She isn’t here. She must be there—he must have picked her up this morning. Billy squeals a three-point turn and speeds away. He drives across town, skipping red lights and stop signs, pounding back a beer and picturing the cabin. She’d have walked right past when he was showering or sleeping. That’s assuming that she didn’t spend the night. He has to know. If he doesn’t, he’ll obsess about it, sitting home alone, thinking right this second Sam’s cutting her a second piece of pie, giving her a neck rub, saying everything—and more—that Billy meant to say.
* * *
Sam collects the Finns in his new pickup, a twelve-year-old Ford he purchased after selling his healthier but far less practical car. He mostly drives for groceries and supplies, the latter of which are often so big—his cast-iron cookstove an obvious example—that he’s usually forced to rent a truck anyway. The pickup has a cap and Wingnut’s behind them in the bed, free to roam and ludicrously happy, sniffing at the windows, pacing unsteadily and hip-checking walls.
A day of ecstasy for Wing—first a supermarket trip, then a morning out at Sam’s, where he ran around the cabin in the inch-high snow and marked a dozen trees, master of the woods. He ate a liver, not quite frozen, when Ava dropped giblets on the floor, and the smell of warm turkey’s had him ravenous for hours. Then he got to ride again to go and get the Finns, and now they’re all together, driving back to Ava, and he’s starting to believe that Henry might appear.
The Finns are wearing slacks and cashmere sweaters, Joan brown and green, Nan brown and orange. They’ve had their hair done and smell very faintly of salon. It’s overcast today, spiritless and pale with the roads wet-black and slushy in the gutters. They make it to Arcadia, where Sam’s prepared a flatbed, covered with a blanket, for the Finns to ride behind him on the ATV. Wing’s leashed between them and they have to take it slow, but despite the bumps and dips, Nan and Joan are happy on the passage up the trail, reminded of years they used to visit Christmas-tree farms, smitten with the woods’ spare beauty in the snow.
They give a heart-deep sigh when they come upon the cabin, admiring its tininess and firelit glow. Ava’s at the door and waves when they approach. She’s rosy from her work and wearing a blue vintage housedress, and even though she’s quite a bit thinner than she used to be, she doesn’t look drawn or malnourished anymore. She takes a pie from Joan and leans forward at the waist, giving each of the sisters quick little kisses on the cheek. There’s a smell of burning oak and turkey in the stove, newborn ice and frostbitten leaves. Sam frees Wing, who gallivants about, biting at a few stray flurries in the air.
“How’s the bird?” he asks.
“I don’t know.” Ava laughs. “We have another hour if you want to walk around.”
“You want to see the sculptures?”
“Of course,” Nan says with the tender irritation Henry used to prompt.
It won’t be easy for the Finns—the way is poorly beaten and the ground’s grown slippery—but they’re both wearing boots and winter coats and look determined. He offers each an elbow and glances back at Ava, guiding them along beyond the clearing, nice and easy.
He starts them at The Reacher, still grasping for the bough, the oldest of his work and so familiar to him now that he’s affected by the genuine amazement on their faces. It happens all the way without diminishment or talk, and every time another figure comes into view—partially obscured or suddenly appearing—Joan makes a sound, like an in-drawn “oh,” and points it out to Sam as if to savor his reaction.
Each of them is blanketed in fine clean flakes, delicate enough to scatter with a breath.
The Pusher at the rock, now holding up an ice floe.
The Strongman burdened with the extra weight of fall.
The Lover like a sepulcher in some forgotten graveyard.
The Prisoner with his heart-hole mended by the snow.
The Field of Limbs, like a terrifying vision of the spring.
The Gazer at the brook, water frozen to a trickle.
The defacement of The Weaver is concealed by a veil, and the great white web sparkles when it moves. They see the others he completed in the warmer weeks of autumn. There’s The Carver at his work, sinewy and twisted, in the process of sculpting out his own hidden legs. Then The Fire, which he shaped from a gathering of logs. He finished it in stages all throughout the summer, adding to the ripples and the ribbons of the flames. Now it stands enormous, sinuous, and dense before an evergreen bush representing smoke.
