by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Animal Voices, Unicorn Whispers, October 2024
[Part 2]
Elijah’s small boat rocked with the storming of the ocean. Gusts of wind blew sharply against his thick, dense fur, and his clothes — even though they were made from special quick-drying fabric — were completely soaked. Waves slapped and splashed against the small boat, threatening to overturn him. Elijah didn’t mind the idea of swimming home. He was a river otter who had been raised among sea lions on a small island near the coast. He was used to swimming, and he was used to the ocean’s whimsy. But he’d spent the pre-dawn hours hunting jellyfish, and now as the sun was about to rise, his little boat was chockfull of delectable delicacies. There were moon jellies, sea nettles, and — even better — he’d finally caught a lion’s mane jellyfish. He’d wanted to catch one since he’d been a little fellow, still afraid of the water.
This morning, he’d finally caught one, and the bulbous pile of squishy, orangish flesh was larger than him. If the boat toppled over, he’d have no way of getting it home. And he had wanted to taste lion’s mane jellyfish for nearly as long as he could remember. He wanted to return home, show off his trophy, and then tell the tale of how he’d captured it to a rapt audience of sea lions, as they all sipped on lion’s mane soup together.
Of course, there wasn’t really much to the story — the hardest part about catching the big, peaceful lump of life had been hauling the slippery thing into the boat — but he would embellish it. Turn it into a tall tale. His audience would expect as much, and they’d all have a wonderful time making up songs and singing them until the early morning.
But first, Elijah had to get home, and right now, the ocean was not cooperating. Every direction he looked, all was gray. Gray sky, gray waves, gray rain pouring down. There was no sign of which direction he should steer toward, even if his boat would have cooperated with steering, which right now was unlikely. The boat was bucking and bolting like a wild bronco, trying to throw Elijah and his precious lion’s mane jellyfish back into the sea.
Then suddenly, a bolt of light shot across the ocean from the sky, just above the horizon, where the clouds cleared just enough to let the rising golden sun shine through. The sunbeam cut through the grayness and landed on a tussled pile of green like a spotlight. Where it shone, trees rose out of the ocean, as mysterious and unexpected as a shooting star.
Elijah stared at the trees, bewildered. They grew straight out of the tumultuous water without a sign of land beneath them. There must be an island down below, he figured, merely flooded by the storm. As Elijah continued to stare at the towering evergreens, he made out bridges threaded between them, connecting the small forest into a complex network of treehouses. A whole city in the treetops, nestled among the needles.
Reasoning that he could get help from whoever lived in those treetop abodes and weather out the storm there, Elijah began rowing again, and steered his boat toward the nearest tree.
As the early dawn light brightened, the storm also lightened. Elijah almost turned his boat back, but the mystery of the treetop village called to him, and so he continued forward, peering up the trunks of the tall evergreens as he passed by them. Finally, he came to one with wooden stairs built around its wide trunk in a spiral that stretched from a small, damp dock at the level of the ocean, up to the canopy above. Elijah paddled his boat right up to the dock, moored it to part of the railing, and then secured a canvas cover over his precious, gelatinous, jelly-flesh cargo.
Just as Elijah was ready to begin climbing the spiral stairs, a voice called down from above, causing him to stop and peer upward.
A round otter’s face stared down intently from a platform several stories above the sea’s level. Another river otter, like Elijah. He wasn’t sure what another river otter was doing out in the middle of the ocean, let alone way up in a treetop village. “Hallo!” Elijah called up, and in return, he saw the otter woman’s round face widen into a beaming smile, bright enough to fight back a storm twice the size of the one that had been tossing him about only minutes ago.
Before Elijah could ascend a single step on the spiral stairs, the other otter was already halfway down to him, fairly flying down the steps, using gravity to bring her down faster than he could possibly climb up them. He wondered what had her so hurried…
Elijah stepped back to make room for the otter woman on the small dock beside him, but as soon as she reached him, she launched herself right into him, wrapping short arms around him and pressing her head into the curve of his neck.
“What?” Elijah squeaked, surprised by the unexpected embrace.
“Oh, Martin!” the otter cried, still pressed closely against him, shaking as if she must be crying or maybe just really scared. She spoke in a muffled rush, “You made it back! The squirrels… they all told me you were gone… Completely gone! Like the storm had taken you away, or maybe taken me away… The whole village even! But either way, they swore I’d never see you again! Where’s Little Lee-Lee?”
The otter woman pushed herself away from Elijah and whirled around to look at his boat. Moving quickly, she knelt down beside it and began untying the canvas covering over the pile of jellyfish, continuing to say as she did, “Is he sleeping? That baby can sleep through anything, can’t he? Such a good kit. Oh, I’m just so glad to see you again! But where ever did you find this nice little boat in that wild storm?”
Elijah was too stunned to stop her messing with his boat, but she stopped herself when turning back the canvas covering revealed a squishy mound of translucent tangled up tentacles instead of the peacefully sleeping otter baby she was apparently seeking.
The otter woman stared at the tentacles for a long moment before turning reluctantly back toward Elijah. As soon as she saw his face, her eyes sharpened, looking first concerned, then confused, and finally… as horrified as if she were staring at a ghost.
“You’re not Martin,” the otter woman said, each word like a stone falling into a lake, never to be found again but leaving behind ripples that couldn’t be taken back.
“No, I’m sorry,” Elijah said, feeling unaccountably guilty for not being a different otter. This otter woman had looked so happy when she thought he was someone else, and Elijah found he wanted to see her happy again.
“Did you see another boat out there?” the woman asked. “A big one? Martin and I were passengers on it when the storm rolled in.”
“I didn’t see anyone else in the storm,” Elijah answered, feeling somewhat confused. It had been dark in the pre-dawn gloom that he’d chosen for his jellyfish hunt, but it hadn’t been so dark that he wouldn’t have seen a large passenger ship on the horizon. And the ocean had been clear. Completely clear. So clear, in fact, that he hadn’t been sure where the sudden storm had rolled in from…
The otter woman frowned, and the fur on her brow creased in consternation. She was looking at Elijah so closely that he felt he should have been self-conscious about it. Like she was scrutinizing him, and why should a random otter woman who he’d only met moments before have the right to scrutinize him like that? But somehow… it felt more natural than it should. Like she was familiar in an unaccountable way.
The otter woman stuck her paw out and said, “My name’s Rosalee.”
“Elijah.” He took her paw, and all the stress of dealing with the sudden storm drained right out of him. “I’m glad to meet you, and I’m sorry I can’t be more help about finding…”
“Martin and Lee-Lee,” Rosalee supplied, taking her paw back. She looked even more confused now. “They should be out there…” Rosalee stared past the edges of the mysterious forest out at the relentless ocean. It was calm now, almost like the storm had never happened at all.
Storms out at sea didn’t usually subside that fast. At least, not in Elijah’s experience.
“You mentioned squirrels earlier,” Elijah prompted. He glanced up at the village in the trees above them. He was very curious about it. And while, he felt sorry for Rosalee’s loss — or potential loss — it wasn’t really his problem.
“Yes, they live in the village up there.” Rosalee gestured vaguely upward with a paw. “They call it Treegadoon.”
