The telephone rings. Jody and her grandmother stare at each other. The sound is thin and high-pitched and Elizabeth Renny just lets it go on ringing. It can only be Laura, and she’ll never believe no one’s at home. When she can’t stand the ringing anymore, Elizabeth Renny picks up the phone, then quickly hangs it up again. It may only be that Jody is used to her grandmother’s hair being pinned up, but from the back, she could swear that her grandmother is no older than eighteen.
“Go on,” Elizabeth Renny says to Jody. There’s a slight hiss in her voice, as though she were speaking to one of her cats.
Jody picks up her suitcase and goes out the door. She looks back inside and sees that her grandmother has already turned away and is rifling through a cabinet where the cat food is stored. As soon as the phone begins to ring again, Elizabeth Renny slips a Tina Turner tape into the cassette player Jody’s left behind. It is amazing how music can drown out any other sound, how it can fill an empty room and seem brand-new even when it’s a song that’s been played a thousand times before.
JODY finds him out in the yard, wearing old jeans and a white T-shirt.
“Eddie,” Jody says, startling them both by saying his name out loud. “We have to leave now.”
He goes inside and puts a white-and-blue striped shirt over his T-shirt. He cannot bring himself to touch the hidden strongbox in the chicken coop, but he gets their suitcases and carries them outside. Jody is already waiting up the road. The back door of the taxi she’s called has been flung open. The taxi driver swallows air and doesn’t move a muscle when the Giant opens the trunk and settles their suitcases inside. The driver doesn’t say a word to them, but every once in a while he looks at the Giant in his rearview mirror. He knows he will faint if the Giant speaks to him, but the Giant and the girl both look out their windows in silence.
The Giant’s legs press against the driver’s seat; he has cramps in his thighs from folding himself into the car. He remembers the night he first came to the Island, he remembers the wooden bench he sat on during the crossing, and the roll of the ferry in the dark. There was cigar smoke and rain and the scratchy black coat against his neck. At the age of ten he knew enough to go out only at night. It is now almost noon. The trip Jody has planned is a long one. They’re avoiding Duke’s County Airport, where Jody might be recognized, and flying from Logan Airport in Boston instead. Jody has disguised herself by wearing a scarf tied over her hair and a pair of metal-rimmed sunglasses, not realizing that as long as she’s with the Giant no one will give her a second look.
When they pull up to the crowded dock and get out of the taxi, the Giant is stunned by the sunlight. While Jody pays the driver, he gets out and takes their suitcases from the trunk, but his head is reeling. Jody gets their tickets, and as they walk toward the ferry, she checks her pocketbook to make certain she hasn’t forgotten anything. There are too many people here. The Giant cannot breathe. Jody doesn’t notice that people are staring, but the Giant knows. He keeps his eyes straight ahead. He tries to concentrate on the ferry and the white foam spraying upward as waves hit the bow, but the sun is directly overhead and every step he takes forces him to walk through his own shadow.
“Damn it,” the Giant says when they reach the wooden ramp leading to the ferry.
Jody remembers the taste of her own blood. She would not be strong enough to hold him, even if she tried.
“I left my plane ticket in the cab,” the Giant tells her.
He drops the suitcases and turns away.
“Wait,” Jody says.
She is wearing a sundress and white leather sandals. The hem of her dress moves in the breeze.
“I’ll be right back,” the Giant says.
As soon as he begins to run, people dodge away and stand to the side. The space created for him fills in with people straining to get a good look once he’s safely passed them by. Even though the crowd comes between them, Jody can see him for a very long time. She watches him run past the ticket booth and the taxi stand and the parking lot. Her cotton dress keeps her cool, even in the hot sun, lucky for her since it will be even hotter on the bus to Logan Airport. At last call, Jody gets on the ferry and stands topside, by the railing. She knows that by now he is on the road home, but she keeps on watching the shore anyway, even after the ferry has begun to pull into the harbor. The water is like glass, green and clear, and not even the ferry’s churning engines can disrupt the calm surface for long. As they move toward the mainland the path they chop disappears and is replaced by calm water, as though they have never even passed this way.
At the funeral her parents do not look at you. It was a mistake for you to come. You know they can read your thoughts. Their child’s death haunts you. You cannot think her name without something inside tearing, and yet a dozen times a day you think, Thank God it wasn’t my child. All the way home from the funeral, you rub a quarter between your fingers, but the force field is oddly absent and you have no symptoms. You do not consider pulling over to the side of the road and weeping a symptom.
Every day you tell your child it was not his fault. He is dangerously confused. Someone has told him that when people die they are returned to the earth and now he is waiting for his friend to return. He says he sees her shadow on the lawn, ready for her when she comes back. He begins to disappear each day but you and your husband decide not to worry. He needs some time alone. Then when you are practicing, driving back from the market where you shop for your neighbor, you discover where your child has been going every day. The little girl’s house is already listed with several real-estate brokers, but there your son is, waiting for his friend. You pull over and call to him, demanding that he get in the truck. You shift into gear, eager to get away from that empty house. He sits leaning against the door, wearing red shorts and a short-sleeved shirt with three buttons, all undone. You tell him nobody returns. You tell him not to wait. You tell him she will always be alive in his mind. Most people, you assure him, do not die until they’re very old, maybe even a hundred, older than turtles, older than the trees.
