Second Nature

by Alice Hoffman

  “Your parents are fighting,” Lydia said to Connor.

  “That’s what they do,” Connor said. “They’re real good at it.”

  “We would never be like that,” Lydia told him.

  “No,” Connor agreed, in love both with her and with her certainty. “Never.”

  Kay’s house was so crowded it wasn’t easy to find space to stand. There was the librarian, Sofia Peters, eating salami and rye. There was Fred, from the diner, all dressed up in a black suit he hadn’t worn for fifteen years, and George Tenney, with the Doctor and a group of men who had gathered around the scotch to toast Old Dick’s memory, again and again. Robin went straight to the kitchen, where she poured herself a cup of hot coffee.

  “A madhouse,” Stuart said as he came up beside Robin so he could collect more wineglasses from the cabinet. “Kay made the potato salad. Without bacon. You should try it.”

  Robin was still wearing her coat, but that didn’t keep her from shivering. “I didn’t think I’d feel this way,” she admitted.

  “Come on.” Stuart left the glasses for a moment so he could put one arm around her. “He had a great life. He did exactly as he pleased.”

  “Right,” Robin said.

  “God, he would have hated this party,” Stuart said.

  In spite of herself, Robin grinned when she thought of what their grandfather could have done to this group with a few choice words. Half of these people would have already headed for the door.

  “But he would have appreciated the potato salad,” Stuart said as he took the wineglasses out to the dining room.

  Still, Robin couldn’t bring herself to join the crowd. Stephen had refused to come to the funeral, and she hadn’t understood why until now. Now she wondered if it was really possible to mourn between bites of potato salad. Perhaps the only thing a gathering such as this served to do was separate the living from the dead. If Lydia and Connor hadn’t come looking for her, Robin might have gone out the back door, with the hope that no one would notice.

  “Did you have anything to eat?” Connor asked. “Do you want me to get you a sandwich?”

  Robin shook her head no, but she loved him just for asking, and for being so awkward, and for drinking a Pepsi, rather than the beer or wine he could have had without anyone’s noticing.

  “You shouldn’t be in here all by yourself,” Lydia said. She’d already retrieved her red jacket from the hall closet. She reached into the wide pocket and took out a loaf of banana bread, which she handed to Robin. “My mother,” Lydia explained. “She didn’t think you’d want to see her, but she sent this. She said when she was little she was convinced that Old Dick was a giant.”

  Robin started crying right then. Lydia and Connor were both too embarrassed to look at her.

  “I said something wrong,” Lydia decided.

  “No,” Robin said, but she kept crying.

  “I’d better stay with her,” Connor told Lydia.

  “Absolutely,” Lydia agreed. She buttoned her jacket and pulled on her woolen mittens. She went to Connor and kissed him. “I’ll miss you,” she whispered.

  Lydia went outside and slipped the hood of her jacket over her head. The sky had cleared to reveal a few stars, but it was even colder now. The trees were cloaked in ice, and some of the thinnest branches snapped. She had never met Connor’s great-grandfather, yet his death, she saw, would affect her anyway. It was an awful, selfish thought, but one she couldn’t get rid of. Connor’s mom would no longer be going to visit Old Dick—she had often stayed until well after midnight—and so Lydia and Connor would no longer have the house to themselves in the evenings. Where would they go to be alone together? It was too cold for Poorman’s Point, and the county had begun to bulldoze all the old fishermen’s shacks, except for the one Stuart had appropriated. Neither of them had a driver’s license yet, or use of a car, and if they checked into the one motel on the island, an inn really, run by an elderly woman named Mrs. Plant, everyone would know the news by the following morning. Desperadoes for love, that’s what they’d be, searching out privacy wherever they could find it. At least for now. Someday they’d be married and then they could do whatever they wanted. Someday her mother would have to call on the phone and make an appointment if she wanted to see her.

