by Carrie Brown
He dropped the glasses to his chest, turned to look at Nolan, who was squinting, staring up into the leaves.
He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything Nolan stepped forward and clapped his hands.
At the sudden noise a piece of the sky above them lifted and swerved away. The air was full of the sound of beating wings, a buffeting sensation, confused and alarming. Conrad drew back instinctively as if to protect himself. A chorus of screeching cries filled the wood.
But in an instant it was over. The sky above them sealed again; like a rock rolled before a cave’s mouth, the birds resettled in the branches, blocking the light. They made an unfamiliar ticking sound.
Conrad stood there, his breath held, and thought he had turned to stone, here in this lost place where the wild creatures of the air had come to roost on the mountain, gathering in the treetops, a rain of stinking hickory nuts and acorns jarred from the branches, falling soundlessly to the soft earth. These were the last uneasy motions of the world, its pointless final adjustments. And he saw Rose’s body on the bed, the shape of her discomfort. He had tried to adjust her head on the pillow, tilting her chin away from where it wanted to fall on her breast. But she had resisted him, had opened her eyes, opened her mouth, and he had thought that she would come back then, that she would hear him, that he could say everything that then rose to his lips, the miraculous sentences ready at last, the thoughts so clear and bright—it would all come to him. He wanted to tell her. And there was something she, too, wanted to say, as if after a lifetime together there was one word that had evaded them, which was now rising like the sun appearing at the window, light flooding into the darkness, breaking over the sill and coming across the floor, rising up the bedclothes and the folded sheet, touching her hands and wrists and arms, the small curve of her listening ear, one word that would be made manifest. He had hovered over her. She had spoken, but he had missed it in the roar of white light that overcame them, his back rounded over her, his hands denting the mattress by her shoulders. It had passed right through him, an interval of illumination, and taken her with it, leaving him behind.
NOLAN HAD WALKED off, a small figure twenty yards away, advancing slowly, balancing along the thin line of the dam.
Conrad watched him bend down, retrieve a long branch, and drive it in toward the water. Conrad hoisted the pigeon crate again, picked his way over the tangled tree roots along the edge of the lake, and stood at the shoreline.
Nolan turned around carefully and came back along the dam toward Conrad.
“Never seen anything like that before, have you,” he said, though it wasn’t a question.
“What’s happening?”
Nolan shrugged, looked up. “They’re waiting,” he said. “Migration’s started, but I guess they know bad weather’s coming, and they’re just staying put until it blows past. Sort of a voluntary detention.” He grimaced and shoved the stick he was still holding into the water again. “I’ll tell you something else.” He fished around with the stick, turned up a dripping tangle, a rib cage of black, sodden leaves and broken branches. “These spillways are all choked up. Four or five inches of rain and it’ll be over the top. This dam’s never going to hold all that water. It’s going to blow.”
Conrad was queasy. He looked up into the trees, the birds waiting there, shoulder to shoulder. He felt impatient and annoyed. Nolan’s grim manner was alarming him.
“Well, surely someone’s been up here before this,” Conrad said. “Looked it over.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Nolan said airily. “There’s dams like this all over the state, all over the country, in just about every little town you can think of on the East Coast. Wherever there’s water. They were built a century ago, or more. It’s like bridges. There’s bridges ready to fall down all over the place, too. They don’t get fixed until they break. And then it’s too late.” He turned around and looked out over the water, its restless cargo.
“It’ll be just like before,” he said. “Helen, that was the hurricane in ‘42. They put in some discharge pipes after that, but nobody comes around to check on them. And they’re all blocked up now. Even the spillway’s full.” He turned around to face Conrad.
“See, this is where Laurel lies,” he said, spreading his hands flat, palm down, in the air. “This is the lay of the land,” he continued, and he tilted his hands, swooped them downward, imitating the driving flight of a seabird. “Water will go this way, down the channel in the mountain.” He swayed slightly as if floating above the land itself, feeling its contours, shafts of warm air, cool air, the view beneath him. “Just like last time. It will come down the mountain, come through town, and go right out the other side, following the river.”
