by Laura Brodie
In the back of her mind she had a small fear that last night might have been an act of reprisal, her semiconscious revenge against the brother who had abandoned her. But there was no longer any need for revenge. Yesterday, when the gallery was filled with David’s friends, each painting starred with a kiss of acceptance, she had felt a profound sense of forgiveness. These people with their stories of how David had healed them—sometimes with medicine, sometimes with kindness—reminded her of why she had married him, and why she wanted to see him again.
The bridge was now humming beneath her tires. One more right turn and she joined the river, winding with the bend of its lazy current, the fallen woman following the serpentine path. The farther she drove from Nate’s warm body, the calmer her mind became, because what did it matter, if at thirty-nine, she had enjoyed one night of physical pleasure? It was best not to analyze a drunken romp. Better to let the memory fade. Nate was the forbidden fruit, only to be tasted once. Nunca más, she told herself. Never, never again.
An hour later, when she pulled up at the cabin, she had the old sensation of arriving at an empty house. No lights shone in the windows; the grass was still unmowed. When she unlocked the door, an immense stillness confronted her. She turned the thermostat up from sixty and laid her pocketbook on the table.
David was probably asleep—probably sprawled like Nate, his arm reaching for her across empty sheets. She let the image settle into her brain, and when she opened the bedroom door all was as she had imagined. He was lying on his stomach, his head turned to the right, one arm extended down the mattress, resting on the empty half. Her lovely doppelgänger.
At the edge of the bed Sarah gazed down on her husband, noticing the details that distinguished him from Nate. The gray hairs, the extra pounds, the dirt in his fingernails. Quietly, she removed her coat, untied her shoes, and unzipped her pants. She crawled into bed without touching his skin, pulled the covers up to her shoulders, and with deep, deep breaths, she washed away the morning’s shock until Nate had dissipated with the early fog. A different bed, a different brother; her mistake had been corrected. Soon she would fall asleep, and could begin the day again.
• 20 •
Two hours later Sarah woke alone in an empty room. She shivered as she sat up against the headboard, pulling the comforter around her shoulders. It took several minutes for her mind to reconstruct the situation—how she had run away from Nate, coming here to seek out her husband and regain her sense of balance. As she thought of David’s hands and eyes and hair, the smell of bacon came floating from the kitchen, and he appeared in the doorway with a cup of tea.
“Breakfast is almost ready. How would you like your eggs?”
“Over easy.” He approached, and she lifted the cup from his hand, letting the steam rise into the curve of her palm.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” David said.
“I had to tell you about the show. It was a huge success.” She described the lights and the flute and the flowers, Judith’s chemise and Margaret’s bruschetta, and President Wilson’s poetic mood.
“Everything sold. And you could see that the people weren’t buying just to be polite—they were really impressed with your work.” She took a sip of tea. “Jim Wilson bought the biggest painting of all—that winter landscape you did five years ago. It’s going to hang in the lobby of Cabot Hall.”
David smiled. “Come and tell me everything. I have to check the stove.”
When he was gone Sarah opened the dresser and fingered the extra scraps of clothing that they left for occasional weekend visits—a few T-shirts, some cut-off shorts, one pair of blue jeans, and an extra-large sweatshirt that she pulled over her head.
“Do you have any other clothes?” she asked as she entered the main room.
David shook his head. “I’ve been wearing this shirt for seven days. Usually I wash my clothes in the bathroom sink and hang them on the deck, but it’s getting too cold for anything to dry quickly.”
“I’ll have to bring you some things.” She was surprised by her own words. Was it guilt or love that inspired this generosity?
David brought plates of bacon and toast to the table, then watched as Sarah dipped her knife into a stick of butter. “Tell me more about last night.”
“Margaret set up a four-tiered silver dessert server. She covered it with lemon bars and macaroons and key-lime tarts, and there was a bouquet of lilies at the top that hung down in tendrils, so that it looked like a giant wedding cake.”
