Upstairs in his room, Tom unpacked the signed Picasso plates. The signatures, in his opinion, were more interesting than the plates themselves, which looked to him sloppy, with geometric shapes painted in muddy colors. He wondered that such naff objects could fetch nearly £100,000. People were daft, was all. Michelle had carefully wrapped each plate individually in bubble wrap and then in several layers of the Worcester Telegram. More waste. Tom felt unaccountably angry. He tried to dispose of the newspaper, searching the hotel corridors for a recycling basket—which of course was nowhere to be found. He walked three and a half blocks in the searing American summer’s heat with the crumpled papers in his sweaty hands before he found the proper blue baskets with the emblazoned motto, WE RECYCLE. That was America, all over, to announce their meager good deeds in large white letters while doing as little as possible to reclaim the world they were busy tearing down.
After that errand was over, Tom ate his lunch in a diner that served the usual unspeakably bad fare. He hadn’t had a decent meal since his feet had touched American soil. Every restaurant he had encountered proffered obscene amounts of sweets and puddings, stacked up in giant lit-up glass displays at the front of the place, as if they were afraid the diners might run away unless they were enticed at the door by monumental cheesecakes, slabs of chocolate brownies, trays loaded with biscuits and traybakes and the like. Though Tom was not normally a coffee drinker he drank a bitter cup with his tuna-fish salad sandwich. Anything was preferable to the watery stuff that passed for tea in this country. The badness of the tea almost seemed enough to justify what he was doing. What a relief it would be to get home to Cornwall and have a decent English cream tea!
For the minute, however, his short remaining time in Worcester hung unexpectedly heavy on his hands. He had not anticipated the hammer blow of a real New England summer, broiling and clammy, supersaturated with both rain and sun. He was used to cool days and cooler nights at the edge of the sea. He’d lately learned about some conservation lands within and around the city of Worcester—more than four hundred acres of them in one city park alone. Now that he was free of all other obligations, he could return at last to his true calling, and see what he might find in these famous New England woods. He’d been reading American nature writers all his life—men like Thoreau, Emerson, Edward Abbey, and John Muir. “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness,” Muir had written. “There is no forgiveness in nature,” declared Ugo Betti. The nature writers were not a cheery lot. Like Tom, they took a dim view of human nature. They did not spare themselves, or anyone else.
“Keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body,” wrote Abbey, the crabbiest of the lot. “The body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
Tom nearly laughed out loud considering those lines. He briefly considered the two American sisters Michelle and Louisa, committed to their “desk-bound” lives. It wasn’t a kindly laughter, but Abbey had also once noted, “Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”
As Tom entered the Broad Meadow woods, under a scattershot of thin shade, and climbed up the sharpest and least-used path he could find, the thought also crossed the back of his brain like the shadow edge of a knife: Wasn’t he also entrusting his own heart to “a safe deposit box”—in fact, hadn’t he just inquired at the motel’s front desk about the availability of exactly that object? Who among those naturalists he admired would approve of his behavior right now? Who among them ever gave way to avarice and greed?
He shook his head as if to shake off the thought and walked harder, faster, up the steep incline, feeling the familiar ache in his calves, the comforting give of soil under his feet, after days of unremitting pavement.
“I just want what’s coming to me,” he told himself firmly, but the voice in his head sounded shrill, and worse yet, there was no answering remark in Claudia’s soft voice. He waited. What he heard in his head at that minute was—an absence—and then he realized that he’d swerved aside to avoid some bramble bushes and lost the path. He fell off balance. Panic constricted his chest. He swiveled left, then right, reorienting himself. Yes, there was the sun, at about forty-five degrees, just touching the dark-green heart-shaped leaves of a towering redbud. He removed his shoes and socks, since he was accustomed to walking barefoot in the wild, and rolled the socks inside the heels of his shoes as he had done a thousand times back home. Of course no sane human being ever walked along the Cornish strand wearing shoes. But even in the forests of England, Tom spent at least part of his time barefoot. No walk was truly a walk, he believed, unless you felt the earth against your skin. Stones and twigs were simply part of the territory; moss was a positive luxury.
