The Gravity of Birds: A Novel

by Tracy Guzeman

  She wasn’t aware the boat had come loose from its moorings until she sensed the absence of land, until she lost the familiar smell of warming wood—the planks of the dock, the bark of trees painted with sunlight, the resinous, warped shingles of the cabin—and felt instead the languid pull of water surrounding her. She sat up, panicking when she saw how far she had drifted from the shore. But the lake was calm, the oars were securely in their locks. She pulled herself onto the boat’s seat and let her hair down, feeling the breeze sift through it until it was dry. She might be able to row herself back with the help of an afternoon gust; if not, she could flag down a passing boat and ask for help. But it was late in the season and the lake was quiet. There were no other boats to be seen.

  Alice ran her hands along the nicked wood of the oars. It was easier to think out here on the water, to contemplate a different course for her life. On land, her limitations announced themselves in a loud voice. But here, far from shore, the determined buoyancy of the ancient skiff and the steady rhythm of small waves worked their way under her skin. The wind picked up and billowed her shirt out in front of her like a spinnaker. Wisps of clouds knit themselves into a pale skein, whirling and unraveling over her head as they turned from dark to light to dark again. A light chop slapped the side of the boat. She could see a storm building at the sky’s edge and watched with interest more than alarm until the curtain of rain appeared in the distance near the point and began its slow undulation toward her.

  Lightning shattered the sky, and by the boom of thunder that followed she could estimate how far off the storm was. She levered the oars into the water, alarmed by their weight. Pulling on one to turn the boat back in the direction of the cabin, she winced at the pain that rocked across her shoulder and down her back. It took all her strength and the oars barely skimmed the water’s surface. Unless she was able to gain more traction, she’d never make any headway. She set the oars back in the boat and pulled the blanket from the floor, draping it around her shoulders and attempting a rudimentary knot, all her chilled fingers could manage. She scanned the floor of the boat, looking for something she could use for cover or as a flag. There was only a plastic milk jug, its top sliced off to create a makeshift bailer. When she looked up again, a stinging rain began pelting her face. Shielding her eyes, she stared across the water, back toward the cabin. She thought she heard the distant sputter of an engine, but whatever the noise, it was stolen by the wind. She put the oars back in the water and pulled as hard as she could, gasping with the effort. Five ineffectual strokes were all she could manage before dropping her head to her chest. The shore was as far away as it had been. But there was something moving toward her, growing larger and louder, a motorboat cutting a deep V through the water as it headed in her direction. Maybe the Restons’ custodian, Evan, had noticed the boat was missing. Or maybe it was George. Then she recognized something familiar in the posture of the figure steering the boat, and she knew it was him.

  It seemed unlikely if not impossible. She’d followed his career without intending to, had read the reviews of his shows, noted the accolades and his success over the past years. There would be no reason for him to be here now. His parents, too, were gone, though not dead. She’d come across an article in Architectural Digest while thumbing through stacks of old magazines in the sterile waiting room of her rheumatologist. There was a grand stone house in France at the end of an allée, shaded by rows of olives. They lived most of the time in Europe these days, disappointed in “the sad degradation of American culture.” The picture surprised her: two unlined, stoic faces with a dog perched artfully between them on a dark blue settee, the three of them equally coiffed and placid. So unlike the face she remembered when she thought of him, which she hadn’t done for a long time. There’d been more important things to contend with, and she’d pushed her memories of him, accompanied by her feelings of disappointment and shame, to a dark place at the back of her mind.

  She could smell the boat exhaust, even through the torrents of rain. He cut the engine and let the motorboat sidle up next to the skiff, reaching out to grab at one of the oars and pull himself closer.

  “Take the rope,” he barked at her, but she didn’t answer. Her joints felt fused into one ineffectual scrap of bone, and she couldn’t move.

