She’d estimated six and a half hours between school and Seneca Lake, but hadn’t accounted for the number of times she’d have to stop to rest, rubbing the stiffness from her hands. She pulled off the road when she was halfway there, parking the car in a spot where the grass had turned from supple green to crisp gold. The air in midafternoon was laced with the smell of things gone to ground. Beech leaves curled in on themselves, brushed with the dull finish of autumn; the shadbush blazed scarlet. She unkinked her body after hobbling from the car and pressed her palms against the warm hood. Whenever a twinge of pain nudged her toward panic, she reminded herself it was a relief to disappear, even if only for a while.
* * *
She’d only been at graduate school for five weeks and was still recovering from the strain of unpacking and trying to meet new people when she had a run-in with her academic adviser. Miss Pym had suggested that even with an extended schedule, it might be difficult for Alice to achieve an advanced degree in ecology and evolutionary biology given her current condition. Miss Pym’s mouth dipped when she said the word condition, as if Alice might have something requiring a certain distance be kept.
“Rheumatoid arthritis isn’t a ‘condition,’ Miss Pym. It’s a disease. And I wasn’t aware that perfect health was a prerequisite for earning a degree. As long as I can do the work . . .”
“The thing is, Miss Kessler, I’m not sure you can.”
Miss Pym’s dark hair was swirled into a tight bun that pulled all expression from her face, save for the quick furrowing of her brow, which suggested a headache. Her foot tapped anxiously against her chair leg, as if she were secretly marching somewhere, away from the college, away from students who tested her patience and questioned her expertise in matters of proficiency.
“I can do the work. At Wesleyan . . .”
Miss Pym arched her eyebrows and interrupted. “Miss Kessler, I’m aware you come to us with the appropriate credentials. I am also aware you slept through Professor Strand’s midmorning lecture on avian biogeography. There were only fifteen students in the class. Your ‘lack of attention’ did not go unnoticed.”
Alice had argued out of sheer stubbornness, finally wearing down Miss Pym, who’d ended their conversation with the admonishment that far more care would need to be taken, before curtly dismissing her with a nod. Back in her dorm room Alice had stretched across the bed, still shaking with anger. She’d fought the urge to call Natalie, knowing the conversation she wished for would not be the conversation they would have. The witch! You can’t let her get away with that, Alice. Clearly she doesn’t know what you’re capable of. I can be there by nightfall. How does this sound? Miss Pym, in the teachers’ lounge, with a wrench. The Natalie who would have offered that had vanished eight years ago, replaced by an odd twin whose same sharp edge was now just as likely to be pointed in Alice’s direction as toward a condescending academic adviser.
She’d watched from her second-story window as other students milled across the lawn toward a demonstration, clumping together in an amorphous blob of support: for women’s rights, for racial equality, for social justice, against the war. She’d envied the ease with which they strode across campus, the way they bumped up against each other in solidarity, their confident, sympathetic embraces, any of which would have sent a wave of pain cascading across the landscape of her body.
At Wesleyan, she’d maintained a rigorous focus on getting her undergraduate degree, refusing to let herself think of anything else. She postponed her grief. She pushed away the guilt she felt about staying in school, along with her images of Natalie, alone now except for their housekeeper, Therese. She battled her way through a pharmaceutically induced fog, one of the side effects of her many medications, and made it a point not to think too far ahead. Doctors can be wrong; new treatments are on the horizon; every case is different became her mantras.
Coping and pushing herself were behavious that had long ago become engrained in her DNA. When she graduated, Alice was certain sheer will and determination, combined with generous scripts from her physicians, would keep her dreams intact. She could still be the first to discover a nest as finely crafted as any architect’s house; to marvel at the stippled mask of a new species of owl; to stand motionless in the Guánica forest scrub, waiting for the predawn call of the Puerto Rican nightjar. If her path had been uncertain, at least the end result had never been in doubt. Until now. Field studies would be difficult at best, straight research claustrophobic and unappealing, and dissections and laboratory work next to impossible, since it was becoming hard to hold a knife. She didn’t want to leave school; she didn’t see how she could stay. She needed to be alone someplace where she could sort out her thoughts.
