by Deb Caletti
“It’s freezing.” He stomps his feet to keep warm. “Plus, it’s great. It looks just like a postcard of a Christmas tree.”
He’s right, and so she says, “Let’s do it.”
He kneels. Of course, the knees of his jeans get immediately wet. He leans under the dripping branches, sets saw against wood. It’s like taking a plastic knife to a pork roast. Not much happens.
He wipes his brow. He tries again, as Isabelle feels the tension build. This was all a bad idea, and the degree of badness grows. First, there was the too-long car ride, and then the wait in line for the saw as Mrs. Andresen chatted merrily with a family of five, and then the hard hike up, and now this—this academic, this professor, kneeling on snowy ground and attempting to fell a tree. She had imagined something else—something holiday-magic-ish. Something fun—new romance, their first tree. She hadn’t pictured the way the elbows of his nice down coat are muddying and how the slit he’s made in the trunk is still only as thick as an envelope.
Now she says something bad. At least, something that only makes everything worse. “Can I help?”
“I can cut down a fucking tree, Isabelle.”
She is silent. In the silence, her mother perks up, irritating as a wind chime.
This is your dream man, this insecure asshole with two dead women in his past?
Shut up, shut up, shut up! Isabelle thinks. It’s nothing she’d have ever said to Maggie in real life. And shut up to everyone else with a comment, too! This is one, small event. One story.
Should she name every kindness now? Every soft and loving word? Every conversation about Sarah and Virginia, where he’s cried and poured out his heart? Should she enumerate every time he’s been patient and generous and humorous? If there were some accounting sheet, some log of this versus that, some way to measure the whole, he’d come out shining.
He’d better rack up forty-fifty sweet nothings after the way he just talked to you, Iz.
Her mother is right. Damn it! She is. And Isabelle wants to storm and fume at Henry, kneeling and sweating in the snow. She wants to rail, because she’s only trying hard here, trying to make a fun holiday, trying to lighten their lives and bring joy and create new memories. He doesn’t have to snap. He doesn’t have to ruin everything.
She doesn’t fume, though. She doesn’t hurl a retort or return to the car without either him or the fucking tree. But in that junk pile where her anger is buried, an old bicycle settles and a paint can shifts, and there’s a little shimmer of something. She remembers another Christmas, when she was just a child and she tried to make cookies in their kitchen. She wanted to make the ones she saw in magazines, but there was flour everywhere and she’d spilled the red sugar she’d found way back in the cabinet, and Maggie was yelling, screaming, her face contorted. One day, in that junk pile, piece will connect with piece and the monster will be built and he will be fierce. She will fume and snap and rail, and fucking weenie men with fancy Ph.D.s and lame poems and bully mothers and bully everyones will step back and tremble at the flames coming from her mouth.
But now she says nothing. There’s only the grunt and exhale of Henry’s effort, and her own breath still hovering in the cold air. The fix they are in grows along with the badness of this idea, because he can’t cut down a fucking tree. Or maybe he could, but it might take until next month around this same time. By then, they’d be half dead and starving and frozen and Christmas would be over, but the thing would finally come crashing down. So he can’t, basically, and she feels a laugh, a gleeful, spiteful ha-ha dancing around somewhere in there, in the vindictive recesses of her mind. It stays there, of course, with all the other dangerous things.
He flings his coat off. “This isn’t helping.” It’s the jacket’s fault, for sure.
Isabelle doesn’t know what to do. She watches, she looks away, she frets inwardly. There is so much trunk left, it’s like they were never here. “Let’s just forget it,” she says.
Well, that’s wrong, too, of course. What isn’t, at this point?
“Jesus, Isabelle, really? And don’t tell me, because I don’t want to hear it, how that asshole Evan could probably cut this down in two seconds.”
Of course, she would never say something like that. She had never in her life said something like that. Honestly, it’s a weird thing to even come out of his mouth. It’s almost…She doesn’t want to think the word, so she doesn’t, not outright. Instead, the word drifts around her mind like a ghoul: disturbing. She feels that word in her chest, and it sits alongside the other one she felt the day he buttoned up her blouse: dread. They are bad words, paired up. Henry is still trying to saw and his armpits are ringing with sweat and his hair is falling over his face. No one is around. Not one person. There are no sounds of children or dogs anymore. They’re on a mountainside, alone.
