Illumination Night

by Alice Hoffman

  Strawberries fall out of the tin buckets onto the ground, then roll down the hill as the little girl runs away from him. The air is warm and thick, the shadows green as apples. The Giant feels the impact of the car as though he were the one who had been hit. He runs to the little girl while she is in the air. It seems as though she is in the air forever, suspended in the blue sky. The Giant drops his pails. He passes the little boy and tells him to run into the farmstand. No one should see this. The little boy opens and closes his mouth like a fish, but he does what he’s told. By the time the little girl hits the pavement, the Giant is beside her. He kneels over her on the blacktop as the car screeches to a halt and pulls over onto the shoulder of the road. Dust rises into the air and comes down like rain. The driver gets out, but before he can move, the Giant yells for him to drive up the road and call an ambulance.

  The Giant knows you’re not supposed to move injured people, but he can’t stand to see the little girl lying in the road. He picks her up and carries her to the grass. When he tells her to open her eyes she does, briefly, but long enough for him to see that her eyes are blue. He does not move when he hears sirens, or when the ambulance arrives. He stands and backs away so that the paramedics can gather around her. They check her quickly, then carry her into the ambulance. Three police cars pull over. The dust that rises up now is like a wave; it catches in the leaves and in the folds of the Giant’s clothes.

  Vonny knows that whatever has happened has something to do with her as soon as she sees a police car parked sideways, blocking the road. She sees the force field, visible for the first time.

  It is a deadly brown film. It can cover you. There is heat inside of it, radiating out in thick, dark lines.

  Vonny is sweating as she steps down on the gas. She breaks right through the force field, and as she does it explodes into bits of white light. She pulls over, leaves the truck running, and jumps out. Her heart hurts as she runs to the ambulance. She pushes a paramedic aside and sees Samantha. She begins to cry. An awful sort of crying, one that has very few tears and burns her throat.

  “The other child,” she says to the paramedic.

  It is impossible to understand her because her throat is held in a vice. The paramedic looks at her stupidly, then gets in the back of the ambulance and pulls the doors closed. Vonny runs to the nearest police officer.

  “My little boy,” she manages to say.

  She has grabbed the policeman’s hand and her grip is frightening. The hand of a madwoman.

  “Just relax,” the policeman says. “There’s no little boy.”

  The ambulance turns on its siren and pulls onto the road. Jody is at the window of the Giant’s house, terrified that her father has sent the police here to look for her. She wears one of the Giant’s old white shirts and nothing else. She sees Andre’s truck up on the road and she tears at the curtains, but she can see no farther than the sunlight, the blue flashing lights, the green leaves of the locust trees. Beyond these trees, the Giant sits, slumped, his head in his hands. He knows this is his fault. He can scare a little girl so badly she will run in front of a car. He can ruin someone’s life. How can anyone love him, he wouldn’t even want that love. He cannot imagine anything other than the little girl up in the air, caught between clouds.

  Vonny will not let go of the policeman. “My little boy,” she insists. These are the only words she knows.

  The Giant remembers the other child. That he could have forgotten the boy makes him despise himself even more.

  “I didn’t want him to see any blood,” the Giant says.

  Vonny turns to him. The way she looks at him sets the Giant’s skin on fire.

  “He’s in the farmstand,” the Giant says.

  Vonny runs and goes inside. The sound of her own pulse fills her head. It is pitch dark and the air smells like dirt and wood. She wills her pulse to stop pounding; if she can’t see at least she can hear. She follows the sound of his crying and finds Simon in a corner, crouched down among spiderwebs and turnips. Vonny sinks down next to him and pulls him onto her lap. She kisses him on the top of his head and along his neck. She can feel his ribs through his T-shirt as she holds him in the dark.

  Chapter Eight

  THE LOCUST TREE

  HE packs his suitcase and gives the chickens away, carrying each one to the closest farm, depositing them at midnight to blend in with his neighbor’s stock. Yet even after the tickets to California come in the mail he continues bringing strawberries and lettuce up to the farmstand. If he acts as though nothing is about to change maybe nothing will. But on front porches and at grocery checkout counters people are talking about him. They say he’s eight feet tall, and he’s growing. He has become an old man who wears rags and snaps the heads off live chickens with his teeth. Already there is a joke being told. How many giants does it take to roof a house? One, if you slice him real thin.

