My family used to have roots connecting us, like the trees. We could speak to each other without a word mouthed aloud, sentiments flowing through invisible strings attaching us all. The roots vibrated with each family triumph and wilted during shared sorrows, singing silent songs between us as we went through life together. My older sister, Joan, used to say the roots were blessings.
“Normal families don’t have ties as deep as ours, Jane,” she’d say to me.
We knew each other, inside and out. My heart was as much hers and my parents’ as it was mine. The roots gave me the best parts of my family and allowed me to take some for myself. My identity was shaped by the determination, work ethic, and tenderness that was crafted before I was born and transmitted to me sooner than I could talk. Some days, though, the roots didn’t feel like gifts. There were certain things you couldn’t hide from a family who could sense past poker faces and steady breathing.
When I was twelve, one of the cats who roamed our fields gave birth to a litter in the barn. I convinced my parents to let me keep a kitten in the house, promising to take care of the litter box and food by myself. The novelty wore off after a few weeks, and I no longer cared to scoop poop and brush shedding fur every day. I let the kitten loose as the sun rose one morning, shooing it out of the back door to streaks of deep purples and pinks painting the sky. When my parents came home that day, I told them the kitten had gotten out by itself. My roots betrayed me, Mom and Dad immediately feeling the remorse behind my dishonesty. By the time we found the cat, it had wandered onto the part of our land that the other cats already knew not to enter into. That land was overrun with daffodils, beautiful yet fatal if eaten by a cat.
The kitten was seizing when we saw it lying in a bed of bite-ridden flowers. My dad silently handed me his deer skinning knife, his eyebrows contorting his face as they set deeply, disappointedly in his forehead. Without him having to say a word, I heard what he wanted me to do.
You did this. See it through.
I didn’t leave my room for a month after I washed the kitten’s blood from my hands that night. I learned that as much as our roots gave us, they took it away tenfold. Sometimes secrets should stay hidden. My family could have no secrets at all.
It started raining when I was sixteen, on the night Joan left. Mom and Dad were in town with friends, celebrating the beginning of Spring, new crops, and new revenue. I was supposed to go with them, but I stayed home with a headache. Joan was supposed to be working a shift at the diner, but she came home early. I could feel her roots changing as she walked through the door. I’d never perceived anything like it, but I sensed her roots expanding, twirling with the excitement of growth. Her roots weren’t just a part of mine, my mother’s, and my father’s–they belonged to something new. She was pregnant. I shot up from my position on the couch, and Joan knew that I knew.
“I have to leave,” she blurted out before I could say anything. “I can’t keep this kid. You know what Mom and Dad will say. There’s no way for me to hide this from them.”
I remembered what Dad had forced me to do four years ago, handing me the knife himself.
See it through.
Tears slowly peppered my face as I took in the sickness of it all. They wouldn’t encourage her to keep the baby because of their belief that she would do right by it and their promised support. They would force her to raise it because it was a consequence.
“I can think of a million different lives where I have a baby and it’s happy because I’m happy. None of those lives start here, with this,” Joan stated plainly, no emotion revealed in the cadence of her speech. But I felt them all. I felt the disgrace she carried in having to make a decision that was best for her, and I felt the settled hatred that there were no better options but the one facing her. My tears flowed freely as I helped her pack her bags. She was dry-eyed as she placed a note for my parents on the dining room table. They never read it. They didn’t have to. Joan left, and the rain came down.
The rain didn’t stop for months, and I felt it weighing on our roots, pulling them down until they were unnervingly stagnant. They became sluggish and waterlogged for weeks after I last saw Joan. My parents didn’t talk, and I could read them less and less as the rot seeped into our family. It was a slow process, a painful eradication of the bonds that had been set in stone for as long as I’d been alive. I wished for the roots to dig deeper, to defy the inevitable decay seeping in. I wished for my parents to feel the aching fever that set every limb in my body on fire. My nerves cried out for a piece that had never been missing before.
My parents stayed silent, and I realized how little we had actually talked to each other our whole lives. Through channels of unspoken communication, my pride, grief, rage, and calm had never been my own. My emotions came manufactured through carefully edited passageways that I didn’t choose to be tied to. Just once, I yearned for my parents to experience what I was truly experiencing. I wanted the roots to scream, relentlessly hounding until my parents ran to find Joan and make everything right. But they sat idly by as my sister made it farther and farther away from us, our ties twisting with anger and resentment, snapping apart day by day.
I no longer feel Joan, and she doesn’t write to me. I like to imagine that she’s happy somewhere now with the knowledge that our roots no longer define us. She’ll still have her iron will and the imperfect mix of diligence and softness from Mom and Dad, but she’s free now to shape an identity completely separate from those attributes. Our parents blame Joan for the damage our family has crumbled under, but I can’t see a way in which that’s fair. Then again, the roots never were fair to begin with. I couldn’t have expected a family so tightly formed under tradition to change with a brand-new season.
And so here I am, tonight, two years after my sister walked away. It’s raining again, but I can’t stay for another storm. I left a note for my parents, much shorter than Joan’s.
I have to see this through.
Cailee Combs
Image byPDPhotosfromPixabay – tree roots spreading across the soil
