A Ring of Endless Light: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 4

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  I didn’t want anything to get complicated between Leo and me, but I hoped I’d always have him for a friend. He was the kind of person, like his mother, who could always be counted on to be there when you needed him.

  The stable was quiet. Grandfather was asleep, the book of Henry Vaughan’s poetry open beside him. Mother was in the kitchen making crème brûlée.

  “I’m like my mother,” she said. “I cook for therapy. And it’s as much of an art form, I believe, as painting or writing or making music.”

  “Crème brûlée’s an art form all right. Yum. Anything I can do to help?”

  “I don’t think so. Except keep me company. But I thought you were off with Leo for the day—”

  “A full day’s an awful long time with Leo. He’s coming back and we’re going to the Inn for dinner and then to a movie. Mother, should I let him pay for me?”

  She turned slightly toward me, still stirring something in a small saucepan. “Is it being a problem?”

  “Sort of. He did let me pay for lunch, but he was very insistent about dinner. The thing is, I don’t want to hurt his feelings, but I don’t want to lead him on.”

  Mother turned back to the stove. “Are those the only alternatives?”

  “That’s what I’m not sure about.”

  “I’m afraid that’s something nobody can tell you, hon. You have to sense it out for yourself. As long as you don’t make a production of it, I have a hunch you could probably let him pay for one evening. Leo needs to feel that he’s a man right now.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought. Thanks.” I looked at her and her eyes were just a little puffy, as if she’d been crying. But her voice was her own voice, without any tension behind it.

  “I’ve unplugged the phone by your grandfather’s bed, but grab for it here if it rings. Sound carries only too well in the stable.”

  At which moment the phone did ring, and I dashed across the kitchen and grabbed for it.

  “Hi, Vicky. Adam. Glad it’s you. I forgot to check this morning. Are you coming over on Wednesday?”

  “Oh, Adam—I can’t. I’m sorry. I promised Zachary I’d go flying with him.”

  There was a pause. Then: “Guess I can’t compete with that. My own fault for not being more clear about it.”

  “Adam—” I lowered my voice, speaking softly into the mouthpiece. “I saw Njord and Norberta today.”

  “Tell me.” Then: “Are you alone?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Maybe I could come over this evening after dinner.”

  “I’m going to the movies with Leo—I’m sorry. Could I come over to the lab tomorrow morning?”

  “Why not?”

  “How—how early?”

  A pause. Then: “Come along whenever you get up and we’ll have breakfast. The cafeteria opens at six-thirty.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there.” I hung up, and my heart was thumping. I hoped nothing in my face would betray me. I asked Mother, “Is it okay if I have breakfast with Adam tomorrow? I’ll be back in time to read to Grandfather.”

  Mother bent down to set a pan of water in the oven. “Vicky, you don’t need to feel obligated to read to your grandfather every morning. He wouldn’t want it to be a burden for you.”

  “I know. But it isn’t. I really like doing it.”

  “All right. But if you’re having a good time with Adam, don’t worry about getting back.”

  Would I have a good time? It all depended on Adam.

  I went down to the beach and sat on my rock. The rain seemed to be slackening off with the drop in the wind. I watched the waves breathing quietly. Adam’s call had left me churning, and I thought perhaps if I meditated I’d see more clearly.

  Mother says my seesaw moods are part of my adolescence and they’ll moderate as I grow older. The hospital had thrown me into a pit of darkness; then Norberta and Njord, responding to my need, had lifted me back up to the light. Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.

  Meditation, I thought, sitting there on the rock in Grandfather’s cove, has something to do with that light.

  I let my mind drift toward the dolphins, and as I stared out at the horizon there was the lovely leap I was half expecting, and I was sure it was one of my friends. My breathing quietened, slowed, moved to the gentle rhythm of the sea. The tenseness left my body until it seemed that the rock on which I sat was not embedded deep in the sand but was floating on quiet waters.

