A Certain Slant of Light

by Laura Whitcomb

  “Diggs,” James called to him. Diggs glanced down the trench, narrow as a grave, and then crept out, staying close to the tree trunk.

  “Are they moving?” he called to James.

  James’s uniform was as dirty and frayed as his friend’s, but his helmet was hung on his back like a metal saucer instead of safely on his head. “We’ve been here for weeks and they haven’t advanced a foot,” James laughed. “We’ll be here until the Second Coming.”

  “James?” I whispered in his ear, but he couldn’t hear me. It was as if I had slipped into a memory of his—a story I could not affect but only observe.

  Diggs started climbing the metal spikes that made the tree into a watchtower. “So, what’s the matter?”

  James looked up into the top of the tree where a round, dark patch trembled on the highest branch. “It’s a nest,” James said.

  Diggs stopped ten feet off the ground and squinted at James. “A nest.” He shook his head. “The Germans bombed every stick and stone into dust and that’s a nest up there, that’s what you’re telling me?”

  “Bet me,” James smiled.

  “No.”

  The day was nearly silent. No bird, no mouse, not even a beetle. The rumbling sounds were thunder, not shells. There was an audible wheeze as Diggs breathed. A soldier coughed half a mile down the trench.

  “Let’s play the game,” said Diggs. “First day back, I’m taking a hot bath while I drink a cold beer.”

  “Peach pie,” James said, but he was looking up at the possible nest.

  “Susan O’Reilly,” said Diggs.

  “I’m going up,” James told him.

  “You’ll get shot,” said Diggs. “Or Brodie will kill you.”

  “I could be up and down in one minute.”

  Diggs started climbing down again. “No bet.”

  James laughed and slipped out of the rope he’d been using as a sling chair. Staying hidden behind the trunk, he climbed higher, using only gashes in the bark and broken limbs to pull himself toward the top. I rose with him just behind his helmet. The enemy line, laced in barbed wire on the horizon, breathed gentle smoke from one spot but otherwise sat lifeless. The top of the tree had been blown off, but the highest branches forked into the air like a triton. James could wrap his arm all the way round the trunk now, and he gripped the blackened bark with his knees. He stretched up and with two fingers lifted the dark oval. As James blinked at it, I heard thunder again and the hiss of what I thought was distant rain.

  I saw now that it wasn’t a nest, it was a child’s hat, small and brimless. It might have been blue once, a baby’s hat, mysterious and final. It seemed to come to life for a moment, jerking almost free with a buzz like an insect. It wasn’t until James saw a small hole in the crown that he looked out across the barrens. I realized then that the hiss had not been rain. Now James watched in disbelief a flood of muddy uniforms flowing away from the enemy’s sandbags. He let the hat drop and fumbled for the whistle that hung round his neck on a chain. A bullet cracked through his hand, spitting blood on his face. His arm jerked and the chain snapped. I cried out but could not touch him. James watched the whistle fall impossibly slowly to bounce off Diggs’s helmet. Diggs gazed up, the baby’s hat in one hand.

  James opened his mouth, but no words came. Gasping for breath, he watched the river of men sweep toward the frosted trench below.

  “Diggs!” He screamed. His friend smiled up, waving the little hat, then hopped back as if someone had kicked him in the belly. He dropped to one knee and then fell. Barely touching the spikes, James slid halfway down the tree, then dropped. I flew with him, wanting it to stop. If this was his death, I didn’t want to see it.

  The wall of uniforms had roared into the trenches now. James clutched at Diggs’s face, but the eyes were set. The coat was torn open at the waist, black and wet. James pressed a hand to Digg’s belly, blood flooding between his fingers.

  “Oh, God.” He was still trying to hold Diggs together when a bullet pinged off the helmet at his back and another kicked at his head behind one ear, sending him rolling into the dirt where he stopped on his back, staring up the tree trunk, unblinking. This was his last memory. He’d remembered it.

