Life Tree

By Martha Amabile

If by some miracle, some fortuitous alignment of the stars and planets, you could go back in time to start over as an 11-year old – without the benefit of knowing anything that you know now or being able to change even a single breath in a day – would you do it? In this thrilling novel, one man experiences just that as he is transported back in time to his childhood. Get ready for an adventure like no other in "Life Tree".

On a cold rainy night while preparing for the next day's funeral, Peter McKinney sits in a bed & breakfast and stares into the night. Then through his memories, he slips back in time to the days preceding Christmas, 1964. The people, places, and events of his childhood were completely ordinary, even mundane, until that night during a similar storm. It was an evening that started off at a church Christmas party with food, fun, and friends. But Peter and his best friend Luke had unknowingly sparked a sequence of events that would change Peter's life forever. Surviving a near-tragedy that night only led to a shocking truth that Peter could never have imagined – especially at eleven years old.

This is a story of ordinary life. It may remind you of your own childhood, of laughter over silly things, imaginative play days, forever friends (or at least you thought they would be), and secrets that to this day your parents don't know about. It is about days free from worry when your only responsibility was making sure the dog got fed. It was a time when your parents seemed so different than they were when you got older. It was a time to dream of only the good things in life and to make wishes on stars. It was carefree, and happy, and once again – ordinary.

Until it wasn't.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667813127

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Copyright © 2021 Martha E. Amabile

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-66781-311-0 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-66781-312-7 (eBook)

Dedication

This book, many years in the making,

is dedicated to my greatest inspirations in life:

Drayton, Aubrey, Gehrig, Angelique, and Janelle.

As my own grandmother used to say, Mimi Loves You!

Contents

Present Day

The Town of Blue Spring

December 21, 1964

The Town of Blue Spring

December 22

December 23

December 24

Almost Christmas Morning

Present Day

Blue Spring

LIFE TREE

Present Day

The Town of Blue Spring

It was a dark and stormy night …

Sound familiar? I can’t think of a better way to start a story. It came from my favorite children’s book, A Wrinkle in Time. I told my grandchildren that if I ever wrote a book, it would start with that sentence. So there it is.

Okay. I’ll be honest—almost all of my stories start that way. Rain, wind, lightning, and thunder can be great inspirations to an author, or great distractions. For me, the latter is more true. I’ve always loved storms. The more violent, the better. Sometimes people will ask me what I miss most about moving from the Gulf Coast and I tell them honestly, Hurricanes.

As I write the words in that previous sentence, I realize that later into my story one might wonder how my love of storms could possibly be true. I really don’t have an answer, except to say that maybe sometimes you have to hate something first before you can love it. I’ll just leave it at that.

Noticing the curtains momentarily light up, I close my laptop, get up from the desk, and walk over to the window. I push the curtains aside and peer through the open slats of the shutters. The glow from the streetlight makes the heavy mist look like gold glitter falling to the ground. Across the street, the Marley kids are standing in the garage with their dad, watching the storm. A gust of wind knocked over a lawn chair and Mrs. Marley is trying to catch a beach ball that’s bouncing around the garage. I chuckle to myself because she looks trapped in a pinball game. Her family is oblivious to her efforts; staring at the rain seems to have zombitized them. Their trance is broken when a car passes slowly, its swishing tires sending up fans of water over the curb and I can see the Marley children laughing. In the distance, just over the rooftops, silver lightning fractures the sky. It’s as if a seam ripped open in a black fabric, and a brilliant light pulses briefly through the jagged tear. It’s so beautiful!

While admiring a summer storm once—long before my wife died—I said to her, I could be one of those storm chasers. She sort of shook her head and with her eyes still fixed on her reading, replied, There’s something wrong with those people. But in the next instant she looked up from her book, tilted her head as if studying me, and said, Yes, yes, you could. Then she went back to her reading with just a hint of a smile.

The wind blows a spray of water against the windowpanes. The storm has picked up. I sit on the edge of the windowsill, peering through the shutters, and my gaze is drawn to the very reason I’m here. I look down the wet street at the old house at the end of the block. It sits dark and abandoned in the pouring rain. I can imagine hearing the swing on the front porch creaking in the wind. But there are no longer any faces peering through the windows. No one pulls into the driveway anymore or knocks at the front door. There are no stiff sheets billowing on the now-rusty clothesline in the backyard. The dented mailbox leans on its wooden post. The house has been empty of people for a long time, but the memories still live there. Over the years, I’ve walked up the steps of that abandoned house, closed my eyes, and felt time evaporate. It awes me that when I stand in the exact spots where I stood as a child, or reach up and grab the very same tree branch that I fell from and broke my leg, the memories bring both elation and pain at the same time. Such memories from the old home!

My old home.

