* * *
After the federal people came from Seattle and left again, after the television crew showed up and flooded their house with blinding white lights, they lay awake in bed. Paul had pulled the shade down, but the flashing lights still seeped in at the edges, and the room glistened around them like a pot of boiling water. Paul’s hand found her thigh and it patted her in a gentle, monotonous rhythm.
“He said something, didn’t he.”
“Who?” Anita said, though she knew who.
“The kid in the woods. He said something to you.” He rolled over to face her and propped his head up with his hand. “I know you. You’re keeping it secret.”
“He said hello.”
“‘Hello’?” He slumped onto his back. “Why are you hiding this from me?”
“I’m not hiding. It’s over, okay, Paul? It’s behind us.” Liar, she thought.
“But—” he said, then stopped. She heard his mouth open again, then close wetly.
“I’m exhausted. Can we go to sleep?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Good night,” she said, and kissed his cheek. His skin was warm and his hair smelled like smoke.
“Good night.”
But even now, she didn’t sleep. Paul was right. If this were a year ago—even a week ago, even yesterday—she would turn over and apologize for it, and tell him what had happened. But now she didn’t want to. This thrilled and terrified her; she felt like she had swallowed a dangerous drug that had not yet taken effect. When it became clear to her that there would be no sleep, she concentrated on slowing down her waking self until she was indistinguishable from a sleeping person: she breathed through her nose and felt the plane strike the earth, over and over; she slowed her heartbeat, replaying the boy’s death, dissecting every moment, trying to get it all right, each pine needle and turn of eye, and sap and blood and smoke.
She barely noticed when Paul got up, moving stealthily to keep from waking her, and squeezed out the door. But once he was gone, she became almost giddy with her subterfuge, and she giggled in the half-dark, filled with herself and her secrets.
And then, like that, it was gone—her concentration broken—and all that was left was fatigue and sorrow. I’ll tell him, she thought, but it was too late—she was already asleep and never noticed when he came back.
* * *
It rained in the morning. The sound was so strange to her that she thought she was back in college in Tuscaloosa; that she was about to be late for a morning class and for once, only once, didn’t care; that she would make herself a breakfast of Cream of Wheat and listen to the radio, the way she did on Saturdays. Then she remembered everything, and held the blankets to her chin until her equilibrium returned to her.
Quarter after six. She slid out of bed, trying not to wake Paul, and went to the kitchen. Through the window, she saw that floodlamps had been put up to guide the paramedics, and a bright path of light twisted into the darkness, interrupted by the trunks of trees. As she watched, two men in white carried a stretcher slowly along the path. They emerged from the woods and into the rain, angling toward the open doors of a waiting ambulance. On the stretcher lay a form under a white sheet, and the sheet fluttered in the wind. The men came to the ambulance and the stretcher disappeared into shadow.
“Ma’am?”
She yelped and whirled around, catching her cut knee on the handle of a drawer. Fresh blood rose to meet the pain. A man sat at the table, the paramedic from the woods. He stood up.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to scare you like that.”
“What are you doing in here?” she whispered.
“I’m real sorry.” He turned to the window, then back to her. “I just needed out of all that for a minute. Didn’t think anybody’d be awake in here.”
“Jesus,” she said, still shaking. Her knee throbbed.
“You cut yourself.”
She looked down. Blood drooled down the knee, where the boy’s blood had been the day before. Was his blood inside her now?
“I did.”
“I ought to patch that for you,” he said. “Make myself useful.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
He grinned. “I’ll be right back.”
She could feel her pulse in the wound, pushing blood out in thick little gasps. She thought about those suicides who slit their wrists in a tub of hot water. She could see the appeal of that.
He returned with a first aid kit and knelt on the floor at her feet. He pulled out a cloth and wiped away the blood, then dabbed iodine on the cut with a cotton swab. It stung, and she twitched. “Easy,” he said, to himself or to her she didn’t know. He smeared on something clear and cold and covered the knee with a neat patch of gauze and some tape. As he worked, he steadied her leg with a warm, dry hand on her calf, and she closed her eyes and inhaled the clean smell of antiseptics.
“Good as new,” he said, standing.
“Thank you.”
“No trouble, no trouble.” He looked out the window again and sighed. “Back to the grind,” he said. “Worst thing I ever seen.” He turned to go.
“Do you need anything? Cup of coffee?”
This stopped him a moment, but finally he said, “No, that’s okay. We’ll send somebody to town for takeout.”
When he was gone, she leaned against the counter, admiring the bandage. It felt good there, like a new pair of socks. In a little while, she went to the bedroom, quietly dressed, and left.
* * *
She took the car out to Valley Road, where a police car was parked. Inside, a cop was eating a sandwich. She rolled down her window.
“I live here,” she said. “Are you here to keep people out?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember me. I’m coming back.”
The cop raised his hand to her.
She drove five minutes past some ranches and an ugly new housing development, and under the train tracks and highway. Very few cars were out at this hour, especially today, a Saturday. Downtown she parked near a coffee shop she went to during the week. No other customers were inside. She ordered a coffee and bought a newspaper.
