The Best People in the World (41 page)

The fog of her breath. I stroked her back, felt the wet skin chill. I pulled the bedsheets above her shoulders.

 

The next morning I heard her crying. I didn't know whether to seek her in my unfurnished dreams or in my unfurnished home.

She lay on her back with her hands crossed over her chest. Her eyes were squeezed closed, but tears gathered in the wrinkled corners and followed trails into her hair. Tiny muscles jerked under her cheeks. Whatever it was, I promised to fix it. My voice triggered a real snorting fit. And why shouldn't she have been crying, imprisoned in the house, starved, her deaf antagonist and me. The constant cold exhausted us; it made our skin thick, obdurate. I made a point of avoiding the bathroom mirror because of the person I saw there: red gums, shovel-size teeth, blunt hair, and dumb eyes. (That vaguely handsome me whom Alice had recognized, tapped, chosen, where had he gone?) Poor Alice.

I promised her we would leave that day. As soon as she was ready, we would get in the car and drive. In two days we'd be in Florida, thawing in the Gulf. A straight shot, I didn't need sleep. We would travel there, she and I. Mangrove swamps and coconuts, alligators, DisneyWorld, pink grapefruit, mosquitoes. That healing water was just going to waste without us. We couldn't forget that we were free.

I told her I understood. She'd come up here to escape her ex-husband, to find a new life, to find her happy face. Well, she'd already accomplished those things. There'd be no dishonor in leaving. All I needed was for her to say the word. The word was “Go.” I'd get her there, I promised.

Her body continued its convulsions. She swiped at her runny nose, knocked the scab off. Finally, though she continued crying, the tears stopped.

I thought her storm was passing.

Spring, I reminded her, was almost here. I lied and said I'd seen a cardinal skimming over the meadow.

She began to hyperventilate.

We kept a mug on the back of the toilet. I was going to dash in there to fill it. I swung my legs off the side of the mattress. My groin, my stomach, the tops of my thighs were speckled with flakes of dried blood. I studied the markings. She'd started menstruating.

What followed was an interval of silence. I didn't have the compassion to weigh her hurt above mine. We maintained a space be
tween our bodies, a sagging of the sheets, perfect for a child. I searched for the word capable of containing our misery.

“Enough,” Alice said.

I wrapped my arms around her shoulders. She put my wrist in her mouth and clamped down, not to hurt me, but so I couldn't let go. “Cry,” I said, and she did. It wasn't a miscarriage. There'd been no unease, no discomfort. Instead, what we'd mistaken for fertility was the opposite—her cycle in suspension. This illuminated a paradox: had she not told me her situation, if Shiloh and I hadn't watched to see that she ate, then the illusion would have remained intact; she could have carried this ghost child, a child's negative, a conception of hunger, indefinitely (she would have continued to shrink as the months added up, six, nine, twelve). There had never been a child inside Alice, but now we had to mourn the children each of us had imagined who would never be resolved in flesh. And because my imagination is not strong, the girl I mourned looked a lot like Sonya.

Finally Shiloh knocked on the door frame, a series of taps signaling that he was coming in. Alice and I had been in the room for a few hours, days.

I waved him out of the room thinking that he would set Alice off.

He slouched in the doorway, his sideburns sticking out on one side and creased on the other. He looked like someone you'd meet beneath a highway underpass.

“I haven't seen you,” he said. “I got lonely.”

Alice had patience again. She shook her head. She gestured that she had to write him a note. He fetched pad and pen. She brought her knees up and wrote on this. I pushed my lips against her arm, not caring to see the words she chose.

“I'm very sorry, for both of you,” Shiloh said. Surely he'd already heard a small voice calling him Uncle, and this was another silence for him to categorize.

I petted Alice's hair.

“Alice,” he said, “I don't want you to change the way you're eating. We're fine like this. A few weeks and we'll have ferns and mushrooms. Trout and rabbit, too. You could be pregnant tomorrow. Right?
My beautiful friends.” He looked at the two of us on the thin mattress (we'd smashed the box spring for its wooden frame). “I'm so sorry about the bed.”