The name echoed with portents and power, making Elijah only more curious about it. “Are they friendly to visitors?” he asked.
“Very,” Rosalee answered distantly. She had switched from staring out at the calm, flat line of the horizon to eying Elijah’s moored boat like she was assessing its exact value and whether she could afford to buy it from him.
“Do you need a ride back to shore?” Elijah asked.
“I want to go looking for my family,” Rosalee answered in a clipped tone, still staring at the boat. Her gaze had passed from assessing to possessive, like she might try to steal it if Elijah left it untended.
“Does your Martin know you’re here? At Treegadoon?” Elijah asked, hoping to convince Rosalee it would be more effective to stay put than to go gallivanting about and become a moving target for her husband to find.
“We were separated in the storm…” Rosalee tore her gaze away from the boat, clearly catching on that Elijah could see right through her plans to make off with it. She looked at him, and her brown eyes were full of need, but the edge softened a little when he smiled at her.
“We’re at the closest thing to a landmark in this stretch of water,” Elijah said gently. “Why don’t you give Martin a chance to find you here. We can go up, and you can show me around Treegadoon.”
“I don’t know it very well,” Rosalee said. “I’ve only been here a day, since the storm started yesterday morning.”
Elijah frowned. The storm hadn’t lasted that long. It had come on very suddenly and dissipated just as quickly once he’d rowed his way into the shelter of the trees of Treegadoon.
Rosalee misinterpreted his frown, thinking Elijah was displeased that she was refusing his plan. So, she decided to compromise: “If we go up, and you get a chance to look around, will you take me with you when you go? And help me look for my husband and son?”
Elijah brightened and said, “Of course. And if don’t find them out here, I can take you to the closest coastal village — I live near it — and we can see if there’s any news of the ship you were on. That’s probably where Martin would end up if he were rescued by someone else or if he ended up swimming to the shore.”
“It’s close enough to swim to?” Rosalee asked hopefully.
“A long swim, but yes,” Elijah agreed. “I came by boat, because I was hunting jellyfish.”
“I saw,” Rosalee answered with distaste, her wide black nose wrinkling.
Elijah knelt down, reached a paw into the pile of squishy jellyfish, and tore off the end of a tentacle. The rubbery, translucent flesh was about thick and long as a wide noodle. He tore it in half and offered half to Rosalee. “They’re delicious.” He took a bite of his half and grinned as his teeth sank satisfyingly into the chewy, elastic delicacy.
Rosalee’s disgusted look melted away, replaced by laughter, and she said, “All right, I’ll give it a try.”
The two otters stood on the dock together, chewing away at their surprisingly tough treats like they were pieces of chewing gum. The jellyfish flesh looked almost like water, it was so translucent, but it had a lot more substance than that.
“Okay,” Rosalee admitted. “That is pretty good. Salty and subtle.”
“It’s even better in a stew,” Elijah said.
“Jellyfish stew,” Rosalee said appraisingly. “I’d like to try that some time.” She was trying so hard to get along with Elijah, but she couldn’t help glancing out at the ocean again and again. When she did, the look in her eyes clouded over like she was still lost in the storm, even though it had already passed.
Elijah secured the canvas covering over his stockpile of jellyfish again, and then he said, “Come on, let’s go check out the village. I bet there are better vantage points up there for looking to see if there are any other boats around.”
Rosalee smiled grimly, nodded, and then cooperated by starting back up the spiral stairs first. Elijah wasn’t going to leave her behind him. He still didn’t trust her not to take off with his boat, and while he wouldn’t mind being stranded here — he could still swim home — he didn’t want to lose that glorious lion’s mane jellyfish. He still planned to feast upon it back at the sea lion village tonight.
* * *
Down at sea level, the tree’s trunk felt as stable as solid ground — especially after having spent the entire morning on a small boat, rocked by the waves of the sea — but as Elijah ascended the spiral stair, higher and higher up the wide trunk, he became increasingly aware of a gentle, subtle swaying.
The spiral stair ended at a wooden platform that encircled the trunk, surrounded by woven-rope handrail and netting up to the height of Elijah’s waist. The platform connected to several bridges — made from wooden planks with the same rope handrails and netting along their sides — which led to other trees with platforms. Those trees, in turn, were connected to even more trees by similar bridges.
Elijah felt like he’d entered an entirely different world — somewhere strange and magical, perhaps mythical. Somewhere never intended for otters.
Elijah had met squirrels before when visiting the seaside town closest to the sea lion village. Although he lived in the sea lion village with his adopted mothers, one of those mothers was a river otter like him, and she’d taken him to the mainland many times. The town there was a crossroads for many species — a real hub of activity, where ships came and went, bringing travelers and cargo shipments. Even so, the squirrels in that port town were generally either outsiders, passing through, or if they had settled in the coastal town, they were likely unusual squirrels who hadn’t felt at home in the cities built by their brethren among the trees. Either way, they were individuals, out of their element, surrounded by a city designed by and for more marine animals.
This, on the other paw, was clearly a place made by squirrels and for squirrels. The kind of place that didn’t care if a river otter felt a little sick to his stomach at the uncertainty of whether this tree was truly swaying in the air or not. Elijah was used to either solid ground under his paws or the jaunty rocking of the waves. This in-between sensation was not something his body understood at all.
Rosalee saw Elijah’s discomfiture and placed a steadying paw on his shoulder. “You get used to it,” she said. “I felt a little sick at the sheer height when I first got up here too.”
“The height?” Elijah asked, thinking to look down for the first time since beginning his ascent. As he’d climbed, Elijah had kept his eyes on the stairs in front of him or on the threads of bridges woven among the trees above him. Either watching his step or marveling at this mysterious place he was approaching.
It hadn’t occurred to him to look down.
The distance between Elijah and the water below came into focus sharply when he did turn his gaze downward, making his already queasy stomach flip and clench inside him. He hadn’t realized that they’d climbed so high. Even landing in water, a fall from this height could be permanently disabling. Or fatal.
The pressure of Rosalee’s paw on Elijah’s shoulder tightened. “It’s okay,” she said, and something about her voice soothed him. It made him think of his mother’s voice — not Angelica, his sea lion mother, but Arlene, who was also a river otter.
As the two river otters stood together on the platform, several squirrels began approaching from various directions, skipping and tripping along the rickety wooden bridges as easily as a sea lion bobs along with the ocean’s waves.
The squirrels were dressed in outfits that seemed to be formed from sewn-together leaves and woven pine needles — all autumn colors like a rusted over sunset. Somehow, the leaves and needles had been treated in a way that kept them supple and soft, even if they had lost their vibrant green hues from when they’d been alive.
The squirrels’ fur varied in hue — some were gray, others red, and a few even had a white stripe, lined in black, that ran down their sides, visible in the gaps between their leafy pieces of clothing. On all of them, the russet, autumn tones of the leaf and pine needle fabric complemented the natural shades of their fur beautifully.
“Did you find your husband?” one of the red squirrels asked, when he got close enough to the otters to be heard.
“No,” Rosalee said. Then gesturing at Elijah, she added, “This is another traveler — Elijah — he’s offered to take me in his boat and help me look for Martin and Lee-Lee, but first, he wants to see your town.”