The morning after her confrontation with Miss Pym, she’d packed some clothes and paid the boy across the hall five dollars to carry her suitcase downstairs and throw it into the back of her ’68 Mustang. Her father had given her the coupe not long before he and her mother died on the Connecticut Turnpike coming back from a performance of Promises, Promises in the city. Ironic, considering how often her mother had used those very words in response to her father’s assurances that he’d never miss another family dinner, or school performance, or fund-raiser again.
Her mother had sat at her vanity, brushing her décolletage with powder, happily dabbing Shalimar behind her ears, while Alice’s father, tickets in hand, paced back and forth in the hall, jingling the change in his pocket and consulting his watch. Her mother hummed “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” while she finished dressing; her father winked at Alice and pulled up her mother’s zipper as he joined her in the chorus. Alice knew the notes to the song by heart; her pulse raced and her stomach pitched at the first few notes. She could never hear that song without imagining the two of them huddled next to each other in the front seat, her father singing against her mother’s hair as she rested against his shoulder. Did they even see the truck? Had there been a moment of panic? A chance for them to think of her for even the briefest second?
Miss Pym had consulted a file while she’d chastised Alice in the airless office. An emotional two years for you. The progression of your condition—an apologetic clearing of her throat—I mean, your disease, losing your parents. So many adjustments to make.
Losing your parents. Who said things like that? As if they were hiding from her and all she needed to do was turn over a few pillows or open a closet door. They weren’t lost. She knew exactly where they were. With her index finger she’d traced the stern granite of their headstones, side by side, just as they’d ended, sitting side by side in a car seat that still held the dirty impressions from the bottoms of her sneakers on its blue vinyl back.
Natalie hadn’t wasted a breath before erasing them, not one article at a time, but with an emphatic swoop. Home for the summer at the end of her junior year, Alice had opened the door to her parents’ bedroom closet and found it completely empty: the clothes, the shoes, the felted hats with their stiff bits of feathers, the tin box stuffed with mementos of their courtship, the rolls of wrapping paper and old Christmas tags with a tracery of ink barely visible, all gone. Their bedsheets were gone from the linen closet, their ice skates and tennis rackets absent from the attic. Their ashtrays, the coasters with their initials intertwined. All of it donated, Natalie had said, to the Salvation Army, because really, why would you want to be constantly reminded of what was over? Even the smell of them had vanished, replaced with the off pine odor of a cleaning product that now made Alice nauseous. The only thing she’d managed to salvage was the reed from her father’s bassoon, still in the old Mercurochrome bottle in the medicine cabinet.
Her childhood home became a prison when she wasn’t at school. Therese, who adored Natalie but had always frightened Alice, cleaned the house constantly when Alice was home on break, wiping the faint cloud of breath from a mirror, the ashy pattern of a footprint from the hall floor. Alice could not understand the woman’s slavish devotion, or how she stayed busy in a household
decreased in number by three, but Natalie insisted on keeping her, telling Alice, “You can’t understand how difficult it is to manage the house on my own. You aren’t here, remember? I am.”
The ghosts of her parents wandered the halls, searching for earthly attachments. Alice heard them at night, their muffled voices falling into her ears as she twisted against her sheets. “Darling, have you seen my apron? I just hung it here in the kitchen and it’s gone.” Or her father, morosely searching for his favorite tie, a gold and navy blue foulard with a tiny stain just above the point, saying, “Your mother never liked that tie. She’s secreted it away somewhere, hasn’t she, Alice?”
