Fellow Mortals

by Dennis Mahoney

  “We already have bikes,” Danny says.

  “We have to stay on the block.”

  “On our side of the street.”

  “Peg worries about strangers,” Bob explains.

  Henry rears up to study all their faces—surely one of them, at very least the youngest, will be giggling. Nan shakes her head in mannerly alarm and yet the fact is too incredible.

  “That’s crazy,” he decides. “I rode clear across town when I was your age.”

  “We don’t have a tree house.”

  “Ethan,” Bob says.

  “Done!” Henry shouts. “As long as your Dad says it’s okay.”

  “You really don’t—”

  “I know I don’t, Bob. But I really, really want to.”

  The aisle has a flutter. There’s a bad fluorescent bulb. The music stops—the deli has a call on line two—and then the radio and light are gracefully restored.

  “That’d be up in a tree,” Bob clarifies, all of them considering the glaring complication.

  “There’s grass under the tree,” Danny says.

  “It wouldn’t have to be that high,” Ethan adds.

  “We’ll make it strong enough to hold a few adults,” Henry tells him.

  Bob’s rubbing at his neck as if a talon’s digging in. “If you truly want to do this—and you don’t have to, I mean that—but if you really do,” he says, eyes going shifty, “then you maybe want to come unexpected with the lumber. On a Saturday morning. Say around nine.”

  “Does this Saturday work?” Henry whispers.

  Bob turns toward his boys and grips the handle of the cart.

  “Sure. Go ahead. This Saturday morning. Just between us for now,” he says to Danny and Ethan. “It’ll be a nice surprise for Mom when she makes it home for lunch. Assuming she even goes out…”

  “That reminds me,” Nan says. “I found a few more houses worth seeing this weekend.”

  “You did?” Joan asks.

  “Several hours’ worth. If you wouldn’t mind telling Peg,” she says to Bob, “we’re available Saturday morning. She’ll have to pick us up. Henry has plans.”

  The men shake hands, the boys and sisters say goodbye, and the groups part ways and carry on with their shopping. At the very end of the aisle, Joan spots a platter and says, “‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,’” but it’s Henry who’s arrested by a dawning realization.

  He turns so fast, Nan strikes him with the cart again.

  “What?” she asks, straightening the groceries that have toppled.

  “I don’t know the first thing about tree houses.”

  “Hm,” Nan says. “If only you knew an obsessive woodworker.”

  15

  When the Coopers drive up, Sam goes out to meet them. Wing’s got his head jutting out the back, choking on the partly rolled window, and Ava’s in the passenger seat with flowers on her dress and her hair blown free around her eyes.

  Sam is laundromat clean, newly shaved and showered, and before they’re out of the car he double-checks his shirt and tucks it in more precisely, smoothing out the front. Wing bounds up and paws him in the crotch; he leaves a muddy print and runs off, hitting every puddle till he finds a patch of muck and flops down, with a somersault, in animal delight.

  “He gotcha.” Henry laughs.

  Sam attempts a casual removal of the stain. Ava meets him on the grass with a gesture of hello, her smile and her wave partially withheld. She’s prettier and plainer than the woman he remembers, and he hesitates, adjusting to her actual appearance. He invited her today, having mentioned it to Henry, but she stands apart, looking at the homes on either side and at the fast-moving scud right above the trees. It’s been intermittent showers, intermittent sun, the weather changing hourly but blustery and damp. Thunderstorms are coming. He can smell it on the breeze and in the rills of cooler air that ripple through the heat.

  “I ate some of your sandwich last week,” Sam says.

  Ava turns to him at last.

  “I ran around like Wing,” he says. “I almost started bawling.”

  “I warned you,” Henry tells him, proud of Sam’s gumption.

  Ava doesn’t speak but has a ruddier complexion, maybe tickled or intrigued, maybe thinking—and it only just occurs to Sam now—about his mouth upon the partly eaten sandwich of a stranger.

  He insists on carrying the cooler. Ava leads the way while he and Henry walk behind her on the path toward the clearing. Wing’s beside them and around them, everywhere at once, and as they talk about the progress he’s been making on the cabin, Sam admires Ava’s dress and how it flourishes around her. She’s ample in her figure but her stride is full of buoyancy, every swell balancing another as she moves.

