Shyamashree Acharya

The phone pinged again. The notifications were stacking like chaos and panic. Without even peeking, I knew it was Zara — her worry pulsing through the screen and unnerving me. The phone’s pings matched my erratic heartbeat.
She was worried, and so was I.
“He said he is going to cut down the tree.”
“He is planning to show it off at the party.”
“Are you okay? Sometimes I feel… You know?!”
And I had to type back to her, “I know.” With a deep sigh, I continued trying to finish my makeup, focusing on adding more foundation to the purplish-pink bruise under my eye.
Zara and I were not only best friends but soul sisters. We had been bonded since Noah bailed with the ark, leaving us lower mortals to figure it out. We found each other at the bottom when we both were sinking under the burden of systemic and circumstantial trauma.
And then my grandmother found us.
Season after season, we grew side by side, sometimes apart, sometimes tangled, but always reaching, like the tree in front of my grandmother’s house. We grew with the tree or because of it.
That tree — the one the whole town knows, the one overlooking the house, the one I see from my bedroom window, the one shading the yard where my grandmother’s ashes rest — Jason wants to cut down, threatening our memories.
…because he knows that will hurt me.
A knock on the door woke me from my reverie, and a chill ran down my spine simultaneously. Jason stood there with a smirk on his face. I wasn’t sure whether he approved of my look.
Towering above me, he came, roughly smudged my lipstick with his thumb, and whispered in my ears, “All this money and still forever a peasant.”
I let my tears roll down, knowing it was the reaction he wanted. He reveled in my pain.
Satisfied, he laughed and said, “Oh, I forgot. Before the party, I wanted to give you this.” He handed me a thick branch from the tree, tied with a red bow, like a threat dressed as a gift. I gasped as I realized what I was holding.
“Watch me rip it, piece by piece,” He laughed as he threw that branch near the stairs and walked away.
The tears overflowed now, as I watched my beloved tree from my window, apologizing for what happened to it. The slight wind, swaying the tree, felt like a nod to me. Am I forgiven…yet?
My grandmother’s sudden demise made me hit rock bottom. I suddenly found myself as the heir of my grandmother, sitting with millions  of problems and money.
Zara and I had never seen so much money.
Before we could understand it, Jason proposed out of the blue. We thought it was such a relief. Jason understood money better, but we never imagined that all he wanted was money — my grandmother’s money, and now my life for more money.
He has started uprooting me by attacking the tree, knowing how much it means to us, to my late grandmother, and to my family.
The party had already started downstairs. The music was loud, happy, and upbeat, the opposite of how I felt. There was the whole town — dancing, laughing, and eating in my grandmother’s kitchen, trying to be on the good side of Jason.
The money has always tipped the loyalty scales. 
And then there was my Zara. She was standing in the corner, in her pretty black dress, her red hair falling on her shoulders like the dragon’s fire. She was looking for me, like always, with her dainty fingers with black nail polish, circling the rim of her glass.
Her face lit up when she saw me, then clouded with concern, anger, and regret when she noticed the bruise beneath my eye makeup.
“I am going to kill him, Ziva. Did he hit you again? Why are we letting him do this?” Zara’s words embraced me before she did, and when she did, she let the hug linger.
In a shaky, breathless whisper, I let her know that Jason had broken a branch from our tree.
The tiny flecks in her eyes smoldered with murderous rage, and as I put my arms around her, I felt a tug on my hair.
Jason was pulling on my ponytail, growling at Zara, “No one is here to see your lesbian love. Go and make me look good before I kick your redhead echo out.”
I shoved his hand away, and in what seemed like the blink of an eye, but felt like an eternity, he was dragging me, in front of Zara, in front of all my Grandmother’s friends, in front of people I didn’t know. His face was red, burning with anger. My tiny act of rebellion was undermining his power.
How dare I?!
In hindsight, except Zara, who followed me up to my room till Jason closed the door on her face, every single townsfolk stood there. They watched me being dragged into the same house where they had attended so many of my grandmother’s parties and saw me grow up, graduate, and get married in this house. And no one stepped in.
If I survive, not a single soul will be stepping into my house again. A mental note I made while Jason dug his fingers into my already bruised arms.
It was his way of showing that he was in charge. He dragged me up the stairs and then shoved me inside the room, not before a slap that drew blood on my cheek. I fell down and then felt his kick on my head and my chest before he left me and locked the room.
As the carpet fibers were getting stained with my blood, I closed my eyes and lay down there, letting the fight in me take a rest. The smell of my blood felt familiar, yet new. My self-pity was ringing through my ears, while every single bone of my body felt jelly, and I was letting the blood, snot, and tears flow through—the saltiness of tears seared through my bruises.
I saw my tree peeking through my bedroom window. I went up to the window and screamed at the tree, “Are you happy? Are you happy now watching me being beaten up? How long? How much more do I have to endure?” and I fell on my knees sobbing.
A thud shattered an unexpected stillness, and then a crash. The silence was deafening. Loud gasps and screams till there was another hushed silence. I started banging on the door. What did he do to Zara? What did Zara do?
The door suddenly opened, and Zara burst in, hugging me, whispering, “He is gone.”
Somebody told me later that I screamed and screamed till I lost my voice, but I only remember rocking back and forth in Zara’s arms while watching the paramedics take Jason on a gurney, with his neck hanging at an odd angle.
The red and blue lights kept coming to the house for days, checking, investigating, and making sure that Jason’s death was an accident. Then, the insurance company representatives came and conducted their investigation. Jason, after locking me in the room, was coming down the stairs when he tripped and fell, and broke his neck.
He tripped on the branch wrapped with a red bow.
Three months later, as Zara sat with her back to the tree, doing her art for her next museum showing, I sat next to her, writing on my grandmother’s typewriter. The noise was the music of our childhood. Jason had taken out new life insurance on our lives — four million on mine, while two million on his. I guess he hoped to get four million.
At least I let him believe that he was going to get it.
When Zara was fifteen, her stepdad suddenly found her alluring and started visiting her room. One windy night, she climbed out of her window and knocked at my door. My grandmother opened the door, and Zara flew into her arms. She stroked Zara’s head and quietly said, “Have you talked to the tree about it?” She led Zara and me to the backyard and nudged Zara to spill her angst on the tree.
A tree branch impaled her stepdad the next morning while he was driving home.
The tree became our protector, our healer, and our provider from then on. As grandmother said, “You let the tree know, and nature will take care of you.”
As the tree’s shade shifted, we felt goosebumps.
Zara asked, as she painted, “Sometimes I wonder how many so far… You know?!”
I kept typing.
“I know.”
And I leaned into the secret silence that always held us.