Hearing her describe the situation, Elijah felt a twinge of guilt that he wasn’t rushing immediately back out to see to help this woman who had lost her family. But if her husband and child were river otters — which they must be, since she’d mistaken Elijah for Martin at first — then they wouldn’t be strangers to swimming. It really was logical to stay here, hoping they’d show up.
The red squirrel who’d spoken before stepped closer. He was a good head shorter than the two river otters, and his tail flicked and flipped like a campfire fluttering against a strong wind. “We told you Rosalee…”
The otter woman glared at the squirrel, and he stopped speaking. “I’m not staying here forever. No matter what you say.” Her words were petulant, and she stamped a hind paw, making her seem younger than she likely was. As it was, she only seemed a little older than Elijah, and it seemed strange to him that she already had a spouse and child. Some of Elijah’s sea lion friends had already begun falling into romantic entanglements and marrying, but he had never felt his heart flutter at the sight of another, so it all seemed very strange to him.
At least, he never had until now. But there was something quite breathtaking about this squirrel with fur like fire whose eyes sparkled brightly in the early dawn light.
“What do you mean, stay forever?” Elijah asked.
The otter woman stared down at the red squirrel. There wasn’t fire in her dark brown fur, but there was definitely fire in her eyes. She was larger than the squirrel, but the squirrel had friends. There must’ve been a dozen or more squirrels gathered around by now, standing on the different bridges between this tree’s platform and the adjacent trees. If the squirrels wanted to capture the two otters who had intruded into their lofty, leafy realm, it wouldn’t be hard. They were too high to safely dive down, and from the way the squirrels had been skipping and hopping around on these swaying bridges, they could easily outmaneuver a couple of marine mammals.
“If the squirrels are trying to hold you here… why didn’t you tell me?” Elijah whispered to Rosalee, urgent and concerned. “We could have escaped easily, if you’d warned me it was dangerous?”
The squirrels close enough to make out Elijah’s whispered words began laughing, and Rosalee turned toward him with the goofiest, lopsided grin on her face… an expression that Elijah somehow found familiar.
“They’re not holding me prisoner,” Rosalee said.
“We would never hold anyone captive against their will,” one of the nearest gray squirrels said, sounding rather defensive. “We love visitors, and we do our best to hurry them on their way… before… well… They get trapped.”
“Trapped?” Elijah asked.
Rosalee rolled her eyes, as if the squirrel was saying one of the most ridiculous things she’d ever heard.
“Yes,” the red squirrel who’d spoken before said. “Trapped by the curse of Treegadoon.”
Ominous words, Elijah thought. Yet somehow, the idea didn’t frighten him. The wind blew freely through the trees. The water of the ocean splashed freely past their trunks. Nothing could hold an otter here, if he didn’t want to stay. Elijah didn’t believe in curses.
Yet Rosalee looked fearful. Defiant. Stubborn and ready to fight. But beneath all that, Elijah could sense she was afraid.
Elijah reached a paw out and took one of hers. He squeezed it, and when she looked at him, he said, “We’ll look around, and then we’ll go. There’s no such thing as curses, and if there were, we’d simply break it.”
Rosalee smiled and nodded.
The red squirrel said, “You’re very welcome to try, and you’re more than welcome to look around.”
* * *
The squirrel onlookers dispersed, except for the red squirrel with the captivating eyes. His name was Shaun, and he volunteered to show Elijah and Rosalee around. Although the otter woman had already been in Treegadoon overnight, she’d spent most of her time there fretting, pacing, and watching the storm, intent on spotting any signs of the shipwreck she’d escaped or her lost husband and child as quickly as possible.
The more she followed Shaun and Elijah around though, the more she felt the intensity of her fear and longing for her missing child fade. It had felt like an ache in her arms all night long as she’d stared out at the storm, wondering whether Little Lee-Lee was safe and how soon she’d get to hold him again. She’d felt like a hollow thing, missing the warm heart that was supposed to be a bundle of wiggling, restless fur in her arms. Her eyes had filled with visions of Martin and Lee-Lee tossed by the storm, wrestling with the waves, unable to find solid ground or even tell which direction to swim in. Every way she’d looked, all she could see was what wasn’t there — her husband and son.
Perhaps the exhaustion of a sleepless night catching up with her, or maybe the cheerful merriment in Shaun and Elijah’s voices as Rosalee followed them on their tour of Treegadoon was infectious, but either way, the nightmarish visions of an otter child lost and crying in the storm began to fade. She was still worried, but the worry felt like a small thing, nibbling at the corner of her mind, tugging at the edge of her sleeve, trying to remind her that she was supposed to be overcome with feelings. But the overwhelming feelings themselves? Those had lifted like the storm. Somehow, she was sure that Little Lee-Lee was safe.
It was an eerie but pleasant sensation, feeling her worries lift away like fog in the morning light. But since there was nothing Rosalee could actually do about her missing child at the moment, she chose to accept the ease that had started unraveling the tightly tangled knots of anxiety in her heart.
With the early morning sun shining through the trees, Treegadoon was an exceptionally beautiful place, and Shaun’s chittering voice had a melodic, sing-song quality as he told her and Elijah all about every place he led them.
Most of the structures were built around the trees with trunks growing right up through their middles. Neither Rosalee nor Elijah could imagine how the squirrels ever felt fully secure, knowing there were several stories of empty space beneath the floors of their little houses filled with nothing but breezes. Though, Rosalee had to admit that the less aquatic creatures who’d been on the passenger ship with her, Martin, and Little Lee-Lee had seemed to feel the same sense of unease about the fathoms of water beneath them.
The two otters exchanged meaningful glances often, especially when Shaun said something just so preciously squirrely that they could barely keep from laughing. A few times, Elijah shook his head in a rueful way when Shaun wasn’t looking, and there was something so charmingly funny about his expression that Rosalee almost laughed out loud, giving up the game. Instead, she managed to stifle her chuckle, keeping their otterly secret from the squirrel tour guide.
“We really have everything we need up here in the treetops,” Shaun explained. “We even grow gardens!”
“You mean that you gather the nuts, leaves, and fruits from the trees?” Elijah asked.
“No,” Shaun chittered, leading the two otters up a flight of steps spiraling around a particularly wide tree trunk towards an even higher level of the city. When they arrived at the higher level, Shaun gestured at the verdant scene in front of them — strawberry plants, tomatoes, zucchini, and all sorts of other practical plants had been trained to grow on a giant net that spread between several of the trees like a giant, garden-sized hammock. “We garden,” Shaun repeated triumphantly. “Isn’t it lovely?”
This was another case where Elijah’s expression almost made Rosalee break out in laughter. He had a befuddled, surprised look of astonishment spread across his muzzle, and there was laughter in her eyes. Seeing it made Rosalee happy in a deep, satisfied kind of way that she simply couldn’t explain to herself. Somehow, seeing Elijah’s reaction to the garden was even more meaningful to her than her own feelings about it, and that simply didn’t make sense.
The three of them wandered about the garden for a while, climbing along the swaying net, and picking fresh fruits to sample. Elijah was particularly enamored of a bright purple berry that looked a little like strawberries, but they grew in tighter clusters, were even more heart shaped, and tasted mildly of lavender. Shaun called them joiberries, and Elijah wondered why he’d never heard of them before.
