Every Last Cuckoo (2 page)

Charles touched her cheek. He might be the doctor in the family, but the palm of Sarah's own hand was accurate within a degree of fever. All those years of mothering.

“What brought this on?” he asked. “You feeling better?”

“Mmm. Just a bug.” Talking was an effort, but Sarah added, “Don't you catch it.”

“Not this iron man,” said Charles, bending to kiss her cheek.

S
ARAH SLEPT UNTIL NINE
the next morning, three hours later than usual. When Vermont's dilute autumn sun finally woke her, she could tell the hour from the position of its diffuse glow
through the honeycomb shades. Her body luxuriated in surcease from illness, but her mind dwelt on mortality. This time a fly-by-night virus. Next time—what?

Sarah was rarely ill. Even as a child she had weathered the odd bout of sickness with a calm born of utter trust in her body. She had submitted patiently to everything from colds to menstrual cramps, believing that to be in the best of health she had to be ill sometimes. She had to let her body use its defenses the way an army practices maneuvers during peacetime. Colds kept her immune system fit. Cramps confirmed her clocklike fertility, announced the readiness of her body for babies, familiarized her with the tugging sensation that would so wildly intensify during labor. No matter what the ailment, her health always returned.

Last night, though, Sarah had feared the body-shaking thud of her heart, the weakness in her joints. Her half-awake dreaming had brought unusual images, scenes in which her molecules came unbound and drifted like motes in a beam of light, or her limbs turned to rivers that ran away into sand. She tried to fight panic along with the nausea, but neither had receded until victorious. Vomiting drained away the poisons, but the fear crept back, peripherally.

The telephone rang downstairs. Charles answered. He must have turned off the bedside phone. Sarah heard the rumble and inflections of his voice but couldn't distinguish his words, only that he was friendly, not grumpy. The grumpy Charles emerged more often than he used to, but, then, so did the grumpy Sarah. So, for that matter, did a broader spirit in each of them, a ferocious joy. There was more to being old than she had ever expected.

With that, Sarah dressed and headed downstairs, stepping
through early November sunshine on the landing, pale light made watery by the wavy, century-old glass in the southeast window. As she turned to finish her descent, she felt briefly unsteady and grasped the banister. Sylvie and Ruckus surged up to meet her, a canine tide. She extended her free hand, received their kisses, and fondled their ears. Content, they preceded her down the last stairs and flanked her on her way to the kitchen, tails moving like metronomes, toenails rattling time on hardwood and tile.

Charles was still on the phone, holding the receiver to his ear with his shoulder while pouring coffee. He saw Sarah and held the pot up inquiringly.

No,
thought Sarah, her stomach contracting. She grimaced at Charles and went to the pantry for tea.

Charles said into the phone, “She's up. Let me see if she's up to talking.” He covered the receiver. “It's Lottie.”

“Ask if I can call her back,” said Sarah, filling the kettle.

Charles did so, laughed, and hung up. “No, she's never speaking to you again.” He surveyed her face and looked her tall self up and down. “You don't look sick,” he said. “In fact you look better than you ought to and too young for an old fart like me.”

“Eye of the beholder,” said Sarah. “What did Lottie want?”

“You, of course.”

“She say why?”

“No, but I'd guess the usual,” Charles said. “Her parents.”

“You mean her mother,” said Sarah wryly. “Don't be so judicious. It's only me.”

Lottie, their granddaughter, belonged to their firstborn, Charlotte, and was named for her. She'd been given her nickname to avoid confusion, but it suited the girl's light, free-spirited
nature. Lately her rising hormones had brought stronger moods, many of them dark. At fifteen Lottie was volatile and given to melodrama. Charlotte, high-strung herself, had no idea what to do with the adolescent changeling in her house, so Sarah was a drawbridge, separating mother and daughter until the traffic on their troubled waters could pass.

The teakettle whistled, and Sarah poured boiling water into a heavy mug, over a pouch of ginger tea. She sat down opposite Charles at the table inside the kitchen's broad bay window. “Thanksgiving's less than two weeks off,” she said. “I need to plan, though the thought of all that food's a bit much this morning.”

