On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light

by Cordelia Strube

  “Wicked,” Harriet says.

  Buck jumps up again and swings his arms in circles. “It just takes practice. How ’bout we start with some stretches? Dee, show them the stretches we were doing yesterday.”

  “No way. They’re, like, totally jock.”

  “They’re effective, is what they are, which is why jocks do them. Come on, girl. Let’s start with the lunge.” He bends one knee and stretches the other leg straight back. Harriet copies him and nudges her mother to do the same. “This one’s great for the calf muscles, hams and hip flexors,” Buck explains. “And of course the old Achilles tendons. You don’t want to start running till those babies get warmed up.”

  “You really know your stuff,” Harriet says. “Mum, did you know about hams, hip flexors and Achilles tendons?”

  “Of course.”

  “Come on, Dee,” Buck says, “let’s do this thing.”

  “I’m on the rag.”

  “No excuses. Stretch.”

  Dee makes a wobbly attempt at a lunge but Lynne, Harriet notices, is starting to get into it. She puts both hands on the ground on either side of her foot, stretching the other leg farther back.

  Buck stares at her legs. “You’ve still got the flexibility.”

  “Muscles have memory,” Lynne says. “I had this phys. ed. teacher who was always going on about that. It’s like riding a bike.”

  “Nice.” Buck puts his hands on the ground beside her, also stretching one leg back. There’s no way Gennedy could do this. With Buck distracted, Dee resumes playing Angry Birds on her phone. Harriet puts her hands down and stretches a leg back.

  “Look at her,” Lynne says, “my little rabbit.”

  Her mother hasn’t referred to her as her little rabbit in years. Harriet feels hope swelling inside her.

  “Quadriceps?” Buck asks Lynne.

  “You got it.”

  “Lean on me.” Buck turns to face Lynne, taking her hand and resting it on his sweaty shoulder. He rests his other hand on her naked one. Almost in unison, they reach behind, grab a foot and pull it towards their ass.

  “Oh that feels so good,” Lynne murmurs. “It’s like the muscles have been asleep for years.”

  Buck smiles. “Sleeping beauty, your prince has come.”

  “Give it a rest, Dad.”

  “Get off your tushie, young woman. Who’s the one needs to get in shape around here?”

  “It’s too freakin’ hot.”

  Buck grabs Dee’s hand. “Let’s go.”

  “Yuk, you’re sweaty.”

  Dee and Harriet only manage one lap. Harriet could do more if her toe wasn’t throbbing. She sits on the bleachers and studies Buck and Lynne for signs of romance.

  “Don’t look so worried, H. It’s a done deal.”

  “I don’t want him thinking he can just do her. It’s supposed to be serious. She’s supposed to make the derp move out.”

  “Hmmm, this might require further strategizing.” Dee sucks on her Sprite and sits beside her. “Okay, got it, I’m a genius. No need to thank me. Here’s the plan. We figure out where they’re going to hook up, then set it up so the derp catches them in the act.”

  “That won’t work, the derp would forgive her. She’d get all guilty and teary and he’d forgive her. He’s got nowhere to go.” Buck and Lynne start another lap. “They look wonderful together, don’t you think?”

  “If you’re into sweat.”

  “Why are they stopping?”

  “Maybe they’re having heart attacks.” Dee resumes playing Angry Birds.

  “He’s pulling something out of his pocket.”

  “Uh-oh, here we go.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “He’s blindfolding her,” Harriet says.

  “His idea of romance.” Dee looks back at her phone.

  “Why’s he blindfolding her?”

  “He’s going to tie his horny ass to hers and guide her like she’s blind. He was talking about it all the way over here. He said that’s how he’ll know.”

  “What?”

  “If she’s The One.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It means she trusts him, yo. If she lets him blind her and tie her up.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “You’re the one wants them hooked up.”

  Buck tethers his wrist to Lynne’s. She starts walking, tentatively at first. He matches her stride perfectly. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, they begin to run.

