She checked him out, perhaps to see if he actually meant for her to shut up. She was sitting a few feet away, both her sneakered feet flat on the forest floor. He kept his face neutral. He wasn’t giving any cues one way or the other. If she needed to talk, well then let her talk.
“I didn’t mean to worry anybody,” she said. “I was just testing . . . Like putting your foot over the edge of a cliff. It’s not that you want to drop. Um, I thought I’d probably just fall asleep and my mom or dad would come find me and turn the pump back on. I mean, maybe that’s what I thought—if I was thinking anything at all.”
He considered this. “Bollocks,” he said.
“What?” Her mouth popped open in surprise.
“Sierra. There probably isn’t one single thinking, sane, sentient human being who hasn’t ever considered putting an end to it,” he said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gone Bodmin. It doesn’t make you rotten or untrustworthy. It doesn’t mean you’re going to do it. Or not do it. But feeling unhappy or disappointed is still not reason enough to throw—” He gestured around them, at the vast green canopy of trees curving overhead. “—all of this away. You quite likely don’t get another chance.” He sounded angry, but he just felt stupid talking at her like this, like some pillock old priest. “Figure out who you want to be. That’s all. It’s your life. Don’t hand in your ticket before you’re ready. And for Christ’s sake don’t waste it.”
Sierra had gone very red in the face. He was afraid she might start crying, and then he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, exactly. Drive her home, probably, and try not to kill both of them in an auto smashup. He’d had as much of weeping women as he could stand.
“What if you do sometimes—feel—ready?” she asked.
“Well, it isn’t all about what you feel either,” he said brusquely. “Trust me on that one.” He spoke quickly. “Figure out where you want to go in this life. You’re not just some bloody puppet. Nor are you in absolute control of everything. You steer halfway between, but it helps if you’re aiming at something good. See if you have some job to do. If there’s any purpose to your being here at all, a chance you might do the other fellow a bit of good. Then you have to stick it out. And you, you’re still green as a leek. You don’t even know what a feather’s good for.”
“Yeah I do,” she said. “They’re good for flying, duh.”
He let out a puff of air. “That’s just what I’ve been on about. We can’t take anything for granted. Even feathers are for more than simple flight. Think about insulation and thermodynamics, for a start. The air moving through helps an owl to listen for the movement of its prey. And then the fringed edge of the feather muffles the sound of its own approach; slows it down; lets it fly at two miles an hour when it’s gliding in for the kill.”
The girl seemed to be still more or less paying attention, and she wasn’t crying so he pushed on. “Feathers help keep a bird clean, line their nests, they make fine camouflage. Just look at that wild turkey feather in your hand—the soft dull brown and gray blends in with the woods, innit? Some species can even sing with their wings, did you know that? They make hums and whistles and drumming sounds. Darwin wrote about it long ago, in On the Origin of the Species. And if you ever see a woodcock in action—they do something called a sky dance, when they’re looking for a mate, right? They rise up high as a five-story building, then drop like a leaf, the wind whistling through its feathers. If a bird can do all that without even half trying, how in the hell do you know what you can accomplish?”
“I never said I did know.” The girl folded her arms. “It’s you grown-ups who pretend to know everything.”
“Fair enough,” he said with a smile and a shrug.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
“Hey—I was the total prat here,” he said. “A complete pig. Over a set of plates I wouldn’t even eat off of. It is I who owe you the apology.”
She let him hang for a minute, and he didn’t blame her. “Okay,” she said finally, from under the curtain of hair that fell over her eyes. “Apology accepted.”
He pushed on. “I wish you’d never try anything as crap as shutting off your pump again. If you feel tempted, might give a call, yeah?”
She looked at him opaquely for a few seconds. Her eyes were flat and dark, like two blue disks. What was he supposed to do if the teenager called his bluff and said no, she’d keep right on trying to kill herself till she succeeded, he wondered. Fall on his knees and beg her not to do herself in? Come out with some more sentimental tripe about how grand and glorious life was, such an adventure and so on? Drive her out of the woods and back toward home with a stick? He felt his heartbeat jump twice, three times while he waited.
