CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1991

In the cluttered rooms of our past, all was just as we’d left it the summer before, and yet everything had changed as places do when they are empty for too long. Moving the box to the hall table, I went into the living room, lifted the sheet off the piano, and sat down on the bench, touching my fingers to the cold white keys. But the instrument was in need of tuning, and I could remember only a fragment of a song I had played as a child, a simple string of chords about dancing Cossacks. I went to the liquor cabinet, not sure if I’d find anything there or what I’d do if I didn’t. But there was a bit of scotch left over in the bottle, so I poured myself a drink, sat down on the couch, and stared out the window. I narrowed my eyes, blending color and shape so the lawn bled seamlessly into the river. Jane had painted something like that once. A large rectangular canvas, strips of color and texture marking the place where the land stopped and the water began. It was unsettling—to think that she had moved away, quietly slipping out without a whisper. I knew how easy it could be.

I tried to remember the last time I had seen Jane: She was picking tomatoes in her yellow sun hat. I’d stood there for a moment with my hand on the side of the warm barn wall, watching her through the trees. I thought of Susan standing in the dawn light, the hem of her nightgown brushing the rug, and wondered if I’d always remember her that way. The first time Susan and I had visited Jane, we drank bourbon out of mason jars by candlelight, pretending not to see the children playing their spy games around the edge of the kitchen door frame. Jane’s coffee table was made out of stacked crates. The cushions on the living room chairs were losing their stuffing. Yet I had noticed a striking sense of order in Jane’s work, large canvases whose symmetrical composition seemed to guide the eye from wall to wall as if each separate painting were part of a synchronized pattern of breath. You could cut a path through the clutter by following those shapes. At one point Jane had come up quietly behind me, touching my arm, and I had felt a connection there, a sort of jolt. Later that night, when the children were safely in bed, I had followed Susan’s shadow up the dark staircase with Jane’s paintings fresh in my mind and made furious love to her, bracing my arm against the wall to keep the headboard from knocking.

There had been a glitter in my wife’s eyes that night; she was full of ideas, and when she got an idea she never failed to see it to fruition. So I wasn’t surprised when she and the children came back from Kingston with a ridiculous amount of art supplies. In the following weeks the mud room became their studio. Susan plastered the walls with their crude drawings of the house, the dogs, Jane’s horse, Mistletoe. Jane was a constant presence, advising the children and growing closer to Susan. I always tried to keep a distance, not wanting to interfere. Once, when I’d felt completely lost, I had ended up on her doorstep seeking some sort of comfort, and she gave me a glass of bourbon and talked to me as a dear friend would have. She had helped bring me back to the world.

Sitting on the couch now, facing the river, I wondered what Susan was doing, whether she was missing Hank the way my mother had missed me that last fall when I’d gone away to school. Was she listening for the sound of her son’s key in the door as my mother had listened for my steps on the path? I was suddenly struck hard by our loneliness, by the idea that it shouldn’t have had to be this way.

I got up to refill my glass of scotch. There was a knock on the back door, and I almost jumped. Jane was standing on the steps, peering in. I felt guilty, as if my thoughts had prompted the visit. She waved tentatively when I started toward her, trying not to appear too startled.

“I saw you coming across the lawn a little while ago,” she said, stepping into the living room as soon as I opened the door. “I thought you were on your way to say hello, but then you disappeared.” The rain had dampened her silver hair. When a drop slid from her temple down the hard line of her jaw, I almost reached out to catch it.

“How have you been?” I said, feeling as if I’d been caught doing something shameful.

She looked older than she had the year before. Beneath the heavy wrinkled lids, her eyes were soft and a little troubled. I wondered for a moment if Susan had called and asked her to check to see if I was at the house. “I’ve been all right,” she said. “I’ve been wondering about you and Susan, though.”

I stopped myself from telling her I’d just been thinking about her. “It’s been too long,” I said instead, going no further. My hands didn’t feel steady, and the ice in my drink chimed against the side of the glass as I offered her a seat. “We don’t come here much anymore.”

