She won’t sleep, and she knows it.
She thinks of Fiona and Holly, and Stanley. Of course, he won’t really want permanent involvement with a woman who already has two children. The thought makes her stir, to want to shake it off. She isn’t looking for anyone. There’re the children to think of, and that’s all. Kalie shifts, moans softly, and now Jonathan’s moving around in the house.
He comes to the door of the room.
“Mom? Do you have Kalie?”
“Yes,” she says. “Go on back to bed, Son.”
“I had a dream.”
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it was. She’s abruptly so weary in her bones. Wait’ll you know what’s actually out there, Son. She lets the words ride through her mind, then takes a breath and says, “Want to tell me about it?”
“I dreamed Grandpa was dead.”
This rakes through her. She doesn’t want to know more. “He’s gonna be all right, Jonathan. It’s just a little fever and some clotting in his leg.
They’re on top of it.”
Kalie moans. The boy comes close, sits down gingerly on the edge of the bed. “It scared me.”
Alison pulls the blankets aside. “Come on, sweetie. Get in.”
He does so. He puts himself tight against her back, shivering. She reaches back and pats his hip, feels the sharp hipbone. Her little boy with his solidness there in the bed, and his dreams that take him far, his fear and uncertainty, and this small privacy, that he sometimes sleeps in his mother’s bed for his night terrors. And she can do nothing about anything he fears, because the life they presently lead is full of this very uncertainty that troubles him.
“It’ll be okay,” she murmurs.
“I wish I didn’t dream,” he says, evidently a little louder than he meant to. He murmurs, “Sorry, did I wake her?”
No. Kalie sleeps on, stirring slightly with her own dreams, making little sighing sounds in the back of her throat.
“I love you,” Jonathan whispers.
“Me too, you,” says Alison, just able to control her own voice. “Go to sleep now.”
“Mom?” he says.
“Please, honey.”
He sighs. She can feel that he’s tense, worrying over something.
“Your grandfather’s okay, baby.”
“Yes.”
She tries to drift off. But he moves again and sighs again. “Tell me, honey.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Mr. Petit, at school. He’s—he was real helpful, you know, for a while, and now he’s being kind of mean to me. Like I did something wrong. And I didn’t do anything wrong.”
She waits for him to go on.
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“I’m not good at the math. And he’s not helping me anymore.
I asked him if I could come see him after school again, and he acted like I’d insulted him or said something wrong. I don’t know what I did wrong.” He sighs again.
“He’s probably just busy, sweetie, with the holiday coming and all that.”
“But I was getting it when he’d explain it to me.”
“He will again. You’ll see.”
“But it’s like he’s mad at me. And I’m falling behind in it.”
“Do you want me to talk to him?”
The boy says nothing for a moment, then: “No.”
She reaches over and pats his shoulder, and lets her hand remain there. He breathes, stirs very slightly, and she thinks perhaps he’s dropped off to sleep. She takes her hand away and listens for him, but then she herself is elsewhere, dreaming.
3.
She wakes hours later, with a sense of something pressing on her chest.
Kalie’s head. Kalie is lying almost completely on top of her, hands flung up around her neck. She extricates herself, settling the child next to her brother, whose thrown-back face looks grief-stricken, mouth wide open, an aghast expression. This is indeed sleep that mirrors the end of life. She touches his shoulder and he stirs, closes his mouth, turns away from her. It will be time for school, soon. She listens for a while to the sounds of the early morning. The wind is still; the rain has stopped. Finally, she rises, looks out her window. There’s a wide band of darkness sweeping across the morning, and she realizes it’s made of birds, heading south, thousands of them. The sky is banded with high clouds, en-flamed by dawn sun, the whole expanse a violet color, with a pink glow toward the horizon turning to brightest gold—a glorious sunrise, and here are the birds trailing across that splendor, as if they have brought it on somehow and are hauling it all across the perfect curtain of the sky.
