by Deb Caletti
“I feel you stepping back. These little distant moments…”
“Every relationship has those, Henry. Every one. Evan’s and mine did. I’m sure you and Sarah—”
“Oh, we had those, all right. We had plenty. Look what happened. She’s gone.”
“I’m here, Henry. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You don’t trust me. I’ve been nothing but honest since you found out. I’ve been an open book. You know you can ask me anything.”
“I do trust you.”
“You question…”
“It’s just hard, Henry. I mean…This isn’t a regular situation.”
“Years ago, I dated an unstable woman. That’s my crime! Virginia was always making threats. Always! Crying…some big scene. I should have gotten her help. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you know what that was like for me? Seeing her fall? Hearing her? Waiting for help to arrive? I will never recover from that. Never.”
“I’m so sorry, Henry.”
“Can you even begin to imagine, then, Sarah disappearing? That night, the wind, the rain…Her gone? Sarah, Jesus! You know, I could not handle her. I really couldn’t. I should have just let her go. Long before that night. You know, sometimes I wonder. I really wonder.”
“Let’s just forget this for tonight, huh? This whole thing with the pad of paper…A pen, Henry. That’s all. Let’s just stop this right here, okay?”
“What do you mean, ‘stop this’?”
“This! Tonight! This discussion. Let’s just order a pizza. Open a bottle of wine…”
“Cooking relaxes me.”
“Well, you can cook, then.”
“I just can’t stand it if you doubt me. I can’t stand being distrusted…”
“Come here.”
She puts her arms around him. His body is as tight as if it were bound in ropes, like the wrists and ankles of mutinous sailors about to be tossed overboard. She pretends to squish his arm muscles, loosening him up. But it feels bad, touching him.
“I can’t be perfect, Isabelle. I feel like I have to be perfect to make this worth it, considering everything else. I mean, are you going to stay with me when I’ve had this cloud of suspicion over me and I act like a bastard?”
“Don’t act like a bastard, then.”
He shakes her off.
“Kidding! I’m kidding.”
“Don’t leave me.”
“Henry, stop.”
He puts his face in his hands. She puts her arms around him. They are like that a long while, and then he kisses her. He unbuttons her blouse. Then he takes her hand and leads her down the hall to the bedroom. He can feel every disloyal thought, so she concentrates on his body, on wanting his body, wanting the body that is there, which could belong to anyone. She concentrates on want, and conveying want.
Afterward, they lay together. She is starving and she has to pee, but she senses she should let him get up first. Anything might be a rejection.
He is in a better mood now. Sex, the miracle cure. “Dinner? Are you hungry? I’m starving.” He rises, tosses on his jeans.
“Dinner sounds great.”
“Wait until you see what I’m making.”
He leaves the bedroom. In a few moments, there’s the clatter of pans and the smell of herbs in butter. Isabelle is just tying the sash of her robe when he calls to her.
“I forgot to tell you. You got a package.”
—
She goes into the bathroom. She splashes and splashes her face with cold water. She tries to stay calm, but there is a rise of anxiety that makes her heart beat like a hummingbird’s.
He has put on some music. Jazz. Jazz makes the anxiety worse. There’s a glass of wine set out for her on the coffee table. The night is foggy, and out the window she can see the distant arc of the lighthouse beam.
She sees the package on the hall table. It’s a small padded envelope. It screams and shouts.
“Who’s sending you things from France?” Henry yells from over the pop and sizzle of chicken cutlets in oil.
“Anne!” she shouts back. “She’s in…” She checks the postmark. “Lourmarin, on a tour. Feels like a silk scarf.”
“Something paper, I thought.”
“She loves those arty gift cards.”
It is now official. Isabelle is colluding with the sender of the packages. It is the two of them (or more, who knows—she still imagines Virginia’s girlfriends) against Henry. She takes the package and shoves it into the back of her closet.
“Something I’ll never wear,” she says when she returns. She puts her arms around Henry from behind. “That looks amazing.” She concentrates hard on believing in the silk scarf and its ugliness.
