Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (2 page)

“When would you be free to start?” asked Lisa.

“Tomorrow,” said Lewis. “Today.”

“Do you live nearby?”

“Not far. Fifteen minutes.”

“Would evenings be a problem?”

“Not at all.”

“Do you have a list of references?” At this Lisa closed her grip on the yellow duck, and it emitted a querulous little peep. She gave a start, then laughed, touching her free hand to her chest. She held the duck to her face as it bloomed with air. “Have I had him all this time?” she asked, thumbing its bill.

Somewhere in the heart of the house, a child began to wail. The air seemed to grow thick with discomfort as they listened. “
Some
one’s cranky,” said Lisa. She handed Lewis the duck as she stood. “Excuse me,” she said. She hurried past a floor lamp and the broad green face of a television, then slipped away around the corner.

The grandfather clock chimed the hour as Lewis waited, its brass tail pendulating behind a tall glass door. He scratched a ring of grit from the dimple of the sofa cushion. He inspected the toy duck—its popeyes and the upsweep of its tail, the pock in the center of its flat yellow belly—then waddled it along the seam of a throw pillow.
Quack,
he thought.
Quack quack.
Lewis pressed its navel to the back of his hand, squeezing, and it constricted with a squeak; when he released it, it puckered and gripped him. He heard Lisa’s voice in an adjacent room, all but indistinct above a siren-roll of weeping. “Now, now,” she was saying. “Now, now.” Lewis put the duck down.

When Lisa returned, a small child was gathered to her shoulder. She was wrapped in fluffy red pajamas with vinyl pads at the feet, and her slender neck rose from the wreath of a wilted collar. “Shhh,” Lisa whispered, gently patting her daughter’s back. “Shhh.”

Lisa’s hair fell unbound past her forehead, its long wet strands twisted like roads on a map. Her daughter clutched the damp towel in her hands, nuzzling it as if it were a comfort blanket. “Little Miss Grump,” chirped Lisa, standing at the sofa. “Aren’t you, sweetie?” Caroline fidgeted and whimpered, then began to wail again.

Lisa frowned, joggling her in the crook of her arm.

“Well,” she said, “let’s see how the two of you get along. Caroline—” With a thrust and a sigh, she presented her daughter, straightening her arms as if engaged in a push-up. “This is Lewis. Lewis—” And she was thrashing in my hands, muscling away from me, the weight of her like something lost and suddenly remembered: a comfort and a promise, a slack sail bellying with wind.

Her voice split the air as she twitched from side to side. Padding rustled at her waist.

“Oh, dear,” said Lisa. “Maybe we’d better . . .”

But Lewis wasn’t listening; instead, he drew a long heavy breath. If he could pretend himself into tears, he thought, perhaps he could calm her. For a moment as sharp as a little notched hook, he held her gaze. Then, shuddering, he burst into tears. His eyes sealed fast and his lips flared wide. With a sound like the snap and rush of a struck match, his ears opened and filled with air. Barbs of flickering blue light hovered behind his eyes. He could hear the world outside growing silent and still as he wept.

When he looked out at her, Caroline was no longer crying. She blinked out at him from wide bewildered eyes, her bottom lip folding in hesitation. Then she handed him the damp towel.

It was a gesture of sympathy—meant, Lewis knew, to reassure him—and as he draped the towel over his shoulder, a broad grin creased his face.

Lisa shook her head, laughing. “Look,” she said, “Thomas and I have plans for this evening, and we still haven’t found a baby-sitter. So if you could come by around six—?”

Caroline heard the sound of laughter and immediately brightened, smiling and tucking her chin to her chest. Lewis brushed a finger across her cheek. “Of course,” he said.

“Good.” Lisa lifted her daughter from his arms. “We’ll see how you do, and if all goes well . . .”

All did. When Lisa and Thomas Mitchell returned late that night—his keys and loose change jingling in his pocket, her perfume winging past him as she walked into the living room—Caroline was asleep in his lap. A pacifier dangled from her mouth. The television mumbled in the corner. Lewis started work the next morning.