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She walks in her nightgown into her workroom to get her watercolors and some paper from the cabinet there, and returns to that window and spends a few minutes trying to render the sight, this apparently endless dark band of color crossing a magnificent firmament at dawn. Suddenly, gazing at it all, she’s crying again, quietly, the tears running down her cheeks. This is the kind of sunrise people take pictures of and put on postcards to represent the promise and glory of a new day on Earth, and nothing about it is remotely sad—and yet she experiences it like grief, wiping the tears from her eyes and staring, aching with it. She thinks of Marge, all those miles away, and looks down at the painting, which is beginning to look smeared and wrong. Finally, she puts it all away and crawls back into the bed, having received a chill. Jonathan wakes with the change of her weight in the bed. He gets up and goes into his own room.
“Get ready for school, honey,” she calls after him.
He coughs, as if to answer her with the reason he shouldn’t go. But she hears him brushing his teeth, and knows he’ll do as she asked. She wakes Kalie and dresses her, and then she makes breakfast for them both. Jonathan doesn’t eat much. He kisses her good-bye, and she tells him again not to worry about the math or Mr. Petit. He nods, looking worried, and he walks out to wait for the school bus. She watches him, and watches the gigantic green-haired boy come from the house across the way. Jonathan stands a little to one side when the boy approaches; there’s avoidance in it, though the tall boy doesn’t seem to notice, but only stands there with his odd-colored spiked hair and dour, downturning face, holding his books with both hands, the way a person would hold a tray, so tall that he dwarfs poor Jonathan. The bus comes, and they get on. Alison watches it go, and then spends time tending to Kalie, who’s restless and wants to know when they can go see Holly and Fiona. She takes the child out on the front porch and lets her play there while she works on her painting of the birds in the sky. The trouble is, she can’t make any of them look like birds, quite. And the sky is now almost white, the birds long gone. Her efforts to be precise only end up making a muddier blur than before, and the painting is quickly becoming one she’ll discard. She gets Kalie to come with her down in the 258
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basement room to bring up a doll she can work on. Kalie wants to help, a good sign. They go back up to the porch and sit out in the windless warm sunlight, and work on a doll’s dress and bonnet. Kalie works the hat, having learned to stitch the brim and pull the cloth to make the wrinkle. It makes Alison very proud and happy to watch her do it. She looks out at the sunny world of her street and thinks of love, her love for Kalie, for Jonathan, for her father. If only it were enough. She remembers the carnal night she and Marge spent, drunk on chardonnay, and is momentarily light-headed, as if the effects of the wine have mysteriously returned. She feels a deep yearning in her abdomen, down into her loins, and her discouragement is almost complete. Kalie puts the little doll-bonnet down, comes to her side, and says she wants to try drawing the birds. Alison discovers there’s another, smaller trail of them beginning in the present sky.
“When will Granddad come home?” Kalie asks. “Today, right?”
“Not today, but soon,” Alison tel
ls her, wishing she could believe it to be true.
4.
Oliver dreams of beaches, blue skies, white crests under sunlight, the swells of the oceans of the world. He’s partaking somehow of all of them, from the North Atlantic to the Caribbean, over to the Riviera and on to the peaceful shores of the Mediterranean and farther, to India and Madagascar, the Far East, the coasts of New Guinea and Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania. It’s as if the idea of shorelines has come to him in his sleep, made manifest by the imp of the unconscious. He wakes with a sense of having been transported to other realms, as though the dream were a kind of preparation. He lies quite still, wondering if he can move at all and trying to picture for himself all the beaches on which he has actually stood. He believes he can hear the sea banging the rocks off the coast of Maine, where one summer, when he was young, he stood with a friend, a boy so beautiful that Oliver himself used to tease about feeling t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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a kind of lust for him. Mary’s brother Thomas. He did not even know Mary yet. Thomas and he had been hired as captain’s mates on a charter fishing boat, the Ipswich. Nineteen sixty-three, Oliver was visiting his aunt’s family in York Harbor. Seventeen years old, a summer job at sea.