  His eyes were still open when I realized that we were back in Billy’s bed. James was in Billy’s body again, lying flat on his back, but he wasn’t seeing me or the room around him. He stared up at the ceiling and frantically felt around his neck and chest, as if looking for the chain and whistle he had worn as a soldier.

  “James?” I touched his arm. He was so cold it scared me. He didn’t answer but covered his face and began to weep. I kissed and rubbed his chest, trying to warm him.

  “It’s over,” I said. “Don’t look anymore. Come back to me.”

  He stopped crying, but he kept his eyes covered.

  “It’s time to be finished with it,” I told him. “Diggs isn’t there anymore. None of them are. They’ve all moved on.” I watched him as he uncovered his face and stared into the ceiling. “You don’t need to go back there anymore,” I told him.

  James gasped in a breath. “He was just here,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “We’re back in Billy’s house.”

  “Diggs was just here in the room.” James searched the whole ceiling and looked around me into the corners. “He said he’s been trying to tell me for years.”

  I felt frightened that a spirit had been in the room with us and I hadn’t realized it. “What did he tell you?”

  “That I was a jackass.” James startled me by laughing. He held his ribs as if it were an ancient, unused laugh that might crack him in two. He pulled me close and hugged me. “It’s all right,” he told me.

  He was back in the present, but he was changed; I could feel it, and it scared me. A weight had been lifted out of him, and he seemed untethered, as if he might float out of my arms.

  James looked at me for a long while as if he wanted to tell me what heaven was like but couldn’t choose the words. Finally he said, “Just walk up to your hell and give it a push. Run through it, and I’ll be waiting on the other side.”

  But I had no idea how to start and was sure it was not as easy as he made it sound.

  “Don’t be afraid to remember.” He smiled at me. “What do you say, Miss Helen?”

  We hadn’t heard the door open. But the voice shot at us like a crossbow.

  “Get out.”

  James sat up and held me behind his body as if he thought Mitch might throw something.

  “Put your fucking clothes on and get out!” He turned his back on us as we scrambled for dress and pants. For one odd moment, I was crouched behind Mitch, reaching between his feet to pull my book bag into my arms. I felt like an elf about to be crushed by a giant.

  “I’m sorry,” said James.

  “Shut up,” said Mitch. I jumped up and backed away. James was trying to pull on his pants but was losing his balance.

  “It was a half day—” he tried to say.

  “Out!” Mitch interrupted.

  “It’s my fault—” I started to explain, but James put a finger to my lips and handed me the camera.

  Mitch turned back around and stood aside, fuming, every muscle tight, as we hurried past him out of the bedroom, me clutching bag and shoes to my open dress and James, half naked, his shirt and sneakers under one arm.

  Mitch followed us to the front door and flung it open so hard it banged against the wall. “Not another girl sets foot in this house with you,” he told James. “Get her home, and if you’re not back in thirty minutes, I’m calling the cops.”

  We stood speechless on the welcome mat as the door slammed shut.

  I tried, but I couldn’t stop shaking. We finished dressing on the porch, a man and woman from across the street watching us from their driveway. We walked back toward the bus stop, James with my bag over his shoulder. A silent police car rolled past us. We held hands and didn’t speak. There’s still the loft in the theater, I told mysel
f, but the idea that we couldn’t go to his house, and we couldn’t go to mine, filled me with dread. As we passed the park, James was rubbing my hand with his thumb hard, as if he was trying to revive me from our shipwreck, but his mind had latched onto something else.

  “You shouldn’t come all the way home with me,” I said, as we came to the bus bench. “You won’t make it back in half an hour.”

  He put his arm around me and pulled me in so my face was hidden in his neck. But he wasn’t listening. I could feel his heart drumming hard. I could feel his throat tighten. I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me. I pulled back and looked at him, to see what it might be. Now my heart started drumming, too. He wasn’t saying it out loud because he didn’t want it to be true.

  “We have to give the bodies back,” I said. “Don’t we?” He gave one shudder and looked me in the eyes. Please say no, I prayed, but he nodded. Something in me knew that having James was a dream, and now I was waking up.

