Sprout

when we moved from Long Island, the broken fragments of which now looked down on us with skeptical but mercifully silent expressions.
    Right in the middle of things Ty got up from the sofa and limped over to the china cabinet, where the ceramic version of me stared at us with its round red polyp of a mouth and two crazy eyes.
    “It’s not the eyes actually,” he said as he placed it face down on the shelf. “It’s the mouth. Looks way too much like a poo-hole.” And then, bending his knees and clasping his hands as though he were getting ready to dive off a cliff, he jumped back on top of me.
    Okay, so maybe I’d done a bit more than drag the leftover furniture out into the woods and cover it with some plastic. Maybe I’d carefully cleared and leveled a plot of land between a few trees, leaving behind a few saplings and shrubs and vines to use later. Maybe I’d arranged and rearranged the furniture a few hundred times until the feng shui was exactly right. Maybe I’d trained the plants I’d left behind to grow into and around the furniture to make it seem like the various pieces had been there for decades rather than a few years, and maybe I’d spent hours on end turning dozens of family pictures into crazy collages with bird bones and feathers, leaves and flower petals, twigs, pebbles, seeds, until all those naively optimistic faces mounted atop lissome bodies had been transformed into animated Day of the Dead caricatures. And maybe I’d relied on a bit more than my dad’s drunkenness to keep me stocked with all the broken crockery I needed to make my collages. Maybe I’d broken a few dishes myself.
    Maybe you figured this out already.
    I swear, though, it was a long time before I realized I was actually making something. At first I was just getting our stuff out of the yard so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore, or face the questioning, condescending looks of anyone who ventured up our driveway and saw half a house’s worth of furniture sitting on the lawn. The plastic was just a way of protecting everything, so that if my dad came to his senses one day and we moved into a real house, we wouldn’t have to start over. And if I left the occasional plant behind when I cleared the land, it wasn’t with any intention of using them, it was just because something about that particular plant had caught my imagination. One of the first things you learn in botany is that a tree spreads its branches so its leaves can absorb as much sunshine as possible, but also so it can keep the sunshine from reaching the ground beneath it, which is a good way of keeping new trees from growing up and crowding the originals out. So for a plant to manage to take root beneath the shade canopy was a fairly determined feat, and it was hard for me to just up and nix that with one good tug. And when I was dragging the stuff under the plastic it made more sense to have it six feet off the ground so I could move around beneath it, and then some things just naturally seemed to go here, some there, a chair flanking the sofa, say, or pushed up to the desk. But it wasn’t until a cold wet day during our first fall that I came to think of the room as anything other than a make-do attic. My dad was drunk out of his mind, and when he gets that way he starts talking to people who aren’t there—my mom, usually, or his parents, with whom he had such a bad relationship that he refuses to speak to them, or some totally random person. “I am not drunk, ossifer. I am three sheets to the wind. I am sheet-faced. As opposed to you, who has a face—like— shhh!You’ll—wake—up—Daniel! ” Usually when he gets like this he goes for a walk or a drive—it’s a good bet a stump’ll show up later, or some vines’ll get planted around the house. But that day he was glued to a chair, so, since he wouldn’t leave, I had to.
    It was raining when I went out. That wasn’t a big deal during the summer. I knew half a dozen places in the forest that were as dry as an attic. But the leafless trees weren’t up to the task of sheltering me, and somehow my mind just came straight here. The first thing I noticed was that water had leaked through the plastic in a couple of places, and even seeped behind a couple of picture frames, staining the photographs. Well, one photograph in par tic ular. The photograph of my mom on her wedding day. This wasn’t, you know, an omen or something. I’d hung the picture off a bit of rope (not vine, but