Conrad stared at his drifting hands, the tilting table of the landscape.
Nolan wagged his right hand. “Most of Laurel is up on the high shoulder, here, to the east. That was smart of them. I guess it was obvious that you don’t build too much right next to a river that’s mostly fed by the wash running down the mountains. Water can go up and down too fast, because when it rains you don’t get just the two or three inches falling on your own head. You get it from over the whole area. Every little stream picks it up and channels it right into the river.”
Conrad frowned. He knew enough from his days as an engineer to know that Nolan was right. Heavy rains near mountains were the worst, for exactly the reasons Nolan cited. And all that igneous rock—there was no place for the water to go but right along the surface of the land. He looked down at the lake, the tree roots looping like coarse stitches along the shore.
Nolan stepped off the dam, passed around Conrad. “Coming?” he asked, turning around.
Conrad stared at the water for a moment. He sniffed, taking in the sour scent.
“Coming?” Nolan repeated.
Conrad turned around to face him.
“There’s nothing you can do about it,” Nolan said, and he sounded almost angry. “You don’t have any control over it at all.”
THEY STOPPED UP at the road, walked to the edge of the escarpment. Conrad set the crate on top of the wall. He gestured to Nolan. “You can get him out.”
Nolan stooped, peered in at the pigeon. After a minute he reached in and took him out. He held him in his hands, and a smile came over his face. Conrad was briefly touched. He, too, was always moved at the feel of a pigeon resting in his arms, how weightless it was.
And then Nolan stepped up close to the wall, and together he and Conrad looked out at the view, the massive, sliding contours of the mountain’s foothills, deceptively soft. Torn runners of purple cloud trailed down the ridges. The wind pulled and pushed at the men’s jackets.
Nolan lifted the pigeon, and then, with a quick motion, it wrenched from his hands and flew away in a rising arc.
They watched until it disappeared.
Conrad took up the crate. “You can come on back to the house and wait,” he said. “Though he’ll probably get there before us.”
Nolan followed him back to the truck. He didn’t say anything while Conrad started the engine, backed up, and turned around to head downhill. “You can just leave me in town,” he said finally. “I walked up to your place anyhow.”
Conrad glanced over at him, surprised. “I thought you wanted proof,” he said.
For a minute Nolan was quiet. “Guess what?” he replied at last. “I trust you.”
Nine
PULLING IN TO his driveway twenty minutes later, Conrad almost hit the little terrier that shot across the gravel in front of his wheels. He braked hard, even though he’d been moving slowly, and lurched forward sharply against the steering wheel, the breath forced from his chest as if a massive hand had struck his sternum. He closed his eyes against the brief shock of airlessness. After a moment, recovering his breath, he sat upright in time to see the dog, Hero’s dog—white, with tiny black ears—trot safely around the side of the house toward the garden.
When the dog was out of sight, Conrad
took a deep breath and got out of the truck. And then he saw the basket on the top step of the porch.
He looked at it for a moment, half expecting the lid to rise of its own accord, and then he crossed the grass and sat down heavily on the step beside the basket. He put his palm to his chest, the place where he hurt after colliding with the steering wheel a moment before. He glanced down at the basket. When he reached over and idly fingered the lid, he felt the heat of whatever was inside rise up against his hand.
He raised his head and looked out over the grass of his front lawn, its stiff points. Without the sun, the world had emptied itself of shadows, sinking into a colorless gray. But the ground glittered oddly, full of the dancing sparks that ignite before the eyes when one is about to faint, light compressed to shrinking particles. Conrad felt his fingers tingle.
“Hero!”
He called out her name in the silence. The air was empty; the wind had fallen in a sudden lull, a hush that spread across the mountains, down along the valley, over the serpentine black body of the river, flowing over the dark green earth. He could hear the loud ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway by the front door, a German relic inherited from Lemuel and Adele. A strange portcullis hung over the entrance to a small cavity in the clock’s face. Every hour, the portcullis would rise, and two wooden cuckoos would leap forward on accordion extension arms to chirp the time. One of the cuckoos, though, had been silent now for more years than Conrad could remember, the silver gears inside its breast slipped and cracked. You had to mentally double the number of chirps if you wanted to know the time. Unless it was an odd hour. Then you could never know for certain.