* * *
It had been eight years since she’d been to the cabin. Myrna Reston, keeping a low profile since a scandal involving her husband’s investment group became known, had passed the job of managing the cabin rental to her oldest son, George, Jr. George had been a minion in his father’s firm, lacking the ambition to do much more than fall into the guaranteed embrace of the family business. Alice remembered him vaguely as a pock-faced teenager who’d tried to shove a garden hose down the front of her swimsuit when she was still in grade school. Fortunately, he remembered her only as Natalie’s little sister, and when she called to ask about the cabin, he’d sounded happy enough to hear from her and happier still at the thought of obtaining some rent in the off-season.
“You can have it for a song, doll,” he’d offered. “It will be cold in the mornings, but I’ll have our man lay in some wood for you for a few fires. There won’t be much happening in town this time of year. Most places have already closed for the season. But you can still get groceries at Martin’s and likely anything else you’d need.”
Alice had assured him she wasn’t interested in shopping, only wanted a few days away from school, where there were too many distractions.
“Didn’t classes just start?”
“Individual study this term. I just need a quiet place to do some research.”
“Hmm. How’s Natalie, by the way?”
George had been as infatuated with Natalie as anyone else, but a stunning combination of arrogance and stupidity had made him noticeably more persistent. He’d always been quick to do her bidding, gifting her with expensive trinkets she hadn’t known she wanted, providing her with the answers to high school exams, nullifying potential rivals with vicious rumors. Natalie had kept him on a long lead, reeling him in with a casual compliment, a fluttering of lashes whenever she needed something. When she was younger, Alice had thought him simply a troublemaker, but as she grew older she’d realized a streak of cruelty tainted his antics, making it difficult to shrug them off as typical eruptions of teenage temperament.
“Natalie’s fine, thank you. As a matter of fact, I think she mentioned you just the other day, George. I’ll be happy to tell her you asked about her. And I’ll take you up on that offer of wood, if you don’t mind.” The lie had slipped from her tongue without a thought.
“I’ll have our man leave the key under the mat. Just let me know what day you want to come up and he’ll have the place ready for you.”
“Tomorrow,” she’d said. “If it’s possible, I want to come tomorrow.”
“That’s not much notice.”
Alice had held her breath.
“Let me call him. I guess we can make that work. I’ll have to tack on something extra, though.”
* * *
She worried that the cabin would have become a miniaturized version of the way she remembered it, but nothing had changed except for the absence of voices. The house had always been full of other people and of other people’s things, and now the sound of her suitcase dropped on the wood floor echoed through the empty rooms. It’s peaceful, she reminded herself. That’s what you wanted. But it was also lonely.
George Reston’s man, Evan, had indeed laid up a stack of wood near the fireplace and opened the windows for airing. The rooms had a vague odor of mildew, except for the bedroom she and Natalie had shared for so many years, with its heavy beams crossing the ceiling and the knotty pine walls. The air in that room was dry and smelled of cedar. She remembered the two of them jumping up and down on the thin mattresses, clutching each other and squealing with delight when their father scratched at the window screens after dark, pretending to be a bear; staining their fingernails with juice from the raspberries they found in the woods; Natalie sitting cross-legged on the gravel by the side of the road, studiously working to free the cuff of Alice’s jeans that had gotten caught in the bike gears, while Alice tried to balance the bike and stay upright. She pushed the checked curtain aside and looked out across the lake. Where had that sister gone? The sun was low in the sky, barely a half circle of it still visible on the horizon, and the water was the dull gray of pencil lead. Dead calm.
She collapsed onto one of the twin beds, pulling the chenille spread over her shoulders. The room grew colder and she considered getting up to close the windows, but didn’t have the energy to do both that and climb back into bed. Instead she pushed deeper under the covers and listened to night make its way into the cabin: the muffled echo of birdcalls, the clicking of bats, the hesitant nocturnal rustling of small animals. She woke once, to find the bedroom filled with milky light, the moon, broadcasting loud across the sky. Everything she saw was sketched in shadow, as if it existed in another realm. She listened hard, then harder, waiting to hear the sound of her parents stirring in the next room. That was how she fell back into sleep, straining to hear something that wasn’t there until her ears ached with the effort.
