Rooted

“Healing Arts 8” by Dominic Klassen

The first root is easy to ignore in its infancy. It clings to the earth, weak and desperate and alone. Its first few secondary roots strengthen it, making it more determined to survive. But there’s still time. It’s not until the roots start burrowing into the floor when you stand for too long, grabbing at soil through sandals, digging into the mattress when you’re asleep, that signals it’s time to leave. It’s not impossible to leave after this point — not yet — but it’s painful. My mother winces when I ask how she knows this. She learned the hard way. Her two missing toes on her right foot remind her every day of the dangers of staying in one place too long, of fighting the inevitable.

“It’s time,” my mother says while she looks over my soles, the roots pulsing with life. “You made it nine months, Illana. You’re getting stronger.”

I smile weakly, confused by the lump in my throat. I did everything my mother told me. I followed the three rules: don’t get attached to anyone, don’t tell anyone anything, and leave when it’s time and not a day later. My mother says I’m getting stronger, but I don’t feel it.

It only takes us an hour to pack our entire lives. There’s no wall art to take down. No photographs capturing moments with friends or family. No neighbors to say goodbye to. Never settling in one place is both a blessing and a curse. My mother buzzes around the apartment, humming as she tosses her Waffle House apron in the trash. No time to return it, she says. When she’s not looking, I steal it from the garbage bin, cut off the restaurant logo patch, and stuff it into one of my packed boxes. The Waffle House holds no particular memories for me, but I worry I won’t remember everywhere we’ve been so I take something from each place we’ve been—all eighteen cities in the last ten years since I started my collection.

“I was tired of that place, anyway,” my mother says as we merge on the highway.

“You don’t have to say that just to make me feel better,” I tell her.

“I’m being honest! We need some new scenery. Give me your feet,” she says, changing the conversation and patting her lap. Her left hand guides the wheel while her right hand rubs the bottom of each of my feet, flicking off crumbs of dirt. I wince as she peels the remaining nub of a root. In the morning, only a small scar will remain until it all starts again.

***

My mother always took care of everything when we moved, but when we arrive in Albuquerque, she makes me help.

“You’re fifteen now. It’s time to learn how to do this when you’re on your own.”

She teaches me everything I need to know: finding an apartment, signing up for school, applying for jobs, piecing together a believable story for the frequent moving. She says it’s because she’s my mother, but I know it’s also because she feels guilty for passing down her condition.

Only the women in our family get it, this unnamed curse that prevents us from settling in one place, from claiming soil as ours. The roots don’t start growing until the age of one, though I got lucky and mine didn’t appear until I was three. They grow quickly at first, sprouting from the bottoms of our soles. They eventually slow down, but they will never stop altogether. “So long as there’s soil beneath our feet and breath in our lungs,” my mother told me. At thirty-seven, she could make it eight years in one place, maybe more, if she didn’t have me to worry about. We each carry our own guilt for the other.

At night we prune, snipping the infantile roots as they peek out of our feet, seeking the warm comforts of soil. Eventually, they grow too thick to cut with scissors. They latch onto the ground, making it difficult to move. The only way to kill them off entirely is to transplant them. They suffocate and fall off, taking longer to regenerate the further you travel.

I only make it six months in Albuquerque. My mother says we should have moved more than one hundred miles away so the ground wasn’t so familiar. I take a piece of rock, bright terra cotta, from the gas station on our way out of the city to add to my box of memories.

***

We head to Dayton. Our move aligns with the starting school year; for one of the few times in my life, I start school with everyone else, avoiding the “let’s welcome the new girl” class introductions. Brooks High School is more than twice the size of any school I’ve attended. When the bell rings, students rush out of classrooms and pour into the main hallway, crashing into one another. I push through the sea, inching my way from English 10 to World History to Algebra 2 to Chemistry 1.

I like all of my classes except Chemistry, where we spend several weeks memorizing the elements on the periodic table. In the second month, when the class has memorized all 118 elements and I twenty-three of them, the teacher partners us with a classmate for labs. I’m paired with Finley, the smartest boy in the class. He is serious and quiet. He runs his hands through his thick wavy hair, his one tell when a question momentarily stumps him.

“I’m sorry I’m not very helpful,” I say to him.

School ended hours ago, but we’re still in the library writing our lab report. He frowns and twists a lock of dark hair between his fingers.

“If you couldn’t tell, I suck at chemistry,” I add to fill the silence.

“You’re approaching it the wrong way,” he finally says. “You’re just trying to memorize things and piece them together but chemistry doesn’t work like that.”

