The cake is perfect, a round shimmer of chocolate that slides easily out of the pan onto the rack. The day is bright and a little breezy and I push open the kitchen window above the sink and set the cake on the sill to cool; the smell of baking will swirl out in eddies on the breeze, finding me in the front yard, reminding me of later, when the sun is gone and the world is close and tucked in. That’s when we will celebrate.

There are still the eighteen candles in the little box in the drawer, at the ready. I tilt them out onto my palm, running my fingers over each one, counting. My chest constricts and the skin all over my body feels too tight, like what is beneath cannot be contained by skin alone. An uncomfortable and unsettling feeling that forces me to put the candles back and lay a hand over my sternum. Breathe, I tell myself. Breathe.

The baking dishes and utensils are scrubbed and dried, the counters wiped down, gleaming in the wash of sunshine from the open window. From the front yard comes a busy tittering of sparrows, the frequent whoosh of cars passing. I go into my bedroom, kicking piles of clothes out of the way of the closet door, and stand in front of the shelf where loose stacks of old jeans and shapeless, stained t-shirts spill onto each other like the forlorn back section of a clearance sale. I reach into the pile and grab one of each; the jeans are mine, the t-shirts all that remain of John’s belongings. These clothes only see the light of day once each year, and are more threadbare than I had thought, used as they are to plundering my garden only in the darkest part of the night, kneeling and groping blindly in soil that against all odds continues to nurture plants. My garden is where I go when the stillness becomes deafening and all the air is squeezed from my bedroom; I drop seeds and I water and I dig and I yank; I sweat into a

vacuum of darkness, expecting nothing. What I don’t do is go out there in daylight, on any day but today. I have found that I need this couple of hours in the garden, each year on this day, to make myself tired enough, loose enough, distracted enough to do what I’m out there to do.

I grab the hand tools from the shed, the trowel and the clippers and a large shovel. The dirt feels like velvet on my bare hands and for a while I sift it between my fingers, clawing smooth soil up from underneath and letting the coolness of untouched earth blanket my palms. I stare at my hands, now covered in a fine layer of dirt, my ragged fingernails trapping half moons of silt. I watch my hands move through the ground as if they are not connected to the rest of me.

I know that people walk by my house and stare; surely they do; anyone would. The paint peels off the siding, and there are bare patches of tar where shingles have fallen from the roof, disappearing into the vegetation below. The front windows are filmed with dust and sap and grime and everything the rain has pushed from the roof over the years. Aside from the patch of garden, unruly in its own right, my entire yard is overgrown with tall clumpy grasses and browning vegetation, completing a picture of uninhabitability, of dereliction and neglect. Mine is not a house for anyone who has earned a place in this world.

I turn to the desperately crowded carrots, tops like a bomb made of bright green lace that exploded and then froze, an instant in the life of shrapnel in motion, delicate and frenzied. As I thread my fingers between the unruly tufts, searching for weeds, I remember how she used to twist off the tops and tie them together for hula skirts for her dolls. I would give her kitchen twine, thick enough for her still-clumsy fingers to work with, and hold the spot with my finger so she could make the knots good and tight. She would spend whole afternoons creating a dozen or more skirts, and John and I would be recruited as audience for the dolls’ dance performances.

As I keep working, digging and pulling and turning over the soil around the plants, sweat starts to bead and then roll, and it feels good, the late-afternoon sun feels good on the back of my neck, and I work hard for a long time before I sit back on my heels and catch my

breath. There is a calm that I know is temporary and so I waste no time now, I stand right up and wipe my hands on my jeans and I go to the shed and get the bucket at last. Eighteen.

Lemons peek through the overgrowth like a million tiny suns. The tree, nearly hidden by brush, is swollen with them, growing in clusters or alone, poking out everywhere they can find space. The branches scratch my arms and the sagging yellow lemons are like baseballs thudding against my face. I pick, the way I taught her: twist first, then pull gently. Most, just past ripeness and full of bittersweet juice, surrender easily. I lean in and inhale the bright tang of them. I pick a dozen, two dozen, slowly filling the big bucket.

She always went right for the trunk, wriggling and turning her small body to slip right between the heavy branches to where the biggest lemons hid. She would climb, one foot on each limb, twisting and pulling until I told her the bucket couldn’t take any more.

“Why can’t we do the stand today?” she would ask, as we stood in the kitchen leaning over the juicer, taking turns pressing the soft wet flesh against the reamer and watching the container fill up over and over again.