* * *
Having visited the highlights of Treegadoon — the gathering hall with a roof of woven branches, the library filled with scrolls, the bridge of whispers, the carved out heart of the oldest tree, and the acorn treasury — Shaun finally led the otter visitors to a small cafe even higher than the hammock garden. In fact, the little cafe’s platform overlooked the garden, giving it an especially lovely view. Neither Rosalee nor Elijah had ever been so high above ground level before, and truth be told, they both found it a little dizzying. Fortunately, there was a railing around the edge of the cafe’s platform, and all the chairs — while a little small for river otters — seemed quite secure.
Elijah stared out at the view of the garden and the ocean beyond while Shaun ordered breakfast for all three of them from a squirrel waiter who seemed delighted to be serving otter visitors, and Rosalee stared at Elijah. His face was restful to look at, like as long as he was happy, she knew everything was okay.
“You mentioned a curse earlier,” Elijah said to Shaun, still staring out at the sea. He could see farther into the horizon here than he was used to.
“Yes,” the red squirrel agreed, toying with the wooden cutlery that the waiter had laid out for them. “The curse of Treegadoon.” His pointed face looked more drawn as he spoke of the curse, whiskers slicking back and tufted ears splaying. Even the brightness in his eyes dimmed ruefully. Shaun didn’t want to tell them about the curse.
“Tell us, please,” Rosalee pressed, realizing that Elijah might let the squirrel get away with avoiding the apparently unpleasant topic. There was a sweet, flirty energy between Elijah and their tour guide, and clearly, he didn’t want to upset the pretty red squirrel. But Rosalee was suddenly certain that she desperately needed to hear about this curse.
Elijah looked troubled now, like he had hoped to keep the visit light and happy, but he could tell Shaun was unhappy. Even so, Rosalee needed to hear what Shaun had to say.
“Long ago,” Shaun began, his chittery voice taking on the hallowed tone of a story he’d heard told over and over again before ever telling it aloud himself. “A visitor came to Treegadoon.”
“Like us?” Elijah asked brightly, hoping to bring back Shaun’s earlier ease with him. It did not work.
“No,” Shaun answered. “A giant white bird. An albatross with a broken wing.”
The waiter arrived, laden down with many delicious-looking dishes — bowls of nut mash, piping hot pastries, and fresh garden salads for each of them. Hearing the words of a story that they must have recognized, the waiter scurried to lay out all the dishes quickly and then leave them to their tale, as the waiter’s own tail flicked nervously behind them.
“How did the albatross break its wing?” Elijah asked, still trying to bring back the bright, easy, give and take that his conversation with Shaun had held earlier.
Again, Elijah failed, and Shaun continued with the story, his tone heavy with portent: “There are many versions of how the albatross came to break her wing and how she came to find our village, but all the versions agree: the albatross begged for help from the people of Treegadoon, saying that if we let her stay in our city and cared for her until her wing healed, fortune would shine upon us.”
A cold breeze shivered past their table at the cafe in the sky. Rosalee reminded herself that there would be many such cold breezes so high up here, but she couldn’t help feeling like the wind itself was playing along with Shaun’s storytelling. “You didn’t take the albatross in, did you?”
Discomfited, Shaun took a bite from the bowl of nut mash in front of him before continuing. “I wasn’t there,” he said, defensively once the bite of nut mash had been swallowed. “This was long before I was born. Before my parents were born. But… no. The squirrels of Treegadoon did not take the albatross in.” His voice lowered with shame to a hoarse whisper. “We turned her away the very next morning, giving her only a few meagre provisions and a small, abandoned row boat, telling her to find help at the shore rather than among us in the sky.”
“Cold,” Elijah observed, finally having gotten caught up in the story.
“To be fair,” Shaun argued, “an albatross is a very large kind of bird. I’m sure we had nowhere suitable to keep her and, way back then, perhaps they worried that such a giant would eat right through their stores of food.” Even as he defended his ancestors, Shaun’s tufted ears stayed low, and he looked ashamed.
“What happened?” Rosalee asked, fearing the answer but knowing she needed to hear it.
“This part… well…” Shaun toyed with the pastry in front of him. It was covered with powdered sugar and flakes of almond. They shouldn’t have been able to grow almonds in a place like this, but many of the taller trees had branches from smaller types of trees grafted onto them, allowing the squirrels of Treegadoon to harvest all kinds of nuts and fruits in addition to what they grew in their hammock garden. “Look, this is a legend, right? So, some of it will sound fantastical… even silly… but…”
“But there’s often truth in legends, even if the details are made up,” Rosalee agreed.
“Right,” Shaun looked into her eyes so deeply that it felt like he was trying to apologize in advance for what he was about to say.
“Just tell me, please,” Rosalee pressed. She hadn’t felt able to eat a single bite of her food since the story of the albatross had begun, even though she hadn’t eaten since well before the shipwreck that cast her here last night. And somehow, she was beginning to think that even more time had passed than that. “I need to know.”
“So serious…” Elijah muttered, but both of the others ignored him this time.
“You do need to know,” Shaun agreed. “Because you are part of Treegadoon now.”
Rosalee didn’t like the sound of that, but she didn’t dare to interrupt.
“When my ancestors pushed off the row boat with the albatross in it, she had barely drifted beyond the bounds of our town before her feathers burst into flame.”
Rosalee held back a gasp, and Elijah rolled his eyes. His otter mother was an inventor — a scientist — and he knew better than to believe in fairy stories about phoenixes.
Shaun ignored both of the otters’ reactions and continued: “The fire completely consumed the albatross and her small boat, leaving nothing but a pool of gray ash floating on the surface of the calm sea. Then the ash began to rise and reformed itself, once again, into the shape of a bird, this time with feathers as meltingly golden as the sunrise.”
Elijah smiled indulgently. At least, it was a pretty fairy story. Rosalee’s heart was racing.
“The phoenix who had risen from the ashes of the albatross had no broken wings,” Shaun said. He was staring defiantly at his bowl of mash now, refusing to meet Rosalee’s eyes. “And she was a powerful magician.”
“Of course she was.” Elijah laughed. “And she cursed you? I mean, your village?”
“Yes,” Shaun agreed, deadly serious, not at all fazed by Elijah’s levity. “The phoenix cursed us for our inhospitality, saying that forever forward, Treegadoon would skip across time like a skipping stone across the surface of a lake, and that we could never, ever turn away a visitor again — that, in fact, anyone who ever stayed the night in Treegadoon would become part of Treegadoon and could never…” He faltered, briefly looking up to catch Rosalee’s eye before looking away again. Then his voice fell to the softest whisper “…could never leave again.”
Elijah smiled. He had been eating his nut mash all through the story, and his bowl was empty now. Before attacking his garden salad, he said, “That’s a good story. Very spooky. I guess it’s a clever way to tell visitors that they should be on their way before dark. Don’t worry though. I wasn’t planning on staying the night.”
