Fellow Mortals (27 page)

“Okay, enough,” she finally says. “I want you at the door in ten minutes, not eleven, and we’re all going to have a wonderful Thanksgiving if it kills us.”

She walks downstairs, weary and regretting her decision that they eat away from home. Bob has occupied the bathroom so she waits before the living room window, looking at the neighborhood and thinking it was only last year, incredible but true, that the Baileys and the Finns were hanging decorations.

It’s lovely, she admits, with the fresh coat of snow, and even the trailer has a cleanness and a tidiness about it. But she can’t abide the cabin, a thing too
Deliverance
to have behind her yard, and though she’s known of its existence since the week of Henry’s accident, it stuns her all the same whenever she remembers.

Now they’re gathering for
dinner
there. It’s almost like a cult. Earlier today she heard the ATV and saw him driving up the trail with Ava and the dog. She heard it once again and saw the Finns riding out, as if they don’t have a kitchen in a very nice home.

She’s surprised when Bob’s behind her, asking what’s the matter.

“Just the holidays,” she says.

She hugs him like a girl.

He rubs her back and she remembers how strong he really is, despite the softness of his muscles, and his paunch, and his manner—how he used to pick her up and she was happy when he did.

The boys are coming down—she can hear them on the stairs—but instead of pulling free she lingers in his arms, wishing it were easier to hold them all together.

“Look at that,” Bob says. “Billy Kane’s going, too.”

That’s the capper, she decides. At least they didn’t ask her.

*   *   *

The eight-o’clock dark feels like ten, especially in the woods, where dusk falls sooner and the night is more insistent, right beyond the glass and underneath the floor. Everybody’s overwarm and overfed and just about dozing mid-conversation, and the Finns begin to dodder and discuss going home.

Sam helps them with their coats and thinks of Laura after parties, how her skin smelled of cocktails and hours-old perfume. The outdoor air has a mentholated freshness. Nan and Ava spend another five minutes snapping up Tupperware and organizing bags. Sam walks Joan toward the middle of the clearing where the cabin light ends and they can better see the stars. He teaches her a handful of major constellations, all that he can show her in the space between the trees. Nan and Ava meet them at the ATV, following their eyes and looking at the sky.

Ava doesn’t have her coat.

“I’ll stay and help you clean,” she says. “You can drive me home later.”

“Don’t worry about it. You don’t want to be here alone,” he says, knowing how the dark yawns out around here, all the world growing distant in a heartbeat of quiet.

Ava draws him closer with a gravity of will, speaking quietly as Nan and Joan shuffle off behind him.

“I can’t go home yet,” she says, eyes moonlit and wet. She almost leans her forehead right against Sam’s. “I need a little more time. I want to know you’re coming back.”

“All right,” he says reluctantly. “Wing’ll stay, too.”

Ava shakes her head and motions off behind him. Wing’s sitting on the flatbed, leashed between the Finns.

“We can’t disappoint him,” Ava says. “I’ll be fine.”

He doesn’t like it but relents, unwilling to deny her and relieved, truth be told, to have another hour of her company tonight. They hug each other tight. Ava walks inside the cabin and he watches her the whole way in before he goes. The Finns are unsurprised. He’s embarrassed when he passes them and doesn’t bring it up, and then he starts the ATV, verifies that Wingnut is properly secured, and smiles at Nan and Joan before proceeding onto the trail.

Right inside the trees, Wing jerks against the leash. He’s caught an unfamiliar scent, something worth attention, but his high-pitched yelps are taken for excitement. Nan shortens up his leash before he tries jumping off.

They rattle through the dark. For the first time in months, the woods feel perilous to Sam, and his attention is divided as he tries to focus ahead, navigating the trail and hoping they don’t get stuck, and glancing back at the Finns, especially Joan, whom he expects to be alarmed by the wilderness around them. Once they make it out, he drives the ATV straight across the lot—it’s noisy but the Carmichaels seem to be out—and then he helps them into the truck, puts Wing in the back, and lets the engine warm up before driving away.

The asphalt’s pleasant after bumping on the trail. No one else is driving. Even in the center of town, the parking lots are empty and the cars sit cold. A soft electric sheen warms the edges of the road: streetlights, gas stations, neon signs reading
CL SED
,
CLOSED
,
LOSE
.

