“That reminds me,” she said. “One of the trailers near us, I think someone might have broken into it actually. It looks like it was ransacked or something. Is there some kind of security here?”
“The Liddells,” said Lynne, and nodded solemnly. “There was some trouble there, actually.”
Gabriel nodded. “The father. He went a bit mad—it was awful, the police came and everything. They took him away.”
“That surprises me,” John said. “I've known the Liddells for years. I'd never imagine something like that from them.”
“Well, you know,” Lynne said solemnly. “They say you just can't tell with families.”
They all sat silently for an appropriate moment or two contemplating the sad fate of the Liddells, and Sylvia said, “What about these people, John?”
“What about them?”
“You know just about everyone around here—do you know Gabriel and Lynne's friends, that this cabin belongs to?”
John looked blank for a moment, then shook his head. “It's a big place. A lot of people are transient. I don't know everyone, just the regulars right around my family's cabin.”
“You weren't kidding about the enthusiastic hunting,” Sylvia said. “That's quite a trophy, the stag back there,” and she inclined her head in the direction of the rest of the cabin.
“Oh, yes, that,” Lynne said.
“It's kind of creepy,” Sylvia said, and John said, “A stag?” and Lynne said, “You should see it, John. Come on back, I'll show it to you.”
Sylvia and Gabriel sat in silence after they had gone. Finally Gabriel broke it by asking if she wanted more curry and she said no, she'd had enough, and they continued to sit there.
“Taking their time,” she said with a nervous laugh, “it's not that much to look at it,” and, “I'm going to see what they're up to” and Gabriel said, “I really wouldn't if I were you.”
“What do you mean by that?” It felt like the first honest thing she'd said to anyone in days.
“It makes you look clingy and suspicious,” Gabriel said. “I don't think John would like that. I know Lynne wouldn't.”
She thought then of all the things she ought to say. Things prefaced by arch remarks like I beg your pardon or even a properly-inflected excuse me? She did not say anything. She and Gabriel sat there and waited and they looked at each other, and she thought how small and strange he was, imagined his pale face a mask to hide a hideous creature beneath it.
Gabriel said, “What do you think they're doing back there anyway? It's not what you think.”
“How do you know what I think?” she said, but even as the words were out she felt like she knew his answer, that he knew exactly what she thought, that he knew everything about her, and John too, that they both did and had since their encounter on the nature trail the previous morning. That she ought never to have looked upon them in the first place, or given them something of hers and John's—the mug, the milk—or eaten their goblin fruit. As soon as John came back they would leave. She would make sure of it. Even if she had to make a scene, a terrible embarrassing scene no one would ever forgive her for, and what did she care what any of the other three thought about her anyway?
She said, “I hate this time of year. Everything coming to an end. It depresses me.”
“I guess it all depends on how you look at things.”
“What other way is there?”
He shrugged. She guessed that he wasn't really in the mood for conversation.
An unsettling chill had settled over the cabin despite the merrily burning gas fire. Any moment now John would emerge with Lynne and she would insist that they go home. Not just back to the cabin, but home-home, all the way back to London; there was still time to catch the last bus and the last train if they were quick about it. Or—she could just leave.
“I feel sick,” she said, and set her wine glass down. “I have to go. Tell John I'll see him back at the cabin.” She was entirely done with social niceties, and without another word she stepped out the door into a night so black and cold that it momentarily seized her breath. The moon sliver from the previous night had been swallowed up by clouds and she was forced to make her way nearly blind. She knew she was on the path because she felt its gravel under her feet, but then there was grass, so now she must be wandering between cabins. Then she no longer cared about finding her way back to the cabin at all, only out of the leisure park. If she could get to the main road, and the harbour, and into town, she had her purse with her and she could buy a ticket or even thumb a lift if it came to that.
