Free Search Party by Valerie Trueblood

to make a movie out of.”
    â€œIf you take me to the movies, you have to hold my hand,”she told Jake. Their roped-off seats were past the middle and she was going to have to look straight up at the screen. “Oh, but who’s going to hold mine?” cried Darla, sending a smile across Abby and getting out of her best coat with a shrug of her bosom.

    A WINDOW with a blowing curtain, with clouds visible outside it. The clouds were flying and the trees were bowing. Two trees. So it was going to be in black and white. Well, why not? The time was fall, from the look of the sky. Birds on the wind. Too blustery for summer, though the big oak tree was in full leaf, in a corner yard with patchy grass that sloped to a flowerbed full of weeds.
    But that’s not right, there wasn’t a yard . No yard, the house right on the edge of the road at a crossroads, where there was a plank sidewalk. Hills behind, grown up and strong-smelling with the wild onions they called ramps. She had learned to eat them. Coal cars sliding by.
    But no. This wouldn’t be the West Virginia house at all, it would be the other one. It would have to begin in that house, the one where she was born. That house. Those two trees: a tall, straight tree and a sobbing tree.
    You could see that house today, the real one, though the town had closed around it and Wilson’s Barbecue Pit stood next door, with parking where the big trees had been. For that reason, when he was filming Jake couldn’t use the actual house; he had to find an old-fashioned place that looked right to him. When he found it, it was in a town in South Carolina, leaving him obliged to make it up to the mayor of McBride with plane tickets and studio passes, because he had promised the filming would be in McBride. So the mayor and his wife had gone around L.A. in a car with a driver, and tonight they had both strolled down the aisle of the theater with offhand smiles as if they too were guests in the town.
    The girl, Abby, was not going to be found at the window with the blowing curtain, looking out, as you expected. In fact your eye passed through the window into the yard, where you lostyour balance cruising unsteadily around the huge low-branching tree. The white oak. Twice around it, dizzyingly, and there was the girl, sitting in the branches with her light hair blowing. She was a pretty little thing. That was part of it, of course, a big part. It always is. The beautiful blondes.
    The title jumped onto the screen: THE SOBBING TREE .
    She had tried to get the title out of him and he wouldn’t tell her, he said, “Wait and see.”
    The girl in the tree was eleven or twelve. The whole thing was over by then, Abby’s experience. So they would be looking back over the whole thing. You didn’t have to go to the movies to know the story was going to go backwards, the same thing was on TV.
    The girl was humming to herself. She could carry a tune but she wasn’t humming happily, you could tell that. Her small, bony fingers picked the bark. Out of the tune she was humming, music commenced, a guitar being played while the tree limbs, which arched downward of their own weight, swept and lifted and sagged in the wind.
    A piano would have been the suitable thing. Either that or an orchestra, not this slow picking, though Jake could not necessarily be blamed for not asking her what music she liked. He did know she had almost married a music professor. At sixteen she had moved away and found herself a job at a state college, landing it for the simple reason that she had written down the word music . Not only could you get work by then, but you could call attention to your hobbies and interests on the application forms.
    She had gotten a kick out of telling Jake about the music professor. By that time Jake knew she wouldn’t have been a professor’s type.
    The letters of Jake’s name materialized on the screen, grew a shadow, and sank away. Another