Free A Chill Rain in January by LR Wright Page B

didn’t like him, and she didn’t dislike him.
    She had private places indoors that he didn’t know about, and she wanted one outdoors, as well. A place from which she could survey the world without being seen, by Benjamin or anybody else .
    In her yard there was a pool to swim in, a gazebo to sit in, but nowhere to play. There were rose gardens and vegetable gardens and rhododendron plantings beneath the trees and a little brook that cut across the property at its lower end—spring bulbs bloomed here in great profusion. But there wasn’t a tree fit for climbing or a secret place fit for hiding herself in.
    So when she was eight, just after she’d gotten her first scribbler, she went poking around on the neighbors’ property, which was just as big as hers but a lot less tended. It rolled up and then down again at the very back, and on that little hill were several fruit trees. Zoe climbed the back fence and sneaked up through the brush to the top of the hill, where the orchard began. From there she could see the whole back part of the property, and over the fence at the side into her own yard, as well.
    This became her secret place. She would climb a tree and wedge herself in between a thick branch and the trunk, and if it was the right season she’d stuff herself with cherries or apples while she sat there, feeling like a big strong bird in its nest.
    Four years passed, and Zoe grew and grew, but she didn’t grow too big to nestle in the branches of a tree, and she didn’t grow too old to need a secret place.
    Two old people lived in the big old house at the front of the property. They never bothered picking the cherries or the apples, but sometimes their grown-up children came for a visit, and they’d take some of the fruit away with them.
    One day when she was twelve, Zoe was sitting in an apple tree. It was July, and the apples were pretty well ready to eat; they were larger than a tennis ball, not as big as a softball, still green but starting to look yellowish.
    Zoe was digging her fingernail into the treetrunk and scooping away little pieces of it, which she then flicked toward the ground. She’d been doing this for quite a while. She had dug through all of the tree’s layers of skin and was now picking away at what she figured must be muscle .
    From time to time she wrapped her arms around the tree and rubbed her cheek hard against its trunk. Her cheek had begun to sting, and when she put her fingers on it they came away with a small amount of blood on them, as well as dirt, so the next time she hugged the tree she did it with the other side of her face against the trunk.
    It had always been very important to Zoe that things be even. Sometimes at the dinner table she might catch herself tapping her right toe against the floor, for instance, and then she had to try to figure out how many times she’d done it without noticing, so that she could tap her left toe the same number of times.
    After a while from her perch in the apple tree she noticed that the old woman, whose name was Mrs. Nelson, had come out of the house and was standing on her back porch, holding a straw hat in her band. She put the hat on and tied its brown ribbons under her chin—and then she looked up the hill into the orchard.
    Zoe became motionless.
    Mrs. Nelson went slowly down the steps, holding on to the railing, and walked through the wildness of her flower garden, which didn’t have any neat edges, toward the fruit trees. She stopped every so often to look at one of the flowers, but she always started to walk again, straight toward the apple tree where Zoe crouched.
    The old people never picked the fruit from these trees, never; what did she think she was going to do, anyway, that old woman: get herself a ladder and climb up here to get herself some apples, or what? Zoe tried to move behind the treetrunk but couldn’t find a branch in the right place to sit on. The leaves of the