Elsa’s Orchard
by Sarah Harian
I couldn’t picture my sister as a mother.
The more that I tried, the more the image seemed abstract: A little girl, running through puddles of mud in a filthy red checkered sundress, giggling manically, her stomach swollen from a being inside of her.
The image wasn’t simply abstract. It was morbid.
Of course, a cute, little pregnant girl wasn’t really the case. Elsa was twenty now, much older than the beautiful six-year-old girl that played over and over in my head like a film. That girl, however, seemed to be the way I would always remember her.
Elsa was beautiful. When she was young her bouncy blonde curls, cherub lips, creamy skin, and large cinnamon eyes could make any grownup instantly melt. She was a porcelain doll sprung to life.
She was much the same now, only her face not so round and childlike but slimmer, elegant, and still beautiful. Her pink lips were now covered in an inorganic hue and her eyes jailed by a two sets of coated, wiry lashes. She was slimmer than necessary, the only thing protruding being the four-month old bump that sat where her flat and hard-earned stomach used to be.
Elsa found out that she was pregnant a month after breaking up with her college sweetheart, Andrew. She dumped her college apartment in Seattle and moved back home to our parents’ apple ranch in Aberdeen Gardens. It was November and I was eighteen, mere months away from graduating high school.
On that cold November morning she hobbled through the front door, wrapped in a pea coat and cradling her swollen midriff. Without a second glace towards Mom or Dad dropped her one small suitcase and made a beeline for me, embracing me in her fragile arms.
“Oh Trevor,” she sighed. “How long are you here for? You graduate in June, don’t you?” I nodded. “Thank God,” she continued. Elsa pulled back to look at me and smiled. “I’m going to need you. You’ve always been my moral support.”
The mud puddles were always our favorite.
The drip system for the trees was old and would always break. Although when we did our usual exploration of the orchard and found the leak, we made sure not to tell Dad until we had thoroughly doused ourselves in the thick sludge the water and dirt had created, screaming and running and rolling through it until we were exhausted and pleased with ourselves. Elsa ruined every dress that she had owned that way and made Mom tear out nearly every lock of hair on her scalp in frustration, but she never tried to stop us aside from a verbal scolding. I think she always knew that the orchard was our childhood sanctuary. I think she always knew that both of us would cherish those memories.
Elsa moved back into her old room with her one small sack of belongings. I sat on my bed and listened to the sound of her feet scuttle across the outdated wood floor above my head as she put away the clothes that she had brought with her. She would squeak along the left wood beam of my ceiling where her bed was, and over to the right one where the closet was again and again. The noise was soon drowned out by my parents’ ‘quiet’ discussion of Elsa’s irresponsibility and stupidity in their bedroom next to mine.
Mom finally sighed. “She doesn’t even realize that she is completely incapable of mothering that child. Just look at her, Allan. She’s excited for it. Her heads up in the clouds if she thinks that everything is just going to fall into place for this baby.”
Elsa looked at the racks of miniature clothes in the department store like the way she used to look at apples in the heart of October before the harvest. She had found out that it was going to be a boy two weeks after she had moved back home. Our shopping cart was filled with all different shades of blues and yellows, camouflage, and emblems of trucks and rocket ships. The baby section was deserted save me, Mom, Elsa, and our cart.
“Hey Trev,” she called with a half full mouth while snacking on some crackers she kept in her purse, “Pick something out for me, will yah? I need your manly advice.”
I rolled my eyes and looked at the rows of generic baby matter. “It’s gonna be a small little speechless blob when it wears this crap. It’s not gonna care.”
She scowled and I playfully stuck out my tongue at her. I gave her a hard time, but strangely I felt drawn to her after not seeing her for a good six months when she was away. Take it, she was now slightly morphed into a baby carrier that I only half recognized, but she was still my Elsa. I watched as she lovingly rubbed her bump while browsing the micro-Nikes. I remembered playing house in the orchard when her idea of being a mom was ordering me, her “son”, around to do pointless chores. I chuckled, and she looked up enough to raise her eyebrow at me. I shrugged and disappeared behind an infant bedroom display.
Being Mom was only one of her many alter egos when we played in the trees. We both became Amazon warriors when we waded through the mud hole, using the grime as our camouflage devices against “the enemy”. However, on days when Elsa was feeling less adventurous, she preferred to be a fairy queen, dancing between the fallen fruit, pretending that her magic was what made the branches sprout their luscious treats. She was the fairy queen nearly every day during the month of the harvest, only wearing her best dresses when she went out, as if it were a time of celebration.
She would hold my hand in hers as we walked through the rows.
“Trev, I’ll only let you be my apprentice if you promise me that you won’t tell Dad the reason why his apples look so good is ‘cause of my magic.” She grinned. Apprentice was one of the words she picked up from the fairytale book that Mom read to her on a daily basis. I’m sure that at the ripe age of six she had no idea what that word meant.
