The Golden Hour

by T. Greenwood

  “See you in a bit,” he said.

  He hung up, thankfully, before I blurted out those old, familiar parting words. A verbal habit, a tic: Love you.

  Gus pulled into the driveway just a half hour later.

  Avery was still waiting on the steps for him while I lingered inside. I took a cursory look around the kitchen, lifted the lid of the Crock-Pot and stirred the thick chowder so I’d have something to do with my hands.

  The door opened, and Avery led Gus into the house.

  “Daddy’s here, Mama! Look!”

  “Hey,” he said, setting down his duffle bag.

  “Hey.” I smiled and hugged him awkwardly. He smelled good, like clean laundry.

  “It smells good in here,” he said.

  I gestured stupidly at the Crock-Pot. “Thanks. It’s chowder.”

  Avery was like a child possessed. Manic, wild, dragging Gus by the hand up the still-precarious staircase to her room. Likely standing on tiptoes to yank the blackout shades down, shutting the door to watch the constellations appear on her upside-down sky. Their voices were muffled from where I stood in the kitchen. I tried not to eavesdrop, but couldn’t help but feel excluded. Avery and Gus in their own private universe. They were in the same house with me, but it felt like they were on another planet entirely.

  Within an hour, Gus was poking around in the shed, looking for a decent board to make the swing he’d promised her. He crawled up into the attic and located the beams to which he could safely install the hooks to suspend the ropes. In the kitchen I watched them through the window in the yard as he sawed and sanded and Avery watched on.

  It grew dark early, and they came in when I called them both to supper.

  We sat around the small table in the kitchen. Avery chattered away and our spoons clinked and clanked against the bowls’ sides.

  “There’s plenty of lumber in the shed. I might be able to fix the stairs for you,” he said.

  “That’s okay.” I shook my head. The chowder was too hot, and I’d burned the roof of my mouth. “Pilar’s hired a carpenter to come by as soon as the right balusters come in. They had to special order them.”

  “They’re kind of dangerous,” Gus said. “I want to at least put up a barricade until you can get a railing up there.”

  “Okay, if you want. We’re careful though,” I said. “How’s the shop?”

  The talk was growing smaller and smaller with each passing moment. I wondered when we’d revert to the weather.

  He shrugged. “Good. We got a big job for a new hotel going up in the city,” he said. “I’ve been getting a lot of overtime. I worked almost sixty hours this week. To make up for taking Monday off.”

  Gus would stay with us through Monday and then take the late ferry home on Monday night.

  “Are you drawing?” I asked, handing him a beer.

  “Yeah, actually, a lot. With you guys gone, I’ve got a lot of time on my hands.”

  Gus’s art was a contradiction. Instead of using canvas, he salvaged tin sheets (corrugated roofing and siding). Oxidized and rusted out. They were all metal and grit at first glance, but then, as you looked closer, you could see the most tender, meticulous drawings (usually done in a white grease pencil). Realistic images inspired by the photos of him and his brothers salvaged by his father when his family’s house burned down. He grew up in Queens in the ’80s and ’90s, with a single father and two brothers. The drawings depicted the boys, each one nearly identical to the next, doing boy things: playing marbles in the street, leaning up against parked cars, hunching over a card game (one boy looking back over his shoulder, standing watch). The boys in these images were restless boys. Innocent boys at the precipice of something, at the edge. For one of them, Gary, this buzzing disquietude would eventually lead him to drugs, to jail. For Sam, the second, suicide. And for Gus, the third, the boy looking over his shoulder, it led to art.

  In every piece, that boy, that young version of Gus, stood guard over the others. Even though he was the youngest. Even though they should have been the ones taking care of him. My favorite, the only one I could bear to look at without feeling like my heart was being ripped out, was one of them playing with a hose, unraveled from the side of a house. In this one, a six-year-old Gus holds the hose and aims it at the backs of the two older brothers, who are, for one oblivious moment, unaware of what is about to happen.

