by Carrie Brown
She tried to pull away from him, but he held her tight.
He turned back to face her. “There isn’t anyone left here,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She looked down the road one last time, at the shapes the rain made, huge ships crossing dry land, their sails full of rain. And then she turned back to face him, slumped against him so that he could feel her full weight, the heavy weight of grief filling her veins. For a moment he wasn’t sure he could support her. He was shaking.
And though it wasn’t really any consolation at all, he knew he was right. There wasn’t anyone left to be saved.
HE GOT HER into the truck, slammed the door, and then ran around to the other side and let himself in. She sat upright, staring through the windshield. From the seat behind him he retrieved a blanket, handed it to her. “Put that around yourself.”
He backed out onto River Road and turned up the hill, driving as fast as he dared, up toward the natatorium, away from the river.
Could a man with a false leg, carrying an iron cash box, walk this far? Wouldn’t someone have seen him, stopped, picked him up? But he’d been so tired. Conrad saw him then, standing behind his counter, handing over the four-leaf clover. Dispossessing himself. And Conrad remembered one evening not so long before, sitting alone on Paradise Hill under the graceful, shifting ceiling of his grape arbor, wanting to empty his own pockets, wanting to be done with it all.
He shook against a sudden chill, the cold slowing his pulse, confusing him.
Who was this girl? He glanced over at Hero, taking in the smooth, shallow curve of her cheek, pale as a statue’s. Her hair was plastered down the side of her face, a loose bobby pin dangling. She reached up once, slowly, plucked away the strands from her mouth, and he saw that she was older than he had thought. Not really a girl at all anymore, though she had Eddie’s blunt, childish chin, the blue, sincere eyes of a baby. She wore a man’s rain jacket, dirty, with a worn corduroy collar, and Conrad realized with a shock that it was his own, cast off long ago, years before. He remembered Rose shaking it out, frowning at it, scurrying off to place it in a box somewhere, another donation for the impoverished. He recognized the buttons—brass, with a silver grommet in the center.
He glanced down at Hero’s feet; her sneakers were gray, soaked with water. She wore a pair of old trousers, ripped at the knees; the flesh behind the tear was almost blue. He thought fleetingly of Rose’s wicker sewing basket, the bright spools of colored thread, the needles lined up, shining in their velvet case, the orderly world of a prepared person.
He was pulling them away from the river, away from the sound of the river. He could hear it behind them, all the lowest tones of the scale released. He thought again of the lake, the dam, and Nolan. Was anyone still there, or had they given up at some signal from their foreman and fled away around the shoulder of the mountain, away from the course of the water? Was Nolan up there still, pointlessly dragging bags of sand to the dam, slipping on the slick rocks, tripping over the long fingers of tree roots that curled into the darkness? Was he falling into the water, his black coat billowing around him? Was Betty there, standing at the shore, trying to save him? Surely someone would have stopped him, Conrad thought. Someone would have seen that he wasn’t fit, an old man armed only with the fever of his realization, his regret.
In the parking lot of the natatorium he stopped. Hero sat silently next to him. Staring at the bright square of the open doors, Conrad realized he had now almost completely lost the sight in his left eye. Harry had been afflicted for a time with a terrible condition, a detached retina, in which the world became riddled with tiny spots of emptiness. He’d had to lie facedown for three weeks after the eye was repaired. But this didn’t feel like what Harry had described. This was more imprecise, he thought, a vanishing, the world pulled out from under his feet, flown to the rafters. He put his hand briefly to his face, saw the world go dark—or rather stream away, a vague shadow replacing the understood contours and perimeters of his world. He dropped his hand slowly. It rested on the seat between them. They said nothing.
Remembering, Conrad reached under his seat, withdrew the picture frame. “Here,” he said, turning toward her; he wanted his voice to be gentle. “He gave me this.”
Hero turned slowly in her seat, lifted her hands out from under the folds of the blanket, and took the picture from him.
“The clover,” she said, and a little smile came over her mouth. It was amazing, Conrad thought, how it changed her whole face. It wasn’t a face you expected to smile, he thought. A grave face. But it was, all the same, quite beautiful.