“Yes. You both sort of disappeared.” She smiled and arranged herself carefully on the couch. “But then, so did I. Is Susan here?”

“She’s at home.”

“I’ve missed her. How is she?”

“Wonderful,” I said, with a sort of forced exuberance.

Jane gave me a puzzled look and stared at her hands, twisting a silver band up and down the length of her finger. It was a wedding ring, which came as a shock. She hadn’t ever seemed to need anyone.

“I thought you might have moved away,” I said, after an awkward silence. “The house is an odd shade. NQOC,” I added with a smile. “You know, Not Quite Our Color.” It was a stupid quip, but I thought it might produce a laugh.

“Renters,” she said. “I went to Brazil. I told them they could do what they wanted. They were starting a new life, and really I was past caring.”

I went into the kitchen and poured her the rest of the scotch, feeling a mild panic set in. The mood had changed. She was less spirited than I had ever seen her. “Did you go there to paint?” I said, handing her the drink. Her hard angles looked softer in the fading light.

She shook her head, took a few sips as if it were a dose of medicine, and set the glass on the coffee table, lacing her fingers together and making a cradle for her thigh the way she often had when we were deep in discussion.

“How things have flipped,” she said suddenly. “Remember that time when you came to me?”

“Is that what you’re doing now? Are you coming to me?” I said.

“I don’t know, Lowell.” She smiled and picked up her drink again.

“Because I doubt I can offer much.”

“It’s certainly easier not to.” She looked away from me, taking a message pad from the coffee table and beginning to draw: dark lines and heavy shadows from which the flat leaves of tropical plants emerged. I closed my eyes and listened to the quick scratching of the pencil.

“I was just now thinking about you,” I confessed suddenly, sipping my drink and frowning at how banal it sounded. I stood up and went to the window, pretending to study the river for a moment, then resettled on the couch next to Jane. The weight of the drink in my hand, and the coming dusk made it easier to get closer, to offer what wasn’t asked of me.

“What’s happened?” I said, almost reaching out to touch her shoulder.

“I got married,” she said, holding up her left hand for me to see.

“That’ll do it.”

She smiled. “I fell in love with him a long time ago, but then he left.”

I asked her where he’d gone.

“Brazil: to live on an island and paint banana leaves.” She shrugged her shoulders and rested her arm on the back of the couch.

“Banana leaves?”

“Love is blind, right?” She almost laughed but then her smile drifted away. “There must have been more of a reason than banana leaves. But I didn’t want to know about it. Artists are selfish.”

“Don’t they have to be?”

“No, don’t think so, actually.” She finished her drink. I was still savoring mine, conscious of the fact that the bottle was empty. “When Alistair called, it was raining like today,” she said. “I was just lying on the couch waiting for something to happen. He told me he was very sick and scared of dying. I hadn’t spoken to him in more than ten years but, however ridiculous, I didn’t even have to think twice; I just packed my things and went to be with him.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d do something like that,” I said. But then, it may well have been the right decision. To go back.

“We were married after I got there. It was foolish, but he wanted to. We lived in a beautiful little shack with saloon doors, like something on a postcard,” Jane said. “It was strange. All that sunlight and hot air, so much deceptive beauty, and those bottles of pills on the nightstand. He wouldn’t put on the caps tightly, and when he’d reach for them they’d go spilling everywhere. I’d wake up to that sound thinking my childhood dog was chasing a ball across the wood floor.”

“How strange,” I said.

“Yes, it is strange how the past comes back,” she said. For a brief moment, my dream returned to me, the minister’s hands, my mother’s voice.

We sat there in silence as the light changed and I felt as if I could almost hear the river.

“It was so hard to take,” she told me suddenly. “Not long before the end, I started in on the pills myself.”

“That’s all right, don’t you think?” I said, trying to reassure her. “We’ve all done something like that at one time or another.”