Before she thinks what she is going to think, she takes off. She starts running.
“Isabelle! What are you doing?”
“Getting help!”
“Fine!” he shouts. “Whatever!”
Now her chest really hurts, but from cold, from slicing blades of frigid air plus the physical exertion of sprinting down the trail. They’d gone pretty far, after all. She’s glad to be back at the shingled shed, where Mrs. Andresen rings up purchases and hands out candy canes. Mrs. Andresen’s son, Drew, follows Isabelle back up. He’s jovial, with cheeks like round, red apples. He knows his way around the mountain, and knows his way around those trees and the egos of men from the city.
“Some of those trunks are hard as rock,” he says, when they arrive.
“I’m glad it’s not just me,” Henry says.
“Nah,” Drew says.
Drew hauls the tree back down as if it’s a bag of oranges. He tosses it up on Maggie’s old car and ties it down, rodeo style. “There you are, folks.”
Henry soothes his bruised self-esteem with a fat tip. But he scootches and squirms the entire drive home, making a point about the discomfort of his wet clothes. Isabelle keeps her eye on the tree. The last thing they need is to lose it on the freeway.
“What’s the problem?” he asks, when they’re finally on the ferry heading home. They don’t even get out of the car. They just sit in Maggie’s Acura with the tree on top, packed among the other cars. The ferry deck rumbles as the scenery speeds past.
“Honestly?” she says.
They fight. It feels dangerous, fighting in that car with nowhere to go. She could get out, but she’d only be on a moving boat in the middle of the icy sound.
Are they fighting too much? All couples fight. Is he too insecure? Everyone has faults. Is he guilty, after all? No! No, of course not. He is a victim of tragic circumstances, and even New Haven Providence agrees. Look, there it is in the mail when they arrive home—that check, finally. New Haven Providence has done much to quiet any doubts, because Henry’s right. If an insurance company actually pays…And when he opens that envelope, she can see that he is a man who has been under much stress. He has been through hell. They make up. Today, he has simply been a struggling human being with elbows and knees now muddied like a child’s, a man who wants to be big in the eyes of the woman he loves.
She understands this, but bigness is beginning to be a strange concept. Because…Something is happening. Amid the loudness and largeness of the holiday—the clamorous bell ringing and looming, lit trees and gigantic candy canes in yards; the colossal blow-up Santas and mammoth reindeer on roofs and the supersized manger with the huge baby Jesus and the enormous, can’t-miss-it, tinsel-glitter guiding star on the church lawn—Isabelle is shrinking.
Chapter 20
Weary is angry. He is raging, stomping, furious. It’s a beautiful, blooming anger. It opens like a flower, or like the jawed pod, the carnivorous clamshell mouth of the Nepenthes pitcher plant. Maybe he should be furious with New Haven Providence instead of with Henry North. No! Since he opened his bedroom computer on this balmy winter night and saw the check deposited into Henry’s account,
he’s raging at both of them and at everything in general. He wants to light things on fire or start an earthquake.
How was Weary able to see this deposit? None of your business. Let’s just say people should change their passwords. Let’s just say even people who are supposedly so smart are stupid, the way they keep a favorite word for years on end, the way they choose something utterly predictable (Nevermore? Please), the way they use the same password on every account from their old university email to phone companies to banks to online stores. Let’s just say that if you think he’s only been snooping in ShutR and a single Visa bill all this time (his best sources, granted), you’re kidding yourself.
What the hell is up with New Haven Providence? Police, insurance investigators—it all could have stopped there. It should have stopped—finis! Complète!—if people were doing their jobs. Weary could have folded up shop right then, went back to his quiet life among the Corvus.