His grandfather had taught him how to set his bare feet down, rolling from the outside of his foot inward, learning to step lightly. His grandfather had called it the “fox walk.” You didn’t pound the ground with your heels the way most humans did. You kept your head up, alert, and more or less felt your way forward. It was easier to climb barefoot, and if you had to wade across a stream, you didn’t need to worry about squashing around for hours in leaky shoes.
Tom walked on aimlessly, forcing himself to move more slowly. His mind kept wandering off. He had lately fallen into a city gait; rushing past buildings, hurrying from room to room. He shut his eyes for a moment, feeling the sunlight touching his eyelids. He listened for the usual sounds: the rustlings and creaks and bird whistles. He was conscious of the sharp whine of cars and vans from the nearby carriageway. A woodpecker startled him, as if it had beaten a hollow drum just next to his head, and Tom lurched off balance again and stepped down flat on a grasshopper, bringing his weight awkwardly down and killing it instantly. He had fished all his life, and hunted occasionally, with nets and sticks and handmade traps. With his grandfather he had once skinned and eaten an otter. —In all his years of tracking, he had never killed a living thing by accident.
Tom dropped to his knees to study the elegant creature he had destroyed. It had been a long-horned grasshopper, a large beautiful one, nearly seven centimeters long, with two translucent pairs of wings, the shorter pair the flushed pale rose of a speckled lily. Its legs were still folded as if he had murdered a monk at prayer.
Tom rose to his feet. He felt breathless, sick. He headed rapidly back down the steep embankment, almost at a run, heedless of thorns and heat alike. At least now he knew what he had to do. He padded back along hot sticky asphalt he’d come from till he had reached his chain motel, one among thousands of identical motels—where the young woman teetering in her high heels at the front desk gave him an uncertain smile, as if afraid he might pull out a stick of dynamite—and then it took only three or four minutes to get up to his room and back down and he was right back out on the road again, in the brutal heat of the afternoon, his shirt clinging to his back with sweat.
Tom’s sense of direction had always been strong, so he didn’t hesitate walking out of the downtown area, heading west toward the now-setting sun. That was a blessing; he could almost feel the air cool around him, minute by minute. He walked steadily, aware that his breath was coming more evenly than it had when he was in the woods. His brain felt alive again, firing on all pistons. He carried his burden lightly. He caught the flash of a dragonfly wing hovering over Lake Quinsigamond; the buzz of insects hiding in the frothy nets of Queen Anne’s lace growing by the sides of the road. A few miles farther on, a bright-blue butterfly, no bigger than his thumb, the color of a summer sky, settled on a nearby lupine, swaying like a tiny King Kong atop the Empire State Building.
There you go, said Claudia’s warm voice in his head. Yes, he was mad as a hatter, but back where he needed to be.
He was sweaty and probably filthy too by the time he arrived at Michelle’s
broad front door. He rang the bell, suddenly too done in even to raise his fist to knock. Sierra’s pale round face appeared briefly behind one of the leaded glass panes at the side of the front door, and just as quickly ducked away, disappearing from view. He couldn’t blame her for not wanting to see him. He didn’t much care for himself, either. A moment later, the door swung open with a puzzled Michelle standing in the vestibule.
He thrust the box of plates into her arms. “I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking,” he said. “Here. Take them. They’re yours.”
He turned and loped straight off, but Michelle set the box down by the door, and ran lightly after him, catching up and tapping him on the back.
“Please don’t run away,” she said. Her face was as open and kind as ever.
He backed away, smiling, but with both hands raised in the air, as if warding off an attack. “Can’t stay,” he said. “I’m not civilized. Absolutely. Don’t want to be.”
“Tom,” she said, insisting. “Would you stop for a glass of water?” she asked. “At least?”
He considered that offer. It was a fair trade. He was in fact very thirsty, and it was a long hot walk back to the motel. He nodded.