“He’s not in there,” she said then, looking up toward the natatorium.
“You don’t know that,” Conrad said. “You don’t know that. Someone might have picked him up.”
But he didn’t move to open the door.
She shook her head.
Conrad looked out into the parking lot. It was empty except for the rows of parked cars and trucks. Everyone must be inside now, he thought. Everyone was safe. Eddie was somewhere. Safe. He turned to her. “Hero, this isn’t really the time. Or the place—” He started to laugh, but it was a sound full of regret, all the regret of the last few months, since Rose had gone. “I have to say thank you, for what you’ve done for me. I want to say thank you.”
She adjusted herself slightly, a barely perceptible movement next to him.
“It was all—delicious,” he said. “It sustained me.”
She didn’t speak. He could feel an odd vibration beside him, Hero listening.
“My wife—” he began, then righted himself. “Rose—was so fond of you.” He paused. “I guess you thought she would have liked that. You cooking for me, looking out for me.”
And then Hero turned to him. “She told me,” she said.
Conrad stared at her. “She told you,” he repeated. “Before she died, she told you.”
“No,” Hero shook her head, and Conrad began to fly apart at the seams then, a wind blowing through him. The girl put out her hand, touched his arm. “Afterward,” she said. “What you liked. She told me what you liked. How to do it.”
Conrad stared at her, the blue eyes regarding him, the innocent eyes of an infant, so unlikely in her face. Trembling, he folded his hands over the steering wheel and brought his forehead down to rest upon them.
Rose had spoken to her, from the air over Hero’s head, as the girl stood at the stove, waiting, poised. She had leaned down to guide her hand, touch the spoon. A pinch of this, a little of that. Thicken it with cornstarch, cream. Not so much salt. He likes chocolate. He likes meat. He likes sage dressing and cornmeal and buttermilk. He likes an orange peeled all in one piece, a helix. Clouds of steam had risen, the yeast of warm bread. Fat had sputtered in the pan. And over the meadows of the cemetery, over the long lawns with their statues of leaping boys and patient angels, over all the attitudes of the resting dead, over the grass and the earthworms and the knitting crickets, butterflies had risen in swarms, the flowers had opened, and the wind had made a heavenly music in the leaves. Rose loved him. Rose had spoken.
Thirteen
THEY SAT THERE in Conrad’s truck, the memory of Rose’s voice in their ears. His wife, leaning from the clouds, inclining toward him from what he vaguely thought of as a distant shoreline, had found a channel back to him, had seen that he was fed and cared for. And what had it been to Hero? He could not guess, except to believe that she had not been surprised, that her world had always been full of voices, the spokesmen of recrimination and doubt. Only there, on that lonely hillside, surrounded by grave markers, had the voices at last given way to cadences that were familiar and gentle, Rose’s voice among them, prompting her toward a human kindness. In the great quiet of the cemetery, Hero had begun her recovery, tending her flowers, mowing the grass around the stones, watching the sun rise and set. In one part of his mind, Conrad still protested this—no one finds solace among the dead. How could the soul be cured in such a place? And yet he und
erstood that Hero had found there the perfect asylum, found sanctuary among the voices of the past thrown across the washboard of the heavens, the conversation of angels. He had hated the ugliness of dying, the wasting pain, how from the first moment that he understood the incontrovertible path of Rose’s illness, she was already beginning to be lost to him, though he held her hand tightly, though he made her speak to him, though he insisted, right to the very last moment, that she find him with her gaze, that she reply. He had protested the cruelty of random partings, children torn from their parents, spouses from each other, friends from friends. He had not understood, until now, that he could wish to believe in a different eternity, Rose taking up a permanent residence in the echoing corridors of his own heart. She would always wait there; she could speak to him still if only he would listen. Acts of imagination, Lemuel said, are man’s answer to his own limitations, his yearning. Be limitless, he had said, arranging the pigeons on Conrad’s arms, stepping back, his finger to his lips.