Shiloh took up the floorboards in his room, reducing the day to a cadence of hatchet blows. The square-headed nails whined as they were pulled from the floor joists. Beneath the floorboards you saw the dark lathing that had been tacked to the joists to support the plaster ceiling of the living room. You could see the history in the wood, the marks of the original tools. The planks were not pine, but oak, eighteen inches wide and the color of tobacco juice.

If a person was to go back now they wouldn't find ten houses in the state that still have first-growth oak. In the 1980s, when everyone was flush with cash, cabinet and furniture makers offered small fortunes for boards like those. They made them into highboys, wardrobes, captains' chairs, into dining tables and lustrous bars for ostentatious restaurants. That whole state was ransacked for the authentic, the historic. Wrought-iron door latches were shipped to prairie mansions in Ohio and Illinois. Antique glass was collected from the windows. On the oldest shacks there was a type of window that had a round glob of glass in the center of the pane, like the bottom of a bottle, and these were auctioned off to speculative Texans who, rich from oil, collected them in warehouses. Hotshot architects straight out of graduate school, kids who had designed houses without a curve or without a plumb wall or without a door, they were commissioned to incorporate this antique glass into definitive modern homes. Those panes became shower stalls; they bored through interior walls; they hung like snowflakes in the middle of huge, uncurling staircases. That whole world was slated for destruction; I still regret my part in it.

 

Sometimes snow came down, sometimes rain. To make time pass I engaged in random fasting, deciding some mornings to allow myself only water, or a single pancake. I had no appetite for what remained in the pantry, the hodgepodge of ingredients stacked across the floor. Alice feasted on brimming bowls of oatmeal and plates of buttered potatoes. She ate slowly, setting things on the floor beside the bed for
long pauses, resuming meals hours later, even after the oatmeal had turned cold and rubbery, the butter congealed.

Down in the valley, tractors spread silage across the frozen fields. Clouds of crows gave protest. Their inflamed voices echoed across the valley. Alice, on the porch, cawed half the day. The birds corkscrewed thermals, disappeared into the atmosphere.

Shiloh took his skis out again, but the snow had changed in some unknowable way and now they refused to glide. Even coming down the hill exhausted him. He left them in the yard. In a few days they sank beneath the surface; the whiteness subjugated everything. If we left the door open, it would swallow the house. What could prevent it?

I returned to Alice and our empty bedroom. She chewed on knots of bread. Her hair had turned a dark auburn. Her patience evaporated. She pinched me in her sleep.

All I could think about was the ramrod stiff boy, propped inside the chimney. It occurred to me that everything that we'd come to think of as bad luck might be traced back to the entombment of the boy. Hadn't Alice been happier, Shiloh less serious? Wasn't the world warmer then, plus fertile? Didn't the air smell better? And weren't the partitions between our days and dreams more definite? Weren't there fewer terrors? Weren't we less guilty of smallness, of failures of character? Hadn't our faults seemed forgivable, less damning?

But in that bedroom Alice had yet to slip away from me; we still agreed to recognize each other. I put my body beside hers. “Never go away. Never leave me. Stay here forever,” those old prayers. “Don't talk that way,” she said. She might have meant that the time for pleading had passed.

“We'll have a baby,” I said. More likely she'd give birth to a locust's husk or a walnut shell, something dry and empty. “I'm counting days,” I told her. But when I looked she'd left the room.

 

On a warm day that set the snow melting, I wandered outside the house. A ring of green appeared where the dripping eaves cut through the drifts. Alice and Shiloh came out to see it with me.

“Do you smell skunk cabbage?” asked Shiloh.

“I think I smell roses sometimes,” said Alice.

“What did she say?” asked Shiloh.

Nothing, I signaled. We smelled nothing.

At some point a horse had come over the hill—we only saw the trail of hoof prints in the thawing road. At the bottom of the hill, an irregular pyramid of droppings. A flock of small birds occupied the tangles of a shrub, and an owl hooted from the pines above the house. Pairs of squirrels chased each other, chattering, through the naked branches of the trees.