“It better be amazing, since I’m such an asshole,” he says.
—
In the night, that unopened envelope beats and thumps in the closet. It is the tell-tale heart under the floorboards, saying Guilty, guilty, guilty.
Who is guilty? Him? Her?
The sound of it is so loud. It thrums in her ears. And yet there is something louder. A realization from her own actions this night. The way she step-stepped around his need, the way she lay with her head on his chest until he rose. She remembers her father, tip-tip-tiptoeing, slipping out of doors, tending with the right gift or the soft word, digging the sneaky tunnel to freedom with a spoon.
It’s plain old instinct, because betrayal, disloyalty, rejection…Sometimes it’s dangerous, isn’t it? Sometimes it means a golf club gets raised, or…A cliff, a boat…
Get the fuck out, Maggie says. Now!
A person can be mean and right.
Why aren’t you leaving? Why aren’t you getting out of there right this minute?
Why doesn’t she leave? It’s the million-dollar question. She doesn’t leave because she’s scared and doubts her own perceptions and her own reality. She doesn’t leave because this is where she lives, and living elsewhere feels too hard. She doesn’t leave because she’s sure things will get better and that this is temporary and that the man she saw first is the real man she’s with now. She doesn’t leave because she has some dogged trust in the reasonable, some unmoving refusal to believe in her own peril. She has a persistent and against-all-evidence faith that those she loves won’t harm her. No, not faith—something much more fragile: a wish.
She doesn’t leave because she’s stupid, stupid, stupid, Maggie says. Anger saves you!
What anger? Henry breathes softly next to her. She can see his chest rising and falling in the dark. She pulls the covers to her chin.
That’s right. Get comfortable.
Who is this? It isn’t Maggie, and it’s not her own self, speaking this time. She hasn’t heard this voice, him, her father, in years and years. She suddenly has a clear vision of the back of his head on long car rides, streetlights shooting flashes of light, the radio low.
Might as well settle in, Izzy, he says and sighs. We’re stuck in this tuna boat and miles from home. Not much else a person can do but make the best of it.
She drifts off. She dreams of auto-bingo, and sprawling farmland, and fast-food drive-throughs. She dreams of a pulsing envelope, with a heart inside of it, ready for a transplant. She dreams that her own wrists and ankles are bound with rope. She’s a mutinous sailor, about to be tossed overboard.
Chapter 24
It’s early in the year, a good month early, for rains like this. Tropical storms don’t usually arrive until March. But the water lashes and hammers down; it slants meanly from the sky and pummels the roof, the ground, and Weary’s head as he hunches his shoulders and runs to the Jeep.
There is no telling who can get where. Roads will be washed away. The power is out. But Weary is the one in ultimate command (nice—he likes that), and so, come hell or literal high water, he must get to the research facility and make sure the captive crows are tended to.
The wipers flick-flick-flick-flick so fast
, but still, he can barely see. The palms whip and sway like manic hula dancers. The Jeep sploshes and spluts in the deep water-filled ruts of the road. At one point up the mountain, he has to gun the accelerator and hope for the best, as there’s a good two feet of floodwater blocking passage.
This would be the time when it would be nice to be back in Boston, tucked warmly into a Starbucks, reading Behavioral Ecology while sipping a peppermint mocha. Then again, that would mean he would not have just made it to the other side of that near-river by his own daring and valor. Anyone can order a double tall. Weary is here at the epic center of Woman-God-Mother-Nature, working with and against her. A palm branch hits the top of the vehicle with a crack, but he is unafraid.
It’s glorious, really. Look around. He’s alive!
The research facility looks brave, too, out here in this storm. With every light out, it’s dim, though, and the overworked gutters pour and pour. Inside, Weary shakes off the wet. First things first—the stores of feed. With the power gone, the eggs are out of the question, same with the fish bait and snails. It’s grains and cat food, shelled nuts and earthworms this week.
When Weary gets to the storage shed, he sees that Lotto is already there. Big, good, devoted Lot. Weary’s heart swells with fondness for him. It lifts with love for fellow humans together in bad times.
