Tree of Life Book III

Part I - Chapter 02

TREE OF LIFE BOOK III – PART I

CHAPTER 02

After dinner—spaghetti and meatballs…

"Spaghetti and meatballs?!" Wendy's eyes went wide.

…it was nearing bedtime, so Ella was going to take Wendy into her room and begin settling her in for the night. Wendy wandered over and gave her uncle Brian a big hug. Turning around, she rubbed her eyes and tripped toward the bathroom to brush her teeth with Ella trailing behind her, holding her blanket and Teddy turtle.

That left Nicole and Brian at the table by themselves, each with a glass of wine in their hands and twirling it. Only one glass of wine. Each. Over all of dinner. This was not what Nicole was used to, but ever since the baby came, it was the most she could imagine herself doing in front of her. Brian understood well enough and just went along with it.

He checked over his shoulder to make sure the little girl was gone. He turned back to Nicole. He cleared his throat. "Are you feeling all right?"

"What do you mean?" She kept her eyes in her glass.

"This is the second time you've attacked me this week. You haven't done that in a while. What's going on?"

She shook her head and shrugged. "I don't want to talk about it." She took a sip of her wine.

"Yeah, you never want to talk about it." He took a sip of his wine too. "You and your secrets. It's a wonder you tell me anything at all." He reached for the bottle beside him and refilled his glass. He began to refill her glass as well.

Now, that wasn't strictly true. Nicole rolled her eyes when he wasn't looking.

There were plenty of things she told him. When it came to Wendy, she always told him everything there was to tell and left nothing out. And that was understandable, because…because who else was she going to tell? Who else would understand? When she discovered her daughter was maturing at an exponential rate and could speak fluently by the time she was six months? Or that by a year, she could juggle equations of sine and cosine and take their inverse derivatives? In her head? Or that about two months ago, she had learned how to fly? Who else could she have told that to? And not be yanked off to the Psych Ward immediately after?

Brian, Brian, Brian.

The only thing that she had kept from him and continues to keep from him was what she knew to be the truth about what had happened to him that summer, that one peculiar summer when the birds came and vines shot out of the ground and it rained lead from the sky on a cloudless day in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.

Better just let sleeping dogs lie…

~~~

About three years ago, after the whole Tree incident, when Nicole had first gotten back into town, she did wonder, at first, what had happened to Brian and what he was doing at the time. If for no other reason but to prepare herself, in case he was going to try something odd and start blowing up his friends again.

She didn't call him directly. She just called…around him and found out that he had returned all right and was already back at his job too. His men were back and they were all okay. Even Wilson was back. It was like they had never left and gone to the Amazon. Like none of it had ever occurred.

She was mulling over what to do next about Brian and really, just the rest of her life, when she had found out in that little stall in the bathroom in the clinic where she worked that she was, apparently—pregnant.

Now that changed everything.

And then it was bringing everything else in her life to a dead stop and calling her mom for advice and trying not to panic and laughing for joy and crying for no apparent reason and laughing again and not being able to sleep because she was crying and laughing and smiling all at once at the ceiling in the middle of the night with no one there, and then falling asleep finally and waking up in the morning thinking it had all been a dream but no—it really wasn't…!