And the Dark Sacred Night

by Julia Glass

  “Christopher, by the time I met your mom, this was old news. She’d lost touch with those people, or so she said, and I had no reason not to believe her.”

  “Lost touch? Lost touch?” Half plea, half accusation.

  “Listen. Jesus.” Jasper contemplates pretending he has to pee again, giving his cowardly self the third degree in Daphne’s goddamn mirror. “Listen. The way I saw it, seemed a good bet her memories of that fellow—the one who got her in trouble, and believe me, it was trouble with a capital T—looked to me like those memories weren’t something she wanted to press in an album.”

  “So he was some kind of hoodlum?”

  Jasper sighs loudly. “Give me some oxygen here, would you?”

  “Sorry.”

  “He could’ve been a friggin’ Eagle Scout. That is not the point. Again, please, we are talking late sixties. ‘Choice,’ to the extent women had any choice, you are talking a whole other kettle of fish than today. Kettle of sharks.”

  Kit thinks about this for a moment. “Do you think she was sorry?”

  “Sorry?”

  “About me. Having me. Because she had no choice.”

  Jasper wonders if this is the first time Kit has ever thought of his existence as something other than a free, all-things-being-equal proposition. “No way did she regret you. No way. That’s certain. She could’ve put you up for adoption. That was a choice lots of girls made back then. You know enough to figure that.”

  Jasper finds Kit’s naïveté surprising, even a bit silly. Rayburn says their children are all so damn spoiled—by the times, more than the parents—that they have yet to face the no-fun, no-justice, ice-water facts of adulthood. This daisy chain of thought returns Jasper, predictably, to Kyle. Stop! he scolds himself.

  Maybe Daphne has resisted Kit’s questioning (her stubborn streak deep and wide as a ravine), but hasn’t he ever snooped through her drawers and closets, the way most kids would do? Is Daphne really so cunning at hiding secrets?

  Well now. Is she indeed. Jasper would have a good long laugh if he were alone. All those nights, the last year or two, when she called to say she’d be staying over with a “friend,” not making the drive home because she was dead tired or the rain was too heavy—or, gosh, it was somebody’s birthday.…

  Kit frets with the afghan on the sofa, a relic of Jasper’s mother. (All these doggone mothers!) He pokes his fingers through the apertures in the yarn. He lets out a shaky sigh. “It must seem like I’m here just to pry something out of you. I’m sorry.”

  “I have a child who comes by mostly looking to pry loose my money. Or my sanity, not sure which. Family secrets are a good deal more fun.”

  “Fun? I wish.”

  Can Jasper ever get it right, the dad thing—the almost-dad thing in this case? “Now I’m the sorry one. I don’t mean to get coy about this. I am dead tired and sore as all get-out after that work today. You did more than your share, and I’m thankful. I was going to make a joke about your not going soft after all, but that would fall flat, too. So I just say let’s sleep on it. I honestly need to think. Reconnoiter with this stuff I haven’t thought about in ages.”

  Kit nods, drained of anger. “Go to bed. I’ll follow you soon.”

  “Watch TV if you like. I’ll conk out dead as a granite slab.” He labors to stand. “Alley-oop and upward!”

  Kit makes himself smile. “See you in the morning. I’ll be ready to get back at it.”

  “Better be,” says Jasper. He forces himself to turn away from the pitiful sight of that boy, looking so forlorn, so … in fact, so like a boy.

  Christ but that woman’s reach is long.

  He thinks of a fancy phrase Daphne once used: filer à l’anglaise. She told him it meant to depart from your hosts’ home without a proper good-bye. Not quite Jasper’s act, but still. He didn’t sleep well, and when the sun began to ooze through the tarp (a problem they’d better amend today), he crept downstairs (funny to creep in a house you rarely share), ate a fat-free muffin with his coffee, and then, out of guilt but with vicarious pleasure, cooked a panful of bacon for Kit, pouring off the grease to save as a treat for the dogs. He left the strips draining on a paper towel, alongside a note saying he’d be back after lunch to resume work on the house. Jim could help Kit set up the sawhorse and tools.

  Driving through the village, he stops on impulse at the bakery and the mini-mart—and still he arrives first at the shop, pleased that his early arrival will startle Loraina. Maybe he should plan a Daily Don’t to drop on her when she walks in the door.

