Every Last Cuckoo (12 page)

“We could bring some over,” Sandy offered shyly.

Charles said, “Great idea! Love venison.” Charles had never shot so much as a squirrel, even in the long-ago days with Albert Graves. Sarah's mouth twitched a little at this heartiness.

Sandy looked over at her husband, who grinned and said, “Don't know how long we'll have to put you folks out. Maybe we'd best provide supper tonight, while we know we can. I can dash on home, be back in half an hour. Stew can thaw right on the stove.”

“Wonderful,” Sarah said, putting more enthusiasm in her voice than she felt in her heart. “I'll make salad and biscuits.”

F
OR THE NEXT TWO
nights, the Hankses slept by the woodstove in the great room. Charles spent his days in town or
in his office above the barn. Sarah ran errands, took care of what household chores the chill allowed, or read in their temporary bedroom—the one nearest the furnace room below, which the radiant heat warmed just enough. Sarah also spent time with Sandy and Tyler while Bob was at work. He was an electrician, rarely idle. Just now he was working with the power company crews on the downed lines. He told Charles they were living in their trailer until they could save enough to build or buy a house.

Sandy was more relaxed on Monday and Tuesday. She drove Bob to work in the mornings so she could have their car, and she spent much of the day out and about with Tyler or playing with him in the slowly melting snow. The two of them built an impressive pair of snow bears, a mama and cub. Sandy textured the fur with a stick that she cut like a brush at the end, and Tyler found smooth round stones for noses, digging in the front driveway where the snow was plowed to only an inch or two. When Sarah exclaimed over the artistry involved in the sculpture, Sandy smiled, embarrassed. “Tyler and I like to make things. We draw, we make bread in funny shapes.”

Sandy was from Ohio and had no family in Vermont except for Bob and Tyler. She had no schooling beyond twelfth grade, but she read avidly and made art out of almost everything she touched, whether snow, paper and pencil, or food. Bob had been right about her venison stew. The dish was heavenly, spiced with herbs, lots of garlic, red wine. There were turnips and kale in the mix, along with potatoes, carrots, celery, mushrooms, and apples. “I never make it the same way twice,” Sandy had told them, ducking their praise. “I just kind of dump the produce bin into the pot.”

Tyler never did open up during their stay. Outdoors with Sandy, he chattered volubly and ran about with the dogs. Indoors he stayed quiet. He sometimes lay on the floor with Ruckus, scratching the rough curls around the little dog's ears or rubbing his shaggy belly. He looked at books or drew pictures in colored pencil. Twice he watched a video called
The Snowman,
which had once belonged to Lottie. But he seldom spoke. When he did, he was articulate and occasionally even funny, but he definitely saved most of his conversation for his mother. Sarah sensed he was a little uneasy with men. He stayed buried in a project when Charles or Bob was around. He sang to himself often, strings of meandering, tuneless notes that he seemed not even to know he was producing. When the power came back on Tuesday afternoon, he took his farewell from Sarah with an obedient handshake and a soft, scripted, “Thank you, Mrs. Lucas. It was nice to meet you.” Then he patted Ruckus and Sylvie, shouldered his small duffel bag, and followed his mother to the car without looking back.

O
N THE FIFTH OF
February, Vivi called to say Molly had been in an accident with her car. She wasn't badly hurt, just bruised, with a wrenched shoulder muscle. Still, she was hampered in her daily activities, and Vivi wanted Sarah to go with her to visit, take in wood, and drop off some food. Sarah agreed.

“How did it happen?” Sarah wanted to know. “When?”

“Last night, just after dusk. You remember, the temperature dropped all of a sudden. She hit a patch of black ice and slid into a tree. Luckily she hit slantwise, not straight on.”

“It amazes me she still drives at all. It amazes me that
I
do, come to think of it.”

“I know. I keep expecting her to give it up, but her eyesight's good, and she has all her wits. Why not keep going as long as possible?”

Vivi picked Sarah up at two. They said good-bye to Charles as he was calling the dogs and heading out for a hike. They drove to the co-op and bought organic fruit and greens, a crusty baguette, and a bouquet of dried flowers in bright pinks and purples. At Molly's they let themselves in by a door near the kitchen, leaving their coats and boots in the mudroom. Garden tools hung from pegs, and a mesh bag full of work gloves, bandanas, and baseball caps bulged fatly from a hook. A bicycle rested on flat tires against the inner wall, adjoining the kitchen door. Stacked-up boxes of overflow, neatly labeled, towered in a corner near a long dowel on which jackets, slickers, and barn coats hung over a mat for boots, shoes, and clogs. The mudroom walls were its best feature. Molly had papered every inch with empty seed packets. In the middle of one exterior wall was a door, also papered and therefore nearly invisible. This opened into Molly's greenhouse.

