by Rachele Salvini
On my first night at home, the trees started falling.
I got up at ten in the morning. A trunk collapsed with a snap, like a cracked whip. My right leg twitched and my stomach seemed to leap.
I opened Sean’s drawer; the baton was right there.
I breathed, took my medicine from my nightstand.
Sean’s side of the bed was made nicely. He had left half a pot of coffee in the kitchen --- no note.
I heard another tree fall. Another blow, like the echo of a gunshot.
I opened the door of our apartment and looked outside. The leaves of the birch trees in the yard were frozen; the crystalized droplets were dangling like cherries.
The sky was white. The town, quiet.
The mailman wore shorts despite the cold, and he hurried towards our mailbox underneath the birch tree. He rummaged in his bag for a while. Another tree, maybe a red cedar, seemed to moan like in one of those documentaries on global warming where glaciers separate and they sound like they’re suffering. The mailman stepped back.
A branch of the birch tree fell on the ground.
When the mailman saw me, he waved at me, his fingers squeezing some envelopes. “Crazy, uh?” he said, and I replied, “yeah, crazy,” like we were friends.
“You can just give those to me,” I said, wrapping my robe around my body, and the mailman handed me the envelopes.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You’re welcome. Do you want some hot coffee to get warm?”
It came out as if we were in a shelter on top of a mountain, in the middle of a blizzard, instead of a suburban area in a small Oklahoma town. It came out as if I spent my life at home studying some dead language; as if I hadn’t talked to anyone other than Sean for months.
The mailman gestured at his shoulder bag, still swollen with envelopes. “Thanks. Next time.”
Another frozen branch from the birch tree fell on the ground with a roar.
I imagined the mailman as he tossed the envelopes in our neighbors’ mailbox and then got crushed by the tree. I imagined myself hearing his scream from inside our apartment, running outside and approaching his corpse, with the same shorts and the shoulder bag swollen with envelopes. In the pool of blood and melted ice I would see my own face, a strand of my blonde hair and a chunk of my open skull, the scalpe stripped away, some gunk oozing on the concrete.
I got scared of my own thoughts, so I ran inside and called Sean. I had sworn myself not to call him, not on my first day at home, but I didn’t make it.
“What’s happening outside?” I asked.
I stood by the door, pressing the phone against my ear. I didn’t want to go back to bed. The birch tree could have fallen on our roof, break through the ceiling, bury me underneath cables and bricks and debris.
“I’m working,” Sean said.
“The trees are falling.”
“There was an ice storm last night. It rained. The trees froze. The light branches can’t hold the weight of the ice. Everything’s normal.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a retard.”
“Then don’t ask retard questions.”
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of the trees.”
He laughed. “We’re not in Middle Earth, honey. Go back to bed.”
“Why?”
That’s when he lost his patience. He sighed without even trying to hide it. “Listen. The doctor said that you need some rest. Didn’t she?”
He had to add that “didn’t she,” like I was stupid. But I didn’t have time to reply, because another branch fell. The walls of our apartment shook. Another hail of bullets. The branches broke on the concrete, the ice exploded.
The line was cut. The power was out.
The white sky looked like it wanted to come inside.
Sean got the baton illegally, from a colleague, because he didn’t want a gun in the house. When he came to pick me up at the clinic last night, he told me that he had a surprise, and I thought that it might be cake or a milkshake, but no. We got home and he slid his hand in the pocket of his coat, then he opened the palm wide to show me this little black metal tube. I asked him what it was. He squeezed it in his fist, then jerked it, and the baton opened.
“It’s not much,” he said, “I would rather have a gun, but it’s better this way, in our situation. If I want, I can break some knees, easy.”
“Whose knee?” I asked.
“It’s hypothetical,” he said, walking towards our bedroom. He closed the baton and placed it in the drawer of his nightstand. Then I heard him saying, softly, “you never know.”
I took more meds to calm down. I washed my face. Every time I heard a tree collapsing, I went back out to watch. I sat at my laptop to Google if trees could break through roofs like ours, with the plasterboard walls and the rusty steel shingles. But then I remembered that the power was out, and my laptop was dead. Our apartment’s only source of light was the white sky outside the windows. In the yard, the birch tree moaned. The ice broke in fragments that looked like nerve endings.
Without power, I couldn’t heat up Sean’s leftover coffee. I opened the fridge, then looked for a bowl to eat my cereal. I chose the pink one with an elm leaf carved on the side. We got it during a trip to Colorado.
