“We got you a homecoming present.” Ward opened the drawer he’d been fiddling with and something white appeared in his hand. A box. He squatted by the rocker, still a funny, kind-of-awkward thirteen-year-old. But his skin was smooth and his hair lay just so on his scalp and he seemed backlit by the glow she had commented on. How perfect he was, oddities and all.
“Open it,” he said.
“Um, okay.” She undid the band, which he pocketed, a brush of fingers in the exchange.
“Hope you like it.”
“I’m sure I will.” The corners of the box were crimped but the lid came off okay. “Oh Ward, it’s neat. It’s like they shrank a real rose and froze it tight. I don’t know what to say.” In the pause, she ran a finger over it, aware that Ward was looking at her, that he was so close she could touch him, that he was her boyfriend, not Jeff, and she’d been blind to it. “Jeez, Ward, you shouldn’t have. You’re the one with the birthday, and I don’t have anything for you, except to treat you to the movie. Thanks. It’s darling. Let me try it on.”
“That’s okay.” He was embarrassed, which she thought was real cute. “It’ll look great on you.”
She left the rocker and stood before the mirror. “The chain is so delicate.” She unclasped it and brought her fingers up under the tumble of hair. In the glass, her breasts lifted. The white rose slid along her blouse, seeking its proper place. “Can you reach the clasp? I can’t do this for beans.”
Ward came up behind her and took the ends from her. Then she brought her fingers up under her hair and exposed her neck. She could only see a little of him in the mirror but he had that fire about him still, less like a glow than the silent snapping flares of the sun’s corona at eclipse. She felt it tingle along her back like beach sun beating down. His fingers played and fumbled at her neck. Frustration grunted out of him once or twice, but his fingers relaxed and she heard a click. Then, incredibly, his lips bent to her neck and ineptly kissed her just above the clasped chain.
June turned to him.
“I’m sorry, I—”
She hugged him. Tight. His arms went about her, uncertain at first, then relaxing into an embrace. She kissed his neck, his chin. Then his mouth came down to meet hers, and his lips were as soft and warm as nestling doves. This was much better than Jeff, whom she’d always thought of as “in charge,” him being fifteen and almost a tenth grader. But with Ward, it was like perfect equals meeting, her best friend of eight years becoming something more. She felt enveloped by love, shy complete love that sparked similar feelings in her.
They broke the kiss. Ward hugged her too tightly but let up at her oomph. She gentled at his ear, “You’re a pretty special friend, you know?” Sunlight filled the room, but she felt surrounded by dusk. Her eyes played tricks: the radiance of Ward’s body, sparklers in a black July night dancing at the edges of her vision.
His whisper went to her heart: “I love you.” A real gamble, even now. He had completely opened to her and lay exposed, fearing her rejection; she felt his fear, and how much he adored her.
“I love you too, Ward.” She voiced it softly at his ear, pressing fiercely into him. He smelled amazing this close, and the corona of his love licked at her skin and made it sizzle. He gave an ohh. His tears she wiped with her cheeks, laughing in delight, and their lips came together again. She was woozy, heady with the richness of it, a naked swim in warm cream. Never had it felt this lovely with Jeff, never, not even when he touched her everywhere and made her go wild.
Taking Ward’s hand, she walked shyly with him, twisting the mini-blinds up tight so that the sun laid thin fierce lines along the meeting slats. The clubhouse cooled as she sealed it up, still early morning in the Sierra foothills. Ward’s space heater, set on high, put out ripples of orange heat, a high soft hum that scoured their ears. A haven, June thought, our home, Ward’s and mine. He’ll be all right with it all. He won’t question where I learned it, or else he’ll be too much involved to think about it until later.
She led Ward to the bed, eased her sandals off, undid the crushed hip pack, and sat beside him, kissing him all aglow. “Unbutton me,” she said, whispering close to his ear because it would have felt awkward looking at him.
“You want me to?”
“How does Timothy feel about it?”
