by Isla Morley
“Hello?” he says in a sleepy voice.
Her heart is knocking against her chest. She turns to face him. A sprig of hair lands in her eyes, and she pushes it to one side.
There’s no way to put it other than the color goes out of him. Spooking someone is not a thing to smile about, but she can’t help it. “Hello, Havens.”
He looks as if he’s been thrown from a horse straight into a fence post. He stands there, mouth agape, eyes the kind they put coins on. She wishes he would say something. Anything. She should’ve sent Chappy to come alert him first.
“I met a doctor a few weeks back,” she begins. She shrugs her shoulders to loosen them. Let him do the talking, she reminds herself.
He takes a step closer, but not in an eager way, more like he expects to stand on a loose floorboard and have it rear up and smack him in the face.
“The doctor figured what was wrong with me and gave me some pills.” Events tumble out of order so she’s talking about having blue dye put into her veins before the test where the blood was taken out. She leaves too much out of her account to have it make any sense and puts in what hardly matters, and still he doesn’t move. This isn’t how she imagined it. Flung into his arms was the picture that formed in her mind, him cradling her face. A gift is how she hoped he’d see her, not this, like a grave opened and the dead rose up and called him by name.
His hands are shaking. “It’s—You—the change—” He doesn’t like it.
A little too loud, she says, “It’s still me.”
Slowly, his hands leave his sides as if he’s trying to get his balance on a narrow log with her on one end and him on the other. His eyes leave her face to take in the rest of her. By what measure is she being tallied? Unblue isn’t something you can count in inches and ounces. What they use to figure gravity or the depth of the ocean, maybe.
“Anyway, the doctor says it’s not a cure, it’s a treatment. I have to take the pills every day.” Why must she keep talking about this?
He frowns, squints, blinks. His face makes all the twirl go out of her. A man came to the World of Wonders one day, scoffing and pointing at Jubilee’s neck and claiming he could see where the paint ran out. With her saddest face, Jubilee tried to convince him that she was in fact a real-life tragedy, but he complained to the barker that he didn’t pay to see a hoax and demanded his dime back. Call her a wrong that can’t be made right, a witch, speller, carrion, or curse, but not hoax. Hoax had a skinning feel. And now she feels like the same dirty trick he accused her of being.
“I heard you were going to come up to the house, but my mother is not well. Your visit would be very upsetting.”
“Yes, of course. I would’ve replied to the letter, but I didn’t want to wait.”
“What letter?”
Stammering, he tells of a letter that was mailed to his old address in Cincinnati and then forwarded to his parents’ house, and she can’t see what postmarks have to do with anything.
“Who sent it to you?”
“Socall. I thought you knew.”
Everything about this is wrong. He came because he was asked to? Because he felt obliged? What all had Socall written?
“She said I’d find you somewhat changed,” he continues. “Perhaps she thought this was the kind of news best delivered in person.”
“Levi is dead.” Isn’t that the kind of news that gets delivered in person? She watches one type of shock drain from his face and another type fill it back up. “Ronny killed him.”
Havens keeps shaking his head, keeps saying he’s sorry, keeps looking at her as if she’s to take back the words and go back to being the girl he met last time, but how far she is from that girl, and the sooner he understands this, the better.
“Socall’s letter was a mistake.”
He extends his hand as if he means to call an injured dog out from under a porch. “Please don’t say that. I’ve been hoping for a letter.” He talks of being in two minds about returning, about being afraid she didn’t want him to come back and how much he has worried about her, and all she wants is to yell, What about my pretty skin! If you see a butterfly come out of its cocoon, don’t you stick out your finger and see if it won’t light on it?
“Well, you needn’t have come, I’m fine.” Words sometimes come with no warning and without your say-so. “I’m due back home,” she says.
He reaches for her as she heads for the front door, but this time he looks where his hand touches her skin. “Wait, please don’t go yet.” He follows her out onto the sidewalk, where she signals Chappy on the other side of the street to go about his business. Havens follows her down the road. “I’ve upset you. I’m sorry. This isn’t how I wanted it to be.”
