by Lauren Wolk
Then a girl who had been watching from nearby rocks
walked through the mob of birds and spoke quietly to the boy.
Looked out toward the sea. Gestured at the sky. Glared at the birds.
And walked away.
The boy watched her go.
Looked at the birds for a very long time.
Then he threw the feast high through the sun-sated air
and walked away slowly, the bag balled in his pocket,
his arms straight out at his sides,
his hands sweeping through
the most uncelebrated region of the sky.
Rachel closed the book and slipped it into her coat pocket. A woman near her turned and looked into her husband’s eyes. He gave a small shrug. Rachel, noticing, smiled. She turned, walked away from the edge of the grave, and stood with Joe while the minister invited the mourners to throw flowers or earth down onto Ian’s casket. Without a word, Rachel and Joe declined.
One week later, Joe woke up in the middle of the night and opened his eyes. He lay quietly, waiting for whatever had awakened him to resume. There was thunder in the far distance, but he did not think he had been awakened by thunder. Acorns and twigs sometimes fell loudly onto the Schooner’s roof, but there was no wind. On occasion, an arrogant raccoon would scratch its irritable hide against the Schooner’s bumper and set everything rocking. The first time this had happened Joe had nearly fainted from fright, but he couldn’t remember the last time a raccoon had brought him up out of sleep into this kind of wakefulness.
Gradually, he grew sleepy again. His body grew heavy. His breathing slowed. And then, as his eyelids slid to a close, he remembered.
He climbed out of his bunk and turned on a lamp, pulled an apple crate out of the back of his closet, and removed from it several dusty books and a bouquet of winter gloves. In the bottom of the crate sat the box of gold. Still inside was Holly’s letter.
He carried it back to his bunk, sat down, and read it through, once, twice, once again. Then he put the letter back into the box of gold, replaced the books and gloves, slid the crate into the closet, and began to dress.
Rachel awoke to the sound of someone banging on her door. The air pulsed with the sound of the hammering. When she heard a man calling her name, she was certain that his voice was a stranger’s, it was so hoarse and terrible.
“Who is it?” she called with both of her palms flat against the door.
The banging stopped. “It’s Joe,” he said.
When she opened the door, he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her up the stairs, past her cooling bed, and into the corner where she kept her books.
“What’s wrong?” she gasped as they stumbled through the darkness. “For God’s sake, Joe,” she cried as he knocked over a lamp and scrabbled for it in the dark. “Tell me.”
“That poem you read at Ian’s funeral,” he said, breathing more slowly, finding the lamp and switching it on. He got up from his knees, put the lamp gently on the table, and turned to the nearest bookcase. “Would you please show me the book it came from?”
He had terrified her. For a book. And it was in Rachel to throw him out, kick him down her front-porch stairs, sweep sand into his eyes. “You had better have a goddamned good reason for this,” she muttered, reaching for a slender book with blue binding.
He seized it from her, turned it over in his hands, opened it. He flipped impatiently past the first page, the second, paused at the third, closed the book, and sat heavily on the floor.
“What did you do with the jacket?” he asked her, using his mouth carefully.
“It was in my way,” she said. “It’s”—she strode across the room to her desk—“right here.” He made no move to regain his feet. She brought the jacket to him, put it in his hands, felt her anger abating as she watched him slowly look at every part of the jacket, read every word on it, and carefully set it aside.
“These poems were written by Harriet Caldwell,” he said. “My sister’s name was Harriet. Her middle name was Caldwell, my mother’s maiden name. My sister was a poet. And I think I was that boy on the beach. The one who didn’t understand about birds.” He held on to the book like it was a lifeline. “I have to use your phone,” he said, and started for the stairs.
Chapter 31
“Mrs. Corrigan?”
“Yes?” the woman said, her voice rough with sleep.
