Every Last Cuckoo (3 page)

There was nothing unfriendly about Tess, but nothing easy or forthcoming, either. Neither she nor David offered much that was personal. Little by little, though, their story would emerge. In the usual way of families, people would talk to each other, one at a time or in small clusters, and pieces of their conversations would conjoin. David might tell Sarah more in private than at dinner. Tess might talk to Charlotte and Charlotte to Charles. Lottie, in a sociable mood, could charmingly pry and question, worming more from everyone than they meant to divulge. And Lottie would tell Sarah everything.

Tess offered to help clean up after their meal, but Sarah said, “Thanks, anyway. I'm going to mix up some pastry first, so I can make the pies first thing tomorrow.” She meant to be up before six. Dinner would be at two. Charlotte would bring side dishes, and Peter and Vivianna Marks, old family friends, would bring wine and hors d'oeuvres.

David and Tess took Hannah upstairs for a bath and a book.
They were using the clawfoot tub in Charles and Sarah's bathroom, directly above the kitchen, and Sarah could hear snatches of conversation through a grate in the ceiling. She was aware, from the variously abashed, accusing, and delighted reports of her grown children, that many private parental talks had made their way into eager ears through that grate. But tonight Sarah, the eavesdropper, heard nothing she wasn't supposed to hear.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
while the pies were baking, Charles and Sarah drove to the village to deliver a turkey for the annual community dinner. The event, held at the town hall, was open to anyone at loose ends for the holiday. People with no family showed up, along with transients, those who were out of work, and others who barely made it on two jobs. A few of the better-off came bearing food; they stayed to help in the kitchen and share the meal. It would all happen again on Christmas.

Charles was handing their twenty-pound offering to Amos Brand, the dinner's organizer—also their friend and attorney—when sirens split the early morning air and shouts followed. Amos, Charles, and Sarah rushed out in time to see state police cars screech to a halt in the small parking lot, while two men hauled a couple of boys roughly from another car. People gathered suddenly from the houses close by, from passing cars, from nowhere, from the air. They stood with their arms crossed. A trooper handcuffed one boy, while another trooper and one of the civilians threw the second boy roughly to the ground after a short scuffle. Murmurs raced through the crowd. The car had been stolen. The boys were on drugs. They weren't from here; an alert had been issued in New Hampshire. The car had New Hampshire plates. That man over there, that big guy holding
the boy to the ground, had a police scanner on at home all the time. He was the one who called it in. Good for him. Serves the punks right.

Sarah's eyes darted over the scene, lighting on each face in turn, always returning to the skinny, frightened boy on the ground. The conscientious beefy civilian had pinned his arms and planted a knee in the small of his back. The boy's ear and cheek were pressed against the pavement, hard up against grit and loose rock. He was furious; he was crying. Sarah listened to the crowd's self-satisfied judgments and easy condemnation.

Charles strode angrily over to the man who held the boy to the ground. “For chrissakes, Bill, get off that kid. Your knee's right on his kidneys. He can't breathe with his arms yanked back and all your weight on him.” He gestured at one of the troopers. “You take over. Unless you want a dead kid on your hands.”

Bill, big as a linebacker, started to hurl a protest, but the trooper motioned to him to be quiet and get up. Then he pulled the boy up and held him by the upper arm. The car thief's face was scratched, streaked with dirt and tears. He was painfully thin, no more than sixteen or seventeen.

“Shame on you both,” Charles said to the men, his voice soft with disgust. He looked at his neighbors gathered there and said, “Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.” He caught Amos's eye, and Amos lifted a thumb into the air.

Charles and Sarah climbed into their car and left. Sarah fought tears, shaken by grief too great for the occasion. It caught her off guard. Charles reached over and took her hand, and they rode home together.

It was still early, only seven thirty, when they reentered their
kitchen. No one else was up, not even Hannah, so tired last night, so late getting to bed.

