“This is it,” he said hoarsely. He pointed to his home’s security gate. The limo nosed through, eased down the driveway, finally came to a stop in front of the wide veranda.
“You guys—out fast, okay?” said Fayal. “I’m gonna piss and get the fuck out of here.”
Jack opened the door and stumbled onto the drive. He blinked in the glare of—what? Morning? Dawn? When he glanced at his watch it said almost six.
“Jack!”
He turned and was nearly knocked down by Emma. “Oh, Jack,” she murmured, hugging him. Behind her he could see his brother Dennis, his mouth an O of anguished relief. “Jack, I thought you were—we all thought—”
Emma drew back to look at him. “Holy shit. You’re bleeding! Get inside, come on—”
“Wait.” Jack looked to where Fayal was zipping up his trousers and sliding back behind the wheel. “There’s someone else.”
The blond boy stepped from the car. He moved away as the engine gunned, and in a spray of gravel the limo shot back up the drive. With a desultory roar it turned out onto Hudson Terrace and disappeared from sight.
“Who is he?” Emma demanded.
“I have no idea. A friend of Leonard’s, I think.”
“A friend of—” Emma scowled. “Jesus Christ. Well, tell him to get inside.”
She looked at Jack’s injured wrist as she steered him toward the porch. “I have to tell you, Jackie,” she said in a low voice, and began to cough. “I hope your friend can take care of himself. I’m not feeling that well, I don’t know what it is.”
They walked inside. Jack turned, saw the blond boy gazing up at the mansion’s crumbling exterior, and beyond it the venomous sky.
“Hey,” Jack called. “Move it, let’s go.”
The boy nodded and followed him inside.
The house was dark. Jack’s brother cleared his throat. He was eight years older than Jack; in the months since he’d visited Jack in the hospital, Dennis’s hair had gone white. His face was gaunt.
“I’m sorry,” he said, wiping his eyes. He squeezed Jack’s shoulder. “I’m—I’m glad you’re okay. I’m going to lie down—it’s been tough, Jackie.”
“Where’s Grandmother?”
“Upstairs. She’s all right. She’s sleeping. But—well, Emma will tell you. I’ll talk to you in a little while.”
Jack turned to Emma. “What happened? Is she really okay? Where’s Marz?”
Emma said nothing. Her face was grey with fatigue, blotched with small raised spots. She smoothed a hand across her head, the blond curls dank and flattened. “She’s dead, Jack,” she said. “She went into labor yesterday morning—”
“Oh Christ—”
“There wasn’t anything I could do.” She began to cry. Jack drew her to his breast, holding his injured hand out stiffly behind her. “She—it was twins. A boy and a girl. It would have been hard no matter what, she was so young, she was malnourished—”
“Twins? Did they—”
“They’re okay.” Emma laughed brokenly. “Can you believe that? Two mouths to feed. But I brought some Similac—there are cases stockpiled at the hospital—and Keeley found some old baby clothes…” She started to cry again.
“Emma, Emma…”
Jack pressed his face against her scalp, smelled her unwashed hair, the sharp scents of disinfectant and isopropyl alcohol. He glanced up and saw the blond boy walking hesitantly upstairs. Emma took a deep breath and drew away from him.
“Enough. You should go lie down, too, Jack. Right now.”
“Me?” He shook his head. “What about you? What about—what happened with Jule?”
“I don’t know. Dennis was able to get through on the phone for a while, but the lines are dead now. They’re supposed to be sending his body here, but—”
She waved a hand at the window, where skeins of purple and gold and red threaded across the sky. “Who the hell knows. Dennis and I—we buried the girl outside. But dogs kept trying to dig it up, and when Dennis went out to chase them off they came after him. The body’s gone.”
She looked at him, her eyes haunted. “What else could we do, Jackie?” she whispered. “What else could we do?”
“Nothing,” he said, his voice cracking. “You’ve done everything, Emma. You’ve done more than any human being could possibly do. Now you have to rest.”
He walked with her upstairs. On the second-floor landing he stopped and kissed her forehead.
“Where are you sleeping?”
Emma gestured at his uncle Peter’s old room. “There. Dennis is in the other bed. Your grandmother and Mrs. Iverson are in there—” She pointed at Keeley’s closed bedroom door. “And the babies—”
A sudden wail rent the air. Jack smiled in spite of himself, craned his neck to peer down the hall into Aunt Susan’s room. The sheets had been stripped from the canopied bed. Two bassinets lay side by side on the empty mattress, and between them the blond boy sat, staring into one of them.
“I think I know where the babies are,” said Jack. A second wail rang out. Trip leaned over, carefully picked up one of the babies, and awkwardly cradled it against his chest.
Jack shook his head. “Hey—”
“Hush.” Emma said. “He won’t hurt them. And I’m too beat right now to take care of them, and you shouldn’t do anything till you’re cleaned up. So just leave him, okay?”
Jack watched as the boy reached into the other bassinet for the second infant, straightened with them both in his arms.
“Is that doctor’s orders?” Jack asked.
“Absolutely.” Emma patted his good arm. “Go try to sleep, Jack. That’s the best thing any of us can do right now. Just try to sleep.”
He stood on the landing, watching as the boy sat with the babies. “Doctor Emma said there’s some formula downstairs,” he called into the room after a while. Trip looked up. His face broke into a smile.