“Why can’t I tell Dad?” I pestered.
She pressed her hand up against my ear to whisper me a secret, although Dad was in the shed and far out of hearing distance. “We don’t wanna hurt his feelins’” she said with concern.
“I’m thinking about Eric, Simon, and Noah,” Elsa said as she popped a buttered green bean into her mouth at the dinner table. Mom and Dad remained silent, both flashing quick glances to one another across the stretch of oak. But Elsa wasn’t looking at them. She was looking at me… for my input.
I cleared my throat. “Definitely not. You want something much more promising than those simple, pathetic names. Something like…. Maximilian.”
She pretended to choke on her food and then threw her napkin at me. “Oh shut up, Trev.”
It was Dad’s turn to clear his throat. “You planning on getting a job soon, Elsa?”
Elsa swallowed. “No I wasn’t. Not until… at least three months after I give birth.” She grinned and rubbed her belly. “I need my bonding time.”
Dad’s fork clattered to his plate. Mom slowly brought her napkin to her upper lip and began to dab it profusely. Finally she set her napkin back down and stared at Elsa.
“Who do you expect to be paying for diapers until then?”
“Andrew, definitely Andrew. I’m getting child support from him,” she replied immediately.
“And that will be enough money?”
“I’m sure it will.” I watched as Elsa noted the distrusting look in Mom’s eyes with her own. “What’s your guys’ deal?”
It was a clear night in July. Elsa and I lay on sleeping bags on the grassy patch just to the left of the porch. I was six and she was eight.
“You think when I’m grown up, I’ll still like to look at the stars, Elsa?”
“Of course you will, silly. Grown ups are just like us, only bigger.” She sighed and reached over to pat my shoulder. “Don’t worry Trev. You’ll be just like you are now when you get to Daddy’s age.”
I looked over her. Her body was pale and relaxed, covered in a sweatshirt and her navy blue sleeping bag. She had one delicate, little finger pointed towards the sky, poking at the stars. She was counting.
“I’ll still like trucks, and racing, and running, and mud?”
“Yep. You’ll still like all of those things. Dad likes him too. And Uncle John, I bet he likes them. They just pretend they don’t. They pretend to like boring things so that everyone will think they’re mature.” She turned on her side towards me, a few of her blonde tendrils tumbling down the front of her face. “You won’t be like that, will you Trev? You won’t pretend to act mature when you grow up, will you?” She gave me a hopeful grin.
I shook my head vigorously. “Nope. Never.”
“Good.”
I heard the viscous tapping of the strongest and coldest rain yet to hit Washington that season. I doubled up on socks that night, throwing my sweatshirt hood over me and burying myself underneath my thin quilt to keep warm. I listened intently to the rain. There was a noise gurgling beneath it, something that didn’t quite fit in with the tap tap tap of its pattern. When it began to rise, I realized that it was coming from inside the house; two voices garbling intensely at one another. They stopped for a mere moment.
The rain broke. I peered from under my blanket and looked out the window to the porch light that enhanced the night. Beyond the eaves I watched as white flecks pounded their way into the ground. It was snowing.
I heard Elsa give a muffled cry.
“An abortion? An abortion?!” she began to sob. “How dare you… dare you even say that to me!”
“I’m telling you because I raised you! I raised you and your brother well because I was ready!” Mom wasn’t bothering to keep her voice down any longer. I heard her also choke back a sob, but it was different than Elsa’s. Mom was crying out of frustration. “You aren’t ready to bring this baby into the world. Take responsibility for what you have done, Elsa! I am not about to take care of a third child!”
Elsa sniffed several times. I heard an intake of breath, and slow steps proceeding away from my bedroom. She moaned.
“What’s the matter?” Mom asked, her voice back down to a near-whisper.
“I…” Elsa began. “It’s nothing. I think… I think I stressed out the baby. He’s hurting me.
“I’m hurting.”
Elsa carried around her baby doll in the orange glow of an August sunset. I followed her with a stick, whacking the bottoms of the tree trunks with every chance that I got. Elsa was showing her baby the trees, pointing out the immature green and pink apples hiding in between the leaves.
“When my baby grows up, it’ll have even more magic then me. It’ll make all of these apples turn big and red so we can eat them in summer.”
I threw my stick and it caught in one of the tree branches. “You’re baby ain’t even real.”
“One day I’ll have a real one. And when that happens I’ll bring him here and he’ll make the apples grow big and red and Daddy’ll have big red apples during summer.”
“How do yah know it’ll be a boy?”
“I’m magic. I know everything.”
I pondered her abilities for a moment. “Am I gonna have a baby?”
