by Dawn Tripp
He hears a click. The sound from behind him. He freezes, then whirls with the gun, his eye catches on the boy, her boy, the one called Huck. He has stepped out from the trees to his right, his eyes are extremely pale, familiar, an odd mix of clarity and fear in his young face. But his hands are empty, the palms turned open, like an offering. Luce lowers his gun and there’s a moment where time drops, the distance between them collapsed, and the world feels suddenly skewed, turned a beat too fast, too close, bewildered. He cannot take his eyes off the boy’s face, her boy and—dawning on him, then he sees it—his.
He stares, transfixed, as the moment shreds. He does not notice the other boy. He would have recognized him. He would have seen the spark of resolve in Pard Islington’s face, taking aim to the air near his head.
He takes a step toward his son.
A shattering flash. Heat.
It is a strangely failed step, almost a lurch, as the ground seems to rise, seems to flow up against him, the distance between them not meant to be crossed. Huck doesn’t move, he stands still, only one hand, fingers open, reaching slightly toward the man falling toward him.
The deer are gone, fled deep to the woods, their hind legs tossing dry leaf to the shadows.
FIRE
JANE
July 23, 2004
Down to the wire. The score close. I am ahead still, but only just—
No letters left to draw. The box-lid empty. I have set the bottle of ginger beer inside it to keep the wind from carrying it off.
Ada is waiting on me to take my turn. Her eyes rest, their green-brown stillness, just resting on my face, light strung through her hair—that sparkling—like tiny diamond bits, crushed glass, salt, a crystal sprinkled there.
“Go on, Jane,” she prods. Gently.
It can all turn at the end. You don’t expect it will, though. No. You never do.
We approach the end of a game differently, Ada and I. We always have. Come to it each in our own style. Whereas I am saving with my letters, doling them out, one, two at a time, maxing out the value of each, Ada will try to drop all she’s got in one shot, go out early, and win that way.
My eyes search the board.
I slip Q-U in against an open A. Q-U-A. In the character of.
Ada nods. “Didn’t want to be caught holding that one, did you?” She smiles. I tally twelve as she drops a G on a double word square by an O, then spells G-L-E-N in the abrupt wedge of space running down.
She gets twenty for that, creeping up, a step closer. I set an O onto V-E-T, L-O across, for eleven. At the bottom of the board, she makes E-Y-E, for twelve. Only four points between us now. She has left the bag of chocolate-covered nuts halfway across the table, still in the shade, dark smudged on the inside of the plastic, one piece left, smallish, near the slit.
I do it quickly, before she can stop me, I think, my hand slipping through, but she is faster. She has pulled the bag away.
“Such a little thief, Janie.”
“You won’t eat it.”
“I might.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I know you.”
She gives me a smile but her thoughts, I can see, have turned away.
“You know, this morning, Jane, when I was sitting with my coffee outside on the porch, everything was still, so still. It was just the sunrise. You couldn’t hear the sea, couldn’t hear even the slap of a wave coming over the dune. Not a breath of wind, and by that, I knew just how that sea would look, all calm out there, flat and smooth, laid out like a table.” She moves a letter on her rack. “It happens sometimes, doesn’t it? You find yourself in a morning like this one, some dumb-luck stunning miracle of a morning you’ve just stumbled into—the whole world touched—a day so lovely, a world so lovely, it don’t seem meant for everyday use.”