They sat there in Conrad’s truck, each remembering the sound of Rose’s voice. And then, from far away, from up on a ragged shelf of the mountains came another sound—the voice of the pres ent, the distant roar of the dam at Lake Arthur tearing loose at last. There was a muffled explosion, the lapping of hushed wing beats. The birds waiting huddled in the trees above the lake rose into the air, a broad black cloak veering away into the sky, hurrying away. With a groaning bellow the lake broke free, poured in thick torrents down the riverbed, cracking the trunks of trees, lifting them by the roots, tearing away the oaks and the sumacs, the dogwoods and the poplars, the elders and the ash, carving away the earth, rearranging the known into the unknown, a white wake kicked up by a giant.
Conrad lifted his head from his folded hands at the sound, saw the double doors of the natatorium ahead of him darken with faces and figures, for they, too, had heard it, heard it over the tinny sound of the transistor radio, the inconsequential morning news echoing above the pool. Lenore Wyatt, her hand on Burden’s sandy-haired head where he slept against her thigh, heard it. The Pleiades—a volunteer sandwich brigade, smooth-bladed knives poised over one hundred slices of soft white bread laid out side by side on an improvised plank table—they heard it, caught one anothers’ eyes, and said wordlessly, Didn’t you know it?
And they all, locked together—except for the old and infirm, who stayed behind, a teenage grandchild or a suffering spouse beside them holding their hands—came to the doors, stepped out cautiously into the rain, began flowing over the parking lot to the edge of the hillside, a river of witnesses, for a view down into town.
And it was just as Eddie had said, how they all stood there then, looking down at where they had been, where their lives had been lived. They tried to shake away the impossibility of it, the thing that was now just a memory, already growing old. How many steps to their front door? Hadn’t there been a tree there by the path, a lilac bush planted one summer morning long ago? Where was the shed? The children’s swings? The stone birdbath? The concrete griffin, hunched by the peonies? They would argue later—when entire buildings had been moved and streets had been rearranged like lines of string, after bridges had fallen and gaping vistas had opened where there had been none before—about these small things, the inconsequential order and placements, how it all had been. They fetched chairs and returned them to their neighbors, picked a sauceboat free from the mud, stepped on the tines of a buried fork, wept anew over lost photographs, certificates, jewelry, crying over what was funny and what was terrible—a piano listing in the town square, its ivory keys stripped, a wedding dress flying from a flagpole. How strange it was. Everything lost, nothing saved, three pigs found in the bank vault, a Boston whaler beached on the steps of the Congregational church, the mud that filled their houses now hardening to chalk. A wavering waterline ran around their walls, a memory of caution. Floors buckled, doors sprang from their hinges. At the town dump, on the windy mornings following the flood when people began cleaning out their houses, flocks of gulls and crows screamed over the detritus, circling high above the slow procession of cars and pickups with their rank loads of loss.
Conrad stood in the crowd at the top of the hill, felt the earth tremble under his feet, saw the explosion from the warehouse downriver where magnesium had been stored, the barrels now carried down the wide, churning current through the town, bursting into flames with the riveting phosphorescence of flashbulbs. It was impossible, Conrad thought, staring down at the rooftops far below him, black flecks of paper in a sea of frothing gray water. It was—impossible.
Standing on the hillside in the rain, they were strangely silent, though he could hear weeping from some, hear a child’s high, protesting cry, hear the words “No, no.” A man stood beside him, the retired mâitre d’ from the hotel’s dining room. Conrad glanced at him, saw he wore his medals from the war pinned limply over his chest. The man’s hands hung loose beside him, emptied of weapons, palsied. Tears ran down his face.
And how strange, now, that a flood should be silent, Conrad thought, that he could hear nothing, that Rose’s voice in Hero’s ear should be the last thing he’d heard, the last thing he’d ever hear. He saw Rose sitting on the kitchen stool in their own house, a recipe book open on her lap, her glasses on her nose, reading aloud to him. The clock began to strike. “What?” he said aloud.