“He’s going crazy.” They shared a laugh. “In a real nice way. He says it’s totally different from . . . well, from what it might be like if I didn’t like it. I’m not making much sense . . . oh, come here.” He propped a blue throw pillow against the wall, sat back and drew her up into his chest, facing out into the room. As her blouse tugged free of her shorts and Ward fumbled at the buttons, knuckles brushing her tummy, she closed her eyes and felt as though she were sinking into a hot bath. When she opened them, it seemed as if she lay back against toasty flame, casting shadows on the far wall. Her body tingled with joy. She wondered at the profound difference between her summer boyfriend and Ward, almost as if Jeff had been the final chapter of her childhood but this new Ward was a transformation leading straight into maturity. If this was true love, no wonder they sang songs about it.
“I guess we’re not going to the movies,” he said, his hands tentative and tantalizing about her bra.
“Do you want to?”
“No, I’d rather keep doing this. You’re so warm and beautiful. I could hold you forever.”
She arched back to kiss him, one hand at the side of his head. A sleeve fell open at her wrist. Sparks darted in the depths of Ward’s pupils. “Let’s get rid of this.” She turned to face him, kneeling between his legs. Her blouse shrugged off and away. Attacking his shirt, she kissed downward as button after button gave way. His hands sculpted the back of her neck, her shoulders, the symmetry of her shoulder blades beneath her bra straps. “Can you undo it?”
“Um, I think so.” He got it first time. Blind luck. June rose so he could ease it off.
She’d never gotten used to this moment with Jeff, but with Ward, her vulnerability opened in complete trust. She felt radiant herself, as if heat and light emanated from her core, fountaining outward at her breasts. Ward’s body looked now like videos she’d seen where scratches of light outlined dancing singers, only she couldn’t be sure her own excitement wasn’t affecting her vision. Weren’t there cones or rods that fired off, and mightn’t they overload at moments like this, basking a boyfriend in backfloods of imagined light?
Ward gasped. He told her he couldn’t believe how beautiful she was. Then they toppled over into embrace, the unencumbered warmth of their chests planed together. The clubhouse, cozy despite the kept-out sun, cupped them like divine hands. This room had been a place of fantasy for them for years. Countless times she had stretched out on this bed, her hand propping her girlish head. Now it was about to bind them in the sweet reality of intimate love. But Ward, for all his embraces and kisses where he lay beneath her, his body twisting in amazing light, was clearly virginal. It fell to her—so a high faint voice inside her prompted—to take the lead.
She broke the kiss, kissed his cheek, again, and put a hand on his belt.
“Should we?” he asked.
“Yes, sweetheart,” she said.
“I love the sound of that word.”
“Hush now. Lie still.” Sweet Jesus, she couldn’t be imagining the halo of light, a streetlamp in fog, at his head, nor the way it seeped away from him like fluorescent moss on a tree. And it seemed to be catching: Her hands, working at his belt and zipper and shrugging his jeans off, glowed like the hands of a praying bust. Mingled with the high hum of the space-heater were new voices. Imagined, surely. But then who could say what truths grown-ups knew about what really went on when two people came together in love? Or maybe they didn’t know; maybe the real thing was so rare that when it happened, people pretended it didn’t, denying the divinity of the light, denying the voices.
When Ward was naked, she laughed at how lovely he was. Jeff’s hands, moving everywhere, had made her feel
whole, not some disjoint being created by bits of cloth. She did Ward the same favor now, showing by touch what the light coming off him proclaimed as well, that from top to toe he was divine and unified, that his penis—as funny and exciting and obligingly stiff as it was—was just as much him as his legs or his shoulders or his head. She knew he was ready when the intensity of his body-glow began to ebb and flow at fever pitch and when his hands left off loving her breasts and started fumbling at her shorts.
“Be right back,” she said.
The hip pack lay on the floor. She zippered it open, found Jeff’s leftover condoms at the bottom, and tore one off. A ring finger and pinkie trapped it against her palm as she peeled off her shorts and panties.
She’d heard talk of afterglow, but this foreglow was amazing, this benignly radioactive skinlight she and Ward shared. She was a walking ball of luminescence. Light seemed to emanate from her bones, her blood, her spirit, bringing with it shifting whispering voices. Ward waited in a haze of pulsing light. She went to him, tore open the foil packet, rolled the condom down over him, and straddled him—needing him, taking his love all the way inside, touching herself as she rode him because he was tensed to explode and so was she.