She dug her phone from her pocket so she could use its light, but the battery icon was red and draining fast. On impulse she thumbed John's number, but his phone simply rang and rang and his voice told her to leave a message or send a text if it was urgent. Then the screen went black. She could hear the sea nearby, and she moved toward the sound with the certainty that if she could get near enough to the sea, she would be safe, but the sound, or her ears, deceived her, shifting, now behind her, now before her.
When the clouds above parted at last, the feeble light of the faraway moon revealed that she was at the edge of the leisure park. The cabins behind her waited, and across the black strip of road the sea would be surging against the concrete steps of the harbour. She had the idea that she had emerged into some kind of purgatory, that she might wander an eternity among the empty cabins, but then a car's oncoming lights loomed up ahead and she stepped to the roadside and put out her thumb. To her surprise, the car came to a stop. A worried-looking middle-aged woman popped her head out of the window. “You lost, love?” she asked. Sylvia said, “I don't know, I need to get to the train station,” and the woman said she was on her way to Colchester and would that do? Sylvia said yes, of course it would.
As they sped away she imagined John might have gone to look for her by now, might have discovered she was not back at the cabin. She felt she owed the woman some explanation, so she said, “Thank you. I had a fight with my partner. I just want to go home now and talk it over with him later,” and the woman said, “You don't need to explain, love, these things happen.” Sylvia pulled out her dead phone again and looked at it, wishing she could ring John and make sure he was okay. The woman commented that it was very late in the year and hadn't the leisure park shut down for the winter? Sylvia found she could not answer her. She could not speak again at all except to thank the woman who drove her right up to the station, where she bought a ticket with minutes to spare. She ran down the platform to her train, dodging other travellers and their piles of luggage, but she could not shake the feeling that she was no longer real, that if she touched anyone she would vanish like the mist rising off the pavement. She leapt aboard her train and was still making her way down the aisle as it eased out of the station.
Then the lights of the station were behind them, and the sound of the engine was the sound of the sea, and they were gliding into a night that was dark, and secret, and uncharted.
A Discreet Music
Michael Wehunt
The dark bloodless taste of widowhood had coated Hiram’s mouth for three nights when he awoke at dawn alongside that cold gulf of bed. He knew at once some kind of change had visited as he slept. Two hard knots burned in his shoulder blades, and feathers were strewn like bleached leaves across the sheets. But he looked out the window, away from these things, bleary-eyed and trying to miss Sandra.
It had begun to snow in the night, the last of the Virginia winter. By late morning the flurries would turn thick and settle into blankets, bright against the pallbearers’ black suits. Bright against his own.
And he was glad it was Sandra he saw through the window and not that other. He drifted into thoughts of his wife, the kind a fresh widower should have, and the bed held him in its half-empty palm. This same oak frame had supported them every night of their forty-two years, the creaks of Sandra rising from it each day the only alarm clock he’d needed. This same shade of pale blue on the walls. Not m
uch had changed their private architecture.
The phone chirred from the nightstand. Sandra’s pillow lay plump beside it, the shape of her head already gone. He reached across to answer the call but his hand fell inches short. Instead he made a fist and eased a dent into her pillow, almost pressed his face there to take in the smell of her hair. He couldn’t bring himself to give his guilt that satisfaction.
He looked back out the window and watched a handful of years melt from her, Sandra in her dirt-smeared apron, turning the soil around the hellebores with a spade. She climbed to her feet and dragged the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving a red-brown streak that stood out like a brand. And like a brand, it seemed to Hiram the one image of her that wanted to live on for him. Her hair was twisted into a tight silver bun, and he was able to savor, still after all this time, the thought of her undoing it before bed. Her one vanity freed and plunging down her back, anticipating the comb of his fingers. She was always so quick to gasp at his touch.
Now the front yard lined itself with pews, and somewhere close Hiram walked their daughter, Helen, down the aisle, but the window framed only Sandra in blue chiffon, the gold of her hair then only interrupted by subtle ribbons of gray, like guests she had not invited.