“Wait here,” Michelle said. She ran off on tiptoe, her sneakers squeaking on the boards of the porch, let the screen door bang lightly behind her, and she was back with his glass of water in less than a minute. Mercifully, she had not dropped ice cubes into his drink, as most Americans felt compelled to do.
She stood with one hand resting on the ball of the white balustrade, watching while he tipped the glass back and drank.
“You’re sure about those?” she asked, gesturing inside, toward the plates he assumed.
He nodded and wiped his mouth. “Please,” he said. “Let’s not.” Her forehead wrinkled, the characteristic two worry lines appeared between her eyes. “Yes. Completely bloody sure. Could not be more positive.” He handed her back the empty water glass.
“Really?” she said.
“I was an absolute prick,” he said. “No excuse for what I did.”
“Do you want to come inside and tell Sierra yourself?” she asked.
“No!” he said. He softened his voice as best he could. “You tell her for me. You’ll have the words. What the fuck-all was I thinking? Lost track of myself. I plead insanity. You tell her that.”
“All right,” she said. The corners of her mouth quirked in a half smile. “I’ll tell her.” She held up one hand, preventing him from bolting. “—But can I ask you one more question?”
She must have seen the exasperation in his face, but he nodded curtly. He owed her that much. She gestured at his bare and filthy feet.
“What happened to your shoes?” she asked.
Michelle called, a few hours later, to make sure he’d made it back to the motel in one piece. He assured her that he had.
“Sierra all right?” he asked.
She hesitated. He felt the silence before her words. “She went to bed early,” Michelle said.
Tom glanced at the clock on the motel bedside table. “Before nine o’clock?” he asked.
“I know,” she said. “Teenagers are unpredictable.” The silence continued till she thanked him again twice, and they hung up.
Late that night, in the middle of a deep dreamless sleep, Tom heard an animal prowling softly around his room. It was a familiar sensation after all his years of living with Claudia. They’d never had a whole bed just to themselves. Always a stray dog or two curled up at their feet, cats pouncing on and off the bed, damaged creatures wandering through the cottage needing to be nursed. His first thought was of Sasha, a rescue dog that had gone blind in one eye. She had a special fondness for edging up under Tom’s legs at night and licking his bare feet. Tom lay in the pitch-dark listening for the familiar sound of the dog’s even breathing. What he felt instead was a prickling feeling of dread.
In one bound he was awake and upright in the motel bed (too soft, too many pillows) aware that he was alone, and in America. What had awakened him?
He looked at the bedside motel electric clock with its enormous red numbers glowing in the dark, fierce as a set of eyes. It was 3:13 a.m. “Christ’s sake,” Tom said aloud. He had a sick feeling churning in the pit of his stomach, which he tried to push away with his logical mind. That part of the brain, he’d found, didn’t function terribly well in the middle of the night; instead the reptilian brain took over, urging him to run away as fast as possible, to get out, get help, do something!
This last bit came to him in Claudia’s voice, edged with a panic he’d not heard while she was alive and physically present. Could be he was finally losing his mind, here in this American motel room.
“What is it I’m supposed to do?” he asked the darkness.
The sound of his own voice bouncing back from the papered wall made him feel foolish and he lay back down.
Get up, you git! the voice answered. Now!
He groaned awake, smacking his forehead with his hand. “I gave back the bloody Picasso plates,” he said. “What more do you bleeding want?” He pulled the slick covers over his head, as if to block out the sound of her answer. But no other words came. A chilling quiet fell around him, like fog. Then he had it, with a cold, sickening awareness. That was exactly what was wrong—the eerie absence of noise where there should have been—something. At least the faintest hum of some machine. A hollow dark swooped in across the silence, swift as a hawk. He thought at once of Sierra. The teenager going to bed before dark, the silence he had heard at her mother’s end of the line.