“You going to call Lottie first? She was heading out soon.”

Sarah tried, but Lottie had already left on some Saturday jaunt. Charlotte, after a brief and stiffly cheerful conversation, said she would tell Lottie that Sarah had called.

Sarah hung up, disheartened. She gathered cookbooks but then sank into her chair and stared out at the late fall garden, trying, as she had countless times, to remember when she and Charlotte had first lost track of each other. As she often did amid thoughts of her oldest child, she wished her other two, Stephie and David, lived nearby. She felt no tension with them.

Sarah shifted her gaze to Charles, engrossed in a book. “Remember the first time it was just the two of us?” she asked wistfully. “Before the kids?”

He glanced up, preoccupied. “Anything in particular?”

“All that sweaty sex.” She smiled and got up to fix some toast.

“Who, us?”

“Us. Don't you ever think about those days? They come back
to me all the time lately. Sometimes I think I remember every minute; other times I think I made it all up. Or I can't tell the difference.”

Charles looked up at her, considering. “I prefer the present.” With that he closed his book, planted a kiss on the crown of Sarah's head, and started back to his office over the barn. As a young man he had meant to study history, before medicine proved a stronger calling. Now he was writing a Lucas genealogy, conducting his research on the Internet. Since his retirement a dozen years earlier, he had written a social history of their village, Rockhill, and had self-published the diary his mother had kept as a World War I nurse. Charles was disciplined and happy. Sarah often envied his routines—mornings at his desk, errands in town, lunch with friends or meetings with environmentalists, then afternoon chores or rambles with the dogs in good weather. She joined him on those long walks when she could, but her days refused to conform to anything like a schedule. She had her own kind of discipline, which kept their lives and house in order, but she didn't have Charles's long attention span, and she wasn't creative.

Sarah made more tea and began riffling through the cookbooks. She sat planning the holidays until almost noon. The sun circled past her right shoulder. Now and then some high, fast-moving clouds cast brief shadows on her lengthening list of tasks. Before Thanksgiving was over, she would feel Christmas bearing down—the last one of the century and the old millennium.

C
HARLES AND
S
ARAH'S YOUNGEST
, David, arrived early from Massachusetts on the day before the holiday. Sylvie and Ruckus reached the door first, barking excitedly. David bent to greet them as Sarah rounded the corner from the hall to the foyer. She meant to embrace her son but stopped suddenly, surprised to see a small child—bright-haired, wearing red—back up a step at the sight of the dogs, her eyes frozen wide, chubby hands in the air. Then she flung herself at Sylvie's neck, accepting wet kisses with glee.

“David!” Sarah cried, delighted. “I didn't expect you for hours. Who's
this
?” She went down on one knee to meet her unexpected guest. “Hello, sweetheart. I'm Sarah. What's your name?” The little girl backed away, as she'd done before the dogs. Her dark blue eyes turned solemn.

David hugged his mother as she rose in some embarrassment. His leather jacket was stiff from the cold, his neat beard coarse and springy against her cheek. Sarah looked up at him and saw the young Charles, tall and handsome. David said, “This is
Hannah, Mom. Hannah's three and a half. And this,” he added, drawing a slender young woman indoors, “is Hannah's mother, Theresa McDermott. Better known as Tess.”

Sarah smiled and held out her hand. “Forgive me! I was so taken with your daughter.”

Tess's hand was warm, her grip firm but not hard on Sarah's joints. “It's good to meet you in person, Mrs. Lucas. I've seen photos of everyone in the family—David has prepped me well.” She threw him a teasing glance. She was tall, with the same pale blond hair as her daughter, the same clear eyes and skin. A certain asymmetry in her face saved it from being just another pretty one. Overall, she had an inquisitive, intelligent look.

Hannah tugged shyly at Sarah's sleeve. “What's his name?” she asked, patting Sylvie's broad, glossy head.

“He's a she, honey. Her name is Sylvie. And this curly guy is Ruckus.”

“Hi, Sylvie,” Hannah crooned. “Hi, Ruckus,” she added, extending her hand to the smaller dog, who obligingly licked it and wagged his stumpy tail. “Ruckus is a funny name,” she announced, and giggled.

