by Carrie Brown
At the curb the young woman hurried toward him. “Your coat!” She gestured at the car, ducking her head against the rain. “I can’t take the chair,” she said hurriedly. “The van picks her up, but the chair won’t fit in the car.” She bent down, peered into the old woman’s face. “Mother? You’re all right?”
“She’s asking for Fisher,” Conrad said then, through the steady, annihilating wash of the rain.
The young woman stood upright, pulled her coat against her throat, appealed to Conrad. “Can you lift her? Just into the car?”
But Conrad did not release the wheelchair’s handles. “She’s asking for Fisher,” he repeated. It seemed to him that perhaps the young woman had not heard him, that he needed to tell her again.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said then. “Please just help me. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. I got called earlier, by her aide. I drove here right away. The children—” She gestured at the car.
Conrad didn’t move. His head felt heavy.
“This is her house,” she said more loudly, as though Conrad hadn’t understood. “She’s afraid to leave. She thinks my father’s coming back.”
Conrad stared at her.
“He passed,” she said, and she had to raise her voice again to be heard through the rain, had to shout at him. “A long time ago.”
Conrad bowed his head then, took in a deep breath against the force of the old woman’s delusion. And then he stooped to reach beneath her, one arm snaking around her back, the other fitted under her legs. She smelled of unwashed sheets. And when he lifted her in his arms, he was amazed at her slight weight, the small head held upright, alert, on its thin neck, the hands reaching for his shoulders.
The young woman hurried to open the back door of the car. Conrad bent, the woman in his arms, to settle her gently in the seat, the rain pounding his back. Carefully he lifted his coat from her shoulders, slipped it from behind her.
“I’ll tell him,” he said, leaning close before he backed out, “where you are.”
And she nodded, satisfied, reached out to touch his hand.
When he stood back up, the young woman was fumbling in her purse.
“No, no,” Conrad said, backing off, hurrying into his coat, wiping his hand across his face.
The woman stopped, then held out her hand to him. “You came out of nowhere,” she said, and Conrad thought of the maps papering the wall inside the old woman’s house, the surprise of finding himself not in strange territory after all, but here where he belonged, at home, his own house marked at the top of Paradise Hill with a tiny black square. It was right there, on the map.
When the car pulled away from the curb, exhaust spewing from its tailpipe, its wheels sending up a plume of water, he saw that they had left the wheelchair behind on the curb, left the front door ajar. He hurried back up the short path, pushing the chair ahead of him. Inside he stopped uncertainly at the foot of the stairs, then pushed the chair carefully into the recess below the risers. He went into the kitchen and, bending over, blew out the candle on the table. The room filled with a swift and final darkness.
He walked back outside, pulling the door closed behind him. It was then that he realized he didn’t know who these people were. Though he had thought he could recognize nearly every person on the street, Laurel being such a small town, he had never seen this family before.
HE DROVE SLOWLY, wet and shivering. He had not forgotten about the danger, about the lake with its restless cargo of black water lapping the rock edge, the old dam straining at its mortared seams. He sensed in one part of his mind that he ought to leave now, head uphill. But he couldn’t tear himself away from the low streets and the empty houses; someone might still be left behind. It would be his fault, he thought, if someone were left behind.
He remembered his pigeons, and his heart wrenched against an image of the river spread over the meadow, trapping his birds, drowning them. He shook his head, spoke reassuringly to himself. They were on the second story; surely it hadn’t reached that high. There’s time, he comforted himself. Keep looking. I need to keep looking.
He passed the clotheslines of his neighbors, with their array of stiff trousers and drenched sheets, forgotten clothes dropped here and there on the lawns, a tiny pink sock belonging to a child, a patterned dress shriveling in the mud, the empty arms filling with water. He saw loose shutters beating the walls. He saw empty chairs on porches, some tethered to porch rails with baling twine, and bicycles resting against fences, chained tight. He saw doghouses trailing ropes, and swings winding and unwinding from the branches of trees in the unnatural wind. In the flower beds, the early fall phlox was blown to the ground, its flowers smashed like paper pulp. Here and there a child’s toy lay in the street—a red bucket partly submerged, a ball spangled with gold stars, a sodden doll, one arm missing, its blue glass eyes staring heavenward into the rain.
