For all that, you were both very still and, for once, the forest was still. It was sunset, late for us to be eating dinner, everything delayed by a sense of thickness in the day as if I had to push through the air to reach the real objects on the other side of it. Soup tureen, carving knife, salt and pepper shakers fashioned into tiny pine trees, ceramic hen under whose breast nestled the butter as round and simple as her heart.
“Pling, pling, pling,” said the love bug. It was a strange creature: pink and purple, its wings both veined and furred. Across its body stripes of black vinyl gave it the comical appearance of a jailbreaker bumbling toward freedom. Its eyes, great, dewy disks of plastic, were set forward on its head. Predator’s eyes, like ours, single minded and designed to track. The better to gaze into your own, Ingrid, I suppose. The better to be beloved.
Around the edges of the world a lemon light seeped up. It was as if we were being submerged in batter—cool and thick and nothing for it but for the baker to pop us into her waiting oven. A breeze ruffled through the tree branches but didn’t reach us three on the porch. In his study, Daniel switched on a light as someone must always switch on a light, and what reached us showed me again the whorl of hair that swirls from the back of your head like silt in an eddy, Jacob’s broad hand on your back and his middle finger slipped down the collar of your tiny white shirt to hold you in place. It seemed to go on forever: the cool green forest, the lemon light, the taste in the back of my throat that is awaiting only sweetness to enliven it, the hollow on my tongue where sweetness must surely come to rest.
When Jacob and I first met, Thalia slid the paperwork across the table to him and said, “Don’t think of this as a beginning. This is just another knot along the way.” He signed and when he passed the sheaf of documents back over to me I imagined, young as I was, that I could decode something from his very lack of curiosity which would show me what he saw. A girl, still slack around the middle, clothed in a red gingham dress that had once belonged to her mother. A girl who had been given very little care and so was due a tremendous store of luck.
I signed my name below his own. Alice Small: the i topped by a bubble, the ls loose and wandering. Thalia was the witness and the next week Jacob and I were wed in the courthouse in Ridley Township, I in the same gingham dress and my mother’s bell-sleeved coat, he in a black suit that didn’t fit across the shoulders. It was Thalia’s idea that we marry, of course. “You are both loose ends,” she said, as if that finished it, as if the rest of our lives should be dedicated to the act of tidying away. Jacob got land out of the deal: the house, the grounds, the mountaintop. And I got a place to linger. My house, it would have been after all, my mountain top, but Thalia said, “What good is it to keep something if you have no one to give it to?” and along with the marriage license she signed away her rights to the land. And myself along with it, it seemed. To Jacob I bequeath both girl and mountain. To my dishwasher because he fits the story.
On the courthouse steps, Thalia gave me back my bouquet—white larkspur and cushion mums, all floating in a frost of stiff, baby’s breath. “Throw them,” she said, though there was no one there to catch, and so I did. They landed on a stiff berm of snow churned up from the street by the plows and when I passed them again on my way to the old green truck Jacob and I were borrowing to take us to our honeymoon cabin I was surprised to see they hadn’t melted a hole in the snow bank—alive as they were, stubbornly green at the stem—but rather lay there as crisp and cold as the frill around the lip of a white china plate. Decoration, but one destined never to be stained or chipped. A cold, proud, useless beauty and one that faded as we pulled away from the curb.
When Thingy and Daniel moved into the house on Newfound Mountain, Jacob and I had been married for almost eleven years. Our life together, which had at first seemed so accidental, had assumed its own shape, independent from the shape our lives had taken apart. Thingy stood in the front hallway with her bags at her feet and craned her neck to see into the parlor where the book Jacob had been reading lay tented on a cushion, then into the dining room where I had laid the table with a white cloth that had belonged to my grandmother and lit five taper candles made with wax from my own bees. “Oh, Alice,” she said and lifted her hair away from her neck to fan it. “It’s just exactly like Thalia left it. You haven’t changed a thing.”