“Then how does it work?”

“It’s like people watching. You have to understand each element’s personality and then observe the natural reactions it has with others or mediate to encourage a different reaction.”

Finley is more energized than I’ve ever seen, and I smile.

“I know, chemistry is really cool, right?” he asks, misreading my smile as interest in the subject.

“Yeah,” I lie.

“I could teach you real chemistry stuff; not just things to memorize.”

“I’d like that.”

I break my mother’s rules one by one.

By Thanksgiving break, Finley and I are inseparable, spending every day after school together in the library. On weekends, we sneak into movie theaters, swim in the community pool, and wander comic book stores until closing. During Christmas break, Finley kisses me. It’s my first, and it’s perfect and both everything and nothing I expected.

In March, we celebrate our three-month anniversary and I tell him everything. I’m shocked when he believes me and it makes me love him even more. He investigates the roots that are growing longer and stronger every day, grasping for the fecund earth.

In June, my mother bakes me a cake, the cream cheese frosting dotted with M&Ms in the shape of a twelve.

“One year. Your longest stretch!”

I try to smile, but my face crumbles into tears. My mother doesn’t know about Finley, about the multiple roots I can no longer manage, about all the rules I’ve broken. I run into my bedroom and call Finley, crying as I pick at my roots. It’s futile; they’re already digging into the ground, crawling out of my shoes.

Finley says if I can wait until the school year ends in two weeks, he’ll run away with me. I promise him I’ll wait but when I hang up, my mother charges into my room. She heard everything, listening in on the other line. She hacks away at my roots, crying and yelling at the same time.

“Completely reckless,” she shouts, but it sounds like “don’t forget this” through the tears.

“I’ll never forgive you,” I say.

An hour later, my feet are caked in blood and dirt, but they’re still in one piece. We leave that night and, for the first time, I don’t add anything to my box of memories. There’s nothing I want to remember other than Finley. Instead, I take one of my severed roots from the trash can and plant it in the front yard. I imagine another one of me emerging from the ground — a second Illana who gets to stay with Finley.

“I’m going to leave you one day,” I tell my mother.

I think she nods her head, but the road is dark and the world is barely visible through tears.

***

Dallas. Baltimore. Nine months. Twelve months. I follow the rules. We’re in Seattle when I graduate from high school and turn eighteen. We’ve only been there a few months and my roots are still easy to maintain. For the first time in my life, I move by choice.

I leave the day before graduation. My mother is disappointed I won’t walk, won’t wear the gown and cap, won’t have our picture taken with my diploma in hand. Class of 1991.

“There’s no point in me going if there’s no one to say goodbye to,” I tell her instead.

My words, heavy as they fall to the ground, pull at the oxygen in the room. My mother knows there’s nothing she can say that I won’t cut down. We’ve become strangers these last two years.

“Be careful. And don’t forget your bug spray. The mosquitoes will be out this time of year,” she says. It’s not motherly advice; she wants me to know she knows where I’m heading, who I’m searching for.

My car is packed, my life in four cardboard boxes. Somewhere at the bottom of one of them is the box of memories I’ve kept from everywhere we’ve been before Dayton. I can’t get rid of it. Other than my mother, who I’m now leaving, it’s the only proof of my existence.

We say our goodbyes, pretending it’s not forever. But our kind never stay in contact for long. I don’t know where she’ll head next and she knows I can’t stay in Dayton forever. She waves as I drive down the street, her figure shrinking in my rearview mirror.

I head out of the city on the I-90 with 2,300 miles to go. I’ve planned out everything I’ll say to him — every apology for leaving and every promise for staying. Everything except what I’ll say if he isn’t there, which he isn’t. The neighbor tells me his family moved six months ago, after Finley graduated a year early from high school and left for college.

“Don’t remember where, though.”

Her words slice me in two. I pick up the pieces and drive away.

***

Minneapolis. Charlotte. Denver. The cities pass in a blur. I patch together a college degree in art history in five years from three different schools, graduating with zero friends. I turned down every party invite, every date request, every club rush opportunity. I pruned my roots and, when it was time, I left without missing or saying goodbye to anyone, transferring to whatever university offered the easiest process. When I graduate, I’m in Denver without a plan. A classmate, Amy, asks me if I want to move in together and split the rent on a two-bedroom apartment.

“We would have so much fun. And my dad knows someone who works at the Denver Art Museum who could totally get us interviews. They have an amazing textiles department,” she says.

