BY EARLY MAY SNOW patches had shrunk into the shade of woods. The last snow had thudded from the eaves of the barn, leaving its metal roof gleaming, and the last tooth of ice had trickled away from the gutters. Sometimes a sunny afternoon turned rapidly cold, an east wind scooping up the chill of drift ice that still lurked in the Atlantic, beyond sight. Then the May hay appeared, a fine green in the stubbled fields where it was mown, and in Starr’s, unmown for years, it found its way through the folds and humps of dead grasses winter had laid down, thickening the mat of the sod for another fallow year. The trees were still without leaves as Innis’s cleared path was nearing the MacRitchies’ little footbridge over their brook. In running streams blackflies bred, tiny devils that could leave you bleeding, but soon he’d be finished with this job, he could work at it fast now, slinging limbs and logs and brush, heaping them for a last burning before the woods were too dry for fire. New birds appeared, easy to pick out in the bare trees and bushes, and he’d have to look them up back in his room, he seemed to spot a new bird every day. A small brown one with a thin curved bill spiralled up the trunk of a maple, looking for bugs, no more than an arm’s reach away. It seemed unconcerned about him or the noise of his axe, his saw. Innis had heard but couldn’t see a woodpecker high in a bare birch drilling for insects stirring under the dead bark, a head like a hammer. Innis took a break to watch a handsome little guy, black and orange with touches of white. It was like seeing a flower bloom after months of drabness. The brook he was approaching was loud, charging through the hillside, much higher than it had been in the fall.
Sharing his secret with Claire had given his plan, as Innis saw it, some class: it was between her and himself, Starr had nothing to do with it. Or that illicit kiss, which some days he hoped she did not remember, other days he wished she did. He watched her carefully for any sign, allowed himself sometimes to think she did remember and was holding it, like he did, out of sight until the right time came to bring it up, or even that she might have, in some odd way, liked it. But Jesus, it was such a pathetic thread to cling to—he couldn’t spin much of a fantasy out of it, not that it stopped him from trying. He saw little of her, he stayed in his room when he was home, came down for meals, and she sometimes worked later in Sydney, Starr arriving home ahead of her. Innis missed the high spirits of her first weeks in the house, her laughter, the way a glass of wine seemed to glow in her blue almost black eyes, her spontaneous hugs, her kidding with him, a bright headband in her blue-black hair, a silver choker against her olive skin, long earrings that twirled against the taut muscle of her neck when she laughed or turned her head quickly when she spoke. That had fallen away after her illness, after Starr doused Innis with ice. Every now and then Innis had to mock himself, ridicule his stoned scenarios, if alone in the house with her what he’d say, what he’d do, it was silly, movie stuff really and he’d end up laughing at himself. He would swing off his bed and check out his muscles in the old dresser mirror, its glass rippled like water: he’d pull back his shoulders, filled out now, broadened. He had lost the lazy fat around his waist, that little tire from lounging in Mohney’s basement smoking weed and munching junk, they could mash staggering amounts of chips and dips and pretzels. He didn’t even miss the TV, the boring movies, the awful afternoon shows, lame and depressing, it was just filler for living, something to jeer, then doze to. He could feel a thin sheath of muscle over his ribs now, and his belly he could pummel hard without a flinch. The ponytail had bared his long thin face, turned it more severe and serious, the hawk nose he’d been ashamed of once but had now grown into he’d got from his grandfather, his mother’s dad. If you didn’t feel like a teenager anymore, why look like one, hair falling over your eyes. Trim, and tightened up, that’s how he liked to look at it: his arms, his hands, they were useful, not just stuck in his pockets as he slouched down a street in Watertown, Mass.
