The Possible World
Page 30
“Are you okay?” I ask. I sit on the end of the bed. He pulls his feet up so they aren’t near me, but otherwise he doesn’t acknowledge my presence. “Are you mad at me?”
He stops moving the crayon but doesn’t look up.
“You said,” he tells the paper with little-boy rage. “You said you’d tell them to find Clare.”
“I did. I did, Leo. Ben. They couldn’t find her.”
He looks up then, his face pinching around the mouth. He’s trying not to cry.
“I don’t want to stay here,” he says. “I want to go home.”
Is he finally remembering Karen?
“Home with your mom?”
“With Clare.” He tells the crayoned picture in his lap. “I hate being here. He’s making me remember the bad stuff.”
Is Jellicoe actually getting information from him about Karen’s murder? At what cost? The boy is clearly miserable. The cops want his testimony, the attending physician wants a publication, the social worker wants to get him off her to-do list. All of them doing their jobs, but none dedicated to his interests alone.
“What do you remember about Clare?” I ask. “What can you tell me about her?”
His face gets an interior look, as if he’s holding something in his mind to describe it. “Her house is really little,” he says. “The walls are made of stones. It’s up a hill and there’s a graveyard.” He looks up at me. “I help keep the graves neat.”
Surely Karen hadn’t let her son hang out in a graveyard. Young children can conflate fantasy and reality; maybe that’s the explanation for what’s been going on with Ben.
“Honey, is Clare maybe someone from a story?” I ask. “From a book, or a movie?”
His hopeful expression dissolves. He shakes his head and curls onto his side facing away from me. And no matter what I say, he won’t turn over or look at me or speak again. After half an hour or so, an aide comes to get him. Time for therapy, and he wriggles down from the bed, careful not to brush against me, and goes away without a backward glance.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
* * *
Clare
IN THE THIRD WEEK OF his illness, Leo was barely responsive, just skin over bone; his hair was plastered to his scalp. I’ll wash it tomorrow, I thought. If he lives. The image of tipping his head back and pouring the warm water over his scalp called up a memory so powerful that it loosened something in me. Careful. Careful not to get soap in his eyes. Careful that the water isn’t too warm, or too cold. All that energy and love and care, come to nothing.
Silas visited, gave him extreme unction, left again. I swayed a little on the doorstep watching him go. Day and night was mixed up by then; was the gray sky morning or twilight? I couldn’t tell. The snow glittered across the fields, made a blanket over the sleeping plants. In time, they’d awaken. Driven by the Creator, or by their own deep hearts? The God who loved His creation enough to make every piece of it beautifully intricate, who loved each leaf and each worm—how could that be the same God who had chosen to give Leo a hard, short life? Who had taken Bradley from my arms, who had let my mother die alone. Which was worse: an all-powerful divinity that exerted such cruelty, or a total absence of any meaning to the world?
I lay down just for a moment on the settee by the fireplace. When I awoke the fire was low and the room cold, and someone was shaking my shoulder.
I swam up out of sleep to see James bent over me.
“You didn’t answer my knock,” he said.
“How long was I asleep?” I leapt up, pushed past him to go to Leo.
The bedroom fire was also low; the cloth on Leo’s forehead was freezing. How could I have fallen asleep and left him? I fed the fire and rearranged the blankets, dislodging Kitty, who’d been sleeping among them.
The farmer was still there when I came out of the sickroom. He’d tended to the guttering fire; flames were now dancing behind the screen.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I told him. “It’s not safe.”
He followed me to the doorway, but when I reached to slip the spoon from the latch he put out a hand to stop me, clasping my wrist.
“This is no place for a person alone,” he said.
“It’s my home.”
“You could choose a different home.” His fingers were warm. “You and I, we’re not young, but we’re not old. We like talking to each other, and that’s more than many marriages have.” He cleared his throat. “I could teach the boy to farm. It’s not always an easy life, but it’s a good one.” He brought his eyes to mine, waiting.
