The Last First Day (30 page)

The Robust Male fern, she has fretted to Peter, looks inconveniently a
lot
like the Lady in Red fern.

That’s us, Peter said. The Robust Male and the Lady in Red.

Ruth rolls her eyes at him, but she laughs. He is so corny, she thinks.

She sets off just after seven thirty, in the morning’s delicate light, along the fire road that runs past their house. It is a familiar path, a mowed blaze perhaps twenty feet wide, thick in midsummer with goldenrod and purple ironweed but now shorn low and easily traveled. The dog—an old, fat, sheepdog-beagle mix named Nanny, whom they’d agreed to adopt from a neighbor after his wife’s death and his subsequent move to an assisted-living facility near his son in Florida—comes with her.

The dog worships Ruth and Peter equally and hates to have
either of them out of her sight. She has powerful herder genes in her, as Peter has observed. She is tormented by Ruth’s habit of solitary walks, wanting equally to be with Ruth and to be with Peter, who more and more often stays behind these days, content to sit on the deck and read—or just
look
, Ruth thinks—while Ruth takes what Peter calls her constitutional.

Ruth has done a lot of coaxing and cajoling, a lot of handing over of dog biscuits, to get Nanny to come with her this morning. For several hundred yards, for as long as the house remains within sight, the dog runs back and forth between Ruth, making her way slowly up the clearing, and Peter, sitting on the deck, leaning forward in his chair to shoo Nanny away when she returns to him, assuring her that she will be happier on a walk with Ruth.

Ruth turns at one point to call Nanny again. From the deck, she sees Peter stand up to lift his hand to wave good-bye to her.

She waves back.

Finally, the fire road drops over the rise, and the house is out of sight at last, as is Peter with his ravaged face, a consequence of the disease that has failed yet to kill him, though it has transformed his once handsome, gentle features into a rough wooden carving of a face, a face on a totem pole, Ruth thinks. She can still see in her husband the man he once was—she will always think him beautiful—but strangers often stop at the sight of him, nearly seven feet tall, hands like big spiders flapping at the ends of his frail wrists, heavy head balanced on his warped, elongated spine. His eyes are hooded and sleepy-looking. When he smiles, his jaw unhinges.

Come on, Nanny, Ruth calls. Come with me.

The woods on either side of the fire road are crossed with sunny ridges and deep, velvet glades, pierced by long columns of filtered sunlight and filled with the trickling sounds of water, where springs bubble forth here and there among the tumbled rocks, their arrangement the silent, motionless aftermath of once massive glacial upheaval. Ruth has read about the geologic history of the area, about plate tectonics and sedimentary structure. She knows that this place where she stands once rippled with the fluvial processes of the Susquehanna River. It feels so solid underfoot, she thinks; it is difficult to imagine these hills in motion. She feels small as she walks, aware of her footprints, the tiny, receding figure she must have seemed to Peter, standing on the deck and waving.

The day is already warm, and Ruth moves out of the bright sunlight and into the dappled shade at the edge of the fire road. It will be hot by the time she returns, she knows. She has brought water, carried in a special flask with a comfortable padded shoulder strap, which Peter gave her last Christmas.

The dog following closely at Ruth’s heels is panting, her barrel chest heaving. In the end, it is more troubling for Nanny to have Ruth straying far from home than it is to leave Peter behind safely at the house, and she has elected to follow Ruth, but Ruth knows that it was a painful choice.

Poor old Nanny, Ruth says to the dog.

She slows, to allow Nanny time to recover.

You’re doing a fine job, she says, stopping finally to pat the dog and stroke her back.

The dog, never good at making eye contact, averts her gaze but moves closer to Ruth’s leg as if to protect her from threat.

I promise we won’t go far, Ruth says. Poor old Nanny, she says again. You’re such an old worrier.

Sometimes Ruth is gone on one of her walks for a whole morning—she gets a second wind some days, and she feels as if she could walk forever—but it makes Peter worry if she is gone too long. She will not go far today, she thinks. She is tired.