When Claire and his uncle were gone, Innis hunkered over his plants, as if just watching them were a nutrient. He kept their location from Claire, fearing something might slip, and he still liked having this secret of his own, right here under the roof. The seedlings were reaching their limits with an electric sun and a half gallon of soil. The foliage looked brave but leery. In their former lives they’d popped up under a wide, hot sun, South America maybe or California—places Claire had flown to in her stewardess days and said she’d like to visit again—but what could they expect here, ice floes lying out in the ocean in May, refrigerating the wind? No sun-struck breezes, just wan rays of fluorescence and cold darkness beyond. Innis gently massaged their stalks, turning firmer now, and he’d have to risk the early June frosts if the stems got woody. Jesus, pot was related to rope, it had to be hardy, didn’t it? He rubbed the leaves between thumb and finger to stimulate their circulation. Like fingering money really, value growing day by day, if he could get it in the bank. Soon he would have to carry his plants up to their clearing in the high woods, their new home. They were over a foot high and crowding and it would be nothing short of tragic for Starr to find them now, their leaves clearly criminal even to him.
Late one night Innis woke to a soft rhythmic tapping, like rain off a roof. Just enough to pluck him out of sleep, it cut across his heartbeat, doubling it as he realized the sound was Claire’s headboard patting the wall. He thought at first she was alone, moving to her own fingers, and his face flushed, he pulled himself closer to the wall. But then he heard the smothered sounds. Two voices. Goddamn them, did they think he was deaf or what? He rolled out of bed, slamming his feet to the floor, and sat there with his hands over his ears, feeling stupid, on the margin of everything.
At breakfast Starr, in a fresh white shirt that had flapped on the clothesline the day before, seemed unusually cocky for the early hour, teasing, but Claire was cool and silent at the stove scrambling eggs. Innis stood at the rear window finishing his coffee while he watched a raven with a slice of bread in its beak take two hops to get airborne, chased by three resplendent shrieking jays. He hadn’t slept much but he was wide awake. A long line of thick white fog hovered above the water. He could see far along the mountain, east or west, miles. But what good did it do him, to see so far in the morning?
Starr had the radio tuned to the CBC news and was chuckling over the antics of a terrorist group called The Armed Proletarian Nuclei. “Now there’s an outfit,” he said, pointing to the radio like it was someone’s face. “They like the big words. You notice? Nuclei? Pinheads.”
“They’re fighting for us, Starr,” Claire said, “working people like you and me, aren’t they? That’s what I heard.”
“That little clump of flies? They don’t have a clue about work, any kind of it. Eh, Innis?” He looked from Innis’s back to Claire’s. “You’re a frosty lot, the two of you,” he said, digging into his eggs.
“You could use a little frost yourself,” Claire said. Innis could feel her watching him but he ignored her.
“No, no, dear,” his uncle said, “the sap is up, it’s spring, not that you’d know it without a little help from me.”
Innis grabbed his jacket and was out the door, heading up the driveway, Claire calling after him to wait, she wanted to talk to him but he didn’t stop until he was nearly to the power line break, his breath seething. Starr had gone to her bed on purpose last night, he knew that now, in case he had any doubt, in case he’d never heard them fucking in Starr’s bedroom down the hall, and he hadn’t, he never listened, he didn’t want that. And she’d let Starr reach for her in the middle of the night, knowing, knowing.
By midmorning he was lost in the tedium of laying tile, Finlay in the bathroom doorway giving advice, Dan Rory rocking in his chair in the parlor listening to scratchy fiddle music on an old record player. The room was steamy from someone’s morning shower and Innis hated this fussy work, fitting corners and edges, but they were paying him for this and he needed it.
“That’s a very good-looking woman in your house,” Finlay said after a long silence. Innis could hear Dan Rory thumping out the beat with his cane. He pressed a tile into place with the concentration of a stonesetter.
“She’s just a boarder,” he said. He didn’t want her mentioned, her name was raw in his mind.
“Yes. Well,” Finlay said, drawing hard on a cigarette. “He never had a boarder before, but he knows how to pick one, God bless him.”
“Only temporary, till she gets on her feet,” Innis said.
“Yes. Feet.” Finlay leaned over him and tossed the cigarette, psst in the toilet. “Likes the country, does she?”
“Likes it okay.”
