He felt he would cry—with bewilderment, like a child.
He was very tired. It felt good to be sitting down. He closed his eyes.
And saw his family coming toward him. Jordana was there, her hair long and wild. Next to her, the children, barely to her hip, Luke’s hair golden-brown and Angie’s white-blond. The children were in bathing suits. He had wasted his life.
His wife saw him. Her face lit up in a smile. He raised his hand to her.
She said, We need to take off your glove.
Opening his eyes, he pulled it off reluctantly with his teeth. The fingers were white and noncompliant; he forced them to bend, pulling at the knot. At last the lace snapped. He stared at it dumbly for a moment before realizing he could pull the skate off. He broke the second knot as well and shimmied his other foot free.
His socks soaked through almost as soon as he stood. Sliding backward with each step, he struggled up the hill. Out loud, Pieter said, “The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.” His throat was raw, from cold and from talking to himself.
The snow’s crust crackled beneath his feet. Another step and sliding back, another step and he stood on the spine of the small ridge. Two hundred yards to his left was the general store.
He shouted with triumph. His feet were so numb that he felt as though he were skating over the surface of the snow as he made his way down the bank and along the road. Clutching the rail, he clumped up the store’s steps and across the porch.
As he stumbled through the door, the warmth of the room pushed against him like a hand. There was a ringing in his ears. At the Formica tables, clustered near the roaring woodstove, a mixture of locals and New Yorkers drank coffee from paper cups and read the paper. A woman—an out-of-towner, with glossy gold jewelry and a beige turtleneck sweater—glanced up at Pieter as he stood on the threshold, and so it was to her he spoke.
“Something happened,” he said.
He was guided to a chair by the stove, given a mug of coffee, his wet socks stripped away for two pairs of wool socks that customers took off their own feet. He shook so violently he could hardly hold on to the coats they’d wrapped around him.
He’d been in here dozens of times without exchanging more than basic pleasantries with Laura, who ran the store. Now she pulled two pairs of mittens from the shelf, breaking off their tags with her teeth, and fit them over Pieter’s stiff hands. One of the out-of-towners was a doctor; she looked at his hands and feet and said she didn’t think he needed to go to the ER. “You have hypothermia,” she said. “Possibly mild frostbite. You need to get warm.”
“Look at this.” One of the telephone repairmen who’d given up his socks walked over, lifting his foot with his hand and hopping the last steps. His two smallest toes were glassy black, like obsidian. He showed the foot to Pieter first—as though he were the guest of honor—and then turned so that others could bend over, murmuring.
“Grouse hunting,” said the repairman. “Crouching down in the snow. Eighteen years old, so drunk I didn’t know I was cold.”
The doctor told a story about unwrapping a frostbite patient’s bandages and seeing the dead tissue creep. “Maggots. A fly found its way into the dressing to lay eggs.” She leaned forward to take a bite from her croissant. “Maggots only eat dead flesh. It’s actually better than surgery.”
Pieter was shaking too much to drink from his mug, though its warmth felt good. “Here,” said the doctor, and took the cup from him and held it to his mouth.
People still stood loosely around him, not ready to return to their tables. He told them, “I skate that way almost every day. I couldn’t even feel the wind until I turned around.” He floated an inch above the chair.
The bell tinkled as the door opened, bringing in a momentary gust of cold and two teenage girls, who stood stomping snow off their boots. “It’s cold out there,” they called to Laura. Beautiful girls, in their parkas and boots and eyeliner, long hair stringy with damp, water droplets sparkling on the crowns of their heads.
The doctor tipped the cup to Pieter’s lips again. He remembered feeding Beatrice de Groot on the ship. The coffee burned as it went down, at once painful and comforting. Through the window, the school buses in the lot across the street were white humps, obscured by snow. It felt good to be wrapped in coats, surrounded by people. For once his life didn’t seem right or wrong, only true—like a high note, or the aim of a blow.