“How’d she seem to you?” Sam asks.

“Healthier,” Nan says.

“It makes me nervous leaving her behind,” Joan adds.

“She insisted.”

“Oh, we know,” Nan says, waving absolution. “Joan predicted it this morning.”

“What do you mean?”

They idle at a traffic light, redder in the glow.

“I thought of being her,” Joan says, sounding smaller than before but with the confidence of having been correct. “Holidays can be so short. I used to cry every year after Christmas.”

“And your birthday,” Nan says.

“It must be worse for you and Ava.”

He’s thought of Laura all morning, all day, and all night, imagining her fingers in the flutes of the piecrust, her mittens in the snow. But the memories have given him a lungful of air, not the slow suffocation he’s been witnessing in Ava. He was conscious of his strength and often thought of Henry—when he split a load of firewood, and loaded up his plate, and smiled, with conviction, when she needed him to smile.

“I don’t know how to help,” he says. “I hear myself giving her advice and can’t believe how meaningless it sounds.”

“What helped you?” Joan asks.

“I don’t know. Seeing people helped. Other times it didn’t. I’ve got to wonder how much of it actually worked, how much of it was time.”

Their faces pale and darken with the intermittent streetlights. He’d like to crack a window but the Finns look cold and so he tolerates the heat, wishing he were home.

Joan asks him if he prayed.

“I’m pretty sure
that
didn’t work. Nothing ever swept in to save me.”

“Henry did,” Joan says.

“I mean that God didn’t help.”

“Like a big warm hand reaching from the sky?” Nan asks.

“Right,” Sam replies, unsure of how to read her.

Joan fidgets with her hands, a habit she’s developed as a puzzle builder, playing with imaginary pieces in her lap. They finally pass a car driving in the opposite direction and the road looks darker when it’s gone, hard black between the curbs.

“I’m eighty-three,” Nan says. “A lot of people, even people my age, think I’m foolish for believing in God. It’s fear of death, consolation in the night … I ought to know better, especially after this year. They tell me look at how cruel the world is, like it’s nonstop fire and disaster. Look at how primitive religion really is. They never think I might believe in something richer, or stranger, or more sophisticated than whatever they
assume
I believe.”

Sam holds a breath, eyes bolted to the road. He’s ashamed that he’s offended them and wants to smooth it over, but before he has a chance, Nan continues, very calmly.

“Any idiot can know there isn’t a wise old man with a bucket of lightning, but a lot of people stop right there. Their grammar-school beliefs weren’t enough. They think it’s more adult to throw them off. And they’re right. You can’t keep thinking like a child when you’re grown.”

“I hate it when you talk this way,” Joan says.

“I didn’t mean you,” Nan whispers.

“I don’t see what’s so complicated about it.”

“I wish it
weren’t
complicated,” Sam says. “It’d be so much easier if God were obvious.”

“He is,” Nan says. “It isn’t.”

“I’d like to talk about something else,” Joan decides, and then they’re briefly at a loss, staring at the traffic lines, following the last few turns toward their neighborhood. Wingnut’s finally relaxing in the back. Sam sees him in the mirror, panting from his earlier excitement on the drive, his crooked tail seeming more broken than deformed.

Snow glitters in the headlights, hours old but still pristine, eddying in fine blown patterns on the blacktop. The cabin feels lost, far behind them in the dark, and the meal is like a memory from early in the week.

“So what do we do for Ava?” Sam asks.

“Whatever we think is right.” Nan sighs.

“But how do we decide?”

“Sam,” Joan says, with an air of disappointment. “How often in your life do you really not know?”

27

Ava cleans dishes in a black rubber trug. The water from the pressure tank is painfully cold—she wonders how long Sam can keep it unfrozen this winter—and she heats it by the kettleful and adds boiling water as she goes. She lays the washed dishes and utensils on the table, emptying the trug at intervals and starting with a fresh round of suds. Her hands are raw but it’s satisfying work, reminding her of holidays with Henry when the dishwasher filled and they would stand together, elbow to elbow, finishing the rest with a towel and a sponge, Ava washing, Henry drying and asking every ten seconds: “Where’s the ladle go? Where’s the yellow pie dish go?”

