Descent (4 page)

3

In the hours before
dawn,
in the storm’s first cool blows, thin curtains fill and lift in the dark. They belly out over the bed, rippling, luffing—and abruptly empty again, and for a moment everything is still. The world paused. There’s a terrific light, the room conjures for a white instant, and almost at once comes the shuddering boom, and before it has entirely died away the door opens and a small figure stands in its frame, back-lit by the hallway nightlight. Fine muss of dark hair, pink-hearted pj’s. Angela lifting the bedding and the child slipping into that sleeve and shaping her little backside to her as a hand within a hand.

I’m scared.

It’s all right. It’s just a storm.

The small shivering shoulders. The quick-beating heart.

Where’s Daddy?

I don’t know but we’re all right. We’re safe. Okay?

Okay.

A kiss to her silken skull and Angela holding her as she quiets, watching the doorframe for the boy to come too, but he doesn’t, and here’s the rain pattering heavy on the roof, on the firm green leaves outside the window, and she is drifting down, smelling the rain, feeling the small girl in her arms, the deep drumtap of the girl’s heart, and her only prayer in that hour of love is Dear God, may the morning never come.

But it does, of course it does . . . and all Angela held in her arms was a pillow, and the door was shut, and the room was not her room, and the bed was not her bed.

Before her, on the bedside table: A plastic bottle of water. A small book of poetry with a blue first-place ribbon for bookmark—
I cease, I turn pale.
A digital alarm clock preparing to sound. An amber vial of pills. She stared at the pills. At the clock. She listened to the house that was not her house, its total stillness. Get up, she thought. Get up now or else lie here and cease.

Cease then.

You can’t, Angela.

Why not?

The girl’s heartbeat still played in her arms. In her chest. She remembered the hour, the minute, she was born: precious small head, the known, perfect-formed weight of it. All her fears of motherhood—of unreadiness, of
unfitness
—vanishing at the sight of that plum-colored face mewling in outrage.
My child, my life.

She pushed aside the covers and sat up. Got to her feet. Crossed the creaking floor and opened the heavy drapes on a gray dawn. No movement in the leaves of the elm tree. The street and the sidewalk dry. The most ordinary of days. Of worlds.

When she came downstairs in her outfit and makeup, the children were at the table. She touched the boy’s head and then the girl’s on her way to the coffee, one, two. They watched her as if she were someone who’d just walked in off the street.

At the stove in the climbing steam he turned and said, “Well, you look nice.”

“Thank you.”

“Will you eat some eggs?”

“No, thank you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“These are my special cheesy eggs with dicey ham.”

Th
e smell is enough, please spare me the description.

“No, thanks, really,” she said.

“All right. How about you two monkeys? Who wants more?”

Angela sat at the table to drink coffee and chew at a cold triangle of toast.

He served himself and returned the pan to the stove and sat to her left.

“Are you excited?” he said.

After a moment she looked up. “–I’m sorry?”

“I said are you excited. About today. About teaching.”

She thought how to answer, thinking for so long that he stopped chewing. He swallowed, then picked up and sipped his coffee.

On the wall at the foot of the stairs a vintage sunburst clock ticked prodigiously. As if sound was its only mode of timekeeping.

The children began to talk to him. He listened and smiled and talked back and she remembered the little girl—
her
little girl—coming into her bed. The firm small body pushed against her. That heat, that smell like no other.

“I’d better be going,” she said. “I’ve got a long walk.”

He reached and touched her then, two fingertips, lightly to the bone of her wrist, and picked up his cell phone and showed it to her. Some sort of colorful image like a bright whorl of bruise.

“That’s something,” she said.

“That’s rain. You should let me drive you, Angela.”

She looked at him. His kind face. The clear blue eyes with their overcasts of worry. She knew how she must look to him. To all of them. It’s going to be all right, she wanted to say, we’re going to survive this, but at that moment behind her a step creaked, and then another, and there was the scuffing whisper of slippers over linoleum, and fingers swept the back of her head, and she watched as her younger sister made her way around the table in her robin’s-egg robe, swooping down to kiss the boy on the head, the girl on the cheek, and lastly the man, fully on the lips.

“Good morning,” Grace said to her husband, to her children, and to
Angela. “Good morning, my loves.”