  Avery was shoveling the lobster chowder in her mouth. I thought it was too rich, too buttery, too sweet, but she couldn’t seem to get enough of it.

  “How about you?” he asked softly. “Are you painting?”

  This was such a sore spot. Like a bruise that wouldn’t heal. I imagined my heart a mottled green and blue.

  “I’ve started something.” I thought of the empty, pristine canvas.

  “Another commission?” he asked, and I heard just a hint of disappointment. Of disgust.

  And this pissed me off.

  “No,” I took a deep breath so I wouldn’t explode. “Something else.”

  Gus nodded. Silent.

  “So what did you do for Thanksgiving?” I asked, taking a long swig of my beer.

  He shrugged. “Nothing much. Went over to Ned’s for dinner. Out for drinks afterward. There’s a new place near his house.”

  Even as my stomach turned and my body cautioned me to stop, I persisted. “Who all went?” I asked.

  He shrugged again, his mouth twitching a bit. “Ned, Wes, Mia. You know.”

  Mia? I didn’t know who Mia was.

  “Who’s Mia?”

  “Just some chick Wes knows.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Yeah, she’s cool. You’d like her. She works part-time at a new gallery in SoHo.”

  Mia. And suddenly, I felt overwhelmed by something, a sort of need to be fascinating, interesting, pretty. I hadn’t felt like this with Gus since we started dating. It was as if I needed him to want me. It was illogical, stupid even. But I’d had two beers, and my heart was broken. I felt this need like something hot and alive in my blood.

  “Actually, I showed her some of my work, and she said she’d talk to the gallery owner. But who knows.”

  Mia. She materialized in my imagination: long legs, bobbed blond hair, cool glasses.

  I became achingly aware of my body, what he must see sitting across the table. The extra pounds I’d put on since we’d gotten here. The blemish on my chin. My hair, which was frizzy and unwieldy in this salty humidity. I suddenly, regretfully, wished I’d worn something sexier than the jeans and sweatshirt I’d mistakenly thrown on thinking it might send the message that I didn’t care. That I wasn’t trying to impress him. That he wasn’t worthy of my putting on anything pretty. What the hell was I doing?

  I watched my hand reach across the table, touch the wedding band that still circled his ring finger.

  But even as I leaned in, I felt him pulling away.

  “Let’s get that swing strung up, baby girl,” he said to Avery, pushing his chair away from the table. The legs made an awful squeaking sound on the floor.

  “Yay!” she said, leaping from the table and bounding up the stairs.

  “Slow down,” Gus warned her. “And I am fixing those stairs,” he said to me.

  I watched Gus climb the stairs and felt the loss of him more acutely than I had in months. Here he was, stuck with me on an island, and he’d never felt farther away.

  * * *

  Later, I did the dishes alone in the kitchen, listening to the sound of Avery literally swinging from the rafters above me, her gleeful squeals and Gus’s husky voice cooing at her. They must have been up there for an hour before Gus came down alone.

  “Where’s Av?” I asked.

  “She crashed out. Too much excitement for one day, I guess,” he said, and smiled. “Can I get another beer?”

  “Oh, yeah, of course,” I said, motioning to the fridge.

  He grabbed two beers and handed me one. I was sort of buzzed already, but I didn’t know
what to do with my hands, and so I accepted it. We stood awkwardly in the kitchen, in a strange sort of impasse. Outside, the sun was gone, and the sky was dark. Moonless. The air felt electrified. Swollen.

  “So what have you been doing besides painting?” he asked.

  “Hanging out with Av,” I said, shrugging. “We’re working on her reading. She likes to help me cook too. Oh,” I added. “I found something.”

  “Huh?” he asked.

  “In the basement,” I said. “I was down there to light the pilot on the furnace when we first got here.”

  He raised his eyebrow at me in disbelief. And I had to smile. I didn’t even like lighting the pilot on the gas stove at the duplex. He’d had to come over at least a half dozen times to do it for me while I cowered in the doorway hoping the house didn’t blow up.

