Here on Earth

by Alice Hoffman

  That’s what Hollis sees when he comes into the kitchen—March laughing at the back door—and that doesn’t please him one bit. Earlier tonight, Hollis met Alison Hartwig at the Lyon; then they went over to her place—she had managed to get rid of the kids and her mother—but he let Alison know he had to be home before midnight. And then, after all that, when he got back to Guardian Farm, no one was there. Since that time, it’s taken close to an hour for him to track March down. This doesn’t please him either.

  “Hey, Susie,” he says, as though he isn’t annoyed in the least. “Great party.”

  “Yeah, too bad you weren’t invited,” Susie says.

  Hollis grins at that. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll hurt my feelings?”

  “Nope,” Susie says.

  Hollis leans closer to March and kisses her. His lips are cold, and there’s snow in the folds of his coat. “You’re the most beautiful woman here,” he says. “As usual.” He notices Hank now, and wonders if perhaps the boy hasn’t taken it too much on himself to think over matters that are none of his business. “I didn’t expect to see you here,” he tells Hank. “You’d better head out.”

  Hank looks at March, uncertain as to what he should do.

  “Go on,” March insists. You can’t even tell that she’s nervous. She laughs, then has a sip of wine. “Find some folks your own age. Just don’t freeze in that car of yours.”

  “Sure,” Hank mumbles.

  “Hey.” As Hank is about to pass him by, Hollis puts a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t tell me you’ve been drinking.”

  “Just a beer,” Hank says. “One.”

  “You don’t want to go in that direction,” Hollis says. “Considering your background and all.”

  It is the worst possible thing Hollis could say to Hank and he knows it—the threat that he might take after his father. March can’t quite believe she has actually heard right.

  “He had one beer,” March says. “I bought it for him. That doesn’t mean he’s an alcoholic.”

  “Maybe I’ll stick to Coke.” Hank grabs a can from the counter. “It’s probably not a bad idea.”

  “We’d better head out too,” Hollis tells March after Hank has left.

  He says it easily, but he doesn’t mean it that way. Nothing is easy with Hollis. March looks at him closely. The evidence is in his eyes. That’s where the anger is.

  “You could spend the night,” Susie says to March. She’s not fooled by Hollis’s pleasant manner, and she never will be.

  Hollis laughs. “Aren’t you girls a little too old for pajama parties?”

  March hugs Susie. “Thanks,” she says. “Another time.”

  “You can come back whenever you want to,” Susie tells her, low so that Hollis has to strain to hear. “You know that.”

  By the time March gets to the front door, Hollis is waiting with her coat and scarf. There’s confetti in the air and slow music playing, but Hollis pays no attention. He holds open the door for March, then lets it slam once they’re out of the house.

  “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he says as they start down the snowy walkway leading to the sidewalk. They can still hear voices from the party drifting out of Susie’s place. Hollis is so furious that the air around him pops. “You should have been there when I got home, but you weren’t, and that’s the problem.”

  He grabs her by the arm, to make his point, to make certain she’s listening and to reel her in, closer.

  “I don’t like an empty house,” he says, in a voice so mean it’s barely recognizable.

  March hears Susie’s front door slam as another guest leaves the party. Some man has stepped out onto Susie’s porch and March is mortified to think of the tableau which greets this stranger: an angry man, a woman who looks frightened, snow falling, ice on the herringboned brick path.

  “What are you looking at?” Hollis is facing the stranger, whom March now recognizes as someone who works at the paper with Susie. The sports editor, she thinks. Bert something-or-other. Whoever he is, he was about to take his gloves from his overcoat pocket—he’s already got his car keys in his hand—but he stopped when he saw Hollis holding on to March.

  “Hey, buddy,” he says to Hollis, his voice soft, as though he were talking to some maniac. “Come on. Ease up. It’s New Year’s Eve.”

  March blinks back her tears. That’s how they look to him: A couple on the edge. A woman who’s about to be hurt somehow. And maybe he’s right. When it comes down to it, who is she anyway? The woman she thinks she is or the woman she appears to be?