  No messages on the answering machine (the phone’s become disturbingly quaint), but he has to sift through twenty-some e-mails, only five related to booking lessons. Some guy’s looking for an ice-climbing jaunt at New Year’s, a daffy-sounding gal wants yoga while her husband skis; out of luck, these two. He clambers around a pile of empty cardboard cartons—which Stu is supposed to flatten every day before closing—to get a pot of coffee started.

  His good years with Daphne he wouldn’t trade for anything: nights of drinking wine, that meek Italian stuff Daphne liked, while listening to records and taking the risk, three boys sleeping above them (often snoring audibly alongside the music), of stripping off their clothes and making love everywhere from the couch by the chimney to the deck overlooking the meadow, its surface so dense with fireflies that it resembled a vast sheet of golden foil, a mirror to the starry sky. Daphne was, no matter what else she turned out to be, damn fun. Vivian he’d loved, and a painful vacuum still forms in his chest when he pictures her body on the living room floor, the swarming of the ambulance crew, the pointless rush to the hospital, how his voice had threatened to quit when he told the boys … but Vivian had been the kind of woman you choose when you’re ready to settle down, as sensible as she is warm, more circumspect than sexy. Daphne was an older version of the girl you choose halfway through high school, the kind who doesn’t mind when you drive too fast late at night, aimed at no particular destination, whooping out the window at all the sedate housebound citizens who frown at your shenanigans while secretly wishing they had your crack-the-whip spontaneity. It occurred to him, a month or so after they married, that for Daphne this was effectively a do-over. It was Jasper’s second go-round at marriage, while it was far more than Daphne’s first: it was the kind of beginning she didn’t get to have when she ought to have had it, ten years before. I am so completely yours, her every kiss, her every loaf of bread, her every combing of her sex-tangled hair said to Jasper. Not like he’d “saved” her, no, but like he’d opened the lockbox containing her heart.

  He had been obtuse to think that she held no grudges about being weighed down early and alone by motherhood, especially a girl with so much talent and spunk. He liked her parents, and boy did they ever like him back, but to hell with how “nice” they were. Daphne’s whole life had stalled when she stayed home to have a kid and care for it in her childhood bedroom while her friends went off into the wider world—a place, back in the late sixties, of tumult and color and high-minded, footloose defiance. Before Kit, Daphne had hoped to try for a career as a performer in, say, a small-city orchestra. She’d been offered a scholarship at a music school in Boston.

  All of that she surrendered for Kit, though of course he wasn’t yet Kit, he wasn’t anybody definitive, when she made up her mind to do so. Jasper had no firm beliefs on the morality of abortion; he wasn’t religious, and he was of the mind that it was women’s business, deciding “when life begins.” And who could ignore that governments sanctioned the taking of lives under a Chinese menu of special situations?

  Not that such noble or ignoble questions had much to do with Daphne when she was pregnant. Or so he could only gather. There was, to Jasper, a kind of no-fly zone around that time in her life. He respected the selective silence she chose to maintain, chalking it up to “dignity.” But how could she not have been angry, sorry for herself, felt like she deserved some kind of compensation from fate? (How vainly Jasper had a
ctually believed, early on, that he was that compensation. Fate had a thing or two to show him in return.)

  In the cramped corner of the stockroom that serves as a kitchen, Jasper rummages in the cupboard till he finds a tray. He rinses it in the sink, dries it with the hem of his shirt; does the same for a cream-and-sugar set so dusty it looks medieval. He dumps the basket of strawberries into a bowl (no woman around to insist on the ritual of washing fruit), puts the warm scones on a plate.

  On cue, he hears Loraina’s key, the confusion of someone trying to unlock a door already unlocked. When she steps inside, he grins at her. “Whatever you do, do not tell me I am the best boss in the universe.”

  She tries not to smile and almost succeeds. “Okay. Won’t do that. I’ll tell you instead that you need to start taking your shirts to the cleaners. The rumpled look isn’t working.”

  He looks at his shirt. It’s flannel, for God’s sake. Who irons flannel shirts?

