A Song in the Daylight (67 page)

Larissa felt profound relief, like a torrent pouring down from her heart to her numb arms hanging by her sides. Thank you, God, she mouthed, standing barefoot in her kitchen, her stomach falling as though she had been thrown from a plane,
falling and falling, staring at them, extending her fingers to reach for Michelangelo’s curly head. Thank you.

She lay in a small hard bed, with gray sheets so stiff and new they abraded her on her back and her bare thighs. The crooked blinds were partly open. The room was dark because the windows faced west and it was morning, and wintertime. No, that was wrong, it was summertime, it was July.

Everything was askew. Was it even morning? Or was it evening? Was the third day the seventh? Because wasn’t she supposed to rest on the seventh day, which was now a Tuesday? Was black white and white black? Were tears joy or joy tears? Was lack of money really wealth, was a surfeit of love really a dearth of it? Or was there a dearth of love?

She didn’t know. And before she got up, she studied the ceiling, granite gray and cracking, like the walls, like the curtains, like the sheets. Who thought it was a good idea to paint everything gray?

Larissa. She was the one who had painted it. Kai wanted a manly color that wasn’t blue. So she picked gray. Was the whole cottage like this? What a travesty. Crawling out of bed, she walked naked past the window, indifferently glancing outside to the blue lake, spilled out in an expansive ink stain, and beyond it the foggy Alpine hills and rolling plains asymmetrically arranged for maximum beauty. Except it was July, which was January. Nothing was beautiful in January. It was just waiting for beautiful to begin. It was cold in the house—to save money they turned off the heat at night. As she walked to the radiator to twist the hissing knob open, she recalled herself on Burns Street in Hoboken, bending the same way, but eighteen years younger and two cold, squalling children fuller. Michelangelo wasn’t even a curly thought back then. They didn’t know how they would pay next month’s rent.
Later they had joked that if they had had him, they might have sold him.

When Kai and Larissa first got to Jindabyne, they felt lucky because they found this place right away, on the peak of a hill overlooking the silver lake, in a cul-de-sac in solitude, three hundred feet above sea level, at the very tip of a dead-end street named Rainbow Drive. Even the name of the street was optimistic. Behind the ash-colored greening eucalyptus stood a little old bungalow; the weatherboard romance of it attracted them. So secluded! Up on a hill! Private. Tiny. Removed. Distant. Far away. The view was a plus, a bird’s-eye glance at the ever-changing lake, the clear of Jindabyne, bluer than blue, and when they stood on their tiptoes at the edge of their property and tilted their heads, they could see the church steeple down left in town center, four miles away by the banks of the lake. It was splendid.

Well, yes, in the beginning it was splendid. But splendid couldn’t walk 7.2 kilometers down Jindabyne Road to town, to get work, to eat, to find a job, to keep one, to shop, to socialize. The Ducati did that, and when Kai was on it, he was in town. They had their tour bus, but Kai took the battery out in the wintertime to preserve it, so Larissa couldn’t drive the bus if she wanted to—even if she could drive it.

In the winters she had no way of getting anywhere except on her own two feet. Which was okay with her. For the first three years it was okay with her. The four miles down the hill had been doable, manageable. But if she bought anything, carried anything, the four miles back up was a real drag, and in the fourth year, it began to get old. She started accepting rides from strangers just to get around. When Kai found out, he became upset. She promised she wouldn’t do it anymore; she knew it was dangerous.

“You have to be safe,” he said. “We’ll get you a car.”

“I’d settle for a Vespa,” she said.

After a good chuckle of fond remembrance of Jaguar convertibles past, they scraped up a hundred Australian bucks for a bicycle for her. It was old, the rims weren’t balanced, and the seat was made of stone, but still Larissa didn’t complain until she was hit by a car while on it, and then she said, you know what, hitchhiking was safer. Jindabyne Road was narrow, and the lady who hit her was trying and failing to make a U-turn. She was so intent on avoiding other cars, she didn’t see Larissa pedaling uphill. So the woman hit her. Larissa swore under her breath, dusted herself off, and lightly cursing the whole way, limped home leaving the mangled bike by the side of the road. Kai saw the bike as he was returning. His panic when he ran into the house was a sight to behold; Larissa forgot all about her broken rib and broken toe. She told him she got away lucky. Heartily agreeing, he made her sympathetic tea every night for six weeks, but because she couldn’t work, he had to work double, and did, and was never home. Her rib had healed over a year ago, but Kai was still never home.