“Ardith Corrigan?” he asked, paused, switched the phone to his other ear. “Look,” he said, when she did not immediately reply. “I know it’s the middle of the night, but it’s important that I speak with Ardith Corrigan. Emily’s mother. Are you—”
“Has something happened to Emily?” she said in a rush and then, almost immediately, asked, “Who is this?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Corrigan. My name is …” And here he had to stop, had to open the lexicon of his former life. “My name is Christopher Barrows.” He was astonished that, with Rachel nearby, he had lowered his voice.
“Christopher Barrows?” She was silent for a long moment. Then, “What do you want?”
Taken aback by her tone, he too paused before saying, “If you are Emily’s mother, I hope you’ll be able to tell me where I can reach her.”
“Why?”
“Well … it’s a long story.” He was beginning to think he had made a terrible mistake. “I’m trying to find Emily so I can talk to her about my sister, Holly Barrows. They were roommates at Bryn Mawr. Emily—”
“Look, young man,” the woman interrupted. “I don’t know who you are or what you want, but you had better leave Holly alone.”
His hand trembled. He grabbed his jaw. “She’s alive?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Holly.”
“I’m going to hang up now,” said Mrs. Corrigan. It was clear that she was nervous, angry, afraid.
“Don’t,” he said. “Please listen to me for a moment.” He carried the phone over to Rachel’s kitchen table and sat down awkwardly, as if his brain were too consumed with what he was saying and what he was hearing to manage anything more. “My name is Christopher Barrows,” he said once again. “Most people call me Kit. Or they did,” he amended. “I have a different name now. I last saw my sister, Holly—Harriet—over two years ago, and a few days after that I learned that she had died.”
He heard the gasp, had expected to hear it.
“But she didn’t die, did she?” he asked, and even though he had come to suspect this, it wasn’t until he heard her say, “Of course not,” that he allowed himself to believe it, truly to believe it, and then his relief was so enormous that at first he did not understand what she said next.
“But you did,” she said quietly.
“Excuse me?”
“You did,” she repeated. “You died. Holly’s father tracked her down, told her that you had died in a car wreck the day after she left home.”
“He told her …”
“That you had died. He told her you had died.”
“And he told me that she had,” he said.
“Oh, my God,” Mrs. Corrigan whispered fearfully.
“My own father. My own goddamned father,” he said, standing up in the middle of the small kitchen.
“Oh, you poor, poor children,” Mrs. Corrigan said, and he heard her begin to cry.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Corrigan,” he assured her. “Everything’s going to be all right now.”
And in a safe corner of her own, warm kitchen, Rachel felt the marrow of her bones grow cold.
Almost immediately after calling Mrs. Corrigan, Joe fell asleep on Rachel’s couch with Pal at his feet.
As she had on another night, long ago, when Joe had called his father and learned of Holly’s death, Rachel sat nearby and watched Joe sleeping. He had changed since that earlier time. Grown thinner. Stronger. His hair was longer, brindled with sun. His hands showed signs of work. And the arrogance that had once hardened his face had been replaced with sensibility, so that even in sleep
he appeared to be aware of the world.
Before she returned to her bed, Rachel stopped in front of the mirror at the foot of the stairs and looked at herself. She did not seem to have changed nearly so much.
In the morning Rachel gave Joe breakfast and listened when he told her again, in fits and starts, what his father had done. Through all of it he was preoccupied, dazed. She watched him carefully the way a mother watches an ailing child. She waited for him to touch her, and when he did not, she closed her hands into fists and crossed her aching arms.
After breakfast she waited outside while he called his sister. She waited for a long time. Then she drove him out to the Schooner so he could pack a small bag, took him back to town afterward, to her bank for the money he’d need to get to San Francisco.
“What am I supposed to call you now?” she asked him as they waited for the Greyhound in front of Frank’s Gas ’n’ Go.
When he turned to her, she saw the sudden warming of his eyes. “Call me what you’ve always called me,” he said, putting his arms around her. “Joe. Just Joe. I love that name.” But even as he kissed her she felt him again retreating. And at the sound of the approaching bus, the light again receded from his eyes.
When they could no longer see the bus, Rachel and Pal walked slowly down the street to Angela’s Kitchen. She was not hungry, wanted no food, but was not quite ready yet to be alone.