  “Take it, Alice, damn it. What’s wrong with you? You’re going to drown out here.” He grabbed one of the oars and pushed the skiff back until he was close enough to the prow to thread a piece of nylon rope through the bow eye. He let out a long length of it and tied both ends of the rope together tightly around the middle seat in the motorboat.

  “Hang on,” he yelled over his shoulder.

  She rested her hands on the edges of the skiff, her fingers too numb and cold to grab hold of anything. The boat surged beneath her as it was pulled across the water, thumping across the motorboat’s wake. Thomas had one hand on the tiller and looked back over his shoulder every few seconds, as if he thought she might decide to take a sudden swim. Unlikely, unless he went a good deal faster than he was going now and she tumbled out. She was more concerned with how she was going to get out of the boat and back up the steps to the cabin without his watching her every step. Her physical weakness was the thing she was most ashamed of, the thing she tried to hide whenever possible.

  Her cheeks stung from the sharp rain nettling her skin. Why had she come back here? She saw the hazy outline of the Bayber house through the waving trees. She’d come because this was where her past was happily captive, woven into the woods, sparking off the surface of the lake. Her younger self still hid in the forest, deciphering the songs of birds, naming the stars in the night sky, half-listening for the reassuring call of her name by her parents, who laughed more and drank more and reminisced on the dock while dangling their pale legs in the cold, dark water. This was where she’d pushed her way through the thin paper skin of adolescence to feel the lovely stirrings of attraction, the polarized tugs of desire and insecurity.

  Then there was all that followed: the realization she’d been foolish and naïve; Thomas’s true character revealed, as well as Natalie’s. This was where everything started, and where everything started to end. A few short months from then, the world would crack open in Dallas. Riding with her father in the front seat of the car that November, she would watch, alarmed, as he turned up the radio volume and shook his head in disbelief, pulling over to the side of the road along with all of the other cars, burying his head in his arms. Looking out the window, she saw a pantomime of emotions playing out in each car: tears, shock, fear. It was the first time she’d seen her father cry, the first time she understood there would be things in life he could not protect her from. That memory had its own tremor, the same as the one she’d felt months before when Thomas Bayber first walked onto their dock: the certain knowledge the world had shifted and nothing would ever be the same.

  Thomas pulled back on the throttle as they neared the shore, killed the engine, and jumped from the boat to the dock. He tied up the motorboat, then grabbed the rope and coaxed the skiff in, putting his foot out to keep it from bumping the dock. Water ran off every inch of him, streaming down the sharp angle of his nose, bleeding off the ends of his hair where it was plastered against his neck. All she could do was sit and wait for him to leave. Finally he straightened up and held out a hand.

  “If you’re waiting for a formal invitation, this is all you’re going to get.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Leave you alone? Have you lost your mind? It’s practically a tempest, and you honestly think I’m going to let you sit here?” The wind tore the words from his mouth. “Get up. You’ll catch your death and I’m not having that on my hands.”

  She glared at him. “Don’t you think I would get up if I could?”

  That stopped him. She cringed at his casual observation of her stiff limbs, her oddly positioned hands, resting like pincers on the sides of the boat. But after a brief and frank appraisal, his eyes stayed on her a mome
nt longer and there was another look, of the sort she wasn’t used to seeing.

  He wiped his hand across his face. “Well, you might have thought of that before you decided to get in the damn boat. Can you at least scoot over to the side, so I don’t send us both into the drink trying to get you out?”

  That much she could manage. She bit her lip as he hoisted her out of the skiff, feeling like something rusted and long frozen.

  “I can do the rest myself.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I can’t very well leave you here, and while I doubt I could get any wetter than I already am, let’s try something more expedient, shall we?” He swung her up in his arms, and she closed her eyes, her humiliation complete. He made his way up the dock slowly and paused at the base of the stone steps. Her ear bounced against his chest as he took the steps, and she could hear his ragged breathing.

  “You’re still smoking.”

  “This doesn’t seem like an appropriate time for a lecture.”