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”
“Yeah?” he said, as if indifferent. He risked adding, “And if you don’t reach me, you just call your mum or your dad.”
“All right, all right,” she said. At a look from him she added, “I promise to call one of you, or all three, okay? —In fact, you can give me your number right now.”
He dictated the number aloud and Sierra added it into her phone, her thumbs flying madly. Future generations would need to grow an extra pair of thumbs, he mused. He’d once read that men’s hands had evolved for punching, women’s for dexterity.
“And I’ll add my number to your contacts, too. Like, just in case you ever need me,” she put in. He had a feeling this was some essential ritual of friendship for her generation, something like pricking your pinkie fingers with a knife and rubbing the bloody tips together had been in his.
“My phone’s in the car but we’ll get to it.” He rose to his feet, scanning the sky for signs of rain. “We’ve got almost an hour’s walk back.” He could not reliably read the weather here. Even the cloud formations in an American sky struck him as obscure. Mysterious place, this young country. He figured it was about the same age as Sierra, more or less. A chav teenager. Cocksure and half-cocked. No wonder it kept throwing its weight around in the world and getting itself into all kinds of trouble.
He stood waiting, biding his time, while Sierra monitored her blood sugar, and ate a few raisins and almonds from her backpack. It was easier to be patient in a forest. They both drank some water. He explained that the best way to carry water was inside your own body. He wanted her to like this place. He wanted her to feel safe here. He’d done enough reading to know that hiking was excellent exercise for diabetics, at least as long as she didn’t try anything risky.
As if she was reading his mind Sierra said, “This place is okay. Peaceful. I might even come back here sometime.”
“With a mate?”
She looked at him quizzically.
“With friends? —You need other people,” Tom added.
She munched musingly on another handful of the dried fruit and nut mixture, picking the peanuts out and tossing them onto the carpet of pine needles around them. “You mean, like in general, or just when I go for a hike?”
“Like both,” he said.
By the time he’d driven her back to her big white house—she read him the directions off her cell phone—he was soaked in sweat from the effort of not turning automatically into the wrong lane or steering the car into oncoming traffic. He could have gotten her there blindfolded by foot. A car was a different animal. An American car on back-assward American roads, something else entirely. He’d never driven an automatic. No one back home drove an automatic unless they were an invalid. He kept looking for the clutch and the gear shifts. Everything in this backward country was bloody backward. Once or twice he came close to sideswiping a car, and to compensate he’d run up onto the shoulder of the road, scraping against branches. Sierra didn’t seem to notice. She was back in her own world again, with her da’s cap yanked down low over her eyes, and her face aimed into the lit-up screen of her phone. She barely glanced up when he finally bounced with relief into her long gravel driveway and wrestled the damned car into park. The engine felt more
like it had coughed and died than it had turned off. He handed the keys over to her.
“Got you home alive,” he said.
“I never doubted it,” she said, grinning. “You want to come inside, for a cup of tea or something? My mom can drive you back to your place.”
“No thanks,” he said. “I like to walk. I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?”
“Okay,” she answered. She bent and retrieved the long turkey feather from the floor of the car. She studied it again, smoothing the edges with her fingertips. Then her eyes scanned the gray sky. “Looks like it might rain.”
“I won’t drown,” he said. “Not being a turkey, myself.”
She looked at him quizzically.
“Turkeys can drown in the rain,” he explained. “Noble birds, but not the brightest.”
“Okay, then.” They both got out of the car, standing on opposite sides of the driveway. The curtain twitched at the living-room window. Michelle, looking out with a worried smile he could read without having to actually see her face.
“In you go,” he said, giving a quick wave as he set off. He watched Sierra’s small square back march away. Front door opened, and then closed. Only then did he set off for the motel.
She was right about the rain, of course. He got completely soaked on the walk back to the motel.
