My window faced them. Any window faced them. The trees surrounding our house, birches, all white paper birches. My grandmother’s—Elizabeth’s—favorite, Dad said. When Elizabeth and William selected this house (the house he was raised in and he in turn would raise his family in), the one with the three acres of land, all the oaks and maples and some William surmised were at least a hundred years old, Elizabeth said it was perfect but for one thing. The wrong trees. She always dreamed of having a house in a birch grove, like white sentinels in the night, so humanlike they seemed. He, all newly wedded and blissfully in love, this woman having miraculously said yes, he hired a team to fell all the trees and plant birch saplings in their wake.

For years, all my young father had to play in was devastation. Ravaged earth expunged of its roots that muddied when it rained, mud running in rivulets in which only pale and bloated worms swam, and drowned. A few years of new birch died off when the rain would come too fast or the frost too soon.

By the time I was born, Elizabeth’s dream trees had staked out their soil, roots clung, bodies inching their circumferences one-ring-more each year until they were solid and true, and beautiful, and nearing the end of the lifespan of their relatively short-lived species. The very trees she wanted all her life only grew magnificent enough for her when she was already dead.

Elizabeth had died giving birth to my father’s brother, breach birth and he tore at her, drained her of too much blood. All for a baby who was already dead upon arrival, looped blue in its own umbilical. It took my father a lifetime, he said, to stop being angry at a little brother he never had to begin with.

He loved his mother very much, as much as a five-year-old can lay claim to, which is more than most anyone. Maybe this is why he so desperately clung to this plot of land, this house with its rotting white wooden siding and peeling shutters, chalky paint that would come off a bit on your fingers if you grazed against it, like the birch bark. The house it was all so easy for me to leave.

****

The black spots on the birch look like joints on a limb, little knees and knuckles. I peel around and around, layers under layers, up as far as my arm can reach down to the ground, six layers until I get as far as I can go without an axe, and go to another tree and do the same, pink flesh exposed.

First is the bark, dead like your head hair, my father explains later, after I’m caught and he positions me at the kitchen table with a blank sheet of paper he will diagram trees on for my moral/scientific education. Like head hair the bark curls in tendrils from the tree, as the finest cornsilk hairs around the nape of the neck. I try to peel pieces as large as I can, but they tear too soon. Flakes of them, flat just for a moment, curl at my feet, winding around themselves into pencil shaving-like tubes, silver on the outside, warm-colored within, marked irregularly with darker brown horizontal lines.

****

No time for monsters in my closet or boogey men under my bed when I had such trees. At night they looked like skinny naked ladies who would surely tiptoe toward my window if left to their own devices, particularly in winter when there were no leaves to slow them down or shield them from view. Naked ladies, one thousand dead grandmothers creeping, but standing still enough to trick me when I store them down from my second floor bedroom. Every year they would grow greater until they would take over. Roots cinching our water pipes. Limbs swallowing the sun. Leaves tickling my window panes.

In the summer, in the morning, I forgot how scary the trees were at night, in the winter, and became la la la Lily, girl who never touches the ground, as my parents called me when it seemed I would never stop. The trees that by night was so white, by day where green on top with bark speckled enough to inspire a game of finding shapes like I did with the clouds. When Mom was fanning herself with some yellowed birth certificate as she kneeled in the living room over her spread of old documents and photos from a family not biologically her own, I played among these trees. The whole world pulsed green in the hot heart of summer, pushing this living color out of every patch of moisture, it seemed the land would explode from the collective pressure of its own growing pains. If you stared at something long enough you could detect the increase, I was convinced, as I eyed the grass. I would always blink and miss it. The blades surely longer than when I last looked but the act itself remained elusive. So I stared.

Then, I discovered the bark would peel off as easy and smooth as the Elmer’s glue second skin on my hands, and I began. As high as I could get, this wasn’t very, but high enough to strip a good portion of each tree’s base. Piles of translucent scabs at my feet. Satiny like an old wedding dress. If the trees were crying I couldn’t hear them, having picked up my mother’s habit of humming tunes as she dishwashed and darned and performed the household tasks of someone who misplaced her last name somewhere. Nothing-tunes you could never identity, but notes nonetheless. Halfway through my project, which stretched for weeks and weeks and took me through the hottest part of the summer, I suspected I was doing something terribly wrong. The kind of wrong that doesn’t feel wrong in the doing, only in the potential for being caught. But too late to stop now. Never touch the ground. I hummed and peeled until there were no more trees left to peel. I left the scraps on the wet ground, kicked them up in some kind of spastic dance, and went inside for supper.

In my window now at dusk, I could see that I had halved the trees. The tops were white, even through the leaf cover, the fragments of bone-like white. The parts I peeled that were pink by day were now dark. Gradually, the leaves on some trees were starting to dry out and fall off, strange, I thought, considering the season.

I was worried, and partially relieved.

****

“LILY” my father screamed my name loud enough to indicate he wasn’t just calling me but was angry. I dug deeper into the cavern I discovered inside the hedges, made sure my legs weren’t sticking out, tucked my hands further under myself.

My mother’s more muffled voice from the lawn, “David, you’re not supposed to be getting worked up remember. How could it be her? Maybe it’s just some tree virus or that gypsy moth thing we had before.”

