by Sharon
She was. Burning up, feverish. He touched his own face. "Me too." He kissed her soft, swollen mouth. On one final strand of breath he whispered, "I can't think what we're doing now. Could it be making love? It was love already."
He had come to her as one goes to Lourdes, expecting miracles. And in her, he found them. Trapped in a streaming universe of rapture, he watched her reach her summit. And when that moment came for him, it was so complete that he died in it and came back reborn.
"Hello, world," he whispered to the air.
It came slowly back to her: the warm, disturbed bedding beneath her, the shelter of her lover, his arms holding onto her hard, the bewitching tangle of their legs. His breath was soft in her hair, softer on her scalp. The backs of his fingers lay on her cheek.
He knew when her eyes opened. Her lashes stroked the side of his thumb. Leaning on his forearm, he pulled away to look down at her face. Her hair clung damply to her shoulders, spreading in a shimmering web-work that melted into the dense pool of her curls. Framed in the night shadows of her hair, in the black brows, her skin was very light, the few freckles across her nose standing out in an intense, creamy field, her lips wet, stung, the color of a tea rose. She was older than her years in some ways, in others much younger. It was the youth he saw now, so undefended it wrung his heart. Gazing into the tender depths of her eyes, he said again, "Hello, world."
He stroked her hair, his hand unsteady, continuing many minutes before he spoke gently. "Do you regret this, Amish?"
"No."
"If it were possible to die one more time, I would have done it if you'd said yes."
She laid her palm on his chest. "In my heart, you are my husband."
"You are my wife, my parent, my child…" He gathered her close, loving her so, and was silent, holding her.
Presently he tipped back her head and brushed her mouth with his, and then drew back to pass his fingertip over the distended fullness of her lips. She closed her eyes and parted her lips at his touch.
"Do you think we can set our hearts to beat together?" she whispered. "We can be like two clocks in time to each other, no matter what happens. Let's try."
He rubbed her breathtaking smile at the corners with his thumb. "It won't work; I'm already too fast."
"I'm fast too." She arched, her hands winnowed his hair, and her body aligned itself to his. She whispered, "Make me faster."
He had read once about fireflies in Thailand that gather in great numbers in trees upon a shoreline, spreading light like a galaxy. Thus was this night, with delight. For them, love was not an art, or a science, or even a feast of the senses. It was two souls coming home together at last.
It was much later that she lay in his arms, listening to his murmured love words, profoundly at peace. Candlelight draped the room in delicate shadows and gave their flushed skin the color of warm cider. The earth had a great quietude.
She felt him stir. His hands tightened around her. He put his cheek on her hair. He's trying to figure things out again, she thought. In time, he spoke.
"Is there a chance we could make them understand?" he asked.
"My 'them'?"
"Your 'them.'"
"No." A pause. "My dad's changed. It's not like it used to be when I was little. Used to be he'd put on his glasses in the evening and sit down with a storybook and read out loud to us—to Daniel and Rachel and me."
"What kind of storybooks?"
"The one about Pooh. I've told you about that, I guess. There was one about four sisters who called their mother Marmee. We thought that was so funny—'Marmee.' One of the sisters, Jo, wanted to be a writer. She was Rachel's favorite of the sisters..." Presently, "Another story that struck me particularly was The Count of Monte Cristo. Do you know of that one?"
"Yes."
"Dad and Daniel got so excited about that story that they ran out to the woods and picked up branches for a sword fight. We used to have more fun… Another time Daniel told me about, when he and Rachel were too young for school yet, Dad took them to town with him to go by the feed store. That Saturday, musicians from the high school were playing in the band shell at the south park and Dad pretended to stop so that Rachel could swing, but Daniel says he could tell Dad just wanted to hear the music. After he said, 'Don't tell your mother we stayed. Such foolishness, she'll think.' Today if music were playing, Dad would drive right by, I'll bet. My younger brothers and sisters, they don't know that side of him."
"What made him change?"