For a moment I could see it: Leo a young man on a tractor, acres of land spreading around him that he would one day inherit. Myself on the porch of James’s fine white house, looking over those same acres. Laughing together in the evenings. What I’d never had: true friendship in a marriage.
And of course that word stopped my foolish daydream: I was already married. And then another harsh truth: Leo wouldn’t live to ride that tractor.
“I’m sorry,” he said, taking my silence for an answer. “I’ve clearly misunderstood. I won’t embarrass us both anymore.”
He let go of my wrist and pulled open the door. Nearly through it, he turned back, took something out of his pocket, came two long strides into the room, and put it on the table. Then he went out, his shoulders shrugged up against the cold. I shut the door and slipped the spoon through the latch to keep it closed.
The small bundle he’d left was about as long as my hand, wound around with cloth and tied with a bit of ribbon. I took it over to the fireplace, sat with it in my lap. The ribbon was threaded through a small card that said Merry Christmas, From James, To Clare.
Today was Christmas. All those plans I had had for baking and presents had evaporated during Leo’s illness, and I’d lost track of the days. It had been years since I’d received a Christmas present. As a child, how I’d lingered over each one, loosening the paper without tearing it, keeping the gift inside hidden from view until the last possible moment. A brush with infinity: until the item was revealed it could be anything. I held James’s present a little longer before slipping off the ribbon, the object spinning in the unwinding cloth until it fell out into my hand. A piece of wood, just the right size, with a hole in one end for the bolt. I turned it over: he’d carved a rose into the face of it, the petals rising out of the wood. It jumped and blurred in the firelight as if a real flower was trapped there and being blown by the wind. It was better than anything I might have imagined. A new latch for my door. Something I needed; something I wanted; something beautiful.
I could feel the hot ovals where the farmer’s fingertips had grasped my wrist. I felt ashamed; how cruel to let him go away without a word. But what could I tell him? I have a husband. It might not even be true. If I was thirty-nine now, Hugh was fifty-two, and people didn’t always live so long back then. He might have died while I’d been at Roscommon; I could be an unwitting widow, bound to no one, instead of a fugitive.
What I would have told James, if I’d been honest: I don’t deserve a happy ending.
I went into the bedroom again. Leo didn’t move when I opened the door. Had he slipped away? But when I felt his forehead it was neither cold nor feverish, and as I watched he took a slow breath of natural sleep. I poked up the fire again and then bundled up to go outside for water. I’d be washing his hair after all.
“He’s turned the corner,” confirmed Brother Silas when he visited the next day. “He might have some residual heart weakness, but I think he’ll live.”
Heart weakness. Well, who didn’t have that?
* * *
EVEN AFTER THERE was no more need for quarantine, Leo stayed. And after he was well enough to return to school, he stayed. His legs eventually overhung the end of the settee but he stayed, pulling up a chair for his feet and sleeping crosswise. Through harvests and plantings and snowfalls, he stayed. Nothing formal was ever drawn up or decided, but he went through the woods to St. Will’s every morning and ret
urned to me in the afternoons. In the summers, we worked together in the garden and the cemetery, the roses blooming around three sides of us, while the cat moved from napping spot to napping spot in the warm grass. We named the cat Archimedes, after the scientist in the bathtub, and called him Archie.
The earth along the one wall of the cemetery stayed barren. I planned to replant someday with cuttings from the living bushes, but it didn’t ever seem time. I watered and fertilized the soil sometimes when Leo wasn’t there to see me do it, but nothing more.
* * *
ONE DAY LATE in the summer after Leo turned sixteen, we were out in the garden harvesting tomatoes.
“It’s a bumper crop,” I said. “I think tomorrow will be a squirreling day.”
It was Leo’s word, invented when he was about thirteen, for the process of storing up food against winter. He said that while I was doing it I looked like a happy squirrel burying a nut. It was true that I enjoyed it, even in the height of summer, when the cottage got terribly hot from the big boiling pots of jars and lids. Although I’d begun reading again after Leo’s illness, getting books from the library every time I visited town, I still liked things I could do with my hands.