  Loraina sees the tray beside the register. “What’s this, Masterpiece Theatre?” She looks around. “Where’s Alistair Whosieface?”

  Jasper fills a mug for her.

  “Let me take off my coat.” She heads to the stockroom, fusses in back for a minute, reemerges. “And the occasion would be …?”

  Jasper sits on the bench for trying on ski boots and skates. “None, darlin’. The scones are my insomnia talking.”

  Leaning on the counter, Loraina eats two strawberries, puts milk and sugar in her coffee. After taking a sip, she says, “Is your insomnia talking to me in particular? I’m not sure I’d buy that.” She picks up a scone and examines it. She knows better than to even suspect it was made by Jasper.

  “I do miss your coming over.”

  “I think I need a real invitation to do that.”

  “You never did before.”

  Loraina shrugs. “Things change. As we of all people should know.”

  “I see,” says Jasper. This isn’t a discussion he’d planned. Actually, he hadn’t planned anything. He knew she’d make him talk, that was all.

  “Okay then, you see. Glad we’re straight about that.” She eats a few bites of the scone, staring out at the empty ski slope, a dreary swath of frostbitten grass. “Well, good news on that front,” she says, baffling Jasper completely.

  “What front?”

  “Didn’t your computer sing its twinkletoes ditty this morning?”

  “Snow?”

  “Late tonight, if the temperature drops as expected.”

  “Much?” Anxious to get out of the house, he hadn’t checked the weather.

  “A good start. If we pray to the right gods. Get out your knee-pads.”

  Jasper rises from the bench. He is headed to the computer, to look at the satellite pictures and draw his own conclusions, when she says, “But we were talking about your insomnia. I have one guess. Daphne.”

  Jasper decides to go ahead and eat a scone. Okay, half. Apple-cinnamon. Does the apple cancel out the butter?

  “I take that for a yes.”

  “Yes, Loraina. Eating is my form of the affirmative.”

  “Kit’s bound to take you back to that time, so no surprises, right?”

  “He’s not like his mother, though. I mean, he doesn’t remind me of her.”

  “Of course he does.” Loraina frowns at him like a teacher at a lazy pupil.

  “It’s more like I’m reminded of the responsibility I had for him. And then, weirdly, didn’t. How he gradually—not suddenly, which would’ve been the case if he’d been younger—I mean, he somehow stopped being my responsibility, a weight on my mind the way Rory and Kyle will always be. God, Kyle.” Jasper refills his mug. “So it’s like I feel guilty about all the years he hasn’t weighed on me, and now, kaboom, he does again.”

  “He’s fine, though, right? He’s hardly Kyle.”

  Jasper shakes his head. “He’s in a lot better shape than Kyle, surfacewise. But no job, two kids to support … Leave all that aside, though. Loraina, he’s come to find out who his father is. Was. His ‘natural’ father, maybe you’d say.”

  “Come to you? Why you?” Loraina has moved to a rack of fleece tops. She checks the tags, evens out the space between the hangers. “We need more pink in the small sizes. God, I loathe pink, but it’s predictably popular. Especially with the size-zero bottle blondes.” She aims an expectant look at Jasper. “So why you?”

  “He tried Daphne. No luck.” Jasper sighs. “Don’t think I ever knew the guy’s name—what would it mean to me? He wasn’t some hood with a switchblade, but hell, we are talking about an act of adolescent foolishness at a fancy-ass summer camp, forty years ago. Forty-plus. Daphne could’ve handed the baby over to some fine upstanding childless couple from Topeka, who mighta never even told the boy he was adopted.”

  “But she didn’t,” says Loraina. “And you think he shouldn’t care? Like there’s a shelf life on curiosity about your genes? Your bloodlines, or roots, whatever you want to call it? The possibility of meeting someone who solidifies your you-ness? It’s all over the airwaves, in case you have ears. Everywhere from Oprah to la-di-da Fresh Air.” While talking, she’s pulled together a dozen items on hangers. She holds them out to Jasper. “Sale rack?”

  “That’s your decision. Fine by me.”

  Loraina carries the items to the counter. “My point is, there’s this epidemic of reconnecting with lost links from your past, shaping and pruning your family tree. Genetic memory, ethnic character, cultural identity. Et cetera et cetera. Not that I think much of such notions, but they’re everywhere.”