  Sixteen

  Harriet helps Mr. Shotlander set up his living room for Seniors’ Reading Night. Tonight’s theme is Life and Death and In Between. The more mobile seniors arrive with extra chairs. Mr. Chubak shows up with popcorn and a three-legged stool he bought in Nepal. He squats on it, unfolds a piece of paper and starts reading:

  To one who has been long in city pent:

  ’Tis very sweet to look into the fair

  And open face of heaven.

  Mr. Shotlander grabs a handful of popcorn. “Chubak, why’s everything you read so dang gloomy?”

  “That’s not gloomy. That’s Keats saying maybe dying isn’t so bad. Listen to this:

  O soft embalmer of the still midnight,

  Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,

  Our gloom-pleas’d eyes.

  Harriet pours Coke and ginger ale into plastic cups. Mr. Quigley brought Gatorade.

  “Who says we have to talk about dying in the first place?” Mr. Shotlander says. He usually reads from The Vinyl Café in a nasally voice.

  Mr. Chubak holds up his piece of paper again. “Listen to the epitaph Coleridge wrote for himself:

  That he who many a year with toil of breath

  Found death in life, may here find life in death.

  “Terrific!” Mr. Hoogstra nibbles a cheese puff because he has to be careful about his gums.

  “What in blazes is terrific about it? It’s dang depressing.”

  “What’s so depressing?” Mr. Zilberschmuck arranges himself languidly on the only armchair. “He’s saying he suffered in life, maybe he won’t in death.”

  “He was a goddang drug addict.” Mr. Shotlander sits on the couch beside Mrs. Chipchase and offers her some barbecue chips, but she’s knitting.

  “Here’s one he wrote for an infant who died,” Mr. Chubak says.

  “Oh, this’ll cheer us up.” Mr. Shotlander eats several chips.

  Mr. Chubak reads,

  Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,

  Death came with friendly care:

  The opening bud to heaven convey’d

  And bade it blossom there.

  “Would someone tell me why in heck we’re talking about death?” Mr. Shotlander demands.

  “Because,” Harriet reminds him, “tonight’s theme is Life and Death and In Between.”

  “Let’s get to the in-between parts.”

  “Death is part of life,” Mrs. Chipchase says, without looking up from her knitting.

  “You’re in denial, Shotlander,” Mr. Zilberschmuck adds.

  Mr. Quigley jogs on the spot, the stripes on his track pants zigzagging. “Wait till you have your first stroke, Shotlander. After his first stroke my buddy Howie’s face got lopsided. That’s when he started believing in reincarnation. All his life Howie was a straight-up you-die-and-get-buried kind of guy. After the stroke he was planning a comeback.”

  “As what?” Mr. Shotlander asks.

  “A Japanese girl. He saw his Jap parents in his dreams, kneeling and drinking tea.”

  “Why the heck did he want to be a Japanese girl?”

  “It’s not like you get to choose. Howie said in a past life he was a platypus and he wanted to be one again because they can survive on land and wat
er and have spurs with venom in them.”

  “Mortality weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,” Mr. Chubak reads. “He’s saying death is there no matter what.

  Aye on the shores of darkness there is light,

  And precipices show untrodden green,

  There is budding morrow in midnight,

  There is triple sight in blindness keen.

  “There you go.” Mr. Hoogstra reaches for another cheese puff. “There is budding morrow in midnight. Terrific! What’s depressing about that?”

  Mr. Shotlander waves a barbecue chip around. “I just want to have a good time. What’s wrong with that?”

  “To some people death is a good time,” Mr. Chubak says. “Or anyway, an easier time.”

  “It’s an escape from human suffering,” Mrs. Chipchase clarifies.

  Before dinner, Harriet used her glue gun to help Irwin make a flying machine for his plastic animals. They used juice cartons for the cabin, egg cartons for seating and flattened milk cartons for wings.