Rosalee had gotten very quiet. She had stayed the night. There hadn’t been any choice with the intensity of the storm. More than that, the words “skip across time” were settling in the pit of her stomach like the skipping stone from the squirrel’s metaphor. “What do you mean by skip across time?” she asked. But as she looked at Elijah — not Shaun, even though her question was directed at him; her eyes were locked on Elijah — she was certain she already knew. She recognized a notch in the webbing of his left front paw.
Rosalee had never seen Elijah’s face before — how could she? She’d never met him until today. At least, not like this, not as he was now. But his face looked like her own face, the curve of his grin, the set of his ears… And his face also looked eerily like Martin’s.
All put together, Elijah looked exactly like the grown up version of her Little Lee-Lee, right down to the funny notch in the webbing of his front left paw that he’d had since he was born. She remembered discovering it on her brand new, absolutely perfect baby and being distraught for a moment to find an imperfection before simply treasuring him all the more. Baby Liam, who she’d held in her arms only one day before. If he were all grown up…
Little Lee-Lee would look like Elijah.
It was as if Rosalee were looking through time itself, and for a moment, she felt like she was falling through time, feeling the power of all she’d lost. The baby in her arms was gone. Her arms were empty, and they’d never hold him tight again. Not as a baby.
But the sensation of falling was strangely counterbalanced by the anchor of Elijah’s eyes, looking into her own, questioning her, exactly the way he’d done just yesterday when he’d been cradled in her arms and didn’t understand the incoming storm.
Rosalee realized that Shaun had been talking to her, trying to answer her question about time, but she hadn’t heard a single word the squirrel had said, and she didn’t wait for him to finish. She’d figured it out — enough, anyway — on her own. She spoke to her son, talking right over Shaun, and said, “Elijah, tell me about your parents.”
The other otter — who looked almost exactly the same age as Rosalee — seemed troubled by the way she had so rudely interrupted their tour guide with a complete non sequitur, but Shaun shook his head, indicating he didn’t mind. He waved a delicate red-furred paw as if to say, “Go on, answer her question,” and then picked up his pastry, finally taking a chance to eat. He looked relieved to be let off the hook for a moment, and Rosalee suspected he’d already worked out what was going on — why she was asking such a seemingly random question.
“Well, okay,” Elijah said, uncertainly, still out of the loop, “I don’t know why you suddenly want to know, but I have two mothers — a river otter inventor, Arlene, and a sea lion artist, Angelica.”
A sea lion couldn’t be a river otter’s biological mother, but with two mothers, perhaps the river otter inventor could be. Even so, Rosalee didn’t think so.
“Were you adopted?” Rosalee pressed, ever more sure of her conclusion in spite of the obvious ridiculousness that this fully grown man of an otter could be the same person as the baby she’d held in her arms only yesterday. His whole childhood had already passed. Without her. She’d seen none of it — only the very beginning, and now… to skip ahead like this? It took her breath away. It knocked the ground out from under her feet.
And yet, her child wasn’t lost. Rosalee was looking right at him.
“Well, yes,” Elijah admitted, still looking lost and confused. “They adopted me when I was quite small. I couldn’t even swim or talk.”
It made Rosalee feel old — so very old, to have such a fully grown child — and also very young at the same time. For suddenly, she wasn’t the mother of an infant anymore. She wasn’t responsible for keeping him alive, raising him, and making sure he turned out okay. All of that had already happened, and she was freed of those weighty responsibilities. It was like skipping back in time to before she’d become a mother, but also like skipping forward. It felt like time was a spool of thread, meant to be neatly wrapped around and around in tight little circles, but it had come all undone and tangled up, crisscrossing wildly in every which way.
“Did they name you Elijah?” Rosalee asked.
“Yes, apparently, I made a babbling sound like ‘lee-lee-lee’ when I was very little, and so they thought a name with those sounds would suit me.” Elijah smiled fondly as he told the story.
Even if the storm had stolen Little Lee-Lee away from his parents and left him bereft, he’d had a good enough childhood afterwards for it turn his whiskers up with happiness at its remembrance. Rosalee was glad. She reached out and grabbed her grown son’s paw with her own.
“Yes, you did make that sound as a baby,” Rosalee agreed, her head spinning from the change in tenses from how she would have said the same sentence an hour ago and her voice shaking from the immense fear of rejection she felt as she opened up to this grown man, hoping he would understand who he was to her. How important. He was still her baby… even if he didn’t know or remember her at all. Even if he had different mothers who’d taught him to swim and talk, thrown birthday parties for him, and comforted him when he’d felt lost.
Elijah looked down at Rosalee’s webbed paw clasped around his, bemused, but he didn’t pull away.
“It’s why your father, Martin, and I named you Liam, and I called you Little Lee-Lee.” Rosalee’s voice broke on those last words. Little Lee-Lee was gone. Even if he’d grown up to be a fine young man — a man whose eyes looked exactly the same when he was confused — gentle and kind. But the baby was gone, lost to a strange trick of time and a curse cast by a phoenix — a mythical creature who was supposed to stay in storybooks.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Elijah said, laughter in his voice. Not harsh laughter. Not mocking. Just confused and amused, but still, gentle. Always gentle.
He had grown up without her, but he had grown up well.
* * *
Elijah understood that Rosalee had undergone a great loss — an unthinkable loss — and so that was probably why she wasn’t making any sense. She must be out of her mind with worry over her missing husband and baby. No wonder she would cling to a fantasy story to find a way to get past her fear that her baby had drowned in the night.
Perhaps it had been cruel of Elijah to make her wait through a tour and leisurely breakfast simply to satisfy his own curiosity about the squirrel city before taking her to search for her missing family. He could always have come back again later to Treegadoon. Although, not if Shaun’s silly story about the town skipping across time were true, Elijah thought with amusement. If that were true, then Treegadoon wouldn’t be here by tomorrow morning.
“Maybe it’s time for us to go looking for Martin and Liam,” Elijah suggested, arranging his empty dishes and dirty cutlery together in a way that would make them easy for the squirrel waiter to manage.
Rosalee looked like she wanted to object — to press her point that Elijah himself was one and the same as Baby Liam — but instead, she nodded. Whether Elijah was Liam or not, Martin was still missing, and she did want to search for him.
Rosalee turned to Shaun and asked, “Is there any chance that Martin could have skipped through time with us last night? If he didn’t…” She glanced uneasily at Elijah, knowing that he didn’t share her belief in the curse of Treegadoon and also probably measuring out how much older her husband would be if he’d lived through all those years while she’d lived through only one night. She couldn’t have liked how the calculation turned out. Elijah was a grown man. Her husband would be twice her age by now, if he’d lived through that time.
“Martin wouldn’t have let our child out of his sight,” Rosalee insisted. “He wouldn’t have. So, if they got separated, it must have been by the curse.” Clearly, she didn’t want to say, either he died in the storm, or he’s still here, but it was what she was thinking. “Is there any way he could still be here?”
Shaun smiled weakly, awkwardly, glancing around himself as if he were wondering why he’d let himself get drawn into the role of tour guide and if there were some other squirrel he could foist the role of town ambassador off to at this late point. “I don’t know,” Shaun admitted. “I’m not an expert on exactly how the curse works. We haven’t had outside visitors for a very long time.” He smiled warmly at Elijah, who obviously was the reason he’d let himself be drawn into this awkward position. The romantic tension between the two of them had been palpable since they’d first seen each other.