Tom had booked the earliest flight to London available, with a transfer to Falmouth, but he was the sort of flier who traveled light and arrived hours early. That meant he’d checked out of his motel before eight o’clock in the morning, but even so the young woman behind the front desk smiled at him with a mouth that was more lipstick than lips, and asked him to wait a moment, holding up one finger.
“Someone dropped this off for you,” she said, handing him a white envelope with just his name, TOM, scrawled across the front.
He thanked her, paid his lodging bill in cash and slid the envelope into the zippered compartment of his backpack. It held the same set of laundered socks, underwear, extra trousers, and T-shirts he’d come with. He wore the same khaki-colored foldable fishing hat on his head. He felt no desire to buy any of the grockle-bait that tempted his fellow countrymen, who then paraded around the cobbles of Rugby Road for the rest of their lives as walking advertisements for Disney World, Los Angeles, or New York, New York. None of that merch for him. He might have bought it for Claudia, just for a laugh. But not just to add to his dragon pile. People’s anxieties seemed to increase in direct proportion to the swelling of their possessions. He’d come close to selling his own soul for the low, low price of £100,000.
At Logan International Airport, he slipped off his shoes, opened his laptop, and made it through American customs without a hiccup. It wasn’t till he was positioned—sitting was too kind a word for it—in an uncomfortable bright-colored molded plastic chair at his departure gate, waiting for British Airways to carry him home, that he finally remembered the envelope with his name written across it. When he opened it, a small piece of paper fell out into his lap, along with one other item.
“I knew you’d sneak off,” Sierra had written in her big, loopy handwriting. Still a child’s handwriting. She drew circles instead of dots over her i’s. “I won’t promise never to do anything stupid, cause I’m only 16, but I’ll be okay. Hope you are too. Thank you. Your friend, Sierra Hiatt.”
“Right,” said Tom, grinning despite himself. He sat back, stretched his legs out in front of him, and tucked the striped turkey feather safely into the hatband of his hat.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Paco, Jean-Marie, Steve, Mary 1 and Mary 2, Sunshine, Dawg, Repeat, Zamboni, and Louisa had all gathered together once again for their semiannual Old-Timer’s Feast. They generally held it in the back of the Manor in West Boylston, at a long rectangular table large enough to hold a dozen or more. When they had first started this tradition as snarky high school kids, they called it the Thankless Feast and held it the day after Thanksgiving. Later on, when many of them had spouses and then kids of their own, it got too hard to reliably pull themselves all together at Thanksgiving so they renamed it the Old-Timer’s Feast and held it in midsummer. They were still in their twenties then and the idea of ever being old, much less old-timers, seemed laughably far away. Now, in their forties, the name had become almost too close for comfort.
Looking around the table, Louisa noticed that certain members of the Bridge gang were definitely starting to show signs of wear and tear—sagging chins, paunches, crow’s feet, hair loss, the whole shebang. The men, especially. Here in central Massachusetts they seemed to age at roughly twice the speed of the women. Or maybe the girls just fought back against time more desperately.
No one had ordered any food yet. Most had glasses of beer sitting in front of them. None of the local fancy craft beers out of Boston for them. They drank what they’d always been drinking: Sam Adams, Budweiser. A few of her gang drank a six-pack a day, easy. They were sitting around the table, chattering and drinking and kidding each other, waiting on Art and Flick.
Art had balked at the idea of showing up alone and looking like, he said, “a public spectacle” on account of his separation from Louisa. He was sitting this one out. The gang received this latest news in silence. But Flick, of all people, refused to take no for an answer. He’d shown up at the Manor right on time, for a change, and when Louisa explained that Art wasn’t coming, Flick did an about-face and headed back out to his truck, tossing over his shoulder, “I’ll bring him back, dead or alive.”