But the streak of dirt was on her forehead still, and he thought of her soon in the earth and turned his head away, squeezing his eyes shut. He’d been a smoker until his sixtieth birthday, while she was the one who used the treadmill he’d bought. How had her heart lurched with a fatal thunder while his crept on? A feather brushed his cheek, pulled a teardrop into itself. His shoulder blades ached like something missing.
Gravel crunched in the driveway. Helen had come to take him to the church. He lay there, for a last moment ignoring the dull pain in his back and the feathers scattered across the sheets. Helen had always had a key to the house. Sandra had never accepted that her little girl had long since left the nest, but since she’d only moved an hour away, maybe Sandra hadn’t quite been wrong.
The front door opened and Hiram swept the feathers down the bed, yanking the comforter up to his neck just as his daughter rapped on the bedroom door. “Daddy?” she said. “Are you decent?”
Decent. The word rang dull as a wrapped bell. He didn’t respond.
Helen came into the room already wearing a gentle exasperation on her face. She held a plastic cleaner’s bag, and Hiram didn’t want to see the stark black suit inside. He found himself angry that he saw more of himself than Sandra in that face. As if she, too, was not paying her mother the proper tribute. It was his upturned flare of the nose, his dirty blue eyes flecked with green like an algae-stained pond. He only found Sandra in his daughter’s cheekbones, the soft jut of the chin, something faint in the shape of her mouth.
“Daddy, I’m sorry but you can’t do this,” she said. “Not today.”
“I’m not feeling well,” Hiram whispered. “Maybe tomorrow.”
She sat down on the bed. “It’s okay that you didn’t go to the viewing, Daddy,” she said. “Everybody understands. But the funeral is now, not tomorrow. You know that. You have to come say goodbye to her.”
He looked out the window again. Only snow falling in vague lines. “Just give me a minute,” he told her.
When Helen had hung the suit on the closet door and left the room, Hiram forced himself out of bed. Three or four feathers were caught in his wake and swirled briefly to the floor.
In the mirror his bloodshot eyes regarded him, the skin sagging below them into little troughs. He stalled the moment as long as he could—knowing Helen wouldn’t hesitate to knock on this door too—and turned around, twisted his chin back onto his shoulder. Feathers, a dozen or more matching the strange snowfall in the bed, were stuck to his upper back. He plucked one off and a sharp tugging pain brought a hiss through his teeth. It had come out, not off. A trickle of blood ran down from the new wound.
He backed a step closer to the sink. Ignoring the feathers, he saw what was more worrisome: something, a growth or tumor, stretched the skin high on each of his shoulder blades. They leaned away from one another, two inches or so wide and half as long, the skin around them pulled taut. He reached, old muscles complaining at the unnatural angle, and touched the one on the left, baring his teeth against a surge of pain that didn’t come. It kept the same low ache and was both cool and hot to the touch.
Hiram caught his gaze in the mirror—wings? The idea felt as distant as tree roots under his skin, or motor oil in his veins. He denied it, shut it all from his mind. This brought Sandra back into it where she belonged, but just behind her, drawing closer in his return to the foreground, was Jim. He most of all did not want to think of Jim, not today, this ghost that had only now demanded that Hiram admit he was haunted.
#
He whispered into the casket. Its cherry wood was polished to an unnatural shine, but mercifully the undertaker had been sparing with Sandra. She lay muted and worn and beautiful against the pale satin.
“I’m so sorry, love.” Hiram stood there and seemed to feel all those stages of grief upon him, cycling away, each seeking purchase. There was a great weight pressed against him, that she could die when he was the less defensible. Her hands were folded across her chest, and he cupped one of his own over the dry cool skin. He would have felt blessed to crawl into the coffin with her, reach up and pull the lid down over the both of them. He drew his hand away and traced the back of a finger along her jawline. A small white feather slipped from his cuff and into the hair behind her ear. He wondered whether to leave it there.