He heard two notes. But it must be closer to five, not four, he thought.
“Hero?”
She didn’t say anything, but he knew she was there, standing thin as a reed behind a tree, or crouched inside the hollow heart of the boxwoods, or leaning up close against the downspout by the side of the house. Listening.
Conrad stretched out his arms, wiggled his fingers. The feeling was returning to his hands, an unpleasant sensation, short, electrical bursts.
“You’re a wonderful cook, Hero,” he said then, speaking to the air. “Just as good as she was. And she was a great cook.” He thought. “Among other things.”
He looked down at his feet, his big shoes splayed on the porch step.
“I know she thought I couldn’t take care of myself,” he continued, still looking down. “She was right. What you’ve given me has—tided me over. It’s been like—magic.” And it had been magic, he thought, the return of his appetite each time the basket appeared, the meal inside a restorative, a tonic, evidence of the world’s willingness to provide.
“Thank you,” he said, realizing how late he was, how remiss.
He looked up, sensing she might appear then. But nothing moved across the square of lawn. He heard a door bang shut across the hedge at May’s.
“May hears me, she’ll think I’ve gone crazy, talking to myself,” he called, trying to laugh at himself. “She’ll think I’ve lost my marbles. First angels, now ghosts.”
And he stood up then in the ringing air, prepared to receive Hero, prepared to have her step forward from among the trees, show herself. He hoped she would come.
But nothing moved. The trees held still, their branches spread wide like the attitude of a man in flight, falling. He looked up at the sky, the heavy roof of clouds overhead, here and there embroidered with fine, crinkled lines of light, an intricate finish.
“Some people are afraid of the dark,” he said then vaguely, but he didn’t know what he meant anymore, whether she was there or not.
“Some people are afraid of—” He stopped. He didn’t know what he wanted to say.
He slid his gaze to the side of the house, a prescience coming over him. Something moved there. A long arm of dark-leaved ivy trailed loose from the house wall, lifted in the light wind that had begun again in terse exhalations among the leaves. He thought of all the infinitesimal motions of the world, the obstinate, heartbreaking progress of an earthworm, eating its own route forward.
“I’d be happy—” he began, turning back, but had to stop. He wiped his sleeve across his face, across the plain devastation there. “I’d be happy to have you come and—visit. See the gardens. Anytime,” he went on. “You could come anytime.
“Please,” he called, more loudly now. “I’m always here.”
May’s white face appeared behind the glass of her kitchen window, staring at him.
Conrad turned away from May’s curiosity, crouched down by the basket, out of view.
“Hero,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of world you live in, what you’ve been through. I’m afraid I can’t even imagine it. I should be able to, I know. But I always tried to tell her, afterward—it’s good to have you back. That’s what I said. It’s good to have you back.”
He picked up the basket, held the warmth of it close to his chest, and turned to open his front door. But before he closed it behind him he looked out once more.
She was standing across the road, framed like a statue in an ivy-covered alcove of the high stone wall. An old bicycle, which he hadn’t noticed before, leaned against the wall beside her. Her face was averted, and her eyes were cast down. She didn’t move.
Conrad raised his hand slowly. He waited, thought he saw her fingers twitch at her side.
And then, just before he stepped back to close the door, he saw her arm rise, a gesture from the other side, from far across the road, the white stripe of the median dividing them—a distance that suddenly, as he closed the door at last, blocking her from view, became nothing at all.
HE ATE, THEN fell asleep sitting up in his chair, his mouth hanging open. And when he woke a few hours later, it was to the sound of rain, not a drumming but a continuous roar. Stepping to the French doors, he passed outside and stood under the awning. The air was melting, the earth already soaked. Conrad thought he could feel the mountain’s layers of metamorphic rock tugging heavily against one another like massive ships, leaning into gravity’s hold. From inside he heard the grandfather clock, six calls from the cuckoo. Midnight.