  “It was hidden in a weird hole in the wall. A box filled with undeveloped film.”

  “Wow. Who took them?” he asked, his face alight with the soft glow of the table lamp.

  “I think it was whoever lived here before.”

  “You mean the person who sold Pilar the house?”

  “No, the house was in probate. The house has been empty since the early ’80s.” I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d been holding on to this secret too long. “Let me show you,” I said, then felt a sudden, distinct ache. Guilt. Like I was somehow betraying the women in the photos.

  I thought about Pilar snapping pictures of the one on the boardwalk with her phone. And so instead of showing him the photo on the wall, I went to the dining room and grabbed the boxes from where I’d left them on the floor.

  “Jesus, Wyn. There must be fifty rolls in here.”

  “I know,” I said. “It would cost me a fortune to get them all printed.”

  “I could have Wes do it,” he said. Wes was our friend from school who had a darkroom in his apartment.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “That’s okay.”

  Regret fell heavily across my shoulders. I felt the same way I felt sometimes after a party where I drank too much, said too much. The remembered conversations (gossip or mean-spirited sentiments set loose by the liquor) like tiny, sharp pebbles in my shoes for days afterward.

  “I mean, I got a couple rolls developed, and it’s nothing exciting. Just some vacation pictures.”

  “Still,” he said. “Aren’t you curious? I mean about what’s on the rest? The fact that whoever took them went so far as to hide them? And what do you think it means, Epitaphs and Prophecies?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s expensive, paper’s expensive.” I was backpedaling now, wondering what selfish impulse had led me here. Why had I shared this? Again. I was furious with myself.

  “Seriously. He wouldn’t have to make prints. But he could at least develop the film, get you negatives. Contact sheets if you wanted.”

  I thought about my dwindling account. About the remaining rolls of film. I thought about the trek I had to make just to get to the post office to send off the film. It could take me years before I was able to get them all developed. I also thought of those photos I had already seen. The feeling I had when I found them. The sense of discovery.

  I started to nod. “Okay, okay. That would be cool. But he doesn’t need to make prints. Just the negatives would be great.”

  Gus nodded.

  “God, I really wonder who took them,” he said.

  I suddenly flashed on the old guy I’d met at the restaurant in town. I wondered if the woman he was talking about was the same one who’d taken the pictures. I also thought about the way the next-door neighbor responded when I’d asked who had lived here. The man’s bewildered face, the woman exclaiming about rats and slamming the door in our faces. The old guy had said something about asking my neighbor.

  “I think the people next door must know something,” I said.

  “Next door?”

  “Yeah. That huge mansion on the other side of the trees.”

  “Let’s go check it out,” he said, grinning impishly.

  “Oh, I don’t think they’re home,” I said, shaking my head. “I think it’s just a vacation house.”

  “So, it’s empty?” he said, his eyes sparkling. I knew this look; I’d seen the same wonderful, mischievous sense of adventure in his eyes a thousand times. “Come on. Let’s go take a peek.”

  “What about Av?” I said.

  “We’ll bring the monitor.”

  Back at home we’d hang out on the neighbor’s porch after Avery went to sleep at night, chatting with our neighbors, the monitor perched on the railing. We’d hear her if she woke up. Still, she was never more than a few quick steps away.

  “She’ll be fine. I promise. We’ll be quick,” Gus implored.

  I hesitated, but when he reached for my hand, I felt my heart quicken. This was the way things were supposed to be with Gus. This is who we were supposed to be, who we were together.

  I made sure the baby monitor was on in Avery’s room, and that she was still fast asleep, and grabbed the receiver. We put on boots and mittens and hats, wrapped scarves around our faces. Gus shoved a couple of beers in his pockets, and we headed out into the cold night.

  “Lock the door,” I told him. “Just in case she wakes up. And seriously, we’ll have to be quick.”