If he’s disappointed with what’s on the surface, he’s going to be appalled by what’s underneath.
Where the paved road gives way to gravel, she faces him. “If you really wanted to come back, you wouldn’t have waited to be told.” Maybe it’s her memory at fault, but he seems altered some, too, and not for the better. His coat and trousers hang about him, the beard adds ten years, and he favors his foot as if he’s fresh-bitten.
“You didn’t meet me at the shack and then you didn’t answer my letter—isn’t that a pretty clear indication that a man ought to keep his distance?”
“You wrote?”
“Two months ago.” He explains that he addressed his letter to Pa though its message was meant for her, and sent it care of Postmaster Combs, who did him the courtesy of writing back to confirm he’d delivered the letter in person. Havens’s hand beckons her as though she need only take it to cross the divide, but between him and her is something gouged wide by shame and deep by all the things that can’t be undone. “I didn’t come here because Socall told me to.”
“I need to go.”
“I’ve made a mess of things, which is exactly what I feared I’d do. I have all these things I want to say to you. Give me another chance, that’s all I’m asking.” He tells her he’s paid for two weeks’ lodging. “I’ll be here every day, so it doesn’t have to be today, or tomorrow. It can be a week from now, whenever you want.”
“You can’t come to my house.”
“No, of course. I could meet you anywhere. You could have Chappy tell me where and when.”
She considers him a long while, weighing her desire to agree against the fear that he’ll regret ever having returned.
“I have to go.” She starts for the woods.
“Is that a ‘yes’?” he calls after her. “Jubilee? Jubilee!”
* * *
“All right, all right, I’m coming!” Socall yells from inside, but Jubilee keeps pounding on her door until it flies open, and right away, Socall’s ill temper is replaced with a guilty look.
“You didn’t think to warn me?” Jubilee still can’t stop shaking.
“I should’ve told you, I’m sorry, but I wasn’t sure he’d come and I couldn’t stand the idea of you being disappointed if he didn’t.” Socall makes no attempt to hide her enthusiasm. “But he came; that’s the main thing!”
“And what did you imagine was going to happen, that we’d go running into each other’s arms?”
Socall’s face drops. “Oh, honey.”
Jubilee retreats from Socall’s reach. She doesn’t want her to feel sorry for her, doesn’t want anyone to feel sorry for her ever again. What if a person can’t ever be consoled? “So you knew he wrote me a letter?”
“Levi was gone and you were gone, so when Combs delivered that letter, your Pa took it and all those pictures and fed them to the fireplace. He didn’t even read it.”
Jubilee slumps down on Socall’s freshly painted orange steps, scoots over when Socall gestures to make room, and bats Socall’s hand away when she tries to re-pin an errant strand of hair.
“Your skin is nice and all, don’t get me wrong, but it’s what’s going on inside that’s been worrying me. And you’re not just upset about the letters,” Socall guesses. “Woul
d it feel better to get it off your chest?”
Shoring up resolve not to speak of it lasts only so long. “All this color does is hide what’s happened.” Jubilee tells some about the World of Wonders, about having attracted people like blowflies to a dead cow. “If he knew what’s become of me, he’d go away wishing he’d left well enough alone.”
Socall grabs Jubilee’s hand and gives it a shake. “Each and every one of us has had to do things we’re not proud of. What we’re not proud of is what makes us all equal. Though in my opinion, you’ve got to come down a lot lower before you join the rest of us.”
“So, you think I should see him?”
“There’s unfinished business between you and Snakebite, and you have to see this thing to its conclusion, whatever conclusion that turns out to be.”
Together they watch the shadows lengthen, and between them settles the kind of silence that comes after a hard rain breaks a drought.
