People always talk about how it’s the little things that destroyed their marriage—things that were there all along, but seemed so tiny or insignificant at the time they went virtually overlooked. I think I can almost guarantee that up until we moved to our house in New England, there was nothing wrong with our relationship, nothing hindsight would point to and say ‘see the red flag?’ Paul and I had been happily married for four years by this point, and had welcomed our first and only child, Ashley, into the world. Paul always said he wanted two kids: a boy and a girl. We were halfway there.
Ashley was three when we decided to make the move. Paul grew up on the West Coast, and I had always moved around the Midwest as a child, so we were frightened and excited by the prospect. We didn’t know anyone out east besides our realtor, but we had each other, and we had Ashley, and at the time that had always felt like more than enough. Ashley even made the final decision for us; the house we had both had our eye on from the beginning was built on ten acres, and there was a juvenile grove of white ash trees growing practically in the backyard. Paul was the first to draw the parallel between the location and our daughter’s name… it seemed like fate. For a young family looking to make a change, it felt like the sign we had been waiting for.
I got a job as a paralegal. Paul was a writer and worked out of the house. We fell into our new routines fairly quickly: during the week I spent most of my days (and the majority of my nights) at the office; Paul wrote and teleconferenced from home, taking almost hourly breaks to play with Ashley and go for nature walks on the property, though the latter he generally took unaccompanied. Despite our best efforts to indoctrinate her early, Ashley had never liked nature or the woods, and wouldn’t step foot into the ash grove without crying even when we were out there with her—not even when we brought along her stuffed toy dog, Snowy, from whom she could normally never be parted. Paul took to putting her down for her nap before going out. I didn’t like the thought of her left alone at home, but Paul insisted he never strayed further than the grove, and assured me he kept the house in sight at all times. Honestly, a part of me felt guilty for not being there myself, so I didn’t push the issue. Paul took walks for inspiration, and I wanted him to feel inspired.
We moved to the house in late winter; by spring, the trees had finally started to leaf, working their way slowly upwards from the trunks to fill out their anorexic branches. Despite my work schedule and my frequent absences from the house, I did finally manage to make one friend: our closest neighbor, Deborah, who lived alone up the street with her ailing father. From her I learned a lot about the town, and a lot about our property in particular—she told me that the house had stood unoccupied for much longer than our realtor had led us to believe, and that with us on the premises she was seeing the white ash bloom for the first time; before that, she had always assumed the trees stood dead on their roots, and presumed that was one of the reasons why the house had trouble selling. It had been a rough week at work, and I remember feeling so encouraged, so proud, that we were what had finally moved them to grow. I never had time to walk the backyard path myself during daylight hours, so I took to admiring the trees from the second story window, when I woke up in the morning, and just before I went to bed. Often, Paul would look up and wave to me as he came and went. Secretly, I had taken to thinking of the trees as his garden, since Ashley had so fervently disowned them. I had no doubt that in time she would grow to cherish them as much as he did… we did.
Summer arrived in New England, and then it was fall before we knew it. By this time, Paul was taking frequent walks through the woods, disappearing for hours on end. I assumed writer’s block—he hadn’t had any significant articles published since the move, and spent most evenings holed up in his office working. I had enough leeway at work by this point that I was now making it home in time for dinner; often, I would find Ashley still in her room dozing, and Paul nowhere to be found. I didn’t want to put a name to it, but I could feel a rift starting to form in our family. I almost wholly blamed myself. I was working too much, and I tried to cut back my hours spent at the office… only when I did, I would start to see the bills pile up alongside the take-out boxes, and I felt frustrated. I had known and accepted what life with Paul would be like before I married him, but we had both worked so hard before. Now, I felt like I was the only one keeping us afloat… even if my darkest fear was that it was my absence that was pulling us all apart.
Deborah was a great friend, and a great source of reassurance and comfort, as the fall days darkened. I remember sitting with her on her porch, both of us watching Ashley play with Snowy on the lawn, though our eyes still occasionally wandered to the ash grove standing in the distance. I remember wishing, not for the first time, that Paul had elected to come visit with us, but he had mentioned a vague deadline and stayed home at the last minute. Maybe our luck was about to change.
"Speaking of change," Deborah had interrupted gently, obviously trying to get my mind off the subject, "can we talk about your magic trees, Filipa? They haven’t changed their colors, not a single one. All of them, green! They’ve got to be the only green trees left in the county. Just take a look at ours."
Sure enough, all of the trees in Deborah’s yard were dressed in autumnal shades of orange and yellow. I can remember very vividly that I did not want to talk about trees, especially not our trees. I had a sneaking suspicion at the time that I was growing to hate them, and I didn’t want to be right. I had dreams about chopping them down… mostly on the nights when I went to bed alone.
It was Deborah’s father who said the words. He was seated on the porch with us in his rocking chair, though I had never heard him speak before, and gathered from things Deborah had mentioned that his dementia was so advanced it had been years since he had spoken a coherent word. Today seemed like no exception, but I accepted the leaf he gave me like it was a cherished heirloom as Deborah rose and helped him back inside. Seeing what remained of her family in shambles made me all the more determined to preserve mine.