  For a while there was a slow parade of traffic. Sometimes five or six cars were parked on the shoulder of the road. They waited for the Giant, but he only came out at night. A week after the accident, a police car drove up and an officer got out and directed traffic, urging rubberneckers on. The assigned officer, Hammond West, knew old Eddie Tanner and, as a boy, sometimes did odd jobs for him. They didn’t get along too well, and as a man Hammond avoided old Eddie, but he remembers seeing the Giant lumbering after his grandfather, a bag of seed or flour over his shoulders. It tears Hammond West apart to think of the line of tourists and troublemakers who will be waiting for the Giant if he has to come down to the courthouse to sign an affidavit for the inquiry. It makes him brood over his mother and father, both of whom were deaf. To Hammond, they always seemed perfectly normal, unless they had to deal with officials. His parents were afraid of tax assessors, meter readers, clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Something as minor as a meeting with one of his teachers would send his mother and father reeling. The strongest memory he has is of them dressed up, walking into town, holding hands, growing smaller and smaller against the horizon until they were no bigger than dolls. And so he has convinced his boss, who’s twenty years younger than he is, to let him take down Eddie’s grandson’s eyewitness account. Hammond waits until traffic has thinned out; then he takes off his sunglasses and walks down the path and into the hollow where, he judges, it’s at least ten degrees cooler.

  What makes knocking on the door a whole lot harder for Hammond is that he knows the Giant has the girl in there. The Giant doesn’t know how lucky he is that his girlfriend’s father is a loudmouth. When his daughter wasn’t found in twenty-four hours Jody’s father started name calling, saying he was going to bring in some real cops from Hartford. He started shouting about some guy who was a giant that his daughter had gotten mixed up with, and that pretty much closed the case. It’s not that the department stopped looking for Jody, just that they understood why she ran away. Since the accident, they’ve stopped referring to Jody’s father as the asshole from Hartford. They’re starting to think about pulling the Giant in for questioning. Hammond loves some of these cops like sons, he’s treated them like sons. Maybe that’s why he takes off his badge and slips it into his pants pocket before he knocks.

  It takes a while for the Giant to answer the door, about the same amount of time as it takes for Jody to run into the bathroom and hide in the tub.

  “I’ll bet you don’t remember me,” Hammond says when the Giant opens the door. “Hammond West.”

  “West,” the Giant repeats, but the name means nothing to him. He blinks in the sunlight, he’s in a cold sweat, certain he’s about to be arrested for something. “How’s the little girl?”

  “Not as good as anyone would like her to be,” Hammond says.

  The Giant meets Hammond’s gaze for the first time. Hammond straightens up and, without realizing it, stands on his toes to gain a little height. “We thought it’d be a whole lot easier if you wrote down your account of the accident instead of having to come in.”

  “All right,”
the Giant says. “I’ll mail it to you.”

  “Sorry,” Hammond says. “I’ve got to see you write it out in your own hand.” He looks past the Giant into the house. “I wouldn’t mind something to drink.”

  The Giant doesn’t say anything, but he moves away from the doorway, and Hammond follows him inside.

  “I remember your grandfather real well,” Hammond says, after the Giant has gotten him a glass of ice water.

  Each time Hammond takes a gulp, ice cubes hit against each other in his glass. He sits across from the Giant, watching him write out his account of the accident. There’s a pair of white sling-back shoes near the bed and a tube of some kind of makeup—lipstick or eye shadow—Hammond can’t tell. “He was a nut about chickens,” Hammond says. “Wouldn’t even sell one.”

  Hammond finishes his water and walks to the sink to rinse out his glass. The henhouses are all empty. The only sound, inside or out, is the scraping of a pen as the Giant writes.