They reach the final figure that he carved before the freeze. It’s a freak growth that awed him when he found it: two giant oaks, one dead and one alive, fused together at the trunks and sixty feet tall. He carved a woman in the deadwood but didn’t cut the green. It’ll foliate in spring, unaffected by his work, and be a fully living sculpture with a canopy of leaves.
She’s climbing with a bare foot lifted off the ground, her other leg buried in the dirt, mid-calf. Her only clothing is a long, sheer gown, fine as silk, and her hair unspools down the middle of her back. She’s looking at the sky with a radiant expression, but her limbs have weight—there’s a gravity about her—and the roots around her ankle are inflexible and cruel.
By the time they come around and see the clearing just ahead, the woods feel numinous and gracefully alive. Joan’s reminded of her long-lost set of figurines, and even at the cabin she expects something more, certain that another strange marvel will appear. Even Nan feels hypnotized and doubtful of her senses. They’re reliant on his arms, glad of his support.
Back inside the cabin, Ava takes their coats. Nan stands frozen at the stove, her hands so numb they barely register the heat, until her fingers start tingling and her joints begin to thaw.
The table’s fully set and dominates the room. Wing’s underneath, watching everybody’s feet and waiting for the next dropped morsel on the floor. Turkey saturates the air, along with cinnamon and yeast, coffee and a myriad of spices and aromas. Nan helps Ava with the meal, organizing bowls and discussing the reliability of meat thermometers. Sam and Joan talk about the cabin, and the Finns’ own home, and the use of black pepper in a good pumpkin pie. A pair of deer pass the window and they all stop to watch, admiring the quick white flickers of the tails. Wing naps until Sam starts sharpening a knife. They heap the plate with breast meat and fill a bowl of stuffing, set the carrots and potatoes out, pass around rolls.
Nan says grace. It’s traditional and brief, a single-sentence prayer, but she almost starts crying when she says the word bounty. She watches Sam and Ava all throughout the meal. They sit together, opposite the Finns, a widow and a widower that look too young, too alive to play the roles. A stranger coming in would see them as a couple, with the nearness of their chairs, the automatic way they hand each other food, the subtle touch of elbows that neither seems to notice.
It worries Nan, thinking they’ll be devastated later when the night sets in and they remember who they are. Let it go, she decides. Let it breathe for a while. All five of them deserve an hour of reprieve.
26
The Carmichaels are due at the restaurant in less than an hour. Peg wants to leave early in case there’s holiday traffic but Danny’s been sitting on the toilet for the last twenty minutes when he ought to be tying his shoes.
“Get off before you give yourself a rash!” she hollers through the door, with the same breaking-point tone she used on Bob when he left his whiskers in the sink, and on Ethan, moments ago, when he groused about putting on a belt.
“I want to hear a flush in ten, nine, eight…,” she says, faster than actual seconds, and when she gets to three and hasn’t heard the toilet paper roll, she opens the door and walks right in.
Danny’s wide-eyed with fear, tears streaming down his cheeks, standing at the sink in his little shirt and tie. His pants are on the towel rack over the heat vent and his underwear is hidden in a ball behind the garbage. He wet himself and panicked. He’s been trying to correct it and he cries without a sound while his mothe
r looks around and registers the scene.
Peg hugs him so abruptly that he sobs even harder. His fingers on her back make her cry, too. She contains it with a sniff and reassures him with a smile.
“It’s okay,” she says, closing the door before Bob or Ethan happens to wander by. She gets him undressed and puts him into a quick warm shower. Once he’s toweled off, she helps him with his shirt and tie, kisses him twice, and checks his pants. Even in the dryer they’ll retain the smell of urine so she folds them up and says, “You’ll have to wear your jeans.”
Danny almost starts to cry again.
“It’ll be cool,” she says, assuring him it’s really very stylish. “You’ll look like a teenager. If Dad or Ethan ask, we’ll say the slacks didn’t fit.”