He returned to the stove, coming back with the frying pan in one hand, an egg-laden spatula in the other. She touched her buttered toast with the tip of her knife, and he slid the egg on top.
“Everyone was talking about how much they miss you, and what a great doctor you were. And listen, here’s the big news.” She paused for effect. “Judith is going to show some of your paintings at her gallery in Washington.”
She watched David’s eyes widen, his mouth open slightly. He returned the frying pan to the stove, then walked across the room to the wall behind his easel, where he lifted an oil painting that was leaning against the window. “You should show her this one.”
A gray heron was wading at the river’s edge, surrounded by cat-tails and misty-blue chicory. Black Egyptian trim marked the corner of the bird’s eye, and its wet breast feathers hung down like porcupine quills. Sarah assessed it skeptically.
“I suppose I could tell Judith that I found more paintings in the attic.”
“Yes.” David examined his work at arm’s length. “I think you’ll be finding lots of things in the attic over the next few months.” He leaned the canvas against the couch and rejoined her at the table.
“So. I’ve been promoted to the big leagues.” He bit into his toast. “It never would have happened if they knew I was alive.”
“You don’t know that. Judith doesn’t take paintings to Washington out of pity. No one in D.C. will care whether you are alive or dead.”
The words were more harsh than Sarah had intended, but David merely nodded.
“It’s a beautiful day,” he said. “We should go for a walk. Can you stay?”
She thought back to her own house. By now Nate would be rising, looking for her, reading her note. He would probably eat a bagel, take a shower, turn on the TV. He might settle on the couch and decide to wait. “Yes,” she answered. “I can stay.”
Twenty minutes later, as they exited the cabin, David lifted a long-handled ax from the woodpile by the hearth. It had been propped like a bookend against the volumes of firewood, and now its curve of polished pine leaned into his shoulder.
“Is that the Paul Bunyan look?” Sarah asked.
“It comes in handy.”
The last crickets of the season leaped from blade to blade as they walked down the yard, Sarah trailing her fingers over the tips of the grass. “Do you ever plan to mow this?”
“It’s not supposed to look like anyone’s been here, and the way sound travels, I was afraid a lawn mower would attract attention. But you could do it whenever you come.”
“Yes, I suppose I could.”
He stopped at a small tree, barely four feet tall, with a trunk no wider than Sarah’s wrist. “You remember this Japanese tulipwood that I planted a few years ago?”
“You bought it because Jefferson liked them. We saw them at Monticello.”
“Right. And you know how it would never grow?” He pointed to a ring of scratches at the base of the trunk. “If you look closely you can see where a groundhog has been chewing at the bark.”
Sarah knelt to touch the scars. “At Monticello they wrapped their seedlings in chicken wire.”
“Exactly. It’s obvious. But I never paid attention before. That’s the sort of thing you notice when you slow your life down.”
Sarah ran her fingers along the bark, thinking that her own life was slow enough already. She liked this little tree with its stunted limbs and tiny branches reaching toward a vast, untouchable sky. What it nee
ded was acceleration, a midlife growth spurt. Sunshine and water and the care of loving hands.
She stood and pointed toward the river. “The dock needs fixing.”
David nodded. “I need some two-by-fours.”
“You need a car.”
“No. I don’t want a car. Not yet.”
Bushes rustled across the water, and a flock of large birds scurried uphill into the woods. They looked like thin gray pheasants with skinny necks, leaning forward at a sharp angle, wings tight at their sides.
“These woods are full of wild turkeys,” David explained as the last bird disappeared into the undergrowth. Turning downstream, he walked to the edge of the clearing, where the tall grass met a line of taller trees. “Let’s follow the river.” He glanced back at Sarah, tipped his head in invitation, then stepped into the darkness.