“Either one’s okay with me,” said Louisa, but she didn’t mean anything by it. Her days were lighter, sadder, longer and—yes, sure, maybe lonelier with Art gone. But she couldn’t say she really missed him. Not the way you were supposed to long for a spouse. Not even the way she missed both of her absent parents. Most of the time she felt relieved, as if someone had given her life back. She’d once read in one of those ladies’ magazines that the key word for happily married couples was easy. Their lives felt easier together than they’d been apart. Louisa was pretty sure that hadn’t ever been true of her life with Art, not even in their earliest honeymoon days. Things were never all that smooth between them.
Even their honeymoon night, in fact. Talk about a bad beginning. Art had gotten hammered on a few too many screwdrivers and Louisa spent the wedding night holding a wet washcloth to Art’s round forehead while he puked into the heart-shaped toilet. That was after he’d already thrown up all over her white sequined wedding shoes. Just what every girl dreams of.
Louisa once heard of a bridal party that got stuck behind a hearse, but otherwise she’d never heard of a less promising beginning. The marriage had been mostly downhill from there. And she couldn’t pretend it was all Art’s fault, either.
Soon enough, Flick returned with Art in tow, under the crook of his encircling arm; Art half grinning and half scowling, casting sideways looks at Louisa as if she were the sun and might blind him if he looked directly at her. He’d already lost some weight, she saw. He looked good.
She waved at him. “How’s it going?” she said.
He mumbled something inaudible, and chose a seat at the table as far away from her as possible. All right, Louisa thought. Be that way. Paco was recounting the time they had all brought their mothers to the Manor, on Mother’s Day, and a couple of the old ladies got stuck inside the elevator. Sunshine’s mother started singing hymns, which was when Zamboni’s mother began hammering on the elevator walls shouting “Get me the hell out of here!”
The gang took their time over the meal—it seemed like one crazy story always led to the next, then the next one. The time Paco nearly fell off the bridge. The time Flick climbed the water tower with Art’s handkerchief on as a blindfold, on a dare. After they’d finally settled up the bill, there was a momentary silence. Flick looked at Louisa quizzically across the table where he sat opposite her. She tried to interpret the look. Did his raised eyebrows mean, Was it okay that I brought Art along? Did it mean anything deeper, some message just fo
r her?
Louisa had done her best not to act like a lovesick teenager after her night at Flick’s house. More important, she tried not to feel like a lovesick teenager. She had sternly ordered herself not to call Flick, not to initiate contact, and most of all, not to sit by the phone mooning around like a goony fifteen-year-old praying for it to ring. She did just fine on the first two days and failed completely on the third. She cried all that day. Even at work, for Pete’s sake. She ate her lunch in the ladies’ room of the office at the far end of the building, the grotty one no one ever used, so she could bawl her eyes out, without interruption. Brandi, of all people, offered her a box of Kleenex when she got back to her desk. After the fourth or fifth day, Louisa pretty much gave Flick up as a lost cause. He wasn’t going to come chasing after her, that was for sure. What could you do? You just kept going. She still had the precious memory of that night. New bits of it would sometimes come back to her. A single night was a long time when you broke it down hour by hour, minute by minute, and it was all hers. Forever. Like the Fred Astaire song said, you can’t take that away from her.
A week later Flick had finally called to see how Louisa was doing, and did she want to go for a walk around the reservoir. The banter between them was light and easy, same as always. He was so familiar. His long-legged strides slowed to match her steps. Once in a while he nudged her with his broad shoulder. They were always going to be friends. That was the bad news. They were always going to be friends. That was the good news, too.
Whatever the tilt of Flick’s head and the raised eyebrows across the table might have meant, Art was the one who snagged her on the way out, steering her by the elbow practically into the coatrack by the restroom doors.
“Mind if I talk to you for a minute?” he said.
“Course not,” she said, caught off guard. Art hadn’t directed any of his conversation toward her during the meal. Not one single word. She’d never even caught him looking her way. She just figured from now on the two of them were going to act like total strangers. They’d exchanged a few emails in the past weeks but it was all business-y stuff, figuring out car insurance and things like that.
Indigo Hill: A Novel Page 17