Driving down Williams Street, he passed Harrison Supplee’s house, foursquare and upright, white as a wedding cake, one of the five or six bigger houses in this part of town; most of Laurel’s better addresses were up on the hill. The few grander houses down low were among the town’s oldest, built by the original owner of the mill, who had spawned similar dwellings, purposeful and white, as dowries for each of his four daughters. A widow’s walk, a folly, perched atop Harrison’s house. The front door had been barred with a series of heavy two-by-fours nailed across the frame, over the knocker, which, as Conrad recalled, bore the shape of a branching tree, its trunk curved smoothly beneath your hand. How like Harrison, Conrad thought, to be prepared, to have barricaded his door. The wine red draperies in the front rooms were drawn.
He drove up and down the streets, staring through the windshield until his eyes ached, retracing his path, the same houses appearing over and over again. He turned down back alleys, now running with water and flotillas of wet leaves backed up like barges stuck in a canal. The water was rising. He could feel it under the tires of the truck, how the body shimmied now and again, rudderless for a second and then grinding, catching on higher ground.
And for a moment he understood how he could already be lost in the flood, a tiny figure moving swiftly downriver, turning over and over, passing familiar storefronts and fences propped up here and there like signposts in a dream. He was carried past the dark windows of leaning buildings, past sloping gardens and toolsheds and deserted places where doors hung ajar at a crazy tilt, where windows gaped, blown out. He was borne into the darkness of the pine forest, where the river ran silent and swift, into the wavering meadows now become a wide sea, past May Brown’s house, high on the hill above, its windows bright with a hot white light, and then past his own house, his arms reaching out as he was swept past his loft, his pigeons washing back and forth, wings limp, in the tide that ran through their roosts.
The smell of the river that bore him away—it was not clear and sweet but choked with green wood and torn root, with nail and fur and ripped bark; it filled his nose and eyes and mouth. And the sound of it—like Lemuel’s organ, he thought, the rushing arpeggios and heaving wind, curtains blowing through the tall windows into the front parlor of the Sparkses’ dusty brownstone, Lemuel himself bent over the instrument, his back shaking with joy. Where had he learned such joy? Wondrous Lemuel, now become an angel—he’d believed he could ascend on the wings of his birds into the blue ether, see the umbra of the earth itself cast into space. Of course he had preferred things built of stone, Conrad thought. The bigger the better. He had admired anything that would stand forever, cathedrals, the pyramids, the temples at Luxor, anything aimed at God’s throne. That high.
And Rose, Lemuel’s own flesh and blood, the girl with her mother’s coloring, like the rose named ‘Peace’, pink and gold—she had lived and died over and over, her heart failing her sometimes for its very fullness, for the feeling of it branching within her like a tree, herself dispersed into the busy, material air of the world. She had taken life slowly, a postulant to its tiny, significant
miracles, tying her little bows of string around the sweet peas, snapping slender bamboo stakes to prop the lilies. She’d seen the eye of the potato sprouting like a fetus, seen a leaf unwinding, first light at its center, her eye to the perfect space there.
If Lemuel had ever imagined the end of the world, Conrad thought, it would have been biblical, like this, rocks and water moving in with a glacier’s regal carriage. But Rose’s ending—that would have been softer, kinder, he knew: the world’s flooded surface strewn with seeds and budding branches, with the stripped bark of the birch, with pipsissewa, prince’s pine, its pink blossoms scattered. It would have been a planting, a sowing.
And his? What was his ending? He found to his surprise that he could not imagine it at all, that he could see only what he remembered now of his life: the generous, high-ceilinged rooms of the Sparkses’ house with their ornamental moldings; the white gravel rooftop glittering, a field of diamonds; the view from his French doors out into his flowering garden, down Paradise Hill; the wings of his pigeons, their tiny V shapes in the sky; the weight of Rose’s round, girlish cheek, warm in his hand. He could remember, as he had once wished, only the precious things, now flying apart like beads on a snapped necklace.