  “I’m glad I’m not young,” Hammond says. He picks up the Giant’s affidavit and looks it over. “Better sign your name,” he tells the Giant, then he bends down and countersigns. “Boy, if I was young and caught harboring a runaway underage girl I don’t know what I’d do. But I guess I’d be smart enough to send her packing. Hey, I might pack up and go with her.”

  The Giant looks pretty pale to Hammond. If he faints it will be like a tree falling.

  “If you’ve got that girl from Hartford I have to see her,” Hammond says. “I have to know she wants to be here.”

  The Giant nods and gets up. Hammond follows him across the room. The Giant opens the door to the bathroom and Jody glares at him from the bathtub. She is wearing jeans and a sweater that’s too big for her. Her arms are wrapped around her knees.

  “Are you crazy?” she says to the Giant. “Don’t let that guy see me.”

  The Giant closes the door.

  “I guess I’m satisfied,” Hammond says. “I probably won’t even remember seeing her for a couple of days.” At the door, Hammond stops. “Don’t blame yourself about the little girl,” he tells the Giant. “She might have been just as scared if it had been me who popped out of those trees.”

  After Hammond is gone the Giant cannot stop staring at the front door. That night he cannot eat and his eyes look glassy. He begs Jody to walk down to the pay phone and call the hospital, and when she returns Jody tells him that the girl is recovering nicely. In the morning, he makes her call again, even though she may be spotted in daylight. This time she tells him that the girl has been discharged. Jody is lying, and she can tell the Giant doesn’t believe her. He has begun an awful habit. He cracks his knuckles, one at a time. From the sound Jody would swear he was breaking his own bones.

  She tells herself that if she can just hold on to him for two more days everything will be all right. They will be leaving; as long as she can keep the truth from him he won’t change his mind. Except for when he makes her leave the house to phone the hospital, Jody doesn’t let the Giant out of her sight. She wants to say good-bye to her grandmother, but she puts it off, afraid if she leaves him, even for a few hours, he will not recognize her when she returns. She tells him he’s nervous because he’s never been on a plane before. She tells him they will fly past stars. And, when his back is turned, she takes the batteries out of his radio and runs cold water over them until they are worthless. He will never hear the news, but he knows the truth anyway, and he knows it is his fault.

  When the Giant sleeps his dreams are sour, filled with rage and twisted trees. He tries to keep himself from dreaming. He closes his eyes and pretends to be asleep when Jody gets into bed, but he cannot pretend he doesn’t want her. He is disgusted by himself, by his clumsy desire. He thinks of the look on the little girl’s face and wonders not why Jody doesn’t see what a monster he is, but when she will.

  He has to be with her one more time, and as Jody is falling asleep, he begins to make love to her. When he moves his hand between her legs, Jody reaches for him, but he slides her hand away. He kisses her and moves his fingers up inside her. He will not let her touch him even after she has an orgasm. He pulls her up so she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, then he kneels on the floor. The room is so black it’s difficult to tell where the bed ends. His kisses feel hotter as he moves lower. Jody is thankful for the dark. She is the greediest person alive. She would want this to go on forever, if she didn’t need time to move more quickly. She can feel his good-bye moving across and through her. When he puts his tongue inside her she has already become something for him to drink. She is unable to keep herself steady on her arms stretched out behind her. He shifts her on top of him, and when he lurches back on the floor, she follows him down, not daring to let him go. He is inside her, but there is still a terrible distance between them. They are disoriented, used to the confines of a bed instead of this mysterious floor that seems to float in the dark.

  Jody moves up and down slowly. She wants them to hurt each other, to cry out loud, to burn away what is wrong between them. The Giant is silent and covered with sweat. He doesn’t flinch when she digs her fingernails into his skin. He doesn’t make a sound. Jody is not surprised in the least when he doesn’t go back to bed with her, but instead spends the rest of the night in a chair by the window. From here he can see the empty chicken coops and the garden that will soon yield lettuce and peppers and a peculiar red cabbage so sweet it makes some people burst into tears when they shred it for cole slaw, and others complain and add shake after shake of salt.