  My mind stopped its running around like a squirrel on a wheel, and let go. I sat there and I didn’t think. I was just being. And it felt good.

  I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, letting go and being, when a sea gull flew directly above me, mewling raucously, and reminded me that I’d better get back up to the stable.

  As I reached the top of the cliff, Daddy and Rob got out of the station wagon, our nice, battered old blue station wagon completely unlike Zachary’s hearse. I followed them into the porch and shook the rain out of my hair.

  Mother came hurrying out of the kitchen, putting her finger to her lips, and Daddy held the screen door so it wouldn’t slam. “Father still asleep?”

  “Yes.” Mother put her arms around Daddy and he held her. Our parents are not the kind who never kiss in front of their children, but there was something very special about the way Daddy put his lips against her hair, her cheek, her lips.

  “C’mon,” I gestured to Rob, and we went into the stall which held the children’s books.

  “Why aren’t you with Leo?” he asked.

  “I’m going to dinner and the movies with him later. I wanted to come home for a bit. It’s pouring again.”

  Rob was witness to that piece of obviousness, standing dripping in his yellow slicker. He shucked it off and put it over a chair.

  “Vicky, there’re probably lots of planets besides us with people on them, don’t you think?”

  I sat down on one of the low round leather ottomans. “John says we’d be pretty megalomanic if we thought we were the only inhabited planet in all of the solar systems in all of the galaxies.”

  “Mega—”

  “Megalomanic. It means thinking you’re the most important.”

  He nodded, looking solemn. “So maybe there’s a planet somewhere where nobody has any eyes.”

  I looked at him, and I thought his own eyes were shadowed, and I wanted to hug him and pull him onto my lap the way I sometimes did when he was little. But he was sounding as though he felt very grownup. “Could be, I guess.”

  “Well, if nobody had any eyes, they’d all get along all right without them, wouldn’t they?”

  “Sure, I guess they’d compensate.”

  “They’d get along with hearing, and smell, and touch, but they wouldn’t have any idea what anything looked like.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was driving at, but I knew that it was important to him. “No, they wouldn’t.”

  “And if someone from our planet went to the planet where no one had eyes, and tried to describe something to them—the way the rain looks falling on the ocean, or the lighthouse beam at night, or the sunrise—it couldn’t be done, could it?” He sounded anxious.

  I tried to understand. “No. It just wouldn’t be possible. If you didn’t have eyes, if you lived in a world of touch and sound, then nobody could tell you what anything looks like. Why, Rob?”

  He pulled up another ottoman and sat, elbows on knees, chin in hands. “Well, maybe when the people on the planet with no eyes die, then maybe they get sent to planets where there are eyes. But you couldn’t tell them about it ahead of time.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So, maybe when we die, we’ll get something as important as sight, but because we don’t know what it is, nobody could tell us about it now, any more than we could explain sight to the people on a planet with no eyes.”

  I still thought of Rob as a baby, but he wasn’t a baby any more, and he made a lot of sense. Maybe it wasn’t the kind of thin
g you’d hear in most churches, but it made more sense to me than a lot of sermons. And I thought Grandfather would like it. I asked Rob if he’d told him.

  “Not yet. I just thought of it. But I will, sometime when he’s—he’s at home.”

  I knew what he meant. Grandfather had been more at home earlier in the morning, before the hemorrhage, when we’d talked about meditation, than he’d been in quite a while.

  Daddy put his head around the partition of the children’s bookstall. “Mother’s making tea. Want to come join us?”

  Leo borrowed his mother’s VW again to take me to dinner.

  “Is Zachary still staying at the Inn?” he asked.

  “I think he sometimes stays at the Inn, and sometimes on the mainland at one of the guest apartments at the country club.”

  “I’d just as soon he’s not there tonight. I want you to myself.”

  I didn’t know whether I wanted Zachary to be there or not. I definitely did not want Leo to get cosmic about me. And yet everything that was happening, our weeping on the beach, our morning at the hospital, was bringing us closer together, whether I liked or wanted it or not.