I sat on the couch. Sean had left everything just like it was before I was hospitalized, which is why I didn’t buy it. I rummaged through all our stuff. I was feeling a new vibration, a new smell, the perfume of a woman who came home while I was at the clinic. I removed the couch cushions, looking for a pearl earring that would shine terribly on the dark leather. It was clear in my mind, as if I’d seen it in a dream. I searched through the cushions, then under the cow skin rug that Sean had bought at a state fair in Oklahoma City.
As I went through the apartment, I heard a creak and the rumble of another branch collapsing, and then the groan of a branch giving up under the weight of all the ice. I threw myself under our kitchen table, covering my head with my arms.
I think I cried. I stayed under the table, my nose touching the floor. The smell of disinfectant reminded me for a second of the linoleum of the clinic. I was there for hours, perfectly still, but my eyes kept looking for the pearl earring across the whole kitchen floor.
Later, I called Sean with my cellphone while I stood by the door and watched the trees falling. “What? I’m on my lunch break,” he said, which was true. His mouth was full. “Did you have an affair while I was gone?”
He sighed again. “No. You remember what happened before your breakdown, right?” I didn’t reply.
“You are the one who gets hit on in bars. Not me. You are the one who didn’t tell that guy to leave you alone.”
I remained silent, thinking of something to say.
“The power is out,” I said.
“The city released a warning. The power should be back by tonight. A few trees fell on cables and such.”
“Do you know if trees can fall and break through a roof?”
Another sigh. “No.”
“No, like, you don’t know, or no, like, they can’t?”
“Both, honey.”
Which didn’t even make sense. “I’m scared of getting crushed,” I said.
“Just don’t think about it. Watch a movie. You must rest.”
He always went back to that. I had to rest. Calm down. Stop thinking.
“When are you going to be back?”
“Soon,” he said. “I’m going to bring you a milkshake. Peanut butter cups and chocolate chips?”
I nodded without saying anything, as if he was right in front of me.
Maybe I remembered the pearl earring from a movie. It was such a vivid image that I must have seen it on a TV show from the early two-thousands, and then it stuck with me for years, buried at the bottom of the crevices of my memory: a wife finds a pearl earring between the couch cushions while her husband is at work. When he comes back, he says: oh, no, it’s mine. See? He sticks the earring in his earlobe, which is not pierced. A trickle of blood slithers on his skin; his eyes redden in his effort not to scream or cry in pain. The camera cuts to the suspicious expression of the wife. The husband tries to smile, the earring shining on his earlobe. Recorded laughter.
I took my hands to my ears to remind myself of the earrings that I was wearing, but then I remembered that I hadn’t worn any since the night before going to the clinic. I hadn’t even worn those tiny silver hoops that Sean had given me for Christmas before the party, before the scene in the car, before my breakdown.
“No no no no,” I said aloud, because the nurses told me to avoid thoughts that might remind me of glimpses and words from that night. They even told Sean, and that’s why he kept telling me to stop thinking.
At least the trees distracted me. Another branch fell. I went to the bathroom, trembling, and I started going through the drawers, opening everything, the bottles of lotion and perfumes; I even shook the decorative shells, but still no pearl earring. I checked the most obvious place: our
bed. I peeled off the bedding, the sheets flying like leaves fluctuating in the air before falling down.
Then I saw Sean’s nightstand and I remembered the baton rolling between the cables and the condoms and the lighters. My fingers shook while I opened the drawer, but before grabbing the baton, I heard another branch falling. The plasterboard walls started vibrating, and I screamed.
The baton rolled at the bottom of the drawer; I ran towards the door, outside, as the walls seemed to collapse around me like in a cave in a movie, with the white light of the sky showing me where to go to come out. But outside the birch tree was still, looking all serious and smug, just like the nurses and the doctors and Sean staring at me the night I was hospitalized. Everyone’s gaze said: you made a scene once again.
I stepped out of the apartment and felt the taste of cold air in my mouth like blood. There was no one outside, not even one neighbor. I wondered where the mailman would be now, if he was done with his rounds and was finally back at home, safe from the branches that might have crushed him.
Sean came home, but the power didn’t come back, and it was going to be dark soon. He put the milkshake on the table. He didn’t get one for himself.
“Where’s yours?” I asked.
“I drank it on my way home,” he said. “What the fuck happened?”
I left everything open: the drawers, the cupboards, the couch cushions, the bedsheets. “Nothing,” I said.
Sean ran his fingers across his face and rubbed his eyes so hard that I heard his eyeballs roll behind his eyelids like the plastic eyes of an old doll.
“Christ,” he said. “Why the fuck did they let you come home?”
He didn’t even look at me while he said that. He kept rubbing his face, his fingers leaving white marks on his cheeks, reddened by the cold.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and maybe I knew that I probably just made the whole pearl earring thing up, and maybe we had really seen it on a show years ago, when we were still in love and watched TV together on the old leather couch, and we laughed so hard to cover the silence. The walls and the ceilings of our apartment were so thin that we could hear the bugs crawling in the pipes. So we laughed.