“Joe’s gone to see his sister for a week or so,” Rachel said. She had decided to spend the afternoon helping Angela make peach cobbler and corn bread while Dolly took care of the tables. It was a hot July afternoon, and the few customers who straggled in off the shimmering street ate cold sandwiches, drank their lemonade from weeping glasses, and wandered off in search of shade.
“His what?” Angela asked, her mouth full of peach.
So Rachel told her what Joe’s father had done.
“That son of a bitch,” Angela said. “He ought to be shot.”
“Well, maybe.” Rachel nodded. “He won’t see his children again. Or grandchildren, if he ever has any.” Rachel chose a peach from the basket at Angela’s elbow. “He’s a director of several large corporations. He’s a trustee at some posh university. One of the Ivies. And he’s a consultant for the government. Joe’s going to collect his trust fund and put it somewhere safe, and then he’s going to write a few letters. Let those places know what kind of a man his father really is.”
“Might work,” Angela said, her hands glazed with peach juice. “Might not. You know how the world works.”
“Maybe it’ll make Joe feel better,” Rachel said, shrugging.
“You all right?”
“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Angela just shook her head, wiped her hands on her apron.
By the time the supper crowd began to arrive, Angela’s face was white, glistening, with red patches mottling her cheeks. She poured a tumbler full of cool water and drank down another tablet of salt.
“Why the hell are we baking corn bread on a day like this?” Rachel muttered. Her thick hair was tied high off her neck, but enough had escaped to cling wherever it touched her hot skin. “Get away from that damned oven, Angie, before you fall in.”
“Quit yelling at me,” Angela growled. But she closed the oven door, dropped her mitts, and ducked under the counter. “Move over.” Rachel made room for her under the ceiling fan. “My kingdom for an air conditioner,” Angela groaned.
The next day, a Sears delivery truck pulled up in front of Angela’s Kitchen. The driver opened the back doors, pulled down a ramp, hopped inside the truck, and soon reappeared with a big box on a dolly. On top of the box he set a toolbox and a coil of thick yellow extension cord.
“She’s a right good girl,” Angela said under her breath as she headed for the door.
But Rachel always did the best of her deeds when she felt the devil in her rising.
She knew she should be glad for Joe and Holly both, but instead she felt cranky and spiteful. She wanted to sit in her kitchen and eat everything in her cupboards, jar by jar. She wanted to sleep all day and lie awake in the hammock all night, watching the bats that were a shade blacker than the sky, wondering what the night birds thought of them. Wondering what papayas tasted like. Wondering anything but what Joe was doing without her.
She wanted to feed Pal with tenderloins and fresh eggs until she stopped sitting by the door, her ears cocked toward the road, waiting for the sound of Joe’s return. She wanted to go about her business, get on with her life, but she felt too listless to bother with much of anything.
In the evenings she sat on her front porch with Pal, listening to her parents’ old records, one after the other, until the stars eased through the fabric of a sky made threadbare by approaching night. The songs left her so sad that she felt almost afraid for herself. She listened to Ed Ames singing “Try to Remember,” Andy Williams singing “Moon River,” Judy Collins singing about sons.
At night she lay in her bed and imagined Joe eating crabs on Fisherman’s Wharf, dancing at a diner in Sausalito, laughing with strangers. She imagined him standing on a beachhead, looking out over the extraordinary Pacific, letting the cold, salty air rush over him, his back firmly toward the east. But most of all she imagined him with Holly.
She couldn’t stop thinking of the two of them, a continent away, linked by blood and adversity, two of the strongest bonds there are. Rachel could not imagine that Joe would spend any of this time away thinking about Belle Haven or about her, unless it was to rehearse how to say he wouldn’t be coming back. The more she thought about this, the more convinced she became that Joe would be seduced by the West, commit himself to the sister he had long thought dead, and put Belle Haven behind him. She was not hurt that he had gone without her, for it had never occurred to her that she too might go. But it hurt that he had gone at all, even though she understood why he had.
