The willow tree we worshiped as kids was adjacent to the lake where Janine’s younger brother had drowned. She said she visited the lake the week after, and the tree bade her; it enjoined her to sit beneath its branches and fog of slender leaves, slender like fingers. Together they mourned and watched the lake dazzle in sunbeams until the sky went dark. Janine came home late, different or lifeless or something else. She got scolded by her parents but didn’t care. Janine and her parents hated each other for one reason or another.
When she first brought us to the tree, it seemed like any other willow tree you had seen before. Like all of the other willows and oaks that surrounded the lake. The four of us were only ten or eleven years old, but still incredulous. Except for Janine. She swore by the tree and its voice, desperate, begging us to press our ears against the wood of the tree’s trunk and listen in silence. Just listen, she would implore us. But one day I heard the tree whisper, and so did Alex. We heard different things: I heard the barks of my long-dead dog Winnie while Alex heard the voice of his grandma who passed away last spring. Alex said he could smell the cookies she would bake whenever he would visit her. Will hadn’t heard the tree speak, still.
We visited the willow whenever our parents would let us go out. We told them we were going to visit a nearby park. We weren’t allowed to even come close to the lake anymore. A year or so passed. We circled around the tree and sat down cross-legged. Janine would listen to her eternally six-year-old brother sing, I would close my eyes and imagine I was playing fetch with Winnie, and Alex would ask his grandma about his granddad who had passed away a couple years before his wife. The lake continued to dazzle.
On Janine’s twelfth birthday, she went alone to the willow to give her brother a piece of birthday cake she had sliced for him. Only this time he wasn’t there. She pressed her right ear against the trunk of the tree—only to hear the hollow sound of wind whistling through the drooping branches of the willow.
The following morning, a Saturday, she brought us to the tree to listen. I could still hear Winnie, and Alex still held conversation with his late grandma. She sobbed as she explained that the tree no longer spoke to her. The three of us mourned together while Will stared at the ground, shutting his eyes hard and using the heels of his hands to cover his ears. Scrambling over to him, Janine asked him what he heard. Asked if it was her brother. He wouldn’t tell us what he heard, what the tree was forcing through his ears.
We grew up, transitioned from junior high to high school. We stopped visiting the tree, grew out of it I suppose. The four of us didn’t talk much anymore, ever since the morning after Janine’s twelfth birthday. She reproached Will that day, claiming he was “hogging the tree.” She was angry or envious or both. The tree was angry, too, but not at Will. We didn’t know what. But its wrath glowed, made the lake dazzle, dazzle with wrath. Will cried a lot that day, and not because of Janine chastising him—they were a different kind of tears.
What I didn’t know until later was that Janine was meant to be watching her younger brother as the two of them played in the lake. Wasn’t supposed to take her eyes off him. She pushed him under the water and drowned him that day, waited until the bubbles that came to the surface of the lake stopped entirely. Told her parents she played in the willow tree, took her eyes off of him. And so he drowned.
The morning after her eighteenth birthday, Janine drowned in the lake. By the willow tree they found a slice of birthday cake and an apology letter addressed to her brother that died eight years ago. A vague one. It was ruled a suicide but Will swears to me and Alex that it wasn’t. Says he heard it, that Saturday morning. Says he listened as Janine drowned her brother when we were ten or eleven, heard an older and regretful Janine drown in the lake, flailing her limbs furiously in an attempt to stay afloat. Says he listened to a child’s voice underscore her death with some song.
She ended her apology letter with a wish to wash the greenness away. To expunge it from her body, her conscience. Whatever that means. The lake doesn’t dazzle anymore.