“Is there someone who is an expert?” Elijah asked wryly. The idea of an expert on a made-up story amused him very much. He wondered what Mama Arlene would think of this place and its superstitions. She was such a devout scientist, she’d probably come up with an explanation for the town-wide delusion about their curse that would make sense of the whole thing. Of course, there was a thought — maybe it was only Shaun who believed this children’s story.
“Tell you what,” Shaun said, his red tail flicking behind him like a restless bonfire on a windy beach. “You two stay here a little longer, and I’ll go ask around, okay?”
Elijah wasn’t the one with a husband and child missing, so he looked to Rosalee for her reaction. She seemed unsure but nodded. So, Elijah said, “Sure, we’ll wait for you. A few more minutes won’t hurt.”
Shaun scurried off, away from the cafe, back down the spiral stair that had brought them so high up in a city that already seemed like it floated in the clouds. Treegadoon was plenty magical without make-believe stories about phoenix magicians added to it. At least, that’s what Elijah thought. Maybe he would bring Mama Arlene here to see it someday. She’d be fascinated by the architecture. He would bring Mama Angelica too, except a sea lion wouldn’t be able to do much more than gaze upwards at the city from sea level.
With her back legs melded together in a mermaid’s tail and her greater size — sea lions are much larger than river otters, who are already bigger than squirrels — Mama Angelica simply wouldn’t be able to ascend into this treetop realm at all. Not unless Mama Arlene invented some kind of pulley system or elevator to help lift her into the sky.
See, this is why Elijah didn’t need to believe in curses and phoenixes. The world already had mermaids, and the delights Mama Arlene could work with her science and inventions was more than magical enough for him.
Elijah was content to sit and wait in silence, enjoying the view of the sparkling ocean out beyond the verdant garden stretched in front of them on its gently swaying hammock, but he could sense Rosalee’s fretfulness.
“Tell me about Martin,” Elijah said, knowing that Rosalee would like the idea of him asking about his supposed father (such a laughable idea) and figuring it would make her feel better to talk about him, no matter how this misadventure of hers turned out.
So, Rosalee told Elijah about how she and Martin had met when she’d been traveling along the river from the inland city where she’d grown up, and she’d convinced him to travel with her toward the coast. They’d lived together on the coast for a while before deciding to go on an ocean voyage and further explore the world. The story reminded Elijah of Mama Arlene’s story about traveling from her riverside home to the coast when she’d been young. Elijah thought his mother would like this woman, and in fact, he found himself almost unaccountably at ease with her.
Rosalee had a manner that felt unusually easy and comfortable to him, but then, he was a river otter who had grown up surrounded by sea lions. So, it didn’t really surprise him that another person of his own species should feel so much more like him than most of the people he knew or met. Even so, he did find himself looking at her — the glimmer in her brown eyes like sunlight on a puddle, the cheerful roundness of her cheeks, and the way her small round ears splayed and flicked as she spoke — noticing similarities between her and himself, wondering if they were more than just species similarities.
But a town skipping through time like a stone across the surface of a pond simply made no sense, and there was no such thing as a phoenix.
On the other paw, mermaids did exist. Mama Angelica was proof enough of that. Could a phoenix simply be an albatross who had learned some clever trick of showmanship for using fire to scare a village of squirrels into believing they’d been cursed? Even if that were the case though… skipping across time? No, Elijah couldn’t believe that.
When Shaun finally came back, the flitting of his tail had slowed, and he seemed nervous. “I have good new and bad news,” he said.
“Did you find an expert?” Elijah asked. He really didn’t know what to expect from a squirrel who generally believed that he lived in a cursed village and could never leave. It was both sad that Shaun allowed himself to be boxed in by such a clearly ridiculous superstition and kind of charming that he was able to still wholeheartedly believe in the kind of magical story that’s generally aimed at children.
“Not really,” Shaun admitted, his delicate paws clasped together in front of him. “It’s been generations since the albatross came to Treegadoon, and so all of us are going on the stories that our parents were told by their parents who were in told turn told by their own parents.”
Elijah’s muzzle quirked into a tight smile as he held back as much of his amusement as he could. He didn’t want to laugh at Shaun. He genuinely liked the red squirrel, even if he was clearly a bit naive. But apparently, he had a whole village backing up his naivete, so it wasn’t exactly or entirely his own fault. Elijah really would have to bring Mama Arlene here. She’d be fascinated by meeting an entire city of squirrels who were ruled by a superstition that kept them from traveling out into the wider world and discovering its wonders. As a consummate traveler himself, Elijah hoped he could persuade Shaun to see reason. Perhaps not right now — Rosalee’s family still needed to be found, and Elijah’s boatful of tasty jellyfish needed to be brought home. But he would return. He was increasingly sure of that.
Shaun continued, unaware of Elijah’s storm of thoughts, and said, “The bad news is that no one has heard of another otter washing into our town during the storm last night. However, some of my friends claim that the crescent dune island to the north of Treegadoon is actually within our borders and counts for the curse. Apparently, a couple of them snuck out and camped there overnight when they were younger. So, if he washed up there, then he would have skipped forward through time with us.”
“A dune island?” Rosalee asked hopefully. She turned her gaze back to Elijah and asked, “Can we go check it out?”
“Of course,” Elijah answered. He had promised to help her, and if they found her actual family, then she could forget this nonsense about skipping through time and him being her lost baby. Everything could get back on track.
* * *
As Shaun led the two otters back through the maze-like bridges and spiral stairs that crisscrossed between all the trees of Treegadoon, Rosalee turned the tables on Elijah and asked him to talk about his life. He seemed amused that she wanted to know about his parents, his playmates growing up, the way he’d celebrated his birthdays, and really every tiny detail of the life she’d missed while he’d grown up, but he wasn’t averse to talking about it.
Rosalee could have listened to him talk about his childhood forever. There was something wistful but also restful about hearing of her child’s life as if it were simply a story to be told rather than a hurdle to be cleared. Something to listen to rather than live through. All the travails had been overcome, the obstacles avoided, and every growing pain healed. It was over for him, but it was all fresh to her. As he talked, images of a young Liam playing among a band of sea lion children danced before her eyes. She pictured it all so clearly. Even the hard times — like when he’d almost drowned and become afraid of swimming — were simply amusing tales now, for better and worse.
Rosalee wondered what it would have been like to live through those times, and she did find herself a little envious of the Mama Arlene and Mama Angelica that Elijah spoke of so fondly. But mostly, Rosalee wanted to meet them. She wanted to go with her son, who was now called Elijah, when he went back to his home, and because she believed in the curse of Treegadoon, she feared deeply that she wouldn’t be able to.
Shaun parted ways with the otters when they arrived back at the tree where Elijah’s boat was docked, leaving the otters to descend to sea level on their own. However, he did press a paper sack of nut-butter sandwiches and joiberries on each of them before he left, and he wished them luck. The sparkle in his eye as the squirrel said goodbye to Elijah was quite charming. The sparkle dimmed as he wished the same to Rosalee.