“Because it’s January, and nobody wants to buy lemonade in the winter time.” She marked the kitchen wall calendar with big X’s for every day of February and March, thick black ink crossing through all our appointments and plans. Periodically, she would check on the frozen juice, lined up in ziploc bags, waiting for April.

When the bucket is full, I duck out from the branches with my haul and place it over the fence onto the sidewalk. The “Take one” sign faces out, for passersby. This is my birthday gift to her.

She was haunted by the idea of rotting lemons. Everywhere we went during the fruiting months, a knapsack full came with us. She brought lemons to her teachers and to play dates, even to the park, where she would hand them out to strangers. She festooned the world with lemons, she found it so incredible that we had our own tree and nothing pained her more than wasted fruit.

“Mama, look!” I hear suddenly, from just up the sidewalk. The word pierces. There is a little boy, maybe four or five, pointing. I know without following his gaze that he is pointing at our cart in the corner of the yard, barely visible through the weeds, like a lion stalking prey. My stomach lurches, the back of my throat filling with bile. I turn away. The paint is faded and the nails have rusted, the wood a tangle of splinters. She painted large, lopsided flowers all over it, and lemons, of course, but I haven’t had the strength to see if they still exist, if twelve years of rain and wind have destroyed her handiwork. I haven’t been able to investigate the softened wood, the fissures and chipped corners. Least of all the one implausibly small nick, barely noticeable, the tiny gaping mouth that swallows up all the other stories the cart has to tell, that forever replays the deafening scream of tires on pavement. “Cute,” the boy’s mother says, as if she doesn’t notice the dilapidated state of the cart, doesn’t see the weeds crawling all up the legs. Maybe she’s thinking of other things. Maybe she knows how to keep her boy close and think of other things at the same time. “Can we buy some?”

The mother laughs. “We’ll have to come back when they’re selling.”

She says this while smiling at me, and I only now realize that I’ve been standing still, staring at them, my hand frozen on the fence.

Her eyes want to share with me an idea of children and motherhood. I begin to shake all over and I clap a hand over my mouth, suddenly afraid I’m going to be sick. “Hey!” the little boy says. “We can make our own!”

He has reached into the bucket and begun stacking lemons in his arms, against his small chest. The mother flicks a glance at me again but now her smile has faded, her eyes like two nervous hummingbirds, darting away. Trembling uncontrollably, I start back toward the house. “Take as many as you want,” I manage to throw over my shoulder, in what I hope is a neutral voice. If only they had passed by five minutes later, I would have been gone already.

I stand for a long time in the hallway, leaning against the front door. I hold my breath until I feel dizzy and there are black spots and then I release, suck in another breath and hold

again, and there, right in the middle of the intolerable bursting feeling in my lungs, are all the friendships I’ve killed off; the colorful shaky-lettered cards from the entire kindergarten class that I swept into a pile and burned in the driveway; the library, and the coffee shop, and even

the grocery store I stopped going to; the scales of a life, shed one by one, the molted skin that is me, that is my fate.

I need to frost the cake.

I weave unsteadily into the kitchen and get a small bowl from the cupboard, mix together butter and cocoa powder, confectioner’s sugar and vanilla, a drizzle of milk. When the cake is frosted, I put it down in the middle of the table and get the candles. The daylight has shifted and grayed, now slanting thinly through the window, more shadow than light. Soon, it will be dark.

“You’re officially a grown-up now,” I tell her. I think about the number, eighteen, and all that it means, ought to mean, the child gone, the adult emerging, what is lost and what is gained by that simple number, but for her there is only what is lost, always what is lost.

I listen with all my concentration so I won’t miss hearing her, just in case, every year hoping. I know she’s there each time, in the shadows. I understand why she doesn’t speak, but I ache for her voice, and the ache is devastating and sweet, the resonance of her somehow within it. There is love within the silence of her, reaching for me. I wrap that ache tight around my heart. I hope she still likes chocolate.

I am startled by the ringing of the phone. Although I have no use for a cell phone anymore, I still have the land line at John’s insistence, and an answering machine filled with the automated voices of telemarketer calls. I know I have to answer this time. I owe him that much. “Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” I say back. “You’re just in time for cake.”

I hear him exhale, in that measured way he does when he’s being patient, and I am instantly annoyed.

“How long are you going to keep doing this?” he says.

“You know, you don’t have to call.”