  “What did you call me?” Hollis says. He lets go of March and takes a step toward Susie’s front door. He used to talk this way to Alan and his friends when they followed him home, those boys who tossed rocks and curses just above his head. Buddy is just another way to say he’s nothing, and he doesn’t have to listen to that. Not anymore.

  March is breathing frigid night air, but she’s burning up inside. What she wants is for Susie’s guest to go back to the party—then she and Hollis can walk away from this without any permanent damage. She wants that so badly she can taste it, but the taste is bitter, a cold soup made of stones.

  The door behind the stranger opens again, and light floods the walkway. Two women, leaving Susie’s party, are laughing, but the laughter falls onto the ice and onto the sidewalk, where it cracks open into silence.

  “Honey?”. one of the women calls when she sees Hollis and the stranger facing off. It’s the sports editor’s wife or his girlfriend, March realizes this from the measure of concern in her voice. “Honey?” The woman blinks several times, as if what she is seeing right in front of her eyes couldn’t possibly be so.

  “Let’s go,” March says. Now she’s the one to grab Hollis, but he jerks away. When he turns to her, she would swear he doesn’t know her.

  “Are you telling me what to do?” Hollis asks.

  Susie’s three guests are watching in silence; all anyone can hear is snow falling.

  “Please.” His favorite word in the world, and March knows it. “Please,” she whispers, so that those people watching don’t see that she’s begging.

  When they get to the truck, Hollis steps in front of March, and for an instant March thinks he’s going to open the passenger door for her. Then she sees the look on his face and she lurches away, so that her back is flat against the door. In spite of herself, she cries out. Her eyes are closed when he slams his fists through the window on either side of her head; she hears glass falling as though meteors were raining from the sky. March cries out again, then hunkers down to protect herself, until she realizes what has happened. She’s not the one he aimed to injure. He has purposely crashed through the glass, and when he withdraws his hands from the shattered window they are covered with blood.

  “Oh, no,” March says when she sees what he’s done. She rises to her feet. If this is what love can do, they’d best give it another name. There is blood on the concrete, and in the snow, but Hollis doesn’t seem to notice; that’s what’s scaring her most of all. He pulls her to him, with all that blood on his hands.

  “I would rather hurt myself than hurt you,” Hollis says. “I never want to hurt you.”

  “I know that,” March tells him.

  “Hey!” the man on Susie’s porch shouts. “Are you all right?”

  They are so far from that, March doesn’t waste her time answering. Her attention is riveted on the way blood spreads. It’s on her boots; it’s pooling beneath her feet.

  “I know you didn’t mean it,” March says.

  Those guests leaving the party are still watching from the brick walkway, uncertain as to whether or not they should intervene. It is still possible to hear the festivities inside the house. Someone must have told a joke, because several people are laughing, and the laughter circles upward. In spite of the snow, March can see stars in the sky, the way they used to when they dragged the ladder out to the chestnut tree and climbed as high as they could.

  March
takes her scarf and tries to clean the glass out of the gashes in Hollis’s hands, but there’s too much blood, and Hollis’s blood seems far too hot in the chilly air. March can’t stop shaking; it’s as if she had some rare disease for which there’s no definitive diagnosis. Maybe it’s terror, maybe it’s regret, maybe it’s only the cold night, the last of the year.

  “It’s all right,” Hollis tells her, but it’s not. He wraps the scarf around his hands. “See?” he says. “It’s nothing.” But that’s not true either.

  March’s mouth is so parched that her lips hurt. Hollis insists on driving, even though the pressure from the steering wheel must cause him pain. They take the back road home, although the snow has made for treacherous driving. The gears of the truck grind; the tires slide over patches of ice. All the way there, March tries to see him in the same way she had before, but she can’t. No matter what she does, no matter how she tries, there’s a man of more than forty with bleeding hands who is driving too fast and who still has no idea of what he’s done to them.