  “Oh,” Henry says, snapping his fingers and doing the worst I-just-remembered-something Sam’s ever seen. “I ran into Bob Carmichael at the supermarket. He was shopping with his boys. Really nice kids. I kind of offered to build them a tree house.”

  “Really,” Sam says, eyebrows just about rising off his head. Ava doesn’t turn but steps a little harder. “I can’t see Peg letting her sons into a Cooper-built structure.”

  “Neither could Bob,” Henry says. “But the boys really want it, and Peg’ll be out of the house this Saturday morning. I figure if it’s far enough along before she gets home…”

  Sam shakes his head very slowly, very widely. “She wouldn’t let her kids take candy from the Finns.”

  “We’re aware of Peg’s charms,” Ava says, peeking back without stopping. “What Henry needs is someone who can build a tree house.”

  “For the boys,” Henry adds. “I wouldn’t ask if I was doing this for me.”

  Sam remembers Danny and Ethan on their bikes, how they used to jump the curb when Peg wasn’t watching. He once caught them peeking at his sculptures through the window. They often helped Laura shovel out her car. He can see them doing plenty with a tree house, stocking it with M&M’s, defending it with traps, but the thought of showing up with Henry like a team …

  “Can I think about it?”

  “Yeah. No, forget it,” Henry says. “It’s basically a box and a ladder. How hard can it be?”

  “I’m not saying no. It’s just—”

  “Say no more,” Henry tells him.

  They arrive at the clearing sooner than expected. Sam wishes he could get a better look at Ava’s face. Instead she wanders off to see the cabin with its newly finished roof, its windowpanes darkened from the lack of inner light. There’s something grim and even fearsome in its being here at all, a quality he recognizes now through Ava’s eyes and through her standing there, tiny and domestic at the door.

  There’s a rumble of thunder in the west, not the day’s first but more convincing than the others. They had planned to move a heap of rotten limbs that Sam had cut, but with the storm moving in, he suggests they all relax and have an early lunch inside.

  “I’ll get the branches,” Henry says. “You and Ava see the sculptures.”

  It’s part of what he offered when he made the invitation.

  “We have a little time.”

  “I’d love to,” Ava says.

  They both regard the sky, neither of them moving, but the storm, having growled, isn’t forcing them to stay. Henry carries branches, nothing heavy or unwieldy—a completely different worker in the presence of his wife. Sam and Ava start hiking through the trees without a word. Her body has a corseted rigidity and poise, and now that they’re alone she looks at everything but him. The wind comes and goes. They hear it in the leaves deeper in the woods, swishing closer till it’s rushing overhead and passing on. Sam’s noticed that the forest feels smaller when it’s gloomy—not at night when the dark makes it infinitely vast, but on days like today, in the muted light of clouds, when the trees seem to huddle and the ground feels warm.

  They begin with The Reacher, the first Sam did and nearest to the cabin. He watches her the last ten seconds of the walk before they come around the thicket, lon
g enough that Ava grows uncomfortable and faces him. She can’t imagine what he’s staring at her for, and then she turns and understands, gasping at the figure. Sam’s been staining all his work to gentle browns and grays, weathering the fresh-cut whiteness of the wood and keeping them in harmony with everything around them. Ava cranes up, mouth quietly ajar, and then she elevates her hand—barely lifting it, he sees—as if to touch it in her mind or make an empathetic gesture. But it’s fear as much as wonder in the color of her eyes, a thrill that makes his own dull pulse start to race.

  He goes before they’re tempted to discuss it and she follows him, attuned to what’s around her and prepared to meet the others. She marvels at The Strongman shouldering the tree, how his knees seem to quake beneath the overbearing weight. Sam regrets it, having killed the tree, in all likelihood, by cutting up the trunk, but now he gets to watch Ava put her hand upon the form, pressing on the great round muscle of his heart.

  They pass The Pusher with the rock and several more that he’s completed—disembodied arms and legs breaking from the ground; a man with antlers in the agony of changing to a stag. They come upon The Prisoner with the hollow in his chest, and even with the beard she seems to recognize the face.