She tossed her baby doll up in the air and caught it. “Nope. You’re gonna be a little squirt for the rest of your life.”
The hurting didn’t stop.
Over the next week it grew to Elsa’s back and continued to rest in her abdomen. When I left for school she lay on the bed, and when I came home she was in the exact same position.
I knew she was afraid.
She got up to use the restroom three times an hour. Every time she came back, she went to her bed and curled up in a ball. When the sun began to set and the snow began to fall again, she used the toilet once more and emerged as pale as a ghost.
“I’m bleeding,” I heard her whisper to Mom.
Dad took her to the hospital. I put on my jacket and walked out on the porch as he drove slowly away through the thickening slush. It was twilight and the snowflakes were beginning to puff up, floating to the ground in one angelic mass. I could make out the beginning of the orchard as it sat at the end of the hill before me, the tops of the branches bare and beginning to collect white remnants of the weather. I focused in on the middle tree, staring at it until my vision blurred.
The branches became fingertips to a larger hand, one that sat in a grove of many other hands, all reaching towards the dense, gray sky. All reaching for something. All reaching to grow.
Elsa didn’t come home for two days. Mom kept getting phone calls from Dad when he had an update to report. I didn’t ask her what he said. She never told me.
I ate at the local diner after school on Friday so that I wouldn’t have to be anywhere but my room when I got home. I tried to occupy myself with anything: homework, books, magazines, movies. I ended up lying on my bed and watching the ceiling, studying the old beams and wondering when they would collapse, if they would collapse, and if it would be on top of me. I imagined what it would be like to have a little alien growing inside of me; a little hairless, sightless creature… hardly human… hardly anything but a mass with a heartbeat and a brain. My stomach convulsed with nausea and I curled up on my side, closing my eyes to drown out the vision with darkness.
I woke up to the sound of tires crunching on the icy driveway in the early evening. I listened as the doors slammed and heard nothing but the sound of footsteps leading up to the porch and in through the front door. One set of them broke off and made their way into the kitchen. The other set dragged up the stairs and into the room above me, across the creaking, unstable floor and stopped at the left side of the room.
The ceiling went silent.
As I lay in bed, I thought of how the magic of our childhood soon evaporated when we were old enough to stop believing in the unnecessary. No memories really stuck in my head like those I had of the orchard. I couldn’t remember what mine and Elsa’s relationship was like during my years in middle and high school. We simply lived under the same house and abided by the same parental rules. We saw each other between school and our mediocre day jobs, cracked jokes at the dinner table when we could, but there was no substance between us that could flourish.
It was though our imaginations had held us together. Once that was gone, there was really no reason for us to be close. Well, no reason until now, when she needed me to care.
The noise subsided from the kitchen and the front room at midnight. I crept to the fridge and salvaged some cold dinner and took it back to my room, where I fell asleep after eating it.
Before the break of dawn, a blood curdling screech rang from above me. My heart leapt from my chest but my body remained motionless, my limbs still spread and glued to the mattress. The scream was followed by long, drawn out sobs, filled with agony.
Filled with the sadness of a mother convicted of failure.
The minutes were drawn out as the crying grew louder and more pained. I heard my mother’s and father’s footsteps come into the room and leave several times over the hours. They could do no good.
It was evening when she stopped and left her bed. She dragged her feet along the floor and down the stairs, stopping momentarily by my open door. I watched her as she looked inside, her eyes hideous and red, her hair matted and resting on her scalp. The hand that she rested against her stomach held nothing. The bump was gone.
She turned away and continued towards the front door, stepping out into the product of the winter storm.
The heat began to suffocate me. My body surged and I sat up. I left the bed and walked to my closet, throwing some pants and my boots on, leaving the house without my jacket. Everything was hot. I could melt the entire storm away by just going outside.
Elsa sat on the top step of the porch, huddled in her thin sweater. I walked swiftly passed her, saying nothing. I was half-expecting her to call out my name but she didn’t, not even when I began on the trail towards the orchard.
I felt the first stream of hot, wet water trickle down my cheek when I reached a mud puddle. It was filled from the broken drip that Dad never fixed, glossed over from the chill of the storm. Every inch of it was frozen solid. Ice jutted from the surface along the cracked, rough edges. Edges that were waiting to be thawed.
The orchard’s hands were weighed with the snow, no longer reaching towards the sky but limp and lifeless. I walked through them, creating a trail of my own, feeling the breath become ragged in my chest.
I imagined a yellow light on me and the trees. It warmed me and melted the snow beneath my feet. The puddle before me began to sweat, the ice breaking so that the water began to glitter gold and red as it reflected the light and the apples. My thoughts grew numb. The light disappeared, the puddle froze, and the world went cold.
I breathed… and breathed… and breathed.