“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “I could have been stronger.” During the afternoons, when he slept, she’d walk along the rocks where hordes of sea turtles sunned themselves like gray old men. The horizon was reassuring, and after the pills kicked in, she didn’t have to feel anything. The shadows from palms spread across the golden sand like soft fingers; that was how she described them. She got used to feeling soft and calm.

One day Jane slipped and fell on some seaweed and almost stayed there, almost let the tide take her. “But when I got back, he kept grabbing my arm,” she said. His energy, his desire to live, passed through her like a shock.

I imagined my parents’ final moments. My mother in her nightgown, my father feeling the startling cold of the rifle at his temple, wondering if she was gone already. When I went home, they gave me pills to sleep, but every morning the dark clouds rolled in again. Sometimes it seemed, as the years passed, that the only compensation for the living world, where things changed, were beautiful objects that stood the test of time.

As a teenager, I had started a collection in the basement of the house in Lincoln. There were drawers of fossils and arrowheads, fragments of Sioux pottery meticulously labeled. Aunt Clara had tried to pull me out of the darkness and into the sunshine, to no avail. Late at night I’d heard her talking to Uncle Philip when she thought I was in bed. “Remember how much he liked to dance at Jeanette’s parties? He’s just not the same.”

“I don’t know how you can expect him to let go of what happened when he’s still living here,” my uncle had said.

“We talked about it, Phil. We decided it was best.”

The basement was my fortress away from all of them. My collection was about putting everything in a specific order so it made a particular sense. Here were the first amphibians embedded in rock when the water dried up into plains. Here was the Pueblo arrowhead from Bandolier State Park. The remnants of the first American people, and then the later finds, the pearl-handled knife I had discovered wedged beneath the foundation of a homesteader cabin off the road just north of Alliance. “Used for scalping?” I had asked.

My father had laughed. “More likely for spreading butter.”

I felt Jane’s hand on my knee and opened my eyes, half-expecting to find Susan beside me. “I came back with his paintings,” she told me. “I can’t even look at them.”

I didn’t know what she wanted me to tell her.

She tightened her hold and said, “The reason I came here was I want to know how you got through what happened to your family.”

I stared at her a moment, trying to imagine the way she might see me. But I hadn’t gotten through it, not really. I almost told her then about the box I couldn’t open and how my marriage had splintered apart.

Instead, I put my arms around Jane and pulled her to me. She seemed almost to have been expecting it. Our cheeks moved past each other, touching lightly, and I felt the soft folds of her skin, smelled the liquor on her breath, and wondered what Susan would say. I stared down at the turquoise stone around her neck. It was veined with dark threads. I pressed it against her skin and studied the red mark it left behind.

“It’s amazing that you and Susan found each other,” she said softly, fingering the stone. “Your sort of love seems special.”

I bowed my head, feeling small and selfish. “You think so?”

“I do.” Her gaze drifted past me, out to the river, and I knew she was thinking about another place.

*   *   *

Later, after Jane had gone, I mounted the stairs without looking at the family portrait she had painted of us, though I could feel all those eyes watching me. I went into Mary’s room and lay down on the floor with my arms tucked under my head. Rain pecked at the window. Staring up at the pastoral clouds floating on the blue ceiling, I tried to reach a quieter place. But behind every thought was the fact that I had left Susan alone, that our children were growing up, that life seemed to be ebbing away.

I started thinking about the boy in Hank’s first grade class who died, and how I’d left Susan to deal with everything. One morning the child wouldn’t wake up. The paramedics had found the mother early Saturday, pacing in front of the window with the rigid body in her arms and pounding his back in an effort to revive him. But it was too late. The autopsy failed to provide any answers.

The boy, Adrian, had spent a day at our house playing Wiffle ball with Hank earlier that spring. I had spent the afternoon pitching while Mary, jabbering, scampered around on her tiny legs, her dark hair streaming out behind her. When the ball went astray she had chased after it, bearing it back slowly across the lawn in both hands, as if she were the leader of some sort of important medieval procession. I remember how Hank threw down his bat and stamped his foot, complaining about how his sister was slowing down the game, and how kind this little boy was in comparison, clapping each time Mary retrieved the ball.

