Matti


By rosaliekempthorne
- 302 reads
You buy the house because of the tree.
As soon as you see the tree, you know you have to have the house. It’s a compact, three-bedroom cottage, some of the wallpaper is a little bit dated, and the kitchen and bathroom could use a little updating too. But you tell your husband all that can be remedied, all that can be renovated and rejuvenated, and once it is, you’ll have the perfect home. And you tell him all this because of the tree.
The tree is a graceful, swooping silver birch. It has sturdy limbs and soft, diamond leaves, it has mottled skin and curly roots that you know must have dug deep beneath the house, blending with the foundations. The two are locked together. Living in the house is like breathing in the tree. Sitting in the window seat, while its young branches tap against the glass. You know you could be happy that way.
The truth is that your husband would do anything for you. He loves you to an outrageous degree. You don’t understand it, but you delight in it. You don’t look that gift horse in the mouth.
“I only ever want to make you happy.”
“And you do. You always do.”
#
You remember Matti.
How could you ever forget Matti? You and Matti were indistinguishable when you stood in front of a mirror, one in a red dress, one in blue; you sometimes fantasized that you could swap places, that the mirror image you saw of yourself could really be your sister, that you were looking into her eyes instead of your own.
Mathilda Elizabeth Rogers-Huddleby. What a mouthful. No wonder she was never anything to you except Matti.
She loved a tree. It was a silver birch. In a different garden. But still, the same graceful limbs and firm trunk, the delicate leaves and pale-silver-against-dark-brown skin. You had a little treehouse in that tree. There was a rope ladder, but neither of you used it. You’d rather scramble over the branches. You’d rather shimmy up as close to the very top as would hold your weight. Your mother dressed you in pretty velvet dresses – one red, one blue – and tidy buckled shoes, but it never stopped either one of you. You waved to passing cars. You laughed out loud. Even your gappy teeth matched.
#
You remember when Matti was gone.
You didn’t understand it. She’d been there that morning at breakfast. And then our mother, after she picked you up late from school: kneeling down beside you, arm around you, explaining. Though you couldn’t understand. You couldn’t make sense of the words. Anaphylactic shock. You couldn’t even repeat those words.
The dark clothes. The solemn music. All the tears. All the photos. While you waited and waited for her to come back, wilfully not understanding whenever they told you that that was never going to happen.
You stared at the tree, morning, dusk, late at night. Stared. Waiting.
#
You’re so much older now. And this is not the same tree. But it could be it. It really could. It looks like the perfect replica of the one you had in your garden when you were six years old. A garden you haven’t seen in nearly twenty years. And you can sit in the window seat and look out at this tree, trace all the paths you used to climb, see that spot in the middle where the treehouse was built. All so exactly alike. Even the dandelions that grown beneath it. All so exactly alike.
#
You have a baby with your husband.
It’s what you’ve both always wanted.
And you toy with the idea of naming her Mathilda. A part of you wants to. But it feels like bad luck. It feels like tempting fate. You read about programmes that can desensitize children so that they don’t develop nut allergies. You Google them, you read up on them, even as you rock her against your chest with the other arm.
You name her Sally. It seems old-fashioned. Odd. Your mother tells you it’s a doll’s name. But when you look at your daughter you see that she’s a Sally, and that’s all there is to it. Your husband agrees. Her second name is Desiree, after his favourite aunt.
#
She becomes a toddler.
She becomes a child.
A little girl.
You don’t want to dress her in velvet and lady-like shoes. You don’t see why she can’t race around in sneakers and overalls, why she can’t get muddy or why she shouldn’t ever be loud. It never worked on you or your sister, so why fight it? And your Sally likes to play in the sand, she likes to swim, she likes to climb banks and play ball games. She always wants to ride on her daddy’s shoulders, even though she’s probably, really, getting too old for that.
And she loves that tree. Maybe from all those days you spend reading to her under it. Or because you taught her to climb it just a little bit when she was small. Or maybe she gets that from you. It doesn’t matter. Because, when you see her tearing around out there, scrambling and climbing and exploring everything, when you see her hanging from a branch of that tree, or swinging back and forth on the rope swing, you know that, in your heart at least, Matti climbs again.
Picture credit/discredit: author's own work
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Comments
This is beautiful and
This is beautiful and bittersweet... it had me engaged from the beginning to end and you have a wonderful way with words. ...I really enjoyed this, thank you.
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