Brenna CampingAndy spent thirty minutes in the hundred-degree heat talking the price of a juniper bonsai tree down from $50 to $20. The man selling the bonsais on the side of the highway leaned against his truck with his arms crossed, refusing to budge. Behind him, heat rose off the stale ground of the Mojave.
Andy examined the shallow ceramic pot. He thought of how the roots were butting up against their confines and how the tree had accepted its fate: forever small. The man tried to explain the necessary steps of caring for a bonsai and the complicated process of keeping them alive, but Andy didn’t listen. Just nodded along. Eventually, the two agreed on $30 if he took the one that wasn’t as healthy, and Andy continued toward Flagstaff feeling ripped off. He passed turquoise jewelry stands and the landscape swelled from sparse desert to forest. Andy drove with the bonsai on his lap, branches trembling.
When he arrived at his wife’s house—divorced for nearly five years now—he stood before the red door, staring at a crucifix hanging on by one rusted nail. In the breeze, the porch swing creaked, and Andy thought of his one-bedroom apartment in LA on the third floor of his building. His door, grey.
His wife, three years after the divorce and only one year after accepting a job at a university in Arizona, married a Catholic and converted. He touched the crucifix, then knocked on the red-painted wood. A dog barked and the door swung open; the smell of fresh linen seeped out. Hanna, his daughter, seven now, stood before him with her hair in a mess of curled ringlets, gripping the straps of a bright pink backpack. Jen, his wife, was hiding behind the door, popping her towel-covered head out. She gave Andy a huge, squinty smile, then looked down at their daughter.
“Do you have all your stuff?” she asked Hanna.
Hanna shrugged and walked past Andy to the back door of his old beige sedan.
“Be careful with her,” Jen said before shutting the door a bit too forcefully. She didn’t ask how the drive was, how he’s doing, or anything. It took two weeks of emails and a detailed itinerary to convince Jen to let them go in the first place.
Andy unlocked the car and Hanna crawled in the back seat.
“I have a gift for you,” he said, hopping into the front seat.
“Mom says I’m supposed to have a car seat.”
“You? You’re nearly an adult!” Andy grabbed the bonsai tree by its ceramic pot and handed it back to her. She held it in her lap, staring at its leaves. Then she began brushing the branches softly with one finger.
As they drove off, north toward Utah, toward the canyon where he had taken his wife camping many times before he called her his wife, he glanced back at his daughter in the mirror throughout the ride. For most of the drive, her eyes were glued to the tiny juniper in her lap, and she would occasionally lift it up to her lips so she could whisper something secret into the web of its branches. She had begun gathering freckles on her cheeks and nose like her mother, but her brown hair belonged to him. They drove through sunset, arriving at Bryce Canyon late when the red rocks could not be seen through the darkness of night.
***
“I’m hungry,” Hanna poked her father’s forehead with one skinny finger repeatedly, waking him up the next morning. Soft rain was falling onto the roof of the cedar cabin he had rented for the next few days, filling the room with the thick smell of wet wood. On the floor, Hanna had placed smooth stones around the bonsai tree as if they were all friends.
“Pancakes?” Andy asked, sitting up in his cot.
He hadn’t yet seen her smile since he picked her up from his wife’s house, but with the mention of sticky pancakes, she released her lips revealing the gaps in her mouth where teeth should’ve been.
***
They drove from the campground to the nearby town, the red rocks and scraggly pine trees surrounding them on all sides. “Mom said they’re called hoodoos,” Hanna said, pointing to a protruding rock formation, “Like Voodoo. Andy, are they magic?”
He winced at the sound of his name coming from her mouth. “Sure,” he answered, “they are magic.”
“Devil magic? Or Jesus magic?”
Andy laughed, “Neither.”
At breakfast, Hanna ate two pancakes washed down by nearly three glasses of chocolate milk. Syrup got caught in her hair, coating her fingers and drying cracked around her mouth and on her cheeks. She told Andy that her mom never let her eat sweets and she hadn’t had pancakes since last Easter when Chuck, her step-dad, made them for her with fresh-squeezed orange juice. She asked if she could get a glass of orange juice to go and Andy said yes, looking out the window and watching as the rain let up and the clouds parted. Hanna colored on a sheet of paper with waxy crayons that the waitress gave her.