Strange, how fully he vanished, as if he existed only when her eyes could discern him. She moved to the line of trees, where a fallen pine branch marked the boundary between sunlight and shade. Ten yards ahead a shadow passed behind a group of tall boulders, but she hesitated to follow. Her misgivings were indefinable; partly it was the woods with their hint of threat—foxes and snakes and dead men with sharp axes. But more than that, she sensed that she should not be forever trailing after David.
For seventeen years she had followed him, from New York to Jackson, and now into this foggy new existence at the cabin. And it wasn’t right, to be always shadowing a man. When, if not by age forty, was she going to be independent—let David go off on his own adventure, while she sought out a journey equally transfor mative?
“Come along.” David’s voice rose from the darkness, and she pushed aside a branch and stepped into the shadows. David paral leled the river downstream, pausing to hack an occasional path through brambles and spiderwebs. She reached him at a calm eddy where a glossy bronze grackle had stopped to bathe, dipping its head into the cold water and shivering its feathers dry. Above them a red-tailed hawk stood sentinel in a barren oak.
“Beautiful birds,” Sarah said.
“They are my best company. Let’s keep going. I want to show you something.”
He led the way at a brisk pace, the ax like a shining pendulum that rocked back and forth on his shoulder. Once she called for him to slow down, but always he continued, stopping only at a sunny opening, where the river divided briefly into two branches, wide and thin.
“We can rest here.” He led her to a grove of young trees along the bank, pointing out a few saplings that poked from the ground in chewed-off spear tips two feet tall. They formed the outposts of a Lilliputian village, stakes whittled to pencil points to impale the heads of tiny enemies.
“Beaver?”
“Yes.” He pointed downstream to a pile of sticks and leaves and mud that might have been mistaken for the washed-out remnants of a flood. Crouching down, he gestured for her to do the same. When she whispered a question he replied with a finger raised to his lips.
Above them, dozens of starlings rose en masse from a sycamore. They moved like a cloud of locusts, zigzagging south from tree to tree. She watched their swerving progress until they disappeared from view, then turned her eyes to the water, where a beaver’s nose twitched just above the surface. He circled and submerged, reminding her of the last divers she had seen in this river. Another minute passed and the beaver reemerged and slid onto a rock, poised erect and glistening. She could see the orange tint of the creature’s teeth, his tiny paws curved in humility, alert for a friend who approached and floated past, soundlessly cutting across the surface. The rock dweller scurried back into the water, followed his companion, then dove.
“In the evening, the whole family comes out,” David explained. “I’ve seen at least five.” They knelt for a few more minutes, watching the unbroken water, until David stood and pointed to a ridge downstream, where the riverbank rose up a fifty-foot rock face. “I’d like to climb that. I want to show you the view.”
Sarah assessed the jutting rocks and thin, diagonal pines. How typical of David, to challenge her like this. He was never satisfied with an easy stroll, never content to meander on a riverbank, skipping stones. David was always pushing toward higher peaks, urging her to follow when she would have been happy to walk for miles beside the water.
She sighed as she considered the jagged cliff. “I make no promises.”
The initial climb was easy, with the ridge ascending in a crooked staircase of limestone. But as the cliff became sheer, pebbles rolled away beneath her tennis shoes and she slowed to a stop, her arms raised against the rock in surrender. She bent her right ear to the cliff as if listening for the mountain’s pulse, then looked down, guessing it was a thirty-foot drop.
She lifted her eyes toward the ledge above, beyond which David had already disappeared.
“David?” she called, but he did not come.
“David!” Still no sign of him.
He had abandoned her, the son of a bitch. Probably lured her there on purpose with the idea that she might fall. That was what the dead always wanted—company. And how easy it would be, to let go of these rocks, lean backward and allow gravity to have its way. After all, a woman should not outlive her husband. A widow was, by historical standards, an abomination. Sarah closed her eyes and thought of Shakespeare’s Juliet with her bloody dagger, of Japanese and Roman widows falling on their husbands’ swords, and of all the poor widows in India, burned alive on their husbands’ funeral pyres.