  “You’re wheezing.”

  “You’re heavier than you look. And I’m old, remember?”

  He regretted using that word, she could tell, by the way he suddenly shifted her in his arms. But it was too late. Of course she remembered. She remembered everything. She shivered as the rain drove into her hair.

  “Alice.”

  “Don’t talk. Please, don’t talk.”

  “You’re determined to make this awkward, I see.” But he didn’t say anything more, only continued the trek toward his house.

  The path was uneven and spongy, half-obscured by decomposing leaves and branches of evergreens the storm was bringing down. She could feel the ground sucking at his every footfall, as if he was trudging through a bog. Ahead of them, light came from the main room of the Baybers’ summer house, faint and watery behind the running wash streaking the window glass. At the back door he set her down gently, his arms shaking with the effort of placing her just so. He pushed the door open, and she came in behind him, weakened by the rush of warm air that enveloped her.

  “I suppose now you’re going to scold me for leaving the house with the fire stoked.”

  “No. It feels too good to be warm,” she said, lingering in the hallway, her teeth rattling against each other. “I’ll only stay a minute to dry out, then I’ll go back.”

  “Alice.”

  It was all he said, but it was enough. Crying was the stupidest thing to do, but in that moment she wondered how she’d managed not to for so long. The years of depending on other people were stacked up behind her and seemed incalculable ahead. Her one job had always been to maintain a certain good nature, a stoicism about her RA. But right now she just wanted someone to have the power to fix her. To fix everything.

  “Why do I seem to have this effect on women? They’re around me and they cry.” He offered her a handkerchief from his pocket, but it was as wet as the rest of him and when she grabbed it water trickled down the slant of her arm.

  He was staring at her. When she finally looked up, he closed his eyes and shook his head. “I was very sorry to hear about your parents,” he said. “Myrna Reston, of course.” He went into one of the bedrooms and came back carrying some clothes.

  “No buttons,” he offered. “Do you need help?”

  “I can’t . . .”

  “We’re both soaked to the skin. The rain isn’t going to let up anytime soon, and I can’t imagine it’s good for you to sit around in wet clothes. Please.”

  She stood up, unhappy to separate herself from the steady, low flame of the fire, the comforting blue and orange of it toasting her skin back to life.

  “There’s a guest bedroom where you can change,” he said, gesturing toward a room at the far end of the hall.

  She took the clothes from him and made her way down a dark hallway. The guest bedroom, if that’s what it was, was three times the size of her dorm room at school. A high queen bed was centered against the far wall between two windows with faded coffee-colored curtains that skimmed the floor. An armoire took up most of the space on the opposite side of the room, its bonnet curled and fretted with scrollwork. A stale sweet odor of perfume clung to the bed linens, the suggestion of tuberose or gardenia.

  There was a loosely wired, gold filigree cage on the bedside table next to the lamp and inside of it, a porcelain bird resting on a branch, the whole thing no more than five and a half inches from tip to base. Entranced, Alice lifted the bottomless cage and cautiously picked up the figurine, relieved the fire had restored some movement to her fingers. The bird was Passerina caerulea, a blue grosbeak, in his breeding plumage. The figure had been worked in intricate detail, and she ran the tip of her index finger along its back, admiring the craftsmanship. The head, mantle, and chest were all a deep cobalt blue with the brightest color appearing on the bird’s rump and the crown; the wing and tail feathers were a dark gray. The wings were marked with two chestnut wing bars, and black masking extended from in front of the bird’s eyes toward the stout, silvery gray bill. The grosbeak was perched on a branch of witch hazel, and even the leaves of the shrub, oval with wavy margins, had been accurately painted: a dark green above and a paler green beneath.

  Alice turned the figure over, but there was no mark to identify the maker. Hanging on the wall above the bedside table was a watercolor of the same bird, in the same setting. Scribbled near the bottom of the painting in cursive that was barely decipherable were the sentences “For Letitia Bayber, our friend. One model to another.” And the signature “D. Doughty.”