  “I could take it as an insult, couldn’t I? His wanting another family besides the one I gave him. Never mind the one he’s got.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you,” Loraina says drily.

  What Jasper won’t say is that she’s probably right on the money. He is repeatedly shamed by the way he underestimates Loraina. Maybe he really is a chauvinist throwback, an accusation fired at him by Daphne more than once on the downhill slide.

  “Well,” he says, “the bottom line here is whether I owe Daphne the total silence I promised on that subject.”

  Loraina laughs sharply. “Honey. Owe her?”

  “I happen to think a promise is a promise.”

  Loraina moves toward him, and he wonders if she might touch him, but not quite. She stops close, facing him, holding two empty hangers in one hand, her coffee in the other. “That’s why I do, actually, love you,” she says, though she’s careful to smile in a way that might (or might not) make it a joke.

  He waits until she moves again—not, alas, toward an embrace but toward the stockroom.

  “So you say I should tell him whatever I know.”

  She turns in the doorway and says, “Me? That’s what I’d do. But don’t ask me to decide for you. Don’t put me there. Today, I decide what goes on sale and by what percentage. That is the scope of my authority, hon.” She points at the clock. Donning her best southern accent, she drawls, “Y’all do remember, honeypuss, that Iron Man Rod is gracing us with his presence before we open?”

  Rodney, the controlling partner in the corporation that runs their side of the mountain (some junior relation to the devil from Atlanta), wants to discuss his new marketing plans. In the recession, ski slopes, even in central Vermont, have to become as territorial as tigers. Or so said Rodney at a staff meeting in August (after which they laid off another half-dozen full-timers). The one thing they’ve got going for their business is that skiing, however expensive it may be, is as much an addiction for many folks as booze or porn. And you can’t replace it with anything else. There’s no methadone for skiing, no Alpines Anonymous.

  “So.” Loraina narrows her eyes at Jasper. “Are we up to speed on our Facebook tutorial, all this woofer, tweeter, blitzkrieg jazz? I’ll bet you forgot to read the stuff in that folder I gave you.” She shakes her head. “I hate it when I know you like a mom.”

  “You do the talking when he shows up. Could you?”

&n
bsp; “If y’all could treat me to dinner at the inn for my birthday. Which happens to be a week from Tuesday, bluebird.”

  “You’re a very bad Scarlett O’Hara, but you have a deal,” says Jasper, relieved. Even if she hasn’t solved the biggest family problem he’s faced since Kyle last showed up shitfaced and squirreling for money.

  On the way home, he picks up a meatball sub. He pulls over just before his driveway to finish it off, spreading the greasy wrapper across his lap. Not that Jim or Kit would give him grief, but he wants to enjoy this particular sin in private. As he eats the sandwich (the whole damn thing), Jasper can hear the deafening complaint of the chain saw. He could turn on the radio, but the only station he likes is the one he thought of as Rayburn’s. Turn it on now and he’d be listening to his friend’s replacement. No thanks.

  When he drives in, he can see that Jim’s almost finished off the tree. Kit stands nearby, peering up at the house, looking perplexed. The sun is sinking toward the treetops; Jasper had hoped the three of them could polish off the exterior work and the insulation while there was still light, but they will have to combine the tasks if they are to seal the house before the storm.

  “Hey,” Jasper greets them. “Snow’s on the way.”

  “Tomorrow. Maybe,” says Jim.

  “I think your maybe’s out of date, my friend.”

  Jasper goes inside to change into his fix-it clothes. On the kitchen counter, he sees a bowl of meat chunks marinating in oil and herbs. He sniffs: lamb. He feels guiltier than ever. Just lose your broom-up-the-ass sense of honor, he tells himself. “Some VIP coming to dinner?” he shouts as he heads upstairs.

  Jim lays aside the chain saw so they can work together on the house. He and Kit take turns on the ladder, hoisting the heavy planks, while Jasper works mostly from the inside, making sure the thick cushions of fiberglass don’t pop out of place. It’s so different from his collaboration with Loraina, this give and take. Very few full sentences are uttered; think of language as coins and they communicate in plain old dirt-brown pennies.