For almost a full minute, he says nothing. I’m sure he’s holding his palm over his eyes, asking the God he still believes in for the strength not to say something cruel. He still doesn’t understand what a relief that would be. Or maybe he does understand, but is unwilling to abandon decency, to let me take that from him, too.

In the space his silence creates, I can hear the tripping cadence of his son’s voice somewhere in the background, high and emphatic like all toddlers’ voices. I can hear something like machinery, rhythmic and sloshing; his wife is washing clothes or dishes or maybe the boy himself, in their whirlpool tub. I can even almost hear the thick Oregon night through the screen door off their back porch, the whisper of trees and the rooting of deer in undergrowth.

I hear the sounds of moving on.

After all, he’s the one who could.

I listen. He breathes into the phone and I listen for reverberations of her in his breath. I close my eyes and I see her there between us, passed back and forth with each inhale, each exhale.

“I’m tired,” he says, and his voice cracks. “Aren’t you tired?”

But now I’m thinking about the fullness of her laugh when he used to tickle her, the delicate feel of her between us after a nightmare, the sight of her on his shoulders, sun in her hair, at the 4th of July parades.

“One thing,” I say, softly.

He sighs, but I can hear him thinking. “One thing,” he murmurs, after a moment. “Purple horse pajamas.”

“You said that last year.”

The wife is trying to coax the boy into something. I hear her promise that Daddy will come in and say goodnight when he’s off the phone.

“All right,” he says, but he’s not annoyed or patient now, just thinking. “That… toothbrush with the two-minute song timer.”

I smile. I’d forgotten about that toothbrush.

“One thing,” he says back.

“Chasing seagulls at the beach.”

I hear the snuffle of his brief laugh. “I always wondered what she’d do if she caught one,” he says.

A few seconds go by and I am certain he’s counting, waiting the appropriate amount of seconds before ending the call. I say goodbye first. His son is waiting.

I lay the receiver in the silverware drawer, and go back to the table. The room has grown dark, and I fumble with the matches until I get one lit. Such a big blaze, so many candles. I sing to her, I sing my love for her, and then I blow out the candles and I’m sitting in darkness.

I sit down on the edge of her bed, as carefully as if her legs were there, stretching out behind me. I lean over and run my fingers along the “good citizen” certificate from kindergarten, taped to the wall behind her headboard, and the T-ball award, from when her team won the championship. I look at, but don’t touch, her paintings from art class, the penguin and the whales, the Valentine’s Day hearts. The coarse water color paper has curdled at the edges. The little loops of Scotch tape still bear the ridges of her fingerprints.

The room is as still as a photograph, and with the curtains drawn it could be any time, any day, any year.

Except for the emptiness. She is not down the hall in the bathroom. She is not hiding under her bed, like she used to do. She is not at a friend’s sleepover. She is nowhere, which means she is everywhere, which means I have to find her. I have to keep trying to find her.

“Bedtime,” I say, ignoring the quiver in my voice, and I cover myself with her comforter. Winnie the Pooh stares blankly up at me and I tuck him in, too, same as always. Her room is

just as she left it; I come in here every day, I stand or sit on the floor, to be near her; I don’t touch her things, and I only sleep in her bed on her birthdays, I don’t dare disturb the imprint of her. She liked me to sleep with her on her birthdays.

I reach over and switch off the fairy lamp on her bedside table. Instantly her room feels all wrong, and scary, and alien, plunged into a total darkness. I bolt up, horrified. I grope for the switch and turn the lamp back on and scramble off the bed, pull the night light from the wall; the little bulb is dusty, the filament inside trembling uselessly in my hand.

I go to the kitchen and dig around in the drawer, but there are no more bulbs. My chest squeezes to the size of a fist. I have managed to fail her again. Acid and bile and chocolate cake rise into my throat. I run to the bathroom, barely making it in time, and suddenly my body is not my own as it clenches and writhes and pushes itself inside out. I desperately clutch the toilet seat and I can’t feel my legs and I am holding on for dear life because I am disappearing headfirst down the dark tunnel, nothing left of me but disembodied urgency like lightning with nowhere to touch down, a screaming swirling need for release becoming too much to bear in spite of this violent expulsion, and next thing I am howling, “I’m sorry” a flood of tears and the haunted sound of the words, over and over again. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I sob, gasping for breath.

I don’t know how long the flood goes on, but eventually it ends. Eventually I am exhausted, evacuated. In the delirium of the aftermath, an unfamiliar feeling takes hold and I realize it is relief.