Did she? He knew one thing she liked. What were the women on the telephone saying about her now, about him, about Starr?
When he broke for lunch, Dan Rory told him it was a good morning for music. “Look at that fog coming in,” pointing with his cane. “But we don’t get to do a damn thing, eh? No seed to get ready, nothing to plow, no cows, no horses in the barn. Just our potato patch. You like our violin music, Innis?”
“Haven’t heard it much.” His father had listened to it on the radio at home, and his mother still went to Down East dances Saturday nights at the Watertown Canadian-American Club, but it had never grabbed Innis. It all sounded the same, old-fashioned, distant, a hundred years away.
“Summer’s the time. Not the big dances they used to have but there’s music around, oh yes, good music. You’ll hear it. How’s the woods coming? Flies bad?”
“I got welts in places you wouldn’t believe. I’ve pretty well cleaned up that patch, down to the brook anyway. Then the road’s not far.”
“I’ll send Finlay down for a look. Listen, a letter come to us by mistake, addressed to you but the wrong box number. Finlay, fetch that for Innis.”
“Me? I don’t get letters.” He didn’t count his mother’s, brief and mostly questions (Are you eating good? Are you still angry with me? To hell with you if you are), as if she had to imagine his life here piece by piece, and he hadn’t written back.
“Well you got one now,” Finlay said, lifting it off the window sill.
Innis tried to save it for later, like dessert, but he pulled the letter out of his back pocket and read it kneeling in the bathroom. Yo! Mohney wrote, carefully in pencil on lined tablet paper, went down to the Combat Zone last night, great time got a massage yeah! You didn’t like that stuff, paying for it but I’ll tell you those ladies know some tricks. Nothing like high school. You finding any ganja there? (I hope some Canuck P.O. worker isn’t reading this huh?) You get the package? The “candy” I sent? It was primo California more bounce to the ounce. I figured you could use it up there. Must be lots of space to grow “things” when it isn’t snowing. Risky shit. Hope this address is okay. Deborah the girl who used to be Debbie, remember? was asking how you like the great white north and I said go up and see for yourself he’s probably horny enough. Nobody can figure out how it happened to you why you can’t come back. Lawyers is what they all say. You had a stinking lawyer but I told them the lawyer didn’t matter fuck all. You in jail? Just goofing. Hot here today good weather for weed. The Great Order of the Leaf? Millions of members. Hope you found some up there. May’s a crazy month you want to fuck around so much. You remember. Trouble is I’m getting fucked with. Remember that big prick Tony and his retard brother? Ripped me off, half a key. If you were here maybe I could do something but shit I’m on my own. Believe me I’d like to hurt them I’m broke busted. Things are getting too hot, hard for a small-timer, you get pushed out. So what the fuck are you up to? I heard its mostly trees there. I don’t know what to tell you if I can’t see you man. I don’t have the scratch to come up there wherever the hell St. Aubin is, sounds like a church. Mohney’s voice, from a great distance. If you could not go back to a place, ever, distance in miles meant nothing, it was somewhere in space. Watertown was harder to call up now, trees and fields and water had absorbed it, diffused it, but if Ned were to show up outside that bathroom window and shout, Innis, Let’s go get those bastards!, that would be a joy. They’d find a way to get even with Tony and his stupid brother, two guys tough as shit but not smart. Innis wished he could send Mohney something useful, a gun, a good knife, anything practical for vengeance. Words were worthless, but he was glad for these. He stared at the page: after Mohney had scratched the last line, he probably got in his Mustang with the dual glasspacks and drove to Izzy’s to shoot pool, or maybe he didn’t do that at all but something new. The day Innis left, they shook hands and said See you later. Later. Mohney pledged to visit, as if Innis were bound for jail, but Innis knew that was the last he would see of him. This called for friendship Mohney didn’t have in him. Innis’s circumstances nothing in Mohney’s Boston could explain. A taint of strangeness in this deportation stuff, you’re my best pal but, it’s weird. Innis had already disappeared from their small talk, Mohney and the rest, he knew how they were, how easily they moved on if you weren’t there in front of their faces, talking. Why should they care how he handled what he had become? Debbie? A fox, but snooty under the skin, not a friend you’d ever count on.