“Has Chuck ever taken you fishing?” Andy asked.
Hanna didn’t look up from the scribbles of red she was making, “No. Mom said he’s ‘booky’ which means he doesn’t like outside.”
“Do you like outside?”
Hanna shrugged. Andy paid the check and they left.
***
Hanna insisted on taking the bonsai tree to the lake with them, arguing that fishing sounded boring and she would want something to play with. When they arrived at the cabin, the tree’s branches looked a bit more brittle than the day before, and the leaves were turning yellow at the tips. Hanna stared at the browning leaves, bottom lip extended in a worried pout, and insisted Andy give the tree water, then more water, then more water until the base roots were completely flooded. She held the dripping pot in her lap on the way to the lake. When they got there, he tried teaching her about bait and weights and bobs, but she was busy hunting for smooth stones and chasing the dragonflies that were buzzing around looking for mates. The ground was muddy from the morning’s rain and had quickly turned Hanna’s white and pink shoes red-brown.
Andy cast out his line, then Hanna’s, perching hers between two stones. She picked up her bonsai, carrying it around and looking for other trees like it, asking it where its family was. He sat on a rock and watched her go from tree to tree, presenting the little juniper to the giant pines with no luck of finding a match.
“Want to learn to skip rocks?” he asked.
“Can’t now. Busy.”
So he skipped a rock across the calm lake. Waiting for a bite.
A few hours passed and Hanna was still wandering the nearby forest in search of other juniper trees. Andy went and retrieved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from the car, calling Hanna back to him and watching as she again coated her face in sticky food. They sat on rocks next to one another, the bonsai between them.
“Mom said you play the guitar,” Hanna said through a palate of peanut butter.
“You don’t remember?” he asked. She shook her head, “I didn’t bring it. Sorry, Hanna.”
“That’s okay,” she paused, brushing away pebbles with her feet, “Are you a rock star? Is that why you still live in California?”
Andy laughed, “That was the goal. But no. I mostly record jingles.”
“Like Christmas music?”
“No, not like Christmas music.”
She finished her sandwich, licking her fingers, and grabbed the bonsai tree, continuing back into the forest. After a few minutes of quiet, skipping rocks and watching the bobbers float without movement, there was finally a tug on Hanna’s rod. The bobber dropped under the water, and he yelled for her to come help him reel. She squealed, hurrying toward the rod. He picked it up and began reeling and tugging, talking Hanna through the process.
“Let me! Let me!” She was jumping, holding onto the bonsai. As Andy reached to hand over the pole and she reached to grab it in return, she dropped the tree, shattering its ceramic base on impact. They paused. Hanna held the pole as the fish tugged and tugged, but she stood motionless, staring at the tree, until eventually the fish was able to free itself from the hook. Then the water, too, stood motionless.
“I killed him,” she said and dropped the pole on the ground.
They both knelt down, grabbing the little tree by its dangling roots.
***
Next door to the diner, the hardware store was barely stocked. They found only large bags of soil and large terracotta pots— nothing small and flat like the bonsai’s original pot. Hanna walked the tree through each aisle of the store, its roots hanging over the edges of her palms and between the gaps of her fingers. Eventually they decided to buy a small plastic sand bucket and they would find soil for it at the campground. Already, the branches of the bonsai were looking weaker.
Outside of their cabin, they dug at the dirt using the little plastic shovel that came with the tiny sand bucket. The clouds were back, and a gentle misting of rain was just starting to come down as they filled the bucket, surrounding the roots of the bonsai. They patted down the clay dirt that looked nothing like the original soil, watered it, and put the tree back inside. Hanna had been on the verge of tears since the pot broke, so Andy took her back to the diner for more pancakes. But she didn’t eat any. Instead, she ordered a cobb salad. She said her mom would make salads for dinner most nights. Outside, fat rain drops hit against the diner’s window.