"It's hard to say. Maybe getting older. There was another thing, too, a bad thing that happened… done to one of my family by English. After that, he wasn't so easy about English things."
With infinite tenderness, he stroked the side of her face. "Your neighbor Ben told me that an Amish girl here was—I'm not sure what—beaten up, harassed, raped… during the Vietnam War."
A violent chill seized her fingers. "My sister Rachel."
He knew. Somehow he knew in the second's hesitation before she spoke. "Were you close to her?"
"Never. But we were entwined. Sometimes it was thorny between us."
He waited for her to speak again. When she didn't, he asked, "Who's Seth?"
"A neighbor."
"Is he in love with you?"
"I don't think so." Her hands were beginning to ache. A smile hovered, uncertain. She pressed her lips to his throat. "One auction and you're ready to write my biography."
He rolled on his side to touch her lips with his, not in a kiss, only the gentlest nestling, and then pulled back, loving her with his eyes, loving her, his heart aching with it. Then very softly, he said, "Have you had a child, Susan?"
"Yes." The word was a whisper, a depthless sorrow.
"You didn't tell me."
"I knew it would make you sad. You see, she couldn't live."
She had turned her head. His hand became unsteady against the soft flesh of her cheek. "You had a little girl?"
"Yes. She came early, and she had that… like the Kennedy baby… So many early babies have…"
"Hyaline membrane disease?"
"That was it. They did what they could at the hospital, but she was just so small." Her face tensed, and she was hardly able to whisper, "Her tiny little hands were as small as acorns."
The air against his eyes became painful. He shut them, and enclosed her in his arms and didn't speak, because he could not. Many minutes passed before she drew away to look at him, and he smoothed back her hair and said, "I would like to write your biography. Everything from this moment on. My name on every page."
She dressed by touch in the predawn darkness, as she had done much of her life. He slept, and she didn't wake him. Partings were things she had learned to dislike.
Outside it was coming to be light, violet-gray, with a clean-swept feel. Chilly air bit her warm skin.
On the path home through the woods, she met Daniel. Unsmiling, he stood under a birch, stark in the graying light against the veins of white bark. She stopped twenty feet from him, jelly in her middle. He gazed back, silent.
"I'm not ashamed," she said.
She'd never seen his eyes look darker or more kind. He shook his head. "Do you think that's going to make a difference?"
"No. Nothing will make a difference."
"And what will you do when he leaves?"
She started to walk again, shivering under her shawl, looking down at the damp sponge of forest litter, "I'll remember him."
Chapter 19
Alan was facing the demolition of a lifetime's assumptions about love and romance. He needed a card reading, "Be Gentle: I'm Newborn." Daylight was painfully bright to his eyes. Colors exploded at him in new hues. His body seemed not to be bound by the law of gravity. His nerves were raw from the assault of sensation. From more than a hundred voices on the set, he could pick out hers at any second and center there.
No less meticulous about their work than they'd ever been, they met the complicated round of their daily obligations with conc
entration. But the real part of their lives was spent together, pretending time didn't exist. The force of their love felt like magic. Perhaps they were waiting for it to create magic, a waiting not acknowledged, never forgotten. She'd been reared to love, not to fall in love. He'd been reared to do neither. Surely there would be more miracles.
For her it was easier. She lived by the moment. He planned. He solved problems. That was what he did best, his raison d'etre—or it had always been before. Here was the problem of problems, the Grand-Slam Problem of a Lifetime, and he was wandering around in it blind. God, this was so fragile. But solvable. It had to be solvable. Everything bent to logic—so Alan told himself again and again, by the half-minute.
Alone with each other, they were intoxicated, exultant. Kids prancing in the moonlight. Kittens with yarn. Crickets in the cool grass. She taught him German songs; he taught her English ones. They made up songs of their own. She told him Amish stories, he read her poetry; they wrote each other sonnets. They gave each other flowers, tucked them into each other's hair, lay for hours enfolded together, caressing each other through their clothes, whispering. For intimacy, they invented their own language, exotic and sublime, like the Latin name for a flower. Smiling, they let the hours unfold. There were so few of them now.