He’d lost her somewhere.
He turned in the crowd—after how long? how long did they all stand there watching?—to find himself embraced by Mignon, her head at his chest. “Oh, Conrad,” she moaned softly, near his heart. And up behind her, gathering in close, were the other Pleiades, their hands linked.
He’d lost her somewhere.
They were turning, some of them, turning away now, coaxed back indoors. The sky seemed to have disappeared, come apart, no longer rain falling but pieces of the upper story of the world itself, as if behind what they all thought of as the sky was something else, the necessary detritus from the moment of creation, not rock nor water nor rooting plant but shards of empty material, of nothingness. The air was thick, moist, both hot and cold.
“You’re shaking,” Mignon said. “Come inside.”
But he’d lost her somewhere, he wanted to tell them. He’d lost the girl. Lost his wife. Lost her.
Someone put a blanket round his shoulders. He felt himself jostled along, his one good eye registering Henri’s back in front of him, her wig righted now, patted into place, soaked dark at the edges. He felt the hot-air blowers of the natatorium, heard the hum of the generator, the steady whoosh of warm air, pumping like a heart. Someone pushed him gently onto a chaise longue at the edge of the pool. He heard the steady lap of water, a soft splashing. Someone passed a hand over his eyes.
“He’s been out saving the world.” It was Lenore. “I saw him, heading into town, oh, four, five hours ago.”
“What was he doing? What on earth?”
“I think—he must have been looking for stragglers.”
“Oh! Poor man. Who did he find?”
I’ve lost something, he thought.
“Burden, fetch him a coffee.”
Conrad felt the cup being held to his lips, hot liquid in his mouth. He opened his eyes, looked out across the water, the bright, false blue of the pool, black lane lines wavering underneath.
And who was that, swimming? Making a steady crawl, enormous wings carving out scoops of water, throwing them high, a joyful sound, beads of brilliant water raining down. The swimmer turned his bright face to breathe. Conrad saw a grin spread out along his jaw, saw water siphon from his mouth like a fountain, saw the white hair, combed back, a goat’s beard. Saw the eyes find him.
“Go home, Conrad.”
He closed his eyes. He wasn’t even surprised.
“It will be all right. They’ll put it back together again. This is what happens. You’ll see.”
He opened his eyes again, saw the shape push itself from the water at the far side of the pool, shrink and quiver and tr
ansform itself into Rose’s small, slender body, the neat waist cinched with a blue belt, her hair flicked back from her face. Her mouth opened, a flower. A sweet scent drifted across the water.
“Time now to go home, bird boy.”
Home. Paradise Hill. Conrad tried to remember the view, saw it collect behind his closed eyes, each terraced garden one at a time, all the way down to his loft, all the flowers there opening to him. And then, with a wrench, he thought, My pigeons. Oh, Rose. He wanted to weep then, protesting a wrong that could not be righted, the river flowing through his loft, drowning his birds. Not them as well, he thought. Not my pigeons, too.
Maybe he should have gone home before he’d headed back into town, should have sprung the doors, set his birds free. But there hadn’t been time. There’d been such an urgency, such responsibility. And now it was too late.
He forced himself to sit up, tried to compose himself against the weight of the grief, all his beautiful birds lost. I chose well, he tried to tell himself. I found Hero, drove her to safety. Still, his beautiful, innocent birds. Rose would have wept for him, the price he’d paid. Realizing this, he felt a small comfort. She would have understood.
He looked up, returned the coffee cup to Burden’s freckled hand, his worried face hovering above.
“Thank you,” he said. He looked around vaguely. “Thank you. I need to go home.”
He stood, tried to prepare himself for what was to come. How many days would it be until the water withdrew, until he could get into the loft, bury his birds, the necessary business of what came afterward? He was so familiar with it, he thought, this aftermath. Suddenly he was so weary.
He patted his pockets, feeling that he had forgotten something. And then he remembered. Where was Hero?
He looked away from the circle of concerned women.
“Hero Vaughan,” he said abruptly. “I had her with me. She was in the truck.”