Maple Jack's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Maple Jack stood at the empty corner and tried his voice. He called the way he used to, low and warm, the kind of sound meant to reach a child's ear from across a yard. His call rolled down the sidewalk and kept rolling. No window opened. No door swung wide. The sound thinned into a pale ribbon of air that curled past the candy cane fence and frayed apart between the houses. He watched it go and knew it had found no one. He needed to know where the children had gone. Without that, every word he sent out would unravel the same way. He looked down at the dirt along the curb and saw faint shapes pressed into the dried mud. Small boot prints. A scuffed heel. A toe turned toward the next street, then another set turned the other way. The tracks had once led straight to his trunk. Now they pointed outward, scattered, like spokes leaving a wheel. He could follow them, but they split too many ways. He needed someone who had watched the children go. At the far end of the block stood a woman in an orange vest with a red stop sign resting against her shoulder. Dorothy Sullivan had worked this crossing longer than most of the trees on the street had been tall. Maple Jack rustled his branches until she turned. She walked over without hurry and stopped a careful distance from his roots. "You're the maple," she said. "They used to sit here." "I need to find them," Maple Jack said. "Where did the children go?" Dorothy looked down the street, then back at him. "Most moved. Some grew up. The little ones go to the day care now. Yellow house, blue trim, two blocks south. Their parents drop them at the door. They don't walk this way anymore." She tapped the base of her sign against the pavement. "Nobody told them about you. That's the part you're asking." Maple Jack felt a spark shift inside his trunk, then settle. "Yes." "Then go where they are," Dorothy said. "They won't come here on their own." She lifted her sign and walked back to her crossing. He could not move his roots, but his voice could travel further than this corner if he aimed it right. Two blocks south stood a small bright building with flower boxes in every window and a painted sign above the door. He could picture the porch now, the low fence, the cluster of small coats hung in a row. The children were not gone. They were only somewhere else. The empty street was no longer a wall. It was a direction. Maple Jack drew in a long breath through every leaf and turned his attention south.