Above The Thunder

by Renee Manfredi

  Listen: This is the truth about heaven and earth. Sometimes things turn upside-down. The birds see you. To them, you are a faraway star. You are in their heaven, walking in their heaven, just as they fly in yours. And, listen, listen: sometimes we are like the birds, too. We come from there to here, to help fly you home.

  “Jack,” Flynn said, though she saw he was almost asleep.

  “Yes, love,” he said.

  “Listen, this is the truth about heaven and earth: When the geese die, they fly down. When we die, we fly up. We live in their heaven, and they live in ours.”

  “Hmm,” he said.

  There was more she was supposed to tell him, but he was snoring now. She needed to let him know that his time was near, and that the man in the yellow shirt, Hector, was here to help him. He would wait with Jack, just the way the birds waited. Hector was sitting on the bed, touching Jack’s hair. Flynn kissed Jack goodnight, and stood to go. She turned around at the door. Hector was right behind her. She looked at Hector, then back at Jack, confused. Maybe this was just his way of thanking her, or of telling her to leave him alone with Jack. But when she walked out into the hallway, Hector followed. When she put her hand on the banister to go downstairs, Hector put his hand on her shoulder, wrapped her in a soft and suffocating embrace, and she began to weep with fear, with what she thought she now understood. Hector hadn’t come for Jack. He had come for her.

  ELEVEN

  VENUS IN PIECES

  Stuart was halfway to Anna’s before he realized he hadn’t gotten Jack anything for his birthday. Even after all this time, after all that had happened, he couldn’t just let it slip by—he’d never let a birthday go by unacknowledged. This year was the big one, his fortieth, and Anna was planning a party.

  Of course, more generous ex-lovers would say that Stuart’s presence was enough, that risking a stable relationship with a partner of nearly a year was more gift than Jack deserved. Jack, of course, wouldn’t see it that way. The one birthday Jack would never forget was his own. Stuart had resigned himself to it long ago—shopping for his own birthday and Christmas gifts, dragging Jack along as punishment while he went into every kitchen store, every clothing boutique, intentionally not buying what he’d picked out weeks before until he saw the suburban-husband glaze in Jack’s eyes.

  David had thrown a fit when Stuart mentioned his plans. Anna had called one Saturday afternoon, asked if he would come to Jack’s party which might be a full-blown celebration or just an intimate gathering, she hadn’t decided. But either way. Sure, we’ll be there, Stuart said. David was so easy-going, so good-natured and trustworthy that Stuart took for granted that he would come along or not care that Stuart wanted to go. But one night, not long ago, Stuart had gone too far. David listened, thin-lipped and pale, as Stuart detailed the anguish of loving Jack, the way it felt as if every cell in his body had been infused with the man. It felt, he said, as though his very DNA had spiraled with Jack’s; to fully disentangle himself would take years of careful unraveling. David shook his head and looked away.

  Stuart and David had a great place in Worcester, a rambling—once genteel, and now shabby-genteel—three-bedroom Victorian with rococo accents and innumerable gothic archways. David was director of libraries for B.U. and there were dinner parties nearly every weekend for one group of David’s colleagues or another. Stuart, having finally finished his Ph.D., was teaching as an adjunct while he searched for a tenure-track position.

  He and David had been painting the living room when Anna called, were trying to find just the right tone of yellow. They had fourteen samples from the paint store, and had narrowed it down to nine. “I think Buttercream,” Stuart said, “Buttercream with the trim in Winter Sunlight.”

  “You’re kidding? Winter sunlight is not a submissive shade. I think Buttercream with plain old eggshell would be friendlier.” They stepped back and stared, then laughed. “We’re such fags,” Stuart said, and rolled the lightly coated sponge down the front of David’s sweatshirt. He answered the phone, talked to Anna for five minutes, and then went back into the living room.

  “Who was it?” David said.

  “Anna. We’re invited up to Maine next weekend. Jack’s fortieth.” He rearranged the plastic drop cloth so it covered the skirt of the sofa.