“I’m going down to the priest’s,” Innis said when he’d cleaned up.
Dan Rory was hunched over his record player. There was the probing scrape of a needle until he cued another 78 and said without looking around: “There’s something I’d like you to do with me, Innis.” He settled back into his rocker, nodding to the strains of a fiddle, a piano pounding out behind it.
“With you?”
“There’s to be a Gaelic service, down at St. James Church, not many miles from here.”
Church? The old guy could forget that. The priest never laid that trip on him and he liked him for it, collar and all he didn’t Jesus and Mary him. “I don’t go to church,” Innis said.
“Your uncle doesn’t take you, and he doesn’t take himself anymore, so that’s no business of mine. I want you to come with me to a Gaelic service. It’s a rare thing now, hard to find a man of the cloth who can do it, but we’ll have a minister visiting. He used to have a church down the North Shore, a lot of Gaelic speakers there in those days, still are more than a few. I want you to be there. That’s all I’m asking. Your grandfather, he was one of The Men in the Knox Church. He shone, he was fluent.”
“I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“Sit and listen.”
“I don’t understand a word of that.”
“This might be the last Gaelic service on St. Aubin, ever. Listen to it. There’s more to listening than words.”
“Don’t have a coat, or a tie either.”
“I’ll phone you up,” Dan Rory said, turning back to his music, which was nothing you’d hear in a church, more a dance. “When the time comes.”
The fog was coming down so fast he didn’t want to hitch to Father Lesperance’s, though he’d rather go there than home. He ran for a spurt, splashing through springwater crisscrossing the road. He sidarmed pebbles into roadside birches showing their first miserly buds. A car passed him and then a pickup stopped, a GMC rotting out from under the old guy at the wheel. He was heading for a tavern in The Mines, his jaw clenched upon the drinks he’d had already, too intent on steering to talk, studying the road as if it were coming head-on, his old grey fedora cocked over his squint like a salute, saucy. “Struck a deer here once,” he said. “Look.” He shoved his hat brim up briefly, revealing a red scar high on his forehead. “Came through the windshield like a horse.”
“Wreck your truck?”
“Wrecked me. Couldn’t even eat the meat. See that house? You can’t, too much woods now, it’s back in the rear. Last man in there he run a flower shop. Glace Bay, somewhere. Planted oh, maybe two, three hundred daffodil, up the hill behind his kitchen. Came up nice but one night, one night the deer came down, ate every goddamn one of them. Moon out and all. Trimmed them right to the dirt.”
“He should’ve slept outside, scared them off.”
“Wasn’t the type to sleep outside. Who is? The deer know it. They’re not dumb, they just get hungry like the rest of us.”
As he pulled up at Starr’s mailbox, steering the truck in slowly as a boat, the man stared at the name for a few seconds. “That one still chasing skirts?”
“No, he’s almost done with that. He’ll be done altogether pretty soon.”
Innis was a few steps down the driveway before he noticed her car, near the toolshed. He stopped. Fog had moved up from the shore and stood white in the back field, dense, drifting over the car, the buildings. A light upstairs, and in the parlor. What he’d heard last night had shook his fantasies hard. Some of them. Awkward to be alone with her now. He’d flung himself out the door this morning, sullen and obvious. Ice. Because ice was what he’d used on his mother and she on him, not yelling, not arguments, not explaining up-front, just day after day of silence, not heat but cold. Why couldn’t he have been better about this? Claire didn’t have to know he cared, he’d acted like a kid. All right, she’d fucked Starr next to his wall. Did he think they didn’t do it in the house, ever? But she’d been careful about that before, he’d thought it mattered to her to keep it private, keep it clear of him.
