by Deb Caletti
Meanwhile, the folks who’ve just moved here flirt with suicide.
“How can you stand it?” Henry asks. “Will it ever be anything but gray?”
“Look, there are a hundred shades of gray. It has its own beauty.”
“Will it ever stop raining?”
“Maybe in June. You knew about this when you moved here.”
“Yeah, but…Jesus. It’s so depressing.”
Isabelle fears that Northwest weather is like the holidays or a sudden illness—it brings out who you most are. If you are easygoing and industrious you’ll learn to knit, and if you are moody, you’ll only see despair in the stark branches set against the sky. And this sodden time makes Henry turn his collar up and hunch. He drags the trash cans to the street like a disgruntled employee, and when the wind howls through the trees, he paces and eyes the limbs suspiciously to see what might fall next. He stares out to the waters of the sound, watching them crash and roar, like the fretful wife of a sea captain.
It makes him feel some sense of impending doom, a lack of safety, Isabel guesses. A metaphorical something blasting through his roof. She catches him on the computer, looking up his own name. Searching for any new development that might mean he’ll be hearing a knock at their door. His uneasiness makes her uneasy. The windows rattle and thunder rumbles as it does, as is usual. This year, though, it makes her jumpy, too.
This evening after dinner, he is wrapped in a quilt, and he is wearing puffy down slippers on his feet as he watches TV. It feels like an overreaction. It feels like pouting and drama. It’s cold in Boston, too, after all. Henry’s arms are folded. It’s the adjustment period, maybe. Or just the weather, or this island, which doesn’t suit him after all, or else his life catching up to him again, now that their romance is turning to relationship. She thinks of Clyde Belle in this house, what he did out there on those rocks with that gun.
Henry can be hard to talk to. At least, anything that appears to be rejection has to be handled with care. You could say most anything to Evan. Probably, because he didn’t much care what you thought. Isabelle sits down next to Henry. She sets a hand on his quilt-thick leg.
“Henry?”
“Mmm?”
“I was thinking…”
“What?”
“You know lately, this gloom…Maybe it would help if you, I don’t know, got a job or volunteered somewhere, or took up a new hobby. I think most people find that if they just stay locked up inside they feel worse…”
“Isabelle, I’ve been working all my life. I have another job now. I have a book to write.”
Every time he says this, she inwardly groans. First of all, Henry did not leave his life in Boston to merely follow a creative urge. Second, she’s met plenty of people who quit their jobs to write, and they’re always like this, indulgently imagining that they’re Hemingway hanging out at Les Deux Magots, when they’re just themselves in a Starbucks, racking up debt on their Visas. Quitting a job to linger in casinos and play the nickel slots is a saner option.
Underneath her eye rolling and inward groaning, though, there’s a quieter and more important question. It’s been bothering her. She doesn’t understand what he’s doing with this book, and what he hopes to accomplish. Does he really envision publishing a volume of poetry as anyone else might? Is it some vast self-deception, some fervent wish that his public past will just be overlooked?
She can’t ask. It’s a prettily wrapped package with a bomb in it, sitting on their living room floor. Those packages seem to be stacking up.
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t stay here all day, then. Can you go to the library? You know, like you did when we first met? You need to get out.”
“Out of the house, there’s a target on my back. People know about me. People talk. I feel it. I’m sick and tired of it. I need a rest from that misery. There’s nothing you need to solve here.”
But he doesn’t take his arms out of the quilt or make a move of any kind. He stays wrapped up in that cocoon. It seems like someone ought to solve something.
“You’re not yourself.”
“I’m fine. Maybe we should set a wedding date. That would help.”
“Henry.” It’s an ongoing dispute.
“You ask what will help, and when I tell you what will help, you don’t want to do it.”
“I do want to, just not yet. I told you. It’s too soon. I can’t rush into it.”
“Maybe rushing would be good for a change. How long did you date Evan before you finally married?”