Radiant joy welled in her, the voices rising and becoming one voice, somehow a familiar voice, light and airy. Wisps of light broke and snapped upon Ward’s body and hers as she felt the onset of orgasm take her. She lowered herself into the light that pulsed about her true love and felt his embrace above, his thrust below. Ward, cresting too, looked deep into her, the adoration in his eyes unbelievable, infinitely mirroring her own for him.
Then he made his sounds, so plaintive and sweet that they carried her over the top and she mixed them with her own, certain that the light’s intensity would ignite them. Instead, as she lost herself in ecstasy, the light took form. It swirled into articulation, two forms beside them on the bed. And Ward’s eyes went to them too, trying to focus on the coalescing light.
What June heard then was the elusive sound of a syllable that was both June and love at once. What she saw seemed less like ethereal creatures forming than like something that had always existed: a rebirth of what had once been hers as a girl.
She saw rippled color. Limbs shifted out of two bodies, amorphous but growing less so. Soft gray eye-lozenges modulated in waxy white faces. Mouths, mingled and distinct, O’d warm and alive.
Her heart leaped. She hoped she might die then, as she recognized her own dear Jeannie: the river of canary hair, those crystalline eyes, the voice that redeemed all woe. But this was Jeannie enmeshed with another being, arms and legs multiplied and entangled, touching June and Ward where their bodies warmed each other. Somehow June’s angel was looking directly at Ward’s and also directly at June. And June guessed, no she knew, that just as the male angel (who could it be but Timothy?) had his eyes fixed on both her and Jeannie, so too those eyes and the eyes of June’s guardian were fixed on Ward.
Dear dear June.
“Oh, God,” June gasped through the spreading wash of ecstasy. Timothy mouthed Jeannie’s words too but no sound came out.
“June, is that—?” But Ward’s eyes shifted past the angels, past the miraculous stroking of their fingers on the lovers’ bodies—and June turned to see what Ward was staring at.
There, as translucent as a mirage, its head cocked to one side, a squat black front-billed cap perched jauntily over its white-feathered forehead and large rimless pince-nez secured at the apex of its beak, stood a gangly stork, fading in disappointment even as she watched it.
*****
Tom picked out three eggs from the carton in the fridge, deftly retrieving them with one hand. They chilled his palm. “Only one for you? Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Sarah patted her belly, her legs angled under her where she sat at the kitchen table. “The munchkin doesn’t leave much room. So I’m doing what Doctor Keeshan advised and having lots of little meals instead of three big ones.”
“No sausage?”
“Too spicy. Heartburn.”
Tom crossed to the stove, where butter fizzed and bubbled in the frying pan. Same old brand of butter his mom had used, same old stove, same skillet, same worn patch of linoleum under his feet. He cracked the eggs, sizzled them in at close range so as not to break yolks, and tossed the shells into the sink.
“How about Samuel?” he asked.
“Nope, there was this kid in kindergarten, never said a word, but at recess he’d swing real high and sing this song over and over at the top of his voice.”
“Sounds familiar, I probably tried him on you before. Okay, scrub Sammy.”
He crossed to Sarah. The house felt too big with Mom gone, Dad insanely holed up in a rundown hotel for boozers and derelicts. But wherever Sarah was, Tom found warmth and contentment. He stood behind her chair, laying his palms against her milk-swollen breasts. Kissing her on the ear, he whispered, “You make me so happy.” Then he placed a hand on the basketball of her belly.
“Don’t you think you should tend to your eggs?”
“Look who’s talking.”
She craned her neck to kiss him. “I love you, Tom.”
“Love you too, hon,” he said, putting the weight of the past year into it. At first, everything had gone so well: meeting each other at college, getting married, conceiving Amy (or little what’s-his-face) last December, sharing all of it with Mom and Dad.
Then in April, after a week in Hawaii, they had come back to find Mom gone and Dad moping about the house, his words tangled and uncertain, no longer the man of fun and fire Tom had grown up with.