He did not want to go into the house, not without a little help from his friends. He patted his shirt pocket. The barn, no more than a dim shadow in the pale fog, was not appealing, that musty cavern. He dragged a finger along Claire’s car, through a film of moisture. A drab Ford, just wheels to get her from here to there. He’d never have stolen it, anywhere, dead desperate. But he slipped inside, closing the door with a quiet thump. She had long legs but not as long as his, he pushed the seat back, settling in. A smell of solvent in his clothes. On his knees in the toxic fume of that bathroom he’d gotten jittery, panicky almost, breathing fast like he’d been running, and he’d jammed Mohney’s letter in his jeans, sorry he’d received it, it yanked him back to Watertown. And now he was facing church, in Gaelic? Sorry, Dan Rory, no, can’t do it, I’ll never be in the mood, not even a Thai stick would get me there. Or maybe he would just disappear that Sunday morning, up in the woods. He teased a crushed cigarette from the ashtray and touched the cork tip with his tongue—yep, lipstick. Hers. The dash lighter gathered its glow, a tremble of electricity in his fingers. It popped quietly from its socket, the red coil mirrored in the windshield as he drew it to the tip of the joint. In a car. Jesus. You turn a key, you hit the road. Summer was coming, the fog would lift, sun would heat everything. Maybe his grandfather had felt this excitement in the spring, restless to work seed into the ground, his oats and potatoes and whatever other stuff he raised. But to his grandfather it was not an urge to be gone from here but to dig further in, deeper and deeper every time he turned the sod. That’s what scared Innis in the old photos along the wall: people so rooted, their destinations so fixed, bound by an island within an island, Sunday stiff, in sepia tones, staring into time. Had they ever known a real city? Yet it came to him in one of those moments of stoned clarity, sighting along the hood of a stationary car, that he was afraid of the coming summer, of its openness, its energy, all the desires flooding back.
A buzz, enough toke to get him inside and to his room, past Claire. A few civil words, a joke, lighten things up. You’re not a wounded teenager. Give it up, Innis. He liked the smell of cars that women drove, they were full of their anger, their perfume, the furious smoke of their cigarettes, he could feel their hips in the seat cushion under him, share the tapes flung in the glove compartment, and the one sticking out of the tape player when she parked he would start it right there where she’d left off and let the music conjure her even if he didn’t care for it, let it take him down the road as if she were still there with him. Then he would light up a joint and fly. He kept the windows up. He wanted the feeling of car: a shut-in warmth of exchanged breath, smoke and lipstick. Ashtray of stubbed butts, singed paper, gum, the sulfur of an extinguished match. The car’s deep metallic quietness. No one ever knew what talk he was making with himself.
He got out of her car, tasting fog, its cool vapor. He was shivering, his jacket too light, too optimistic for the day, shirtsleeve weather in Boston now, but he knew it wasn’t just the air.
“Is that you, Innis?”
He stopped in the hall at the door to the parlor. She was sitting on the sofa, wrapped in a brown flannel bathrobe that belonged to Starr. She had laid a fire in the old fireplace Starr almost never used.
“I’m surprised to see you, this time of day,” Innis said, rubbing his callused hands, harder than he needed to. It was like meeting her all over again. “You’re not sick, I hope?”
“I think you’re a little sarcastic.”
“Me? Never.”
“Don’t go up to the bathroom yet, it’s dripping steam. I couldn’t face work, I couldn’t get up for it. You have a good day?”
“I made a few bucks. Keep Starr happy, I guess.”
“Is that important, keeping Starr happy?”
“You’d know more about that than I do.”
“Don’t be mean. You’re too young to be mean like that. He’s treated me good, not everyone has.”
“How about me?” He stood with his palms to the fire. “How did I treat you?”
Claire leaned toward the fire, her face flushed from the bath. “Like you’re a little afraid of me maybe. I’m not sure what you are afraid of, so I shouldn’t say that. I know you heard us through the wall. I’m sorry for that, terribly. I realized it too late. But you knew already. Hearing us had nothing to do with the truth.”
