Telephone of the Tree, page 1
Rocky Pond Books
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Rocky Pond Books,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2024
Text copyright © 2024 by Alison McGhee
Illustrations copyright © 2024 by Danah Kim
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Hardcover ISBN 9780593698457
International Edition ISBN 9780593857151
Ebook ISBN 9780593698464
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Cover design by Jessica Jenkins
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Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153
Chapter 154
Chapter 155
Chapter 156
Chapter 157
Chapter 158
Chapter 159
Chapter 160
Chapter 161
Chapter 162
Chapter 163
Chapter 164
Chapter 165
Chapter 166
Chapter 167
Chapter 168
Chapter 169
Chapter 170
Chapter 171
Chapter 172
Chapter 173
Chapter 174
Chapter 175
Chapter 176
Chapter 177
Chapter 178
Chapter 179
Chapter 180
Chapter 181
Chapter 182
Chapter 183
Chapter 184
Chapter 185
Chapter 186
Chapter 187
Chapter 188
Chapter 189
Chapter 190
Chapter 191
Chapter 192
Chapter 193
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_146938465_
To Birgitt Kollmann, dear friend, magician translator, she who has long divined the heart and soul of my books, with love
How I picture the night Kiri and I first met each other, first looked into each other’s eyes, first reached for each other’s hand, back when we were babies:
The moon like a bright white ship sailing through the sky.
Tree limbs dark against the moonlight, branches reaching to the invisible sun.
Kiri’s mom holding Kiri tight in her arms and dancing Kiri down the block.
My dad holding me tight in his arms and dancing me down the block.
In the bright moonlight they dance their crying babies up and down the block so we’ll stop crying, so we’ll be peaceful, so we’ll . . .
sleep
sleep
sleeeeeeep
I picture Kiri’s mom and my dad whispering the names of all the trees to Kiri and me as they dance us past:
oak maple willow
birch pine mulberry
crabapple ginkgo butternut
and all those whispers weave their way into our hearts that night, so that night of dancing with the trees becomes the night that made
Kiri and me
love trees
maybe even
want to be trees
because of their tall, strong calm
Almost all the trees on our block were planted to celebrate new babies—
oak for Pops
maple for Dad
mulberry for Mrs. S
weeping willows for Rowan and Geneva
little crabapple for Gentleman
baby birch for me
baby pine for Kiri
The oak and maple and mulberry trees are tall and wide now. They’ve been growing as long as Pops and Dad and Mrs. S have been alive.
But two of the trees were planted not for new babies, but in remembrance of people who passed on.< br />
The ginkgo in honor of Mrs. S’s husband, Douglas, because he loved their beautiful fan-shaped leaves.
The butternut in honor of my grandmother Randa, because she loved to eat butternuts.
Fast-forward to second grade. Kiri and I are in Mr. Nesbitt’s class. He has just told us all to draw a What Do You Want to Be? picture.
“Imagine yourselves at age thirty,” he says.
Thirty?
Kiri and I are seven. It takes a long time for us just to count to thirty. We look at each other.
“I mean, my mom is thirty,” Kiri whispers.
“My parents are thirty-one,” I whisper back.
Will we ever be that old? When we get to that age, will we feel old?
Thirty is so, so far in the future.
But Kiri and I know what we want to be. We’ve always known, known from the night our parents danced us past the trees.
I look over at Kiri, who’s already drawing, sketching an outline on rough paper.
Tall brown trunk. Branches curving downward, filled with pine cones. A child with braids and a round face smiling out of the trunk itself.
“White pine!” I say.
Kiri nods and smiles. Their own white pine, planted in front of their house at the end of the block when Kiri was born, is already taller than they are.
My turn.
I pick up a tan crayon and a white crayon and a green crayon and begin to draw.
White trunks split at the base and curve upward. Papery branches float out and up. Green leaves dance on limbs.
“River birch!” Kiri says.
“Yup!”
Then:
“TREES?” Martina says in her Martina voice. “Kids can’t be TREES.”
Martina always, somehow, knows what to say to make others feel bad.
Right away my hand covers up the drawing. Right away Martina’s eyes flash and she smirks. She knows she’s gotten to me.
Martina always gets to me.
But not to Kiri.
“What’s your problem, Martina?”
Kiri is calm, and their voice is soft, and their question sounds like a question but isn’t. What Kiri is really saying is back off.
“Mr. Nesbitt told us to draw what we want to be, right?” Kiri continues. “And Ayla and I want to be trees.”
Kiri has power.
Kiri has presence.
Kiri is already like a tree.
“Ayla and I are dreaming big,” Kiri says to Martina. “Why shouldn’t we?”
Yeah, why shouldn’t we? I think, and we look at Martina until she frowns and backs away.
Kiri makes everything better.
That day in Mr. Nesbitt’s class is the day I learn you don’t have to make up an excuse for what you want to be.