  “We can’t,” I said. “We don’t even know how.” But he just cupped my head in his hands and kissed me. The way he was studying my face was too terrible, as if he was going to fly up to heaven without me and wanted to remember the exact color of my eyes.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Not yet,” he agreed.

  Over James’s shoulder, I saw Mitch’s car pull up to the corner half a block down, but he turned away from us and drove south. “There goes Mitch,” I said. James turned, but the rusty car had already changed lanes and disappeared.

  The bus filled the street with a diesel hiss. James stepped in with me long enough to drop in two coins but then lowered himself to the curb and handed me the book bag.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said.

  “See you in the morning.” He smiled as the door closed. We watched each other as I moved to a seat by an open window. Several passengers were climbing out the back door, so I had time to lean out and reach down to touch his outstretched hand. James turned as if he heard someone calling. The police car that had passed us earlier pulled up to the curb.

  James let go of my fingers. “Go home now.”

  Two police officers approached James as the back door of the bus flapped shut.

  “William Blake?”

  James gave me one last reassuring wave and told them, “Yes.”

  I was still leaning out the window when I heard one officer say, “You’re under arrest for accessory to rape.” I called to them, but my cries were covered by the roar of the bus as it pulled away from the curb. The officers turned James’s hands behind him and chained his wrists. The bus driver warned me to sit down. Mitch’s car thumped up on the curb and he jumped out. I rushed to the back doors, but they wouldn’t open. The wail of an infant in the back of the bus made my fists fly to the glass. I pleaded for the bus to stop, pulled on the cord until the bell quit. I struggled to the front door and stood crazed on the step, though the driver told me that she could open the door only at a designated bus stop.

  “It’s an emergency!” said the elderly man in the front row. I tried to look back to see what was happening to James, but my tears made the view through the windowed door a blur of silver.

  Finally, two blocks north, the doors opened and I ran, my bag dragging at me so hard I dropped it on the sidewalk. By the time I staggered to the bus bench, there was no trace of James, Mitch, or the police.

  Fourteen

  I WAS STARING, seeing nothing out the bus window, riding north again. And I felt nothing until I spotted the maroon car sitting alone in the school parking lot. I got off the bus and walked across the street, scared but still too stunned to guess what she might do or say.

  “Mom?” I leaned in the passenger window and saw that Cathy had been crying.

  She jerked at the sound of my voice and looked over as if I were an apparition. “Where were you?”

  I opened the door and sat with my book bag in my lap. “I went to the park to study.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about the half day?” She still seemed frightened rather than angry.

  “I forgot.” I put on my seat belt, but Cathy didn’t start the engine.

  Her hands were shaking as she put her cell phone back into her purse. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I did,” I lied. “I couldn’t get through.”

  She sniffed and looked at herself in the rearview mirror as she put on her own seat belt.

  “I’m sorry I upset you,” I said. I was so weary I didn’t think I could say another word. I wanted to fall asleep and wake up with James free, as if it were this morning again.

  “It’s all right,” said Cathy, and I could tell I wasn’t the sole reason for her red eyes. I just didn’t have the energy to care what was wrong.

  Cathy reached to turn the key in the ignition and stopped, staring at my knees. “Where are your pantyhose?”

  I moved my bag to cover my legs and lied again, feeling that it would be too conspicuous to say that I had decided to stop wearing them. “They tore,” I told her. “I had to throw them away.”

  She frowned but said no more about it. I was already knotted with worry for James, and now Cathy’s abnormal lack of interest in my bad behavior was making it worse.