She glances down at the board, then back again at the letters in her rack. “And that’s where I was,” she says, “just sitting out there, having those kinds of thoughts, my own private snivel for that sunrise. And that’s how he found me. He came marching outside and launched in whole-hog about that skiff. Had his list of reasons all lined up, he just started firing away—about the seams and the hole in the transom, the gunwale this and the leaking that, blah, blah, blah, and how long it takes each spring, each spring taking longer, to get the thing tight, and it never really does get good and tight. Go and buy your own boat, I say to him, do what you want with it, but no, he says, he wants that one, and what the hell’s wrong with me, and so it went, on and on and on, and nothing I said this morning would put an end to it—I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him that skiff was your father’s; even after all this time, I’d no idea how that would fall; still, when I think about it close, more than likely, he probably knows, how could he not really? And isn’t that our secret, his and mine, a secret too close to say out loud—but this morning, he wasn’t going to give me any room edgewise, just kept up his wrassling, and by then it didn’t matter none what I could have said, my sweet peace and quiet was all busted up—my beautiful rumination—smashed right to smithereens—and still he didn’t quit and, finally, I threw up my hands—I was so steamed—‘How does it come to this?’ I shouted at him. ‘How does it always seem to come back to just you and me, stuck here together in this scrap stinking house going at it this way?’
“It caught him up short. My yelling. And he left off then. Just stood there a minute, my middle-aged trouble in his shirtsleeves, just stood there stock-still, looking at me. Then he grinned.
“ ‘ ’Cause that’s all there is, Ma,’ he said, grinning away. ‘Just you and me, Ma. Everywhere.’ ”
Ada shakes her head. “Damn kid.” She is smiling though, trying maybe not to—“So I’ve been mulling it over since, I guess. Been thinking maybe I should just give in to his malarkey, give in and hand that old skiff over, such a beat-up thing, my stupid heart in that boat, I should just hand it over, let him go do with it what he will.”
She smooths a word near the edge of the board, lining the tiles so they fit neat to their squares. Just so.
“I could,” she says, shaking her head, a faint smile, her face softened, gentled up. “I could, but then”—she steals a glance at me—“what would we have left to fight over?”
“Ada.” I say.
Wait, Ada. Wait. Something else. Let me tell you. Something else about yesterday.
This is new, I say, I have not told you this.
Yesterday—it was after seven, that grit of evening, the air had begun to cool. I was in the kitchen when I heard a noise, faint-like. The cat, I thought, come to scratch at the door to be let in, and I went into the front room to see, and found Marne sitting there, on the sofa next to the end table with the orchid on it, that coin in her hand, that silver coin Ray had given her. She was looking at the photograph, the girl on the bridge. As I came into the room, she closed her hand, that coin, a flash disappearing into her fist.
“What?” she said.
“Just thought I heard something,” I said. “It must have been nothing.”
She nodded. “Must have been.”
I sat down in the chair across from her, by the window. She looked away, back at the photograph, or through it to the wall, and we just sat there awhile, my daughter and I, in the silence of the front room marked only by the tick of the clock on the mantelshelf, and the dark came fast, it pulled in through the window, fell across our laps, until it cloaked us, and we were full in it, our faces in shadow from each other, and once, in that new dark, I saw a flash in her hand. The coin.
Then she spoke. “You know,” she said. “Sometimes I look at that photograph, and I wonder who you were.”
I didn’t answer, and she was silent for a time, then she asked, “Why do you keep that orchid I gave you?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“It’s dead.”
“No,” I said. “Just the frost touched it.”
“Maybe it would do better somewhere else.”
“It likes that spot.”
“How do you know?”
“They’re fussy things,” I said. “They get notions. Don’t like to be moved.”
She didn’t answer.
“Some things, you know, really belong to one spot. They’re meant for staying put just there.”
She heard me then, I could feel it, though she did not answer.
“It will come back,” I told her.
“How do you know?”
“It will.”
“You can’t know.”
“I trust it will.”
Then there was silence again, and by that silence, I could tell that she did not believe me.
Her heart was breaking. I could feel it. I could hear it in her voice. And I knew that it was Ray she was thinking of. She loved him and didn’t want to. She has never wanted to let herself love anyone, to risk that broken place, to risk that losing, but still she did. She loved him, and so her heart was breaking.