NO SURVIVORS
MARSHALL VALLEY PLANE CRASH KILLS 58
31 Marshall Residents Believed Dead
Her heart sank when she saw it, though there had been little doubt. Nobody had lived. There was an aerial photo: the plane had come down in two pieces, the tail section and the rest of it. An inset picture showed the blackened engine. She skimmed the article and found little she didn’t know. The police chief was saying that the list of victims would not be released until their families had been notified. “Nobody wants to find that out from the paper,” he told the reporter.
She wondered how the boy’s uncle had found out. Probably he was at the airport. She tried to imagine what he would be like, extrapolating from the boy’s freckles, his hair. Nothing came to her. She wished she could meet him, could tell him that the boy was thinking about him when he died. Larry, the uncle’s name was Larry.
She finished her coffee and walked around in the rain. She had loved doing this as a little girl—not just the feeling of being out in the rain when everyone else was inside, but knowing that there was a warm bath and dry clothes waiting for her, and the familiar comfort of her room.
Her parents were the kind of people to whom a rainstorm posed no more limitations than a sunny day, to whom the day was no more appropriate for doing anything than the middle of the night. They had been hippies when she was born, and to some extent still were; they could rarely see past the next couple of days, let alone years. “If we thought ahead,” her mother once told her, “we probably wouldn’t have had you.” They never planned for her education, and Anita had to work her way through college, taking night classes at school and working days at the bank. It was there that she first got access to her parents’ finances: they had no savings, and their checking account (riddled with bounced checks and service charges) rarely had more than a couple of h
undred dollars in it. Her dad worked at an ice cream factory and her mother made jewelry.
So it was no thanks to them that she became a neat freak. That came from her second-grade friend Vanessa, the smartest girl in the class, whose mild British accent made her the butt of class jokes among those who envied her grades. Anita liked her, though. She took her licks with dignity and wore her hair in a French braid. She and Anita ate lunch together and made up elaborate stories based on their classmates’ worst qualities.
Anita thought that Vanessa must be rich, as she assumed all British people were. But when she was finally invited to the house, she was surprised: it was modest, and her parents self-effacing and frumpy. They weren’t rich; only clean. Where were the trays full of cigarette butts, the teetering stacks of books on the floor? The kitchen linoleum was unscuffed and unstained, and the trash sealed away in an upright plastic lidded box, instead of a leaky paper grocery sack. During dinner, Vanessa and her parents ate with unhurried dignity and washed their dishes as soon as they were through; afterward Vanessa’s mother mended clothes and her father, a newspaper reporter, read a stack of daily papers from all over Alabama.
When Vanessa suggested playing a game, she led Anita upstairs to her bedroom, where she slid a board game out from under the bed and removed the pieces from the box one by one. When they finished playing they replaced everything, put the game away and selected a new thing to do.
Anita was enthralled. Vanessa’s house calmed her, and when she went home she could barely breathe amid the dust and clutter. Her behavior at home began to change, and her mother grew puzzled. “You’re cleaning your room,” she said. “Why are you doing that?” Anita started washing dishes after dinner and cleaning up her parents’ messes, and began a secret resentment of them that lasted until she moved out of the house.
She supposed she married Paul partly because he was a mess to clean up. But it was more complicated than that: he was a kind and affectionate man when he thought to be, and he had a delicacy about him—thin fingers and neck, and a sort of windswept gawkiness—that provided her a nearly bottomless attraction. Most significantly—and now she regretted having been so taken in by this—he was utterly loyal. He would never leave her. Such a promise was irresistible to her at twenty-one, her heart as lonely and open as an empty house; now it wasn’t enough. She would no longer fool herself that Paul was going to turn into somebody else.
She left the coffee shop by seven-thirty, but stood for several minutes just outside the door, under the wide green awning, and watched clouds move across the mountains. From a distance, the world looked carefully orchestrated: the hills’ simple rock carpeted with trees, the weather traveling, changing, as if with a specific destination. She remembered, as a child, noticing this apparent purpose up close too: the pattern of cells seen through a microscope, or the fastidious sameness of a flower’s petals.
She walked a few blocks down Weir Avenue to the florist’s shop. It was closed, but through the door, hazy with condensation, she saw its proprietor leaning over a desk, sipping a cup of something. She knocked, and the woman looked up, alarmed. Anita waved. The woman held up her wrist and tapped her watch. Anita made a pleading face. Finally the woman came to the door and opened it a crack. Moist, perfumed air breathed out. She was middle-aged, plump, a look of private self-satisfaction fixed on her face. “We’re not open yet,” she said.
“I know. I was just wondering…I don’t want to come in, but maybe I could get some flowers.” She dug bills out of her pocket and held them up. “Maybe some daffodils?”
The woman frowned, turned her head back to her desk and steaming cup. “Well…” She disappeared for a moment into the back of the shop. Anita kept the door open with her foot, breathing in the warm air. She felt water on her back and shivered.
“Two dollars?” the woman said when she returned. In her hand was a wrapped bundle of half-open daffodils, more than Anita had ever bought at once.
“For all those?”
“Okay, three.”
Anita handed over the money and took the flowers. As she left, she saw the woman settling back into her chair, and felt a twinge of jealousy tickle the back of her throat.