“You won’t ever die,” he says to you.
You keep driving.
“If you ever died,” he says, “Daddy and I would die too.”
You keep both hands on the steering wheel. You do not cry.
“No,” you say. “You and Daddy would not die. Every person’s death belongs just to that person.”
When you pull into your driveway he gets out of the truck without saying a word. You cannot stand the fact that he is suddenly afraid of loud noises. Raised voices or the sound of dogs barking make him burst into tears. He is detached, no longer interested in his pets or in new toys. What you have been waiting for has finally happened. Clothes bought at Christmas no longer fit. Although he is still smaller than most children his age, when you measure him against the counter you begin to cry before you can stop yourself. But your son does not seem to care. He has taken to slouching. Though he is miles beyond any form of bribery, your husband has come up with a plan to get him interested in something. He goes out to the store and returns with a ball and a hoop he attaches to the shed. Even if your son continues to grow at this rapid rate your pediatrician has warned that he will never be above average height. His future in basketball is probably limited. Still, your husband insists he learn the game. You hear thumping as they practice dribbling the ball in the dirt. You watch through the window. At first your son is not interested. He stands with his arms crossed, a parody of adult boredom, as your husband shoots basket after basket.
You cannot help feeling that the accident has proven you right. You wonder if phobics comb the newspapers for crimes and disasters that corroborate their world view. You have suspected there was danger out there, now you know you were right. The sound of the basketball hitting against the shed makes you even more aware of all you can lose. At night you dream you are a child. Your father is in the kitchen, rolling out dough for pies. You recognize the sound of a knife cutting apples and everything seems famil
iar: the sound of the parkway, the color of the sky. Even though you are asleep, you realize that in your dream your father is younger than you are now. You wake up remembering how he used to sing in the car, and that he once had a beautiful voice. This is what you have realized: your father will not continue to be alive after he has died. You truly have not known this before. You have viewed death as though you were a five-year-old. You have imagined battling with your father after he was dead, trying to convince him you were worthy. You are no longer concerned with being someone’s daughter. But at least your struggle with your father has allowed you to know what you are to your own child. You are the person who never dies, you are a parent, not quite human, there only to love him.
You have begun to think about babies, and you want one. You forget that babies mean getting up in the middle of the night, you forget bending low over a crib to check and make certain your baby is breathing. To create life in the face of death is a show of strength. You make love with no birth control fourteen days after your period, and afterward tell yourself the two beers you had made you do something so stupid. When you really consider all the dangers any child brought into the world must face you are immobilized. You stop driving up your road. You ask your husband to pick up your neighbor’s groceries. You refuse to go outside. But now you begin to be afraid in your own house. You think of faulty wiring, spontaneous combustion, lightning striking, sudden infant death. When your safe place begins to feel dangerous it can mean your pattern of phobias is breaking down. This can be a sign of recovery. Why is it, then, everything seems difficult? Why are you so certain that unless you start all over again you will be lost? Having broken through the force field, why do you still feel its sharp edges? You think about this for as long as you can stand to and then one morning you go out and drive back and forth in the driveway. By the time you have made your third run down the driveway you have stopped asking yourself why you have to start all over again. You are simply a woman practicing the art of real life.
Simon likes the way the dust rises up when he dribbles the ball. He likes the sound of metal as the ball touches the hoop, then ricochets into and through the basket. His arms begin to feel loose after he plays for a while, heat moves up his limbs to the center of his body. Each time he scores a basket he feels as if he’s eating thunder. There’s a crash inside his throat. The thunder is what’s making him grow taller, it’s exploding inside him, taking up all the space beneath his skin.
Nelson lies in the shade and watches, his eyes darting back and forth as Simon runs toward the basket. Simon tries not to look at the dog, because every time he does he thinks about death. In Simon’s mind the accident has become a single flash of light. He sees the light behind his eyes as he falls asleep at night and whenever he enters a dark room. He sees it every time he hears a loud noise, like the slamming of a car door. But when he plays basketball everything turns blue. It is not just that he tilts his head up as he aims for the basket. It is more blue than the sky.
No one will ever make him believe the accident wasn’t his fault. He still doesn’t quite believe that he can’t take it all back, like a tape rewinded, then replayed without any mention of the Giant. He will always think of the house down the road as Samantha’s, even after it is sold, and he alternates between imagining that Samantha is in New York with her family and believing that she is somewhere in his yard. She seems extremely real to him, realer than last winter when she sent him a postcard from New York.
Simon tries to think only of basketball. Usually, he’s easily frustrated. When he can’t button a button he sometimes pulls it off his shirt. When he can’t lace a shoe, he throws it across his room. But when his father instructs him on how to hold the ball and aim, Simon amazes them both by listening. He knows that if he really tries, this is the one thing he can do. It helps him to forget that he cries at night and sometimes wets his bed. He does not understand why people have to die. What happens to them when their bodies stop working? Sometimes he thinks Samantha is inside him, and that is why her shadow stays in their yard and hasn’t gone back to New York City.