She gets the change of clothes and he’s immediately calm, and then she sneaks his pants into the washing machine and follows him up to the boys’ shared bedroom.
“I want to talk to you two,” she says, and whether it’s her mildness of voice or Danny’s lack of worry, Ethan comes to her with confidence—a slightly bigger version of his brother, handsome in his dress clothes and old, so much older than she comfortably admits. They look at her together and she kneels on the carpet, holding hands with each of them and turning face-to-face.
“I’m sorry for everything that happened this year. I wish I could have kept you from it all,” Peg says. “I know you think that I was mean to Mr. Cooper. I know you’re mad about the tree house and all my other rules…”
They shake their heads because they’re young and she’s their mother, not from honesty. She understands the difference and continues all the gentler.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I don’t expect you to like every one of my decisions. But I worry you’re afraid of me … afraid to disappoint me. And you shouldn’t be afraid of that. I love you more than anything.”
They hug her, both at once, in an awkward clutch of arms.
“Does this mean we can use the tree house again?” Ethan asks.
“No.”
“Can we order two desserts?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Why does Danny get to wear jeans?”
“I peed my pants,” Danny says, smiling in his shame.
Peg tenses when they openly discuss it, very crudely, but instead of redirecting them she watches them together, how they laugh and seem to instantly forget her in the fun.
“Okay, enough,” she finally says. “I want you at the door in ten minutes, not eleven, and we’re all going to have a wonderful Thanksgiving if it kills us.”
She walks downstairs, weary and regretting her decision that they eat away from home. Bob has occupied the bathroom so she waits before the living room window, looking at the neighborhood and thinking it was only last year, incredible but true, that the Baileys and the Finns were hanging decorations.
It’s lovely, she admits, with the fresh coat of snow, and even the trailer has a cleanness and a tidiness about it. But she can’t abide the cabin, a thing too Deliverance to have behind her yard, and though she’s known of its existence since the week of Henry’s accident, it stuns her all the same whenever she remembers.
Now they’re gathering for dinner there. It’s almost like a cult. Earlier today she heard the ATV and saw him driving up the trail with Ava and the dog. She heard it once again and saw the Finns riding out, as if they don’t have a kitchen in a very nice home.
She’s surprised when Bob’s behind her, asking what’s the matter.
“Just the holidays,” she says.
She hugs him like a girl.
He rubs her back and she remembers how strong he really is, despite the softness of his muscles, and his paunch, and his manner—how he used to pick her up and she was happy when he did.
The boys are coming down—she can hear them on the stairs—but instead of pulling free she lingers in his arms, wishing it were easier to hold them all together.
“Look at that,” Bob says. “Billy Kane’s going, too.”
That’s the capper, she decides. At least they didn’t ask her.
* * *
The eight-o’clock dark feels like ten, especially in the woods, where dusk falls sooner and the night is more insistent, right beyond the glass and underneath the floor. Everybody’s overwarm and overfed and just about dozing mid-conversation, and the Finns begin to dodder and discuss going home.
Sam helps them with their coats and thinks of Laura after parties, how her skin smelled of cocktails and hours-old perfume. The outdoor air has a mentholated freshness. Nan and Ava spend another five minutes snapping up Tupperware and organizing bags. Sam walks Joan toward the middle of the clearing where the cabin light ends and they can better see the stars. He teaches her a handful of major constellations, all that he can show her in the space between the trees. Nan and Ava meet them at the ATV, following their eyes and looking at the sky.
Ava doesn’t have her coat.
“I’ll stay and help you clean,” she says. “You can drive me home later.”
“Don’t worry about it. You don’t want to be here alone,” he says, knowing how the dark yawns out around here, all the world growing distant in a heartbeat of quiet.
Ava draws him closer with a gravity of will, speaking quietly as Nan and Joan shuffle off behind him.
“I can’t go home yet,” she says, eyes moonlit and wet. She almost leans her forehead right against Sam’s. “I need a little more time. I want to know you’re coming back.”
