The End of the Day

by Bill Clegg

  After the prom, Jackie cooled toward Dana and avoided her in the weeks that followed. When school let out for the summer Dana came up from the city and the two of them fell into their old routines—lying out on the back patio lounges listening to the radio, watching TV on the third floor at Edgeweather. They watched whatever was on, mostly reruns, because it was the summer. Jackie liked That Girl and The Flying Nun, which Dana put up with but thought both Marlo Thomas and Sally Field were corny idiots. They both loved The Ed Sullivan Show and Peyton Place, though they were devastated when Mia Farrow didn’t come back in the third season. Since they didn’t have friends in common, the girls talked about celebrities as if they went to school with them. They had wildly different and conflicting opinions about them all—Dana worshipped Joel Grey, Jackie thought he was creepy; Jackie loved Paul McCartney, Dana dismissed him as a fake and by their junior year was bored of the Beatles altogether and only had ears for the Rolling Stones, a band Jackie thought was trashy. And so on.

  Squabbles marked their friendship from the beginning so the first noticeable shift in the summer of 1966, between their junior and senior years in high school, was that they gradually became polite with each other. After years of arguing passionately over disputes as trivial as whether Marlon Brando or James Garner had the best chin or which was more refreshing, iced tea or lemonade, they gave up trying to convince or prove anything to the other. They also became more secretive. When Jackie told Dana about Floyd kissing her for the first time, Dana rolled her eyes. After that, Jackie barely mentioned him and Dana didn’t ask.

  The summer after they graduated from high school, Dana came to Jackie’s wedding in a black suit and brought an antique umbrella stand that Jackie was sure she’d last seen under a mirror in the foyer at Edgeweather. She’d fashioned a white silk scarf into a sloppy bow, tied it to one of its spindles and put it on top of the table where the presents were piled, and shouted in an English accent, For your brollies, mum. Jackie recognized the scarf right away as one Dana had worn constantly her sophomore year. At the small reception Dana kept to herself but after the cake was cut, she managed a barbed apology as she made her exit, If the nuptials weren’t planned at such breakneck speed I might have had a little more time to consider what to get you.

  Driving home from Hatch Pond, Jackie remembers something Floyd’s sister, Hannah, said to her after she’d found out they’d gotten engaged. She and Floyd were standing by his truck in the driveway at the farm. A friend had dropped her off, and as she stumbled from the car, clearly drunk, she steadied long enough to look Jackie directly in the eyes and slur, You don’t fool around, do you? Locked it all down before the stupid lug had a chance to think about it. Seems like yesterday you needed a ride home from my birthday party. Dainty!

  She’d dismissed the outburst as the drunken ramblings of a protective sister. Now she considered her words more seriously. She had moved fast, let herself get pregnant, and encouraged Floyd to consider marriage the only possible option given the circumstances. She also chose to dismiss the strange morning at the farm along with dozens of moments when she saw his head turn and his eyes follow girls at school, or at the town beach. This was what men were like, she’d said to herself. Her father notwithstanding, she knew by then that men were susceptible in ways that women were not once they’d chosen who they wanted to be with. It was, she believed, before women had chosen, when they were still assessing their options, when they were most dangerous, and she was becoming aware that more and more women were choosing to delay making a choice. Some were rejecting making a choice at all, simply wallowing in their options, indefinitely. Jackie knew perfectly well that many of Dana’s friends, like Dana herself, were in this last lethal category.

  Jackie parks the car in front of the garage, gathers Amy, and leaves the picnic food and blankets and dishes in the trunk. Amy is limp in her arms as she crosses the driveway and climbs the front steps to the house. Once inside, she switches the porch light off after she shuts the door behind her. He can trip on the steps, she thinks, break his neck for all I care. But after two steps into the hallway, she stops and turns back. She stands with Amy in her arms until she begins to sway gently with exhaustion. She is now a wife who wishes her husband to break his neck on the outside stairs. Of everything that’s happened that day, this is what instigates tears: the transformation of something she wanted so badly—a happy marriage, a loving husband, a family—into something hateful. There is nothing Floyd can say that will make it right between them, but she is not prepared to be that woman. Before she turns back toward the hallway to put Amy to sleep, she reaches her hand out and flips the switch. She may not want to share a bed with or speak a civil word to Floyd for a long time, but tonight she will leave the light on.

  After she puts Amy in her crib, Jackie retreats to her bedroom. It’s the first night she will sleep alone since she and Floyd rented the house. She switches the lamp next to her side of the bed and walks slowly toward the bathroom. At the sink, she goes through the motions of brushing her teeth, wiping her face with a cool washcloth, and changing into her nightgown.

  In bed, she twists the lamp switch off and right away notices she’s left the window that faces the front yard open, the shades up. She begins to wriggle out from the sheets and the light cotton blanket to get out of bed and close them, but something catches her eye and she stops. The leaves on the elm tree outside flutter up and down in the breeze, catching the porch light like a school of fish blazing as they bank through an underwater sunbeam. She cannot make sense of what she is seeing and for a few seconds remains spellbound, still. As Jackie’s eyes gradually adjust to the dark she begins to identify the gnarled trunk, the old low boughs rising at steep angles into the moonless night. She remembers the tree’s age and in her mind caresses the number like a child would clutch a beloved stuffed animal, or how when she was a kid she rubbed her twenty-five cent allowance between her thumb and pointer finger until the coin and her hand were both damp with sweat.