  He said, “In a way I suppose Zachary and I could be friends. His mother’s dead. My father’s dead. I think he’s just as mixed up about life as I am, though he shows it in a different way. But he has all the money he needs. And I don’t.”

  “Hey, you have enough to take me to dinner at the Inn,” I reassured him. “And you’re going to Columbia in the autumn.” The wheels of the little car hished on the wet macadam. I was glad I was driving with Leo, not Zachary.

  “That’s not much in the way of competition, when he can charter the launch any time he wants, and keep rooms at both the Inn and the country club, and feed you on champagne and caviar.”

  “Leo—you don’t have to compete. With all his money, Zachary’s a lot more mixed up about life and death than you are.”

  “He knows what he’s going to do after college—law school. And he’s got the money to go there. And the brains.”

  “If he’s willing to use them, and that’s a big if. It took him all this time to get out of high school.” The windshield wipers on the little VW whizzed away, as though joining in the conversation.

  “Okay, then,” Leo said. “I really didn’t mean to spend this date talking about some other guy.”

  “Conversation about Leo only,” I promised.

  “And Vicky.” He drew up in front of the Inn. “You get out, and I’ll go park.”

  I scurried in through the rain.

  And looked at the Inn through Zachary’s eyes. After the country club, it did seem pretty dingy. There wasn’t anyone to take my coat. There wasn’t, as far as I could see, anyone to do anything. The paint, which should have been white, was greyish. There were cracks in the plaster. The lighting wasn’t intimate, it was just dim.

  Leo came in, and took my jacket. “I made a reservation,” he said. “Zachary clued me in to that one. I wouldn’t have thought of it otherwise.”

  “No more Zachary,” I reminded him.

  We had a table by the window, and even in the rain the view across the little green to the beach was lovely. The rain slanted against the tall street lights, glowing with golden droplets. And reflected in the night windows, but not blocking out the view, were the lights of the dining room.

  The menu that was given me, unlike the one at the country club, did have prices. I chose filet of sole because it was the cheapest thing on it.

  “Hey, Vicky,” Leo said, “please have anything you want. I’m going to have steak.” That was the most expensive.

  “I really like sole,” I said.

  “Well, okay, if you’re sure. Then I think I’ll have it, too.” He didn’t offer me anything to drink.

  While we were waiting for our order, the waitress brought in some crackers and cottage cheese and relish. I kept nibbling crackers because I didn’t have anything to say.

  Leo did. “I know you don’t play around, and I don’t, either, but can’t we be friends?”

  “We are friends.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I drank a few sips of water. “I told you, Leo, I don’t feel that way about you.”

  “Yet …”

  I didn’t answer. If I told him I did feel that way about someone else it wouldn’t solve anything, it would only create more problems. He’d know it had to be either Zachary or Adam, and I had a hunch Leo suspected Zachary. As for Adam, the last thing in the world I wanted him to know was that I thought of him as more than a friend. I had enough sense to know that if Adam suspected how I felt he’d more than put on the brakes; he’d get out of the car and run.

  “As far as feeling that way is concerned,” Leo said, “I think Suzy and Jacky do, and I agree with Mom that they’re much too young.”

  “So’re we.”

  He leaned earnestly across the table. “Half the Island kids are married out of high school.”

  That was true in Thornhill, too—not nearly half, and half was undoubtedly much too high an estimate for the Island—but enough, enough so that I’d used it as an argument in my own mind in thinking about Adam and me.

  I’d missed part of what Leo was saying; he was talking about Jacky and Suzy again. “ … and Jacky said they had lots of fun.”

  ‘Lots of fun’ can mean more than one thing. “What do you mean?” I demanded. “What kind of fun? How much fun?”

  “Don’t get all excited. Not that much. I mean, not all the way or anything.”

  The idea of my little sister and Jacky: it wasn’t that impossible. “If it’s not that much, and I’m certainly glad it isn’t, why are you bringing it up?”

