Every Last Cuckoo (20 page)

“Ah,” he said. “They make an eerie sound. The first time I heard it, the hairs stood up on my neck and arms.”

“They sound closer than they are,” Sarah said.

“Good,” he replied. “I have lived in cities all my life. Except for a year or two on a kibbutz, a long time ago. And the animals there were tame. I rather like hearing the sounds of wild creatures at night now that I'm getting used to them, but I don't wish to meet them. I like those solid logs all around me.” He clapped his hands suddenly, startling Sarah. “That reminds me! May I borrow some firewood? Some nights, even now in June, my desert blood refuses to keep me warm.”

Sarah dropped her head into her hands. “I am an idiot,” she said through her fingers. Looking up, she gestured toward the barn, where stacks of dry wood were ranged six feet high. “Take all you want, any time. There's a big garden cart in the barn, too.
You can use that to trundle the wood to the cabin.” Impulsively she put her hand on his shoulder. “Mordechai, I'm so sorry. Have you been freezing to death all this time?”

Again he shrugged. “I thought it would get warm soon. It's a small thing. I could have asked at any time.”

“It does get cold in Israel, though, doesn't it?” she asked. “Not like here, of course, but you do have winters?”

“Oh, yes. Damp winters, freezing rain. It gets into the bones.” He looked at her with his brown-green-amber eyes, forest eyes in a desert face. “We have our wild creatures, too. Though for now, most are asleep. No car bombers, no attacks.”

Sarah hoped Mordechai didn't think her a sheltered fool, yammering about catamounts and coyotes. “I'm glad for that, Mordechai. People must be so frightened in the bad times.”

“Well. Frightened and determined. They will live in their promised land, whatever the cost,” Mordechai said. “But here I am—completely safe in this beautiful country where I grew up. Which now feels foreign,” he added. “It is very, very strange to be back.” He rose and handed Sarah her photographs. She showed him where the garden cart was, ashamed that she hadn't given a thought to his comfort on chilly nights. There would be chilly nights all summer.

S
ARAH RAN INSIDE TO
grab the phone while Lottie's friends unloaded computers and boxes of clothing from a rattletrap van in the front driveway.

“Hello?” she said, panting.

Silence. Then a faint, ragged intake of breath, a shuddering exhalation. Sarah was about to hang up, thinking this was a crank call, when she heard a small, strangled voice say her name. “Mrs. Lucas?”

“Yes. Who is this, please?” More silence. “Hello. Are you there?”

She heard her caller take another shaky breath. She could almost picture someone closing her eyes, putting a hand to her breast to steady herself. Sarah's own heart lurched against her ribs.

“Mrs. Lucas. This is Sandy Hanks. I don't know if you remember—”

“Of course I remember you, Sandy. What's wrong?”

The story came out between jagged bursts of crying. There
was a fire, an electrical fire, the Hankses' trailer was gone. Bob was in the hospital in Barre. Sandy and Tyler had no place to go, could they stay with Sarah for a little while?

Lottie walked by carrying a box. One of her friends, similarly laden, was silhouetted against the screen door, shoving it open. Between Sandy's weeping and the chatter and heavy tread of teenagers, Sarah felt momentarily dazed. She had promised Lottie's friends, and they were half moved in, but she could not turn Sandy away. It was simple, but so complicated. Where would she put everyone? The house would be a zoo, all those teenagers, a four-year-old—probably five by now—and a distraught mother. She must be mad; if not now, then soon.

Sandy was still pouring out her story. Bob was severely burned. If he survived, he would be hospitalized for weeks or months. Sandy had few friends. Bob had only his mother, who lived in the far Northeast Kingdom and wasn't well. No one could put them up. “I can't pay you, Mrs. Lucas. But I can help out, I can cook, stack wood, clean. Anything.”

Sarah started to speak, but Sandy kept on with frantic energy.

“We've lost everything, Mrs. Lucas—our home and clothes and furniture. Tyler's toys and books. His baby pictures!” Sandy wailed.

Sarah said briskly, “Sandy, you come on over, right now. Do you have a car? Are you steady enough to drive?”