As a matter of simple aesthetics, the ideal human form is that of the small child. We lose all sense of grace as we mature, all sense of balance and all sense of restraint. Tufts of wiry hair sprout like moss in our hollows; our cheekbones edge to an angle and our noses stiffen with cartilage; we buckle and curve, widen and purse, like a vinyl record left too long in the sun. The journey into our few core years is a journey beyond that which saw us complete. Many are the times I have wished that Caroline and I might have made this journey together. If I could, I would work my way backward, paring away the years. I would reel my life around the wheel of this longing like so much loose wire. I would heave myself past adolescence and boyhood, past infancy and birth, into the first thin parcel of my flesh and the frail white trellis of my bones. I would be a massing of tissue, a clutch of cells, and I’d meet with her on the other side. If I could, I would begin again, but nothing I’ve found will allow it. We survive into another and more awkward age than our own.

Caroline was sitting in a saddle-chair, its blue plastic tray freckled with oatmeal. She lifted a bright wedge of peach to her lips, and its syrup wept in loose strings from her fist to her bib. Lewis held the back of a polished silver spoon before her like a mirror. “Who’s that?” he said. “Who’s inside that spoon? Who’s that in there?”

Caroline gazed into its dome as she chewed her peach. “Cahline,” she said.

Lewis reversed the spoon, and her reflection toppled over into its bowl. “Oh my goodness!” he said. His voice went weak with astonishment. “Caroline is standing on her head!” Caroline prodded the spoon, then taking it by the handle, her hand on his, steered it into her mouth. When she released it, Lewis peered inside. “Hey!” he said. His face grew stern. “Where did you put Caroline?” She patted her stomach, smiling, and Lewis gasped. “You
ate
Caroline!”

Caroline nodded. Her eyes, as she laughed, were as sharp and rich as light edging under a door.

The upstairs shower disengaged with a discrete shudder, and Lewis heard water suddenly gurgling through the throat of the kitchen sink. Mr. Mitchell dashed into the kitchen swinging a brown leather briefcase. He straightened his hat and drank a glass of orange juice. He skinned an apple with a paring knife. Its cortex spiraled cleanly away from the flesh and, when he left for work, it remained on the counter like a little green basket. “Six o’clock,” said Mrs. Mitchell, plucking an umbrella from around a doorknob. “Seven at the outside. Think you can make it till then?” She kissed her daughter on the cheek, then waggled her earlobe with a fingertip. “Now you be a good girl, okay?” She tucked a sheaf of papers into her purse and nodded good-bye, extending her umbrella as she stepped into the morning.

That day, as a gentle rain dotted the windows, Lewis swept the kitchen and vacuumed the carpets. He dusted the roofs of dormant appliances—the oven and the toaster, the pale, serene computer. He polished the bathroom faucets to a cool silver. When Caroline knocked a pair of ladybug magnets from the refrigerator, he showed her how to nudge them across a tabletop, one with the force of the other, by pressing them pole to common pole. “You see,” he said, “there’s something there. It looks like nothing, but you can feel it.” In the living room, they watched a sequence of animated cartoons— nimble, symphonic, awash with color. Caroline sat at the base of the television, smoothing fields of static from its screen with her palm. They read a flap-book with an inset bunny. They assembled puzzles onto sheets of corkboard. They constructed a fortress with the cushions of the sofa; when bombed with an unabridged dictionary, it collapsed like the huskwood of an old fire.

That afternoon, the sky cleared to a proud, empty blue, and Lewis walked with Caroline to the park. The children there were pitching stones into a seething brown creek, fat with new rain, and the birds that wheeled above them looked like tiny parabolic M’s and W’s. The wind smelled of pine and wet asphalt.