4

The moment she walked
into
the classroom she knew she’d made a mistake, but some of them had already seen her and it was too late. Rebecca Woods whose mother, Anne, liked a good martini in the afternoon; Ariel Suskind with her tremendous brown eyes and a father who taught graduates at the university and who had left Ariel’s mother for one of them. Angela had a brief smile for these daughters of friends and once friends, and they had the same for her before the girls were moved to urgent doodling, to matters of the cell phone. She saw the flushing young cheek. The spill of fine hair which must be rehung behind the ear. Girls of high bloom and maturity enough to know wreckage when it stood before them but not to bear it, and in that instant she abandoned every plan she’d made and asked them to open their books please and just read, and this they did without a whisper or passed note or pen poke among them. Instead there was the mute fervency of secreted devices, messages firing lap to lap like cells along a nerve chain, and she sat out the hour staring into the paperback and letting them take her in as the news reached them one by one:
She lost her daughter in the Rocky Mountains, then she lost her mind; she was in the “hospital” for three months & now she’s our sub? Is that even like, legal?
Yes, children, here is your lesson, here is all I can teach you, until the bell sounded at last and she stood and pretended to search the contents of her tote bag while they shouldered their packs and trooped wordlessly out and—

“Good-bye, Mrs. Courtland.”

“Oh, good-bye, Ariel. Please tell your mother hello.”

“I will.” The girl slowing, not quite stopping, books held to her chest, the great brown eyes. She had an older sister with the same eyes who had run track with Caitlin but who’d broken her neck diving into a pool and lived now in her wheelchair, and Angela digging intently at the tote bag, muttering, a glance and a smile—“Bye now”—and the girl Ariel nodding and turning and going on, and Angela’s heart racing high in her chest as she shut the door and shook out a palmful of pills and then spilled them back into the vial, all but two, and clapped them into her mouth and swallowed them dry. When she opened the door again some minutes later the hall stood empty left and right. She stepped out and walked it with the rap of her heels bouncing off the tin lockers like the footfall of some following soul. Like the twin sister who still spoke to her, whom she saw in the mirror. Two old dears alone in that church-quiet corridor, they might have been, childless where a thousand living children ran.

How do you go on?

You just do, honey.

The clack-clack of heels. The gray rectangles of doorlight ahead.

Why?

Because He asks you to. And for your family.

She pushed through the doors and there was the smell of rain and she sat on the wooden bench and slipped off one heel and pulled the white sock onto her foot, the white sneaker after, and then she did the same for the other foot and tied the laces. She lifted her face to the sky and shut her eyes against the first cold drops.
Your family.
She tried to think. She tried to remember what that meant. How you were supposed to feel. Above her, the flag lapped silkily upon itself, susurrant as some creek or stream making its way across the sky. The drops fell harder. Colder. She pulled the black umbrella from her tote bag and thumbed the button and the device shot forward and flapped into tautness over its bat-wing joints. She felt the pills under her heart like a hundred small hands holding it aloft.

At home—at Grace’s—her little sister, who did not work on Mondays, was putting the kitchen back in order. She was getting dressed, she was brewing fresh coffee and reading the paper, she was listening to that clock. She was waiting for Angela to walk in the door and tell her how it went. She was waiting to talk. Grace had no memories of another sister, of Faith. To her there was Angela, and there was this girl who looked exactly like Angela in the old albums—identical pretty young girls smiling, dazzling the camera, no way to tell which was the girl who would live and which the one who would not.

Angie.

Yes.

We can’t just sit here.

I know.

She sat a moment longer beneath the umbrella, inside the dark bell of it, listening to the drops drumming. Then she stood and walked away from the school, and away from Grace’s.

5

T
wo days of heavy snow before the pass opened again and they could go. Unbelievably bright and crystalline Saturday morning, the little resort town gilded end to end in a deep wonderland sugar. Skiers racking their skis on a shuttle bus outside the motel and clomping aboard in splendid plastic boots. A foursome of boys jostling up the walk waving snowboards—Hold the bus!—eighteen, nineteen, careless as lords.

It was the day before
Th
anksgiving.
Th
ey had lived in the motel for four months. Family of four when they checked in, family of three checking out.

Everybody in? Grant said unthinkingly.

Th
ey were the only car going upward against a long, down-snaking procession of inbound traffic, as if they alone defied the laws of the divide, of physics.
Th
e whitened pine forests rolling by like a child’s dream of winter (if anything moved, if anything stirred in all that whiteness the eye would see it at once, seize on it—but nothing did), and they wound their way up one side of the divide and down the other without a word among them, slipping at last into a vein of freeway that carried them through the city toward the plains to the east, the great peaks rising behind them, more massive somehow with distance, undiminishing, the car doing seventy but dragging, straining, the sensation of a climbing ride that would reach its vertical limit, falter, and plummet backward. As it must. As it should.