Leo brushed the dirt from a tomato and scraped at the surface gently with his thumbnail. Sometimes slug bites hid under a patch like that. It must have passed muster, for he put it into the bowl he carried.
“Whatever happened with that farmer?” he asked. “The one you used to do mending for.”
“I’m sure he’s remarried,” I said after a surprised pause. “And has someone else to do his mending.” Ever since I had declined his proposal, I had seen the man only from a distance. Leo did most of the shopping now; he had a crate on the back of his bicycle to carry packages. Whenever I passed the farm, James was not near the fence; he was on his tractor or driving his combine, or nowhere at all in sight.
“He’s not. Mrs. Massey told me.”
“You shouldn’t pry into other people’s business.”
“I didn’t ask. She just told me.” That was probably true; Mrs. Massey was a gossip. “You can’t just stay alone here forever.”
“I’m not alone. You’re here.”
He shrugged, and I understood: he wanted to leave.
I knew that he must be restless, tucked away in Roscommon the way we were. He had taken a part-time job delivering for Massey’s Dry Goods the year before, bicycling around Waite on his secondhand Schwinn. The town was small, but the world was suggested there, in the magazines and the newspaper headlines, and on the curved black-and-white screen of the television in the hardware store window.
“You haven’t finished school,” I said.
“I’m older than anyone else in my class.”
“You were ill. You missed almost that whole year.”
“Clare,” he said softly. “That was a long time ago.” As he said it, of course I could see it was true: he was nearly a man now, his arms muscular and brown. It had been a long time since he had had to tilt his head up to talk to me.
“I don’t want to sit in classrooms anymore,” he said. “I want to do something.”
“I always thought you’d make a good teacher. Or a scientist.”
He walked down the row of tomato plants, turning the fruit expertly without releasing it from the vine, inspecting it for blemish or rot.
“I’m thinking of joining the navy,” he said.
“The navy?” Almost nothing could have surprised me more. He hated the water, unfortunate for a lad born in Rhode Island. There’d been a fishing excursion sometime when he was small that had not gone well, sunburn and seasickness at least, perhaps other miseries he didn’t mention. He’d grown up without interest in swimming or sailing.
“It’s not just boats,” he said. “They have naval pilots.”
He wanted to fly.
“You don’t have to join up to fly airplanes.” I heard how foolish the words were as I spoke them. How else would a boy like Leo get the opportunity to learn how to fly? “Anyway, they won’t take you for two more years.”
“They will if I get permission.” He muttered this with his back turned to me.
We hadn’t talked about his mother, ever. She was still legally his mother, would always be; he and I had no official or legal relationship. She could sign the paper to approve his induction, and I would have no say in the matter.
I’d reached a heavy-burdened plant whose vines were hanging almost to the ground. Leo put his bowl down and came over to do the restaking while I knelt to reach the hidden fruit.
“You know, they may not take you in the service, with your heart,” I said.
“My heart’s fine.” He lifted a trailing vine and knotted it to the wooden upright with a soft strip of an old undershirt.
“They’ll do an examination to check.”
A pause, a hitch in his movements.
“They already did one,” he confessed.
I sat back on my heels and looked at him, my knees cold in two patches from the damp earth.
“You already joined up.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you.” Contrite.
With the sun behind him like that, he could be any grown man. He was grown. And that was part of it, wasn’t it, part of what I’d taken on. The letting go. I would have had to do it with Bradley, if he’d been lucky enough to live that long. If I’d been lucky enough.
“Well, you’ve told me now.” My chest twinged hard, and I looked up at the sky. “We’d better finish before the rain comes.”