  Sam studies her expressions while she studies all his sculptures. Just the sight of Ava’s hair summons memories of Laura. How she used to bite an apple up and down instead of sideways. The smell of her in spring after jogging in the rain. He starts to cry without a sound, feeling nothing in particular, the symptom too familiar to conceal or make a fuss about. It passes just as quickly but it wearies him tremendously. He lets her walk ahead and tries recovering his breath.

  Ava leaves him to his thoughts and gets a wave of déjà vu that’s difficult to clarify, a memory of having some memory before. She stops before an evergreen toppled by the wind, horizontal but supported at an angle by an oak. There’s a woman on her back. She’s naked and supine, semi-arched with her stomach and her knees rising up. Her ankles are together, ten toes in a row, and her wrists cross high above her head as if they’re bound. She’s luxuriant and warm, stretching in her sleep, in the contour of someone in surrender to a dream. A giant wingtip is covering her eyes like a hand. A second wing folds around the middle of her waist, holding her secure and covering her navel. All around her, by the hundreds, lie the shavings of a wood plane, each of them a fine white feather in the leaves.

  Ava holds a hand to the bottom of her stomach, breathing through her mouth and following the swell. When the breeze soughs up, it’s downy and caressing, softening her hair and moving through her dress. Rain begins to patter on the highest of the leaves; they can hear it, like static, long before it lands. Lightning flickers in the shade and there’s a thunderclap, close. She picks a shaving up and keeps it when they start back out.

  The woods have darkened imperceptibly and suddenly it’s cold. The quicker pace enlivens them, dispelling what they saw. Sam is clearer now, approachable—a sculptor, nothing more. For a while there, he might have been a shadow or a ghost.

  “What are you doing out here?” Ava asks, over-bright.

  Sam continues on beside her, neither tensing nor exhaling.

  “I mean, it’s wonderful,” she says. “But with the cabin now it’s…”

  “Strange.”

  She’s surprised to hear him speak the very word that she was thinking.

  “Henry’s worried,” Ava says. “So are Nan and Joan.”

  “And you?” he asks, turning and impossible to gauge.

  “I don’t know you.”

  Sam smiles. Ava wonders what it means.

  They reach the cabin right before the storm opens up. Wing’s in a corner, hiding from the thunder. He’s relieved to see them back and greets them with a wag, but his fear’s too instinctual to meet them at the door.

  “This ought to be interesting,” Sam says, looking at the rafters. “There hasn’t been a serious rain since I finished the roof.”

  He lights a kerosene lantern and the room comes alive, shapes overlapping on the firelit walls. The table’s in the middle with a set of plastic chairs, but aside from his chest of supplies the place remains unfurnished, comfortable but lacking any quality of home. Another great bolt brightens up the clearing and the rain falls strong, blowing in the door. Ava looks for Henry but he isn’t in the clearing so she settles on her heels, reassuring Wing.

  “How long were you married?” Ava asks.

  “Three years,” Sam says. “We were together five. It feels like less.”

  “Henry and I have been together twenty. It feels like more.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It depends on which year we’re talking about,” she says with a smile. “Why do you think it felt shorter with Laura?”

  He pauses at the door, looking at the rain, and holds the lantern overhead to reassess the ceiling.

  “We were apart a lot of the time,” Sam says. “She worked nights. I was sculpting. In the last year, we were probably together, I don’t know … an hour a day? Even less sometimes. Neither of us liked it. But you form certain habits…”

  He stops what he’s saying when he notices a leak. It’s minor but it hisses on the lantern glass. He puts an old paper cup underneath it on the floor, missing five or six drips before aligning it correctly. It’s comical, she thinks, because the door is standing open and the floor around the entryway is positively soaked.

  Henry appears in the distance, striding through the mud, blurry in the storm with an armload of wood. Thunder cracks, zero Mississippis from the flash, but when Ava calls him in, he doesn’t hear and carries on.

  Sam joins her at the door to watch him in the clearing and they’re misted by the rain, arms pressed together, following his shape until he lumbers out of sight.

  “How serious is Henry’s heart condition?” he asks.

