Chapter 94
Thomas Elise's son, Marcus's grandson climbed the new mango tree in his eighth year.
The tree had grown, in the ten years since its planting, to something substantial. Not the full height of the original, not yet that would take another decade, maybe more. But the third branch, which Marcus had planted specifically as a third branch would form, was climbable. Just barely. Thomas was eight and possessed of the complete physical confidence of someone who had not yet been told what he could not do.
Marcus was in the yard on a Saturday morning when Thomas climbed it. He was in the doorway of his mother's old room, which he visited on Saturdays now not from sentimentality but from the practical need to maintain what remained of the yard as a living space and he watched his grandson pull himself up to the third branch and sit in it and look out at the rooftops.
The same rooftops.
The same mountains in the east.
The same shimmer of heat on zinc.
Thomas looked down from the tree with an expression Marcus recognized: the surveying look, the look of a person who needed to see things from above.
'I can see everything from here!' Thomas called.
'I know,' Marcus called back.
Thomas looked at him from the branch.
'Did you sit here too?'
'Every day,' Marcus said. 'When I was your age.'
Thomas considered this.
'What did you see?'
Marcus looked at the rooftops and the mountains and the shimmer of light.
'Everything,' he said. 'And I was only just starting to understand what I was looking at.'
Thomas seemed to find this adequate. He turned back to the view.
Marcus stood in the doorway of the old room, watching his grandson in the tree that had been planted from the soil of the original, in the yard that had been his world and was now the world of his grandchildren, and felt something that had no word adequate to it or rather had many words: gratitude, continuation, the fullness of a life well-spent, the specific joy of things growing past you in ways you helped enable.
He thought about his mother.
'I see him,' he said, quietly, to the yard, to the air, to whatever remained of her in this place she had held all her life.
'I see him and I know. Everything made sense.'
The sky above the yard was gold and violet.
He watched his grandson survey the world from the third branch and thought: the soil holds the roots hold the tree grows,This was always the whole story this was always enough.