For three days she listened for the phone to ring, and when after that Joe had not called, she unplugged her phone, gagged it with its cord, and threw it under a chair.
On the third night since Joe had left Belle Haven, Rachel dreamed that he was lying in her hammock with his hat over his face, his hands behind his head, his long legs crossed. When she sat down beside him, the hammock tipped him over so that he had to grab her around the waist to keep from falling. And when the hat fell to the ground, she looked down, laughing, and saw that it was not Joe lying there in her hammock but the young man who had fed her ice cream from an unclean bowl, whose sheets she had bloodied, whose face she had all but forgotten. Harry’s face. Harry Gallagher. Whose name tasted like bad meat in her mouth.
On the fourth day since Joe’s departure, Rachel awoke to the sound of birds outside her window. Listening to the sound of them, she remembered the feel of Joe in her arms.
She knew why she had mixed him up with Harry in her dream, but as she lay in her bed she wondered why Harry’s common brand of barbarism had stayed alive in her blood for so long. Perhaps, she thought, what he had done seemed more heinous in the context of her placid adolescence. People had always been kind to her. Belle Haven had been a wonderful place to grow up in. Perhaps, she thought, she had been too lucky. She had certainly been naïve. This town, which had kept her safe, had also kept her from knowing the world. Perhaps, in consequence, Belle Haven had made her a perfect mark.
The birds were still singing. A shaft of sunlight slowly approached her bed. There was a cool breeze coming through the nearest window. “Enough.” She sighed, pushing the sheet down and away, swinging her legs off the bed and rising.
She missed Joe. She was angry with him. She wanted him back. But on that spectacular morning she tied back her hair, cuffed her sleeves, grabbed a wicker basket from the pantry, and slammed the door shut behind her. “Never waste a summer day,” she said out loud and bounded down the steps into the sunshine, stomped down the hill, and headed for Caspar’s Hollow.
Rachel had accomplished a great deal in the two years since she’
d left school. She had raised funds for special door-to-door bus service for the elderly and the handicapped, fattening the pot with money of her own. She had spent scores of hours in Belle Haven’s single library, scribbling down the titles of essential books she could not find, and had then donated them all, boxes and boxes of them, and new shelves to hold them. She had bought dozens of flowering trees and arranged for them to be planted wherever there was room: along the creek, in the park, outside the post office, throughout the town. She had taken a course in CPR. She had spent a hundred afternoons with the kindergarten class—singing, painting, storytelling. And every Thursday morning for two years, she had walked down along the old, meandering, leaf-slick cow path that led into Caspar’s Hollow to sit with Mr. Caspar and hold his knotty hand, water his plants, make sure he had enough to eat.
Ross Caspar was too old to do any more farming; his wife had died a long time ago, and his children had moved away. So he lived alone on his hill-bound farm with a passel of dirty black kittens and an attic full of bats. When the batteries in his hearing aid went dead, he simply turned up the sound on the television and made Rachel look straight at him when she talked. When the television went dead, Rachel brought him a book and began to teach him how to read. And when he finished reading his first good story, he laughed and cried and beat his fists on the arms of his old chair until the air became foggy with dust.
“You’re on your own now,” Rachel had said.
“Don’t I know it,” the old man had replied, wiping the tears off his baggy face. “Bring me some more books, Rachel, next time you’re out this way.”
And she had. Every Thursday morning. For two years. Rain or shine.
It had been weeks now since anything unusual had happened in Belle Haven. The grass had grown back over Otto Browning’s grave. The water in the Hutters’ well was fresh and cold. Even at the edge of town, boreholes that had once fairly whistled were often quiet now, and the fumes they vented were mild, the smoke infirm. In the face of all this, Rachel had allowed herself to be seduced by summer: by the scepters of corn that raced upward, creaking and snapping, through the quiet summer nights; by the children stalking crayfish along the shady banks of Raccoon Creek; by the black storms that blew in from the west, lifting the branches of the trees, flashing the white, warning backs of the leaves.