I wanted to tell her, You just can’t think like that. I wanted to say to her what you, Ada, would have said to me. I wanted to tell her about the gray horse, about prayer-flags, about watching the trees pass up the moon. I wanted to give her something to hold on to, something fierce, something with fire, a few words she could hold like stones, something you would have given to me, something that might be enough to offset the weight of what she felt—the fear. It was mine, that fear she was feeling. From the time she was a child, I had wrapped her in it like wet shadows.
I wanted to tell her what I had never been able to. I wanted to give her the promise that all would be right with the world. I wanted to say it in a way that she could hear it. I wanted to tell her what I see in Ray, that strength, that same blunt strength that reminds me of his mother every time. I wanted to tell her that love is only this: A tiny nothing. A slip of the tongue. A glance. A world can be built on a glance. I wanted to tell her that the hope you feel at the beginning of a game is a hope worth playing for.
“She’s trying to hold on by her fingernails, isn’t she, your Marne?”
I hear you say it. Ada. It is you and not you. Your voice. Isn’t it? Who else would it be?
“It’s going to work out between them,” I say. “I can feel it. You think I’m a fool, don’t you? I know you do. You think I’m loose-headed to believe that I can know.”
I see you shake your head. “You can’t know.”
Ada. Wait. Let me tell you also this.
Last night, after supper through the screen, I saw the lightning bugs, and at first I mistook them for shooting stars. Then when I realized they were only what they were, I stepped outside and sat on the porch steps to watch as they hurled themselves down, their lights like tiny blades taken to the night, and I thought to myself, Tomorrow I will go and tell Ada this. Tomorrow. And she will say something like, Good Lord, Jane, shooting stars? Will you wake up and die right?
Last night, though, I could not leave them. Those little fire-bugs. Somehow. I could not go back inside, that flutter inside me like I was string, a wiry tremble that only the dark was vast enough to hold, and I understood then what it was you have been trying to tell me, I finally began to grasp what it was that you have always loved about the night—not the light of the stars or planets or the moon with its stubborn and holy routine, but the unthinkable reach of the millions of miles of darkness between them, and every possibility that might exist there, and I sat on the porch, in that sudden and clear understanding, feeling that night all around me writhe and crush and breathe like a sea.
I can still feel it, even here, now, at this table, in this hard polished daylight, the board laid open between us, so filled. I can still feel it, that flutter of thinking about Marne and Ray, thinking about what you would say when I told you, how you might shrug, Whatever happens, happens. But wait. I see you shake your head. Ada, wait, isn’t it true that one way or another, their lives are still laid out, so young, parables of sunlight, like fields for walking into, as ours once were. Last night, I sat out on the porch and thought of this. I watched those lightning bugs dive in their fever through the night and I thought of how I had to tell you all of this.
A sudden movement, a darkness, shifts at the corner of my eye. I glance up. She isn’t there. Her seat is empty. Two tiles left in her rack. Two pieces. Unplayable perhaps.
She’s gone. And it occurs to me that in fact she has been gone for quite some time. I have known this, though, haven’t I? Funny, how it happens—a quirk of the heart—these things you know but cannot own until, all at once, you do. When was it I saw her that final time? Winter. Yes, it was winter. I remember that day. The morning of Christmas Eve. A day of fog when I walked over the bridge—that day I saw Huck, just like I saw him this morning—out on the river working through that thick low-lying whiteness torn to threads, that old skiff with him in it floating there, a thumbnail of blackness drifting just beyond the Point of Pines. I remember, when I saw him that day, I thought to myself, I will go and I will tell Ada this—that Huck is out there, working the river when no one else is.