Idiots! Losers in leisure suits, fat men in uniforms! He knew this would happen, too. He knew it! And nothing, nothing, makes you more furious than being proven correct. Just as he suspected when Sarah disappeared, after news reports started dwindling, after there were no more revelations of late-night fights or drunk arguments on boats, after Virginia’s relatives retreated back into their lives, after detectives made only one measly phone call to the New Caledonia Corvus Research Facility and Sanctuary to ask questions—it’s essentially over, from an official standpoint. The insurance check is written, and the police and DAs have pretty much moved on to cases they can solve and prosecute. His last hope for a legitimate solution is gone. Henry North escapes punishment! Twice! And he goes on his merry way with a fat wad of cash!
No one will care about Sarah anymore. No one’s cared about Virginia for a long time.
It’s up to Weary now.
And it’s up to Isabelle. Poor Isabelle.
It’s time, anyway. The ring, plus the passage of a few months, means Henry North has started the peck, peck, peck at Isabelle’s spirit, Weary is sure. This is what happened with Sarah as soon as commitment entered the picture, and Henry North will keep on being his insecure and narcissistic self, sure as corvid Yves will be sneaky and Little Black will be gentle and Corbie will be aggressive when thwarted.
After the ring and the wedding, the slide was swift for Sarah. Why did she stay? Why does any woman (or man, for that matter) stay? The swiftness of the slide is part of it, that’s what people don’t understand. You’re down, down, down in the pit before you know it, and the walls are high and slick and there are no toeholds. You are so small and your voice is tiny while you’re there at the bottom. No one would hear you, anyway. Something feels a little familiar about the darkness, too.
And, yes, Sarah lacked “self-esteem” certainly, that magical potion people seem to have either too much or too little of. She had to summon it and fight for it, he knows. She left home and got an education and established herself at the university. But her strength was fragile, wasn’t it? Contingent on the external, and Henry North flipped the switch hidden way down inside. He was something recognized, something that compelled her. He was a remembered voice, calling. Henry North took her love and he smothered it, broke its neck. She was old, familiar prey. He was an old, familiar predator. You succumb, that’s what you do, if you haven’t ever learned to fight.
Where is Weary now? What is he even doing, as these thoughts roil and rumble and gather steam? He is in his closet (ha) at his home on the hill. It is night. It is dark, except for the moon and the yellow light of his room blazing. Crickets and insects chirp and bleep and party. Birds sleep. The bamboo doors of Weary’s closet are flung open. You should see all the stuff in there. Clothes of various sorts, books, trinkets. Everything he acquired here in New Caledonia to fill and fill the hole of loss. He shoves all the shit he buys into that closet so he doesn’t have to face his lame desire for it. His other rooms are Zen, clean-lined and simple. Inside, outside. How things look, how things are.
He hunts, but it’s not truly necessary. He knows where the box is. As he pulls that box down, he thinks of the crows and their protective rage. Like something out of a horror movie, those birds will dive-bomb anyone near their young. It happens every year from June until July, when the fledglings leave the nest. The older crows will menace anyone near their vulnerable offspring, wage a vicious attack to the back of a person’s head. How do you prevent it, when it’s the season of fury? Wave a tennis racket, or carry an umbrella. Wear a hat; walk backward. Face them. Look at them. They will only come at you from behind.
If you harm their young, if you threaten the new, budding confidence of what is fragile in the world, well, maybe you deserve what’s coming. You deserve a surprising, vicious attack that you don’t see coming.
Weary sets the box on his bed. There are treasures inside. Each is the glass or the fishing lure or the Matchbox car or the tiny skull or the bottle cap that is a crow’s riches. Corvus will gather these private gems, and they will turn them over and over again, gazing at their beauty. They will bury these treasures, to keep them away from others. And then, sometimes, as a gift, they’ll offer them.
Weary is lucky to have Jean-Marie, who is not only an excellent lover and a superb procurer of documents, but also the petit chief of a first-rate courier service, which promises expediency and anonymity. The first package will arrive when Isabelle is alone, while Henry is away on his little trip back home, according to the ticket purchase on the Visa bill.