HAVENS
Ten o’clock, and the sun has yet to burn through the fog. Curtaining off the meadow from the rest of the holler is the hazy suggestion of trees, and a double-veiled hillside reposes at a discreet distance like a seasoned chaperone. Somewhere a woodpecker is drilling against an unyielding trunk. Other than that, nothing but a hush. You can almost hear the blades of grass bending from the strain of heavy dew. Careful not to step in any of the tiny gossamer hammocks, Havens arrived at the aviary two hours earlier than what she’d arranged, and the wait has made him jittery and fearful that this will be a repeat of the last time he waited for her. Twice he has rushed toward a shape thinking it her, only to discover a bush.
Only one other time has Havens felt this way about someone. Over the years it’s been easier to attribute his and Virginia’s parting of ways to the matter of children rather than admit an attendant issue, for which he was also at fault: using only clues as to Virginia’s preferences for a romantic match—what he’d perceived to have been clues, which could just as easily have been red herrings or whims based on her fluctuating moods—Havens had fashioned his nineteen-year-old self into who he believed Virginia’s ideal man would be, then spent every moment trying to live up to the construct, which turned out not to suit her in the least. How could she ever have been anything but disappointed? Thirteen years later and scantly more self-assured than his younger self, he now wishes he’d accrued a surplus of attractive features and accomplishments, and the temptation is great to present Jubilee with an intended version of himself in the hope that he’ll one day mature into it, but he is resolved to play no part in deceiving her about his deficits, even if it means receiving marching orders sooner rather than later.
He spots her the moment she steps out from between the misty trees. She has Chappy accompany her only as far as the redbud tree, and she comes the rest of the way looking as if she is about to deliver bad news. Instead of a heart, there is a ceiling fan in Havens’s chest, and its lopsided wobble at full-speed threatens to loosen the entire fixture. What he plans to say flies right out of his head when she reaches him, and he is struck much as he was when he first saw her at the stream, except this time she doesn’t turn away or startle. It seems nothing could startle her anymore. Wearing a pale pink dress and white shawl, she is the color of peeled apples, but there are other changes, too—her auburn hair is shorter, just below her shoulders, and wavy, and she’s even more slight around the waist and shoulders. He has to stifle the urge to pick her up.
“Thank you for meeting me.” He hands her the posy of lilacs, then takes off his hat and turns the brim around and around as if to steer clear of hazards. He must not come on like gangbusters, not be off-putting.
“I can’t stay long.” She fiddles with the corner of her shawl.
“It’s just so wonderful to see you, to be here, in your company. It doesn’t feel real, does it?” He apologizes for how he conducted himself at the boarding house the day before, and confesses that he didn’t sleep a wink.
Her eyes are gray in this light, washed almost entirely of green, and still her gaze makes him feel numb. She has a guarded way about her, different from the wariness of strangers she had when they first met.
“Shall we sit?” He beckons to the nearby log, but she stays where she is, and an awkward silence gathers between them. None of the easy way from when last they were together exists, and how could it? How can she feel about him now as she did before?
“Your foot’s not all the way healed.”
Foot? “Oh, right. I overdo it sometimes, and it lets me know. The doctor says the limp will go away in time.” Why ramble on about this?
“They didn’t print my picture, did they?” she asks.
He gives a brief account of chasing down the photograph and making sure the story got buried.
“You lost your job?”
“My loss is nothing compared to what you’ve gone through.” Last night Sylvia Fullhart filled him in on Ronny’s assertions of killing Levi in self-defense, adding that few people took it to be chapter-and-verse.
“I tell myself I ought to take comfort that Levi found love before he died.” She tips her head back and turns cloudy eyes heavenward. After a long pause, she continues, “Everyone says time heals, but I don’t think so. I think time just keeps robbing a person.” She explains that it’s getting harder to remember the sound of his voice, that she’s having trouble remembering some of his songs. “Some days I can’t even picture his face. I lost him, and somehow I still keep losing him, and the crazy thing is I wish you still had that picture of him so I could see him again.”