Jacob and I had spent a week honeymooning in one of a bank of cabins just north of Elevation. The cabins were primitive but had lights in all the rooms, an electric range, even a rabbit-eared black and white television if we had wanted it. I found an oil lamp in a hinged bench at the door and Jacob trimmed and rethreaded the wick, lit it and trapped the blue flame under its scratched glass bell. We set the lamp in the window. It was the height of winter, snow deep on the ground, the forest silent but for the creak of ice-weighted limbs and sometimes their sudden snap. We were the only ones there.
Later, we took the lamp with us as we walked from cabin to cabin and stood on each of their porches like carolers. Our tracks in the snow behind us wavered in and out of each other: Jacob’s sturdy and narrow, the rind of ice glittering where he had broken through. Mine were more like a bird’s tracks skittish seeming, uncertain. In reality, I had been looking at Jacob: the way his neck strained above his padded plaid coat, the peculiar, tense curve of his back. Jacob against the ice-light of the river which chuckled and rilled. Jacob against the dark bulk of a cabin, peering in a window. He handed me the lantern as he cupped his hands over his eyes so I was suddenly alone in its halo, water seeping in at the sides of my shoes, a bird’s nest—the plaintive, messy architecture—drooping from a pediment of the porch. Jacob lowering his shoulder to the door, thumped it once and popping the lock.
Each of the cabins had the same sofa, waterproof pillows patterned with oak leaves and acorns, and every cabin had a variation of the same story hanging above the bed. In one an angler stood in the river, the water swirling to the tops of his hip waders and his line lax. In another, trout—sleek and brown and attended by their own perfect, sleek brown shadows—hung at different levels in the dappled tea water, wreathed by weeds. In another the line was taut; in another there was a net. Sometimes there was a white bridge in the picture, its stones gleaming in the first spidering rays of dawn. In most the fisherman had brown hair, but in one, where the net bellied under the thrashing arc of the fish and the fisherman had started toward shore, his hair was a deep, clownish red. Hair like an afterthought or a poorly examined memory. “There was something here, wasn’t there?” the artist might have said. “Something hovering just above his head. . .”
We broke into a different cabin every evening and woke every morning in a strange bed. Every morning we were confronted by each other’s bodies—brown and pink and white and puckered—and by the cold world waiting outside the pocket of warmth we had made in the sheets. I got up and made breakfast. Jacob got up and put logs into the woodstove, naked. With his back to me, his torso was a tight, brown line that ended in the sudden white snarl of his buttocks. A spark flew out of the stove and landed on the white skin of his upper thigh. He swore and slapped at it, swung around and saw me watching him and we went back to bed as the eggs burned up on the stove. In this way, we wanted each other. In every other way—eating, sleeping, walking out into the white woods in the morning, building up each cabin’s fire higher and higher—we were separate and didn’t talk beyond our immediate needs. “Pass me that,” we said to each other. “Please.” It really is not so different today, although we say more without having to say it and know already what the other one wants.
At the end of the week, we drove Thalia’s truck even further up the mountain and moved into the house with her, our room already set up on the side of the house that faced the forest, our linens turned and a list of chores she expected us to attend to sitting on the bedside table. The paper was held down by a weight shaped like a fish, back bowed against the rocks, gills gaping.
Four months later we saw the smoke punching up
over the ridgeline, but didn’t know what it meant until a trooper drove into the yard to deliver the news. The fire had started in the kitchen, hardly a surprise given how cheaply Thalia had built it, but how quickly the flames spread was a little unusual. The Feed Store was a short walk down from Elevation’s fire department but nevertheless, by the time the pump truck got there and started spraying the roof, the fire had already spread down the hallway to the dining room, into the attic space, through the store and was licking up the front door.
“Shit,” the trooper said, “it was punching holes in the roof before they even got the hose on the hydrant.” He was Jacob and my age, which is to say very young, and I thought I might even recognize him from school, the outline of his bullet head highlighted against the pouring light of the frosted glass main doors.