This morning he’d gone out to find work at the ski shops. He was happy to do this, wake up each morning not knowing how he was going to make money today. They had been saving decent money through the summers, knowing from experience the winter months were meager, but last summer was particularly hard. They hadn’t made any profit; everything went on operating expenses and living costs. There was too much competition. What Kai and Larissa offered was a quality overnight tour, which attracted a hefty price tag and a particular clientele, while the competition took the daily tourists out for a quick fix down Alpine Way to Khancoban, maybe stopped for lunch at Crackenback, perhaps drove past the Strzelecki monument and was back in three hours to pick up another tour. That wasn’t Kai and Larissa’s tour.

Sure, during winter season all the tourists and students came for the toboggans at Perisher Blue and the snowboarding at
Thredbo, and the place was hopping, but also the itinerants flocked to find temporary work in Jindabyne. They worked for less money than Kai could accept. There were more people than jobs. Kai became like a migrant worker himself, renting skis and sleds, clothing equipment, selling coffee and cigarettes, pumping gas, and then scuffling for more work after he was let go for a man willing to work for half of Kai’s salary. This winter was more meager than usual. Perhaps there was an economic downturn somewhere. It was like that late-night joke: he couldn’t get a job at a ski resort in the winter.

When Kai was leaving this morning she asked him, what am I going to do today, and he said, do anything you want. Read. Paint.

I don’t paint, she said. So read. I don’t read anymore, she wanted to say. The mind wouldn’t let her, wouldn’t keep still on the words on the pages. So cook something. But the stove was electric and erratic. Nothing she baked ever came out right, though everyone claimed Jindabyne was best for baking because of the high-altitude mountain air. Cakes were lighter, pastries were crisper! As far as Larissa was concerned, it was good for nosebleeds and little else. She either burned the roast or it came out wet. Mejida, their landlady, said she would replace the stove for a fifty-dollar-a-month increase in rent, which was six hundred dollars a year. Every year. They thought about and decided to buy their own oven; and here it was, the replacement oven. Yet Mejida, a friendly Indian woman, newly married, who lived next door, would bring rice pudding with cardamom, sweet samosas, naan, and everything she made tasted delicious. Larissa wanted to blame the oven. I used to bake so much better, she wanted to explain. I used to make brownies, pound cake.

She thought about cleaning the house after she showered and dressed. Except there was nothing to clean. And nothing to clean with. She’d used the last of the Windex last week.
She had no new vacuum cleaner bags, and the one that was in the Hoover was so full that every time Larissa turned on the vac, the dust blew wildly out the exhaust vent and made the house smell like old people’s closets.

They had stayed out too late yesterday and her head felt it today, all parched and sore, like there wasn’t even sugar in it, just hops and rye, and maybe cranberry. Perhaps there had been some mixing of the alcoholic liquids; she couldn’t remember. KISS and AC/DC had been on too loud, two bands she never particularly cared for, but at Balcony Bar, girls didn’t choose the music. To fit in with the younger crowd, Larissa dressed in Billabong jeans, tight sweaters and high-heeled cowboy boots she got on sale for thirty dollars, which crushed her feet as though she were a Chinese female, yes, feet bound, but overall feeling pretty lucky not to have been drowned in the river at birth.

It was still early. Larissa didn’t want to look at the clock. She didn’t want to face the actual time, because then she would have to face down all the hours alone until he came home. A gutter child with ceaseless feet, she decided to walk to Caldwell’s. She had to go early, otherwise all the fresh meat would be gone. One way or another she was determined to make Kai dinner this evening. They’d been eating out every night, burgers here, sandwiches there, sometimes nothing but bar food, or the hot snacks their friends Bart and Bianca put out. Bart and Bianca always seemed to have a little more money than Kai and Larissa, though Larissa couldn’t understand why or how.

She didn’t think she was eating enough, judging from the sheer woman in the mirror, unrecognizable even to herself. She had never been able to regain the pounds since the last months in Summit.