* * *
HE CAME HOME after basic training looking both frighteningly adult and terribly young in his uniform. He’d be gone again in three days, to a place I’d never heard of. I made him repeat the name. He’d rolled his eyes and pulled the atlas from the bookshelf he’d made for the front room, paged to Asia and put his finger on the country that ran along the edge of the landmass, pinched and narrow in the middle and bulging at top and bottom, like a drop of honey coming off the spoon.
“Clare,” he said. “You have to read the papers. We’re at war.”
“We’re not.” I’d lived through a war.
But apparently, we were.
I’m a gunner, his first letter said. It didn’t say—didn’t have to say—how disappointed he was. A gunner, not a pilot. Still, he was flying. Leo was flying—and he was shooting at people. Leo, who didn’t like killing pests in the garden.
They name everything here. The plane’s called Victoria, and the gun’s Caroline. Were they named for sisters or sweethearts or mothers? He didn’t say. He sat in the side of the plane, he reported, but the rest of that paragraph was blacked out by the censor. It picked up again with The pilot’s a guy from Wyoming called Ticky. The next sentence stuttered with censored bits: He’s XXXXXXXXXX and I don’t know if XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. It’ll probably be all right, but XXXXXXXX.
I held the paper up, tried to see his words through the censor ink, but it was thick and did its job well. His letters gave me only the barest sense of how he was; they focused on concrete details, about the food and the men who were flying with him, their habits and their silly nicknames. The men who were holding his life in their hands.
“How’s he doing over there?” said the postmaster when I pushed through the post office door. “Mine’s infantry. He doesn’t write much, though. Not like your boy.” I took the stack from him: three letters, a bonanza.
He wrote every week. I didn’t get all the letters, and sometimes they arrived in a clump and I had to sort them by the postmarks to read them in order. He didn’t tell me enough of what I longed to hear: how he was, what was really happening, when he might be coming home. You need to get out of your hidey-hole, Clare, one letter told me. You need to go back into the world. Why was he wasting words talking about me when he knew I wanted to know about him? Don’t worry about me, I wrote back. I’m fine. But he did write every week. Until he didn’t.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
* * *
TICKY’S IN A FOULER-THAN-USUAL MOOD on the airstrip, jamming his sunglasses on against the breaking dawn, sucking from a cup of what I hope is coffee. Probably up all night drinking ba muoi ba and whiskey, and then a handful of uppers to jump-start the day. Not a person you want to trust your life to. But his double chevron tells my blank shoulder what to do, so when he snaps, Move your ass, Cherry, I ignore the sore pit of fear under my breastbone and climb into the plane.
Clare asked me for the names of the boys I fly with. What boys? I wrote back, We’re all men here. But that wasn’t true. We are boys, reckless, testing ourselves and cocky. We have to be. I can’t write her the way we really talk, the language we use. I’m called FNG and Cherry, and sometimes Rhoda. No one uses my real name. I can’t write about how I wake every morning with my heart beating so hard I can feel it in my throat. Reading about such things would frighten her. Writing it down would frighten me.
Sometimes, coming back from a mission, knowing I’m as far from the next one as I can be, I feel something surge up in me like a wave, so intense I can barely contain it, something like joy or love. Not love for a sweetheart or even a brother, it’s like nothing I’ve felt before, and I feel it for all the men with me in the rattling ship, our airborne sanctuary. It’s a feeling born of this time that will not come again; it draws a circle around us and makes us one forever, and no one who has not been here with us will understand. The feeling lasts in me until we land. It sometimes lingers into the evening, but by morning it’s always gone. I have thought more than once, while the feeling fills me, that it is worth all of the rest, all the terror and sorrow, all the unspeakable horror, just to experience these moments, so alive and filled with feeling. I think nothing will ever feel so real again.
I can’t write any of that either. My letters have gotten shorter and more meaningless with all that I have to leave out. I still write as often as I can, filling in the space left by what’s unsaid with questions: how is Archie, how are the crops, did Mrs. Massey ever get that color TV she’d been talking about. While I’m writing, I’m crawling through the words back home.