It was getting darker. Sean’s eyes were still closed. “Drink your milkshake,” he said, as if I were a child, and he walked towards the bathroom.
I stood there, in the kitchen, with my milkshake, the condensation on the cup dripping onto the table.
“Why did you get that baton?” I asked.
Sean stopped on his track.
“I can’t relax knowing that there’s a weapon in this apartment.”
He turned around. His black hair was sweaty, long and damp on his forehead. “You remember the Christmas party, right?” he said, slowly. “I want you to say it. That you remember the party. You, shitfaced. That dude drooling all over you.”
Sean came closer. I felt his sour breath, then his bracelets rattling on his wrists. I smelled his aftershave and cigarettes and the lemon oil he used to clean the car.
“Christ. Just remember what happened in the car.” He spat in the sink and turned to leave. “And fucking pick up this mess.”
“You’re scared,” I said, and he stopped walking again.
“Of what?”
“You’re scared.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. You got a baton.”
Sean ran back to me, surrounded me with his smell, the cigarettes, the aftershave, the lemon oil. He brushed his lips against my ear, and for a second I thought that he was about to hug me. His ears were dirty. I thought of the pearl earring that I couldn’t find.
“You’re out of your mind,” he said, slowly, his mouth twisted, his voice just a whisper. And maybe it was true, that I was out of my mind. He had told me many times: on the way home after my breakdown, and then the night when he dragged me to the clinic with the excuse of going to get a milkshake.
I remembered the party. Sean spitting in that guy’s face, screaming to get the fuck out of here. The guy was just a sad drunk, like many others, like us. I hadn’t had the heart to tell him to leave me alone.
I remembered Sean, wasted, punching the roof of the car as he drove all the way home, so hard that I saw the plastic crack under his fingers and I imagined my face in the trajectory of his fist — my cheeks exploding, my eyes rolling back at the bottom of my skull. I remembered the trickle of blood on his knuckles, him crying behind the steering wheel, leaning his head against the dashboard as he said: this is not the life that I wanted.
Then I punched him in the face to make him shut up and stop making me feel like a burden, as if I were some extra weight he was carrying.
It took his breath away. The car swerved and he ran over a branch in the middle of the road.
I remembered the total silence after the car landed in a field. We just sat there, breathing hard. The knuckles of my right hand throbbed, and I couldn’t believe it — not me, who never punched or slapped anyone, and didn’t have the heart to snap back at the guy who had followed me around all night at the bar.
And even now, after my hospitalization, we were in silence, just like that night in the car after crashing. All the trees were groaning and the ice was breaking around our apartment, almost waiting for a branch to collapse and break through the ceiling, us underneath all of it, standing, still, unable to say anything.
He went to the bedroom, grabbed the baton, and I immediately knew that he wasn’t scared of the drunks who hit on me at parties, or the people who could break in while I was home alone, “resting.” I knew that the baton was for me. I had known since the first instant, when he said that he didn’t want to have a gun around the apartment, that he didn’t want to hurt anybody, but if he needed, he could break some knees.
Sean opened the baton with a crack. I stood in front of him, unmoved, surrounded by the chaos of the room, the world outside shaking. Sean spat in the sink again and then threw the baton against the wall. The drywall crumbled and fell like sand.
What’s crazy is that I didn’t even scream once. Between the blows, there was this total silence, almost metaphysical, as if I went back to the clinic for a second, my vision blurry, the smell of disinfectant obstructing my nostrils, my brain fluctuating somewhere, in a safe place, or
wherever my meds took me. I could almost hear the bugs running away from the thunders of the baton, their quick little steps on the other side of the wall. Sean kept hammering, screaming, tears and sweat pouring down his face. He didn’t look at me. Maybe he thought of a different woman, a woman wearing a pearl earring that was lost during a kiss and got buried between the crevices of the couch.
Maybe not. Maybe he thought of a whole life with me, with the obsessions and the punches.
Sean didn’t look like he was going to stop. He kept breaking our apartment from inside until I left to take a breather. I thought that he would follow me, but he didn’t. It was getting darker. I stood by the door. The trees were finally quiet.
The pieces of drywall collapsed around us.
Rachele Salvini is the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. She was the runner-up for the 2023 Quarterly West Chapbook Prize, and her first chapbook, Oklahoma Bestiary, is coming out in 2025. Her work appeared in Prairie Schooner, Monkeybicycle, Moon City Review, and others. The Italian version of "The Ice Storm" was originally published on micorrize.