“I didn’t want to go home alone.”
She didn’t say anything for a long moment, and I looked out the window at the cornfields.
“It got better, though, once you got your driver’s licence, and that piece of shit car,” I said at length, trying to put the conversation back on track. “At least then we weren’t hurtling through the night on our ten speeds.”
“And you always came with me, then walked all the way home.” Her voice was warm at the thought.
“Yeah. I wanted—” I tightened my hands around the wheel “—I wanted to spend as much time with you as I could. I didn’t want the days to end. Not like that. I wanted. . . . You know what I always dreamed of? I dreamed of spending the night with you. Waking up in the morning and having you there with me. We never had that.”
“I thought we would,” she said. “I thought we’d have a lifetime of nights together.”
I couldn’t say anything to that.
With the sun on the horizon, I pulled up to the crossroads where the highway met the lake road.
“Left,” she said.
“Up to the lake?” I asked, flipping the turn indicator.
“Unless you’ve got other plans.”
I eased into the turn.
As the sky darkened, we took a walk along the beach. A cold wind had blown up off the water, and I gave her a coat out of my trunk.
The lights of the hotels and restaurants danced along the water, and voices and music spilled along the wind from the Bird of Paradise. The moon, almost full, appeared and disappeared as clouds drifted by.
I took her hand. It felt like the most natural thing in the world.
“Are you happy?” she asked, not looking at me.
I squeezed her hand gently. “I am.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not now. When you’re at home, in New York or San Francisco. Are you happy? Is there someone there, worrying about you?”
I shrugged. “Not anyone permanent,” I said, thinking about the last few women I had dated. “I see. . . . I date. Some. I work. Mostly it’s work.”
“Are you happy?”
I thought for a moment.
“Never mind,” she said. “If you have to think about it that long, it’s probably not something you want to be thinking about.”
I didn’t even try to argue.
“This must seem pretty boring to you,” she said after a while. “Compared to Paris and Morocco and New York and all those other places I’ve never been.”
“Right now,” I said, meeting her eyes, “there’s no place in the world I’d rather be.”
She smiled, and her hand tightened around mine. A gust swept across us, and she shivered.
“You’re cold.”
“I’m fine.”
“We should go back.”
“No, I—I’d like to keep going, just a little longer.”
“Here,” I said, drawing her close and encircling her with my arm. “Is that better?”
“Mmhmm,” she said, snuggling herself tightly against me.
We walked like that, nestled into one another, until the rain came, black sheets of icy spray thundering off the sand and the water. We ran back to the car, laughing and shivering, soaked almost to the skin.
“This is getting to be a habit,” she laughed as I fumbled with the key to the back door. “Coming back here all wet.”
“We’ll have you fixed up in no time,” I said as the door opened and we scurried in. “I’ll get you a robe or something to put on while your clothes are in the dryer.” I kicked off my shoes and my socks squelched against the floor.
“No, that’s okay,” she said. “They’ll dry quick enough.”
My jacket landed with a wet thud.
“That’s crazy talk,” I said. She was pale, her lips only slightly pink against the white of her face, her jaw trembling. “You’re freezing. Your teeth are chattering. Listen, go in and have a hot shower. Leave your clothes outside the door and I’ll bring you something warm to put on.”
She pulled her jacket off and dropped it on the floor beside my own. “I’m really okay.” Her shirt was soaked, and plastered to her skin.
“Well I’m not,” I said. “I’m gonna have a quick heat-up in the upstairs shower while you do the same down here.”
She started to speak, but I stopped her. “I’m not going to take no for an answer. Take your time. I’ll leave a robe hanging on the doorknob.”
She smiled shyly, paused for a moment, then turned away. I waited until I heard the bathroom door close before I allowed myself the full body shiver I had been holding back. “Jesus,” I muttered. I took the stairs two at a time, clutching my arms across my chest, so cold I thought my own teeth might start chattering.
I turned on the heat lamp in my parents’ en suite and pulled off my clothes as quickly as I could, dropping my socks and pants and underwear in a heap on the floor. My shirt clung cold and wet to my face as I pulled it over my head.
When I had struggled free, Isabel was standing in the doorway.
My first impulse was to cover myself, but I didn’t. I looked at her, met her eye.
“I thought—” she started, looking at me.
“Okay,” I said. “You should—you’re gonna catch your death.”
She nodded and stepped forward, closing the door gently behind herself. Without looking away, she reached down and unbuttoned her pants.
I could feel the heat from the ceiling lamp against my naked shoulders, and I imagined steam rising from me.
She shucked off her pants, and in almost the same motion pulled off her shirt.
“I thought,” she said, reaching behind herself for her bra. “I thought I’d stay. Tonight. With you. If that’s—”
The bra fell noiselessly to the floor, and she stepped gingerly out of her underpants.