The passing days spun into forever, but the things she carried inside were eternal, operated by their own clock, their
own intervals. Which is why it was so hard sometimes to tell how much time had elapsed since this event or that, a birthday, a concert, a phone call, a car accident—everything was
crash
and over. But the thinking about it afterward lasted a lifetime. It was one endless cross-country trek separated by the bridgeless divide between the lifetime before and the lifetime after.

One more morning. Snow. Sunny. The mute mountains white with foam stand wrapped in pine-clad crystal trees, in disconsolate willows. In the mirror is Larissa’s pallid face. Everything is as it’s always been. In the afternoon after school Michelangelo will be running around the den with Riot in smaller and smaller circles, trying to get himself so dizzy he’ll fall down—on top of the dog. Emily will be at cello and then volleyball. She will need to be picked up at five. Asher will be at track or band practice. Jared is at work. Larissa stands in front of the mirror in one hallway, in another, her heart grown hollow with gladness, with sorrow, and wonders what it’s like to be dead. Once you got dressed up, shopped for food, enjoyed pleasures big and small.

And then you were dead.

The other things receded with almost no regret. Just the distant clicking of the hoofs of constant horses that carried off the years and the memories in their empty saddles. Carried off things that no longer mattered. Now other things mattered.

What were they?

This was the thing: Larissa knew a little bit about many things, but not a hoot about anything. She wasn’t like Jared, who knew everything about investments and accounting practices and the profit-loss margins of multiconglomerates, and about runs batted in with two outs in late innings with a runner on third and the home team trailing by a run. She wasn’t like Ezra who read prodigiously on varied topics and was thus able to fake deep and expert knowledge even on
concrete pavers. No, Larissa knew a little bit about fashion and hair, more about books, still more about theater, modicum about rock music, less about jazz, tiny bit about history, and knew least of all what moved and spurred on human hearts, especially hers.

She thought if only she could understand her father, then other things might become clear. But she never understood him, and so much else in her life remained nothing but a hard floating January cloud. No promise of anything in the air. It wasn’t spring, it wasn’t even the amber heaviness of decomposing fall, it wasn’t the green heat and salt water of summer. It was a bitter clear void of January. Everything felt like neither before nor after. Seasons came and went under the Southern Cross. When was Christmas? The joys of the season had gone for Larissa, the weight of all the resolutions she couldn’t keep was upon her shoulders, no Valentine’s day, no winter break, no planning of a week’s escape somewhere, the Easter Fair, the Food Fair in Dalgety. It was day in and day out of the blue and red Summit swings not moving in the subzero cold.

Except it was
July
!

She stood for a long time naked in front of the mirror in the subdued and dusky house, all alone, before she finally went and turned on the shower. Afterward she got dressed in old sweats and a hoodie, layered herself up with T-shirts and a Henley, put on a ski hat, a scarf, some gloves (they might have been Kai’s), put on walking shoes, and left the house. She had brushed her hair, but that was all. Her mascara was running out and she didn’t want to spend another six dollars on a new one, not until they knew for sure if Kai could get some steady work. The six dollars she had in her pocket was for dinner tonight if she planned carefully. She would do without thicker blacker lashes as she walked down the mountainside, the frosted dry grass crunching under her feet.

It was colder than she wished, but not as cold as Summit
had been, with its icy blizzards. In July, though, Summit was not cold. In July Summit sparkled with green sunlight, and Italian ices were sold at every corner, and she and the kids spent June at the Swim Club looking for lizards in the bushes, and then six weeks in Lillypond, where the mosquito nets were up, and the lake was warm. They were water rats, jumping off the wooden float, chasing dragonflies through the murmur of the swaying reeds, the moonlit fields.

This blue lake was not for swimming in July. The dry crisp-ness in the air hurt her nose, it started to run, felt like it was bleeding. She wiped it with her glove. It
was
bleeding. She continued down the slope. She really should get it cauterized; in the wintertime, the nose gushed blood twice a day like a clockwork geyser.

Briskly she walked to Caldwell’s with her hands in her pockets and her hat pulled down over her ears, the way Asher had worn it until his thirteenth winter, when he suddenly decided he was rejecting all winter attire for one whole season, for no other reason than he was protesting winter. The advantage was: it had made Emily dress warmer in protest to his protest. Michelangelo didn’t have a choice: his mother dressed him, and besides the little boy didn’t like to be cold.