But how easy it is to be led deeper into the woods, which this morning, Ruth begins to notice, are filled with the strange spiral webs of orb weavers. Some of them are a foot or more in diameter, utterly fantastical things, and they hover in the woods as far as she can see in every direction. The finely spun rings of the webs are backlit by the rising sun, the empty bull’s-eyes of their centers surrounded by halos of filament suspended among the branches of the wild hydrangea and the elderberry.

She marvels at the gleaming architecture strung all around her. She can see as many as a hundred of them—no, two hundred, she thinks, or three—gazing in astonishment.

Look, Nanny, she says.

She wants, for a moment, to return to the house and get Peter, to bring him here to see this extraordinary sight, but she knows, even as she thinks of it, that by the time she can return and rouse him, the light will have changed and the webs will have vanished. Or, not so much vanished but become invisible. It is only an accident of the light that she has happened upon this strange phenomenon, this wonderland.

He can’t really make such a journey with her anymore, in any case.

She bends to inspect a web nearby, sees a single fly netted in its center, wrapped in a sarcophagus of silk thread.

Behind her, when she glances back, Ruth can still see the brighter light of the clearing on the fire road, but the ferns grow so thickly here that it is not difficult to drift into the woods and to move among the big old trees. Nanny comes behind her, trampling a heedless path.

After a while, Ruth is thirsty. She unscrews the cap from her water bottle, drinks deeply. She looks down at Nanny, her mottled tongue hanging, and she pours some water into her cupped palm for the dog to drink.

Nanny laps at Ruth’s palm, her tongue thick and surprisingly strong.

As Ruth bends over, she feels her legs waver beneath her.

Let’s sit, Ruth thinks. What’s the hurry?

Come, Nanny. She puts her arm around the dog’s soft, heaving flank.

Hours and hours of light, she thinks, lying back among the ferns and staring up into the cathedral space. Green days. Mineral nights, full of sparks.

What could be more nicer than this? she says to Nanny.

Silence.

She opens her eyes. She wants to sit up.

What could be
nicer
, she corrects herself, surprised. She knows better than
that
.

High above her, the trees are rocking. Ruth feels, for an instant, a giant genuflection of the earth under her back, as if the mountains are boiling, swelling beneath the surface. Then
all is still again. But she realizes that she cannot move her hands or her legs.

Her eyes traverse the green swaying overhead.

The dog’s breath on her face is, briefly, hot and foul. She turns aside to avert her mouth; she wants first to vomit and then to laugh. Nanny is gone.

Come back, she thinks.

A moment later she feels Nanny’s worried tongue on her neck, along her hairline, against her closed eyes, then a flickering of something—fingertips—against her cheekbones and across her chest and arms. A tickle. A plummeting descent—she feels her feet skitter against shale—toward sleep. She fights it, knowing.

She does not want to leave Peter.

Then she is awake. Once more she opens her eyes—it is so bright, though, she cannot open them for more than a moment—and it is Peter, looking down into her face.

She smiles at him—beloved Peter—and at the green, glowing world beyond him.

Shining day, she thinks. Perfect light. What a spectacle it all is. How happy she has been, after all.

It is past noon by the time the dog finally abandons her position at Ruth’s side, having sat there through the morning, snapping at flies as they approached Ruth’s nose and open eyes and mouth. She hurries home, following her trail.

In the flat light of midday, the host of spiral orbs, as Ruth predicted, is no longer visible in the woods.

When the dog appears, weaving rapidly down the fire road toward the house, nose to the ground as if tracking prey, Peter is standing on the deck under the hot sun, both hands gripping the railing.

Ruth? he calls when he sees Nanny.
Ruth!

But the dog, he sees finally, is alone. No one follows her down the clearing.

The night after that awful dinner at the headmaster’s house, Peter having retreated upstairs to the attic with his grade book and his papers under his arm, Ruth stared at the door through which he had disappeared.

She wanted to throw something.

She kicked the table leg, hard, hurting her foot, and then she looked around, her chest heaving. There were plates on the shelf, two glasses upturned in the dish drainer … but no, nothing breakable. She couldn’t bring herself to throw anything breakable.

