Mainly she felt confused, and worried. She tried to talk to Bobby in a soft, soothing voice. They left the apartment for short spells, to walk in the park or pick up bread or coffee on the corner. Everyone they met looked as unreal as they felt. Everyone greeted each other, asked after each other, looked at each other with concern. Did you know people there? Are you okay? Are we okay? Is it going to happen again?
Most of Bobby’s former coworkers, he said, were surely dead. When he tried to call the friends he’d been staying with, the phone rang and rang.
They watched television obsessively, staring blankly at images of police and firefighters, the mayor, the president, all just a hundred blocks downtown. Bobby spoke to Cora several times, assuring her he was all right and asking her to let Cynthia know this too. Neither of them told their parents they were together.
On Saturday, five days after Bobby arrived at her apartment, Scarlet went out on her own for a couple hours, to get some groceries and run a few errands. When she got back to the apartment Bobby had nearly finished a bottle of vodka he’d found in her freezer. He wasn’t a scary drunk, or an angry one. Just a cold and sad one. Once again he cried and cried. That night they watched TV in silence, tears streaming down both their faces. In the morning he was up and dressed before she was. She walked out of her room to find him quietly inching open her front door.
“If you go out to get more to drink,” she said, “you can’t come back here.” As soon as she said it her stomach tightened in fear. Did she really mean this?
He closed the door as slowly and quietly as he’d opened it. He stood perfectly still for a while before he turned to face her. “All right,” he said, nodding but looking down, not meeting her eye. And he opened the door and left.
The apartment felt, suddenly, cold and cavernous. She tried to watch television but couldn’t stand it anymore. There was a hollow ringing in her ears that wouldn’t stop. She realized she had no idea how to reach him. Would Cora know? But she couldn’t call Cora to ask her that. Would she have to go searching for him in all the bars in her neighborhood, like some sad, neglected wife in a bad old movie?
Four hours later her buzzer rang, and then he was there, in her doorway again. He had flowers in his arms—three big bunches of deep-blue baby orchids. And at that moment, his curly hair falling over the collar of his flannel shirt, he looked like he’d looked when he was sixteen. When he’d watched a ladybug traveling the length of her belly on the beach, tracing its path with his finger. When he’d kissed her sweetly, and made love to her so gently, on the floor of the Main Street Diner.
He still had the same haunted eyes. Looking into them then, as he stood there, watching her watching him, all her memories of Cider Cove, of Bobby and Richard and Cora, and Addie and Tom, all of it came back. Suddenly it seemed that those days of burrowing together in her dim apartment, clinging to one another desperately, made sense—and now they were over. Somewhere, somehow, someone had lifted a curtain or opened the blinds.
“I didn’t know what kind of flowers to get,” he said. “I don’t even know what you like.”
“Those are fine,” she said.
“I never really thanked you for taking me in.”
“You know you don’t have to thank me.”
She reached for him then, and for the first time since he’d rung her buzzer a week before, his arms, not hers, felt like the strong ones. She let go of something then. She let him hold her up.
He dropped the flowers and pulled her face to his. “I read your poem about Richard, after I met you in the bar that night,” he said. “‘The dark boy alone,’ ” he whispered, his breath warm and wet at her ear, “‘while the others cycle through the graves.’ ”
She pulled back to look at him. “You remember those lines?” she said, scanning his face for any hint of irony.
“I know the whole thing by heart,” he said. And then he recited it, line by line, word by word, while he took her hand and led her to the bedroom, and this time he undressed her, as slowly as he had years before, and wrapped her in his arms.
“I think I may love Bobby,” she says now, to Tom. “And I do think I want to have this baby with him.”
Tom nods. It’s clear he is skeptical.
A few days after he brought Scarlet the blue orchids, Bobby went home to spend time with his daughters, and then to visit Cora. Much as Scarlet hoped that day had somehow cured him of his need for a drink, it wasn’t quite that easy. He was drunk, in fact, when he came back to her apartment after his visit to New Jersey.
In October he checked into a clinic, and Cynthia filed for divorce. Eventually, when he was free to leave the clinic on occasional weekends, he stayed with Scarlet. “I’m going to stick with this,” he told her one weekend near Christmas, “for my kids. For me, for you.”
During those weekends when he stayed with her, Bobby refused to watch television or read the paper. Once he saw a picture on the cover of a magazine Scarlet had left on the coffee table, of a little boy’s face, peering out from under a bed. He was the son of a man who’d died in the World Trade Center attacks, and he’d hidden under the bed when a reporter had come to talk to his mother. Which didn’t stop the photographer who came along, apparently, from tracking him down.
“I understand that kid,” Bobby said. “Sometimes you just wanna hide under the bed.”
Scarlet was curled up to next to him on the couch. Now she looked up from the book she was reading; remarks like that worried her.
“I read somewhere that all the birds near the towers flew away just seconds before the attack,” she said to change the subject, yet not exactly.
Bobby said nothing.
“Addie and Tom used to talk about all the birds that flew into the glass of those towers and died. Someone they knew was doing research on that. I wonder what they’re thinking about all of this. I’m kind of afraid to ask.” Still no response.