“That was his doing, and you know it. If we’re going to be married forever, it doesn’t hurt to take our time now.”
“And you wonder why I’m depressed?”
“I’m sorry, Henry.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s my fault. It’s me. If I hadn’t come with all of this…baggage. We’d be riding off into the sunset. You’d think I was a good catch. You’d think you were lucky to have me.”
“Henry, stop.”
He looks at her, raises an eyebrow. He looks mad. Maybe furious. She can’t tell what’s sadness or depression or anger or need. She can’t tell what’s the burden of his old life, or the weather, or the way she’s not measuring up. Before now, she thought he was just sensitive and depressed about his past, but she wonders if maybe he’s just sensitive and depressed.
She unwraps the blanket.
“Don’t,” he says.
She does anyway. She has to solve and worry and charm and make right. Her heart pumps guilt to the different parts of her body. The guilt travels to her organs and muscles and to her nervous system. It’s part of her structure. It’s the message that travels among the other essential messages of hunger and fear and safety. She folds herself up in the blanket with him. When she glances at his face, his cheek muscles are tense and his eyes distant.
Quiet works, too. Soft steps. As a child, Isabelle would just wait out the storm. She stayed still. She made herself as small as possible. Fear and stress hunched down with her. They wriggled inside, snipped the pathways of her brain that said run, messed with the control board. They turned the anxiety dials all the way to the right, shut down the switches for memory and survival, and settled in for the long haul.
With her head on Henry’s chest, she can hear the thump and squall inside of him. It sounds like a storm in there, too. The rush of his own blood and the gust of emotions sound terrible enough to name, same as a hurricane. It could be named Depression or Confusion or Post-traumatic Stress. It should maybe just be called Tempest.
It should maybe be called indigestion, Isabelle. Stop making people so much larger than yourself.
She ignores the Maggie in her head. The big thing she knows about storms is that they always pass. They always come back, though, too. Somehow, down in the storm cellar, she always forgets that part.
—
The gray of fall transforms into the deeper gray of winter. Every now and then, just to keep everyone on their toes, a blue-sky day appears, and everything is covered with the white glitter of frost. On Main Street, the Christmas decorations go up—loops of fake evergreen boughs, wreaths hanging on the lampposts. The tree in front of the library gets adorned with strings of colored lights, and big gold and red ornaments the size of grapefruits. Jane knits Isabelle a scarf. It’s a gesture of love. It’s four feet of woolen mutual forgiveness. It’s an expression of reluctant acceptance of Henry, which means Isabelle really can’t confess the truth now, about Henry’s troubling moods and her own strange bouts of unease. She hasn’t said a word about any of that, and so it looks like those secrets will stay secrets. Still, every one of those stitches say that Jane is in her corner, no matter what.
“It’s beautiful,” Isabelle says, and winds it around her neck.
“Just how I imagined. That blue with your eyes,” Jane says. She plucks and adjusts the scarf, stands back and nods her approval.
“I didn’t know you could knit,” Eddie says.
“I learned. Margaret M
acKenzie gave a class at the library.”
“I guess you can teach an old dyke new tricks.” Eddie chuckles.
“Where’s mine?” Joe says. “I want one.”
Pilots Louise and Liz meet eyes, and Liz rolls hers. They are hoping they don’t get invited to the family Christmas dinner.
“Thank you.” Isabelle kisses Jane’s cheek.
And maybe, maybe, there won’t even be any more unsettling moments that she should be divulging to the people who care about her. Maybe it all has been a phase. Because, shortly after, Henry cheers up. Sarah’s life insurance company, New Haven Providence, has informed him that after nearly three years, they’ve completed their investigation. Sarah has been declared dead in absentia, her death ruled accidental, and they will be sending him a check. It is not the anticipation of the money that lifts his spirit, he says again and again. It’s the evidence of redemption. Accidental confirms Henry’s story, that they had been arguing and drinking and that later that night, Sarah drowned while taking the dinghy ashore. If an insurance company can’t find a way not to pay, well, then…he says. They celebrate. The celebration feels wrong to Isabelle. Sarah is still dead. The pop of the champagne cork startles Isabelle like a gunshot.