Sandy did, and she was. She was calling from the hospital's burn center, where she and Tyler had spent half the night and all morning. The fire had broken out around midnight. Bob had hustled his wife out through a window and raced through flames to Tyler's room, sustaining burns over half his body. He
had inhaled a lot of smoke as well. Everything was gone, but Tyler and Sandy were safe, and Bob was hanging on. Sandy thought he blamed himself. He was an electrician; he should have found the problem before it could flare. “He'll never believe it wasn't his fault,” she cried.

Sarah spoke soothingly, urging Sandy to come over. She hung up and rapidly began to calculate and revise. She'd told Lottie that her friend Jordan could have Charlotte's old room and a boy named Angelo could have David's. All three of her children's rooms were to house other children now—nearly grown ones. With Sandy's arrival, though, Lottie and Jordan would have to double up. Sarah felt like an innkeeper. The Inn of the Desperate and Disaffected. Well, no matter their condition, they would all have to use the same bathroom.

She gathered Lottie and her friends and explained the situation. “Whatever,” Angelo said, heading back to the van for another load of goods. The girls scarcely blinked, though Lottie said, “That sucks.” Sarah assumed she meant this in sympathy, not complaint, since Lottie and Jordan promptly went upstairs to transfer Jordan's belongings.

Sarah watched them go. Jordan Tilley was a tiny girl. Her mop of dark curls tangled with a purple streak over her left temple, where it was all held in place with a filigreed silver comb. She wore a silver ring in her right eyebrow and a slender leather collar with small metal spikes. Her low-cut, tattered jeans, heavily decorated with inked curlicues, were held up with a studded belt. An expanse of smooth, flat, childlike belly showed between the belt at her hip bones and a cutoff green T-shirt that stopped inches below her sternum. Jordan had Betty Boop eyes and a soft, little-girl voice. Sarah had never met her before and did
not know her family. She had spoken with Jordan's mother in advance of the new living arrangement, startled by the woman's harsh dismissal of her own daughter. “She's a pain,” the woman had warned. “She does what she wants. I work two jobs. I don't have a husband. I have two other kids and no control over Jordan. She's on her own.”

Lottie had sworn that Jordan would be no trouble, but Sarah knew firsthand that parents had their own stories to tell. Jordan would move in on trial, as would Angelo.

Sarah at first misheard Angelo Fiori's last name as “Fury,” and he appeared steeped in it. He was a handsome boy, tall and skinny, with a smoky voice and a broody, scrutinizing look in his light gray eyes. His dark hair hung in a fringe over those eyes. Angelo bore none of the tattoos, piercings, or strange hair colors of most of Lottie's friends. In that, he was like Lottie herself. But he was unkempt and taciturn, and he didn't meet Sarah's eyes. His parents, Joan and Ed Fiori, had been nothing like Jordan's mother. Where she was cold, they were heartbroken; where she judged, they were merely stymied.

Joan had told Sarah, “We've tried everything, but he wants nothing to do with us. The only thing we can all agree on is that he should live somewhere else for now.” Her eyes filled as she added, “I feel like a cuckoo, laying my egg in some other bird's nest. It's so unnatural.”

The Fioris insisted on paying Sarah for Angelo's room and board. Jordan's mother had made no such offer, nor did Sarah want her to. Three kids, two jobs, no partner—an impossible situation.

Sarah wondered whether she would end up feeling like a single mother, too. It was hard enough to take care of herself. Some
days she woke up and couldn't remember the last time she'd taken a bath or shower. Clumps of dog hair scudded before her feet like tumbleweeds before she finally vacuumed or mopped. The laundry piled up until she had nothing clean to wear. She did start cooking again, when Lottie moved in, but now they usually made sandwiches or foraged for quick-fix meals. They ate together most of the time, but not always. Lottie was often out. Sarah had not once stopped to consider that three teenagers in the house would mean more cooking and cleaning. Someone else would have to do that, she decided.

Sighing heavily, she went in search of Lottie and the others, who were making an unholy racket. Laughter and loud music blared; someone dropped something heavy, and Angelo yelled, “Fuck! That
hurt
!”

Sarah approached with her fingers in her ears, and Lottie quickly turned the music down. “Just for today, Nana. For the move. Peace and quiet again, once the boxes and stuff are in.” She grinned and moved to the tamped-down beat of the music. She jerked her head sideways, slid an arm out in the same direction, and slithered her body along behind. Then she moved the other way.