The cloud in the squirrel’s eyes summoned a storm in Rosalee’s stomach. It looked like to her like Shaun knew he would see her again — like he knew the curse of Treegadoon would bring her back to here — and she didn’t want to believe he was right. So, she shoved the feeling away as best as she could and followed Elijah down to his little boat.
Elijah uncovered the boat and made space between the piles of jumbled jellyfish for Rosalee to sit down and join him. Then he unmoored the vessel, shoved off, and began rowing northward between the many wide tree trunks toward the alleged crescent dune island.
The more Rosalee urged Elijah to tell her about his past, the more complicated her feelings became — like she was hearing about an alternate timeline, where she’d been there, but since she was only hearing about it, years and years after the fact, so many details were lost. Precious little details about the quirk of his smile, the happy dances and wiggles of an overexcited child, tiny moments too small to preserve in story had already washed away for ever on the tides of time, and Rosalee couldn’t call them back by listening to a grown man tell her about his memories.
And yet… There was such a freedom to jumping forward like this. She already had a grown child. If she wanted another, she was young enough to have another. But she didn’t think she would. She and Martin had loved Liam. Another baby wouldn’t be the same, and it had all been so much work. This trick of time had traded her first-person experience of raising Liam for the freedom to be young and carefree herself again. It was so much to process, and she’d had so little time to process it. Seasons had passed for Elijah in a blink of an eye for her, and she thought, she’d like spend many seasons sorting out the way she felt about it. Right now, it was almost like the feelings were piling up inside her, too deep for her to feel them, saved way in a place deep, deep inside being buffered so they wouldn’t overflow, flooding her, washing her away in their overwhelming power.
For now, while the complicated feelings piled up inside her, on the surface, all she could feel was entranced by every little thing that Elijah said, every movement he made as he rowed the boat. He was the most fascinating, mesmerizing being she could possibly imagine — just like he had been as a newborn infant, first settled in her arms. It was like meeting him for the first time all over again.
Elijah kept rowing as the trees thinned around them. There had to be hundreds of trees in Treegadoon, and near the middle, they grew densely close together. But around the edges of the city, they grew more sparse, and the bridges between them high above looked like threads in the sky.
When they finally cleared the last of the trees, Rosalee saw the glittering golden edge of the dune island in the distance. It was close enough to be an easy swim for an otter between Treegadoon and the island, but far enough to be a difficult swim for a squirrel. A very difficult swim for a squirrel.
Elijah made quick time rowing to the island, but then he kept the boat a calculated distance from the shallows, where it wouldn’t get grounded on the sand. He rowed around the island toward the east, letting Rosalee look at the shore, searching for signs of her lost husband.
“I think I see paw prints on the sand,” Elijah said as the reached the narrow end of the island. He steered the boat out around the sharply curved peninsula, bringing them to the other side of the sand bar that served as an island. “This place isn’t much bigger than the island I’m from,” Elijah observed.
“The one with the sea lions?” Rosalee asked, biting back her desire to tell Elijah that he was from further inland. He’d been born in a coastal town but most definitely on the mainland. Regardless, she knew Elijah still didn’t believe she was his mother, and she didn’t want to fight with him. If he never believed her, maybe she could live with that, as long as she still got to be near him. Rosalee could be friends with her son. She could live with that.
Elijah’s boat followed the coastline, and Rosalee saw more and more paw prints on the sand, until a campfire came into view. Small, puffing smoke, and cheerily red even under the direct sunlight of midmorning. Martin was tending the fire, throwing driftwood on it and looking solemn. There’s nothing more serious than a solemn river otter. Their whole beings — from tail tip to wide muzzle — are made for expressing joy. When Martin looked up and saw Rosalee and Elijah waving eagerly from the approaching boat, his round face brightened, and the expression completely transformed him
Martin ran right out into the water, unbothered by soaking his tattered clothes, and swam the last part of the way to the edge of Elijah’s boat. He threw his front paws over the edge and clung on. Rosalee leaned over and wrapped her arms around him, leaning her own head against his. “Oh, Martin,” she said, whispering right by his small round ear. “I didn’t know if you’d made it.”
Martin sobbed, unable to answer her, far too stricken by the profound, pressing weight of their shared loss and his fault in the matter. He had lost their baby, Tiny Liam, Little Lee-Lee, in the tossing waves of the prior night’s storm, and he would have to tell her. But Rosalee knew what he had to be feeling. She knew he thought their child was lost, and she wasn’t sure how to tell him otherwise. Elijah didn’t believe her. Would Martin?
* * *
Elijah and Rosalee each grabbed one of Martin’s paws and pulled him aboard the small boat. Immediately, he fell into Rosalee’s arms, wrapping his arms around her as well, and he whispered to her, “I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry,” but she countered each apology with a whispered back, “It’s okay, it’s okay, dear, he’s here,” until Martin pulled away from her, just enough to look into her eyes. Confusion met reassurance, and a flicker of hope was born.
Rosalee pointed with a webbed paw at Elijah and said, “It won’t make any sense, but we’ve fallen through time, Martin. This is… Elijah. You know him. Look at the notch on the webbing of his left paw.”
Martin looked at Elijah, and suddenly, the otter rowing the boat felt very, very uncomfortable. He’d helped this woman find her husband, but now she was trying to comfort the distraught man by repeating absolute nonsense to him about skipping across time and curses cast by fiery mythical birds.
This was such a horrible tragedy, and Elijah wanted nothing more than to be away from it. He knew intellectually, abstractly that losing a child must be one of the worst possible pains — something he couldn’t really even imagine — but to look at the face of this tragedy and see how it had broken Rosalee so thoroughly that she was living in a complete fantasy… It was too much, and Elijah wanted no more part in it.
“I’m sorry,” Elijah said to Martin. “The squirrels in the nearby city–” The thick copse of trees that made up Treegadoon was still visible rising above the sea to their south. “–spun us a tall tale, and Rosalee seems to have fallen for it. I don’t know what happened to your son, and I wish I could stay and help you search–” This was an outright lie, but sometimes, it’s the sort of lie an otter simply has to tell. “–but I need to get home to my own village with my jellyfish-hunting haul.”
Martin looked around himself in the small boat, taking in the piles of translucent tentacles for the first time. “How delicious,” he remarked diffidently, clearly struggling to know how to react to the untenably bizarre situation he’d found himself in, faced with an otter his own age who looked uncannily like he could be brother to both himself and his wife insisting that they weren’t caught in some kind of time distortion.
Under normal circumstances, Martin had to agree that time folding in half around him was very unlikely. These weren’t normal circumstances, and he didn’t know what to think. But he could see in Rosalee’s eyes that she believed wholeheartedly that Elijah was their son. Their Little Lee-Lee. Baby Liam.
Martin shook his head and held a paw to his temple. “Your village,” he asked, “do they have more boats? Might they be any help in mobilizing a search force–” He was going to say, “for our lost child,” but the words choked in his throat, unspoken, too hard to say. Either their child had just grown up in the blink of an eye, or he’d been lost in the storm alone all night, not yet old enough to know how to swim. The last Martin had seen of Baby Liam, the child had been clinging to a broken crate. It was possible the wooden crate had proven seaworthy enough that the infant had ridden it like a toddler-sized boat through the storm all night. But not likely.