***
The next morning, the branches of the bonsai looked brittle and more of the needles were turning brown. Hanna held it in her lap, gently brushing it with one finger and whispering secrets to its branches like she had when she first got it.
“Pancakes again?” Andy asked.
She shook her head.
“Okay. Eggs?”
No answer.
“I know! We can get milkshakes!” he sat on the floor next to her.
“I want to go home,” she whispered.
Andy sighed and leaned back, looking up at the knots in the wood of the ceiling. Hanna was crying next to him.
“You know,” he said, “There’s a way that we can still save it.”
“Him. It’s a little boy.”
***
Without breakfast or coffee, the two drove back to the lake. On the way, Hanna’s eyes stayed on the little bonsai tree. They passed hoodoo after hoodoo and she never pointed out one, but Andy thought of magic and the tree and Hanna’s little fingers poking at his forehead to wake him up the morning before. He thought of the last time Hanna called him “Dad,” not Andy. Two years ago—the last time he saw her—right before his wife moved to Arizona, away from California. Because he let her go. Because he and Jen knew it was what was best for her—a home with a steady job instead of freelancing; two parents; a safe neighborhood out of the city. Since then, Hanna had seemingly doubled in size. Since then, she had begun looking more and more like her mother and less and less like him. But together, their brown hair was greasy from a lack of showering.
At the lake, Hanna wasn’t distracted by the dragonflies. Instead, she immediately went to work looking for the bonsai tree’s parents. The two hiked along the densely wooded shore, climbing over fallen logs and avoiding large roots. After twenty minutes of hiking, searching through dense and towering pine trees, Andy looked out on a small bay where the lake’s water gently lapped at the wet soil of the shore. There, leaning toward the water to access the sun, was a juniper tree with a twisted trunk.
“I found one!” Andy shouted at Hanna who was continuing through the forest. She turned around to see Andy approaching the tree and she smiled.
“That’s her!” She ran back, bucket and tree swinging.
They began digging near the juniper, fingernails filling with clay. They brushed away rocks and created a nice sized hole for the bonsai.
“Where’s the dad?” Andy asked.
Hanna shrugged, gently removing the tree from the tiny bucket and placing it in the hole they’d dug. She began patting the ground down around the tiny tree until it was sturdy. “He’s somewhere,” she said, “don’t worry.”
They left the tree there at the bank of the shore with its mother. As they walked through the forest toward the car, Hanna kept looking back. In her hand she carried the empty plastic bucket.
***
At the diner once more, both Hanna’s and Andy’s hair wet from a shower, the two ate pancakes together. It wasn’t raining outside, and some hoodoos could be seen clearly through the window. They had decided to end their trip a day early, choosing instead to go back to Flagstaff the next morning. Hanna slowed her eating, only finishing half her pancakes, and watched the sun as it started to set over the trees and rocks. Andy drank from a cooling coffee, watching her gaze.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?” Hanna asked, still looking out the window.
Andy thought for a moment then answered, “Remember the magic in the hoodoos? I think the magic will make the little tree grow big and strong.”
“But what if it’s devil magic?”
“It’s not.”
He could tell she didn’t believe him. They were silent for a while, looking down at their soggy pancakes. Then they left the diner, went back to the cabin, and packed up.
***
“Will you come here for Christmas? You can play me your jingles,” Hanna held her pink backpack in front of herself. The sedan’s engine hummed, motionless outside of his wife’s house. The red door. The creaking porch swing. The crucifix. He thought about a Christmas with his wife and his daughter again. He thought about Chuck, about the better gift he’d give her. Something that wouldn’t start to die in a couple days.
“I don’t know, Hanna. I’ll try.”
“Okay, Andy.”
She got out of the car, walked to the porch, knocked on the door, and was greeted by her mom. Blonde hair, freckles. She knelt down to hug Hanna and looked past her daughter’s shoulders, out onto Andy. He thought of Christmastime snow in the forest. His daughter’s cheeks red from the cold. His ex-wife waved at him, and Andy waved back. Then he drove back to LA. Through the forest, through the Mojave, through the cement city highways. Back to his apartment, through his grey door.