As I stare through the window of this B&B, my mind closes the gap between what was and what is. I wonder if there is some invisible gateway from the present to the past, a kind of timeless intersection in the middle of the street. Maybe, just maybe, I could slip through a crack in the concrete and find myself in a time before the moss had reached the higher branches of our oak tree—where my kite was forever entwined at the very top. Or maybe with the moon just right, and the planets in some kind of fortuitous, once-in-a-billion-years’ alignment, I could be sucked through a black hole right there by the stop sign, waking up in the year 1964.

But would I really go back if I could?

I am drawn to that house. It’s an inspiration to me now. It is a place where happy childhood vanished in an instant, to be replaced by the harshest realities of my life. It is the hallmark of my most joyous dreams and most frightening nightmares. It is the reason I drove across town and rented this room for the week, to know that I am close, that it is there on the other side of the curtain.

The garage door comes down and the Marleys are gone for the night. It’s quieter. The storm can’t make up its mind to be subtle or ferocious. I listen to the light rain patter, the wind gusts, and the rumble of far-away thunder. I stand here now, with a cup of steaming coffee in my hand, looking down the street at the old house. It was a long time ago that I stood at that window with a glass of Kool-Aid in my hand looking toward where I am now. This is Mrs. Quinsetti’s old house, renovated into a beautiful bed-and-breakfast, with each big room depicting a Civil War hero. It’s spacious, with antique furniture and old memorabilia, and warm—a fireplace sits in the corner. I’m in the Robert E. Lee room. Across the hall is the Ulysses S. Grant room. It seems fitting that they would be on opposite sides of the hall. The empty field behind this house, where we used to hunt tarantulas, is still there.

Over the years, my job had me living in different parts of the country. But this was always home. So when I retired, with my grown children living in the next county, my wife and I decided it was time to move back. I’m so thankful that we did before she passed away, because she is now permanently in a place that is home to me, and where one day I will rest beside her. I don’t live far from here—over by the lake, as a matter of fact. But although there are times I have driven by my old house, I try to avoid the urge. My wife said once that I had learned what I could from the past, so it was time to let go and let the dust settle on those memories. Ironic that she said that because it was her idea to move back. What she was saying was not to forget the past but to simply put it into perspective. So I know she would understand my need to be here today—and especially tomorrow—on the street where I grew up.

Sometimes my memories are so strong it feels like I’m still living my life behind those walls. It wouldn’t surprise me to look through the grimy windows and see myself decorating the Christmas tree with Aunt and Uncle and my beloved black Labrador, Brenly—sixty pounds of boundless energy and mean as a butterfly—who dashes up the stairs with a candy cane in his mouth and silver tinsel waving from his tail like a flag.

From where I stand now, that portal between the past and the present is a thin pane of glass.

I hear the whispers. They remind me that it was a cold and snowy night, very similar to this night over fifty-five years ago, when I sat on the sofa wrapped in a comforter, chilled to the bone, my teeth chattering uncontrollably, my mind as numb as my body, staring at the flames in the fireplace as I listened to words that changed my life.

Setting my coffee cup on the window ledge, I sit on the corner of the bed and let the memories sweep me back to the best times of my life, which led to the worst time of my life, which led back to a new beginning.

There is another brilliant flash of lightning followed by a crack of thunder that sounds like the sky split open. The storm has arrived! I hope it lasts for days. But it would be nice if there were a pause in the rain tomorrow, just long enough for the funeral.

* * *

December 21, 1964

The Town of Blue Spring

Peter! Get off that couch and away from the window! I’ve told you about tree branches blowing around in a storm! They could come crashing through the glass!

Tree branches. Although I had never heard of that happening to anyone, I did as Aunt Joan ordered, plopping down in the armchair across the room. Brenly, the six-year-old furry love of my life, wandered over and started licking my slippers. Brenly will lick anything. Sometimes he just walks through a doorway and licks the wall on his way into the other room. The other day he was sprawled on his back in the middle of my bed, paws straight up, just licking the air. Uncle said he’s dumb enough to think his tongue just might reach the ceiling. Aunt says he’s not dumb, just not too keen on perspective. There is no describing how much we love this dog. Uncle pretends to be neutral about his feelings toward Brenly, but one night shortly after we got him, he disappeared. It was the Fourth of July, and no doubt the popping of fireworks scared him. We all panicked when we saw the front door had been left open and no Brenly. Uncle had the police department, the fire department, every neighbor within a two-block radius, and the church choir driving around looking for him. Turned out he was under my bed the whole time. With one of my new shoes. Happy as a lark. That’s when I knew what that puppy meant to Uncle because he didn’t even scold him for chewing up the shoe. I wasn’t so lucky.