Not impossible. Not likely.
Not the best mix of probabilities for all of Martin’s hope to rest on. But not the worst, and he couldn’t let go of hope. Not yet.
Reluctantly, Elijah admitted to himself that the sea lions would probably be very helpful in a search and rescue operation. They wouldn’t even need boats. Sea lions swim nearly three times as fast as river otters and are adapted for swimming in the ocean. But then, Elijah realized, he could also get back to them faster with less weight in the boat. And that served his purposes quite nicely. So, he said, “Yes, my village is mostly sea lions, and they would be happy to help you search for survivors lost in the storm. If I leave you both here, then I can get back to them quite quickly and get the search started.”
Martin nodded, happy with the suggestion. “Yes, then we can stay here and begin searching directly. How far is this sea lion village?”
Rosalee looked much less happy, quite concerned in fact. “No, we should stay with Elijah.” She believed to the deepest depth of her heart that if her son left Treegadoon without them, they wouldn’t see him again until he was a very old man. Her heart was already wrestling with the complexity of her infant child aging instantly to be her own age. She didn’t think she could handle missing his life entirely. “We have to stay together,” she insisted. Fervently.
Martin looked confused, but he shrugged and put an arm around her shoulders. “If Rosie insists, then I’m with her. I’m sure a couple more otters in your boat won’t slow us down too much. Besides, we can take turns rowing.”
“Actually, for a longer trip,” Elijah said, “I’ll be using a motor my mother — she’s an inventor — built for powering the boat automatically. And it’ll take an hour for me to get back to the sea lion village alone. With the two of you? I don’t know how much longer it will be.”
Martin looked at Rosalee, brow raised in a questioning expression, but she shook her head firmly. She had no intention of leaving Elijah’s side and allowing him to jump to old age before the sun rose on Treegadoon tomorrow.
“We stay together,” Rosalee said, staring down at the tentacles piled all around her in the boat. “I won’t leave you again.”
Martin thought for a moment that Rosalee meant she wouldn’t leave him. He still didn’t understand that she truly and completely believed Elijah to be their infant son, but he realized — sensing the tension in the boat between the other two otters — that there was something significant happening between them. There was a connection. He could feel it too. Elijah, although entirely new to him, felt familiar in a way he couldn’t describe. And like Rosalee earlier that morning, he found his panic about his lost son inexplicably soothed by this stranger’s presence.
Martin’s logical mind told him that Elijah seemed like a very confident, competent otter — surely, all he had to do was see the successful haul of jellyfish in the boat around him to know that! Any otter who could catch so many jellyfish — including one larger than an otter! — all by himself clearly knew what he was doing, and if this otter was going to help them search for their child, well, then Baby Liam was all but found already.
Another part of Martin’s mind — perhaps even more logical than the first — picked away at this explanation, telling him that a competent stranger’s help would count for very little if Baby Liam had already drowned in the storm. But… That part of his mind held little sway, so long as Elijah was sitting right there. And Rosalee was right: Elijah did have the exact same notch in the webbing of his left paw as Baby Liam. Martin remembered when Rosalee had found it and worried that they’d injured their brand new perfect baby already, but he’d spotted the notch almost as soon as Liam had first been handed to him. It wasn’t an injury, just a quirk, and it was such a particular thing for Elijah and Liam to have in common.
Tentatively, Martin reached out and grabbed Elijah’s left paw. The other otter looked surprised but didn’t object as Martin gently touched the notch in his webbed paw. “An old scar from when I was quite small,” Elijah explained. “I can’t remember how I got it.”
“Actually,” Rosalee whispered, wrapping her arms tightly around herself like she needed to be hugged or maybe to hug someone else but couldn’t, “you’ve had it since you were born.”
Martin let go of Elijah’s paw, and the two otters stared at each other for a long moment.
“I think we can afford to lose a little time,” Martin said, measuring the words out carefully. “Surely, the advantage of us being there to talk directly to the searchers and tell them everything we know about the storm and ship will be enough to outweigh a little time lost in getting there.” Martin’s mind was working overtime to try to make this situation make sense, trying to find logic in the face of the fantastical. Because like Rosalee, part of him knew: he was already reunited with his lost son.
Elijah sighed deeply. He no longer wanted to be mixed up in Rosalee and Martin’s mess of a tragedy… But at least they were both sounding more reasonable and much calmer now. He didn’t understand that it was his own presence that had calmed them down. He didn’t believe in the curse of Treegadoon. He believed in the science and rationality that his inventor mother had taught him. Perhaps, if he brought Rosalee and Martin home with him, then his mothers could deal with them.
“Alright,” Elijah said. “If that’s what you think is best, then I’ll get us on our way.” He bustled about the boat, properly covering the piles of jellyfish so they were secure and setting everything straight. Then with everything in its place — including his two passengers — Elijah secured the oars he’d been using to the sides of the boat and turned on the motor his inventor mother had built.
The little motor roared to life, and the boat revved up, taking off like a strong wind had caught its non-existent sails. The little boat shot like an arrow through the water, and Elijah pivoted the angle of the motor to steer it, keeping clear of the hazardous trees as he began heading home.
“It’s so fast,” Rosalee said, breathlessly as the wind whipped past her. “So much faster than I’d imagined…” And maybe, maybe she meant more than the boat. Maybe she meant the whole day — meeting her son as an adult, oscillating between loss and wonderment, tragedy and joy, storm and eerie calm. It was too many feelings, simply too, too much.
The sea lion isle was south of Treegadoon, so the boat had to circle the copse of trees before it could continue on through clear, empty sea. And as they passed the towering trees, Rosalee and Martin felt a building sense of foreboding. The sensation was unattached to anything specific, just a feeling, but when someone feels something, they usually try to figure out why. Rosalee worried that the motor on the boat was unsafe, but also, she could clearly see that Elijah was familiar with it and had probably used it safely many time before.
Martin worried that he was wrong to abandon the site of where he’d lost hold of his infant son, terrified that he was making the wrong choice in staying with this strange otter named Elijah, no matter how comforting his presence had seemed only moments ago.
As the small boat finally rounded past the last of the trees, facing a clear stretch of blue, the discordant dissonance warring inside both Rosalee and Martin rose to a fever pitch, and every nerve in each of their bodies screamed with utter conviction and no regard in the slightest for rationality that they simply couldn’t leave Treegadoon. There was no room left for laying a carefully constructed framework of logic over the top of the feelings urging them to stay. There was only room left to act, and Martin jumped over the side of the boat right away. He’d had less time to acclimate to the idea that Elijah was his son, and it was easier for him to let go.
Rosalee, on the other paw, felt torn in two, and the power of the curse was barely able to overcome her motherly attachment to the otter trying to drag her away from a mystical place that had laid claim to her, deep beneath her pelt, deep inside her heart. Rosalee belonged to Treegadoon now, and even Elijah couldn’t draw her away. With a broken-hearted sob of inarticulate confusion at her own actions, Rosalee also jumped over the side of the boat, and Elijah found himself zooming away from the otter couple he’d sworn to help.
Continue on to Part 2…