“Don’t clap. She’s ruining everything,” Hank said, kicking the grass with his sneaker.

Perhaps it was the anger, the frustration in him, I don’t know, but when I pitched a slow lob to my six-year-old son, he spread his legs sideways over the plate, cocked the bat, and hit that ball like a pro. As the white globe slowly arced across the sky, I was amazed at my son’s strength and suddenly envious of all he had in store. “That’s it, sport!” I said, clenching my teeth so hard I thought they might crack. The wind carried the plastic ball out to the right, and it spiraled down over the river, disappearing out of sight behind the cement wall, and for a moment, everything had seemed caught in time, my son’s bright future as unquestionable as the assurance with which he’d taken his first real swing.

The little boy, the visitor, had clapped his hands and grinned. He knew he would never hit a ball like that but he didn’t seem to mind. We kept Adrian for the rest of that day while his mother worked at the library. He picked at his grilled cheese and sat in the living room staring out the window. His skin was so fair, and his hair so light, he seemed almost like an exoskeleton with nothing inside, a remnant that might blow away in a light wind. It was easy to forget he was there.

When his mother finally came, we found him in the living room dancing with Mary to a tinny song on one of her little plastic records. They were two little adults, my daughter blushing shyly and this strange boy staring straight in front of him like some little Victorian lord. He held my daughter’s hands in his and guided her in small circles across the living room rug, and it was this image to which my mind kept returning the evening the first grade teacher called to tell us what had happened.

*   *   *

I admit I withdrew after that. I wanted no part of the parent meeting, though Susan dragged me along. I told her I’d stay home with the children, but she handed them over to Jane and demanded that I play my part. We stuffed ourselves in rows of tiny desks beside long-faced parents speaking in hushed tones. Adrian Wells, which one was he? Poor boy, how did it happen?

Miss Mackey, Danielle, who could not have been much older than twenty-five, stood at the front of the room looking small and perfect, her blue eyes large and wet with confusion and sorrow. She seemed not to know what to say, and yet somehow, rather than being annoyed by her befuddlement, I couldn’t stop staring at the fine contour of her shoulders beneath the thin straps of her dress, at the thick silver tag chain from Tiffany’s settled in the delicate cleft where her neck met her collarbone. I admired the strength in her little arms, the fine definition of muscle as she went over and opened a window to let in the cool air of the late-spring evening. There was something sweet on the breeze, a scent of flowers that I thought had come from the yard, but when she brushed back between the rows, I realized it was the smell of Miss Mackey herself, some floral perfume, perhaps, or a milky lotion.

What was discussed or decided upon I really can’t remember, but when the parents stood around afterward in tight clusters, I examined the children’s baskets of art supplies and toys, trying to shake the memory of how pleased the boy had been to be dancing with my daughter. I picked at familiar traces of Elmer’s glue on the art tables and sifted through a fruit basket of plastic bears in primary colors. I lined them up in a little row on the shelf. “What’s wrong with this picture?” I said to Susan, when she came up behind me.

She stared at me a moment as if to say, What’s right?

“Look at the ears. See how chewed they are?” I said. “More like bats than bears, don’t you think? Dog toys. It’s no wonder Hank can’t get his thumb out of his mouth.”

“Are you worried about germs?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Then what? Miss Mackey?” she said hopefully, pressing her fingers into my open palm, as we stepped out into the warm evening and made our way across the parking lot and slipped once again into the safety of our old wood-paneled Buick. “Are you worried about her not being experienced enough to handle the situation?”

“She reminds me of a dogwood blossom,” I said suddenly, without thinking, and started the car.

Susan leaned back into the seat, stared out at the road as if she were the one driving, and took a sharp breath. “If you mean too delicate to withstand a change in temperature,” she said quickly, “I see your point.” There was an excitement in the way she rolled down the window, a sort of desperate edge I couldn’t understand. She stuck her head out into the night and let the wind catch her hair, then pulled it out of her eyes and tossed herself back against the seat. “Lowell?”