But she was not the type of woman to sacrifice herself. Sarah raised her foot and placed it on the trunk of a pine sapling. She was a graduate of Barnard, for Christ’s sake. She reached for the next handhold, then another, and another. A few feet from the top, she stopped to catch her breath, and only then did David reappear.
“Would you like a hand?”
“No. I can do it myself.” She pulled herself over the rim, brushed off her pants, and stood up. “Lead on.”
She followed David to the summit, where a flat-topped boulder offered a clear view in every direction. Sarah climbed up beside him on that broad rock, the woods rolling up and down the surrounding foothills while the river appeared and disappeared in silvery threads.
“It’s an amazing view,” she granted.
“All-encompassing.” He spread his arms and rotated slowly, north, northeast.
“Look down there.” David pointed south toward two stone towers, reduced to the height of toothpicks, rising from the water like chimneys in a burned-out ruin. She recognized the structures as canal locks.
“That’s the place where I flipped over.”
She stared at the spot, imagining David’s face gazing up from the riverbed—those are pearls that were his eyes.
“It changed me,” he said, and Sarah nodded.
Nothing of his that remains
But hath suffered a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
A gunshot pierced the quiet. Instinctively they crouched while the air reverberated.
“Deer season,” David said. Another shot cracked to the north, and they both jumped down from the rock.
Sarah turned upriver. “We’d better get back before someone kills us.”
On the return they spoke in deliberately loud voices, tromping through the undergrowth with a clatter that sent squirrels rushing to the treetops. Sarah gathered kindling while David hacked at a huge dead limb that dangled from a maple tree. He dragged it through the woods, slicing a path whenever the approach was narrow. When they reached the cabin he stopped at a wide oak stump, the remnant of a beautiful tree split by lightning years ago. He pulled the thinnest branches across this chopping block, sheared off the leaves and twigs, and began to cut the wood into foot-long sections. Meanwhile Sarah went inside, stretched on the couch, and settled into the opening chapters of War and Peace.
By four-thirty, when the sun had dipped below the treetops, she knew that she would spend the night. Her own house still seemed forbidding, and the cabin was
warmed by a large fire that David had built. She prepared an early supper, opening a can of baked beans and a jar of applesauce. Some ground meat from the refrigerator was enough for three hamburgers, and she cooked them in the frying pan, cutting off a sliver to see if they were done.
“Yuck.” She spat into the sink. “Your hamburger is rotten.”
“It’s not hamburger.” David spoke from behind his easel. “It’s ground venison. The owner of the general store is a hunter. You don’t like it?”
“It’s not what I was expecting.” But perhaps that was a blessing. Her expectations had sunk so low in the past few years. “Venison is fine.” She pulled a bottle of red wine from the kitchen rack. “We should celebrate your show’s success, and your debut in Washington.” She brought two glasses and a corkscrew to the table.
“Let’s drink to Judith,” David said, “and all of her new discoveries.”
Midway through dinner David made a request: “I was hoping you might join me on Thursday for Thanksgiving. It’s lonely out here, with winter coming on. The nights are getting colder, and the birds are flying south, and they are the only living things that I’ve been speaking to.”
It was odd, how David’s life had become an echo of her own. They were both alone in their separate quarters, equally plagued by silence and the need for closer human contact. “I’ll come,” she said. “I’ll do the shopping, you can help with the cooking.” She rose from the table, took a piece of paper and pencil from a kitchen drawer, and began to write.
“What are you doing?”
“Making a list of things to bring on Thursday.”
“Like what?”
“Clothes, shoes, hats, gloves. Your winter jacket. A snow shovel. Chicken wire for your tulipwood tree.” She had become his accomplice, planning months ahead, anticipating his needs. Perhaps it was only a selfish gesture; she didn’t want her dead husband discovered buying wool socks at Wal-Mart. But there was also some comfort in writing down her traditional Thanksgiving menu: turkey and cranberries, sausage, celery, mushrooms, onions and stuffing, sweet potatoes and green beans, sourdough rolls.