The Dependents
Page 24
“Then you’ll explain it to me?”
“Sometimes I think it’s like putting an unanswerable question out into the world and getting back another unanswerable question. Then trying to figure out if a question can answer a question.”
“Can it?”
“What do you think?”
She smiled at him, her eyes radiant, her manner calm. And it amazed him and pained him all over again that she would never feel the astonishing fact of her existence the way he did. To her, she would always be only herself, but to him she was the fissure down the middle of his life, the creation into the void that had given him two worlds—the world before she came into being and the world after it. That he could feel this and she couldn’t kept them inextricably bound together, at the same time that it ensured they were somewhat forsaken to each other, like amiable strangers.
“Dary,” he said.
“Dad.”
“Again,” he whispered. “Say it again.”
And she did.
When Ed came back inside, he and Dary conferred briefly. They said they were ready to take him to the hospital, and Gene relented. But first, he said, there was something he wanted all of them to do together.
Ed and Dary helped him down the stairs and across the snowy beach. The snowdrift had formed into one solid-looking piece, a thick cake they punctured with their feet as they made their way down to the frozen lake. The wind and rain had cast pine needles, still green, across the snow, and beneath the largest trees the snow top was dented with small cavities the size and shape of marbles where icy raindrops had fallen. The fitful wind drove the scent of the trees, the sharp tang of the needles, toward them in gusts. Then the wind shifted direction and smelled of nothing and was bitterly cold.
They reached the lake’s edge. A few patches of new snow dotted the ice, but otherwise it was bare and white and crosshatched with lines of deeper white. Dary, who was carrying the can containing her mother’s ashes, stopped and pulled off her glove with her teeth. When she opened the can, Gene and Ed huddled around her.
The sky was matted with clouds, light gray and darker gray. The wind blew into their faces and they turned to angle themselves against it, but it seemed only to turn with them and shove at them with greater strength. The hemlocks swung at the air with their thick branches and the large pines shuddered and the small pines leaned. Gene searched the far shore for a line of smoke above a chimney, but the houses were dark and abandoned, planted like a wall on the edge of the water to keep the snowy mountains from sliding into the lake.
In the flat, diffuse light their faces looked pale and clenched. Gene had asked Ed to pick out a poem and Ed had worried there wouldn’t be anything suitable in the cabin. But he had picked one out anyway, a poem Gene didn’t know. Now Ed began to read it with a stiffness in his voice. At first Gene feared that Ed had chosen a poem full of unnecessary solemnity or bleakness, but it was not a bad poem after all. It broke off with a surprising line that struck him as rather wonderful: “We end in joy.”
Then Dary began to shake the can with her mother’s ashes over the ice. The wind blew most of the ashes back to the shore, where they clung to the snow like dirty flakes. She crouched down with what remained of the ashes, and this time tipped the can directly onto the hard surface of the lake. Some of the ashes blew back to shore and some blew across the ice, jittering and then disappearing, so that the three of them were left looking at the frozen lake itself, the silent white immensity of it. The trees were almost black against it and even the snow on top of Mount Orry looked gray compared with it.
“It’s almost like a piece of the moon,” Dary said.
He stepped out onto the ice. He didn’t wait for them to object, he just did it, and limped his way a short distance from the shore. Any second they might come for him, but he hobbled on. He was unsure if he would make it—with every step his ankle hurt a little more and his breath quickened—but where he was going was not very far. When he got out to the place where the floating dock used to be, he paused. Something in his chest was tightening and his heart was trying to beat it back, but instead of relieving the tightness, his heart was twisting it around. He lowered himself to the ice, a motion he could control until the last few inches, when he fell. His heart—he could feel it beating all the way in the soles of his feet. He lay down on the ice with the polished moon of the lake floating all around him, and he proposed a life to Maida and then remembered he’d already lived it. He removed a glove and touched his face. It was wet, though he didn’t remember crying. When he looked up, the sky was swarming with clouds. The light gray ones had merged with the dark ones, and all of them were tossing into each other.
About the Author
Katharine Dion was born in Oakland, California. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. She has also been a MacDowell Fellow and the recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She lives in Berkeley, California. The Dependents is her first novel.
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