  “Serious enough.”

  “I lied to you,” he says.

  “Lied about what?”

  “About the cabin. He’s been helping all along.”

  Water gusts in and Ava shuts the door. “Doing what?”

  Sam sits but isn’t comfortable; he fidgets in the chair.

  “Everything,” he says, muffled by the rain. “Cutting trees, hauling logs. Lifting them in place.”

  Ava paces with the table like a barrier between them.

  “You knew about his heart?”

  “He told me it was nothing. I took him at his word,” Sam says. “But when he asked me not to tell you…”

  She forgets about the cup and kicks it over with a pop, most of what was in it splashing on her shoe. When she bends to pick it up, the cold leak dribbles on her neck. Then she can’t reposition it no matter what she tries. Sam observes her—that’s the word—as if afraid to intervene, and Ava notices her dress is clinging to her breasts. She tries to fluff it loose but then she really doesn’t care, facing Sam and swelling up, daring him to look.

  “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know,” she says. “I’m glad you told me.”

  “Let me get him…”

  “Let him finish,” Ava says.

  * * *

  Henry stumbles to his knee with the last load of wood. The moisture in the air makes him feel as if he’s drowning. It’s astonishing humidity, a swamp of steamy air. He breathes as deeply as he can but the pressure’s overwhelming and he sways, and his vision turns to particles and fuzz. He can’t see the cabin and the sky feels low, right above the leaves and smothering him down. Then a breeze lifts up, freshening his skin, and the world comes clear after several hazy minutes. He decides he ought to eat and tromps across the clearing.

  The thunderstorm’s passed. It’s more impressive at a distance, charcoal and guttural and burly through the trees, and only now do the flickers of the lightning make him nervous. He can see Sam and Ava in the cabin setting lunch. Wing wriggles at the door; he isn’t sure it’s safe yet but can’t bear to wait, so he runs full tilt and almost knocks Henry down. They grapple in th
e mud, man and dog reunited.

  “I’m all right,” he says to Wing, who can tell something’s off.

  Henry strides in, showing off the mess, but his smile falls apart when Ava turns around.

  “Oh!” she says, deflecting his embrace with a palm. She notices that Wing is muddying her dress, pushes him away, and says, “Look at the floor.”

  “Ah, shit,” Henry says. “Sorry, Sam. I’ll clean it up.”

  “It’s a cabin.” Sam shrugs. “Come inside.”

  Ava bristles.

  “Nan’ll get that out,” Henry says about her dress.

  “I’ll get it out,” she says, handing him a sandwich.

  Sam sits and eats potato chips, tipping in his chair. Ava opens all the windows, desperate for the air, and pretty soon they’re being bitten by a swarm of fresh mosquitoes.

  “What I say about the sculptures?” Henry asks through bologna. “Especially the lady with the wings. That’s my favorite. Not exactly my type of woman,” he adds, patting Ava’s thigh. “I’m more of a meat-and-potatoes man myself.”

  She puts her sandwich down.

  “You ought to use Ava as a model sometime.”

  Sam eats a chip, leaning farther in his chair, staring at her face as if to honestly consider it. They all go back to eating in silence until Henry finishes up, gives the last bite to Wing, and starts talking nonstop about Nan and Ava’s garden, Joan’s puzzles, anything that zips through his head. He comes around to Bob Carmichael at the supermarket again, mentioning the boys and the bicycle rule.

  “It’s different now,” Ava says. “Parents worry about abductions.”

  “I never got abducted.”

  “Maybe no one wanted you.”

  “I’ll do the tree house,” Sam announces.

  Henry gets a rush—even Wingnut stands—but it’s Ava who’s the most transformed by the news. She looks sunlit and full, gazing privately at Sam, seeming prouder of his help than Henry’s offer to build the tree house in the first place.

  Henry thanks Sam repeatedly and asks about lumber, screws, table saws, nails—Billy Kane knows tools, maybe he could help them out. Sam reminds him that Billy’s real house is structurally questionable and that the Kanes, by and large, are better left avoided. If they need an extra hand, they can always use Bob. They agree to buy supplies tomorrow afternoon and have them ready for construction right away on Saturday morning.