  I led him down the rocky cliff to the beach, and we stood looking out at the water. The moon was obscured by the thick clouds overhead but illuminated the sky from behind. The sand was unyielding, hard. Frozen. I imagined all of the pieces of sea glass that lurked beneath the surface waiting to be unearthed later.

  The monitor crackled in my hand. I listened carefully. Heard her sigh.

  “She’s fine,” Gus said. The sounds of her sleep were familiar to both of us.

  At the foot of the stone steps, I motioned for him to follow me.

  When we reached the top, the mansion sat before us, just a silhouette against that wild sky. There wasn’t a single light on.

  “Holy shit,” Gus said.

  He walked toward the dark house, and I felt like I should reach out and stop him. Gus was always more bold than I was, always the first one to step through a doorway, me always at his heels.

  “Have you met them yet?” he asked.

  “Pilar and I brought them a pie.”

  Gus turned to me. “A pie?”

  “For Thanksgiving.” I shrugged. “A couple answered the door. Older. Like sixty or something. They looked like they were from a J. Crew catalog. The lady was weird. Totally slammed the door in my face.”

  “Have they always lived there?” Gus asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose.”

  “Do you think they knew the owner of your house?”

  Something about the way he said this felt strange. It was Pilar’s house, not mine. My house was that duplex back in Queens. Our house.

  “Do you think anybody’s home?” he asked, creeping across the lawn.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s totally dark.”

  “Let’s go see,” he said, and the boyish smirk, the one I was powerless to resist, beckoned me.

  We made our way across the massive expanse of the front yard. The ground was crisp, hard beneath our feet. I kept checking the monitor. Still, just the quiet sound of Avery sleeping on the other end.

  Gus ducked deep into the shadows and slipped around the side of the house. I had to run to keep up with him. The house was even more enormous than it appeared from the front. Easily five or six thousand square feet. The only fence, however, was the natural one made by the woods that separated the mansion from Pilar’s property.

  When we got to the backyard, Gus stopped.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “What?” I asked, breathing heavily, bent over to catch my breath.

  “Look.”

  The backyard was like something out of Gatsby. A swimming pool made to look like a natural body of water, circled by a labyrinth of foliage. The pool was empty now, drained for the
winter, I supposed. Surrounding it were rocks and hedges. Weeping willows hanging overhead like something from a dream.

  “Come on,” Gus said. It was a phrase he’d said a thousand times to me over the years. Words filled with the possibility of adventure. Of excitement. At the end of that single, beckoning directive was, inevitably, the promise of fun.

  “What about Av?” I said.

  “She’s right over there,” he said. “We can be at the house in thirty seconds if we go through those trees.”

  I peered at the trees, and my heart pounded hard.

  Gus went to the edge, climbed down the ladder into the depths of the empty pool, and motioned for me to join him. I could feel his hands on my hips guiding me down into the dark hole. Grateful for the certainty of them. The steadiness of him.

  When we reached the bottom, he pulled one beer out of his pocket, unscrewed the cap and handed it to me. It was nearly frozen. I was nearly frozen. We were in the deep end. Over our heads.

  We sat down on the cold bottom of the pool and drank our beers in silence. The monitor crackled, but she remained asleep.

  It was so dark, I could barely see the outline of him. I could have been alone here, at the bottom of this pit.

  When he finally spoke, his voice echoed.

  “This is awesome. Look up!”

  When I looked up at the sky, my eyes were confused at first. It looked like constellations, but it couldn’t be. The sky had been filled with clouds. I thought of Avery’s room, of that upside-down night sky.

  “It’s snowing!” I said, when the first few snowflakes fell on my open face. Cold, then melting on my cheeks.

  “It’s snowing!!” Gus said. “Woohoo!” His howl echoed against the concrete sides of the pool.

  He reached for my hand and pulled me up to my feet. And we ran up and down the bottom of the pool, faces peering up into the sky. Finally, breathless, I stopped. He held me. It took me by surprise. I was buzzed and freezing cold and exhilarated and vertiginous from the darkness, from the dizzying sky. The snow, the snow, the snow.