 

Over the empty field the ice crystals rose in spinning towers. I listened to the trees creak and the wind moan as it scraped over the roof. The animals had returned to their hiding places. Alice found me sitting in our bedroom closet. I may have crawled in to be near the boy, or to collect the black feathers that from time to time still trickled out.

“I can't get warm in bed,” said Alice. A thin scab ran in dots and dashes across her cheek. I couldn't remember what had happened to her. Something had reached for her, a door hinge or a nail. The wound angled toward her mouth.

“How long have I been here?” I asked her.

She reached out and pinched my arm. “Did you hear me?”

I got up quickly, as if I had somewhere to be. I took a step forward but she blocked my body with her forearm.

She helped me unbutton my shirt. She helped me with my pants. She led me to the cold mattress and covered me.

“What,” I said. “What?”

She inched her way down my body, kissing my shoulder, chest, and stomach. She pulled her pants off before she returned to me.

“Please,” she said.

I imagined her body as a boat I might row away. I only wanted to move her. I was sweating for the first time in months. All my hair hurt. The mattress scuffed against the wall. Alice coughed into her fist. I reached my moment without drama.

Alice held my face to see how I wore humility. “It's okay,” she said.

I kissed my girl's hands. “Of course,” I said.

She stroked the seam of my chest.

Here was the moment we might have healed each other, if either of us knew the thing to say. It needed to be concise and beautiful. It had to offer a clue as to how we should live the rest of our lives. I still believed in such things. What could those words have been? Would they have sounded like a trumpet's blast or a trickle of water inside a cave? If you moved to Vermont in 1973, this didn't seem too much to ask for, one insight. All around us people were unlocking the secrets to themselves and they had luminous faces and long, wild hair. They were us. If we found this one thing, then we could go anywhere, even home.

For a few months we had lived among green flowers, between blue sky and bluer water. But now across the valley a black rift tore the lake in two and instead of blue water I saw a patch of starless space, a gaping mouth. The sky looked ancient, bled of vibrancy; the birds fled from it, puffed their feathers, waited on branches, sang three-note dirges, songs that echoed in the cathedral chambers of the earth. We'd become so low and dusty, so defeated, so poor. What had become of our graces? Where were the simple pleasures? We lived in a world of unadorned things. My hand moved over Alice's shoulder and slid beneath the blankets. And to touch her with the same hand that had touched the dead boy. I asked a pledge of her heart, that it continue its clenching. Yes, we are souls and spirits, but never more than a body—there is nothing else. Our most personal memories die with us, so what lives on is not us, but the person who carries it. In that way Shiloh is the dead boy and Alice, my most beautiful girl, is Sonya, and her crow is more human for her. And so I carry my sweet Alice with me. These many years later I can see her in the way I pour milk; when I whisper to a friend, I pretend their breath could be her breath. And sometimes still, in the shower, I hide my face in the crook of my arm and her fingers run over my ribs. No she would not recognize her boy; days and nights have changed my face. I've driven twenty hours to visit my pawpaw on his deathbed and once I have found him crying in the garage and once I have found him on a
stainless-steel cooling board. And I have buried my mother on a cold day in May when yellow-throated violets hid in the green, green grass. And wandering about I have placed my favorite faces in crowds that could not hold them, just to suffer the disappointment.

I retrieved my clothes and dressed. I thought I might try to escape the house, if only for an hour. There seemed to be a toxic gas building up inside. It displaced the oxygen in your blood. I asked Alice if she was interested in going out. She thought it best that she remain still for a while. She clasped her pink knees to her chest.

I was afraid that if I took a swab and stuck it inside her, all I'd find would be dust and feathers, as though instead of impregnating her, I'd stuffed her like you would a pillow.

7

Hope

I walked past Shiloh's open door, and took the main stairs down. The light filtering into the living room told me we were suffering another bright and empty day.

Parker leaned back on one of the kitchen chairs with the heels of his boots resting on the edge of the table. A tinfoil boat of takeout food balanced on his lap.

“Hello, horndog,” he said.

Parker wore his hair brushed apart, like two sheaves of black wheat. His mustache drooped over the corners of his lips. A bone necklace, like a string of babies' fingers, ringed his neck. Beneath his deep-set eyes, blue-green circles.