  When they get to the house, all the dogs are seeking shelter on the front porch. The snow is coming down harder. Hollis unwraps the scarf from his hands and washes up in the kitchen sink. When he’s done, they go upstairs to their bedroom. They don’t have to speak. Hollis, after all, is tired, and frankly March is too. As Hollis unlaces his boots, March watches him. He looks so old tonight, so completely worn out. Would she even recognize him if she met him on a crowded street? Would she know him at all?

  Looking at him now, March sees that the boy she loved, the one who kissed her in the attic and promised to love her forever, is no longer inside him. That boy is separate. He’s taken on a life of his own. There he is, sitting at the foot of the bed, moving aside so Hollis can pull down the quilt and get in between the sheets. March lies down beside Hollis, but she keeps her eyes trained on that boy, the one she loves beyond all time and reason. Just as she suspected, he’s tired too. He rests his beautiful head, then closes his eyes.

  March tries her best to be quiet; she doesn’t cough, doesn’t move. She listens for the sound of Hollis’s even breathing, and soon enough there it is, slow and easy. The boy she loves is now curled up on the extra quilt, lonely, the way he’ll always be, with or without her. He told her once he did not trust the human race and he never would. He told her he never meant to hurt her, and that, she knows, is true.

  Although it’s not easy to leave that boy on the edge of the bed, March grabs her clothes and her boots and goes downstairs to dress in the dark kitchen. There is the teapot on the rear burner of the Coopers’ stove; there is Hollis’s black coat, where he left it, thrown over a wooden chair. There are his gloves, on the shelf, and the glass he last used to drink water, rinsed out and drying on the drain board. Everything March sees is a shadow in the dark, even herself: her scarf, her hand turning the doorknob, the way she shivers when she feels the cold against her skin.

  She slips out the door so quietly that the dogs curled up on the porch don’t hear her pass by. When she gets to the very end of the driveway, she turns to look at the house. If she didn’t know better, she would swear that a girl with dark hair was standing in the place where the roses used to grow. If she didn’t know better, she’d hesitate. Instead, she turns and runs.

  At first, she counts her steps the way she used to, but after a while she stops counting. She paces herself so she won’t become exhausted; she avoids the road and goes through the woods. The air is so cold it snaps; the clearing sky is filled with stars. March hurries; she’s going so fast that she might have missed seeing the foxes if her coat hadn’t been snagged by a branch. When she turns she spies them in the meadow, more than a dozen foxes, all in a circle, just as Judith Dale had told her. Here was a meeting of the last specimens on the hill, the descendants of those few who managed to escape in the year when open hunting season was declared.

  Judith Dale used to swear that at gatherings such as these, each fox would rise on his hind feet and walk about, just like a man; if you listened carefully, you could hear each one speak, in measured and somber tones. What you overheard might change your life and rearrange all you once believed you knew for certain. A fox’s secret was one worth knowing, worth waiting for, worth its weight in gold, or so March had always been promised. But Judith Dale was wrong, and now March is glad to discover that she was. These creatures are nothing like men; they haven’t a word to say, and no secrets to tell. When March leaves, several of them follow for a while, as though they were dogs—not that she needs their guidance. She knows the way, after all. She’s been here before.

  IT’S FREEZING IN HANK’S DREAM ON THE MORNING WHEN it happens, that first bright day of the year. He is dreaming about a tree of ice—leaves, trunk, and branches—when he hears the crash. In his dream, the tree falls to pieces, shards of crystal that can cut like knives. That’s when he gets out of bed; he goes to his window and witnesses the last few instants of what is happening, as Hollis’s truck skids into the devil’s comer.

  Hank pulls on his jeans and races downstairs; he slams out the door and runs down the driveway in his bare feet. The snow cuts into his skin, but he runs faster. At the edge of the driveway, the red dogs gather together, afraid to go farther. The crash is so close that Hank can smell gasoline. There is Hollis’s pickup, on its side, and the newspaper delivery truck crossways, blocking Route 22. Before Hank can round the comer, Hollis’s truck bursts into flames. The driver of the other truck is sitting in the road, shaking, as the roar of the fire rises higher and ashes fall down, like thick black snow.