Sarah eyed their progress, which had produced mainly chaos so far. “Sandy and Tyler will be here any minute,” she told them. “The noise might be more than they can take. I didn't tell Sandy she'd be entering a rave.” She left them, shaking her head. She said a wordless prayer for Bob and right away heard Sandy pull in behind Angelo's van.

C
HARLOTTE CAME INTO THE
kitchen through the mud-room and stopped in dismay. “Mom, this place is a
mess,
” she
said. “Look at it!” She swept an arm out to encompass the sight in front of her. The counter was cluttered with jars and boxes that no one had put away. They sat amid crumbs and the sticky residue of unidentifiable substances. Dishes sat next to the sink and inside it, waiting for their turn in the dishwasher, which ran nearly all the time and was running now. The floor was gritty.

Sarah looked around. “It is pretty bad, isn't it? I don't notice it like I used to.” She pointed her chin toward the hall. “You should see the great room. Tyler's toys everywhere, the dining table covered with artwork and homework and mail. Lottie and her friends leave a trail of shoes and books and clothes and CDs wherever they go. I don't know how they can tell whose stuff is whose.”

Setting a brown bag down on the counter, Charlotte looked around disapprovingly. “It was never like this even when we were all living at home. Isn't Lottie helping out?” She hoisted her purse strap higher on her shoulder. “What about the others?”

“They're all better than I am,” Sarah told her. “I just don't seem to care much about housekeeping anymore.” She returned to what she was doing, tying long, supple branches together with fine wire.

“What's this?” Charlotte asked, looking over Sarah's shoulder.

“Oh, nothing really. I'm trying to build frames for some photos I took. I've had three of them enlarged, but I don't want to put anything formal around them.”

Sarah spread them out, and Charlotte looked at them—
Terra Firmament,
the snowflake photograph, and a new image of lines in a rock face that approximated a human profile with a beaky nose. Sarah thought that one looked a little like Charles, which was why she wanted to frame it. Charlotte didn't pick any photos
up, but she walked around to the other side of the table, trying to figure out what she was seeing. Sarah explained them to her, then pointed to another photo, not an enlargement. “Think I'll do this one next. Can you tell what it is?”

Charlotte could not.

“Moose marbles,” Sarah laughed. The close-up of the round, brown turds, clumped together and glistening after rain, could be a stone wall, the convoluted surface of a mudflat, a cluster of smooth beads or nuts. Without knowing, it was impossible to tell what actually formed the bumpy, abstract pattern that pleased Sarah's eye so much.

“Lovely, Mom.” Charlotte grimaced. “Since when do you take pictures of anything but your garden and all of us?” she asked.

“Since I started feeling like it,” Sarah said lightly. “I'm discovering a lot of new pleasures.”

Charlotte sat. “Such as?”

“Oh . . . reading late into the night. Walking. I go for walks in the mornings with the dogs. I take the camera. I find things in the woods, or I see a bird or plant I don't recognize, and then I come home and go through your father's books. I like identifying what I'm seeing. I like thinking that Charles is pleased by this.” She gestured toward the rough frame she was constructing. “I never tried this before. Usually I just put the photos in a drawer. But Mordechai suggested blowing some of these up, and I like them. Don't know what I'll ever do with all that stuff, though.” She nodded toward the bay window behind Charlotte. The sills were crammed with things Sarah had picked up on her walks. A brittle nest lined with feathers. A smooth, gray, heart-shaped rock, almost perfectly symmetrical. The clean, tea brown skull of a weasel, or at least what Sarah thought was a weasel. Feathers,
a cluster of leaves eaten down to their skeletons. Tumbled glass from a streambed, a rusted hinge, and a scratched, square-shouldered glass bottle from the site of a long gone farmhouse now crumbling and overgrown by young woods. The bottle bore raised letters that said
TINCTURE OF CANNABIS
, confirming something Charles had told Sarah, that this had once been a common household remedy, perfectly legal. An earthenware cup from the same place wasn't even cracked, though its base and handle were embedded with dirt where the glaze had worn away.

Frustrated by Charlotte's polite silence, Sarah said, “I'm thinking of getting a cat.” Actually she hadn't thought of it at all until that minute, but she suddenly realized she was no longer living with anyone allergic. At least she didn't think so. She'd ask her boarders.