The girls were buying cocoa mix and a bag of marshmallows. Laura took their money but stayed on the wrong side of the counter, leaning back to thump the keys of the register and scoop out change.
“See that guy?” Laura asked. “He could of died out there.”
The girls turned their lovely, incurious gaze on him.
Forty-four
Angie waited for her paycheck at work but didn’t give notice. She didn’t tell her parents she was leaving, or her housemates, or even Luke. It took less than an hour to pack her things and carry them to the Galaxie. Other than a few pieces of furniture, which she’d have to come back for sometime, she didn’t own much.
During psych evals, after you counted backward from one hundred by sevens or whatever, they asked you to explain an aphorism, to prove you could understand abstract thought. One of the aphorisms she’d been given was a rolling stone gathers no moss. In other evaluations, she’d been given other aphorisms and had done okay with them—glass houses and a stitch in time—but she’d never been sure if moss was a good thing you lost by moving or a bad thing you avoided. Good or bad, the moss she’d gathered in twenty-five years barely filled half the backseat. Most of the things she’d once valued in her life she’d lost, or left behind, or destroyed, or given away. She had some clothes, a few recent photos, her Walkman. She had the two books she’d carried around for years—the Dickens novel and the mystery with the wedding cake and toppled plastic groom—waiting for the time her brain slowed and she could read again. She still wore the ring Abe had bought her when she visited Harvard, with its narrow hopeful band of blue-green stone set into the silver.
She and Abe talked occasionally. One odd residue of their relationship had been that, after the night Evan Johansson found Angie by the Charles River, he and Abe had become close. They’d ended up rooming together all four years and had both moved to New York after graduation. Abe worked at a brokerage company and dated a woman who worked at a different brokerage company; he said he was happy. Angie knew he couldn’t have admitted it if he wasn’t happy, and that comforted the part of her that hoped he felt the same nagging regret she did. She didn’t know how much of her nostalgia for him was really nostalgia for being eighteen, when more things had seemed possible to her than they did now.
It was past midnight, shatteringly cold. Back inside the house, she wrote out a rent check: a lot of her money, but she needed to get out as cleanly as possible. Besides, she’d come back for her furniture once she had a place, so she couldn’t leave her housemates too pissed off.
They slept in the house around her. She scrambled two eggs and tipped them into a plastic bag, which immediately fogged with steam. Carefully, she washed the frying pan and set it in the rack to dry. With the rent check, she left a note against the sugar bowl as eloping daughters did in forties movies, the kind she’d watched on wards because they couldn’t see anything that might be disturbing.
The girl, a small suitcase in one hand, stands with the other hand on the doorknob, looking over her shoulder. From the curb, the young man calls, “Are you coming?” The girl blinks back tears. She runs a hand over the surface of the table. Pushing her voice into cheer, she calls, “Yes, I’m ready.” Then, softly to herself, “I’m ready.” Music swells. She walks out the door.
Angie smiled. There was nothing dramatic in her leaving, no one watching, no one waiting for her in California. If she could like herself enough to be amused, maybe she’d be okay. She might even one day come to love herself, the way
people did in arranged marriages.
Outside, the motel sign blinked: WELCOME VACANCY. WELCOME VACANCY. WELCOME VACANCY. The air was so brittle with cold it felt breakable. She crossed the street and very slowly lifted the hook of the gate, opening it a few inches. She whistled softly, holding out a piece of scrambled egg.
“Gibson,” she whispered. “Come on.”
The dog came toward her tentatively, dancing backward once before eating the eggs from her hands. Moving slowly, she reached out, unlatching the chain from his collar. The house lights were on, but she didn’t see movement. She breathed in deeply, then put her arm behind his back legs and lifted.
He panicked in her grasp, twisting and whining. He nipped her upper arm before she managed to get her hand around his muzzle. Eyes wide with fear, he bucked and strained. Holding him tightly to her chest, duck-legged with effort, she staggered across the street to the car. The dog writhed in her arms, heavier than she’d expected; she feared she would drop him.