She went over to the dresser beside their bed, wrenched open the drawers and began emptying them, tumbling blouses and brassieres and socks and Peter’s sweaters to the floor. From the closet she snatched shirts from their hangers, hurling them
behind her. She picked up a book and threw it as hard as she could onto the bed. Then she threw another, and another.

She got down on her knees and heaved Peter’s shoes out of the closet into the room behind her.

She paused. She felt sick, sweat on her forehead. What else? What
else
could she do?

She tugged the bedclothes with their cargo of books to the floor. She beat a pillow savagely against the table, the sofa, the armchair she had laboriously recovered in pretty orange fabric, hurting her fingers for days with the awful upholstery tacks.

The pillow exploded. Feathers filled the air.

She went to the bookshelf and grabbed the stack of pages that was the play she’d been writing, having long since given up on the novel. She paused for a minute; she would never be able to put it all back together … but, oh, what a pathetic thing it was anyway, her
stupid
play—and then she flung the pages onto the floor.

They fanned out, sliding across the floorboards.

Standing in the middle of the room, she looked around.

There was nothing else she could touch without doing real damage, she realized. She had to get out of there.

She listened. Upstairs there was silence, though Peter must have heard her, she thought.

Had heard her and didn’t care.

She ran, stumbling, down the steep staircase. At the bottom, she opened the door and then slammed it so hard behind her that it bounced back open and struck the wall, where it stood open. She heard the report of it hitting the wall behind her, but she was already running.

• • •

Later, when she got back home, she found Peter sitting on the floor.

Clothes and feathers and shoes were everywhere around him, the contents of the bookcases in a heap.

A bottle of Scotch stood on the table.

He looked up when she came in the room.

In his lap, he held a stack of papers, the pages of her play. He’d begun sorting the pages into little piles, she saw, trying to put them in order.

There were feathers stuck to the back of his sweater and one in his hair.

He looked away from her. You scared me, he said.

I know, she said. I scared myself. I’m sorry.

Peter took a drink from the glass on the floor beside him, and then he got to his feet. He walked over to the bed and heaped the covers back onto the mattress. Then he crossed the room and pulled Ruth roughly against him.

Don’t ever do that again, he said. You promised, Ruth. You promised you wouldn’t leave me.

I won’t, she said.

That wasn’t leaving, anyway, she said. That was … steam.

They were wild with each other that night, a mixture of pain and anger and desire and love.

In bed, in the darkness, the weight of Peter against her felt like the deepest kind of consolation and forgiveness.

She had walked that evening across the mostly deserted campus, her head down against the wind. The icy rain had turned to snow again, but at first she hadn’t felt cold; she’d been
giving off heat like a furnace, making a penumbra of warmth around her, her breath a cloud.

Her hair, though, was quickly covered with snow. She’d shaken her head, lifting her face to the sky, blinking against the numberless, endless, falling snowflakes, the darkness lit from within as if an enormous lamp burned somewhere high above her. She took deep breaths, trying to calm herself.

The snow fell so thickly that soon the paths were covered.

When she felt slippery grass underfoot, she could tell she’d veered off the path and lost her way. She fell down but scrambled immediately to her feet, an explosive energy inside her. She could walk all night, she thought. She could walk forever. She’d just keep going.

Soon, though, she felt the land beneath her feet shifting down the grade. Was she near the entrance gate? Were those massive dark shapes ahead the old oaks?

She fell again, sliding downhill for several feet. The cold of the snow on the back of her neck and down her collar was shocking.

She lay on her back, watching the air above her swarm with snowflakes.

She was a bad person to have hurt Peter in that way. She was a bad person to have made such an awful mess of their lovely apartment.

She felt cold and wet and very tired. How could she have behaved so badly?

She sat up in the snow, brushed her hands against her coat and got to her feet. Where was she?

She turned around. In the distance, through the falling snow, she could see that a few lights were on here and there in the school’s buildings, high up in the darkness above her. She knew there was still a handful of boys left on campus, those who would be picked up in the next day or so by families taking them in for the holiday.