In her dreams that night she stretched, arms and legs waving like sea grass, her bones as flexible as bands, her spine arching and curving like a bowstring. Green water surrounded her, and her own buoyancy came as a surprise—grace restored, movement effortless. Stretching became swimming. Swimming became running through the water, until the viscosity of it increased and the push of it against her body was more than she could manage.
Coming out of sleep she smelled chimney smoke and the heavy tang of resin, and blinked, anxious to dispel the remnants of her dreams. Morning sun cut through the bedroom window, and with it came the familiar stiffness of limbs and joints, body parts that had long since betrayed her. The most necessary aspects of her skeletal structure had turned from useful bone into a series of nicks and catches, grinding against each other and melding into immobile pieces, petrified versions of the knots her father had taught her to tie when she was a child.
* * *
They were standing on the pier, Alice and Natalie and their father, twenty-some stone steps down from the cottage. The Restons’ flat-bottom skiff bobbed back and forth, occasionally wedging against the piers until the water pulled it free with a groan. Natalie, just thirteen then, was already more intent on watching her reflection ripple back and forth in the water than on any sort of lesson, and Alice seized the opportunity to commandeer her father’s attention.
“It’s important both of you develop some basic nautical skills,” her father said, apparently oblivious to the fact that neither of his daughters had an interest in launching out across a stretch of dark water. The toe of one of his new deck shoes marked a page in a book of knots, and Alice recalled the crisp black-and-white illustrations, a frayed piece of rope magically turning in upon itself in one diagram after another until it become an intricate web of twists and circles that looked impossible to decipher.
Her father held a length of rope loosely between his hands. “The end of the line you work with is called the ‘bitter end.’ The main length of line is the ‘standing part.’ Before the end of the summer, both of you are going to know how to tie a reef knot, a clove hitch, a bowline, a cleat hitch, and a becket bend.” Her father squeezed her shoulder. “We’ll have you weaving a monkey fist before you know it, Alice. A quarter for each of you for every knot you learn.”
All afternoon she sat on the dock, the planks warm against her skin, the smell of the lake filling her nose, working the rope over and und
er, under and around, around and through. After several hours, she had transformed the piece of rope into a series of misshapen knots. Natalie skipped rocks and lay on the deck, her sleeves rolled up to her shoulders, her jeans folded neatly up past her knees. She glanced at Alice occasionally through eyes slitted against the sun.
“Don’t you ever get tired of doing what you’re supposed to do?” There was no hint of sarcasm in the question, only a trace of confusion, as though Natalie was searching for something that eluded her.
“I guess one of us should probably try to.” Alice got up and sat beside her sister, picking up Natalie’s piece of rope, biting her lower lip as she started her careful construction of knots again.
Natalie smiled at her before rolling over onto her stomach. “Make mine look good, okay?”
What Alice remembered most from that year was not biking into town with her father or reading her mother’s elegant script on the postcards addressed to relatives. It was not sitting between the two of them in the evening, watching her father’s hand touch her mother’s hair or the field of stars that sprouted across the dark sky. What she remembered most was the feel of smooth rope in her hands, the indentation of warm coins pressed against her palms, and Natalie’s wink when their father counted out two equal shares of quarters.
* * *
Her body rebelled from the previous day’s drive, but she’d been expecting as much. Her flares were almost always followed by a day requiring rest, and then it was usually possible to drift back to a state of status quo. She drew a bath and as the water lapped at her skin, she remembered the way her body had felt in her dream, fluid and lithe. Spiders crisscrossed the ceiling, skittering back and forth to escape the steam. She pulled her hair up in a loose knot, dressed, took a blanket from the basket next to the fireplace, and headed down to the lake. The sun glinted off the water’s surface, blinding her with bright sparks. The skiff was in its same spot, tiny wavelets pushing up against its dented sides. Alice spread out the blanket, climbed into the boat, and lay down in the empty hull. The water rocked her, and the sun warmed her skin until she felt like melted sugar, liquefied to a soft gold.
The Gravity of Birds: A Novel Page 10