Sitting here now, bored out of my mind, I wished I had gone into town with Uncle Leland, but I didn’t want to crawl out of my warm covers so early in the morning. I knew the last truckload of Christmas trees had been delivered to the store and Uncle needed someone to help mount them on the wooden stands. That someone would be me. But listening to the howling wind outside had made me snuggle deeper into the quilts. It was Brenly who decided it was time for me to start my day. He grabbed the quilt in his teeth and pulled it onto the floor. He tried to drag it out of my room, but got tangled up until he had completely disappeared underneath it. I watched a lump of blue quilt spinning in a circle at the foot of my bed. After jerking the quilt off Brenly, I put on my robe and slippers and followed my bouncing black Lab, who stopped to lick the wallpaper on the way downstairs.

So, after gulping down breakfast, here I sit in the safety of the armchair watching the potentially fatal wind (according to Aunt Joan) shake the trees and rattle the windowpanes. I sighed heavily. The apex of boredom for an eleven-year-old is watching your aunt put a hem in a pair of trousers. Her head bobbed up and down as she looked through her reading glasses at the tiny stitching. On the floor by her feet was a wicker basket that contained spools of thread and an assortment of buttons in every size, shape, and color imaginable. On rainy days we string the buttons and hang them in the window to blow in the breeze. When the wooden spools of thread are empty, we glue them together, paint them, and adorn them with accessories, like Pez candy for feet and yarn for hair. I sometimes dress them in Play-Doh. They are called the Spool People.

On other rainy days, we might take a ride in the car listening to the windshield wipers trying to keep time with the radio. We always drive into the country. Aunt Joan hates traffic. Of course her definition of traffic is a moving car anywhere within sight. When she has to drive across a street, she’ll wait until there’s not a single car in either direction before she feels it’s safe to proceed. I almost finished my math homework one afternoon waiting for her to take her foot off the brake. People in town have learned her driving habits, so if they’re behind her they sometimes decide to do a U-turn and take another street. They never bother honking because she’ll just roll down the window and wave. And she has been known to get out of her car and walk back to see why they honked. After a long spell of waiting for a clear path to cross the street, she says the same thing every time: Why Peter, I guess you just gotta be born on the other side!

Uncle Leland also seems to have some sympathy for me on rainy days. Sometimes he brings home a watermelon, or half-melted ice cream sundaes from the drug store. It is Uncle Leland who drives my competitive spirit. He loves playing board games and cards. He taught me Pinochle at a very early age, but never lets me win. Even when I was four years old and we played Candy Land, a game that relies more in the luck of the drawn cards, he would find a way to win.

Aunt scolds him for being so cutthroat in Sorry too, because instead of advancing one of his pieces, he’ll move onto my square and send me back every time. When Aunt joins us in Monopoly, Uncle always makes her mad too, because he buys up rows of properties and puts hotels on them, never negotiating to keep one of us in the game. Once I got so mad I slammed the dice down and crawled underneath the kitchen table. Uncle continued to play, handing the dice to me under the table when it was my turn. When I snatched them up and angrily threw them against the wall, he leaned over to see what I had rolled and then casually told Aunt, Peter got seven. Ha! He landed on my hotel! I couldn’t even win at being angry. But I’ve gotten used to it. Uncle says it makes me learn strategy and handle defeat—traits that will be invaluable to me as an adult in the real world. Aunt says that’s hogwash, that he just can’t stand to lose. I think both of them are right.

Suddenly Brenly bolts for the kitchen.

Peter, I think I heard the kitchen door open, Aunt says without looking up from her work.

Could be a tree branch came through it.

She looked at me with mock scorn as I leaped out of the chair, thankful for even the slightest distraction. The only person that would just walk into our house any time day or night was Luke. And there he stood, dripping on the kitchen floor, removing his galoshes as Brenly licked up the water from the linoleum. Now that dog is truly in his glory!

Luke Kinney has been my best friend from the time his family moved here two years ago, when we were both nine years old. When his parents introduced him to me with his full name, he promptly told me, My name is spelled with a U. I looked at him strangely and replied, Duh. To which he explained, No, L-u-k-U-s. Since we were just meeting, I didn’t ask him whether his parents knew how to spell.

We live next door to each other and spend almost every day together because Luke also is an only child. We get in the usual amount of trouble for young boys. We’ve never done anything really bad except one time Luke said Jesus! when he was angry, and his dad spanked him with the belt. That’s when I found out that his parents took religion way more seriously than we did. Of course it should have been a hint to me when I learned Luke’s three hamsters were named Matthew, Mark, and John. Anyway, from that moment on we made up the word Jemus! whenever we were aggravated or needed to make a point. Mr. Kinney seems to think it’s funny. In fact, I’ve even heard him use it on occasion.