I pull myself out of the fantasy my mind has already started building. Horrified, I realize I’ve made a friend, the kind that knows your favorite art and includes you in the front seat of their vision of the future. I’m so tempted to agree, to tell her everything, to risk everything, that I leave Denver that night.

I break off a root and stab it into the soil outside Amy’s apartment. In my dreams, another version of me will sprout and do everything Amy envisioned for us. The real version drives all night, arriving in Chicago fourteen hours later.

***

I celebrate my twenty-sixth birthday drinking day-old coffee in a Greenpoint church basement at an AA meeting. While I’m not an alcoholic, I tell myself I could be, that it would be very easy for me to slip into daily drinking to erase the isolation of my life, to feel better about what I’m doing. In some ways, I’m not entirely lying. Rather than alcohol disrupting my life, preventing me from forming relationships with people and maintaining a consistent job, it’s my roots. The AA meetings offer the false sense of community that Amy made me realize I crave. For an hour, it feels like a hangout of friends. And when it’s over, we leave. I don’t talk or see any of them outside of that meeting.

 And then I meet Dan. Dan is three years sober. He normally attends the morning meeting, but because of an alarm clock mishap, he is here, at the evening session.

“Fate,” he says, his smile wide and eyes glistening.

I’m mesmerized by his baritone voice, his perfect enunciation, his golden eyes. We don’t notice when everyone else leaves for the night, not until the janitor flickers the light to break up our conversation.

“Sorry,” we apologize, giggling like children caught passing notes back and forth in class.

We continue our conversation at a twenty-four-hour diner. Over coffee and cheesecake, we run through the standard first date Mad Libs. Dan: is an adjunct physics professor at Brooklyn College who lives in Williamsburg, has lived in New York for six years, and dreams of traveling the world.

I am less detailed than Dan, starting with the truths that are easy to share. I: am an art preparator at a small gallery in Chelsea and live in the Lower East Side, moved from Chicago to New York a year and a half ago, and dream of settling down in one place.

When the server returns to our table with the check, I notice the logo on her apron and it reminds me of my mother’s Waffle House one. I still have the logo patch, all these years later. It sits in a box I haven’t opened since I left Dayton the first time, since I stopped collecting things from where I’d been. I think about my mother and, for the first time since I left Seattle, realize I miss her. I never wrote to her, never called. At first, it was out of anger; then because I had nothing to share other than a timestamp. Denver: 1993-1995. Nothing else and no one to record.

“I should go,” I say.

We leave the diner and I wrap my jacket closer around my chest. It’s early November, and the air sharpens its teeth in preparation for the bite of icy January. He asks for my number but I shake my head “no.” He takes my hand and, with a pen he pulls from his coat jacket, writes his number on my palm and tells me to call him.

I stare at the scribble as I walk home, as I brush my teeth, as I fall asleep in bed. I wake in the middle of the night and scrub at the ink with the fury of Lady Macbeth, picking at the red and irritated skin that’s left behind, searching for traces of a remaining digit. I don’t realize yet that I’ve already memorized it.

I change AA groups but leave every night with a sour taste in my mouth. While cooking dinner, I trace his number with my fingers on the kitchen counter. Three weeks after that night at the diner, I call him.

I learn quickly that Dan is the guy every woman wants to date. He’s beautiful and charming and everyone who meets him loves him. I don’t know if I love him. He doesn’t give me the kick in the stomach or the chest ache like Finley, but he makes me feel like freshly watered flowers when they’ve been out in the sun too long, parched and faded and then magically alive again. It’s close enough to love for me to say “me too” when he says those three words on our three-month anniversary.

We’re in Central Park, picnicking near Belvedere Castle, celebrating our two-year anniversary. I’ve told him about everything except the roots. Not yet, I tell myself. Not until I have to. Dan spreads out in shavasana on the blanket and closes his eyes, and I stare at him while he naps. I stare at him a lot when he’s not looking, wondering how I ended up here. This wasn’t part of the plan. It’s everything I actively worked against happening. For the first few months after every date, I promised myself I’d end the relationship. One time, I considered moving overnight without saying goodbye, highlighting the route to New Orleans on a map. But now it’s been two years and I think I’d rather die than return to a life alone.

As I run my fingers through Dan’s hair, I wonder what my mother would say if she saw me. On spring days like today, I imagine her telling me she loves me, that she thinks about me every day, that she hopes I found a way to live happily. So, when ten minutes later Dan wakes from his nap and asks me to marry him, I say “yes,” willing the imaginary vision of my mother to give her blessing. And when he adds that a college in Indianapolis offered him a tenure track position that he desperately wants and hopes I’m okay with, I say “yes” again.