  “I don’t think so,” David said.

  Stuart shrugged. “Whatever. I’ll be back Sunday night.” He walked over to the fireplace, not sure that the mantel should be anything but white. Maybe off-white.

  “I mean, Stuart, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you, either.”

  He turned. “Why?”

  “I think it’s perpetuating your relationship with Jack. In the long run, your way is more painful.” Stuart just looked at him. “The relationship is over. You’ve already grieved for the man once, do you need to do it all over again?”

  “What’s it to you? It has nothing to do with you. With us.” He gave David a quick, light kiss before turning back to the problem of the yellows. One of the things he loved most about David was that he could speak so freely; insults and sarcasm had always been the price of being candid with Jack.

  “I really don’t want you to go. I’m asking you not to go.”

  “You’re being silly. Insecure and silly.”

  But David hadn’t backed down. “If you leave, I might or might not be here when you come home.”

  Stuart had looked at him evenly. “Is that some sort of threat?”

  “No. It’s just that I have to think about what it means to have a partner who doesn’t respect me when I feel strongly about something.”

  “Okay,” Stuart said. “I understand.” David didn’t mean it. Or, if he did, they would deal with it when he got back. All those years with Jack had squashed his panic response. Stuart no longer felt unhinged and desperate every time his lover slammed out in anger or wasn’t precisely where he said he would be. Still, David hadn’t ever come down so strongly before. Was he was serious?

  Stuart would talk to him later from Anna’s, he decided, speeding through the tunnel in the forest green Jeep Cherokee he and David had bought just last week. The seats were leather and the car even smelled rich. He loaded Thelonius Monk and Coltrane on the CD player, hit shuffle, and picked up his phone. No. Not now. Why stir it all up now?

  He stopped in Portland to browse the shops. What the hell could Jack need or want? Clothes? Books? DVDs were always a safe bet. At a Blockbuster, he found a digitally remastered boxed set of Robert Mitchum’s lesser-known movies, as well as every one of Ben Affleck’s movies—Jack’s other schoolboy crush. For Flynn, whom Anna had said was into Irish dancing, he found Riverdance in addition to the god-awful sequel.

  It had been snowing lightly when he left Worcester, but it was seriously winter up here. The pines and spruce were bent under the weight of ice and snow.

  He stopped at an inn just an hour away from Anna’s for a cup of tea, and to get out of the weather for a bit. In the back dining room, the one with windows on all sides, a huge stone fireplace was fat with birch logs. He’d been here twice before—once with David, on their way to a New Year’s Eve party at Anna’s, the second time alone, when he left on a whim to visit Jack but got control of himself in the end.

  Stuart asked for a corner table, far from the madding crowd of tourists. It was always a good idea to sit quietly, to gather himself in, before seeing Jack. Occasionally, he felt nostalgic for the life they’d had, but not often; mostly he felt lucky to have what he had now, a man who was stable and loyal and who loved him unreservedly.

  The dining room was full of families and noisy children. He ordered a brandy. Outside, the mountains were already fully sheathed in white. Stuart wondered about the rooms here, if they were as nice as the B&Bs where he and Jack used to stay. David had not a trace of sentimentality. The times when Stuart suggested driving up north to look at the leaves, he at first thought Stuart meant rare archived manuscripts—as in the leaves of the frontispieces of old books. “And wha
t’s wrong with looking at the leaves in Massachusetts?” David said, when Stuart clarified what he meant. Stuart just rolled his eyes. In his darker moments he wondered if they were too different to make it for the long haul. But there was something to be said for pragmatic love as sturdy as a handrail.