I pull myself to my feet. I brush my teeth, splash water on my face and head back into her room, holding the night light.

“It’s ok,” I tell her, clicking off the bedside light once again. “I know it’s too dark, but it’s going to be ok.”

In the pitch black, I hum her favorite Beatles song. “Who knows how long I’ve loved you,” I sing, quietly. “You know I love you still…”

After, there is only quiet, except for the rhythm of my own breath against the pillow. I don’t realize I’ve fallen asleep until I am awakened by something coming to me through the fog, a sound that I can’t place, a feeling of joy and of love, and all at once I understand the sound and I understand that it is what I’ve been listening for all these years, finally come to me.

I get out of bed and pull on my socks and boots. I take big strides through the house, unhurried but invigorated, grabbing the flashlight from the front hall closet. Her voice still swims in my ears, and I am giddy.

With the flashlight, I go to the shed and grab the tools. I navigate my way over to the lemon tree, set the flashlight against the trunk, and start hacking away at the tangled mass of weeds, which are nearly as tall as I am and don’t give easily. But, I am patient, persistent. Soon I have cleared a patch, then widened that to a larger clearing, and at last the tree stands free, at least on one side. I have cleared the side facing the house so that from now on, I can see the lemons from the kitchen window, where I will no longer draw the curtains except at night.

“I’ll finish up the other side tomorrow,” I pant, laying down the scythe and retrieving the flashlight from the base of the tree.

I make myself look toward the sidewalk, shining the light on the spot where I know the concrete will always be a different color and texture, even after twelve years, because a thing that gets fixed later on never quite looks the same, especially something as dense and unforgiving as pavement.

Then I walk over to the cart. The flashlight is too heavy in my hand and I keep it aimed at the ground, away from what is in front of me, the tiny cone of light a pinprick in the darkness. I remember the way my hand covered hers, gripping the brush, the bright blue paint dripping onto the grass as we made the letters together. I remember carrying it out to the sidewalk, her little fingers clamped around, inside of where my hands held onto the wood. John on the other side, lifting. The way I had to walk behind her, leaning forward, so she could feel like she was helping. I remember how the last time, she was strong enough to carry her end

without me. I stand there and I stare at the dark shape in front of me, tears now streaming down my face, dripping into the weeds at my feet.

I was only gone for a minute.

The first sound was the blown tire, sharp and explosive. The second sound, metal on concrete, and the sound of the world ending.

Somebody, one of the police officers probably, discretely brought the thing back into the yard. Nothing has been moved, except for the weeds that have grown all around and the grasses that have pushed up against the bottom and sides. The last thing John did before he left was suggest destroying the stand and I screamed at him to leave it alone and that’s the night he finally packed his things.

I’ve been out here so many times in the blindest part of the night, I’ve sat in the middle of the overgrown garden beds, compelled to stay this close, enshrouded by everything I can’t see.

I lift the beam of light then, and I look. I look and look, and I kneel in front of it and brush aside the weeds so I can better see the tiny fairytale flowers, where her hand was bold and confident and the colors still hold their thickness.

“My baby,” I breathe, placing my palm against the wood. “My Willa.”

I look at the yellow paint of the lemons and I remember now that she drew faces on them and seeing them makes me laugh. There is one with long brown hair like me and one with glasses like her dad and s smaller one in between, smiling a thin black paint smile. I sit down in the dirt and keep the beam on the cart, for I don’t know how long but the light at some point starts to dim, wavering in and out under the strain of weak batteries.

Finally, I stand up. The world is already materializing, gray shadows heralding the approaching day. Soon the sky will be washed with dawn. But I’ll be asleep. I feel like I could sleep forever, but I know I won’t. I know that at some point, I’ll get up, have some coffee, and finish clearing the weeds.

Laurie Okin is a native of Rockport, Massachusetts, and currently lives with her family in Los Angeles, where she has lived for the past several decades. During that time, she has been a professional actor, splitting her focus between her career and raising her two wonderful kids, daughter Rose and stepson Jack, and spending time with her husband Tom. After the pandemic that brought everything to a screeching halt whispered in her ear, "You know, now would be a GREAT time to start writing again," she decided to return to her lifelong passion for short stories and poetry. She's been thoroughly enjoying her return to writing, in the margins between family life, career, and, most recently, a job as a dog walker, which she loves. "The Lemon Tree" is her first published story (so far!), and she is very grateful for the opportunity.