“Sarah, do you really think nature would do this?”

“Yes!”

“But look at the level where the bark is gone. That’s the length of Lily’s arm going up as high as it can, on every damn tree in the yard. Lily, get out of the bushes and come here!”

“They are just trees, David. We could plant our own. This isn’t the end of trees.”

“How can you say that?!” he screamed. “You know these are special.”

“I know.”

And she did know, so much so that she expanded the theme and had already spent half the year researching and collecting for the branches of a family tree she was painting for him for his next Christmas present.

It was so hard to find a good hiding place with a dad who found a four-leaf clover every time he set foot on a patch of grass. The man didn’t even have to bend over, even with his bad eyesight, lucky clovers every time. He always gave them to me, helped me press them into the Bible, not chosen for any religious significance as much as it was a handsome, gilt-edged book we probably wouldn’t ever need to actually use. Those lucky clovers made him my hero, surely a magical man, and now he was mad at me and I had no option but emerge from the hedges as less than I once was.

He didn’t ask me anything, just looked at my guilty face, his the color of the rhododendron blooms. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled toward the ground, wondering if I were standing on a flour-leaf clover now and could he see that through my foot.

“That doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “Now they’ll all probably die, Lily, do you understand that?”

I wiped my eyes and nodded, although I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. When I split worms in half, both halves still squirmed. My bare feet were the darkest part of myself, a dirty color that paled in stripes where the straps of my flipflops usually fell.

“Help us weed, honey,” Mom said, some sort of offering, handing me the little garden fork I liked to use, a strange utensil, and guiding Dad off to some other overgrown pocket with her hand on his arm, talking in soothing tones.

“Go get some shoes, you’ll get tapeworms. They go right up through your feet,” he turned and said, staggering slightly, her grip tightening to steady him.

****

The next day, Mom repositioned over photos of ancient strangers, I ransacked the closets for anything white and hospital-like. In the hallway linen closet: a bag of rags in which I found a ripped white sheet that I further ripped it into long narrow strips. In my parent’s bathroom, under the sink: gauze, cotton balls, medical tape, Band Aids, Ace bandages. Hikers and campers prone to being chased by bears and surprised by the worst storms on record, my parents had a large supply. I gathered my findings into a garbage bag which I dragged out the back door.

I wrapped as many trees as I could with my gauze and white tape and cotton. When I ran out of supplies, many more trees to go, I hugged them so they wouldn’t feel left out and went inside in the hopes of something warm to drink, milk or cider or the liquid that comes before Jell-O. “Now don’t die,” I said, as I closed the door between us. “And don’t follow me inside.”

****

I awaited the headlights that skimmed past my window, circled my room like two floating ghosts. I could differentiate his car from the other cars in the neighborhood just by the size and shape of those skimming orbs. And the distinctive sound of his gagging car, muffler rattling through the open windows, temporarily blocking out the gentle thuds of bugs against the screens. “Daaaaddy,” I sang, gaining speed down the hall and crashing into him as he emerged through the front door.

“Easy kiddo, slow down,” I wanted him to swoop me up to the ceiling the way he would, and he started to, but my mom gave him a glance and he slowly lowered me.

“Don’t jump on your father,” she said.

“It’s too hot, honey,” he explained, but I felt the strange presence of something else.

She returned to the dinner preparations. Our kitchen always smelled like boiled unseasoned vegetables, nondescript and potato-like, but the walls were covered with the repeating forms of vivid, oversized fruits, oranges and apples, bananas, plums. “Tomatoes are a fruit too,” my father said once which confused my definition of fruit: things on our wall.

“I have something to show you, Daddy,” I said.

“Let your father get changed, Lily.”

“No, he has to come see now.”

He released me, dropped his briefcase on a chair, and let me lead him outside, my small hand gripping the edge of his navy blue blazer where there was a gold button too gold to be real. “Look!” I exclaimed. “I saved them.”

“Oh Lily,” he said, and not in the excited way I imagined. “What have you done? Has your mother seen what you’ve done with all her things?”

“I was trying to make them feel better,” and I couldn’t help myself now, the tears came for so long I didn’t even know what I was sad for anymore, Mama, sing me a wordless song.

****

He draws a diagram on the paper on the table, a cross section of the tree, circles inside of circles. The thin layer underneath the bark is the cambium, he says, the only living layer of the whole thing, capillaries bring nutrients from the roots to the leaves. Every year as the cambium layer regenerates itself outward; the old layer dries out and dries, becoming the wood. Inside the cambium is the soft wood. Inside the soft wood at the very core is the heart, perfect wood for carving, ancient and uncrackable, already cured. You can count how old a tree is, he says, by each ring of dead cells. The lighter part is the summer growth; the dark edge is the winter, dark and light alternating through the years, until a fire or some illness breaks the pattern. The white birch has a shorter lifespan than your maples and oaks, living usually only forty or fifty years. They are coming toward the end now and you’ve given them the final blow. When branches break off, scarring the cambium, too much exposure can lead to the whole tree rotting, filling with termites and ants. Peel enough, like you did, all the way around, and you cut off the whole feeding system, killing the whole tree. It would be like slitting your neck, he says, you wouldn’t be able to swallow food and you’d starve to death, the air whistling from the hole when you tried to breathe.