Still, he called me ma’am as if I had been automatically aged by this tragedy, and tried very hard to look appropriately somber, but he was excited and who could blame him. He had seen the fire, after all; felt the pressure of it as it coiled just behind the door and then heard it roar as it sprung all at once through the roof and up the doorframe. I imagined the fire rushing through the crooked alleys I had spent so much time in as a child, fattening itself on bags of diatomaceous earth and novelty cricket cages, pot holders shaped like lobster claws and the dark, murderous bulbs of allium and daffodil, bearded iris and yellow tulip trapped dreaming in their net sacks.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the trooper said, fanning himself with his hat and turning, as if in spite of himself, back toward the ridge where smoke still rose. A thin, mean line now, straight as an arrow, pointing toward disaster.
In point of fact, they never did find Thalia’s body, but, by the accounts of the customers who had paid up and left just before the fire started, there had been at least six people in the building when it burned. Four of these had been diners, a family from out of town and Mr. Tauft, a regular who enjoyed his chop well done with lots of gravy. The other two were Thalia herself and the Sainte Maria who was doing triple duty as a server, cashier and dishwasher as Jacob’s place at the deep-bellied sink had not yet been reliably filled.
The family—a man and a woman, a teenage boy—and Mr. Tauft were identified easily enough by their dental records and some simple guess work on the police’s part who tracked down the registration of the only car with out of town plates which also happened to be the only one on the street to which no one laid claim. Oddly enough, the Sainte Maria had never been to the dentist, and her body, charred beyond recognition and found huddled next to the melted cash register in the main room, was identified through a process of elimination. She was a small girl and this body was small. She wasn’t anywhere else in the town or, as far as anyone could tell, outside of it. A scrap of her leopard print coat had wafted up the fire’s draft and fluttered down with the rest of the embers of burlap and forget-me-not wallpaper, flaming receipt paper and tufts of molten insulation to land like a letter at the fire chief’s feet.
Of Thalia, they never found a trace. Not a strand of hair; not a single fire-cracked tooth. That she was dead was as much wishful thinking on the town’s part as it was inference and yet, at her funeral in which we buried an empty box, everyone who owed her money—a considerable portion of the town’s people and the farmers who tilled the outlying ridges—showed up and each brought a flower to heap on her grave.
Jacob and I cut the heads off all her peonies which she grew in a sunny rectangle she had dug between the house and the cemetery, and whose buds she sprinkled with sugar every morning to encourage the ants to come help them bloom. If there had been a body in the casket, we would have fought harder to bury her on our land, but, as it was, we settled on bringing something of the land to her, though, by cutting them too soon, we damaged the young plants so badly they never fully came back. I have a bed of wildflowers there now: white yarrow and hyssop, pearly everlasting and pink fireweed. I leave them alone to seed themselves and some years they all froth up—a fountain of white pricked by lavender and sharp pink—and some years I have nothing there but onion grass and weeds. Still, I consider it one of my gardens, and, when the urge comes on me at night to walk out into the forest, that is where I go instead.
Because I am afraid of what I will find if I wander any further, I admit it. Because I know what Thalia would have had to become in order to leave nothing of herself behind.
And still in my dreams that scrap of fabric flutters down from the smoke-gray sky. Singed around its edges, but whole and, as it unfolds at the fire chief’s feet, revealing in one of its many soft, bruised eyes, the single burning ember that would have caught and consumed it had not the chief brought down his sturdy boot and stamped it out against the curb.
Now it is night, very late. I have gotten up alone and come down to my own room to write. I brought you along, Ingrid, so that if you cried I wouldn’t have to run up the stairs again to fetch you. Though you woke up the moment I slid my hands under your back, you are now lying in your basket at my feet looking at the sheen of my lamp reflected on the window glass in what seems like perfect contentment. I have spent all the months of your life—not so many, I could count them on one hand—wondering what it is you see and what it is you don’t see. Now I am beginning to think it doesn’t matter: that we all see some things meant only for our own eyes.