Inside, the kitchen was spare, all the surfaces clean and bare except for the wide sills of sunny windows, crowded with houseplants. The largest bank of windows was taken up with a view of Molly's barn, a big block of weathered red against the snow and blue sky. The curving gully beyond it ran fast with a white-water stream in early spring and then dried to a pebbled bed with barely a trickle most summers. Beyond the streambed was a small apple orchard. Molly's place was heaven when her
perennial gardens were in bloom, aswarm with butterflies and hummingbirds. Her vegetable garden, between the house and barn, was laid out in raised beds each summer, all orderly and weed free. Molly had managed all of it herself until just a few years ago. Now she paid a teenager to help.

Vivi and Sarah deposited their wares in Molly's fridge and cupboards. They found a vase for the dried bouquet and took it with them through the living room to Molly's sitting room, hollering her name before them. She lay on an overstuffed chaise longue with books and magazines strewn around her and a pot of tea on a wooden tray at her elbow. She was expecting them. The teapot was wrapped in a thick hand towel, and three cups—thin, translucent china with a shamrock pattern—sat next to it, along with a matching milk pitcher and sugar bowl and a plate of molasses cookies.

“You must be feeling better if you've been baking,” Vivi said, leaning over to buss the old woman on the cheek. Sarah presented her with the flowers, and Molly thanked them both.

“Can't stand sitting still,” she said. “Busy's a habit old as I am, and that's damn old.”

“So what happened?” Sarah urged. “Vivi told me you got banged up a bit.”

Molly stretched the neck of her baggy sweater and uncovered a massive, technicolor bruise that extended from the inside of her collarbone to the outside of her left shoulder. Gratified by her visitors' gasps, she told them, “It was on that wicked little low-down curve on the Rockhill-Worcester Road, the paved part of it. Can't remember how I hit exactly. Must have been wrenching the steering wheel round, trying to keep from going into a
ravine, when I slammed into that tree. Anyway, this is the worst of it. It's stiff, but if I keep moving it loosens up.”

“You were lucky,” Vivi said. “My God, Molly, you could have dropped, what, fifteen or twenty feet?” She shuddered.

Molly laughed. “Bless that little maple.”

 

AFTER SEEING HER FRIENDS and family out, Sarah roams her house, uneasy about going to bed without her husband. She wanders from window to window, peering out, listening for night sounds. The moon is bright. Four deer pick their way across the snow, and their long shadows walk with them. The does, pregnant at this time of year, will drop their fawns in some wooded spot early in the spring.

Spring seems very far away.

Sylvie and Ruckus stay close to Sarah as she moves like a prowler through her own house. Finally she lets them follow her upstairs to sleep on the floor of her room. She takes one of Charles's sleeping pills, waits for the drowsiness, and climbs onto the window seat, avoiding the bed. There, in moonlight, she finally gives in to numb unconsciousness.

Sarah dreams. The keening wind enters through cracks around her windows. A baby shrieks somewhere in her house. Sarah, freezing in her nightgown, races from room to room and cannot find the child.
Whose
child? Her bare feet pound up and down the hall and stairs, and the screaming goes on and on. Then Sarah jerks upright from her druggy sleep, staring into darkness. The high howling follows her into consciousness. It comes from Sylvie, who is no dream. Sarah fumbles for the light, thinking she is in her bed. She can't find the switch. She gives up and begins howling in the dark herself, knowing now what the dog knew the instant it
happened. Sarah and Sylvie voice together their hair-raising grief, ancient and ceaseless, and Ruckus takes up their crying. The room must surely burst apart in this noise of unbearable loss.

Amid the wailing, the phone shrills—three times, five times. The machine picks up but records only the breaking of the connection. Sarah hears none of this, nor does she need to.

PART II

E
VERYONE CAME, FAMILY
and friends from Vermont and all over the country. Then they left. Sarah pictured the house swelling up with a deep intake of air, drawing tiny, weeping people in with its breath and then blowing them out mournfully to zigzag in the stinging cold. The inhalation held her aloft; the exhalation gave her some brief peace in its wake.

There was no funeral, just a memorial gathering at the town hall, as Charles had wished. He didn't want a church, and home was too small; but the town hall, with its tall windows, creaky wooden floors, folding chairs, and echoes of town meetings, had just the plainness that appealed to him. And it was large enough to seat two hundred.

Sarah learned all of Charles's last wishes from Amos Brand, whom they'd last seen on Christmas Eve while dropping off a ham for the community feast. A few days after Charles died, Amos came to the house with the will, though Sarah had offered
to meet him at his office. When he arrived and she saw how distraught he was, she understood—he didn't want his grief on display among his colleagues and staff. He tried to subdue it even with Sarah, but his shoulders shook when she embraced him. She served him coffee while he recovered himself, and they stayed in the kitchen to soften the formalities.

Amos sat at the table, across from Sarah. She said, “Charles never opened his eyes again after I left the hospital. His heart just stopped. They don't know why.” It wasn't the first time she had said this out loud. She said it often, as if repetition could resolve the mystery, but it never did.

The will was a predictable document, duly stated in legalese and properly signed and witnessed. Charles had written all other instructions on light gray paper in his own angular longhand. For a doctor, he'd had a legible, even elegant script, which had always drawn comment. More than once, he'd said, “I wish people would just think about this. Doesn't it seem odd to
expect
doctors to have poor hand coordination? Isn't that a little scary?”