The mutter of the church built slowly behind him. He turned, his shoulders giving a throb beneath the tight seams of his suit coat. For a moment he didn’t see the cousins and the friends gathered there, Helen comforting someone whose head bowed under a cloud of white hair. He saw 1981, the last year they had before Hiram quietly doomed himself with Jim Hudson. He saw one summer night, in a canoe he and Sandra had taken out on Parson Black Lake, the moon a bloated joy hanging up there just for them. He heard the cicadas filling the world, and Sandra whispering, “Let’s jump in.”
Hiram looked back to his wife. She’d been such a smiler. He closed his eyes and reminded himself it was the funeral, not 1981 and not the viewing, either. He had avoided seeing her like this, and now here he was. He felt Helen’s presence as she reached him, and before she could grasp his shoulder, the swollen knot there, he turned and took her warm, thriving hand. Let her lead him to the front pew. He sat and thought of that canoe, set adrift by an oar braced against the tree-crowded bank. He thought of how young his hands had been that night, holding the oar, how clean they had been.
#
“The eye is the first circle.” Jim had told him that beside the Missouri River, in the early hours of Hiram’s second night in St. Louis. It had always sounded like a quote to Hiram, but in the moment he’d been too embarrassed to ask. The words wouldn’t leave his head these past days, so he typed them into Google and learned they were from an Emerson essay. Jim spoke to him all over again as he read. About how the second circle is the horizon seen by the first, and how this shape comes to be repeated through nature and the world, on and on.
He thought about that repetition, outward from the circle of his own vision, first glimpsing the tall black-haired man reaching up to staple a Xeroxed paper to a less-cluttered height of a telephone pole, denim shirt riding up three tanned inches above the thick belt. All those razor-straight horizon lines. The man’s sign offered a reward for a lost miniature Pinscher named Otis. Hiram had thought it a kindness, to not cover up the flyers already there. It was the first and last time he ever felt this heat-flash reaction toward anyone. That it was a man disoriented and thrilled him.
They’d shared guilty food and their first guilty kiss under the Arch. Hiram had been sent to Missouri for a week to attend a tech convention, and he wondered how many of the other tourists craning their necks had wives back home. “If that wasn’t the gateway kiss, I don’t know what
is,” Jim had told him when their lips pulled apart. They’d held hands through the sparse downtown and let the stares bounce off them. The week had seemed as long as a breath. At the end, the airport, glazed with the awe of what he’d done, he wondered where Otis was. If he’d be found.
Circles. Coming back, always. It was how he had thought about Jim all these years, he realized now, thirty-three of them, thirty-three loops back to the fourth night and a fifth of bourbon in a hotel room. Had the room been on the sixth floor? No, it had been far too dingy a place to stand that tall. There had been a thump and a shout through the thin wall, “Quiet the fuck down.” The rattled wheeze of the air conditioner on their sweat-slicked skin. Clenching and pulling, their soft animal sounds. He wondered where that Wild Turkey bottle was now, if it still had the ancient taste of their lips on its mouth, and why was his memory doing this to him?
Sandra had been arranging a bridal bouquet at work when her heart quit on her. She’d gone quickly, the florist blurted out when he called, that strange consolation everyone seemed to fumble for. Hiram had squeezed the phone until its plastic groaned, imagined her on the concrete floor among clipped gardenia stems, her hair come unraveled from its bun and silvering all the vivid color in the shop.
But his second thought, elbowing the first rudely aside, had been of Jim. What Jim might look like now, did he have grandchildren, did they brown in the sun the way he had. The thunderbolt of guilt at that had come, but it had taken a shameful long time.
He remembered all the nights he padded into the bathroom while Sandra slept in her bland peace. His left hand pretending the porcelain ridge of the sink was the corded muscles in Jim’s thigh while he thrust himself into the right. The grease spot from his forehead on the mirror as he finished, gritting his teeth against a week that kept falling further into the past. He would stand there so long the covers had cooled when he returned to bed, to stare at the ceiling. These acts had to lead him back somewhere. Surely they did.
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