A log snapped, shifted, sparks whirled up the chimney. She was wearing the wide headband he’d seen in her dresser drawer, lemon yellow against her black hair. Heat came into his face as he recalled the panties he took, pushed way back in his drawer where he’d discovered them one morning, puzzled and excited for a few moments, as if he’d slipped them off a woman and completely forgotten.
“And that night you were sick? Was I afraid that night?”
“Doesn’t matter if you were. You looked after me.”
“And Starr had to be an asshole about it.”
“I straightened him out on that, like I said.”
“I’m not sure you did, Claire. He was sending me a message last night, wasn’t he? A little knee in the balls.”
“He couldn’t sleep and he came in my room. Some things just happen, they’re not planned. Russ showed up where I work yesterday. It wasn’t pleasant. I don’t want Starr involved with him. I was edgy last night, I needed … I was selfish, okay. I forgot you were there.”
“Thanks. This fireplace is a little smoky. You notice?”
“I felt like a fire. It’s dying down anyway.”
“As long as he doesn’t blame it on me.” Innis sat on the floor, leaning back on his elbows so he could warm his feet. “In the barn that time, I liked it with you, up there in the old hay. I want you to know that. Jesus, it’s been some winter. Hasn’t it? In Boston daffodils would be up by now. No deer to eat them either. My mother planted a bunch in a little backyard we had for awhile. And rosebushes. She was always on me to help her look after them but I didn’t care about plants and flowers, that was for old folks. I remember spring, the smell of the ground and the grass. Everything goes to your head in May.” He was tired and a little sleepy from the fire. For now, he wanted to feel nothing of his uncle in the house. Never had he sat here with Claire as if Starr were not due in any second, or already in. Her legs, sheened from bathing, were level with his eyes and gave off a scent of powder. In the weak window light her eyes seemed darker, larger. Parlor gloom, he’d felt it before. A room once set aside for guests, Starr said, visitors and Sunday-comers, the minister, deacons like his father, relatives dressed for solemn gossip on that God-driven day. “You look terrific, by the way,” he said.
“In this?” She tugged at the robe’s lapels. “Thanks anyway, Innis, dear. I’m glad to be away from work. Some plaid-pants politician didn’t like the color of the car we rented for him yesterday. What a fuss. And Russ on top of that. Maybe I’m not cut out for dealing with the public anymore. Or my private affairs in public.”
“What were you cut out for, would you say?”
“Who knows? I had the looks to be an airline stewardess, so that’s what I did. It could be fun at times, exciting, and I got around, I saw a lot of places. I met a man, and then another man. I came here with one who thought cheap land and good horses would get him a lot of money. Big mistake.”
“Mistakes aren’t final.”
“Some are. Yours aren’t. You’re young.”
“What would you know about my mistakes?”
“Don’t get testy. It’s nothing to me how you got to this house. Is it?”
“He told you about me, didn’t he, that son of a bitch. Who else, I wonder.”
“Hey, easy, dear. Me living here, it would’ve come out sooner or later. Don’t worry about it. What am I going to do, put it in the Post? Come on.” She reached for his face but he pulled away. He got up and stood at the window.
“I hate this place. Ass-end of nowhere. I can’t make it to September, Claire. I’ll have to split, I know it. Jesus, we might as well be in the Arctic here. I can’t even get the damn things in the ground. I have to start my life all over again, okay, but it won’t be in North St. Aubin. I’m a Canadian after all, it turns out, not an American. I don’t even know what a Canadian is.”
Claire came up behind him and put her arms around him gently. “Innis, dear, you have all kinds of time. You can’t know how valuable that is. Don’t be hasty. I’ve seen a lot of that.”
He didn’t want to move or say anything that would release her embrace, motherly though it was. Wasn’t it? In the field above the house an old cherry tree was still without blossoms. The road had disappeared, he couldn’t see the mailbox, the air looked like old cotton. Beyond that slowly flowing mist there could be anything, things you wanted, things you didn’t. He hardly breathed. “Smoke some weed with me,” he whispered.