Weary holds the watch to his ear. It’s silly—he knows it has stopped ticking. There’s nothing he can do about that now. He just has an irrational wish to hear the sound and see the tiny hands move again. It reminds him of the history books he likes to read sometimes, stories of war and disasters, torpedoed ships and murdered leaders. He always hopes they’ll turn out differently somehow, even though, of course, they won’t. They are stories that have already happened, with the fates of the doomed determined long ago.
Chapter 21
On New Year’s Day, Henry flies out to visit his brother Mark, Jerry, and their two daughters. He missed his family over the holidays. Isabelle stays behind. She’s a believer that absence makes the heart grow fonder, or maybe she just needs some time alone. Missing a person is good for love. Longing for them is.
But after Henry leaves, it’s not longing she indulges in. The first half of the day, she’s full of get-it-done energy. She jumps into the sort of industriousness meant to keep oneself out of trouble and one’s mind quiet. The ornaments come off the tree. She drags the dry behemoth to the curb for the Boy Scouts to pick up. She sweeps and vacuums all those needles, plucks the pointy spikes from her sweatshirt, wonders why humans put themselves through such misery every year. But just after half the lights around the windows are down, right as she picks off a piece of tape from the ceiling molding, she stops. She gets down from the stepladder. She gives in to a strange restlessness, the urge to search, which has been insistently bugging her, like a high-pitched frequency she can only somewhat hear.
She looks in their closet, full of their clothes hanging on their hangers, same as they are every day. She smells one of Henry’s shirts. Ahh. Notice: It’s love she mostly feels. Then why this, now? Why is she fishing in these pockets? Pants, jackets. She finds a foil-wrapped stick of gum, some coins, some lint. She looks in their dresser drawer, in the wood box he keeps there. Older coins, some cuff links, a teeny tiny key, a watch with a slinky metal band. His old wedding ring. She already knew these things were here. She places the ring on her left index finger, same as Sarah once did to Henry.
Get that creepy thing off! Maggie snaps.
Isabelle moves on to Henry’s office. The musician left a sleek teak desk with two drawers, a modern swivel chair, a huge painting with yellow and black misshapen ovals that look like the routes of two drunk racecar drivers. The art isn’t what you notice anyway. In that house, laid out horizontally along the cliff side, it’s all about the windows, and the huge views
from every room. Even this small office boasts wide vistas of the gray sound and the gray rocks and the gray inlet where the gray whales sleep. From here, she can see the squiggle of the trail down to the beach that hugs the bluff.
She sits in the chair, swivels a bit. This used be the Greggory girls’ bedroom, she remembers, from when she babysat all those years ago. You’d never recognize it, as contemporary as it looks now. If she looks closely at the walls, though, Isabelle bets, she’ll still be able to find the thumbtack holes from their puppy posters.
There’s a cup of pens on the desk, and a blank notepad, and Henry’s laptop. She takes a pen and gazes out the window like Henry might, scribbles a pretend spiral of inspiration, rips off the page and crumples it up. The house is so quiet that she can hear the tick-ticking of the oven clock in the kitchen. She opens the window above the desk and inhales the sea air. A seagull screeches. The waves crash. Rain pitters against the deck and drips down the drainpipe. She misses Henry, she thinks. At least, the house is so quiet without him that she feels its emptiness. Now that her busyness has stilled, the stark gray out those windows is almost spooky. She listens for the creak of footsteps, or the slow turn of a doorknob. No. She’s fine. No one is there. It’s just her and all those ghosts in her head.
Isabelle pictures Henry in his airplane seat, his earbuds playing classical, his eyes closed. She wishes she were sitting beside him holding his hand, about to visit his family and the city he spent so many years in. And she’s glad she’s not there. Really glad. She’s happy she’s not squished into the seat beside him, holding his hand, about to visit Jerry and Dr. Mark, staying in their guest room. Maybe she’s meant to be alone. Unmarried. Deliciously free of people’s expectations. It sort of sounds like heaven, actually.
She opens the top drawer of the desk. There’s a stapler, a box of paperclips, a bottle of Wite-Out, index cards, office stuff. She moves on to the next drawer.