I thought of how shy she had been the first few times we had made love, insisting that I turn out the lights, blow out the candles. I had memorized her body, every curve and sway, long before I ever saw it.
I thought maybe it was just the passage of time which had changed her, had given her strength, but then I remembered that summer day, a few months after we had been making love, the hike that had taken us into the hills on the hottest day of the year.
We had stopped at the side of a creek, and I sat on a rock at the water’s edge, kicking off my boots and dangling my feet in the glacial water.
When I looked up at her, she was naked, her pale skin almost incandescent in the afternoon sun. She had smiled, I guess at my expression.
“This is me,” she had said, as if bestowing me with a great secret.
“Thank you,” I had said, knowing without understanding that this was the right thing to say.
Standing in my parents’ bathroom, more than two decades later, I wanted to thank her again. I wanted to thank her for being brave enough to cross that final distance between us, that infinitesimally small, infinitely large gap that had been there since I had pulled into the yard and found her there waiting. I don’t know that I would have had the courage.
“Is that all right?” she asked. “If I stay?”
I nodded. “I would like that. I would like that very much.”
We stayed in the shower until the water ran out, then we lingered under the heat lamp, drying each other with my mother’s fluffy white towels until our skin shone.
We slept, as we always had, in my mother and father’s bed. I didn’t bother checking my old room. I knew that whether I found my old twin, intact after all these years, or a new guest room, it wouldn’t measure up to the room that we knew so well.
I woke to the sound of rain against the roof, hard and relentless. The room was dark, save for the dim slice of light from under the bathroom door.
“I like the sound of the rai
n,” she whispered. I could feel her words against my chest. Her voice was soft and distant, sleep-drugged and languorous.
We just lay there for a long while, listening to the sound of the rain, the sound of one another’s breathing.
“You used to know a poem,” she said. “About the rain. You used to say it when we were lying together like this. Something about the wind and the rain.”
I didn’t even have to think about it. “‘Oh western wind, when wilt thou blow,’” I started. “‘That the small rain down can rain? Christ, that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again. . . .’”
“That’s the one,” she said, in a voice that sounded like she was lost somewhere in a dream. “Say it again.”
As I repeated the words, I could feel the heaviness of sleep upon her, heard her breathing slow. My love in my arms, and I in my bed again.
We curled together in the middle of the bed, our bodies so twisted into one another that it was impossible to tell where one of us began and the other ended.
In that way, we slept the night together for the first time.
When I woke up, the room was light, but I had no idea where I was, no memory of how I had come to be there. I scrambled for a moment, pulling the covers tightly around me, until I saw Isabel and remembered. She had raised herself up on one elbow and was smiling at me, an odd, knowing smile.
“Izzy,” I said, as if I hadn’t seen her for years. “You’re . . .”
“I’m here, Daniel,” she said. “Right where you left me.”
I reached out, touched the side of her face, the warmth of her cheek. “You’re here,” I said, feeling stupid.
She leaned over and kissed me, her lips lingering against mine. “I’m here,” she breathed.
I slumped back against the bed, muscles relaxing that I wasn’t even aware that I had tensed.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I had. . . . I had a dream,” I confessed, feeling even more stupid.
“A nightmare?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I’ve had it, the same dream, the last few nights. Ever since I heard the news and started back here.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
What I wanted, more than anything, was to kiss the hollow of her throat.
“It’s . . . I’m sure it’s just coming back here, all the memories, all the thoughts that’s bringing up. . . .” I traced my fingers along her clavicle, across the warmth of her throat, feeling the warm pulse of her there.
“It’s about all this,” I said, trying to find a way to begin. “It’s about . . . Henderson. And me. What my life would have been like if I had never left.”
“That must have been a nightmare for you,” she said. “And what would that have been like?”
“I . . . Some of it’s so vivid. I can see myself running the newspaper, joking around with the guys who run the press. Frank and Jim.” I shook my head, finding it hard to believe that I could actually remember the names of people in a dream.
“I can see myself having dinner with my parents, every Sunday night. My parents and . . . my wife,” I said carefully, watching her to see how she would respond. “I’ve got a wife. And two little kids. Two boys. Michael and Stephen.”
“That sounds nice,” she said, curling in closer to me.
“It is. I mean, I think it is. It’s strange—it was one of those dreams where I’m inside myself, but I’m watching myself from outside at the same time. So I don’t know. I think I’m happy, but I’m not really experiencing it directly. Does that make any sense?”
“As much as dreams ever do,” she said. “And where am I in this path not taken? Am I the doting wife, or have I been demoted to that girl you used to know?”
She sounded so happy, so casual and jokey, that I almost couldn’t bear to tell her.
“You’re not,” I started. “See that’s, that’s the thing. You . . . you’re not around. Right at the beginning, right at the start of the dream, you. . . .” I tightened my arm around her. “You die.”