Lewis strapped Caroline into the bucket of a high swing. He discovered a derelict kickball between two rocking horses and, standing before her, tossed it into the tip of her swing, striking her knee, her toe, her shin. “Do it again,” she said as the force of her momentum shot the ball past his shoulder, or sent it soaring like a loose balloon into the sky. It disappeared, finally, into a nest of brambles. Pushing Caroline from behind, Lewis watched her arc away from him and back, pausing before her return like a roller-toy he’d once concocted from a coffee can and a rubber band. She weighed so little, and he knew that if he chose, he could propel her around the axle of the swing set, a single robust shove spinning her like a second hand from twelve to twelve to twelve. Instead, he let her swing to a stop, her arms falling limp from the chains as she slowed. A foam sandal dangled uncertainly from her big toe. Her head lolled onto her chest. She was, suddenly, asleep. As Lewis lifted her from the harness, she relaxed into a broad yawn, the tip of her tongue settling gently between her teeth. He carried her home.

After he had put her to bed, Lewis drew the curtains against the afternoon sun and pulled a small yellow table to her side. He sat watching her for a moment. Her breath sighed over her pillowcase, the turn of fabric nearest her lips flitting slightly with each exhalation. She reached for a stuffed bear, cradling it to her heart, and her eyes began to jog behind their lids. Gingerly, Lewis pressed a finger to one of them. He could feel it twitching at his touch like a chick rolling over in its egg. What could she be dreaming, he wondered, and would she remember when she woke? How could something so close be so hidden? And how was it that in the light of such a question we could each of us hold out hope—search eyes as dark as winter for the flicker of intimacy, dream of seizing one another in a fit of recognition? As he walked silently from her bedroom, Lewis lifted from the toy shelf a red plastic See ’n’ Say, its face wreathed with calling animals. In the hallway, he trained its index on the picture of a lion, depressing the lever cocked at its frame.
This,
said the machine,
is a
robin,
and it whittered a little aria. When he turned the dial to a picture of a lamb on a tussock of grass, it said the same thing. Dog and pony, monkey and elephant:
robin—twit twit whistle.
Lewis set the toy against a wall, listening to the cough of a receding car. He passed through the dining room and climbed the back stairway, wandered the deep and inviolate landscape of the house—solemn with the thought of faulty lessons, and of how often we are shaped in this way.

An old story tells of a man who grew so fond of the sky—of the clouds like hills and the shadows of hills, of the birds like notes of music and the stars like distant blessings—that he made of his heart a kite and sailed it into the firmament. There he felt the high mechanical tug of the air. The sunlight rushed through him, and the sharp blue wind, and the world seemed a far and a learnable thing. His gaze (the story continues) he tied like a long string to his heart, and never looking down, lest he pull himself to earth, he wandered the world ever after in search of his feet.

Talking about love, I suspect, is much like this story. What is it, then, that insists that we make the attempt? The hope of some new vision? The drive for words and order? We’ve been handed a map whose roads lead to a place we understand:
Now,
says a voice,
disentangle them.
And though we fear that we will lose our way, still, there is this wish to try. Perhaps, though, if we allow our perceptions of love to brighten and fade as they will, allow it even if they glow no longer than a spark launched from a fire, perhaps we will not pull our heart from its course: surely this is possible.

My love, then, for Caroline is what slows me into sleep at night. It is a system of faith inhabiting some part of me that’s deeper than I’ve traveled. The thought of her fills me with comfort and balance, like heat spilling from the floor register of an old building. Her existence at this moment, alongside me in time, unhesitating and sure, all of this, the
now
of her, is what stirs through me when I fail. My love for Caroline is the lens through which I see the world, and the world through that lens is a place whose existence addresses my own.

Caroline chews crayons, red like a fire truck, green like a river, silver like the light from a passing airplane, and there’s something in my love for her that speaks this same urge: I want to receive the world inside me. My love for Caroline is the wish that we might spend our lives together: marry in a hail of rice, watch the childhood of our children disappear, and think to ourselves someday: when this person is gone, no one in all the world will remember the things I remember.

Salient point
is an early and sadly obsolete term for the heart as it first appears in the embryo: I fell upon it in a book of classical obstetrics with a sense of celebration. The heart, I believe, is that point where we merge with the universe. It is salient as a jet of water is salient, leaping continually upward, and salient as an angle is salient, its vertex projecting into this world, its limbs fanning out behind the frame of another. What I love of Caroline is that space of her at rest behind the heart, true and immanent, hidden and vast, the arc that this angle subtends.