Havens knows exactly the moment he’d have photographed Levi—on the porch that humid midsummer evening, flat-picking those guitar strings, bouncing the heel of his boot on the floor boards and singing in a bold voice full of plaintive arcs and drops. “I’d give anything to turn back the clock.”
“Turn it back to where? Because if it’s to a time before anyone gets hurt, you’d have to turn it to way before I was born.”
He reaches for her trembling hand and feels his chest swell when she permits him to hold it. Or maybe he’d stop the clock right now.
“Do you still take pictures?”
Havens evades the question. “I haven’t been myself, not since I left you.”
“Who I was is not who I am now.”
“I couldn’t expect you to be exactly the same. I’m not the same, either.” For the sake of transparency, he describes the morose, indecisive, self-pitying bum he’s allowed himself to be the past few months. Still, she does not give him the boot. He moves his thumb across the back of her hand, aware at once of everything about her—the tendons in her neck pulled taught, how rigid she stands, how shallow she breathes. “I’ve missed you so much, Jubilee.” So much he could crush her. Inching closer to her, he says, “There hasn’t been a day go by that I haven’t thought of you.”
“I expected you to go on with your life. I didn’t think you’d come back.”
Havens shows her the color picture Massey gave him. Even though he is barely in the frame, Havens’s posture and expression are a giveaway. “You tell me that’s a man who’s going to forget the woman in his arms and go on with his life.” He tells her she’d visit him in his dreams. “You’d be as real to me as you are now.” Sometimes, he’d wake up and look out the window, and he’d see her walking toward him, a trick doubly cruel for being so fleeting. “Everything reminded me of you,” he adds. “I couldn’t even see a pigeon and not think of you tending your birds.” He shows her the handkerchief she’d embroidered for him. “I don’t go anywhere without this. It’s my way of taking you with me.”
Briefly, she smiles, and he feels he could run a victory lap around the meadow.
She juts her chin in the direction. “Thomas is still here.”
“Of course he is. Only a fool would take off.”
“Do you want to say hello?”
As soon as they enter, the northern flicker flies off his perch and lands on her arm, fluffing his wings in
a display of pride. Havens’s greeting he returns with indifference. Together, he and Jubilee clean the cages and put out fresh seed for the convalescing birds, and he answers her questions about his daily routine in Dayton and the people he encounters along the way—the bus driver who always gives him money advice, the shoe shiner who sings Cab Calloway tunes, and the old beauty queen at the soda fountain who is the neighborhood matchmaker. “She knows all about you.”
“She does?”
“I imagine I’ll be back in her good graces when she hears I came to see you.”
“I know what a city is like now,” Jubilee volunteers, her tone changing and her eyes becoming hooded again. “I can’t say I care much for it.”
She stands in the doorway with her back to him. He watches her shoulders rise and drop. Though he’s anxious to know this part of her story, whether she’d been admitted to a hospital in Louisville or whether she’d met a doctor some other way, he senses her qualms and knows to let her go at her own pace.
“Ronny’s the reason I ended up in Louisville.” Facing him, she describes being ambushed on her way to the shack and finding out about Levi on the back of a pickup and being thrown on the four-twenty train, and Havens clenches and unclenches his fists.
“I was on that train! I should’ve found you!”
He follows her outside to the log, afraid to hear what comes next, and yet he says, “There isn’t anything you could tell me that will change my mind about you.”
As though having come to a crevasse, she hesitates. Eventually, with now-or-never resolve, she takes a deep breath and tells him she found employment at the World of Wonders Sideshow. “I was the Blue She-Devil. People paid to see me sit on a chair and shout curses.”
Havens is winded. He has difficulty tracking what she says. All manner of ghastly images are flooding his mind. To keep the shock from showing, he tries imitating a tree stump, but he has to put his hands on his knees. “How long?” Let it have been only one day, he prays.
She folds her hands in her lap. “Four months.”