Around him the house held its breath. The runner in the hall was disarranged as though a child had run its length, scuffing his feet. The cloth lay unevenly, lumped in the center. Mail had spilled from the table by the front door, a sharp-edged pool of white on the floor. The chairs stood empty around the dining room table, pushed back at odd angles as if the occupants of a dinner party had risen suddenly in alarm, had been called away. He stood in the hall by the stairs, hanging his head. He remembered the young men from the ambulance crew hoisting the gurney to bear Rose away down the stairs, aiming her toward the door.
Upstairs he pushed open the door to their bedroom against the soft blackness. In the absence of her living, breathing self, he wanted to touch something of hers. He wanted to feel the fabric of her dresses against his arms, her nightgown under his fingers. He wanted to put his hands into the small soles of her shoes. The watery light from the street lamp fell against the double doors of Rose’s wardrobe, wavering against the rippled veneer, parting at its dry seams like the bark from a tree. He opened the doors. Rose’s scent hit him so powerfully that he stood transfixed for an instant.
He pulled wide the doors of the wardrobe, saw the light fall over the slips of dresses hanging inside, everything just as she had left it, the sprigged florals and the gleaming skirts, the gathered blouses and worn cardigans folded over their hangers. He reached for one thing after another, took each out and held it up, ran his hand along the folds and drew the fabric hungrily across his mouth. He knelt on the floor, drew out her shoes and fit his hands inside, remembering the feel of Rose’s foot in his palm. He saw her standing in the garden, feet rounded slightly outward, rocking back and forth, thinking, piles of weeds at her feet. He lifted the shoe and felt her weight within it, the bended knee, the lifted skirt.
He emptied the wardrobe m
ethodically, laying her clothes on the bed. And when at last he had finished, he stood still a moment before approaching the wasted mound, throwing himself across the smell of her. He crawled over all that was left, the silk shifting beneath him, his shoes catching the thin fabric, crumpling it. He gathered the clothes in his arms, buried his face in them, his back shaking with the emptiness of what lay beneath him.
But as he lay there, his cries quieting, he imagined he heard footsteps, Rose passing lightly through the rooms downstairs, her quickening tread, coming and going. From far away, in the kitchen, he heard the radio suddenly come on, bursting into a waltz, and he rose from the bed, moved to the top of the stairs.
“Rose?” he whispered.
The clock at the foot of the stairs beat and whirred.
He came downstairs, stood frowning beside the clock. Then, with a sudden movement, he reached forward and held fast to the chain that suspended the weights, the dangling lead pinecones. The clock made a spinning, protesting sound and then ceased.
“Rose?” he called into the dark hall.
He was confused then, couldn’t remember whether he had just come inside or was preparing to leave. Was he going on a trip? Where was his bag? Was he waiting for Rose? Had she just called to him from another room?
And then, on the hat stand by the door, each arm topped with a gold bead, he saw the long yellow slicker he’d been issued when he started volunteering as a school crossing guard. It had been Rose’s idea, a way to get him out of the house each morning after he’d sold the gilding business and his patented anode, a month after his seventieth birthday. He’d been tired of the traveling by then, even tired of the work itself, though from time to time he’d do a small job as a favor for someone, something he could manage in his workshop—repairs of one sort or another, frames or clocks or bits of jewelry.
He’d been embarrassed by the crossing guard job at first but had gradually grown to like it. It had a kind of authority to it that he appreciated, striding out into the center of the street, holding his hand up against approaching traffic, the little children streaming past him. In the morning, Rose would fix him a cup of coffee, usher him out the door for his walk to the bottom of the hill. One of the bus drivers, a heavyset woman with a pile of orange hair atop her head, sang like a Valkyrie as she drove. She would wave gaily to Conrad as she turned the corner, and he could hear her rich soprano melting out of the bus’s windows, the children bouncing gaily on their seats behind her.