Sarah put the pies to cool. Wordlessly Charles drew her into his arms and kissed her. He slid his hands from her shoulders down along her spine, gently massaging her back before clasping her hips and pulling her in close. It had been a long time, at least a month. Sarah was a little surprised that desire should choose this occasion, but not this hour. Intimacy often found them in the morning, when their energy was strongest.

She climbed the stairs with Charles, mentally moving her holiday chores around to accommodate this unscheduled break. They entered their room holding hands, then took off their clothes and unmade their bed as if for sleep. Sarah knew this early morning love was about comfort silently sought and silently given. It wasn't she who needed it, having recovered from her reaction to the scene in town.

How many times had she and Charles come together like this, in how many ways? This time was slow, there was no urgency. Whatever happened happened. Their bodies and desires had changed, but almost in tandem. Charles and Sarah took their time now, as if time were still limitless.

Charles was no longer as avid or athletic as he had been when young, but he was no less inventive. Sarah loved his patience. Her orgasms, like his own, took longer to achieve, when they happened at all, but the feelings were the same. What was new, what now entered Sarah each time with Charles himself, was a blend of gratitude and anxiety.
We are blessed,
she thought,
fortunate that we have had this, that we have it still, though each time could be the last.

Charles reached for the bottle of slick liquid he called Jiffy Lube—essential to their foreplay now. When she was ready, they moved together and fell into the rhythm that made them one. Eventually Sarah called out softly, tightening the grip of her arms and legs. This time Charles didn't follow, nor did he mind. He kissed her and rolled onto his back, his whole length warm against hers, under the covers. This late in life, destinations, and even journeys, mattered less than each moment they spent together. What satisfied each was that the other was there.

Afterward Sarah turned to Charles. “It was because of David, wasn't it? When those two cops manhandled him.”

“Yes,” Charles answered, lazy and happy, having swum once more in the mouth of the river of their lives.

C
HARLOTTE ARRIVED AT NOON
to help in the kitchen. Her husband, Tom, a wiry man with curly black hair and amused blue eyes, helped Charles move extra chairs into the great room and put a wide leaf in the dining table. The two men talked about Tom's pediatric patients while they worked. David went into the backyard to fix the gate hinge. Sarah thought he envied Tom's closeness with Charles. Those two shared medicine and much more—politics, a love of the woods, wry commentary on town meetings—but David found little conversational ground with his father. Even his stories about the math students he taught in Boston, so full of the potential for revisiting his own teenage years, led only to impersonal observations and anecdotes. David probably compared himself unfavorably to Stephie's husband, Jake, who also taught high school math. Jake loved his occupation and excelled at it, earning Charles's respect. David was marking time, hoping before long to make a new living as a ceramic artist.

It must tear him up to think that his two sisters had brought home better sons than he was. If only he knew. If only he had seen Charles protecting that young car thief, that angry, sad boy who'd made him think of David at the same age.

After David finished with the gate, he helped Lottie and her younger brother, Luke, hang an old tire swing they'd found in the barn. They had taken charge of entertaining Hannah, glad for an alternative to boring adults or their own resources. Once the swing was back on its old beech branch, Hannah could be heard throughout the house, begging to be pushed higher. Tess occasionally checked outside but seemed unworried. She moved quietly from one task to another, one group of David's kin to the next, smiling, listening, speaking little. She didn't cling to David; rather it was he who ranged into her proximity, as if for some nourishment his family could not give.

At twelve thirty, the Markses, Peter and Vivianna, came through the mudroom and into the kitchen. They met Tess and Hannah and hugged David, chattering and joking as they unpacked their box of goods for the holiday meal. Peter was stocky and bearish and wore a white beard still threaded with its original red. Vivi was small and angular, with prominent cheekbones, black hair barely streaked with gray, and eyes so dark the pupils were scarcely visible. She was in her midsixties, and Peter was a few years older. They'd been Charles and Sarah's dearest friends for almost forty years. The four of them nearly always shared holidays, with and without family.

“So!” Peter boomed at David, gesturing with exaggerated politeness toward Tess. “This woman looks far too good for you!”