“It’s raining like a bastard,” Lotto says.
“It’s a typhoon!” Weary says. “How did you get here?”
“Bike,” Lotto says.
“Bike?” Weary can’t imagine it. There’s no conceivable way. “Bike and a miracle?”
“This storm’s not so bad.” Lotto was born in Nouméa. He’s used to these squalls. “Matias was here before me.”
“Good, good,” Weary says. But what he means is Fantastic. What he means is Thank you for being fine people with fine characters, almost like family. What he means is People like you make a place home.
“You should go back to your house now, Professor,” Lotto says. “It’ll take me and both my cousins to get your Jeep out if it gets stuck.”
“You should go back, Lotto.”
“I’m staying. Plus, Grandma’am is driving me crazy.”
“I don’t want you to be alone up here.”
“How could I be alone, with all of them?” He hooks his thumb toward the corvid pens. “Matias is probably staying, too.”
“Shame about the generator.”
“Piece of shit. Anyway, a generator doesn’t have a chance against this. You ever see a local with one?”
“They’re expensive.”
“Using your head is free and works better. I’d get back down the mountain in a hurry, though, if I were you.”
“I appreciate you, Lot.”
“It’s quieter here with all this wind than at home with Grandma’am and my sisters yapping at me.”
The thing is, in spite of his unconventional situation, life is beautiful here. Life is large. Life is one hundred percent.
—
With no power, and only the glass of wine for company, Weary is cut off. No phone, no television, but, more important, no Internet. No news. He paces, tries to read. Paces some more. Think of all the things that could be happening with Henry North and Isabelle, during this big stretch of pummeling rain and nothingness.
Plus, he will admit it. He’s become a little addicted to the click-click, the possibilities in the refresh. He’s as bad as the crows with the levers and their hope for their favorite treats. He presses and presses, only he gets tidbits of information instead of tater tots and hard-boiled egg.
The shutters bang-bang-bang. Weary tries to eat what is still safe to eat in the fridge. Drinks more wine. (Well, anyone would.) He paces some more. Knowing that the birds are in good hands back at the center, he has only one worry, one obsessive thought, one question.
What is happening, Isabelle?
Weary thinks of the one-eyed, long-bearded, Norse God Odin, the Raven God, with his long, dark cloak and broad hat, with his two goddess crows, Hunnin and Munnin, who bring him the news from all over Midgard. The ravens fly through the nine worlds and then return to Odin’s throne at dinnertime with their reports, mostly news from the battlefield, news about his female warriors, the Valkyries. Better yet, the raven goddesses could see into the future. They knew who would die, who would conquer, and they would whisper these knowings to him.
Weary could use those crows now.
He can only use the flight of his own imagination. He forces himself to settle into his desk chair, which sits in front of the dark, lifeless computer. The alcohol helps. He shuts his eyes. He raises his black satin wings. He lifts off. The wind through the palms sounds like the atmosphere zipping past his raven ears. The cliff is behind him, and now there’s only sky. He crosses the sea. There is a glass house on a bluff on an island. He swoops past the window, peers inside. There is a man and a woman.
They fight. They make love. A padded envelope sits on a table.
Raven Weary perches on a deck rail. Watches.
Empathy. What is she feeling? What is he? The envelope, which was once in Weary’s hands, is now in hers. He’s seen the hands; he imagines the lovely fingers opening the package. He imagines the weight of the ring on the left hand. Rip, tear, and then the images spill.
Weary knows there’s a good chance that Henry North will see the package this time. Perhaps he’ll even open it, paranoid child that he is. Would it hasten things? Blow it all up? God forbid, draw them closer for a time? Weary can’t control everything. But it seemed right to send the second envelope to their home where he might find it. It’s a little shakeup. A little rattle to the nerves.