  “Where are they flying to?” Harriet asked.

  “To heaven, of course.”

  “Why, of course?”

  “Because that’s where everybody goes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Everybody knows that.” His bony shoulders tensed as he struggled to flatten a milk carton. She could see how weak he’d become, and was glad he believed in heaven.

  Mrs. Chipchase reads “. . . village life would stagnate if it were not for unexplored forests and the meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering hedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.”

  Mr. Hoogstra jabs a toothpick in his gums. “The tonic of wildness. Terrific!”

  “That’s Mr. Thoreau,” Mrs. Chipchase says.

  “You feel like you’re right there, don’t you?” Mr. Chubak sucks on a juice box. “Crawling around on your belly with all that wildness around you. Notice how he says wildness instead of wilderness?”

  “Terrific.”

  Mr. Zilberschmuck drinks JD from his mickey. “Thoreau wasn’t a drug addict, Shotlander.”

  “He was a goddang hermit. A freak.”

  Harriet can still smell body lotion on her clothes. Lynne showered for half an hour after the run, and must have squirted an entire bottle of peach lotion on herself because Harriet could smell it even more than the glue gun.

  “Mum’s singing,” Irwin said.

  “Really?” Harriet stopped scissoring and listened to her mother singing the lame Whitney Houston song she’d hummed driving home. This could only be a good sign. Next her mother, stinking of lotion, came and sat on the floor, putting her arms around them. “What are you monkeys building?”

  “A flying machine!” Irwin squealed.

  Usually Lynne was critical of Harriet’s artwork, unable to see how it could be what Harriet said it was. But smiling at the glued cartons, Lynne said, “It’s the most wondrous flying machine I have ever seen.” Harriet had never heard her use the word wondrous before.

  “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,” Mrs. Chipchase reads.

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

  Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

  This describes perfectly the peace Harriet will find in her backwoods cabin at Lost Coin Lake.

  “Who the heck wants to live with a swarm of bees?” Mr. Shotlander demands.

  “Speaking of bees,” Mr. Hoogstra says, “did you get your mosquito bite looked at, Harry? You can’t be too careful. It was skeeters took down the dinosaurs. The volcanoes just finished them off.”

  “She wasn’t bitten, you jackass,” Mr. Shotlander says. “She was hit by that layabout.”

  “Nobody hit me.”

  “He wins if you don’t make him pay, Harry.”

  Mr. Zilberschmuck fondles a cigarillo. “It’s none of your business, Shotlander.”

  “Of course it’s my business. Harry’s my friend.”

  “Friends don’t snitch on friends,” Harriet says.

  “I was angry with my friend,” Mr. Chubak recites,

  I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

  I was angry with my foe:

  I told it not, my wrath did grow.

  Listen to Mr. Blake, Harry, he says you have to let it out. Either way you lose if you keep it buttoned up inside you.”

  “He should know,” Mr. Shotlander grumbles, “a goddang lunatic.”

  “It’s time you and Harry kissed and made up,” Mr. Chubak says. “It’s not healthy the way you two go at each other.”

  “I don’t go at anybody,” Harriet says, passing around the Bits & Bites, although she almost went at Gennedy as he sat smugly at the dinner table because he might have a client. “Nothing’s confirmed,” he emphasized. Harriet has heard about potential paying clients before. Gennedy is perennially close to striking it rich via some deep-pocketed criminal or other. He just needs that one high-profile case and all their financial worries will be over. Harriet considered going at him about the extensive evidence proving that he is a useless lawyer no one with brains or cash would hire, but she’s done this before and his self-satisfaction is impregnable. Nothing she could say would ever make him doubt his genius. Instead, over tuna casserole this evening, she said, “You should have seen Mum on the track. She was awesome.”

  “The track?”

  “We went jogging with Buck,” Harriet explained.

  “Who’s Buck?”

  “Darcy’s dad. He’s totally built. He can do one-arm push-ups.”