Lemuel had been a master builder, had spent his life balancing rock in the air, a trick designed to delight, confound. Engineering was for the cautious, the skeptical, he had told Conrad, as if that were what he had always expected of him. Architecture, by contrast, was a faith. And Rose had been a gardener; that was her skill, the patient business of waiting and watching, of looking for the smallest signs.
And his? His had been the art of amazement, he knew now. Amazement at all that had filled his days, the brief calendar of his life.
HE STOPPED INSTINCTIVELY for the light at the corner of Williams Street and River Road. He stared ahead through the frantic arcs of the windshield wipers, drumming his fingers on the wheel, until he realized that the light was out, of course; it would never turn green and tell him it was safe to cross.
He gripped the top of the steering wheel as he turned onto River Road, steering around the water that splashed darkly here and there in waves over the top of the wall. On his right the river heaved over the edge of the bulwark in sudden cascades as far down the road as he could see, white froth foaming over the dark water. He thought of the boy with his finger in the dike, the boy who’d lain all night stiff with cold, his shoulder to the sea, until help arrived. Up ahead he made out the lights at Eddie’s, the only lights anywhere, the white sign knocking back and forth wildly over the front door. He could hear the river, close now, a sound without intervals, a score without pause. He was frightened.
“Who’s left?” he asked aloud, and his own voice sounded strange to him. He remembered standing on his fire escape when he was just a child, learning to train his first pigeons; he had called into the evening sky of the city, its wild, dramatic light. “Come home!” he had called after them, as if they would hear him and understand, his child’s voice and the birds disappearing together into the setting sun, across the rooftops. “Come home!”
“Lemuel!” he shouted now, banging his palms against the steering wheel, startling himself. “Is anyone here? Tell me!”
And he thought he would be answered, that his voice, a distant signal, would be picked out from all the others, the angels in the fig tree, the strangers standing just to the side, heads conferring, wings stirring in the warm air. In her last moments Rose had spoken to them, to the gathering she saw ahead of her on the path. They had parted to let her pass, and she had nodded her head, murmuring. They had exchanged some words; he could tell by her intonation, her soft inflection, that hers were questions, that their answers pleased her. What had she said then? And would they hear him now? Surely they would hear him.
But as he pulled close to Eddie’s, he saw with horror that Eddie’s car was still parked around to the side of the low white building. The back door to the restaurant was ajar, a rectangle of light. Conrad pulled the truck over to the curb, took his hat from the seat beside him, and got out, staggering against the force of the wind. He ran to Eddie’s car, his head bent, his feet sending up geysers of water, then cupped his hands and peered in through the black window, half expecting—hoping—to find him there, fumbling with his keys or slumped over the wheel, seized by a sudden, perilous need to sleep, a last rest. But the car was empty.
He turned and ran to the back door, stepped in over the chipped and peeling sill into the quiet kitchen.
“Eddie!”
There was no answer.
He walked quickly through the kitchen, past Eddie’s cot, past a calendar stopped at a past time, months before, years before. He looked into the front room. The dishes had been stacked neatly in the wide sink, the griddle wiped clean. A single egg, white and pure, rested in the bowl of a spoon on the counter; oddly it struck Conrad that it was a trick, a balancing act, and he stared at it, waiting for it to fall and crack open, for a bird to struggle and rise from the shell.
Where was Eddie? And he thought of him, Eddie with his false leg, standing as he had done earlier that morning atop the bulwark, staring down into the river, its frenzied surface.
Conrad turned and ran back through the kitchen, back out into the rain, gasping against the cold, wet air.
He couldn’t have gone far, he thought. Not crippled like that. Not with that leg.
He fought his way through the wind and the slashing rain out to the front of the building, turned, and faced down the long road. The dark buildings stretched along one side, their windows full of the flashing light of the storm; the river sped past on the other, the water jostling and swelling behind the wall.