“Now?” She laughed, stepping back from him. “In the afternoon? Right here? It’ll leave a smell.”
“Only for a bit. Starr wouldn’t know it from woodsmoke.”
“Don’t be so sure. Well … we’d best not do it in the front window, eh? There’s probably enough talk as it is.”
“Who’d see us now? We’re a little island, lost in fog. An island in an island in an island.”
They sat on the sofa, Innis patting his shirt pocket as much to soften his heartbeat as to find the roach. Smoking with a woman like Claire? Nothing better, no one could tell him different. Starr didn’t have a clue. Booze made you stupid, it bruised your brain.
“A clip would help,” he said.
“This do?” She handed him a hairpin from her headband and he wedged the roach into it and held it out to her.
“There’s a few good hits in that,” he said, delighted to see it in her fingers.
He struck a wooden match on a fireplace brick and watched her lips seek the stubby cigarette, her eyes closing tight as the flame shrunk and flared.
“Nice,” she said.
He plucked it from her hand and drew deeply, lipstick in the smoke. They exchanged it solemnly until he pinched out the last hot bit. Somewhere upstairs the wind had got in and a curtain flapped.
“I left the bathroom window open,” she said. “I should close it.”
“Nah. Let it go.”
They were suddenly quiet, inside themselves. Innis didn’t care about Starr, or his shop that was so absurd it was beautiful, and Starr was in it now. Claire took his hand and turned it open. He watched her fingers as she slowly traced its lines and calluses, then closed it.
“After I was sick this time, I felt old,” she said. “I saw what it might be like, needing people to look after you. That scared me a little. I have no family left.”
“God, you’re hardly old. And family isn’t everything.”
“I’m older than you.” Her eyes were shiny as she gazed into the flickers of fire, low and blue. She tucked her knees up, gathering the skirt of the robe under them. Innis took her hand and turned it over as she had done his.
“Let’s see,” he said, “how old Old Claire is. Jesus, will you look at that.” He skimmed his fingers over her skin, in circles, barely touching. “Withered up, poor girl. There’s a crease, and there.” He did not want to release her hand or look at her face. “Yeah, she’s a right old crone, this one.”
“Watch yourself, son,” she said, patting his cheek. “Just like a man, serving up the compliments. I don’t go for flattery.”
“You know all about men, I guess. Me and Starr and the rest.”
“I should know something. Shouldn’t I?”
Innis slid down from the sofa and stretched out on the rug. “Did you get wild dreams while you had that fever? When I was a kid I got them. I was afraid to fall asleep when I was sick. Everything would grow huge and rush up close to my face. I’d see maybe a horse looking in my window. Awake I would’ve liked a horse at the window, but not sleeping.”
Claire reached for his ponytail and tugged it. “Did you kiss me while I was out?”
“Out where?”
“Out of my head that night, did you kiss me or something?”
Innis stroked the worn bristles of the rug. He looked at the stuffed sofa, the ceiling light fixture shadowed with flies. He had never been stoned in the parlor. In the kitchen the sink tap dripped. Starr had told him to put a washer on it but now it was pattering out a tune in cold dishwater. Starr would not come back this afternoon. There was nothing of him in the chemistry of this room except her question: Innis could lie, easily and quickly, and that kept him from fearing it. But maybe that was not what she wanted.
“I kissed your belly. Once, quick and soft. That’s all I did. It looked so tasty I just had to. Sorry.” He glanced along the inside of Claire’s leg where the skin looked so soft he closed his eyes. When he opened them she was staring at him, or maybe into him, he wasn’t sure.
“You don’t seem like the sneaky type,” she said.
“It was just a kiss. Creepy, was it?”
“It didn’t come back to me that way, no.” She smiled. “I just wanted to ask you, now. Must be the grass. It brings … details.” She stretched her legs and leaned back into the sofa. Innis saw her again in that bed, just a flash. He had given her water. He had cooled her hot skin.
He touched the instep of her bare foot, drew his hand back. “I had to do that,” he said. “Sorry.”
