a day might be able to sense when she was in the middle of a dream, but Nic only recognized her dreams upon waking. If she had the presence of mind to wonder if this was a dream, then there was only one answer. The hornet leaves were gone, the branches really were undamaged, and the tub really was full of—

“Oh my God,” Nic gasped.

The pears were moving. The heap shifted upward ever so slightly, then settled. She stared, eyes wide as any tree person, and it happened again, more noticeably this time, as if something underneath had drawn in a deep breath. The topmost fruit, the least rotted ones, rolled away. One tumbled onto the floor, coming to a stop within inches of Nic’s toes. She leapt back. The three words she had spoken had taken all the air from her lungs.

“Nicole?”

Nic knew the voice immediately, even though she had not heard it since she’d been in her early twenties, she doubted she would ever forget it. The kindest, warmest woman in her life. The woman who had been more of a mother to her than her father’s ex-wife had ever attempted to be, always ready with a willing ear and a warm embrace. Strength drained from Nic’s legs. She dropped to sitting on the closed lid of the toilet.

Leave now, she told herself, but she could not fail that voice again.

Everything else moved. The tree people scuttled along the wall to drop into the morass of decomposed pears. Some worked the top of the mound with their oversized hands while others disappeared below, returning after several minutes with paper-doll arms and legs stained by liquefied skins and juice. They were shifting the pears to one end of the tub. There was nothing furtive in their smiles now. Those wide-eyed expressions were manic.

“Grandma?” Nic asked.

“Yes, darling.”

Might as well go all in, she thought. If you’re going to hallucinate the fruity resurrection of your dead great-grandmother, don’t settle for half measures.

“You can’t be here.”

“Your father said the same thing.”

“Dad saw you?” Another wave broke over Nic, alternating heat and cold from the top of her scalp, down her spine, to the soles of her feet. She thought of the unexpected heart attack that took his life. She had never thought to ask where the EMTs found him, but she suddenly felt certain she knew. They had discovered him on the bathroom floor, below Pear Yggdrasil with branches outstretched along the wall.

The last few pears in the back half of the tub shifted, and Nic saw a uniform layer of almost-black leaves. The surface of the leaves sighed and expanded rhythmically. Nic raised a hand to her lips, though she was too terrified to voice her scream. It was a cocoon.

“Just a moment, darling,” her great-grandmother’s voice said. “It’s all right that you made me wait. We’re together now.”

A leaf-clad figure rose from the tub. The smell that issued forth as the cocoon opened was heady, sweet, intoxicating. Nic recognized the round cheeks, the welcoming smile—even if she did not entirely trust the stinger hook of each tooth—but where there should have been flesh there was only throbbing pulp and clinging leaves.

“Give us a hug,” Nic’s great-grandmother said, arms wide. “Just one little bite—a peck, even—and we’ll never be separated again.”

Nic’s body surrendered in a rush. Her mind swam on her grandmother’s smile and whatever pheromones filled the bathroom. Her traitorous feet carried her toward that long-desired embrace, and one final thought that was wholly her own ran through her mind as she slipped a foot over the lip of the tub: I really do hate folk art.