  “I don’t know. It was a dumb idea.”

  “It was.” I looked at Leo and said swiftly, “Let’s just forget it. One more thing. I’m not Suzy. I don’t work the way she works. She’s always been pretty and cuddly and I’ve always been elbows and knees and not cuddly. But when I cuddle it will be really important. And I don’t want it till then. But I do want to be friends with you, Leo, real friends, who can talk to each other and be there for each other, no matter what.”

  He started to speak, then stopped as the waitress came in with our filets of sole. There was broccoli with hollandaise, and parsley potatoes, and it smelled good.

  “Why have I been so hungry all summer?” I asked.

  “Because eating is part of life. So is loving.”

  It rang true. “Let’s concentrate on eating, then. For now.” Then I asked, “Have you been hungry, too?”

  “Famished. I talked to my mom about it, and she explained about it being an urge to live. When Dad’s father died—he had a heart attack unexpectedly, just like Dad—they wept, and then they made love. And she showed me that this wasn’t being disrespectful but a—what did she call it? Oh, yes, an affirmation of the goodness of life.”

  I thought of Mrs. Rodney, short, stocky, sensible, unglamorous. Commander Rodney was more like a movie star. And I couldn’t visualize them making love. Or even kissing the way Zachary and I had kissed. And my parents? Could I visualize it with them? Sooner or later I was going to have to see them as separate people, not just Mother and Daddy. John hasn’t called Daddy anything except Dad for a long time. Somehow, calling him Daddy this summer was trying to keep him—well, maybe not exactly omnipotent, but the daddy of my childhood who could kiss a hurt and make it all right. The daddy who ought to be able to cure Grandfather’s leukemia. And I realized that part of the pain of this summer was in letting the old mother and daddy go, because that was part of my own growing up. They had to be free to weep, to hurt, just as I did. Daddy had to be free to be human and not able to cure all diseases. And they had to be free to make love, whether I could picture it or not.

  Leo had been talking through my thoughts. “ … and faith that God will never abandon any of his creatures. Vicky, where do you think my father is now?”

  I thought of Rob’s planet with no eyes
. “Well—I do think he’s somewhere.”

  “And what about Zachary’s mother?”

  “Frozen?”

  “Yeah—frozen. That keeps getting in the way when I try to like Zachary. Much more than the fact that my dad died after he pulled Zachary out of the water.”

  —Leo, you’re nice, I thought,—you’re lots nicer than I am.

  I said, “I don’t know whether I think freezing her’s holding her back or not. I guess if she’s really dead, it isn’t.”

  “But what if—in a few centuries or so, it should happen the way Zachary thinks, and someone does bring her back to life?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible. Adam says that anything human beings can think of has to be possible sooner or later.”

  “So what does that do to her now?”

  I took three bites of sole without tasting them. “I don’t know. I guess I think God can cope.”

  “You do believe in God?”

  “Some of the time.”

  “Not all of the time?”

  “No. But whenever anything goes wrong or I’m frightened I shout for God to help. So I guess when it comes to the pinch I believe.”

  “You don’t feel you have to be strong and self-sufficient enough to be able to do without God?”

  “Do you?” I countered.

  “My mom says it isn’t either strength or self-sufficiency, and I think she’s right. And I guess if she can believe, with all she’s seen as a nurse, it’s got to be real. That she believes.”

  I thought of the emergency room that morning. To work in an emergency room and still believe in God would be a real test of faith, and I wasn’t sure I’d pass it.

  Zachary would say that needing God is all self-deception, a cowardly illusion. But Adam hadn’t hated me for being afraid, that night when we sat together on the beach.

  “If it isn’t real”—Leo pulled me back into the present—“then nothing makes any sense. It’s all a dirty joke. If we get made with enough brains to ask questions, and then die with most of them unanswered, it’s a cheat, the whole thing’s a cheat. And what about all the people who die of starvation and poverty and filth—is that all there is for them, forever?”