“God, your fingers are cold,” she whispered.
“It’s the weed. Cannabis hands.”
“It’s strange out here in the country sometimes,” she said. “May, and the light is like ice today. Marooned in mist.” She shivered, clutched the robe to her throat. She squeezed his arm, then his thigh. “That woods has hardened you up.”
“A real spring day would be a gas, huh? I mean a real warm day, flat out.” His voice had gone husky, barely carrying the burden of words.
“Yes, yes. Flowers, Innis. Perfume in the air.” She pulled off her headband and twirled it across the room. “I want to smell lilacs on that bush out there.” She tilted her head toward him and smiled, her black curls falling around her face. He tried to say something. The next step seemed to be his but his breathing took away his voice. He moved up beside her slowly, and then he put his lips against her lips, lightly, hesitating so as to save himself, his pride or whatever he had to save. But when she did not recoil or speak and he felt her hand down his back, he leaned into her arms. She felt luxurious, wholly longed for, and his hug was strong, meant. Her neck where he kissed was cool, then warm, and he wondered what this thrill he was so glad for was going to cost him. She held his face in her hands.
“You’re a hungry one, you are.”
“You could feed me.”
“That’s risky. It could be bad for us both.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“You wouldn’t kiss your mother like that. And don’t be too hard on her.”
She slid out of his arms and stood with her back to the fire, warming her hands behind her. Innis looked at her slender feet, the curve of her leg. Even in Starr’s old brown robe, roped at the waist, she looked beautiful.
“I saw your sketchpad,” she said, not looking at him but out the window as if she was speaking to someone else. She sounded so serious he smiled.
“What sketchpad? I have lots of them, Claire, but I don’t show them to anybody.”
“It was lying on your bed, your door was open. I just picked it up, leafed through it. You never saw me naked like that.”
“Okay, I took liberties. You can do that if you’re an artist. My high school teacher told me that’s what art is all about, changing what you see. There was nothing dirty there.”
“I didn’t mean that. There’s other things though.”
“What?”
She shook her head, smiled. He rested against the sofa, smiling too, his eyes sleepy. “Come upstairs with me, Claire.”
“Oh, Innis,” she said with a soft, helpless laugh. “Upstairs,” she whispered. “Such a simple word.”
He reached his hand toward her, hoping what he’d asked was ambiguous enough not to leave him looking foolish.
“I have to get a drink,” he said. “Pot makes me thirsty. I can hardly talk.”
“We’ve talked already. I should get dressed. We wouldn’t want your uncle to show up about now. Would we?”
“I don’t really give a damn, Claire. I don’t.”
“You should.”
As she stepped past him she touched his hair and he was glad she didn’t say anything more, his mouth was so dry.
In the kitchen he filled a tumbler from the tap and drank the cold water greedily, gasping. The spring in its dark little house, way up the hill. Yet this country was so huge, thousands of miles, thousands of lakes, and maybe he would find one whose edge he could live on. Here, he was just at the beginning of it, as far east as you could get, and out there was the rest of it, spreading westward. His pot plants were ready, but he couldn’t plant them on a day like this, a chilling east wind pulling in fog from the ocean. Late frost or not, he’d have to get them up there soon, their roots were probing out the drain holes in the cans, they wanted space, a real sun. At the sink, he took in air, calming himself. If he had gone upstairs to bed with her, would she have compared him with Starr? God. He didn’t want to think about it. But she liked weed, she liked that sort of magic, and Starr had none of that to give, the whole feeling was different. After one more mouthful of water, he stood in the lower hall listening to Claire’s footsteps, heard her sit on the bed: he knew that sound so well, the way her weight spoke in the springs, her tossings, murmurs, rhythms of sleep. Then there was last night, and there was this afternoon.
On the hall tree, coats were hung. He punched his uncle’s old pea jacket hard, one fist and then the other, then went out to the toolshed. In the big vise he clamped a straight piece of scrap iron and banged it with a ballpeen until it lay flat.