It snowed that afternoon. It was the first snow. And I came around the house and found you lying on the great white pillow near the woodstove, your eyes filled with the sky. Huck’s house. That little hurricane house, behind the dunes you had given him when the carpetbagger left him and took everything else. You gave him that house when he had so little, when he needed, perhaps more than anything, to know that you forgave him, and when the tables turned and you fell sick, he brought you home to die. And I came by that day, last Christmas Eve, to bring you a gift. I had brought the game as well, but we did not play. I only sat with you awhile, held your hand. I looked down once at the blueness of your veins raised up like riverbranches under the pale of your skin, and you told me that the bliss we have is to go on loving what we love, knowing we will lose it, let the sunlight and the rain wash over us and wash us down. Then you fell silent, looked away, and it was winter again outside, a bowl of water on the window ledge, snow falling through it, and the echo of someone chopping wood in the yard next door.
You are gone then, Ada. So you are. And everything you’ve told me since—in words or by a glance—did I pull it from the air or breathe it out of what you were? That echo of you.
I stand up from the table and collect my things.
Carl is waiting for me on a bench in the hall just inside. He sits where it’s cool, in the air-conditioning. As I reach the door, I pause a moment and watch him through the tinted glass. He turns a page of the newspaper, his elbows resting on his knees, then he looks up as if he feels me there and his eyes are what I know, in the late afternoon, that softer brown, flecks of raw light still in them. He smiles as I push through the door. It feels cold inside. I shiver.
“You’re done then?” he says. I nod, and he closes up the newspaper, folds it under his arm, and we walk together out into the day, puddles of sun slick on the tar, the air in the parking lot kinked with heat. Halfway across, my heel catches on a stone. He is quick. He grasps my elbow, steadies me, shifts the newspaper into his opposite hand, and tucks my arm through his, and holds it there, the pressure of his hand on mine, firm but gentle, as he has always been with me, and we continue walking. White glint off the hood of a car, ours, the door handle hot to touch. I slide into the front. He closes the door behind me, the windows open, and we drive.
“Can we take the long way home?” I ask him. I know he will say yes. There is nowhere in particular we have to be. We’re in no rush to get there. We drive through the village at the Head, and up the hill. We cross over the highway, and at Booth’s corner, he takes the left-hand turn onto Main Road. We drive through Central Village, past Lees, the fish market, and the Grange, past Hix’s Corner where the Knotty Shingle church once stood before it burnt. The road curves and dips, then begins to rise. I watch the fields pass by. It is later in the day than I had realized. At the Santos farm, the corn is on the ripening, crows fight through the fields, the hay has been cut, kicked over, spread to sun. It lies now, the
blue and silver color of the sea.
As we are coming up on Dunham’s Hill, I see them ahead. I see them even before the road bends by the tall spruce, and they come into view: the loose cluster of them there, lining the road past the brook, and another patch I don’t remember seeing there before, they must have escaped from the rest, grown up on their own.
“Slow down,” I tell him, “Carl, slow down.” The breeze softens through the window, thick with the damp reek of the swamp woods and the shade, the sweet white scent of grass, and he slows the car, just then, as we pass that little clearing, near the old half-sunken wall, where the wild lilies open, for their one day, into fire.
AFTERIMAGE
MARNE
July 23, 2004
I had heard them this morning, my parents downstairs in the kitchen, their hushed voices drifting up through the hollow of the pipe chase. Early still. They did not want to wake me, my father asking where she wanted to take her walk today. “The bridge,” she answered. Then silence. “Are you sure, Janie, that’s what you want?” he said, like he knew already then what she would find there.
First light nudging in, as it does, touching the familiar outlines of everyday things.
I heard the car start up, the engine on idle as he waited, the door closing softly below, the tap of her shoes on the porch. Then they were gone, the house empty. Empty. I could not fall back asleep. I finished reading the book about light—no notes on those final pages—I set it, closed, on the end table, the last few words, still a glow, forsaken, at the edges of my mind.
——
It happened as I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom. I spit, rinsed my mouth, let cold water spray down the basin; then, glancing up, I caught my mother’s face. It has happened before. I’ve passed a mirror quickly and glimpsed her face, there, in mine. It’s startling when it happens. This time, though, more so. I reach for the faucet, twisting it closed, without lowering my eyes, the water slowing, slowing stopped.