Th
ey drove on, away from her, mile by mile.

In the back the boy had his homework, the things the school had sent, arranged on his lap, his naked leg pillowed along the length of the seat, the entire length of it, no other way for him to be in the car, so where would she have sat?

East of the city nothing but the road ahead and the wintered plains and the blue sky.
Th
ey drove over a ruddy stain where an animal had been struck, and Angela reset her sunglasses. Deeper into the plains dark rags of meat and hide littered the road. Black hooves in the ditch like strange blossoms.
Th
ey came upon a fully intact animal in the median, a newly antlered buck on folded legs, no blood but no life either in the eye that watched them pass. Oh God, said
Angela, and Grant said, Don’t look.

How can I not look?

Watch the horizon. Close your eyes.

Th
at doesn’t help.

What do you want me to do?

Th
ere was the rattle of pills and her head kicked back once and then again as she drank from her water bottle. If she looked over her shoulder all she would see of the boy was his leg.
Th
e lurid seams.
Th
e gleaming steel brace clinging to his knee and holding the pieces together under the skin. A thing from the future that from time to random time probed with its needle legs raw, deep beds of nerves. Since they’d gotten into the car she hadn’t looked back, not once. As if her head no longer moved that way.

Grant tabulated through the stations and switched off the radio. How you doing back there? In one of his pockets were Sean’s pills.

Fine.

Th
e leg okay?

Th
e boy looked at his leg.
Th
e steel arachnid.

Are there any rest stops in this state?

When they stopped, Angela’s head, lolled against the window, did not stir. Grant pulled the collapsed wheelchair from the rear of the wagon and after a few minutes the boy was in it and they were pushing into a bitter wind, his bare leg pink and white in the cold.

No warmer inside the men’s room but at least windless, the wind whistling around the glass blocks where the caulking had pulled away. A large man in a checkerboard winter vest glanced at them and turned back to his loud pissing. Sean wheeled himself to the handicap stall and Grant said, Will you be all right? and Sean didn’t answer, his heart rising furiously. At school was a bathroom with a blue wheelchair sign on the door and the door would swing open when you came near it with a certain kind of card, and the only people who had the card were the janitors and a boy in his class with MS and an older girl, a friend of Caitlin’s who’d broken her neck diving into a swimming pool. And now Sean would have the card too and he would go into the cripple’s bathroom and sit like a girl when he pissed.

Some minutes later he wheeled out of the men’s room and steered toward the glass doors of the lobby and stopped. Out in the car, his mother’s head rested as before. Sunglasses like black outsized eyes, blind and unblinking. To the west was nothing, the mountains gone, absolutely, as if into a sea.
Th
ey were the survivors; all they had now was each other. Like in a book, or a movie.

Want something from these machines?

He wheeled around.

Th
ey’ve got Snickers bars. Coke, his father said.

Sean stared at the machines. I’m not supposed to eat that crap.

You can eat whatever you want.

Why?

Because you can, that’s all.

Because I’m in this thing?

Because you’re sixteen, Sean.

Th
ey were silent. Wind pushed at the glass doors, rattling them like a man locked out.

What is it? his father said.

Nothing.

What, Sean?

Is she going to be all right?

His father stared at him, his eyes glassing over, and Sean said, I mean Mom, and his father looked out at the car.

She’s going to need time. And help. She’s going to need your help.

And yours too.

Yes.

But you’re going back. To keep looking.

Yes.

I’m going with you.

You need to get back to school, Sean. And you need to heal that leg.

Th
ey were not on the highway long before his knee took up an intense
pulsing—rhythmic flashes of pain he thought he ought to be able to see like light in the eyelets of flesh where the spiderlegs sunk in. A quasar of bone and nerves throbbing under the zippered skin. He stared at his knee and he remembered the ground up there.
Th
e brown bed of needles, the weeds and the dust. Lying there looking up into the trees with the feeling of piss in his crotch. Hot piss in his crotch and a leg all wrong and his heart pounding and still seeing the man’s face behind the wheel, no surprise no fear no nothing, just the yellow lenses, and
he’d closed his eyes when the man came up—Don’t touch him, she said—and he’d kept them closed like he was sleeping as they put the man’s blanket that smelled of wool and gasoline over him and he kept them closed as she knelt and talked to him one last time, and he kept them closed and he kept them closed with the piss going cold in his crotch.

How’s the leg? his father said. As if the pain were visible after all, burning like headlights in his mirror.

Fine, he answered
.