“Listen,” she said then, turning to face him, “I’ve been thinking. I think I’d like to have a baby.”
He stared at her, wide-eyed, openmouthed.
“With me?” he said.
She tried to sound lighthearted when she laughed. “No,” she said, “with one of the other guys who hangs around here when you’re gone. Who do you think?”
He nodded, slowly, then seemed to scan the room as if he were looking for a way out. For a moment she feared she’d really set him up for a bender now. But then he looked at her and smiled, almost shyly. “Okay,” he said. “We could try that. Want to start now?”
“I can’t really explain why I’m pregnant,” she says to Tom now, assuming this is the real question he wants her to answer. “It just suddenly seemed like the right thing to do.” She turns to him and shrugs. “That’s worse than a cliché, isn’t it? Everybody started getting married and having babies after September 11. I guess I’m just one of the horde.”
Tom smiles as he looks over at her. “It does just seem like the right thing to do, Scarlet,” he says. He reaches over to stroke her hair. “It certainly was, for us.”
She leans closer to him, longing to hear more of his soft voice, more of that low, soothing rumble in the impossibly loud cab of the truck. Of course there’s more to say, she thinks. But the rushing air, the noise of the road below them—it’s all screaming around her now, and she can’t hear a thing.
“God, it’s like some kind of wind chamber in here or something,” she says, closing her eyes and pinching back the tears.
Then Tom says the very thing she would not let herself think, and things grow suddenly still. “We were both losing our mothers when we decided to have a child, weren’t we, love?” He reaches over to take her hand and she nods, staring at the darkness. And then she lets herself cry into the stillness.
Later, as they approach the house on Haupt Bridge Road, Scarlet’s cheeks are tight from her drying tears. Look how far she’s come, she thinks to herself, from dreams of a summer house on Nantucket, to an organic garden in Vermont, the
n a literary life in New York City. Now here she is, nearly two months pregnant, preparing to have a baby with her teenaged crush from New Jersey, an unemployed alcoholic in rehab, with no clear picture of where, or how, they are going to live, approaching her childhood home with her mother’s body in tow. Daughter of the infamous Addie Sturmer Kavanagh and her besotted husband, Tom, on the day after her mother’s death. Pulling into the drive behind her parents’ home, a cottage still decorated with her earliest crayoned scribblings and her mother’s lovely early paintings, preparing to dig a hole and bury her, in this land she loved and sometimes hated, on the ridge across the creek.
She laughs out loud at the thought.
Tom glances over as he turns off the engine. “What’s funny?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says, “nothing,” and she waves her hand in front of her face. It just feels like too much, suddenly, now that they’ve arrived.
Finally she takes another breath, then turns to face Tom. “Do you think I’m being foolish?” she asks.
He takes her face in his hands for a moment, then says, “I know you, Scarlet. You’ll figure out how to make it work.”
Then he pushes open his door and steps out into the moonlit night. The sound of the tree frogs is almost deafening; she had forgotten about that sound.
“Come on,” Tom says as he waves to Dustin, who is stepping out of the car behind them. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”
Tom busies himself with gathering shovels and pickaxes, then disappears into his and Addie’s bedroom for a while. Scarlet takes Dustin into the cottage and points him toward the bathroom. When he emerges a minute later, she is in the kitchen making tea. Looking at Dustin’s tired face, she realizes that he’s older than she’d thought—maybe not that much younger than she, in fact.
He accepts her offer of tea, sitting down at the kitchen table. She tries to make conversation—Was the drive all right? What did he think of the river road?—getting little more than one-word answers from him.
“It’s really nice of you to help us with all this,” she finally says, stuttering a bit with the awkwardness of it all, frustrated at knowing so little about him. “It must all seem kind of strange to you.”
He looks puzzled. “What must?” he asks.
She points toward the back door, in the direction of the truck where Addie’s body lies waiting, in Dustin’s rough-hewn coffin. “Well,” she says, “all of this. Driving my mother’s body back here under cover of darkness, getting ready to bury her secretly, nowhere near an actual cemetery . . .”
Dustin smiles at her then—such a sweet, soothing smile; he reminds her, at that moment, of Bobby, and she feels a pang of longing.
“No, it doesn’t seem strange. In fact this is a pretty easy burial. Tom worked everything out ahead of time. I’ve done plenty that were harder than this one.”
“You mean you’ve done this before?” she asks, still trying to absorb his words.
Now he looks puzzled again. “Of course,” he says, “lots of times.” And then, to Scarlet’s astonishment, he hands her a card. “Dustin Lamott, Alternative Burials,” it says, with nothing else but an e-mail address in the lower right corner.
“I’m sorry,” she says, handing the card back to him. “I just assumed you were one of Addie’s friends or admirers. She had a lot, especially among activists and”—she stumbles for words, finally pointing back at the card—“alternative people.”
“Well, I did admire your mother,” he says, sipping his tea. “Your father too. And I guess I’m kind of an activist too. I guess you could say I’m active in the effort to subvert the funeral industry.” He smiles as he says this, then tips his teacup in Scarlet’s direction.
She tips her cup back. “I had no idea,” she says, “that a natural burial was so difficult to arrange.”