Tom threw back the covers and stood barefoot on the wall-to-wall carpet. His legs trembled. He cocked his head, the better to listen. The faint drone of the air conditioner made its steady sound here in the motel room. All right then, there was a sound, so everything should be all right but he could not shake off the feeling of panic. The cooled air created almost visible crests around him, as if he’d been standing in the middle of an icy lake.
What he was straining to hear was farther off by miles. He could almost picture the exact distance between his motel and Michelle’s house. He waited, trying to catch even the faintest echo of the girl’s machines. But as pitch-black is said to be the absence of color, he heard a deep-black silence stretching around him. He wanted no part of it, yet it was already here, a part of him.
Tom tugged his cell phone from its charger, cursing aloud, and blinked at it. There were no new messages. Michelle had texted to say goodnight around 9:30 p.m. He had meant to delete it. No emergency messages, no calls.
Then everything is fine, innit, he told himself. No worries. The feeling of panic did not go away, or even subside. It gripped him harder, till he could actually hear his teeth begin to chatter. Tom pressed Michelle’s number, grinding his teeth together. Her phone went straight to voice mail. A chipper voice-mail greeting, telling how important the call was to her. He did not leave a message.
Cursing himself as a bleeding soft-headed eediart, Tom sat on the motel bed and fished out his trousers and sandals. He was moving purely on instinct now. He snapped on the bedside lamp, blinding himself with its fluorescent bulb. He phoned a Worcester taxi company, its number listed on the folded card provided by the motel. Then there was nothing to do but anxiously count the minutes till it came.
The taxi waited in the dark in the motel driveway moments later, small and insubstantial compared to British taxis, painted a vivid headache-inducing yellow. Tom climbed in and gave the West Side Worcester address. The sleepy-looking man who drove the cab was Arabic, and played Arab music, but he had attached two American flags to either side of his car, clearly in an effort to soothe the jumpy American clientele. He was less chatty than any Cornish taximan would have been, and silently dropped Tom off at the curb on Lenox Street, pointing wordlessly to the dollar amount on the screen beside the steering wheel. Tom paid and got out, his sandals crunching on the Hiatts’ long gravel driveway.
He felt both the eeriness and
errant stupidity of standing in the middle of the night on a dark and safe and vastly silent American suburban street. Mist swirled around his ankles. The streetlamps wore trembling white halos of fog. One light gleamed from deep within the bowels of Michelle’s big house—someone had left a kitchen light on, apparently. There were no other signs of life anywhere, and Tom considered the idea of calling back the cab company, forgetting the whole thing, simply riding back to his motel and going back to sleep. Instead he ran up the porch stairs, brushing past damp wisteria leaves, and his forefinger of its own accord pressed the front doorbell. Almost immediately a light snapped on upstairs. Then another, and he glimpsed Michelle moving along the upstairs hall in a white nightgown. She must have paused out of habit to check Sierra’s room.
Within forty seconds came her piercing scream, a man’s voice calling, the sound of pounding on a door, and lights flicking on all over the house. Tom shrank back into the shadows. He had simultaneously no idea what was going on inside the house, and a clear vision of what was happening within. His heart went on slamming inside his chest as the minutes ticked by.
The hospital ambulance pulled up surprisingly fast, emergency workers jumping out of three car doors at once, like a clown car in a circus. Their flashing red light splashed the leaves of the yard as if with blood.
Joe came running out the front door first and pounded down the porch stairs with Sierra a deadweight hanging in his arms, wrapped in a pink blanket. Michelle raced just behind, a pair of jeans thrown on under her nightgown, her blonde hair crushed to one side from sleep. The medics lowered the girl onto some kind of cot, talking to her all the while, strapped her down, and wheeled her into the back of the ambulance. At least she must be still alive then, Tom thought. Her father tried to climb in after her but was signaled to wait. Michelle stood with her hand over her mouth like someone watching a horror movie. Her gaze barely flicked over Tom’s figure; then she blinked and seemed to come to awareness that he was in fact standing there.
Indigo Hill: A Novel Page 15