  “He just kept going,” the driver of the delivery truck says when Hank pulls him to his feet and guides him farther from the fire. They stand there and watch the flames. The road is so burning hot it’s melting patches of ice. By the time the EMT and fire trucks arrive, whatever snow remains has turned black.

  There’s soot all over Hank’s clothes and in his eyes. For days afterwards, he will find ashes, in the strands of his hair, under his fingernails, in his eyelashes. He doesn’t tell March the true date of Hollis’s accident. He waits several days before he sends the telegram. He doesn’t want her to think that Hollis was chasing her, flooring the gas on that icy morning so he could track her down at Logan before her plane took off. Maybe he was after March, or maybe he was simply in a hurry to get to the Lyon Cafe and find somebody to take her place. But there’s another possibility, and it’s one Hank believes: Hollis simply couldn’t bear to wake up and find himself alone. There was a time, once, when Hank was nine or ten and woke in the middle of the night, when he made his way downstairs and he saw Hollis at the kitchen table. Hank stood there in the doorway and watched, and he thought he would never in his life see a lonelier human being, not if he lived to be a hundred.

  Perhaps this is the reason Hank stays with Hollis at the funeral parlor. Someone should be there, and in all honesty, Hank can’t imagine being able to sleep even if he were to spend the night in his own bed. There’s a room to the left of the chapel, and this is where Hollis is. Hank picked out his clothes: A pale gray suit. One of the good white shirts Hollis favored, tailored in Italy. Black boots, hand-polished. A dark blue tie, the color of still, deep water. Hank chose the coffin as well, the most expensive one available, fashioned of cherry wood and brass. Though Hank himself prefers plain pine, he knows that Hollis would have elected to show people in this town that he had the best. Regardless of whether or not anyone appears at the service tomorrow, Hank has seen to it that he has received exactly that.

  The room beside the chapel is poorly heated and the lights are turned low. Hank tosses down the duffel bag of clothes he’s brought along, then positions himself in an overstuffed chair. It’s not unusual for people to spend the night here. They don’t want to let go; they want one more chance to make it right. For those who believe in paradise, such a night is wrenching. For those who believe in a single worldly existence, it may be the longest night they ever spend. All the same, Hank is there for the du
ration, he’s not about to leave, although in many ways the man in the coffin doesn’t resemble Hollis. It’s not only his physical aspect which seems so altered, by fire and reconstruction, it’s that Hollis would never lie down like this, so mild and meek.

  The later the hour grows, the more chilled Hank feels; at last, he covers himself with his coat, and he falls asleep that way, sitting up, his long legs stretched out, his breathing the only evidence of human life until Alan Murray comes to pay his respects. Alan wears the Judge’s recycled overcoat and a pair of boots Judith Dale left him one winter when the snow was particularly deep. He has tied back his hair with a rubber band and clipped his beard with a pair of nail scissors. Although he has a pint of gin in his pocket, he won’t have a drink until he begins the walk home.

  He passes by his son, asleep in the chair, and goes to sit on the wooden bench facing the coffin. It is gratitude which has brought him here and kept him sober, at least for these few hours. Without thinking, Alan bows his head. For the day Hollis came to take his son, he is grateful. For every meal Hollis fed the child, he is more grateful still. For every dollar spent, for every night of sleep, for blue jeans and socks, for shoes and books, for cups of tea, for milk, for pie, for companionship, for curfews, for duty, for love.

  Hank wakes from his uneasy sleep and blinks when he sees the old man. The chapel is now so cold that a film of ice has formed on the inside panes of window glass. Outside, the night is as blue as a lake and much deeper than any river. If your soul were free, it would be the sort of night to rise up.

  “You’re staying with him?” the old man asks.

  “Sure,” Hank says. He runs a hand through his hair; still. some strands stick up like stalks of wheat. His face is pale in the dark, his skin ashy.

  “It’s good that you’re staying,” Alan Murray says. He can feel the weight of the bottle of gin in his pocket. His circulation is shot, so he rubs his hands together.