  Lydia often managed to have her own way, but that wasn’t a crime. All this week she’d been working on her father, who was good-natured and hated the sound of an argument in his own house. Twice she’d cried in front of him; she’d confided that she wouldn’t be able to eat a bite of turkey or stuffing if Connor wasn’t invited to dinner. That was all it took, the invitation had been issued, but now Lydia worried that her mother might make a scene. Poor Connor was so nervous he planned to bring Michelle roses, although they were out of season and much too expensive. It was a long way from Kay’s house to Mansfield Terrace, and Lydia had plenty of time to think. As she reached Cemetery Road she’d already decided that if her mother said one unkind word to Connor she would never forgive her, and what’s more, she would consider running away, at least for a day or two, until she got what she wanted.

  Lydia had begun to walk faster, although now and then she skidded on the sidewalk. She kept hearing that snapping sound. Once it was so close to her she imagined a branch was about to come at her from behind, but when she turned there was nothing, only the dark cold road and the black iron fence no child in town would dare to climb after twilight. She almost believed that there was a man inside the gates of the cemetery, but she knew that wasn’t possible. She was not a girl who scared easily; she wasn’t frightened by empty roads or lone crows perched on telephone wires. She went on, fighting the urge to run. Probably the funeral was what made her so uneasy; it was perfectly natural to be spooked after such an occasion. Still, when she reached the corner of Mansfield Terrace, she felt that the snapping sound was footsteps. She thought about Connor to make herself feel better; she thought about tomorrow, when he’d arrive at their door for Thanksgiving dinner, about the roses he’d be holding, the stems wrapped in green paper.

  She could have sworn then that someone was following her; she heard someone breathing. Another girl would have run right then, but Lydia was too practical for that: she had to see what she was running from. When she turned and saw it was only Matthew Dixon on his way home, she stopped where she was and laughed. She had never been more relieved. If anything, Matthew was the one who looked frightened when she turned on him—in spite of his size, which seemed even larger beneath a bulky green coat.

  “God,” Lydia said. “You scared me.” She slipped off her hood, in order to get a better look at him. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m home for Thanksgiving,” Matthew said. “Vacation.”

  “I mean here.” Lydia grinned. “Walking behind me.” He was such a big dope, even if he did go to Cornell.

  “I don’t know,” Matthew said. “I went for a walk. My parents are driving me crazy.”

  “Tell me about it. My mother’s like a member of the secret police. But no one’s going to tell me what to do.”

  “I know what you mean,” Matthew began, but Lydia’s attention had shifted.

  Half a block away, Michelle was out in the driveway, sprinkling rock salt on the concrete. When she looked down the street she recognized Lydia’s red coat. Michelle had had just about enough of teenaged antics, especially on a night as cold and miserable as this.

  “Get inside,” Michelle called. “It’s freezing.”

  “Parents.” Lydia shrugged, then she headed for home. She took her time, just to annoy Michelle, even though the night was so dark and cold she had the urge to throw her arms around her mother when she reached their driveway, a silly, childish urge she made absolutely certain to control.

  After Old Dick died, Stephen had covered him with a clean, white sheet and pulled down the window shades. When Robin and the ambulance arrived, they’d had to persuade him to let them take the body. Robin had put her arms around Stephen; she didn
’t care that the driver of the ambulance happened to be Eugene Douglas, an old friend of Roy’s, or that Eugene was watching them carefully from the doorway, the better to report back to Roy and anyone else who cared to listen.

  “This is the way we do it,” Robin had whispered to Stephen. “It’s the way to say good-bye.”

  She could feel how upset he was just by touching him. He wouldn’t look at her, not even for a second.

  “You let strangers take him away? That’s the way you do it?” At that moment, Stephen believed he could never belong among them. He closed his eyes, considering, then stood up. “Fine,” he said, although that hardly meant he agreed. “Then that’s the way we’ll do it.”