Time withheld the miracle. Someone handed Alan an itinerary his secretary had prepared. In three days he was to return to Los Angeles; a raft of appointments was listed for each of the following several days. He was stunned by the reality proclaimed by the itinerary, and that same afternoon, he filmed Susan for the last time. Afterward, in front of everyone, he said, "Susan, I'd like to see you for a minute." And he took her to his room, where they made love with desperation—damp, shivering, making each other wild, exhausted.
He drove her home in the middle of the night. Holding her close in the starry darkness in front of her house, he whispered, "You're part of me now." Then he left. Somehow he would solve it.
She didn't make it to the house. After the car lights faded, she collapsed in the sweet grass, her hands behind her head, and gazed up at the low-flying moon and the vast bead-point necklace of stars. Deliciously relaxed, suspended, she tugged a handful of grass and sprinkled it like sugar over her chest and face, her eyes closed, glorying in the ticklish flickers on her skin, throat, and cheeks, the pungent fragrance.
Brushing the grass from her face, she tried to re-create Alan's touch and imprint it in her mind. Her forearm dropped across her face, and she could catch the faint freshness of his scent on her skin. Heady memories tickled as though the blades of grass had slipped through her skin.
Gathering energy, she sat up, stood, and began walking toward the house. The lemony light behind a kitchen window and the scrape of a chair inside told her that Daniel was home, back from the cattle auction. The porch swing creaked under the stir of a subtle breeze. The night sounds chimed. This was her home, her place in creation, and when she opened the door, she looked forward to the soft light, the serenity, the simplicity.
Defilement hit her like an open fist. Urine and pig excrement, made a cloud of suffocating odor. She flinched violently and choked.
"Daniel?"
Hogs were in her kitchen. Her voice made them riot. Bewildered, vicious with fright, snarling and squealing, their trotters slipped in the filth that covered the floor. They had rooted into the flour. Her own raspberry jam had been smashed on the floor, clotted and blood-red like a small animal had been torn apart.
She twisted away, her fist on her stomach.
These were strange animals, not hers, a boar, four sows. This was not an accident. This was hate. "Who has done this?" she gasped. Wilting inside like a poisoned reed, she watched the porch ceiling begin a slow reel. She clutched the doorframe for balance, holding up her body, though her soul was shrinking and withering. Take this cup from me, oh Lord.
It had begun. The paying. She shut her mouth on the nausea, the horror. She didn't hide her face until she found her bed filled with baby pigs.
In Anna's dream she was a child in a button-back dress. The aurora borealis filled the northern sky, a monumental haze in the shape of a giant ghostly sea gull, the wings slowly beating, stars showing through. Her sister Rachel watched it from the porch, closed up, as if it were carrying her a message. But Susan swung around and called out, "Quick, Anna! Get the others! You've the loudest voice!"
And then she was sixteen again, in her bed, with Daniel bending over her in the dark, his hair gleaming like a starling as he spoke hushed words.
"Dress right away and come outside. Don't wake the others."
When he took his hand from her mouth, she whispered, "Is this real?"
He said, yes, it was real. But it didn't seem real when she followed him to the other farm and found Susan being sick in the outhouse, and the house with the stench of a ditty barn. Help Susan clean it up, Daniel said. Hogs had got in the house. But if that was all, why did Susan hold onto Daniel's arm when he said he was off to check on the heifers in the back field, shaking her head, her eyes pleading? He left them, though, and soon after, Susan said, "I don't know what's going to happen, but I don't want you to see any more of this," rubbed her gently between the shoulder blades, and firmly sent her home.
Halfway there, she'd put it all together, and was back in a nightmare. Seth's name had been mentioned by Daniel, and Susan had gasped, "No." Daniel had gone to confront Seth. These terrible things to Susan… and she knew why! The sky landed with all its weight on her shoulders. When she was running again, it was toward Greyling.
