A Ghost Among Trees

2

She couldn't take her eyes off the ring. It was shiny and gold, glistening in the sunlight. Ellie would have liked it, but knowing what it meant had her hating its existence.

"She proposed," her dad was saying. "Ellie, this won't change things between us. I'm not going to love you any less. I'm not trying to replace you."

Ellie forced herself to look away from the life-changing accessory, staring at a fleck of green paint on her little finger.

Ten months. Ten months with the girlfriend, and he'd agreed to marry her? They had gone to a fancy restaurant last weekend, while she was staying with the sitter. Was that when it happened? Would he have said yes if she was there?

He hadn't even asked her. He didn't ask for her opinion before he got engaged, but now he was wondering how she felt. She couldn't force the words out, and wasn't sure she wanted to.

Stepmom. The word sounded foreign to Ellie. Her dad's girlfriend was becoming a permanent part of their life, stepping in to replace Ellie's mother. That felt wrong, as though accepting this woman would mean betraying her biological mom.

"What about Mom?" Ellie wondered, her words coming out shrill and whiny. "You're replacing her."

She couldn't meet her dad's eyes. He was shaking his head, assuring her that wasn't what he meant at all.

She tried to understand, but she couldn't get past the mixed up emotions to accept the truth. She wished there was a simple fix. If she could swipe a paintbrush across a canvas to erase the girlfriend and bring her mom back, everything would be so much easier.

She closed her eyes. Her mom was gone, her dad was moving on, and Ellie wasn't sure how to handle that.

Ellie's shoulders shook with sobs as she stood up. She felt as though she might spontaneously combust if she stayed there for much longer. She had to get out of there.

As Ellie's feet carried her across the kitchen floor, she thought about how it would feel to be a ghost among trees, to blend in with the forest whose greenery she had been painting for years.

No one said a word. Ellie was certain she had never heard a silence so silent before.

Her dad cleared his throat, opened his mouth, then closed it again. Ellie could tell that he was in pain, too, but she was too upset to care.

"Where are you going?" He finally asked her.
"Anywhere that isn't here."

She imagined herself up in one of those trees, staring up at the sky and feeling the warm rays of sunlight drying her tears. Maybe, if she went to the forest, she could make herself feel better about it all. Wiping her eyes, Ellie ran for the front door. She could hear her dad calling for her to come back, to talk to him, but she ignored the sound of his voice.
Letting the door slam behind her, Ellie ran across the street. Her bare feet slapped against the gravel of the forest pathway, but she didn't care. She ran until the gravel turned to dirt, until she was surrounded on all sides by the beautiful green leaves.

Brushing strands of hair out of her face, Ellie slid down the trunk of the nearest tree. She wrapped her arms around her knees, staring up through the canopy of branches into the evening sky. The last of the afternoon sunlight spilled onto the ground, dappling the earth with patches of light and shadow.

Ellie vaguely realized that she was lost, but she didn't care. All she could think about was that big, awful, life-changing conversation.

The girlfriend hated when Ellie painted. She said it was messy, and that Ellie would never make money off of it. Ellie didn't care about money. Maybe she'd think about that when she got older, but right now painting was her whole world.

The girlfriend was always telling Ellie that she needed to find something else to spend time on. Ellie didn't understand how her dad could fall in love with two people who were so different.

Ellie had tried to like the girlfriend at first. The girlfriend's name was Melissa, and Ellie had made an effort to start calling her that. It hadn't stuck. Ellie didn't like her, and was never good at hiding that. Did her dad really love the girlfriend? Maybe he was lonely, and that's all there was to it. Ellie could imagine that. She still got lonely, still missed the sound of her mother's voice sometimes.

Maybe, when Ellie calmed down, she could convince her dad that marrying the girlfriend was a mistake.

Thinking about all of it nearly brought on a fresh round of tears, and the girl forced herself to stop going back to that conversation. She crossed her legs, letting her fingers sink into the dirt. The coolness of the ground was refreshing, and the forest around her seemed to hold its breath in the silence.

Ellie imagined she could sit like that all night, but the sound of approaching footsteps startled her out of the moment.