And then, in the distance, through the rain, he made out a dark figure wobbling along the road away from him on a bicycle, veering sharply, unsteadily, around the water where it splashed over the wall in alarming breakers.
And after a second he could hear her.
“Dad!” she was calling. “Eddie Vaughan! Daddy!”
He started toward her, began to run. He came to the center of the road, ran crookedly down its white line.
“Hero!”
He yelled into the rain, but she didn’t stop. He could hear her calling. Her voice came from all sides, the way it had bounced over the bowl-shaped hill of the cemetery, echoing against the mountains, coming back to her unanswered, nobody there but the dead. Hello . . . Hello . . .
“Eddie! Eddie Vaughan! Daddy!”
Conrad called her name then, over and over. He feared she would never hear him, but she must have at last, for when he thought he had no breath left in him, he saw her turn her head. She put out her leg and stopped the bicycle, planting her foot on the road. She turned uncertainly toward the sound of his voice.
When he reached her, he caught her arms in his hands, steadied her astride the bicycle. “Hero,” he said, and found himself amazed that she was real, made of substance, the slight give of her ordinary flesh under his fingers, a smear of mud over her chin.
He looked at her face, the wet hair streaked over it, obscuring her expression.
“I looked for you,” she said. “I went to your house.”
He stared at her.
“I wanted you to help me,” she said, and shook her head. He saw that she was crying. “I can’t find Dad.”
“What do you mean?” He glanced around. It was preposterous, he thought, that they should be standing here, that Eddie should have disappeared. He felt himself grow unreasonably angry.
He shook her. “His car,” he shouted above the wind. “Why didn’t he take his car?”
She looked up at him. Her wet face gleamed white, but her eyes were dark, full of fear and injury and pleading, and his own heart was breaking up inside him, a thousand assaults.
She held up a set of keys, clutched in her fist. “It won’t start.”
He stared at her. The car wouldn’t start? And Conrad wanted to see it then, though some instinct told him that he was wrong
. Please, he thought. Hadn’t Eddie gone out the back door, the cash box under his arm, his hat pulled down over his head? Hadn’t he gotten into the car, put the keys in the ignition? The engine had clicked, a small, final sound. Nothing.
Was that it? Or hadn’t he even tried?
Conrad looked around wildly, gripped the girl’s arms. He could see the river, its black surface roaring, nearly parallel with the top of the bulwark. He noticed, with an odd sensation of recognition, that someone had stuck a bouquet of plastic flowers—blue and yellow and pink, the dusty fake flowers Eddie kept in white vases on the tables—into a crack between the stones, like a shrine. He turned away from it.
“You’ve looked?” he asked then, wanting to be certain. “You’ve been looking?”
She nodded her head, turned, and searched with her eyes down the road away from them as if they might see him then, coming toward them through the rain.
She opened her mouth to speak, but at that instant a wave crested over the top of the wall near them, a sound like breaking ice, a dangerous thaw. Hero let out a cry, and Conrad pulled her back with him, his arm suddenly hot with a younger man’s strength, biceps curled. He held her tight, but the tumult of stone cold water wrenched against his grip. The bicycle fell away soundlessly, fleeing in the wave’s backwash, its silver spokes revolving. Conrad gasped. His mouth was full of water. He staggered, reached one hand pointlessly after his hat, which was swept away.
He shook his head, trying to catch his breath, and bent his face to look into hers. He stood nearly a foot taller than she, had to lean over to see her clearly. “We have to go,” he shouted against the wall of sound. “We have to go. It’s not safe.”
But she protested. “My father,” she said, trying to wrench free of him.
Conrad gripped her arms. He looked back over his shoulder at the river rising behind the bulwark, curiously ridged like the mountains themselves, crags sliding into crevasses, cliffs melting into foothills. He looked at the lights of the Four Leaf Clover Cafe, Kate’s lucky place—four white walls and a blue door, the sign swinging madly.