The move comes at the perfect time and I’m eager to get to Indianapolis as soon as possible. The roots have broken through my soles and started latching onto the mattress at night while I sleep. I buy new socks because all of mine have holes on the bottom. I trim the roots in the bathroom, smoothing the rough ends with pumice, and burying the remains deep in the trash. I rotate between shoes and socks, never leaving my feet bare when around Dan to avoid exposing my bandaged soles. I still haven’t told him; not until I have to. Dan is in a hurry to beat traffic, so for the first time in years, I don’t plant a root into the ground. I massage my sock-wrapped feet, wondering what second life could have sprouted.

***

When we arrive in Indianapolis, I feel renewed. Only scars remain from the last root growth. I know I can’t keep this up forever, but I’m desperate to hold on to Dan. For now, I play the role of a loving fiancée.

I knew Dan would be busy with his new job, but since starting at Butler University, he’s working more hours than ever. He tells me he needs to prove himself if he wants tenure — to take on every extra class, publish a research paper, join committees and attend every staff social event.

“Just until I get tenure,” he says.

When I ask how long that will take, he shrugs. “Hopefully only seven years.”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll be tenured and we can settle down.”

My roots are more manageable than ever, but I know that in seven years they’ll spill across our floors, climb the furniture, and break through windows. My mother may have lost a few toes for a man, but I’d lose both feet. I tell myself I have time before it comes to this. I’m always finding a reason to buy more time. For the next year, I fall into an easy routine, spending mornings working part-time as a docent at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and afternoons exploring the city. My mother once told me that the more frequently you move your feet, the longer it takes for the roots to take hold in the ground. I don’t know if it’s true but I try anyway, walking miles every day.

I patch together a mostly normal life, even as my relationship with Dan unravels. We live separate lives, feigning normalcy over shared dinners, our one remaining tradition. We parrot goodbye kisses in the morning and “I love you”’s at night. In our king bed, there are miles between us. But I’m still happy. Mostly. At least I’m not alone. At least it feels like I’ve claimed a patch of land as my own. As much as Dan and I have lost what we had in New York, it’s still better than coming home to an empty room. It’s still better to have someone who can register your existence each day. Every touch offers proof of life.

Three years pass, and I still don’t have an exit plan. At work, a colleague mentions an opening for a visitor professor opportunity at Stanford in the physics department. I tell Dan but he replies with a frown.

“I’m happy here. I could be department chair next year, and I’m on the path for tenure. Why would I give this up?”

He says he wants to put down roots. I laugh at the irony. He reminds me that on our first date I said I wanted to settle down. I remind him he said he wanted to travel the world. We don’t speak for a week, and then the conversation is buried, as if it never happened. Before I have time to come up with an alternate plan, my doctor tells me I’m pregnant.

At first, I question whether to keep it, whether I should tell Dan. But when I hear her heart beat for the first time, I promise to do whatever it takes to keep her safe and loved, even if that means staying in Indianapolis. If she can have a normal life, I’ll give it to her. I name her Olivia, and when she’s born, she’s perfect. I can watch her for hours, staring at her chest as it rises and falls. I inspect her feet every night, scouring every pore for signs of roots.

“She won’t randomly combust,” Dan tells me. He’s annoyed I’ve become the stereotypical worried new mother. I’m annoyed he’s shown more interest in the book he’s writing than his daughter.

When Olivia is a year old, she’s still rootless. I ignore the fact that I was a late bloomer and make plans for her future. My roots have started digging into the ground wherever I stand for too long. I keep moving. When Dan tells me to stop jogging in place while cooking dinner, I tell him I’m trying to lose the baby weight.

I estimate I have another year or two before the roots take over and I root into the ground. I know the exact spot in the local park where I want to end up, and I write a letter to Olivia to explain what happened to me. I’ll be the small maple by the fountain, I write.

But until then, I enjoy the time I have left with Olivia. I make Dan promise to enroll her in summer camp when she’s old enough, to let her take ballet and quit it and try something else and something else until she finds what she loves.

“Why can’t you?” he asks, but I don’t answer.

I’ve made peace with my decision until Olivia’s second birthday when her first root appears. I crumble to the ground, a pool of tears forming on the tile floor. An hour before Dan is due home from work, I plan out my speech.

“There’s something I’ve been keeping from you,” I start. “But it’s not as bad as you might think.”

After I tell Dan, he shakes his head, repeating “no.” I try to show him my feet, but he refuses to look. When I grab his hand, guiding it to my foot to touch the root, he pulls away so forcefully he elbows me in the jaw and I see stars.