But I was getting angry, so deeply angry, and by now I was also frightened. I picked up Paul’s phone one day, something I had never done before, and thumbed quickly through his messages, though my haste was less a product of any chance of being caught (he was out in the garden at the time) and more a product of my own guilty conscience. I saw all the texts I had sent from the office that he had never responded to, and unresponded-to texts from friends back home; nothing to indicate an affair. I flipped through his e-mails. I closed out every app and put the phone down where I had found it. Fifteen or more individual correspondences, all one-sided, from his editor, wondering where Paul was and where his stories were. The final one had been sent three weeks ago, then silence. I didn’t need to read what it said.
I didn’t tell Deborah, she had enough to worry about. But I started to prepare myself for a confrontation. Everything came to a head the day I came home and heard Ashley screaming in her bedroom. I ran inside to find her in her room, hot tears pouring down her face; I remember wiping her nose with the back of my sleeve, something you never think twice about when you’re a parent, and noticing that she had peed more than once in her pajamas. Had Paul even changed her out of them that morning? I looked around frantically for Snowy, but couldn’t find him—I looked for a stuffed dog before I even looked for my husband. When I found neither, I lifted Ashley into my arms and descended the stairs, every furious footfall on hardwood reporting like a gunshot, warning him of the war that was coming before I had even thrown open the door to his office.
He wasn’t there, and neither was Snowy. A fetid gust of cool air hit me full in the face as soon as the door was open, stirring the pile of papers on his desk; the window had been left ajar for I don’t know how long, and even from the doorway I could tell there was a costly water stain blooming on the carpet from the rain. All of the papers that slipped and fell to the floor were blank. Worse than the state of the room, worse than even the smell coming off my weeping daughter, was the smell that assaulted me upon entering. Such an overwhelmingly putrid odor… how had I never noticed it before? How had it not crept out through the bottom of the door? How had it not clung to Paul, if this was really where he had gone to every night?
I didn’t go into the room. I went back into our bedroom and placed Ashley down on the bed, telling her to sit and be still. In the absence of Snowy, I grabbed for the first thing I could give her to hold onto—the leaf on my bedside table, the one that Deborah’s demented old father had given me. What had he said to me? Fraxinus nigra.
My computer was open, and I typed an approximation of what I thought the spelling could be into a web search and hit ‘send’. Every few seconds my eyes would flash to the window, hoping, dreading, that I’d catch a glimpse of Paul coming out of the woods. I noticed a flock of birds in one tree further out, sitting undisturbed. Where was he? The results were in: fraxinus nigra. Black ash. The leaf matched the image results for a black ash tree. Ours were white ash. Weren’t they?
My head was spinning as I carried Ashley back down the stairs with me and locked her in the backseat of the car. The smell from the office had already started to leech into the rest of the house. I had made up my mind by this point that we were staying at a hotel in town, but before I could think to put the key in the ignition I was headed for the woods. The trees didn’t match their leaves. The leaves didn’t match their trees. Where was Paul? He could sleep out here in his garden for all I cared.
It was then that I started to notice them. The little things. The leaves. It was then that I realized they weren’t growing at all—they had never been growing. Each one of the dozens, thousands, millions, had been impaled on its twig, a facsimile of growth, of life. Nothing was growing here. Someone had taken our dead forest and dressed up its corpse. It seemed like impossibly precise work, work that would take months, seasons, of nonstop attention—worse, it wasn’t real work at all, because there was no gain, no point, just hours upon hours of irreplaceable time being swallowed up forever.
I knew I was right when I found Paul. He was standing in a clearing with his back to me. I didn’t call out to him when I found him because I wanted to catch him in the act, to see for myself the insanity of his project. I watched as he took each leaf from his hand measuredly, then speared it through a dead twig. It was Paul. Paul had done this.
I didn’t watch in silence for long. I remember that by the time it occurred to me to speak, I was already screaming.
"Where did you get the leaves, Paul? Where did you get the leaves?”
I remember being more surprised by the question than by my screaming—it wasn’t one that had occurred to me on a conscious level, though suddenly it seemed like the only one that was important. White ash. Black ash. I thought I saw something move out of the corner of my eye, and I could smell it: the smell from the office, that suffocating putrescence that drug up family memories of Christmas and perverted them all one by one. When I turned my head to look, there was nothing, but I found Snowy. He was gored on a branch, the stuffing spilling out of his chest.
I didn’t move to retrieve him. Paul had turned and was staring at me, his mouth hanging open as if in shock at being found out—only it stayed open, and he stayed staring at me. Like he was brain dead. Like his eyes had been eaten out by ash borers, and in the darkness only pitted sockets remained. Pitted sockets and pitted husband. Beyond him, I could see the tree filled with birds. I could see that despite screaming my throat raw, none of them had moved to fly away.
I left Paul there in the clearing, and I took our baby girl with me. I haven’t heard from him since. It’s the little things you don’t notice, they say. I had a lot of fears when I first got married, but I guess my only fear toward the end was that he had run out of leaves.
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