“They’re so tiny,” he said. “But they’re really, really cute.”
Jack smiled back. “Yeah, well, be careful. They’re brand new. Maybe you could figure out how to feed them.”
The boy nodded. “Sure. Thanks.”
Jack turned away. Outside his grandmother’s door he hesitated, then peeked inside. Keeley and Mrs. Iverson lay side by side on the bed, mouths open, snoring loudly. Jack shut the door, and went upstairs to his room.
Somehow he had expected a seismic change, the roof caved in, bedclothes strewn anywhere. But no. Only the window had been opened, and the door leading onto the morning balcony. He closed the window, hesitated, then stepped out onto the balcony.
After the city’s rain of ash, the freezing air felt pure as spring rain: it washed away the stale smell of Leonard’s limo and the sickroom scent of the house beneath him. From downstairs he heard first one of the babies shrieking, and then the other. Then Keeley’s voice crying out for Emma, Emma calling back wearily, and Mrs. Iverson exclaiming, “Poor things!”
Then a deeper tone, Trip’s voice commanding them all: “Shhh, hey, everybody be quiet—they’re just hungry. I’ll take care of them.”
The wails grew louder but, miraculously, Emma and Mrs. Iverson and his grandmother were silent. Jack shook his head, imagining the boy pacing around the bedroom, trying fruitlessly to calm the infants. But after a few minutes the babies quieted. Lazyland grew still again.
He stepped to the railing and leaned out. A film of ice covered the rail; as he stood there he could feel it melting beneath his fingertips, giving forth a damp green smell. There was a strange emerald clarity to the air, a brilliance that he thought must be caused by ice crystals, or reflected light, one of those atmospheric things he had never understood. He looked up into the sky, the coiling clouds and haze of smoke above the Hudson. He felt no fear; only a sort of exhausted peace. A sense that he stood upon a battlefield, but at least he was still standing.
“Happy New Year!”
From the riverbank far below a voice echoed. There was a rapid burst of fire
works or gunfire, cheers and what sounded like a trombone blatting.
Jack yawned, rubbed his eyes, and indulged in the absurd wish for more champagne, recalling Larry Muso in his arms.
I should have kissed him, he thought. He remembered Larry’s words—Go back to your house—wait for me there, Jack, I’ll meet you as soon as I can—and Leonard’s—You’ll see me again, we’ll see everybody again, real soon.
He couldn’t remember the last time Leonard had said anything remotely comforting.
He stretched, wincing. His arms hurt, and his wrist, and his chest. His mouth and throat ached from where he’d inhaled burning fumes. He wondered if, by chance, Emma did have anything in that black bag for him. He scarcely felt strong enough to walk back to his bed. He looked out for one last time into the night.
Beneath him the estate’s overgrown lawns sloped into stands of sumac and alder, the ruins of all the other houses that had once stood guard upon the Hudson. Light shone through the tangle of trees and broken buildings—firelight, the flicker of a few moving headlights, myriad bonfires and a confetti of red and green marking the rowdy flotilla massed upon the river. The fires along the upper span of the George Washington Bridge still burned. Its struts glowed dull gold and citron yellow, and cast a spangled reflection in the black water below.
It’s beautiful, Jack thought. It’s really beautiful.
He lifted his head. For some reason—the cold; excessive moisture in the air; maybe just his blurred vision—the glimmering suddenly seemed less pronounced. He frowned, then sucked his breath in.
For one moment—so quick he was not even certain if it was real, or if it was another remnant of the fusarium stirring in his sight—for one moment, something seemed to move in the vault above him. A profound darkness that might have been a cloud, or wings, or a mile-long pennon; the silent flank of a dirigible passing at an unimaginable distance through the heavens or the shadow of something else, spirochete swimming across his eye’s inner orb, the silhouette of a face he loved. Something moved, a vast cyclonic eye that turned slowly in the blazing heavens, as though the sky was ready to burst at last.
But even farther overhead something else glimmered, faint as Jack’s breath in the chill morning air, faint as a heartbeat, faint as dawn.
“I see it!” he cried aloud. “I can see it, it’s there, it’s really there—”
And in that instant, the rush of wind and revelry dying into the sound of the sea and the wails of the infants downstairs: in that instant Jack smiled; and thought he saw the stars.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Hand is the author of Æstival Tide, Winterlong, Waking the Moon, Illyria, Generation Loss, and others. She lives in Lincolnville, Maine.
NOVELS BY ELIZABETH HAND
Available Dark
Radiant Days
Errantry: Strange Stories
Generation Loss
Illyria
Saffron & Brimstone
Mortal Love
Bibliomancy
Black Light
Last Summer at Mars Hill
Waking the Moon
Icarus Descending
Æstival Tide
Winterlong
Copyright
Copyright © 1997, 2012 by Elizabeth Hand
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts “The Wasteland,” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt, Brace & Co., copyright © 1964, 1963 by T. S. Eliot.
“A House Is Not a Motel,” by Arthur Lee, published by Grass Roots Music BMI.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission should be emailed to [email protected]
UNDERLAND PRESS
www.underlandpress.com
Portland, Oregon
eISBN : 978-0-982-66393-6
First Underland Press Edition: June 2012
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