“What?” The word bubbled out of her like a laugh, and her face broke into a broad smile. “I die?”
I nodded slowly.
“So let me get this straight—you’ve managed to write me out of this fantasy version of your life as well? Jesus, Danny, a girl could get a complex.”
She was joking, but I was still feeling the strange aftereffects of the dream, unable to so quickly put aside what I had seen, what I had felt.
“It’s not like that,” I tried to explain.
“I know,” she said. “I was just. . . .”
“It was terrible,” I said. “You were driving, and I was watching, and you . . . you took a corner wrong and you went into this ditch, full of water. You drowned, right there in front of me, and there was nothing I could do. . . .”
“Shh,” she said, gently touching my face. “It’s all right. I’m right here.”
“I know.” I pulled her closer to me, close enough I could smell her hair, kiss her on the forehead. “I know you are.”
She kissed me at the corner of my mouth.
“It’s weird. You were so young. We both were. And you died, and that’s . . . it was like that changed everything. After that, it’s like I didn’t have the courage to leave. I just . . .” I couldn’t even put a sentence together, couldn’t concentrate on anything other than the gentle touch of her fingertips on my face.
“Then it’s a good thing for you that I’m still here.” I could hear the smile in her voice, but my eyes had slipped shut, and I was drifting away.
“Were you happy?” she asked from the doorway. We had kept the curtains closed and, coming back from the bathroom, the pale length of her seemed to glow in the half-light.
“What, just now?”
She climbed back into the bed, drawing the covers up around the two of us. “No,” she said. “I got the impression you were pretty happy just then. No, in your dream: were you happy?”
I pulled her to me, almost atop me, blanketed by her warmth. “I lost you,” I whispered. “Again.”
“Aside from that,” she said. “It didn’t sound like it was a bad life.”
I brushed her hair back from her face. “No. No, it wasn’t, I guess. I had a family, a job, people I knew, people who knew me. It would have been a fine life. For someone else.”
“A lot of people are happy with lives like that.”
“It wasn’t mine, though. Even in the dream, I could feel like there were things I should have been doing, different choices I should have made.”
“Everybody has regrets.”
“I know. I have a few of my own.” I looked at her meaningfully.
She smiled. “You learn to live with them. You build the best life you can. You die happy.”
The word was a potent reminder, and we both looked at the clock.
“We should start getting ready,” she sighed.
“Yeah.” The thin edge of my agreement slid into me like a blade. I didn’t want to leave this bed, this room, this moment.
Isabel didn’t seem to want to move, either.
“Let’s throw some clothes on. I’ll run you into your place so you can pick up some proper attire—” I stretched out the words “—and we can get ready together here.”
She shook her head. “No need.”
“What?”
She smiled, a little shyly, and her cheeks coloured. “I don’t need to go home. I’ve got a dress and some stuff in the car.”
My smile broadened as I reckoned with the implications of her words.
“I was hoping you would ask me to stay,” she explained, still blushing. “That was one of my regrets, too, that we had never spent a night together. That I had never woke up a morning in your arms. That I had never watched you dream.”
Her word
s warmed me, and I felt even less like rising from the bed. “You watched me? When I was having that dream?”
She nodded. “You were smiling.”
After showering, we dressed side by side in my parents’ bedroom, in front of the broad mirror fronting their closets. I had a charcoal suit, with a plain white shirt and a dark tie. She wore a simple black dress, and a silver chain around her neck.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly to her reflection as I tied my tie.
“For what?” Carefully putting in an earring.
“For leaving like that. Without you.”
“That was a long time ago.”
I shrugged.
“It would have changed everything.”
“Still, I’m sorry. I think I would have liked to see what a life with you would have been like.”
“I might not even have gone,” she said, her reflection smiling mischievously.
“Really?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I tend to be pretty capricious. I was even worse back then.”
I smiled, then looked down at the floor. “It’s not too late,” I almost whispered, half-hoping that she wouldn’t hear. I felt ridiculous, putting so much weight on a single night. But it wasn’t just a single night, was it?
I felt her hand on my arm, and when I looked up, her reflection was staring at me. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes it is. Too late. You can’t go back.”
“This isn’t—this wouldn’t be going back. This would be going forward. . . .”
Her reflection shook her head. “You know that’s not true. We’ve made our choices, both of us. They can’t be unmade. We can’t uncreate the people we’ve become.”
I started to argue with her, but I couldn’t. I knew what she was saying to be true.
“We had our night, Daniel. And that’s something I’ll never forget. But it doesn’t change anything.”
I thought she was wrong about that, but I couldn’t be sure.
We drove in silence to the cemetery. The road was another of those long country roads, straight, with cornfields on both sides, yellow and dry. It was still grey and cloudy, but the rain had stopped, and I took the top down. As we drove, the wind played with our hair.
Seven Crow Stories Page 16