Thomas was a native of South Carolina, and since Oliver was from Virginia, and they were two boys from the South, they became friends. Two other boys were working the same job that summer, both from New Hampshire, and they made fun of Oliver’s and Thomas’s accents. They also assumed things. During one visit to a boardwalk and beach, one of the New Hampshire boys pointed to a couple, a black man and a white woman, and said to Oliver, “I’ll bet you never see that where you come from.”
“Sure I do,” Oliver told him. “I have.”
“You’re lying through your teeth.”
“That’s a pretty dangerous thing to do,” Oliver said. “Calling a man a liar.”
“I’m not blaming it on you,” said the other. “You don’t have to defend anything.”
“What do you think,” Oliver said, “I just came up from a holler and a shanty shack, with my mouth full of cornpone and a sheet over my head, shouting hee-haw?”
And then, later, he and Thomas stood at the edge of the pounding ocean and sang “Dixie,” and harmonized the words “Fuck you” into the wind spray, laughing, a little drunk on beer. Thomas went to Vietnam, like Oliver, but he died there, a freak accident in a jeep on a street in Saigon. Nineteen sixty-eight. Mary never forgave the world for it. And it was all complicated by the fact that Oliver knew her because he had known Thomas and had been Thomas’s friend. Mary was a steely person inside. Oliver loved her and failed her over and over, and she forgave him over and over, because she understood how it was for Oliver to have been there, too, in that war, how it all happened—how you went from a job riding the ocean in the sunlight of the North Atlantic in summer, catching the big fish, those spectacular flashes of blue and silver rising, caught, out of the waves, spiraling upward all the way to the tail and then plummeting to the surface again in an explosion of foam, a white 260
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shattering, and all the peaceful passes, too, the slow rocking and rolling of the boat, tying off lines, singing into the always-motion of the water, getting drunk in the nights, and feeling the sun still burning into you even in the dark, how you went from that to a war and to fearing the light, any light, and moving in a green terror, a terror of jungle deeps and sudden death and flames licking at you, and being in the terrible bloom of a mortar round that kills two of the men with you outright and leaves one knowing he’ll die in minutes, a poor, frightened, wide-eyed twenty-three-year-old boy sitting in a muddy green ditch, holding his own intestines in his hands and murmuring that he doesn’t want to be moved. Over and over, in the minute left to him, he said, “Don’t move me, please. Don’t move me, please.” Over and over. Mary understood how all that played in Oliver’s mind. And she tamped down her own sorrow and anger and tried to make a life, even after the damages of war, and she mostly succeeded, because she was strong-willed and brave and because she knew how to love a man through his failures. Oliver is that man. And all of it started with being at the edge of the northern sea with a beautiful, dark-haired boy, listening to the banging on the rocks and feeling pleasantly drunk.
Oliver remembers this, still hearing the roar of the sea—is it that sea, and is he still dreaming?—and, just as it comes to him to question it at all, he realizes the sound he has been hearing is Drew, snoring and sighing in the next bed. Drew’s wife comes in. Mildred? Oliver can’t remember, for all the other names. He nods at her as she walks by him.
They turn the television on. Oliver stares at a pretty, blond woman, who speaks agreeably about coming warmer weather and rain. And, in the next moment, the nurse is there with breakfast—a hard-boiled egg, apple juice, a little fruit cup, milk. None of it appeals to him. The nurse, a girl with light blond hair and eyes the color of a midday sky in summer, frowns at him and threatens to spoon it into his mouth if he won’t eat it himself. He takes a bite of the egg, thinking of her as the prig she probably is. It’s all part of the stroke and the complications that have kept him here, this unsummoned rage, and he knows it yet can’t control the feeling. He manages to say, “You go—to—church?”
She stops what she’s doing with his IV and waits for him to continue.
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“Well?” he says.
“I go to church. That has nothing to do with my wanting you to eat.
If you don’t eat, Mr. Ward, you’ll die. That’s not a matter for debate, is it? And I don’t believe it’s a religious matter, either.”