  Was this Thomas’s mother’s room? Alice had seen only the one picture of her, in the magazine article, and it was hard to reconcile the expressionless woman sitting with her husband and dog as the friend of someone who could make anything as wonderful as this bird. She looked around the room again and realized how out of place the figure was, the only delicate thing in a room full of dark mahogany furniture and subdued colors, all of it overscale and foreboding. Alice set the bird back on the table and replaced the cage, almost sorry that something so beautiful was consigned to a room where it was rarely seen.

  The curtains at the windows were open, tied back with cords ending in woolly, frayed tassels. The house was surrounded by woods on all sides. When Alice looked out the windows into the flat black of trees and night, the only thing she saw was her own watery reflection in the glass. She struggled out of her clothes, leaving them in a damp pile on the floor. The things he’d brought her were his, she could tell by the way they hung on her. The soft T-shirt dropped well past her hips, its faded blue interrupted by a Rorschach splotch of ink across her stomach. The pajama pants were easy to pull on. She tugged the drawstrings at the waist, tying a loose, sloppy bow, then gathered up her own soggy things and went back out to the main room.

  He had changed into dry clothes as well and nodded when he saw her. “They look better on you than they do on me. Can you drink?”

  She’d missed her regimen of medications, the kaleidoscope of pills she swallowed several times a day. “Do you have brandy?” she asked, tired and reckless, longing for a degree of oblivion.

  He raised an eyebrow but didn’t answer, only poured something amber from a decanter into a glass and held it out to her, taking her clothes when she took the glass. She held it with both hands and took a cautious sip, feeling the warm liquid light a slow flame down her throat and stamp itself into the wall of her chest. She marveled at the liquor’s impact, the sharp smell of it burning her eyes, the agreeable fuzziness left in its wake. He disappeared somewhere as she lowered herself into a high-backed chair close to the fireplace and shifted back and forth, searching for the position that was the least uncomfortable.

  This room was the same as she remembered. It could have been yesterday she left her footprints on the chalky floor while trailing after him, and squirmed on the love seat while he frowned and sketched. It gave her the odd feeling of being in a museum, a museum whose curator was lax in his duties, she thought, noting the fine film of dust covering everything
: a stack of books, the face of a clock, the tapers in their heavy brass candlesticks.

  Thomas came back into the room and poked at the fire before sitting in the chair across from her. His feet were bare, pale, with high arches, the little toe on his left foot crooked, evidently broken at some point. There was an uncomfortable intimacy seeing him barefoot, and she felt every shift her body made beneath the fabric of his thin shirt. Eight years since they’d last seen each other. How little the difference in their ages mattered now.

  “There’s a porcelain figure in the other room.”

  He poked again at the embers. “I hadn’t remembered that’s where I’d put it.”

  “Is it yours? It doesn’t look like the sort of thing you’d have.”

  “Because you know me so well?” He smiled at her. “It can be yours if you like. Take it.”

  “Why do I get the feeling it isn’t yours to give?”

  “Perceptive as ever, I see. I guess you’re right. Technically, it’s not mine to give away. I stole it.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You should. I took it from my mother. It was something she cherished, a gift, from a very dear friend of hers, and quite valuable, I imagine. Have you ever heard of Dorothy Doughty?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “She died ten years ago or so. She and her sister, Freda, were neighbors of my mother’s in Sissinghurst. I think Freda used to watch after my mother sometimes, when she was a child. The sisters were both sculptors; they had their own kiln at the house. Dorothy was an ornithologist and a naturalist, as you can probably tell. She liked to do models of the birds she saw in their backyard garden. She and Freda ended up joining the Royal Worcester company as freelance modelers. Freda’s models were of small children, but Dorothy’s were all of birds and quite lovely. The one in the bedroom was a preproduction prototype. She gave it to my mother the year I was born.”