“Yes, dear?” I said, putting my hand on her knee like an actor in a play. I fought the urge to say something devastating, something that would wound her; I don’t know why.

“I know it’s wrong to want to kiss you at a time like this, but I want to kiss you anyway,” Susan said with great urgency, taking my hand off her knee and pressing my fingers to her lips as if she thought I would slip away.

When I traced my finger up the inside of Susan’s thigh, I was thinking about Miss Mackey’s milky lotion. How old we must have looked to her, how far from where she was. My face was gaunter than it should have been. My stubble was flecked with gray, and part of my dinner had landed on my shirt. “What’s gotten you so excited?” I said to Susan, though I almost didn’t want to know.

She pressed her hot face into my neck, perhaps in an effort to pull me back from the comfortable place to which I was disappearing, and whispered, “We’re dealing with the hard things so well together, don’t you think?”

I nodded my head. I didn’t want to contradict her. It was a beautiful night. The moon was full, and along the road by the baseball field two pairs of yellow eyes in the tall grass watched our passing.

*   *   *

No more than a week later, I woke up in darkness to find the bed cold and empty beside me. The night felt unsettled, and rather than hide my head beneath the quilt, I put my feet on the floor and stepped into the dark hall. A bright strip of light streamed out from beneath Hank’s closed door. I could hear the slow murmur of my wife’s voice behind it.

She was perched on the edge of the bed pulling the covers up to our son’s chin when I turned the knob. She acknowledged my presence with a concerned look, but I’m not sure my son knew I was there. “Mary sleeps with her eyes half open, and sometimes they roll up in her head,” he was saying, taking his thumb out of his mouth and drying it on his choo-choo pajamas.

“Does that scare you?”

“Not if I’m there. If I’m there and she stops breathing I can wake her up again.”

She promised him that wasn’t going to happen.

“Don’t be afraid,” Susan said to Hank, brushing back his hair. She may as well have been talking to me. “You let me be afraid.”

We returned to bed without touching, like strangers, neither of us speaking a word. We lay there in the dark for what felt like hours, silently replaying what had happened to our son. I could feel the tension in the body next to me, and finally she spoke. “Hank was watching Mary to make sure she didn’t die in her sleep.”

I remember how strange my throat felt.

“It’s not just because of Adrian.” I winced when I heard that little boy’s name. “You know what he told me? He had some idea his grandmother and grandfather Bowman just went to sleep one night and never woke up.” I knew she was blaming me. The darkness felt claustrophobic.

Susan sat up. The headboard creaked as she leaned back against it. “You have to explain,” she said. “You have to talk it through. Your past becomes your family’s past, and the things you don’t deal with show up as your children’s dirty laundry.”

I plastered my arms at my sides like a dart. “I get it,” I said.

“Do you really, Lowe? Do you get how long it took me to get over my mother’s dirty laundry?”

Her voice was full of such bitterness. We were locked together in a strange motionless dance. I reached out and touched her thigh, finding it warm and pliant. “I’m sorry,” I said.

She flopped back down and threw her arms around my neck and pushed her body against me. “Children know when things are being kept from them,” she whispered.

*   *   *

A few days later, she told the children everything. I was lying in the living room reading a biography of Duchamp when Susan sat down and perched on the edge of the couch. She clearly had something to say to me but could not bring herself to speak. “The children and I took a walk down to the lighthouse,” she said finally, “I told them about your parents the best way I could.”

What did she want me to say? Did she expect me to thank her? I imagined how it must have been, the children tucked on either side of her as they dangled their legs off the deck of the historic lighthouse. “I didn’t tell them any specifics, just as much as was necessary. I thought it was best,” she said.

“What?”

She sat there poised, biting her lip, and for a moment she seemed to want to add something. Finally, she said, “It’s strange, isn’t it? So many horrible things happen, and no one has any idea what is best to say.”