  ELIZABETH Renny is furious with herself for having such bad vision. She missed the Giant completely at graduation, and now when she asks if she can meet him Jody says he is much too shy. That doesn’t stop Elizabeth Renny from thinking about what may happen when they come home from California. The Giant will change all the light bulbs in fixtures out of her reach now that she is too unsteady to climb up a stepladder. She will invite them to brunch and serve pancakes with sour cream. She will buy them a cat for a homecoming present. When she feels she knows him well enough, she may ask the Giant to cut down the pine tree. One thing is certain, Elizabeth Renny does not plan to die anytime soon. At least not until they’re back home and settled in. She wonders if the Giant will prefer her house to his own, although surely her next-door neighbors would not appreciate his keeping chickens here.

  Since Jody ran off, something odd has begun to happen to Elizabeth Renny. She is growing younger. One morning she notices the brown spots on her hands have disappeared. The next day her hair is measurably thicker. She rides Jody’s bicycle once around the yard and doesn’t feel pain in her legs. When Laura or Glenn calls to see if there’s any news of Jody, Elizabeth Renny is as snippy as a teenager. Laura tells herself her mother’s voice sounds so high because of crossed phone wires. She has no idea that her mother has stopped wearing her old polished flats in favor of a pair of soft black ballet slippers or that her old-woman’s insomnia has been replaced by deep, dreamless sleep. She would never believe that Elizabeth Renny can now touch her toes twenty times in a row, as though there has been a shifting in her bone structure.

  Once again she feels a young girl’s agitation and is reacquainted with both impatience and desire. She knows that Jody plans to go to California, and she can’t stop thinking about all the things she herself has never seen. She waits for her granddaughter, she keeps her door unlocked, and when at last Jody appears, on the night before she leaves, Elizabeth Renny grabs on to her hand and will not let go. She pesters her with questions. When Jody tells her the Giant has no shower and she’s had to wash her hair in the sink, Elizabeth Renny insists she take a hot shower. She follows her granddaughter up to the bathroom and keeps talking as Jody showers. In the steamy bathroom Elizabeth Renny’s skin is flushed; her hair curls around her forehead. Jody steps out of the shower and imagines she sees a young woman handing her a towel. Jody waves her hand, making circles in the steam.

  “Don’t tell me where in California you’ll be stayi
ng,” Elizabeth Renny tells her. “I might slip and let the cat out of the bag.”

  “San Francisco,” Jody says.

  “Don’t tell me!” Elizabeth Renny says. She trails after Jody and sits on the bed while Jody towels her hair dry. “Hotel or motel?”

  “I don’t know,” Jody says. “I’ll write to you as soon as I get there.”

  Jody takes a small suitcase from the closet and packs a cotton dress, two white shirts, underwear, a pair of sandals, her tortoiseshell hair combs. Why is it that she can’t shake the vision of arriving at the airport in California alone? She is waiting for her suitcase to travel along the silver luggage wheel. Above her, jets fly so low their roar shakes the cement floor.

  When they go downstairs, Jody puts her suitcase down by the door; she then takes a diet soda she’s left behind out of the refrigerator and pops open the can. She feels about a hundred years old. Sinbad jumps onto the counter and rubs against her arm. She does not regret lying to the Giant after her phone calls to the hospital, but each lie has taken something out of her. She reaches for her soda and spills it.

  “I’m a little nervous,” she says. “That’s all.”

  Elizabeth Renny reaches into a metal canister meant to hold flour, takes some money and puts it on the table. Jody stares at the money. If something inside her wasn’t missing she would burst into tears.

  “Take it,” Elizabeth Renny says when Jody hesitates.

  Jody slips the money into her pocket. When she hugs Elizabeth Renny she’s surprised by how small her grandmother seems.

  Jody backs away, then gets a dishrag and cleans up the spilled soda. She stares out the window above the sink as she rinses out the dishrag. There are lights turned on next door, in the kitchen and the upstairs bedrooms. Although the sky is still light in the west, darkness has settled over the lawn and Vonny and Andre’s house seems small and far away. Jody carelessly bites her lip; she tastes a drop of her own blood. She knows it’s time to go.