“It’s okay,” she muttered into his fur. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
Part Four
Forty-five
Behind the house where Jordana lived listed a tiny shed, its wood gone silver with age. Saturday morning, she wrestled the lawn mower out from the tangle of objects cluttering the dirt floor, croquet mallets and oil cans, a hand-painted sign advertising a garage sale, an ax handle without a head, a collapse of knotted yellow rope. The shed’s corners were hung with cobwebs dense as the layers of a wedding veil.
The mower itself was relatively new. When she’d managed to pull it out into the yard, she checked the gas. One lever on the handle seemed to be for accelerating, another for adjusting the blade’s height. She placed one foot on the casing, as she’d seen Pieter do, and yanked the starter cord. The motor caught on the second try, coughing a few times before settling into a low rumble.
She needed to occupy herself. Angie was flying in this morning from California, but Jordana wouldn’t see her until late afternoon. Angie would stay the weekend, then drive a U-Haul truck back to California with the rest of her things. It had been four months now that she’d been out there. The first few weeks she’d been vague and cagey about what she was doing—she’d said she was staying with a friend, but the friend didn’t have a landline, only a cell phone, so Angie couldn’t be reached.
Jordana said, “You’re not sleeping in your car, are you?”
“Mom, I told you. She just doesn’t have a phone.”
Angie sounded okay when she called, steady. She was talking to Luke more often, and Jordana trusted him to act if Angie was really in trouble. And then she’d found a job—in the benefits office at a community college in Oakland—and an apartment, also in Oakland.
Jordana wouldn’t mow the whole property, only the quarter acre or so nearest the house. At the small pond, she edged as close as she could, then backed up, dragging the heavy machine, turned cumbrously, and made a rough circle around the water. When she finished the circuit a knee-high fringe remained, pleasantly feral, spiked here and there with tall blue cornflowers.
She wore an old tank top and cut-offs, April sun heating her shoulders and the backs of her legs. The grass threw out its deep green smell: part wood, part lemon, part sweet rot. It sometimes seemed to her that she’d lived her life backward. If only she and Pieter had found each other after she’d gone to college, lived alone, had lovers and jobs.
Fruitless to think of it now. Instead she focused on the warmth of the sun, the satisfying ache in her muscles as she pushed the mower up a small hill. Damp swatches of grass clung to her legs and forearms.
The mower lurched slightly. Glancing back to see if she’d hit a rock or stick, she saw a family of bunnies nibbling grass. They were pale brown, the size of her fist. She stopped and, moving carefully, reached to turn off the mower. The noise of the yard became audible again: insects, rustling breeze, leaves clicking overhead. Occasionally, without alarm, a rabbit glanced up at her and then bent its head again to the grass.
As slowly as she could, Jordana lowered herself into a squat. The rabbits were so close she could have reached out and stroked one. They nibbled, glancing up at her every so often. After a minute, legs already aching, she stood up again. As she gingerly shook out her leg she saw a sixth rabbit a little distance from the others. It was lying on its side, panting in fast, shallow breaths. Its legs paddled as though at swim.
Jordana took a step forward, then covered her mouth. Bits of soft gray, like shredded eraser, were scattered on the ground. A clump of bloody fur clung to a stalk of grass.
She ran to the edge of the driveway to find a rock. She expected the rabbits to scatter as she came back toward them but they didn’t. She knelt by the injured animal. The back of its skull had been sheared away by the lawnmower’s blade. Oh, God. Oh, God. With both hands, she raised the rock. She closed her eyes and brought the rock down hard, jerking to a stop somewhere before the rabbit’s head.
She couldn’t do it.
Breathing in deeply she raised the rock again, the insides of her elbows watery. She blew out her breath and crushed the rabbit’s skull. A crackling noise, like fire. Its back legs jerked. Faintly, through the heated air, she could hear the buzz of a small plane overhead. Twice more she hammered the stone against the rabbit’s head. Its siblings watched her, curious.