Today Daniel received some important correspondence from his publisher and when he told us about it at dinner he said, “This is finally the beginning for me.” He said this as he chewed, his beard wagging below his jaw as if mimicking him. You were sitting in my lap, Ingrid, and across from us was a window framing the last creeping light of day as it slunk across the meadow, an empty chair, a burn mark etched indelibly in wood.
“This book is closer to home,” Daniel said. “It had to be, given the circumstances.” He was gesturing with his fork, pointing at you, Ingrid, at me, out the windows to the dark meadow which we nevertheless understood was green and white, a faint blue along the razor edges of the grass, yellow dusting the fat, glossy blades.
“I used the cemetery here as a starting point,” Daniel said, twirling his fork to encompass us all. His cheeks were flushed above his beard and below, the glow fading down his neck where it broke up into a rashy red just above his shirt collar. At the far end of the table, Jacob stood up abruptly and poured himself more water from the blue enamel pitcher I had set just slightly out of reach of everyone. On purpose, Ingrid, on the principle that it is important to remind your lover of his desires, your husband of his need.
“A theoretical starting point, of course,” Daniel continued. “I hope you don’t mind. My editor said the second book needed to contain more of myself and I thought, at the time, how? How, given my previous model for research, how can I be in this book in any way other than the great white sahib—the eye, you understand, the observer who can only see himself reflected in the quaint ritual around him? I tell you, it made my skin crawl. But then, well, then the accident happened and the baby was born.” He stabs at you again, Ingrid, and in my lap I feel you stiffen in a way I believe means you are amused. “And suddenly I was already in the book, all the research I had done, all the theory. . .It was always me, I just had no perspective, no applicable counter tension to put pressure on the data set.” He put his fork down carefully beside his plate. He considered the remains of the chicken splayed before him. “So then I sat,” Daniel said, “and for a long time I thought about death.”
Daniel thinks about death and his face blooms open, petal upon petal ringing each replication of its shape like a dandelion. A dozy weed, a sun nodder. Jacob snorted, but made no other comment and I, who always think this way, looked up at the window expecting to see something. There was nothing there, only the grid of the window screen sectioning all our reflections into manageable squares of color and smeared light. When something did come, it was only a small white moth attracted by the same bleary brightness. It pumped its body against the screen and stayed for a long t
ime, crawling from sill to sill, battering its faint wings as if they themselves were curtains it was attempting to draw.
“What could it have been?” the artist might have mused and, though he settled on hair, I believe any number of more appropriate images might have flitted through his mind first. I, for example, might have painted a fork or a crown of bees. A peignoir blooming as if swollen with water, a cairn of loosely stacked stones, a rabbit that runs and runs, its legs on a hinge, its ears laid flat against its skull.
“I’m not criticizing,” Thingy said. “It’s beautiful. Like an homage,” and she put her hands over my shoulders and pulled me into her, both of us leaning awkwardly over the barrier of her suitcase. I could smell her hair—a crisp, mobile scent that stood out to me even through the exotic garden layers of shampoo and perfume—and I felt her take my own hair and wrap the braid around her fist, tug gently like it was a steamboat pull as she had done when we were children and knew without thinking what was in each other’s thoughts.
“I’m glad to be here,” Thingy said and I, overcome at the foot of my own stairs, hearing my husband come up the porch and a man I didn’t yet know behind him, talking already, kicking his boots against the sill, I said, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” said my Thing. She pulled away and looked at me, her eyes water eyes, coruscate, opaque. “You silly goose,” she said and kissed me on the cheek.
When Thingy and I were twelve and Luke sixteen, the Nina drove us down to Ridley Township to see a movie. It was a foreign film, a princess movie, which was only playing in the rickety art house theatre that sat in the center of the downtown. To save money, the Nina had brought snacks with us: dried apple rings she fished out of the bottom of an oversized freezer bag, a sack of hard candies Thingy and I split, Thingy only eating the purple ones until her tongue was slick and almost black with the dye. The Nina ended up being disappointed in the show. “Too much music and not enough songs,” she said, “and why were the animals so unfriendly? Their eyes were drawn so beady you could hardly see them.”
Hex: A Novel Page 25
