Page 1 of The Singing Trees
Prologue
December 2019
Cape Elizabeth, Maine
At the top of the steps, with a gloved hand on the icy railing, sixty-seven-year-old Annalisa Mancuso gasped in awe at the hundreds of wind chimes that dangled from the many snow-dusted branches in what had become a forest of singing trees.
The set that she’d made almost fifty years earlier—the centerpiece of her friend’s collection—hung halfway up a red oak directly ahead. Vintage keys and silver cylinders circled a gold pendulum bob that had once driven the movements of an antique grandfather clock. Considering they had been here since the eighties, the parts had taken the weather well, as if each were frozen in time.
Annalisa had found each forgotten component in the clock shop where she’d started to make a life for herself, before the angry storm had parked itself overhead, revealing a world tarnished by hidden agendas, lies, and war. That ambitious eighteen-year-old girl had no idea what was to come, the dark of night always following the bright of day.
A swath of memories rose up—flashes of the countless hours she’d spent under her mother’s tutelage on their side porch in Bangor, working their paintbrushes to the hypnotizing melodies of the wind chimes they’d made together when Annalisa was a toddler, a set crafted with antique spoons and silver bells. There, on the porch in front of theireasels, was one of the few places they could escape her father’s dark moods, and it was also where she first discovered the healing power of these wind-driven instruments.
The disturbance in the calm started as a rustle deep in the forest, a white whisper that rose in volume as it grew near. The wet dead leaves on the ground stirred and spun up into the air. Then a bitter winter wind came rushing through, sending the chimes into a mad dance.
A shiver came over Annalisa as she closed her eyes and listened to the symphony of sound that filled the air, and the past wrapped around her, both like a shawl and a snake.
When the wind calmed, Annalisa let go of the dangerous thoughts, the ones that had plagued her for so many years, and looked back at the chimes with another shiver. Growing up a Mainer, there was a time when she could have stood out here in this frigid cold all morning, but the years had shed the warming blanket of youth, so she knew she better get started. Hopefully, considering her objective, she could still scale a ladder.
Descending the steps and crossing the snow-patched yard, she entered the garden shed and found an extension ladder leaning against the wall, next to the leaf blower. “This seemed like such a good idea earlier,” Annalisa said to herself, remembering her promise to her friend, who was knocking on death’s door a few miles away. Reaching the point of calling Emma a friend had taken a lot of catharsis, but the designation rested comfortably now both on her tongue and in her heart.
And it had all started with these chimes.
“Are you sure you feel comfortable climbing?” Emma had asked, knowing her request came with a certain element of danger.
“Are you kidding me?” Annalisa had responded with a smirk. “You’re looking at four years of overpriced barre classes. I could climb the steeple of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.”
Emma had let out a smile. “Always with the jokes.”
Making her way toward the red oak, Annalisa wondered what barre classes had to do with plucking wind chimes out of tall trees. She extended the ladder and locked it into place, then leaned it up against the branch. After testing its security, she carefully made her way up, feeling the burden of her nearly seventy years on earth in her knees. Her legs shook as the distance between her and the ground grew. She forced herself to take a breath as she finally reached the hook of the wind chimes and attempted to pry it from the branch.
Though she should have been focused on her balance or her mission, in actuality, she was thinking that if someone was secretly filming this absurdity, she’d be the laughingstock of YouTube, might even break the internet. God, life used to be so much simpler before smartphones.
The chill of the ladder crept into her gloved hands as she took one more needed step up and pulled hard at the hook until it came free. The keys and clock parts pinged against the pendulum bob as she carefully lowered herself and her memories back down the ladder.
Thankful to still be intact after her daring stunt, Annalisa carried her prize through Emma’s beautiful and well-kept house to the sunroom and gently set it in the box of tissue paper she’d prepared. After making sure the tabby cats had water, she carried the box out to her Subaru and climbed inside.
She drove along the wild and rocky, utterly miraculous shore of Cape Elizabeth, then worked her way through the quaint neighborhoods of South Portland and over the bascule bridge to Casco Hospice in Portland, where she’d spent the early morning. To save her back, she pushed a wheelchair with the rather heavy box of chimes in its seat through the lobby and down the hall.
“Mission accomplished,” Annalisa said as she wheeled the chimes into the room.
Emma, wan and obviously hurting, cracked a smile with her chapped lips and muttered a thanks. She wheezed as she drew oxygen from the cannula resting against her nose. “Did you have muchtrouble?” Each word seemed painful to discharge. She had aged tremendously in the last year, and the skin of her face hung loose and pale. Annalisa thought it overwhelmingly sad and strange to watch a woman four years younger than she deteriorate in such rapid fashion.
Glancing through the two neighboring windows into the December morning, Annalisa wished there were a way to open them—despite the cold. A little fresh air might do wonders for this place. “I don’t know if the chimes will make much noise once they’re up, but at least they’ll put some good energy into the air.” Both women knew well the power of the chimes resting inside the box.
Annalisa looked at the desk with the white phone and box of Kleenex on it, and to the cheap print of a bunch of lemons with their bright-green leaves, framed above the bed. The tropical image was wrong in so many ways, so un-Maine. It was a lifeless room that no amount of color could resuscitate. Not the white walls or the light-blue bedspread or the many flowers springing from vases, sent from the veterans Emma had helped over the years as a counselor.
After disappearing to the West Coast, Emma had spent two years in Marrakech as a Peace Corps volunteer. Upon her return, she’d become a certified counselor. For more than thirty years, up until she’d become sick, she’d worked with veterans (mostly Vietnam vets) to help them escape their nightmares. Knowing she couldn’t help her brother, she’d chosen to help other warriors like him. If the amount of flowers sent to this room by her former clients was any indication, Emma had saved many lives.
Still, this room, this hospice, was nothing more than a holding room for the end, and it could provide only a trace of comfort as the cancer ate away at Emma’s body.
“Don’t you want to get out of here?” Annalisa asked. “Don’t you want to go out on a lounge chair somewhere tropical, sipping piña coladas while a suntanned, bronze-skinned lover rubs lotion all overyou? You say the word, and I’ll grab the wheelchair. We’ll be on the next flight to Aruba.”
“If only I had the energy,” Emma said, speaking as if she were tasting the idea in her mind like a touch of sugar on a strawberry margarita glass.
Twisting around and looking to the tile ceiling, Annalisa said, “Where shall we hang these?” She glanced at the swivel chair tucked under the desk. Considering her climb earlier, she thought this daring feat might just kill her. Maybe she should enlist some help.
“Annalisa?” Nothing more than a whisper.