Isabelle has retrieved her winter coats from the storage box at Island Air, and they now hang on the guitar hooks in the closet. It makes the coats look strange, like an imposing army of men, shoulders up to threaten their enemies. It’s an illusion. She grabs the black wool one, then her purse and keys.
“Heading to work!” she calls.
Henry is just out of the shower. His hair is wet and he smells all soapy clean and toothpasty mint. His towel is wrapped around his bottom half, a sweatshirt hastily thrown on top.
“Kiss goodbye!” he commands playfully.
He tastes good. She loves his ass in that towel, and gives it a grab. He looks into her eyes. “Let me see you,” he says.
“I’m late.”
“They’ll go on without you. You should really just sell that place and we could travel. You’re always talking about wanting to do that.”
“I am?”
“You are.”
“I’d be bored without a job. I’d get cranky.”
“You’re still beautiful when cranky.”
He’s trying to start something. He kisses her more slowly, trickles one hand into her white blouse, runs the other down the back of her black jeans. She doesn’t know why he’s doing this now. He knows she’s meeting Jane early to go over the winter schedule, vacations, and the hiring of extra contract pilots. It’s almost a test, she thinks. One of those horrible loyalty tests you can never win because they’re not meant to be won. They’re meant to demonstrate how a person is victimized, how they never get what they want, not from you, the withholding daughter-friend-lover, who is letting them down. Me or them, the kiss asks, the hand demands.
“Henry.”
“Just come here.”
“I’ve got to go.”
He pulls away. There’s that slight exhale, the whff from the side of the mouth, a succinct report on the extent of one’s flaws.
“Tonight,” she says. “Rain check.”
He reaches up and fastens the next highest button of her blouse. “Showing off for Joe?”
“Silly. You know Joe’s practically a brother to me.”
“I wonder if he acted like a brother when you lived with him for that month.”
She gives him a little shove before she leaves, because he’s joking. She’s sure he is. Mostly sure. Virginia had male friends in her life, after all. At least, Isabelle heard the story of how she and Henry met, two groups of pals canoeing. But Sarah had that professor, the ornithologist, who Henry suspected was more than a friend. Whenever he comes up in conversation, Henry’s tone turns sarcastic and spiteful. He was probably in love with her, Henry once said, while she likely just admired his birdbrain. According to Jerry, there was more than that to admire, since he was attractive and charismatic. Who can say? The point is, Henry seemed to honestly believe in some relationship between them, which is likely why he’s so watchful about Joe.
Evan could not have cared less about any other men in her midst, at least after his early flare of jealousy flamed out. She could have walked around naked, sitting on the laps of rivals, and he wouldn’t have even noticed. It’s kind of nice to be powerful enough to spark a little possessiveness.
What’s weird, though, is that she doesn’t feel powerful. Henry’s hand buttoning up her shirt like that—it gives her a funny squeezing in her chest. What is it? Something bad. A strange, small dread. Her spirit shrinks, as if it’s in one of those plastic bags you connect to your vacuum to suck the air out.
Isabelle drives down Main Street. The wreaths and the boughs seem to tilt strangely. Maybe it’s because Nathan the artist and Roddy Jones hung them after the Beer and Books club meeting. Or maybe it’s because her personal ground has shifted.