“Well, he's a funny dog,” said Sarah. “Go on into the kitchen, all of you. I have a feeling someone there will be very happy to see you.” She'd heard Charles come in through the mudroom, returning from errands. Driving into the barn from the village road, a rutted dirt byway through the woods, he wouldn't have seen David's car in front. Sarah suddenly wondered why David had come in that way, through the door on the wide porch. Family usually entered from the barn and mudroom, shedding boots and jackets on the way.

Sarah sent David and his guests ahead of her and took their
coats to the hall closet. She longed for Stephie and Jake to come, too, bringing the whole family together at one time. But northern Minnesota was too far away for a short holiday trip.

Sarah overheard introductions as David and Tess encountered Charles. Hannah entered the spirit of things by telling him, “This black dog is Sylvie. That curly guy is Ruckus.”

Charles pretended surprise. “You don't say. And did they come with you in the car, all the way from Cambridge?”

Hannah's laugh rang down the hallway, a wholehearted burst. “No! They live
here
!”

Sarah entered the kitchen in time to see Charles scratch his head, looking confused. “Never saw them before. Now ain't that the darnedest thing?”

A
N HOUR OR SO LATER
, after a light lunch, Hannah explored the backyard with the dogs and came back exhausted and out of sorts. Tess took her upstairs for a nap, while David and Charles toured the property together. Sarah watched them. They adopted identical male postures, legs apart, hands in pockets or pointing at a tree limb that needed pruning, a piece of roof in need of repair, a gate hinge hanging loose. They had confined themselves to practicalities ever since David's adolescent rage against his father had finally faded to politeness. This saddened Charles the way her distance from Charlotte saddened Sarah. They had never dreamed that love would not be enough.

Charles, for reasons of temperament and constraint, would never glean from David the information Sarah wanted. Who was Tess? Where was Hannah's father, and did he share custody? Did Tess see staying power in David? No other woman had inspired more than passing infatuation since David's shattering
divorce a dozen years ago. He was forty now. Tess was younger, probably only thirty or so.

Perhaps she was the reason David had come in through the porch door. It could be his way of announcing that they should take her seriously. He had told Sarah only days ago that he and Tess were living together, a revelation that automatically elevated her above David's many other loves. But he'd said nothing about Hannah.

Sarah had been moved by Hannah's instinctive courage, her willingness to forge past her wariness of dogs and new places. She wanted to feel Hannah's weight in her lap, to smell her hair. Her keenness for the child surprised her. She had taken her grandchildren's sequential arrivals in stride—she'd expected their entrance into her life as she expected the seasons to change. But Hannah drew Sarah's eye and ear; she was strong-willed, talkative, and filled with color and light.
A butterfly next to an old bat like me,
thought Sarah, chagrined and wry.

A
T DINNER
D
AVID SAID
he had met Tess at a Quaker meeting, the last place Charles or Sarah would have guessed. Tess had been raised among the Friends but hadn't practiced as an adult until Hannah was a year old. She explained that she wanted Hannah to grow up among people who lived simply and worked for peace and social justice. She seemed reluctant to discuss the matter further, though she did add that Quakers believe each person carries a particle of the divine inside. That was the basis for everything they stood for.

Sarah had trouble picturing David as a believer or even a seeker. He'd always seemed too coolly ironic for faith, too tightly bound by flesh and bone and logic—though in recent years he
had begun expanding, following artistic impulses that no one had known he had. His chosen medium was clay, his forms were large-scale architectural pieces and sculptures. Still, Sarah thought his nature was more accurately reflected in the finished, cooled shapes than in the fire that cured them.

She asked him what had drawn him to a Quaker meeting, but all he said was, “I went with some friends a couple of times. I liked the silence. It was peaceful.”

Tess told Charles and Sarah that she worked as a freelance writer for several museums in the Boston area. She wrote exhibition brochures, captions for works on display, occasional fund-raising letters or grant proposals. “It's only part-time. I can work from home, so I'm there for Hannah.”