She notices a hairline fracture in a plate. The quiet and the nearness of the fire make her woozy. Thirty minutes, he’ll be back, then … what? She thinks of riding out in the dark—unfair of her, she knows, forcing him to make a whole second trip—and how she didn’t leave the porch light on, didn’t leave any of her lights on at home. She’ll make a lot of noise opening the door, sending Wing in first to run around the rooms, but turning on the lights will only make it emptier.

She takes her shoes off, rubbing on the arches of her feet. Embers settle in the stove and the windowpanes tick. In the drafts from the walls, she can almost smell winter. But tomorrow she can start to plan Christmas with the Finns.

There’s a knock. Ava jolts, more inwardly than outwardly. She would have heard the ATV along the trail and it was definitely a knock and not an animal or branch. The door is unlatched. Ava tenses on the chair. Then she’s up like a shot, reaching for the lock, but the door swings open and she moves back fast.

“Hello?” a man says, hesitant but clear.

Billy Kane steps in, twisting at the knob.

The cabin has a fluttery reality about it, like a film with a gap in every other frame. Billy looks at her and grins—sheepishly, it seems. He’s wearing boots and a barn coat, corduroy brown, and his knuckles and his cheeks are cold-bitten red. Ava doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, doesn’t speak. Billy stands at the threshold, patient and polite, as if he wouldn’t dare cross without a formal invitation.

“Ava?” Billy says. “Hey, it’s me. It’s only Billy,” waving at her face as if he’s found her on the floor. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“What do you want?” she asks, dampening his smile.

Billy says, “I know it’s weird showing up like this,” as if it isn’t really weird and she’ll forgive him just for saying it. He’s talking too slowly and enunciating words.

“I didn’t expect to find
you
here,” he says. “Where’s Sam?”

“He’s around. He’ll be back in a few minutes. Wingnut’s here … my dog. He’s right around back.”

“Your dog was with the Finns. Maybe Sam didn’t tell you,” Billy says, leaning on the doorframe and blank behind the eyes. “I just wanted to check on him. Holidays, you know? I’m sitting home alone—my wife’s divorcing me, I told you some of that … I figured we could all use some company tonight. I stopped at your house, too. You weren’t home. I mean
oviously
,” he slurs.

“This isn’t my house,” Ava says. “I can’t invite you in.”

“Ahh,” Billy says, dismissing her excuse. He bumps the trug with his boot, splashing water on the floor, and the door falls shut behind his back. “I know Sam. He’s my
neighbor
.”

“Please go. I don’t mean to sound rude. I just…”

“I’m not a burglar,” Billy says. “I could steal a piece of that, though,” looking at the pie half eaten on the table and appearing to remember some better Thanksgiving. He looks at Ava’s body with the same dull gaze, moving up slowly from her knees to her stomach.

All the while she’s remembering the time before he came, how many forks and plates she washed, how many minutes since Sam drove away.

“Remember at the drugstore?” he asks. “I think you took that wrong, like I might have asked you out. I’ll be honest, I was nervous. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, you know? And afterward I thought of what to say and it’s been sticking in my head ever since. Listen … being honest, right? So you can trust me? I didn’t come to see Sam. I came to see you. I figured you were here. I know you come here a lot. See it’s this,” Billy says. “We’re the
same
. We’re a fit. You don’t see it yet, the crazy kind of sense it all makes. Listen for a minute, let me talk it out. Your husband wrecks my house, right? Everything’s a mess. My marriage falls apart. All because of him. And then he dies, and neither one of us can see it for a while. One day Henry owes me everything, more than he could ever pay me back, and then”—clap!—“he leaves it all behind.”

Billy shuts his eyes and wobbles very smoothly.

“I understand what you’re doing out here,” he says. “I
understand
it. But with Sam—and I don’t mean anything against him—but sometimes a person’s too broken up. If you’re taking care of him, who’s taking care of you? You see what I mean? You’re gonna make me say it.” Billy smiles at her, timidly but acting like he’s doing pretty well. “I understand what you’re going through. You lost your husband. I lost my wife. But Sheri didn’t die. I’m not a wreck like that. I’m standing on my own two feet. Not like Sam. Not like Sam. All I’m saying … I don’t know,” he says, pausing in a swoon. “We’re like a phoenix from the ashes. You and me. We’re a
phoenix.
”