She got unsteadily to her feet. “Get out of here! Get out!” She shook her arms and the bunnies leapt up, flashing into the tall grass.
At the house, she didn’t know whether to ring the doorbell. It felt presumptuous to let herself in and ridiculous not to. Finally, she knocked on the doorframe, which seemed less formal than ringing the bell. The hallway was dark. She knocked again, then started to push open the door for herself just as the kitchen door opened. Quickly she pulled the door shut and waited to be let in.
It was Pieter, wiping his hands on a dish towel. “Wasn’t it open?”
She shook her head, shrugging. “I don’t know.”
Neither of them knew what to do. They saw each other sometimes, meeting at Papa Toby’s to deal with bills or running into each other at the Igga, but this was the first time she’d seen him here at home.
Not home, she reminded herself.
She took a step forward to hug him, then stopped. Pieter still had his hands in the dish towel. She ended up patting his arm, above the elbow. An awkward silence—not quite silence, because Pieter was doing his nervous back-of-the-throat humming.
“Well,” he said. “We’re in the kitchen.”
She followed him, feeling meek. The first times they’d met at the diner he’d been angry and silent, refusing to order anything, giving one-word answers to her questions and then standing to say, “Are we done here?” Then, sometime midwinter, without explanation, his hostility had suddenly slackened.
She expected Angie and Luke to be doing their usual thing, teasing and poking at each other, but when she came into the kitchen, she found Luke sitting at the table, Angie hovering in the center of the room. Wendy sliced red peppers at the counter, knife rocking neatly against the cutting board.
Jordana rushed to embrace Angie. She hadn’t expected to feel overwhelmed in this way. She took a step back to look at Angie, who wore a man’s yellow oxford shirt untucked over paint-splattered jeans that were tight around her hips. She looked solid, capable. Her shoulder-length hair had brightened, the way it used to in summer, to the color of buttercups. “Oh!” Jordana said, and hugged her again, and Angie laughed and said, “Mom.”
“You look wonderful. Doesn’t she look wonderful?”
She expected Luke to say something half mocking like She’s ravishing, as always, but it was Wendy who said, “You do. You look great.”
Angie smiled and rolled her eyes.
Pieter hadn’t come all the way into the room but hung back, leaning against the doorframe. Wendy gathered pepper scraps between her hand and the knife blade, moving quickly to the trash can to dump them in. Strange, seei
ng Wendy so comfortable in this kitchen. But she’d lived here more than eight months.
Angie opened the fridge. “Wendy fixed the thermostat,” she told Jordana, pulling out a green apple and biting into it. “Want one? They’re not frozen.”
“Aren’t you going to wash that?” Luke asked.
Angie spun to face him. “Why are you so on my back?”
“I just asked if you were going to wash it.”
“‘Is that really all your luggage?’ ‘Isn’t it time for your meds?’ You’ve been on me ever since I got in.”
“Kids—” said Pieter.
“You always”—Angie wheeled around—“you always want no one to be mad. It’s not a crime to be upset.”
“Leave him alone,” said Luke.
Stiffly, Pieter said, “I don’t need you to defend me, Luke.”
There was a silence, then Jordana said, “I forgot the wine in the car.”
She glanced at Pieter, giving the merest tilt of her head, and he said, “I’ll help you carry it.”
Out in the driveway, she asked, “What is going on with them?”
Pieter shook his head. “It’s been like this all day.”
“Christ.” She opened the driver’s side and stretched across the seats to pull out the wine, which she’d jammed down against the opposite door. The day’s warmth had drained away into cold lavender dusk. She handed the bottle to him. There was more to say, but she couldn’t think what, and the moment passed.
Wendy and Pieter had cooked chicken with peppers and onions. There were loaves of French bread, a salad. Jordana started to get up for butter, pausing halfway out of her seat when she realized the awkwardness of opening the refrigerator that was no longer hers. She sat partway down again, then stood. “I’ll get butter?” she said, and waited for Pieter’s nod.
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