He knows his father has been trying to make him happy. Andre played ice hockey when he was growing up in New Hampshire and he doesn’t even like basketball much, and now he cannot have a conversation with Simon that doesn’t include Larry Bird and the Celtics. A mechanic he knew in Boston sold him two season passes for the Boston Garden for the coming season. Just the two of them, they’ll stay in a hotel near the Charles River, they’ll eat junk food till they drop.
But when the Celtics tickets arrive in the mail, Simon locks himself in the bathroom and will not come out.
“This is it,” Andre tells Vonny. “This is the fucking limit. Nothing I do makes him happy.”
Simon doesn’t know how to tell his father that he doesn’t deserve to see the Celtics. Since he was the one who knew about the Giant, he was the one who should have been hit. How long, he wonders, will it take before he stops missing her? How long before he no longer sees that flash of light?
In the hallway, his parents argue. Andre vows to take the bathroom door off its hinges, even though this means he will be late for work. Simon hears his mother telling him to unlock the door. He hears her start to count to three. He unlocks the door and walks right past Vonny and Andre, into his room. Vonny follows him and stands in his doorway.
“Don’t you ever lock yourself in there again,” she tells him. “Do you understand?”
He nods his head. He understands perfectly. He should be sent to his room for disobeying, so when his mother goes downstairs he closes his door, punishing himself. He will not allow himself to play basketball for two days. He will not allow any TV for three. He lies down on his bed and falls asleep with all his clothes on and he dreams that Samantha steps out of the sky. Her dress and shoes are blue, her hair is pulled into a ponytail. All around her is that amazingly bright light, bright enough to fill his eyes with tears. When Simon wakes he is wet all over. He has peed in his pants, his body is coated with sweat. He takes off his clothes and puts on a dry T-shirt and shorts.
Except for the hum of the wheel as his mother works on the porch, the house is quiet when he goes downstairs. Andre is at the garage in Vineyard Haven and should not be home for hours. Simon’s rabbit, Dora, is eating from the bowl Vonny has made for her. RABBIT is stenciled in black letters below the rim. Vonny has been setting out her food and water, and Dora no longer follows Simon from room to room. Simon hears the call of a bobwhite. Out on the grass gnats hover. Simon still feels hot. He gets himself a glass of lemonade, and when he sits down at the table he notices that the rabbit has finished her food. He takes a spoon and ladles sugar into the rabbit’s bowl, then watches her eat. Every once in a while she stops and is perfectly still, then returns to the bowl. Simon pets the rabbit, who’s been so ignored lately she’s suspicious. Next to the stove, Nelson is snoring. Simon realizes Samantha will never be any older. She will never learn to walk the tightrope; she will never be any bigger. Who is Simon to go on without her? How dare he grow, go to school, own a pet? He goes to the door and opens it, then leans against the screen until it sticks open in place. The rabbit sits and watches. Nelson hears the opening door in his dream and sits up, bleary-eyed but, as always, ready to go out. Simon pushes the dog away. He picks up Dora and puts her directly in front of the open door. The rabbit does not move. There is sugar stuck to her whiskers. Simon gets the sugar bowl and starts a thin trail along the kitchen floor, out the door, down the porch steps. His chest feels tight and his stomach hurts; sugar sticks to his damp fingers. The rabbit begins to slowly follow the trail, at last hopping down the steps. Simon slowly walks past her, into the house. He closes the door and watches her through the screen mesh. When she finishes all the sugar she sits there. Her body moves up and down when she breathes.
“Run,” Simon says through the screen.
Dora sits up straight, as though she’s heard him.
Planes pass by overhead and Simon can
hear the rhythmic creak of Vonny’s wheel out on the sun porch. He leans his face up against the cool wire mesh of the screen. After a while he goes outside and picks up Dora. It’s a hot day, the first of many, and even the brown rabbits who come to eat grass at dusk are hidden in dark places under the bramble bushes. These rabbits are not so silent as they seem. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, they begin to scream and no one knows why. Are they calling to each other? Have they picked up the scent of an owl? Or does the cry push out of their throats simply to break the spell of their silence?
Gravel and rocks spin out as Andre’s truck pulls up in the driveway. He leaves the truck idling and slams the door open. In Simon’s arms the rabbit shivers.
“Goddamn it,” Andre says.
He’s yelling, and Simon’s not sure why.
“You’re not going to do this to me,” Andre says.
Ever since leaving the house, Andre has been thinking about his father. He’s been thinking so hard he no longer knows if he’s furious at his father, his son, or himself. All he knows is that if he measured himself against his father right now, they’d be just about equal. That’s what’s killing him. Equal amounts of distance and silence. The sum of zero.
As he walks up the driveway he sees that Simon is afraid of him. He must look like a crazy man. He’s been working on a transmission and his hands are covered with grease. He doesn’t give a damn. He goes up to Simon and grabs him by the shoulders.
“Talk to me!” Andre says.
Simon holds on to his rabbit and backs away.
“I said, talk to me!”
“I won’t!” Simon says.
Andre tears the rabbit out of Simon’s hands.
Illumination Night Page 19