  Stephen had insisted on carrying the old man downstairs himself, but he had refused to go to the funeral, and instead he’d spent the day gathering Old Dick’s clothes from the closets, carefully folding the suits and the white shirts Ginny had always washed by hand, before putting them into cardboard boxes. When the sky grew dark, he put on his heavy black coat and went out, without bothering to lock the door behind him. Everything was still the same: the ice on the road, the bare trees, the sky above him. All of it went on, as if Old Dick had appeared in a dream that had nothing to do with the road and the trees and the evening star.

  Stephen followed the route to Robin’s house, but he didn’t plan to go there or to the supper at Kay’s. Instead, he walked down Cemetery Road, then went through the gates. It was a miserable night, but Stephen didn’t feel the cold. He went to the freshly dug grave and knelt beside it; he took his hands out of his pockets and placed his palms on the newly spaded earth, which had already turned icy and hard. Two of the cemetery crows, which seemed never to sleep, circled above him, curious. This is what men did to remember the dead: They visited a place where nothing was left. They put up stones in the shape of their grief. Stephen stretched himself out on the pile of dirt, facedown, and he stayed there for so long that one of the crows came to perch on his back, and might have settled there for the night if Stephen hadn’t finally risen to his feet.

  If he walked along Cemetery Road every night for the rest of his life he still might not feel as if he were on his way home. But he wasn’t going to choose to leave Robin, he saw that now. He’d been making this choice every day, a little at a time, until at last there was nothing to decide. Whether he belonged here or not no longer mattered. When he saw her truck in the driveway, he didn’t have to think: he ran until he reached the carriage house, then went inside and took the stairs two at a time.

  Stephen hadn’t bothered to turn on the heat since the hour of Old Dick’s death, and now the rooms were colder than the air outside. There was ice on the window ledges and along the hems of the faded chintz curtains; ice had been woven through the bands of lace on the dining room tablecloth and had left a blue veneer on the bookshelves and the floor. Robin had been waiting for him for nearly two hours. She was still wearing her coat, and although her hair had come undone, she hadn’t bothered to fix it. When Stephen came up beside her and looped his arms around her waist, she wanted to stop breathing. She wanted the hour on the clock to freeze so that he could kiss her forever, until their lips were bruised, until he drew blood. He opened her coat and the buttons of her black dress. She wanted him so much that she couldn’t look at him, and she was grateful that he always wanted to have her from behind. She leaned down against the table, leaving the print of her body in the ice, but that just made her hotter, especially when he wrapped himself around her. He was holding her even tighter, and his mouth moved along the delicate skin on the side of her throat; she could feel the edge of his teeth, not as if he wanted to hurt her but as if he thought she might try to get away, even now, when she was telling him not to stop.

  Through each and every window Orion could clearly be seen. He’d be there until the stars shifted and he had to flee from the milky edges of the sky, or be stung, in spite of his arrow and bow. On this night before Thanksgiving, the temperature dropped quickly. Clotheslines snapped in two and car batteries froze solid and would later need to be thawed with hand-held hair dryers. A single night, nothing more, one that some people would sleep right through, beneath heavy quilts, and others would praise for each cold, clear second. When at last Robin hurried to get home, she didn’t notice the position of the last few stars. She gunned the engine of her truck to keep it from freezing up on her, and when she got to Mansfield Terrace she turned off the ignition and let the pickup roll into the driveway so no one asleep in bed would hear. She made certain not to slam the truck’s door, then went to retrieve the newspaper from the frozen lawn. She felt the marks he’d left on her throat and began to shiver. She’d have to go inside and run a comb through her tangled hair; she’d have to run the water in the bathtub and wash with hot, soapy water. But for now she stood there on the lawn, for just a little while longer, as if that could stop the night from ending. At that moment, she truly believed she had everything she’d ever wanted, and she never once imagined that Connor might be watching from his window and that he had already judged her, hours before daylight.