“I can’t do this,” he says, leaving the apartment. “We’ll get you both some help, do whatever it takes to stop that,” he points at my feet, “but right now I need some air.”

I don’t have a plan, but I won’t wait for him to return or let him turn Olivia into a science experiment. I remember my mother telling me the horrors her mother went through, the doctors attempting to remove her roots, amputating both legs to the knees only for the roots to start growing from her palms. I have no choice but to continue making all of my mother’s mistakes. It started with the first date with Dan and ends with me leaving with our child and without him.

I pack quickly, reaching only for the necessities. As I reach for a suitcase on a shelf in the closet, a box falls and my past spills onto the ground, apron patch and all. Everything leading up to Dayton. My heart climbs a few inches. I pack the box along with three bags of clothing. I know where we’ll go.

We don’t plant a root. There’s no alternative world where we thrive in this city. I give Indianapolis the middle finger as it fades from my rearview mirror. Olivia is asleep in her car seat, but it won’t take long for us to reach our destination. We aren’t heading across the country. Not this time. Just a little over one hundred miles; just enough to restart the root growth.

***

Dayton feels like the right place to be. It’s the closest place that feels like home, despite having lived in so many other cities for longer. I’m at a bookstore, looking for a mouse book Olivia won’t stop talking about after hearing her preschool teacher read it. We’ve been in Dayton for a year, preparing to move. Olivia is stronger than I was at her age, but her roots are agitated, thirsty for the earth, and need to be transplanted to start over the cycle.

“Illana?” a voice interrupts my search.

It’s Finley.

He’s taller and his hair is longer and curlier, but even a beard can’t hide his boyish grin that’s the same as it was when we were fifteen. Without thinking, I wrap my arms around him. He helps me find the mouse book and we leave the bookstore to find a bench in the park.

As soon as we sit, everything I’ve wanted to tell him rushes out of me, starting from the night I last saw him. The truth comes naturally — about Dan and Olivia, about all the times I thought about him, about everything that could have been. By the end of my story, we’re holding hands as if we’re fifteen again. Our fingers interlace and I hope he never lets go.

I ask him if he became a famous chemist, but he shakes his head. He left Dayton to attend UCLA as a pre-med student only to discover a passion for movies and graduate from USC’s film school. Working for a small production company filming short documentaries, he’s in Dayton visiting an old friend before he leaves for Berlin for a documentary on an obscure German expressionist artist. He tells me he tried to find me, that he hoped he’d see me again one day.

“And then what?” I ask.

“And then you’d come to Germany with me,” he smiles, and squeezes my hand.

***

We become a family of three, as normal as possible for people like us. We marry in Vegas during a long layover on our way to Lima. Sometimes I assist Finley with shooting and other times I paint, a new hobby I started exploring. Olivia claps when Finley returns from a day of shooting, shouting, “dada!”

We create our own rules for Olivia, but just two: leave when it’s time and not a day later, and always say goodbye. We fall into a rhythm. Film, explore, move. Every year, we have more Christmas cards to send to new friends we acquire in each city we visit — Berlin and Lima and Houston. At some point in our travels, I lose my box of memories, or maybe I throw it away. Olivia’s box of memories is digital: a folder with hundreds of photographs documenting her travels and everyone she’s met. Her memories are of people she loves, people she will never forget, and people she will see again someday. And each time we leave a city, she stabs a trimmed root into the ground where it will sit firmly in the earth for a little while before drifting off with the wind.

about the author

Melissa Darcey is a writer and high school English teacher in San Diego, California. Her work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Louisville Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, Nat. Brut, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. 

about the artist

Dominic Klassen, Born in Germany in 1990 and mostly grew up there. A young autodidact and visionary who is constantly progressing in his evolutionary path, in order to inspire as many people as possible for visionary mindset and acting on it. In 2015-2016 he lived in Byron Bay Australia, where he began to paint with oil paint and an old business card as a spatula. He quickly realized that his creations have depth to them. The colors and depth associated with it represent a kind of liberation and tranquility for him. A place of peace but also a place of total exhaustion, because often the paintings take several hours and are painted in one go. Quite intuitively, he began to combine painting with a kind of meditation. In this he found access to his subconscious mind and the emotions hidden there, which he now makes visible in various ways. In 2020 he started his clothing label which has a focus on organic and limited Edition pieces. Fashion acts like a bridge and is a wonderful opener to get into a conversation, what an easy way to contribute to society, he says.