By the time she returned to her car she was soaked and cold, but focused. The things she needed to do fell into place in her mind like ice cubes in a tray: she needed to drive home; she needed to take a hot shower. Dealing with Paul was far down on the list, pressing but distant. She got into the car, set the flowers on the passenger seat, turned the heat on full blast and watched the windows fog up around her.
Driving through town, she grew impatient at lights; pedestrians blocked her right turns and she pounded the wheel in frustration. An old woman tapped at her window while she waited at Weir and Cedar; Anita knew her. She was crazy. She had a gigantic account at the bank, and a safety deposit box so stuffed it could barely be closed. “Can I trouble you for a ride?” she hollered over the traffic noise. Anita had given her rides before, but when the light changed she raced through the intersection as if chased, leaving her with a vague sensation of wrongdoing.
When she got home, the cop guarding their drive was gone, as were most of the cars in the yard. They had left behind a muddy landscape of deep ruts. Only the ambulance and dumpster were left now, and the drab green Buick of the federal investigators.
Inside, all was quiet. Muddy footprints crisscrossed the kitchen floor. She checked in on Paul. He was still sleeping. What was it that she felt for him? She stood watching, trying to figure it out. Tenderness, she felt tenderness, she decided, and stopped there, for now.
She turned on the faucets for her bath, then stepped into the kitchen, where she stuck the daffodils into a glass of water. She set the glass in the middle of the table. It was by far the brightest thing in the room, but the flowers, still not completely open, struck her as pitiful and vulnerable.
Through the window, she saw a few straggling paramedics, looking limp and haggard as they walked back and forth in the yard. As she watched, a man approached the dumpster carrying a wet plastic bag, darkened by its contents. When he got there, he tossed the bag in.
5
Bernardo made his plane reservation, put the ticket on his credit card. Probably he would never pay for it. His hands were shaking. He copied down his departure time with difficulty, and in the dim light from the street the numbers came out lopsided and barely legible: 6:44 a.m. for his flight from Reggio to Rome, and then a few transfers to Seattle, and another to Montana. He hung up and looked at his watch: ten o’clock. He had all night to wait.
Even here, in his own kitchen, he felt exposed. He went to the painting studio, locked the door behind him, pulled down the window shade and turned on the light. He left the window open a crack, the better to hear anyone who might come looking for him. Paula had already been to the door twice, and the phone had rung several times. He hadn’t answered.
There was a time when he could find comfort in this sort of solitude, when he could enter into a state of blissful concentration. Now there was only loneliness and fear. He went to the armchair, sat down, took the ashtray off the arm and set it on the floor. On second thought he dumped it out on the carpet—no point in keeping things tidy now—and lit a fresh cigarette. He crossed his legs and took on the demeanor of a relaxing man. He looked at the paintings.
He was a bad painter, the paintings were testament to that. In his lowest hours he had often tortured himself with his shortcomings: his technical ineptitude only heightened the shallowness of his subject, which was always the same. The sea. He was a seascape painter. This was not an unusual thing to do in Reggio di Calabria, as it was a coastal town, right on the strait, and seascape painters were a dime a dozen. They painted in the morning and sold the paintings to tourists in the afternoon. But Bernardo’s paintings had never left the studio.
The one he liked best—the only one he liked at all, in fact—he had never finished. Like the others, it had no title. It leaned crookedly against the far
wall, opposite his chair, just where he’d left it years before when he stopped working on it. He supposed he was afraid of finishing, of wrecking what little was good about it. It depicted a trio of turn-of-the-century Calabrian swordfishermen, floating in one of the old-style wooden boats, the kind with the upright cross standing in the center like an altarpiece. A lookout man, the guardiano, stood on the crossbeam, one arm wrapped around the pole, one pointing to the water somewhere beyond the painting’s right-hand edge. Below him stood the allanzatore, his spear balanced on his shoulder, peering where the lookout was pointing. A third man stood with his hand on the pole for support, staring off into the distance, where another boat, a larger one, trawled deeper water.
Bernardo liked the desperation of the scene. The lookout’s arm and fingers curled around the cross for dear life, and his legs, bent at the knees, seemed about to give way. The spearman’s stance was defiant and dignified, even as his face betrayed his frustration. But the predicament of the third man, the oarsman, was Bernardo’s favorite part. The ship he was watching spelled doom for his small boat. It was the future of swordfishing: the long steel hull, the gleaming spears that never missed. In the painting, it was only the oarsman who seemed to know this.
This oarsman was—or was supposed to be—Bernardo’s grandfather, dead fifty years now. Ultimately, the oarsman was a failure. He didn’t look enough like the old man, Bernardo thought. In moments of expansive optimism, he tried to convince himself that the mental image he had of his grandfather was idealized beyond recognition, that he would never be satisfied with any attempt he made to paint it, because painting it was impossible. But really, he knew better. What he had tried, and failed, to convey was not doom but hope. The oarsman knew what the big ships meant, but he didn’t care. It wouldn’t stop him. That persistence (perhaps foolishness), to Bernardo, was the essence of his grandfather. It just wasn’t evident in the painting.
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