  An abrupt wind blasts and the leaves flap up again to expose their silver bellies. Faint, faraway thunder rumbles like logs rolling from a pile. Jackie fixes her eyes again on the tree’s thick haunches. Older than anyone living, she reminds herself, waiting for the appearance of lightning or the sound of louder thunder. Older than every house in Wells. Every tree, too. Older than Dana and Floyd combined. Older than airplanes and phones and television and cars. Older than Edgeweather. Older than the Fourth of July.

  Jackie shuts her eyes and scooches down into the middle of the bed, her body now completely covered by the sheet and blanket. Outside, she hears the muffled crack of an exploding firework. A small animal skitters across the roof. Jackie’s stomach, still sour from vomiting before, rumbles and whines. Just empty, she thinks defensively, as if someone had suggested something more serious.

  Another firework goes off. Minutes later, another. Eventually, the erratic bursts—explosions she is sure she can feel rattle the house, despite the four and a half miles to Hatch Pond—are followed by a rat-a-tat-tat sequence of fast pops that sound like mortar fire. The blasts accelerate and are soon punctuated by louder, more significant explosions. The finale, she remembers, closing her eyes, the part of the night that had always been for her the whole point. She imagines women and children sprawled across the first and second lawns, on blankets, in aluminum folding chairs covered with strips of brightly colored nylon; men mingling in the parking lots, drinking and smoking and mumbling imperceptibly; couples squeezing into each other, looking out over the water from the end of the wobbly dock. She sees them from above, as if she is seeing them all for the last time. Their heads lift, their faces turn toward her, and when she recognizes no one she unleashes her pyrotechnic fury. So many explosions at once, so fast upon the next they become one explosion, one sound, one angry point in the sky for everyone to see and feel as it rips the air with hate. Let them look. All of them. Both of them. Dana. Let her watch as she explodes in the sky. Let the fiery matter that
Jackie once was rain down on her treacherous head, scorch her porcelain skin, singe her hair, destroy her duplicitous face.

  Outside, the world goes quiet. Jackie pictures the people of Wells, their necks still stretched to the sky, their eyes hungry for more spectacle, their ears straining to be shocked. She can almost hear them groan with disappointment when nothing comes, feel them hesitate in the ordinary dark, reluctant to pack up their coolers, fold their blankets, stub out their cigarettes, finish their beers and return home. She clutches her pillow with both arms, bunches the thin cotton casing in her fists and pulls it from under her head, down below her chest, to her belly. She has not felt nauseous since she returned home, but now feels a sharp cramp radiating from her pelvis to her lower back. She has not eaten but she feels full, uncomfortably bloated; at the same time, she feels perspiration beading across her brow, down her temples and between her breasts. Hot now, her whole body dampening with sweat, she kicks off the sheet and blanket. The bloating sharpens into cramps that feel like knives stabbing into her abdomen, behind her hips and pelvis. They strike with alarming force and leave her immobile in a fevered heap, clutching her knees to her chest. Eventually, she rolls from the bed to her feet and makes her way down the hall to the kitchen phone. As if expecting the call, her mother picks up on the first ring.

  Jackie returns to the bare bed and waits. She knows what will happen. Her mother will arrive, still in bedclothes and the same white bathrobe with pale blue piping she’s worn in the summer months since Jackie was a girl. She will rummage in the hall closet for a hand towel, run it under cold water in the bathroom sink, and with it wipe the sweat from Jackie’s face and neck and arms and legs before covering her with a thin nylon windbreaker and guiding her out the front door to her car. Because the hospital is less than a three-minute drive down the hill, neither she nor Jackie will hesitate to leave Amy in her crib where she’ll sleep at least another four hours. The attending ER doctor will tell them what she already knows; that the life that had only recently started to grow inside her is gone. And eventually, if there hadn’t been any yet, there would be blood. Her mother will agree to tell no one, not even Jackie’s father, though she will tell him the moment she gets home. He will never, not even once, let on that he knows. In the morning, Jackie will call Scott at the hardware store in town to come and change the locks on the garage, front, and back doors. This will be the only part Floyd will find out about. And Dana will no longer exist. The two of them will know the consequences but only half their crimes. None of your business, Jackie will answer every time either one of them, or anyone, demands an explanation for her severity. Dana will insist on an explanation just the one time; and Floyd for weeks will holler and plead and write a note in black magic marker on the back of a brown Trotta’s grocery bag and slip it under the locked front door, What have I done, it will say in enormous letters without question mark or punctuation.

  All this will happen, but before it does she must wait for her mother to come, lie jackknifed and writhing on a bed she will no longer share.