“Most people don’t have any idea,” he says. “And by the time they find out, it’s too late. Some funeral director’s already got them signed up for a ten-thousand-dollar casket and has shot their mother or their husband full of formaldehyde and started painting on the makeup.”
Scarlet shudders, imagining Addie’s body being handled this way. “So how did they find you?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Word gets around. Internet, maybe. Tom e-mailed me a couple months ago, and I drove over to Scranton to get the barn siding. And then two days ago he e-mailed again and said it was time to load up the wood and drive to Cider’s Cove.”
“Cider Cove.” She corrects him instinctively, as this bit of background slowly sinks in.
He rises from the table then, carrying both of their cups to the sink. “Like I said,” he continues, “Tom took care of everything in advance. He’d already worked things out with the guy who owns that farm now. He said he was planning to tear the barn down anyway—he told me to help myself to all I wanted. And I did too; siding from an abandoned barn is good for what I do—lightweight and already starting to rot, and it hasn’t been painted or treated with anything for years, so the coffin’s not going to add any more unnecessary toxins to the soil.
“It’s not the easiest wood to work with, of course,” he continues, returning to his chair. Suddenly, it seems, they’ve hit on something Dustin likes to talk about. “It tends to fall apart when you hammer or sand it. Fortunately I had plenty to work with for Addie’s casket.”
Scarlet nods and tries to look interested. But she is still reeling from the things Dustin has just told her. Tom and Addie have been planning this burial for months? So all that drama two weeks ago, when she first arrived at Cider Cove to help with getting Addie comfortably arranged in Cora’s studio—Addie’s insistence that they bury her on land owned by the college, then Tom’s apparent hesitation to do anything quite so outlandish—was all of that some sort of ruse? she wonders. If they both knew all along what they planned to do, what in the world was the point of all that?
“So you’re saying Tom and Addie arranged all this with you months ago?” she says.
“Well, as much of it as they could. But you know, most deaths don’t allow you to plan every last detail. You don’t generally know when it’s going to happen, and when it does happen, you have to move fast. I have to be ready to pick up and go at a moment’s notice. Kind of hard on my wife and kids sometimes,” he says with a laugh.
“I can imagine,” Scarlet says. Thinking meanwhile, Ah, yes, of course this is who he is: another committed ecowarrior who’s married to the work of saving the planet. No matter the strain it puts on his marriage, his family. Of course this is who Addie would find. As soon as she thinks it, though, she feels a stab of guilt. What’s a parent supposed to do, abandon any and all passions the moment her child is born? “Keep writing,” she hears Addie saying to her last night. “That will keep you going.”
“But there is one thing that’s different about this particular burial,” Dustin says then, as he rises from the table and leans on the doorjamb, crossing his arms.
Only one? Scarlet thinks, trying to imagine what he has in mind. Transporting the body in a seafood truck? Burying Addie in such an audaciously illegal place?
“What’s that?” she asks, dreading his answer.
“I still don’t have any idea where we’re going to bury her. Do you?”
Walking outside, they find Tom climbing slowly up the steep hill behind the cottage, flashlight in hand. He is, he tells them, trying to step off the boundary lines for the little piece of land he bought, along with the cottage, thirty-seven years ago.
“I had to dig around forever to find the damn deed,” he says. “I’ve never given the property lines a thought. But obviously we can’t bury her down here, near the house.”
“No, not on a flood plain like this,” Dustin agrees. “We’ll have to find a spot that’s far enough from the creek, and also from your well.”
“Right,” Tom says. “But we don’t own all the way up to the top of the ridge, and even if we did, that’s getting a little too close t
o being in sight of some of the buildings at the college. And that hillside’s steep and wooded; I can’t quite imagine how we’ll find our way around all those roots.”
Dustin reaches for the flashlight. “Show me where you think the lines are,” he says. “I bet I can find a spot that will work.” He disappears into the darkness of the hillside, and for a while all they hear are his boots tramping through the brush. The beam of his flashlight weaves back and forth as he moves slowly up the hill.
Scarlet opens her mouth to say something, but no sound emerges. She reaches for her father’s arm and looks into his eyes, searching.
“But this isn’t what she wanted, Tom,” she finally says.
Tom looks at her tenderly, then pulls her into his arms. “Scarlet,” he whispers in her ear, “this is one of the things Addie and I talked about in that last hour before she died. I didn’t see any reason to tell Cora and Lou about it, and I assumed you were assuming all along that we’d just bury her here, on our land.”
She pulls her head free to look at him. “What are you talking about? What did you talk about before she died?”
“About where she wanted to be buried, love. In the end I persuaded her to let us do it here, on our land. Someplace quiet, without all the other complications.” He reaches over to smooth Scarlet’s hair, an instinctive gesture, something he’s done since she was a child.
“It won’t do a bit of good now, to try to stir up trouble like that,” he goes on. “We all know it, Scarlet. There’s too much money involved; something like an inconveniently buried body isn’t going to make anyone at the college change his mind.”
“That never would have stopped Addie,” she says, her aggrieved voice surprising her; since when did she think like Addie? “She never cared about the odds.”
In Hovering Flight Page 24