—
On this Saturday morning, Henry fries eggs. There is the crackle and spit of hot butter as Isabelle sits on a counter stool, blabbing on about Kit and the passenger he had, the one who brought so much luggage a second plane had to be hired. It’s stupid, she knows. Why is she even doing this? But since Henry’s comment, she’s careful to avoid mentioning poor, innocent Joe. Joe was the pilot of the second plane, but she lies. Or, rather, she edits. In the telling, she changes the identity of the pilot, turns Joe into Liz. Now she starts to tell another story about Maggie, how one time she got pissed at a rude passenger and tacked a “handling fee” onto her credit card, when Henry, who is sliding eggs onto two plates, suddenly stops. He’s caught sight of something out their kitchen window.
“Sarah, look,” he says.
He doesn’t even realize what he’s done, because he’s so intent on the small woodpecker right outside on their tree. The bird is a stunner, all right, a real showstopper, with his fluffy black-and-white-striped head with its swath of red, and those black-and-white-spotted wings. Isabelle has frozen there, holding the forks. Henry turns, sees her, realizes.
“Oh, crap.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t believe I just said that. I saw the bird, and…”
“It’s all right. I understand.”
She does, sort of. Birds were Sarah’s passion. Isabelle holds those forks as the eggs, shiny with grease, get cold. The bird bam-bam-bams the tree. Sarah’s name hangs there in the air.
“Open mouth, insert foot,” Henry says.
It’s more than just a casual blunder, because her name immediately exhumes the body disappeared at sea. It shouts the fact that Sarah was a real, living woman, who once sat in a kitchen with Henry, about to eat eggs. It’s a slap of a reminder. She was a woman to whom he would say Sarah, look! A woman who then might stand beside him to watch a woodpecker. Her lungs were full, and her heart was beating.
The woodpecker drills for insects buried deep in the trunk of that tree. Isabelle feels sick. She doesn’t want those eggs. She just wishes buried things would stay buried.
—
They huff and stomp in the cold. There’s a light layer of snow on the ground at Andresen’s Tree Farm, a forty-five-minute drive outside of Anacortes. Okay, fifty-sixty minutes, after the ferry ride, and then there was the trek up the mountain, and the walk out into the forest with the saw. It was farther than she remembered. Well, she’d done this back in high school with a group of friends. A group of friends that included Joe, which is something she doesn’t say. This is getting really silly, because Joe has no idea he’s become a bit player in her home-life drama. When she sees Joe, he’s the one who says, So, hey, how’s it going with the prof? He’s the supportive friend who even suggests they all go get a beer together sometime. Meanwhile, Henry bristles when after-work gatherings are mentioned, and he drops little questions about Joe as if he suspects they’ve reignited their high school romance and have embarked on a torrid affair.
Lately, too, Ev
an has been getting slings and arrows, derisive comments about jocks and salesmen, to the point she’s becoming slightly protective of Evan, who didn’t have a Ph.D. and who couldn’t cook fine foods or speak eloquently about American literature. And like she also did with Evan, Isabelle has cut the number of men she’s had sex with by half when recounting her history. Henry doesn’t need to know about that artist, either. It’s her business. Maybe all men have a jealous streak. Do they? She has no idea. Jealous streak—it sounds almost fashionable, like those people with black hair with a swath of white in front.
Lies! One of the ten signs of a healthy relationship! Maggie says, up there on the mountain.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Isabelle says.
From where they stand, they can see the Andresens’ barn, set picturesquely on the far hill, which is surrounded by next year’s baby trees. They are walking among the larger, taller ones, which grow larger and taller still the farther they walk. In the distance, she can hear children laughing and shouting. A dog barks and barks. She cups her mittened hands around her nose and breathes in and out to warm it.
“It’s beautiful, yeah,” Henry agrees. “It’s far. Is everyone here opposed to just getting a tree in a grocery store parking lot?”
“Don’t be so stingy.” Isabelle puts her arms around him from behind, and they step like a puffy-coat-plus-a-puffy-coat giant.
“Hypothermia doesn’t make me feel generous.”
“Get in the spirit.”
They walk a little, holding hands. “This one,” he says.
“This one?” They’ve barely looked at all. She would like to hunt around a bit, debating the pros and cons.