  The wind kicks up again and through the open window she hears the chatter of branches and the squall of ravished leaves. It roars on and on, a great whooshing sound, like static on a television set after the last broadcast, or the pounding surf she and Dana were afraid to swim in three summers ago in Rhode Island. She’s never heard anything that sounded so powerful, or so lonely. Nearly everything she had counted on—Floyd, a second child, a happy marriage, even Dana—was now gone. Replaced with pain almost as excruciating as labor, but worse because of what it signaled, not a beginning, as with Amy, but the end.

  Above the house, the night air moves between branches, hisses through the high, vast canopy that has swayed there for centuries. The hiss builds to a howl and in it Jackie thinks she can almost hear a voice, singing notes and words to a song she does not know. The sound is neither male nor female and it soars high and loud, escalates from voice to siren, and while it does the hairs on her arms and legs prickle to attention. At its apex, it overwhelms every other sound, inside the house and out, and then collapses to one high, thin, ragged note. It reminds Jackie of the crude flutes she and Dana used to make from paper when they were kids. All that was needed was a plain sheet ripped from a notebook, a pair of scissors and tape, and no matter how many times they made them, Jackie was always surprised that from such simple, everyday materials, music could happen.

  Soon there is only the sound of wind-ruffed leaves. Again, she detects the traces of a voice, speaking this time, not singing, but as before, she cannot make out the words, nor determine the sort of message they make—a warning, a secret, an instruction of some kind. Eventually, the wind calms, the tree stills, and just as mysteriously as the voice began, it stops.

  The night turns quiet again. Jackie rolls onto her back hoping to relieve the pressure on her abdomen, but the pain there only sharpens. She listens for sounds outside, but beyond the dreary commotion of crickets there are none. With compounding regret, she wonders what it was she was supposed to hear. Something important, she decides, dread rising as the plain beams of her mother’s headlights sweep across the wall above her bed. Something she needed to know.

  Lupita

  She’s beyond the break. Shoved by invisible hands into the busy water past the reef’s edge, toward open ocean. Saltwater burns her eyes and nose and throat and sloshes in her stomach despite her best efforts to keep it out. Across the low light of morning, she scans the shore for the hedge and roofline of her cottage but she’s drifted too far out and down now, beyond Makahoa Point, which marks the end of Hanalei Beach. After the Point there are a half a dozen beaches and a few spits of sand between headlands, and then only jagged lava thorning the narrow shore along the Napaali Coast. She knows that to thrash against the pull here will do her in, so she points her exhausted body toward what looks like the widest stretch of sand and moves with a current she hopes will carry her there.

  * * *

  In her flight from the big house—out the service door, across the short lawn and driveway to the garage—Lupita tried to erase what had happened. With each hard slap of her boots against the grass and asphalt, she willed the hour and all in it away.

  And then the next morning, Ada at her bedside, poking her awake, pinching her shoulder, the words How could you barely audible, more statement than question. You were there? Lupita asked, still disbelieving, then horrified for a flash that Ada had somehow been involved in what happened, another arrangement made for the Gosses. Ada’s response—standing from her crouch, tears spilling from her eyes, repeating the same three words as she stepped away—made clear her involvement was no less or more than what it was. Which was worse, her sister believing she’d willingly lay on Dana’s bed with Mr. Goss or her sister seeing what had actually happened and choosing not to help her. Either was too awful to accept. At the door, Ada paused, still looking toward Lupita but not meeting her eyes. It seemed as if she was about to say something; but just then their father shouted from the kitchen. And she was gone.

  After Memorial Day weekend, Ada returned to the city and soon moved to Palm Beach to work in the Gosses’ house there. Mr. Goss mostly stayed in the city until the end of summer, which was unusual, but his absences went without comment and no one seemed bothered. The one weekend when he did join his wife and daughter, Lupita stayed in bed and told her mother she had a headache and could not work in the big house. She didn’t care whether or not she believed her, there was no force that could put her in that house with him. This was the last weekend in June. By then she’d not had her period for five weeks and for the three days prior she’d been struck with fits of debilitating vertigo and nausea. She knew she was pregnant. Even as she prayed to the Virgin and to her grandmother to tell her what to do, she took for granted they would turn their backs on her if she chose not to have the baby. From what her mother and Ada had told her, her grandmother had assisted with hundreds of births. In the instances when there was a stillbirth or a p
regnancy she could not save, she would light candles and pray for the lost soul to find its way. Lupita could recall the sound but not the words of her prayers, an impression of her sadness. She imagined more than remembered her saying the same unforgiving words she’d heard her mother speak more than once, Lo único peor que un niño muerto es aquel que es asesinado por su madre.

  In her last months at St. Margaret’s, Lupita had disappeared into studying for her final exams and completing her term papers. With money she’d saved from birthday presents and money the Goss family had paid her over the years for helping at the big house, she bought a suitcase from the Sears catalog. A flame red plastic Samsonite with metal snaps. She gave her father the money, he wrote a check, and they sent the carefully filled-out order form in the mail. And then she waited—for the suitcase to arrive, to graduate from high school, for the end of the summer—without a plan, only fear that her stomach would bulge before she’d figured out what to do.

  The morning before the Fourth of July, Dana called Edgeweather from New York. Lupita answered the phone in the manner her mother had instructed. Goss residence, Lupita speaking.