CELIA WAITED FOR HIM to say something else but he was done, sitting there slack and heavyeyed. The fire was dying down and something screeched across the valley. She stood and said come on. Let’s go inside. She held out her hand and when he didn’t take it she tugged on his shirtsleeve. Come on, Colburn. It’s late.
“I have to go,” he said.
“I know. That’s what I’m saying.”
“Not from this spot. From this place. From this town. I need to get away from here. I should have never come back in the first place.”
She sat down again.
“There’s something wrong with it,” he said.
“With what?”
“With this place.”
“Did all that really happen?” she asked. Her voice filled with the kind inquisition of already knowing the answer.
He got up from the chair and walked to the edge of the kudzu. He reached down and picked a leaf from the vine. Held it at arm’s length as if it were a mirror. Then he let it fall from his hand and he turned to her.
“Come with me,” he said.
“Come with you where?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to stay here any more than I do.”
She stood and moved next to him. The fire down to ember and a red glow against their skin. How could you never tell anyone about this, she wanted to say. How could you hold it for so long. What part of you kept it hidden. Where will it go now. You look broken and you are broken and it’s okay to be broken.
“This is my home.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“For some people there is.”
“Well. It’s not mine.”
Celia backed away from him. Walked back to the chair and picked up the bottle of wine. She drank some. Listened to the night. Drank some more.
“Have you gone over to your old house?” she said.
“I told you the night I met you I didn’t know which one it was.”
“Do you want me to take you?”
“No.”
“Isn’t that why you came here? To see it?”
“Yes. Maybe.”
“Then I can show you.”
“No.”
She drank again. Didn’t know what to say. Thinking now of how often she had caught him in a dead stare. His eyes hard and void of emotion. Snap out of it, she would say before when she caught him. Realizing now it was not so simple, that in those moments when he stared at the sky or at the wall or at a spot on the floor he was the child again. He was alone in a house with other people. He was lifting his foot to kick away the stool. He was leaving the shed and walking into the kitchen to tell his mother she needed to come outside and he was standing alone in the backyard listening to her scream as she moved inside the shadows and greeted the dead. She moved back to him and touched his arm.
“When I look out the window of my building, I almost expect to see myself walking along the sidewalk,” he said. “Dragging his body along behind me.”
He stood rigid and she wondered how much he was like his father. If something had transferred from one soul to the next in that moment in the workshop. And then she wondered about being here with him now. If it was like the conversation her mother and his father had shared so many years ago, as the blue neon hand shined and the incense burned as her mother was pushed back by his father’s darkness. By his promise of what was to come. No smalltown psychic bullshit. No token promises of the bill collector staying away or the husband getting sober or the ghost of a dead grandmother hovering in the corner but something different. The customer instead telling her about his life in ways her mother hadn’t been prepared for. I had nothing for him, her mother had told her years later. Nothing to take him off his path. Nothing to make him feel better. Celia held her hand on Colburn’s arm, standing in this flat circle of time that held them both and she imagined that one day a child with her blood and a child with his blood would find themselves on the edge of this valley, under the same moon and stars and sharing the same nightmares. Time coming around again.
He did not respond to her touch. She sat down and lit a cigarette and set the bottle of wine between her legs. Colburn then walked around the fire and he picked up the other chair and moved it closer to her. She gave him a cigarette. And then he said while I waited on you out here I went looking for your spring. It’s still there. I found a machete in the shed and I cut a little path. It’s a nice spot. She leaned her head over against his shoulder. He touched one of her curls. They sat quietly then, listening to the crickets singing. An owl calling. Two orange dots of their cigarettes waving around in the black like fireflies. Two eyes from somewhere deep in the darkwood watching them.