“All right,” he says reluctantly. “Wing’ll stay, too.”
Ava shakes her head and motions off behind him. Wing’s sitting on the flatbed, leashed between the Finns.
“We can’t disappoint him,” Ava says. “I’ll be fine.”
He doesn’t like it but relents, unwilling to deny her and relieved, truth be told, to have another hour of her company tonight. They hug each other tight. Ava walks inside the cabin and he watches her the whole way in before he goes. The Finns are unsurprised. He’s embarrassed when he passes them and doesn’t bring it up, and then he starts the ATV, verifies that Wingnut is properly secured, and smiles at Nan and Joan before proceeding onto the trail.
Right inside the trees, Wing jerks against the leash. He’s caught an unfamiliar scent, something worth attention, but his high-pitched yelps are taken for excitement. Nan shortens up his leash before he tries jumping off.
They rattle through the dark. For the first time in months, the woods feel perilous to Sam, and his attention is divided as he tries to focus ahead, navigating the trail and hoping they don’t get stuck, and glancing back at the Finns, especially Joan, whom he expects to be alarmed by the wilderness around them. Once they make it out, he drives the ATV straight across the lot—it’s noisy but the Carmichaels seem to be out—and then he helps them into the truck, puts Wing in the back, and lets the engine warm up before driving away.
The asphalt’s pleasant after bumping on the trail. No one else is driving. Even in the center of town, the parking lots are empty and the cars sit cold. A soft electric sheen warms the edges of the road: streetlights, gas stations, neon signs reading CL SED, CLOSED, LOSE.
“How’d she seem to you?” Sam asks.
“Healthier,” Nan says.
“It makes me nervous leaving her behind,” Joan adds.
“She insisted.”
“Oh, we know,” Nan says, waving absolution. “Joan predicted it this morning.”
“What do you mean?”
They idle at a traffic light, redder in the glow.
“I thought of being her,” Joan says, sounding smaller than before but with the confidence of having been correct. “Holidays can be so short. I used to cry every year after Christmas.”
“And your birthday,” Nan says.
“It must be worse for you and Ava.”
He’s thought of Laura all morning, all day, and all night, imagining her fingers in the flutes of the piecrust, her mittens in the snow. But the memories have giv
en him a lungful of air, not the slow suffocation he’s been witnessing in Ava. He was conscious of his strength and often thought of Henry—when he split a load of firewood, and loaded up his plate, and smiled, with conviction, when she needed him to smile.
“I don’t know how to help,” he says. “I hear myself giving her advice and can’t believe how meaningless it sounds.”
“What helped you?” Joan asks.
“I don’t know. Seeing people helped. Other times it didn’t. I’ve got to wonder how much of it actually worked, how much of it was time.”
Their faces pale and darken with the intermittent streetlights. He’d like to crack a window but the Finns look cold and so he tolerates the heat, wishing he were home.
Joan asks him if he prayed.
“I’m pretty sure that didn’t work. Nothing ever swept in to save me.”
“Henry did,” Joan says.
“I mean that God didn’t help.”
“Like a big warm hand reaching from the sky?” Nan asks.
“Right,” Sam replies, unsure of how to read her.
Joan fidgets with her hands, a habit she’s developed as a puzzle builder, playing with imaginary pieces in her lap. They finally pass a car driving in the opposite direction and the road looks darker when it’s gone, hard black between the curbs.
“I’m eighty-three,” Nan says. “A lot of people, even people my age, think I’m foolish for believing in God. It’s fear of death, consolation in the night … I ought to know better, especially after this year. They tell me look at how cruel the world is, like it’s nonstop fire and disaster. Look at how primitive religion really is. They never think I might believe in something richer, or stranger, or more sophisticated than whatever they assume I believe.”
Sam holds a breath, eyes bolted to the road. He’s ashamed that he’s offended them and wants to smooth it over, but before he has a chance, Nan continues, very calmly.
Fellow Mortals: A Novel Page 21