Weary tries and tries to stare with his small, black-marble raven eyes into those large glass windows. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. One might think that Henry North is only paranoid because he’s been an unfairly and consistently hunted man. But no. Henry North is paranoid because he’s paranoid. He’s paranoid because he’s insecure, and he’s insecure because he’s been made small by that shitty, mean father of his. Weary is not unsympathetic on this point. He remembers his own father and the broken hinge on that violin case when he was a child, how scared he was to admit to it, because of what would happen. Still, you can blame and blame all you want; your actions are still your actions.
Crows are scavengers. They pick, pick at a body until only the skeleton is left. At first, for Isabelle, there will only be Henry North’s confident solid self, his largeness in the world, his practiced largeness. But then, even without Raven Weary pecking away to expose the soul, Henry North will show what he’s made of. Little by little, he will reveal the thin skin, and then the cruel heart, and then the fragile architecture beneath.
Raven Weary sits on the deck rail and watches. And then he lifts off again, to bring back the news to Norse God Weary, about who will win and who will lose this battle.
It’s possible he’s drunk.
Chapter 25
“Glad I caught you before you went home, Izzy. Can we talk for a sec?” Jane asks. Caught you sounds like an accidental meeting, but Jane just jogged to the parking lot from the office, and her big chest is heaving a little from the effort.
“If it’s about the Quinces and Shorecrest Engineering, I’m sorry.” Isabelle mixed up the reservations, and they ended up sending a small plane to pick up the large group.
“I don’t care about that. It’s fine. We’ll eat the refund. But, you, Izzy…Are you all right? You don’t seem well. You look awful. And you’re so distracted lately, I’m worried you’re going to walk off a cliff.
“Shit.” Jane realizes what she’s just said, shakes her head. It’s been a problem, the unconscious slips of everyone around her. There have been many nervous twitters around too many words: dead, missing, murder.
“I’m okay. I’ve just been busy.”
“Busy.”
“Yes, busy. A lot, you know, on my mind. I appreciate your concern, I do. It’s all
good.”
“I don’t want to press you. Just, I’m here. If you ever need to talk. Bud’s? Fried chicken? A little catching up?”
“Thanks for caring, but I promise, I’m fine. Really. You and Eddie can relax.”
Jesus!
“Not dinner, just a beer? I’ve got a twenty burning a hole in my pocket.”
“Sounds great, but another time? I’ve got to go.”
She’s got to go, because she has something important to do. She phoned Henry earlier. She’ll be home late, she lied, because the gang is going out to eat after work.
Is Joe going to be there? he asked.
No. It’s his sister’s birthday.
My God, she’s been lying a lot. The lies come so easily that she’s starting to get worried about keeping track of them. She should maybe get a binder with colored tabs, like she used to have for her high school world history class. The lies are necessary for keeping the peace, she tells herself. Keeping the peace is not a red flag. It’s a small city on fire before the war.
Like everything else, the lies are complicated. What is the situation, and what is merely her, being crazy, being unable to be in a relationship at all? Because she lies about Joe because Henry is jealous of Joe, and she lies about her doubts so she doesn’t trip his insecurity, and she lies about things like this package now riding on the seat next to her in the car, because it would make him lose his mind with understandable upset. But she also lies about small, inexplicable things. Decisions she’s made. Food she’s eaten. Things he’ll judge her for, but more than that. Things she just needs to keep for herself because she needs something that’s away from his prying eyes. The cheeseburger becomes a turkey sandwich just to have a little room to breathe.
Confusion is so helpful, the way it makes a bunch of commotion and noise so you can’t see the thing you don’t want to see.
“Another time, then,” Jane says.
Isabelle waves goodbye to Jane, who looks sad standing there in the parking lot. Isabelle misjudges the driveway and ends up bumping one tire down the curb as Jane watches. Damn it! The more Jane and Eddie worry, the more frazzled she gets, that’s what she tells herself. On the way into town, she runs a stoplight she’s been navigating since she learned to drive, and a Darigold truck narrowly misses her as the driver leans on his horn. Maybe she’s the real danger to herself. Isabelle’s phone buzzes from inside her purse. She pulls into the back lot of the library, parks next to the dumpster as if she’s eluding the cops after the bank robbery. She checks her messages.