  Maybe there would be significant snow accumulation tonight. Anna would have a pot of her amazing soup going, probably a fire, too. It was a little like going home, the clean warmth and gentle lighting, the mouth-watering food smells. He was grateful for Anna, felt blessed to be invited to her parties and for all her invitations—even if he didn’t accept most of them. If not for the problem of Jack living there, he and David might visit more often. Both of his parents were gone, dead within fourteen months of each other to the day. His father had died painfully, of pancreatic cancer. One by one the adult children had filed in to their father’s hospital room to say goodbye. Stuart’s brothers and sister had eight kids between them. Stuart studied his father in the bed, propped up by the inadequate pillows, and it seemed improbable that this was the man who knew his boyhood, the arms that held him as a child. It seemed an odd thing to be thinking, that this man would be taking the knowledge of his childhood away forever. That was the worst thing, Stuart supposed, the way in which his family history just disappeared when his parents died. He supposed it was the same for his siblings, though not exactly. They had their children, their own families, for holidays. Both of his brothers lived in Massachusetts, his sister in New Hampshire. Stuart had never been invited to their homes. He hadn’t realized how estranged he was from them—he didn’t feel estranged—until his parents were gone and he and David ended up either celebrating holidays alone or tried to forget Christmas altogether. It wasn’t that his siblings shunned him, it was just that he didn’t occur to them. He wasn’t resentful for not being included, but he was hurt by their forgetfulness—intentional exclusion, he sometimes suspected—in leaving him out of family gatherings.

  He sipped his brandy, turned his body away from the two families who had come into the dining room. Two terrible women in their thirties, fat suburban mothers wearing Land’s End khakis and some poly-cotton turtlenecks they probably picked up at Kmart. He wanted to lean over and tell them if they wanted to sneak a cheap turtleneck into their wardrobes, the secret was to buy black, and black only. Nothing advertised price better than the dye lot of those rainbow colors. Fat women with soft asses and softer brains, sprayed hair and inferior children. Repulsive, these stupid cow families from the boroughs and provinces, with their conservative politics, mini-vans and self-righteous certainties.

  What was wrong with him today? He rarely felt so hateful. Maybe it was the run-in with David, who seemed increasingly manipulative. David was subtle in how he applied pressure, Stuart had to give him that; often, not until a foul mood overcame him did he realize David was its source. Though it didn’t quite feel like that now.

  He turned back to the window. Outside there were two men with Russian-looking hats carving a block of ice with chisels and what looked to Stuart liked sanders. They had lights set up all around their work area as though they planned to be there a while. Stuart watched absently as the men worked. He started to relax a bit with the heat coming from the fire and the warm flush of brandy moving through him.

  Someone at one of the big tables saw what was happening outside and before he knew it Stuart had four children crammed between his table and the window, craning their necks to see. Two of them actually stood in his sightline. A couple of bulldozers, knocking into his table and nearly upsetting his teapot. He looked over at the mountainous mother who smiled at him, self-confidence creasing her doughy face, as though it was only natural that they use the entire room.

  “Excuse you,” Stuart said, and with his foot pushed the chair opposite him when one of the boys knocked it with his thick body. How could a mother let her son get this way? Thighs as thick as spruce trunks, face pale from bad food and too much television. Stuart pushed the chair back, eased it into the space the boy was occupying, but the kid was oblivious. He shoved hard a second time so the chair caught the boy in the middle and knocked him off balance. The kid stumbled and toppled. There.

  Instead of getting the hint, though, to Stuart’s horror, the boy started to cry. Conversation stopped at the tables, and one of the women, presumably his mother, called over, “What’s the matter, Gerald?” The kid looked at Stuart, who returned his look with a hostile arch of his eyebrow. There. The world isn’t moving out of the way for you, sonny. The boy’s mother came over. “What happened?”

  “He shoved that chair into me!” the kid said between sobs.

  The mother looked at Stuart, her little mouth with its shimmery pink lipstick—pink lipstick against a red turtleneck!—shaped exactly like those old-fashioned bottle-openers. Apparently, the woman was waiting for him to deny it. Stuart downed the last of his Hennessey. “You need to teach your son some manners,” he said quietly.