You can just dream big.
Kiri and I are ten now. Second grade was a long time ago, but we still dream big.
I still think about that day, though. I see Martina’s face and the way she backed slowly away from our table, as if there were a force field around it.
I see Mr. Nesbitt’s head, bent over his desk. His dark hair fallen across his face, and his pencil scribbling shhh-shhh-shhh across the same rough paper the rest of us used back then.
I wish Kiri were around right now. It’s easier to dream big when they’re with me.
Junie For Short must wish Kiri were here too. Junie For Short is Kiri’s dog, and sometimes these days she just howls and howls.
“Junie sure misses Kiri,” my mom says. “Just like the rest of us.”
“Her name is Junie For Short,” I say. “Don’t call her Junie.”
Junie For Short’s real name is Juniper, but that name was too big for the tiny puppy she used to be. So Kiri and I nicknamed her Junie, for short, only what stuck was the whole thing: Junie For Short.
I don’t howl, but I miss Kiri too.
I picture Kiri, calm and strong, like a tree.
Kiri, come home.
Just as I’m thinking that, Junie For Short, all the way down the block at Kiri’s house, begins to howl again, as if she can hear my thoughts.
“That dog’s always crying these days,” says a voice from the sidewalk.
“I bet she misses Kiri,” says a child’s voice, and at the sound of those voices I stay
still
still
still
in my birch tree, because I know the voices are Gentleman and his mother. Gentleman is a nickname too. His real name is Fraser, but no one calls him that except his parents, and only when they’re angry with him.
Which is a lot.
Not today, though.
Since Kiri left, I try to avoid Gentleman, but it’s kind of impossible because he lives on our block.
He keeps asking me about Kiri, like he’s worried or something, like he wants me to talk. Like he doesn’t like me being quiet.
He tells me to call Kiri.
“I can’t,” I tell him. “There’s no phone where Kiri is.”
“Text them, then.”
“Gentleman. You need a phone to text.”
“Well then, go visit!”
I just close my eyes and shake my head. There’s a lot that Gentleman doesn’t understand, about phones and a whole lot else. So as he and his mom pass by my tree, I shrink up against it, hoping he won’t see me.
It’s futile. Up he comes to me in my tree. Five years old and full of swagger. The top of his head, with its sproingy wild curls, bobs in my direction.
You can’t deny it, Gentleman’s a cute kid.
But he’s also a pain, with his constant chatter. His constant But why are you so quiet these days and Why don’t you just call Kiri.
“Go home, Gentleman,” I say. “Your mom’s going to start yelling for you any second.”
Through the birch leaves I see his mom’s almost at their apartment building. Hey! Come back and get your kid, I think.
But then I see that Gentleman doesn’t look like his usual self. His eyes aren’t bright, the way they usually are. He just looks at me.
Then: “Can I tell you something, Ayla?”
I shrug. It’s no use to say no. If Kiri were here, we’d give each other a secret here he goes again look.
He looks at me with those un-bright, un-Gentleman eyes.
“Ayla,” he whispers. “Sweetheart died.”
“Oh no! Sweetheart, your gecko?”
He nods. Leans against a low limb of my birch tree. His mouth is pressed tight in a way that looks the way my own mouth suddenly feels, which is a don’t cry sort of feeling.
Those eyes of his. So sad.
This is terrible.
The idea of Sweetheart being dead is too hard to handle. Gentleman loves that lizard as much as Kiri loves Junie For Short.
“How did Sweetheart die?” I ask.
“My mom says ‘How should I know, I’m not a vet,’ ” he says. “My dad says I probably fed her something bad for her.”
“Like what?”
“Like a Cheerio,” he whispers. “Sometimes. For a treat.”
It doesn’t seem as if a Cheerio once in a while would kill a gecko. And it seems like a mean thing to say to a little tiny kid who just lost their best lizard friend. But Gentleman’s parents aren’t like mine.
“Now I know why Junie For Short keeps howling,” he says. “It’s because she misses—”
Suddenly Gentleman’s voice gets quieter and quieter and I can’t hear what he’s saying.
Or maybe his voice doesn’t get quieter. Maybe I can’t hear him because I shut my ears down.
If you think
lalala or nonono
LOUD
inside your own mind . . .
LALALA
it drowns out everything in the outside world.
Remember this. It’s a useful skill when someone says something you don’t want to hear.
LALALA
I chant inside my head the whole time Gentleman leans against my birch limb talking about whatever he’s talking about, maybe Sweetheart or maybe Junie For Short and her howling or maybe—
LALALA
Finally, Gentleman stops talking, which is good because if you have to lalala for a long time, you get tired.
“So now you know the whole story,” he says. “Thanks for listening, Ayla.”
I don’t know the whole story. I don’t know any of the story, actually, because of the lalala, but I nod anyway. It would be mean not to.