David cuffed him lightly. “You would know, wouldn't you?
Vivi outclasses you by orders of magnitude. You realize that, of course.”

“Absolutely. Always marry up,” Peter laughed, then clapped a hand over his mouth. He opened the hand and whispered loudly, “Not to be premature or anything.”

Tess and Vivi exchanged glances, then smiles. Peter had made them instantly easy together. He made David easy, too, as Charles could not.

Peter was an outspoken, outgoing, occasionally outrageous man descended from a line of Russian Jewish emigrants to western Europe. Many had died in the Holocaust. Peter carried this legacy as lightly as he could. He appreciated humor and savored pleasures, having seen and heard much sorrow. He had been born in New York City to parents who had tried without success to put a good face on life, to shield their son from horror. He loved them, but he never relaxed with them.

In his twenties Peter had settled in Vermont because Vivi would live nowhere else. Through her, he made many friends. He came to love the state's landscape, its people, and its diehard independence. Like Charles, he relished its history, especially the fourteen years in which Vermont had been a tiny, independent nation bordered on three sides by the hard-won new Union with which it exchanged wary looks. Peter had even run for governor once, losing narrowly in the primaries to someone with better connections in the state legislature. Before his retirement, he'd been a newspaper editor. He still wrote stinging op-eds, when he wasn't building rustic furniture in his barn. He sold the smaller pieces at fairs and farmers' markets, the larger ones through galleries.

Vivi was a native Vermonter, a builder's daughter, unflappable and kind. She had met Peter at college in upstate New York before hightailing it back to Vermont. She was a weaver and sold her works through the same markets and galleries as Peter.

Peter and Vivi set out cheese pastries, shrimp, and a horse-radish sauce, knowing just where to find what they needed in the Lucases' kitchen. They opened a bottle of wine, and the promise of a quiet interlude after the busy preparations drew everyone into the great room for appetizers.

At two o'clock they all trooped into the dining room, where dinner proceeded as in Thanksgivings past. Afterward they dispersed—David to the great room with Charlotte and Tom, Lottie and Hannah back outside, Luke to Sarah's computer in her office, a narrow room near the kitchen where she took care of bills and other household business. Charles, Peter, and Vivi went outside to walk off their holiday meal in the cold. Thanksgiving day had begun under low, convoluted clouds and spitting snow. Overnight a scant two inches had fallen, the first measurable snowfall of a tardy season. By late afternoon, patches of clear, rinsed blue shone through the gloom, gradually reclaiming the entire sky and spilling sunlight over the landscape, sharpening its subtle browns and grays, its dark greens, and now its first thin cover of white.

Tess and Sarah stayed inside and cleared the table, talking amiably as they rinsed plates and glasses and stowed them into the dishwasher.

“Have you always lived near Boston?” Sarah asked. She understood that Tess was private. She felt a certain tension in the younger woman, as if she were keeping herself apart out of deference to family history and habits, as if she feared she might unwittingly
step on toes or into crossfire. Still, Sarah was inclined to like Tess and was curious about her.

“I grew up on the North Shore,” Tess said. “My father owned a fish processing plant outside Gloucester. A lot of my friends were fishermen's kids. I moved to Boston for college—started out at BU in art history and later went on to Harvard for my master's. You'd have thought my father had won the lottery.” She smiled.

Sarah learned a few more things about Tess in their short conversation by the sink. She was thirty-four, older than she looked, and she had two sisters and a brother, who among them had produced five cousins for Hannah, all within a few years of the same age. Everyone on both sides of the family, including Tess's parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, lived within forty miles of one another.

Sarah was about to ask how Tess had managed to spend this Thanksgiving away from her large clan, when the younger woman took a hard choking breath. Her whole body jerked into helpless rigidity, seized as if on a hook. Her jaw stretched open without a sound. She dropped the glass bowl she'd been rinsing, and the noise of its shattering broke her frozen spell.

“Hannah!” she wailed, and tore out onto the deck, slamming the storm door open beyond the range of its hinges, cracking the wooden frame at the top.