  “Pardon? What did he do to you?” She looked at Stuart with a mixture of surprise and defensiveness, mostly surprise, which infuriated him.

  “Ask him,” Stuart said. “But kindly ask him at your own table and leave me to mine.”

  The woman’s face darkened, and Stuart could see her retreating, ready to let it go. “He’s eight years old. It wouldn’t kill you to have a little tolerance.” She wrapped a protective arm around the boy.

  “Oh? Actually, you may want to take your own advice,” he said. “About the tolerance part, I mean.”

  The whole noisy table of them departed, and Stuart was left in peace, though ashamed. He truly hadn’t meant to get so angry. All-consuming fury wasn’t his style.

  He left money on the table and went out. The air smelled of bayberry and pine from the wreaths hanging on the porch, the perimeter of which was lit up with white Christmas lights. He sat in the car and just stared awhile at the white Georgian columns and felt the ache Christmas always brought up in him. He found his phone, dialed home, but didn’t let the call go through. Too near Anna’s now, too close to the whirlwind of Jack.

  Stuart had brought his coat, the one with the mementos of Jack, and put it on when he got to Anna’s. He didn’t especially want to bring it, but he suspected that David had been going through his things and he didn’t want this under his eyes. It hadn’t fit in his suitcase and he didn’t want to leave it in the car—some of the pressed flowers might be sensitive to cold. He juggled his armful of luggage and bags, knuckled the doorbell. Maybe he wanted to show it to Jack, maybe that’s why he’d brought it along.

  Through the glass blocks alongside the door, he saw Anna backlit by the yellow light of the hallway, blurring toward him. “Hi, dear,” she said, opening the door. “I was just about to call the state troopers.” She took his packages and hugged him. “We just finished dinner. We waited as long as we could.”

  “That’s okay. I’m good.” He followed her into the living room. “Where’s our boy?”

  “He’s in the bathroom. Flynn is doing the dishes.” Anna held up a decanter of Scotch, and he nodded. “Flynnie?” she called in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Yesie?” she yelled back.

  “Uncle Stuart is here.”

  “Lord a mercy!” she called, “All the blackbirds is flyin’ outta my pies.”

  Anna set her mouth, shook her head at the look on Stuart’s face. “It’s a new thing, speaking in what she thinks of as rural Southern dialect. We’re trying to ignore it.” She glanced down at his coat. “Do you want me to hang that for you?”

  “Oh, I can do it.” He went out to the hallway closet.

  “Uncle Stuart?” Jack called from the bathroom, and laughed. “Did I hear the name Uncle Stuart?”

  “The same. Get your rumpus out here.” He walked back in to join Anna.

  “He might be just a little while.” Anna poured herself another Scotch, poked at the fire and added another log. “He’s having a little trouble. How to put this delicately? The bre
akfast cuisine around here is stewed prunes. It’s all the medications he’s taking. His system is going into revolt. Forty-eight pills a day, all carefully timed.” She sat back in the chair, propped her feet up on the table in front of her. Stuart saw the fatigue in her drooping shoulders, the slackness of her jaw line. She was thinner than ever, she who hadn’t anything extra on her to begin with. “I meant to tell you on the phone, Jack has developed a dowager’s hump. It’s a fairly common side effect of the medication, along with a thickening of his neck. But the drugs are working. He has more lucid days than not, and his viral load is down by about forty per cent, which is a gift.”

  “That’s good,” Stuart said.

  Anna nodded. “That’s very good.”

  Flynn came into the living room, walked over to Stuart smiling. She was huge! Inches taller than when he saw her last, her little-girl figure starting to soften and curve somewhat, though she hadn’t added the pubescent fat around the middle. Everything on her was going to form; she wouldn’t have to wait three years for her figure to emerge, clarified, through the baby padding. “My God, you’re gorgeous.” She returned his kiss, embraced him warmly. “Shucks, Rhett, you make a lady blush.”

  He laughed. “Have you been reading Gone with the Wind?”