  I felt sick when we walked into the house, teetering in the kitchen doorway. I swallowed the acid back and Cathy caught my elbow hard, like a hunter’s trap. I told her I just needed to rest, but she ran me a bath and I didn’t protest. She left me alone and went to cook dinner. I sat naked and shivering, though the room was clouded in warmth. I imagined James at home with Mitch, watching television, eating pizza, being all right. I tried to convince myself that Mitch had called the police just to scare Billy and teach him a lesson. But I knew that something else was wrong. The phone rang while I was still sitting in the tub, and my heart skipped a beat. Cathy didn’t come to the bathroom door, though; it wasn’t James. I pictured him as the soldier, high in a tree, and wondered what forgiveness felt like. James had looked into the face of his nightmare and God had pardoned him. I saw the peace on his face when he came back. But it wouldn’t be so easy for me.

  I jumped as a sponge floating on the surface of the water bobbed against my arm. I finally dressed myself and came out into the dining room, where the table was set for two. Cathy brought us a dinner of chicken soup, toasted cheese sandwiches, and chopped apple salad. Her face looked pinched and ashen. I sat beside her and put my napkin in my lap, but the smell of food made me feel ill again. When she bowed her head in prayer, I closed my eyes and breathed like a seasick hostage.

  “God, please bless this meal. Amen.” Cathy opened her eyes and dutifully served the soup.

  “Where’s Dad?” The silence would have been a blessing normally, but tonight it seemed dangerous.

  “Working,” was all she’d say.

  I sipped my water and tried to eat a bite of apple salad, but it made my stomach roll in on itself.

  Cathy gave a sigh and put down her spoon. “Is there anything you want to tell me?” she asked.

  My pulse skipped again—a missing beat, like a hole in my heart. “What do you mean?”

  “When you were little, you used to tell me everything.” She sounded betrayed.

  “Not everything,” I said.

  “Everything important.”

  “What shall I tell you about?” I asked. The last thing I wanted was to be forced to speak, but it was the only thing Cathy wanted, and her will yanked at me like a leash. I slumped forward on my elbows.

  “Are you involved with someone at school?” she asked me.

  The question stung me like a slap. “Involved in what way?”

  “Intimately,” said Cathy, too embarrassed to look me in the eye.

  “I’ve never even been out on a date,” I said. “You know that.”

  “Do not get smart with me.”

  I waited until she spoke again.

  “There’s somebody at school you’re interested in, who’s interested in you. Som
eone you spend time with, isn’t that true?”

  “Since he doesn’t go to our church, you can understand why I didn’t tell you about him.”

  Now she looked at me, her face a white shale that flooded pink. She slapped her napkin into the table. “Who is it?” She seemed on the verge of calling the police.

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said.

  “Don’t you dare go back to acting like you did before.”

  “Before what?”

  “Before Daddy took away your camera.”

  Dan had gotten rid of his daughter’s camera—the one that she had used to take the large, crisp pictures I had found. But Jenny had managed to hide the other camera, the one that took instant pictures. The one that did not require a laboratory to develop her images.

  Cathy’s fists were shaking. “You were always questioning everything, keeping secrets.” She stopped to take an unsteady sip of water, but it didn’t help. “I thought we were past that.”

  I didn’t want to cause more trouble than I already had and have her shorten my chain. “I apologize for being smart with you,” I said. “I don’t feel well.”

  She composed herself, folding her napkin and putting it back in her lap before looking into my eyes.

  “So, what do you have to tell me?”

  “There is someone I’m interested in at school,” I said. “And he’s interested in me, but it’s still new and it’s private.”

  “Private.” She repeated the word as if she was about to go look it up in the dictionary and challenge my Scrabble play. “What’s his name?”

  I didn’t want to bring James into this peculiar madness. “I’d rather not say.”

  Her lips went tight as she pushed her chair back and stood up. “Get out.”

  I was so surprised I just stared.

  “Go to your room!”

  I hovered in my bedroom doorway, my heart still pounding, until I heard the kitchen sink water running, then I tiptoed to the study and called James. His line was busy. I stood there, listening to the pulsing buzz, staring at the bookshelves and remembering, without meaning to, that Dan had been squirreling away special things into his briefcase. I saw a place where a little plaque had balanced on a tiny stand that was now empty.