  NINE

  ALL THROUGH DECEMBER the ice stayed with them. For the first time in fifty years the water surrounding the island froze solid and children could skate the whole way around, ducking under the bridge where the willows grew, hooting until their own voices scared them. There were twelve car accidents during the first two weeks of the month; tires just skidded right off the road. People found themselves wishing for snow. At least that would be something, a change from the blue-gray ice, but even when snow was predicted it never fell.

  The Doctor had taken to making models out of toothpicks because there was no need for him and his men to go out and plow, as they usually did to pick up the slack during the winter, and finally he had to let Angelo go, although he’d worked for him for nine years; the Doctor couldn’t very well pay Angelo his regular salary when he himself was gluing tiny dinosaurs and ships together all day long.

  During the short gray days that faded into a white twilight an hour before supper, people grew restless and were suddenly well aware that this was indeed an island they lived on. Still, they were the ones who had chosen to vote down the mall proposal and who had believed a triplex cinema would create traffic jams. They were the ones who had moved here so they could watch the deer from their kitchen windows, and now the poor things pawed the ice, trying to get at some greenery. The AA meetings at the Episcopal church were more crowded than ever; a ham-and-bean supper to raise funds for the library drew a crowd of more than a hundred. Basketball games at the high school were so well attended that the vice principal considered charging admission, but of course he was voted down by the School Board; without a few diversions like basketball, the teenagers on the island would go absolutely nuts.

  Already there’d been several incidents: A gang of bored high school boys had taken to hacking down mailboxes with an axe. One ten-year-old daredevil had ridden his bike far out on the ice, scaring sea gulls, joyfully skidding over the frozen bay before crashing through into the water, where he would have drowned if George Tenney, who’d taken the afternoon off to go ice-fishing, hadn’t managed to pull him out. A group of teenaged girls, with nothing but time on their hands, had formed a club; each morning before homeroom they met in the girls’ room to drink vodka from a grape-juice bottle. Roy was relieved that Connor wasn’t involved in any of these sort of pranks, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t worried. On Thanksgiving Day, Connor had arrived at Roy’s apartment with a gym bag filled with clothes and an armful of schoolbooks, and he’d been living there ever since. He slept on the couch, often fully dressed, and ate nothing but pizza, washed down with Kool-Aid. Every time Roy approached him and tried to find out what had forced his decision, Connor would turn on the TV. When Robin telephoned, he refused to speak to her. Teenagers were moody, that was nothing out of the ordinary. But when Robin didn’t come to the apartment, to argue with Connor and insist on taking him home, Roy knew tha
t whatever had happened was serious. It wasn’t like her to give up so easily, particularly when retreating meant Roy might win.

  Roy went to see her the week before Christmas, when the pizza boxes in his kitchen had reached a staggering height and nearly every mailbox on the island had been decapitated, with the perpetrators still on the loose. Mansfield Terrace was one of the slickest streets on the island, though it had been dusted with salt and sand a dozen times or more. The front steps to Robin’s house were downright perilous. A man could break his neck with one false move, and then where would he be?

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Robin said when she looked through the storm door and saw that it was Roy. Her hair was pulled back and she was wearing one of Roy’s old sweatshirts and a pair of jeans.

  “Fine,” Roy said. He came inside even though she hadn’t opened the door for him. “I’ll talk.”

  Robin wrapped her arms around herself and stood by the door, just so he wouldn’t get the idea that he’d be staying.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Connor won’t tell me.”

  “He hates me,” Robin said. “That should give you endless pleasure.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Roy said. “You won’t give me a fucking inch.”

  “I didn’t want to tell him about Stephen because I thought he’d be upset, but he figured it out and he’s furious.”

  “Figured what out?”

  Robin looked at him sharply. “You know.”

  Roy laughed out loud. How stupid could he be? Was it just that he didn’t want to think about Robin making love with anyone else, or was he really a total idiot? Every time he even began to conjure up Robin in bed with someone else, a black curtain fell across his mind to block out the scene. Last Saturday he had actually gone shopping and bought Robin a Christmas present, gold hoop earrings that were far too expensive.