A week later, the phone rang; Tom got it in the hallway at the same time his dad uncradled the receiver upstairs. Hand over mouthpiece, he heard his mother tear into his father something fierce, digs and swipes, where are the divorce papers you promised, wounds opening up to weep and fester, where he’d always thought healthy tissue and clear smooth skin held sway.
Until that instant, his father’s distracted dithering had been a puzzle. But there in the hallway, hearing the nexus of his family shred while Sarah whispered “What’s wrong?” over and over like a stuck needle, he felt the vastness of his father’s loneliness hollow out his head, the raw defenseless brainmeat being scooped and scattered. He shut it off, shut it out, before it claimed him too.
Then his dad had vacated the home, spending most of his time in the town square, moving out to be nearer to free space, he said. Those not part of the grapevine had found his presence there amusing at first. But as his initially engaging euphoria gave way to bitterness, as his looks deteriorated and his clothing devolved to his one favorite suit all the time and the booze began to take increasing amounts of attention, they blocked him out as the others had, skirted about him, about the town square itself, pretended he wasn’t there.
There had been coolness toward Tom, toward Sarah too. If it hadn’t been for the support of George Schneider—thank God for understanding managers—he had no doubt the bank would have found an excuse to let him go months before.
“You have that munchkin of ours, rest up, and we’ll be gone from here before you know it. We’ll go south, somewhere on the coast.”
“But I like it here, Tom,” she protested.
“You’re just nesting.”
“No, that’s not it. Your eggs are calling, I think.”
“Jeez!” He crossed to the stove, switched burners, shut the one off. “They’re okay, just some brown patches. Yolks’re solid, I’m afraid. Sorry.”
“No problem.” Tom gave her the least damaged egg, salvaging what he could of the other two for himself. She persisted: “Really, we’ve got to help your father. We can’t give up on him, it doesn’t sit right.”
“We’ve tried. He won’t listen.”
“He’s family, Tom. Walking away’s no good.”
“Do we have to get into this right now?”
“No, I guess not.” Sarah took a bite of egg, but Tom knew she wasn’t going to let it l
ie. “It’s just not right to let him kill himself.”
“Like he says, Sarah, he’s a grown man. He’s made his own choices.” Tom salted his eggs and sliced them with the side of his fork. But he had no appetite for them. He watched his moving hand as if it belonged to someone else. “How many times do you offer help before you accept that someone is beyond saving?”
“When it’s your father, you keep offering it until he accepts it.”
Tom’s fork clattered on the plate. “Well I wish I could be as much of a saint as you, but I’ve had it with the old man. I just want to get on with my life. I want to forget him and go somewhere else and start over.”
“I’m sorry.” He felt like a heel, upsetting her like this, but then he guessed it was mutual. “Let’s drop it for now,” Sarah went on, “but maybe while you’re at work, I’ll think about what we can do. Maybe we can map out a plan after dinner.”
He sighed. “If you like, yes, let’s.” He heard sarcasm creep in. “No, I know how that sounded and I really mean, let’s do that. But I also mean, I don’t believe anything is going to work.”
“At least you’re willing to try.” She rested a hand on his arm. “You haven’t given up hope.”
Hope. An empty word. Fruitless planning. But if it kept Sarah happy, he’d go with it until the baby was born and she could be more clear-headed about what was real and what was pure fantasy. “No, I suppose we can always hope.
“I’ll try, hon,” he said, “I’ll try.”
4. How Three Turned Into Six and One
“If this is a dream—” said Ward.
It’s not. Timothy, enmeshed with Jeannie and yet entirely distinct, like lime Jell-O bonded fractally from below to cherry, sounded at once flutier and more sonorous than before. A few years back, Ward’s mother had replaced her last-tweet, last-woof, bargain-basement speakers with top-of-the-line ADC Soundshapers; the impact of Timothy’s words went deeper than Ward’s favorite Wagner transformed by those new speakers, deeper because they mainlined into his brain, became one with the decrescendo of his orgasm, one with Ward himself, one with his overwhelming love for June Lockridge.
A Flight of Storks and Angels Page 6