She asked for Mr. Wilde at the high barred gate, dwarfed by it, alarmed at having to talk to the uniformed guard. How could Susan come here every day? Guards and uniforms always made her think about how it'd been in Europe, where secular princes sent out spies to capture and torture the righteous. They'd played that game when they were little, hiding secret notes under their clothes and inside baskets of baked goods, being imprisoned in the corncrib, going bravely to the pyre. Here she was, living the game, but it had twisted, as the dream had.
The guard talked to the telephone. She was given permission to enter when she explained she was Susan's sister, though no one knew where to find Mr. Wilde. They offered to drive her to the buildings, but she'd never been in an automobile before and she was afraid to try it, especially sitting beside a uniformed stranger. Armed with vague directions, she followed a long paved drive under electric lights that buzzed angrily and ruined her night vision, making what was beyond into a solid, formless black. She knew perfectly well the monster was only a man in a costume. In spite of that, the sick suspicion remained that it was here somewhere, crouched in a cavern strewn with bones.
She'd thought it all out, about moving pictures, staring at the picture of grazing cows on the barn calendar, trying to imagine how it would be if some part of it would start moving. It wasn't natural. It made her feel queasy. Out there, the world was getting stranger.
Tonight the movie people were having a party to celebrate reaching the end of their work here. Strings of tiny lights were twined in the maple branches. Laughter and music filled the paved gardens. For the first time she heard music without words. To her it sounded empty and cold.
No bacchanal, this party barely made it to PG13. Alan had been to many worse. When he saw Susan's little sister coming toward him with David's guiding hand on her back, he only thought, What's happened?
Willowy, tear runners on her creamy cheeks, Anna was ethereal in her distress, a shocking reminder of the innocent lives he'd accidentally trapped in his web. After several failed attempts to speak, she was able to gasp out.
"I couldn't go to my dad. He doesn't know about the movie. There wasn't anyone else…"
Then she told him, her words halting and quaint. In those few minutes, Alan understood at last that he had ruined Susan.
Alan was everything Anna had hoped: calm and kind, someone she could trust. He assured her he didn't; think Daniel and Seth would kill each other, but he'd go an
d make sure. He'd do everything he could for Susan. He put his hands on her arms, squeezing a little, and her stomach did a flip-flop, the way it had last winter by the skating pond when Isaac, godlike at twenty-two, had taken up her hands, kissed her cold mouth, smiled, and said, "I've been trying to court you, silly." It was disconcerting to think this even more godlike being—and English, to boot—could do the same thing, but she was glad she'd come. There had to be a way to mend this. This was Susan. People would understand.
They found Seth and Daniel at Christ Yoder's farm, and, as Anna clambered from the car, what she saw wasn't understanding. Seth was up against the chicken house, brushing his forearm across his nose, his coat sleeve coming back slick with a line of blood. And Daniel, the sanest, the most insightful of men, had his jacket torn and covered with dust. He was advancing toward Seth, speaking harshly. Christ was standing in front of him, pushing hard on his chest.
There were others there too. Fanny stood by the fence in her nightdress and shawl, with a lantern at her feet, and others from the young folks—one of the Rader boys; Sol Whetstone, who was a best friend to Luke; and two of Susan's brothers-in-law, Dan and Isaac. Seeing them all made Anna realize that Seth couldn't have done it alone. Her old playmates and one budding love, friends she had trusted since infancy, had dealt her sweet, fanciful older sister an unforgivable blow. She sought the comfort of Alan's gentle grip, Alan, a man she barely knew.
Alan received her in his arms, and held her tight although he saw the Amish had frozen in the bright funnel of his headlights. They were staring at Anna- with him, and it was clear that none of them liked the combination.
Handsome eyes alight, tawny in the lamplight, a young man stepped toward Alan. "You'd better take your hands off her. Anna—"
"Don't say my name!" Clasped in Alan's nerveless grip, Anna had become rigid. "Don't you stand there and say my name, Isaac! Were you with Seth in this?"