  “No way!” Irwin squealed.

  “And clap push-ups.”

  “Wowee wowee, can I go with you next time? I want to see him do fancy push-ups.”

  Gennedy, chomping, turned to Lynne. “Is that the truck driver? Why did you go jogging with him?”

  “It’s called running, Gennedy, not jogging. I went because he asked.”

  “I see. What else will you do if he asks?”

  “I can’t believe you said that.”

  “What? I’m just asking a question.”

  “No you’re not.” Lynne looked at Harriet and Irwin. “Who’s coming with me to get freezies?”

  “Me me me me me!” Irwin chirped, and off they went. Harriet watched them from her bedroom window. Lynne took an indirect route to Mr. Hung’s via the parking lot where Buck’s truck happened to be parked, and lifted Irwin into the cab. Irwin sat on Buck’s lap with his hands on the big steering wheel. Harriet could not have strategized this better.

  Mr. Shotlander offers Harriet his hand to shake. She’s thinking about the ear wax on his fingers.

  “Come on, Harry,” Mr. Chubak urges. “Make peace.”

  Harriet quickly shakes then surreptitiously wipes her hand on her jeans.

  Since he hit her, Gennedy has been avoiding her. But after Lynne and Irwin left, he attempted to reassert his superiority over Buck. “Guess he can’t be overemployed if he spends all that time at the gym.”

  “At least he’s employed.” Harriet headed to her room to glue the silver ring she found flattened on the tarmac onto The Leopard Who Changed Her Spots.

  Mr. Shotlander throws up his hands. “What’s wrong with a good old love poem? Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day . . . how’s the rest of it go?”

  Mr. Tumicelli in his black overcoat, dragging his oxygen tank, comes in wheezing. “She’s gone. My wife. She left the building.’

  Mr. Tumicelli’s wife has Alzheimer’s and wanders. Initially he tried to stop her, but she left anyway. His efforts to restrain
her bruised her arms. When the police found her, they concluded that the bruises were evidence of spousal abuse. They charged Mr. Tumicelli, and he spent two years in and out of court proving his innocence. The lawyer cost him his savings. He is afraid the police will charge him again if he tries to stop Mrs. Tumicelli from wandering. The other seniors think he should put her in a home with a lock-up but he refuses. So when Mrs. Tumicelli disappears, instead of calling the police, the seniors search for her and coax her back to the building with Smarties.

  Harriet collects the plastic cups and chip bowls. She sees the drug addicts’ poetry copied out in Mr. Chubak’s neat cursive. On the back of the sheet she copies out the cabin poem Mrs. Chipchase has bookmarked. She folds the sheet of paper carefully and puts it in her pocket.

  Irwin knocks on Harriet’s door. He is the only one who heeds the NO ENTRY sign.

  “What do you want?”

  “They’re fighting again.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Couples fight. You want to get in my bed?”

  “Can I?”

  “Come on.” She pulls back the comforter to make room for him. He crawls in and rests his head on her chest. His speedy heart beats into her.

  “Are they fighting because of me?” he asks.

  “Definitely not.” The bickering started in the kitchen while Irwin was having his bath. Lynne told Harriet to watch him. He sat in the water gripping a manatee and an orca, intently pointing them towards each other. This meant the sea creatures were communicating by sonar. Harriet tried to make out what Lynne and Gennedy were saying, but they were keeping it down.

  Tucking the comforter around Irwin’s shoulders, Harriet hears Irwin’s scratchy breathing and pictures his lungs filling with fluid.

  “I wish I wasn’t sick,” he says.

  “You’re not sick. You just have a condition.”

  “You’d play with me more if I didn’t have a condition.”

  “I’m way older than you. I don’t play anymore.”

  “What do you do instead?”

  Harriet isn’t sure. She spends so much time on the run, not belonging, trying to be nowhere to avoid trouble, she’s not sure she does anything.