“No,” he says. Even as he appreciates her articulateness, the feeling of resentment toward her wells up in him. It’s amazing.
“Eat your egg,” she says.
A moment later, Holly walks in and takes a chair. “How are you this morning?” she says.
He looks beyond her, expecting to see Alison. But there’s no one. The empty hallway, where a voice on the speaker system says the name of a doctor and then repeats it, and gives a room number. There’s so much unexplained process in a hospital, so much surface matter that one is exposed to, it’s like a laboratory for the production of paranoia: Oliver has found it impossible not to believe that every pronouncement on the in-tercom is about him, his condition, his situation. It’s all in code, and it’s all some bad development. In the nights, a nurse comes in and squeezes the bottoms of his feet; he has no idea why. He has simply let it happen, trying to keep the thin veneer of sleep, which is all sleep ever feels like here, even when it’s deep and drug-induced.
“Fiona dropped me off,” Holly says, evidently seeing the worry in his expression. “She’s on her way over to pick up Alison and Kalie.”
“Oh,” Oliver says.
“Stanley’s at the house. Working. It’s noisy. I’ve decided we’re all going to have Thanksgiving there.” She thinks a moment. Then laughs into one hand. “Crazy, I know. But I think it’ll lend a feel of the first Thanksgiving—the unfinished element of it, you know?”
He nods. “That’s—good.”
“You’re not eating,” Holly says. “Food’s that bad, huh.”
“Bad,” he tells her, and wants to say more.
“You can’t eat any of it?”
“Not—hungry,” he says.
“But you’ve gotta keep your strength up,” she tells him. Then: “Oh, God. What a cliché. What a stupid movie line. I don’t believe I uttered it. Forgive me.”
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He smiles, or believes he does. He nearly asks her about it. Did I just smile at you?
But she’s smiling, too, and she pats his wrist. “I take it that I’m forgiven.”
5.
During the six-o’clock Monday morning mass, Brother Fire notices that one of the five people in the pews behind him is Mr. Petit. This is new. And, at Com
munion, the four others come to the railing, but Petit hangs back, hands folded in front of him, head bowed. It becomes nearly impossible for the priest to concentrate through the rest of the ceremony. The quiet in the church—the occasional sniffle or cough or throat-clearing, the soft, whoosh of traffic outside—begins to feel oppressive, weighted with something, some aspect of trouble. He wants to talk to Mr. Petit. But the mass ends, and Mr. Petit has gone off to his school.
Father McFadden’s old man spent the night and is sitting in the small kitchen with the housekeeper, Mrs. Drake. He’s drinking coffee and talking in a wonderful, charming brogue about what a hopeless student he was and how bright his son is. “Think of it,” he says. “My boy writing poetry, like the Dean himself.”
“Who?” Mrs. Drake says.
“Mr. Swift,” says the old man. “They still call him that in Dublin.”
Brother Fire missed being introduced to him, and so now he introduces himself. “Just in from the six-o’clock,” he says.
“I never used to miss it,” says the other. “I’m Sean. And people call you Brother Fire.”
“Well, yes.”
“Fine bunch of boys in this parish, Father.”
Brother Fire feels remiss, because he hasn’t been as involved lately.
Father McFadden comes downstairs, wearing a sweater and jeans. He’s taking his father to the mountains today.
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“Look at ye,” Sean says to his son. “A poet, and ye look like a raga-muffin. Doesn’t he look a disgrace to ye, Father?”
The old priest deflects this with a genial wave of the hand but finds himself thinking about how it might have been for him had his own father lived long enough to visit him in one of his parishes. What might father and son have said to each other? Finally, he turns down breakfast and excuses himself. Today, he’ll go visit Oliver Ward in the hospital, and then he’s supposed to have lunch with Holly. There are a couple of other stops he has to make. This is the part of his life that has always pleased him the most, though, of course, now it’s colored by this battle he’s having with himself. Climbing the stairs, he thinks of Mr. Petit and feels the sense of frustration at not being able to speak with him.
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