A HURRICANE STRUCK THE EAST COAST AND SWEPT THROUGH Enon in early August, right before the anniversary of Kate’s death. I would not have known that it was coming if I hadn’t walked to Stonepoint to try to find Frankie Shuey at the Ironsides Tap Room, so I could buy more drugs. When I arrived at the bar, Frankie and another guy were the only ones there. The guy sitting next to Frankie looked vaguely familiar, as if maybe I’d seen him on other landscaping or painting crews over the years. He was thin and his shoulders so slouched it looked like he might snap in two. His complexion was pale gray and the sharp bones in his face looked like they might split through the skin. He had thin black hair and a black mustache up under which a burning cigarette had been stuck. I could tell by how sunken his cheeks were that he had no or very few teeth left. Overall, he had the appearance of a body long abused but not especially strong in the first place. I had a sense that he was always sick, always had a cough, always had asthma or bronchitis, always needed bed rest and hot soup and a good drying out. He and Frankie sat side by side, each with a boilermaker. The already dim bar darkened more and I looked over at the two high, wide, narrow, smoked windows in the wall that faced the harbor. One window was already blacked out and I watched as someone outside fitted a sheet of plywood over the other and began pounding it into place with a hammer and nails. The guy Frankie was drinking with sat on his left, so I pulled out the bar stool to his right.
I said, “Hey, Frankie.” Frankie turned to see who I was and turned back to the bar.
“Hey,” he said. The guy on the other side of him looked at me and crunched up his nose.
“The fuck’s this guy?” he asked Frankie.
“It’s Charlie Crosby,” Frankie said.
“Who the fuck?”
“He’s a guy named Crosby,” Frankie said.
“ ’Scuse me,” the guy said. “He smells like shit. Tell him to get out of here. Hey, you, Charlie Crosby; you look and you smell like shit—get lost.” I remembered stories about how sometimes the guys on the fishing boats that worked out of Stonepoint would stage fights on a pier or in an alley behind a bar at night. They’d make some crew member fight the toughest guy in the fleet, and threaten to beat him half dead if he didn’t. They’d get him drunk and riled up and show him a little wiry guy they said was talking shit about him and say that if he didn’t beat the guy up they’d beat him up for being a punk. They’d always snare a new guy into this trap, the bigger the better, because he’d always think that he could take the little guy they pointed out. I remembered stories guys to whom this had happened told about how all the other fishermen made a circle and got the little guy and the dupe in the middle and started taking bets about how long it’d take the little guy to put the big new guy into a coma. Every version of the story I’d heard was about how unbelievable it was what a ruthless and tough fighter the little guy had been and how the guy he’d beaten had woken up in his own apartment three days later packed in ice, so battered that he couldn’t see or eat or nearly move just to get a sip of water for a week. In all my time working on painting and landscaping crews, I’d never been in a fight and never seen one as bad as the ones they described (sometimes guys took a slap at each other, but nothing really brutal). I could see the guy sitting next to Frankie being sick and drunk and high and underfed and never getting any sleep and hauling fish or lobster traps up into a boat in a T-shirt with bare hands in roasting sun and drenching rain and freezing snow, every day that the seas weren’t too high, for twelve, fourteen hours a day, looking every second as if what he was supposed to do was die, as if it was his real job to die, young and viciously, whether through ignorance or orneriness or hatred born of destroying himself in revenge against whatever it was that brought him into this world from his mother’s womb just so that it could watch him suffer his dad’s fists and his friends’ fists and after die back out of it, ground down and broken.
I didn’t know whether the guy with Frankie was tough like that or one of the guys who weren’t strong, weren’t tough, but were the wretched of the wretched and for that reason left alone by the brawlers, or not left alone but let be by them, allowed to be a kind of mascot. He made me feel sick and frightened but also guilty. Part of me felt like I’d like to grind him right up and out of this world, like a roach, because he was so bereft of anything like human kindness or intelligence or light. But for the same reason part of me felt defensive of him against that very same sentiment of disgust and contempt.
I stepped back from the stool I was about to sit on.
“Hey, hey; okay; I don’t need to stay. I just want to ask Frankie something,” I said.
“Oh, well, fuck you,” the guy said, in a high voice, like he was trying to imitate a little girl.
Frankie snorted out a laugh and looked at the guy for a second and looked again at the bottles lining the back of the bar and shook his head. “Jesus, Scruff,” he said. “You’re a white-hot little leprechaun today. It’s business, man.”
“I bet it’s business,” Scruff said. He looked at me from my shoes to my hair. “Fucking gimp.”
“Sorry. Don’t mind Scruff. He gets all fucked up whenever there’s a storm.”
“When there’s a fucking gimp,” Scruff said.
“I don’t got anything right now,” Frankie said.
“Nothing?” I said. “Oh, man—I was hoping—you’d been to New Mexico.” I meant to come off as nonchalant, to keep it sounding light.
He turned from the bar toward me and dragged on his cigarette and squinted at me. “Nah. I don’t go to New Mexico no more,” he said.
“Last time you ever say ‘New Mexico,’ ” Scruff said. “Ever.”
“Okay, okay. Sorry, sorry,” I said. “But I’m kind of in a jam.”
“I got twenty Vickies, twenty-five each,” Frankie said.
“That’s kind of steep,” I said. He was gouging me because I was clearly starting to fray.
“How about fifty each, gimp?” Scruff said.
“I only have three hundred,” I said. “Can you do it for that?”
“Nope. A dozen for three hundred.”
Scruff swigged at his beer and tucked his chin in to swallow and get his next insult out as fast as he could. I wished I could dash his brains out on the bar top. The whole predicament was so lurid and so cartoonish, so almost diabolical, though, that I just repeated, “Okay, okay, okay, okay” as fast as I could, to stop Scruff from saying anything more, and yanked the money out of my pocket and handed it to Frankie.
Scruff looked at the dirty hank of cash. “How much dick you have to—”
“Oh, man,” I groaned. “Just shut up, would you? Jesus, you’re a grim pain in the ass.”
Scruff leaned back on his bar stool and blew smoke up at the ceiling and laughed and slapped his knee. “Ha! You’re worse than me!” he coughed. “You’re some kind of sad shit, Kemo Sabe.”
Frankie opened a plastic bag and removed eight white pills from it and put them, loose, back into his pocket. Instead of being glad for the bag of twelve pills he handed me, I could only think about the eight he’d put back in his pocket. The pills were strong but full of acetaminophen I’d have to extract, and that made me all the angrier. I slid the pills into my pocket.
“All right, Frankie,” I said. “Thanks for everything. Will you have some stuff by the end of the week?”
“I don’t know. Check in if you want to.”
“Okay. Thanks for everything.” I turned and walked toward the door.
Scruff called out behind me: “I hope a tree falls on you and you die, fuckwit.” I bowed my head and waved and left the bar.
OUTSIDE, THE WEATHER IN front of the hurricane made it feel like another planet. Moisture saturated the air, insulating sound and making it feel as if I were moving through liquid, almost as if I could lean forward and gently push off the sidewalk with my feet and do the breaststroke floating half an inch off the ground the rest of the way home. The light behind the ceiling of low, dark clouds seemed to come down to the earth through water and not air. I swallowed two of the pills dry, and by the time I reached the bridge that connected Stonepoint with Barnton, across the harbor, it felt wholly as if I traveled through an underwater kingdom of refracted light and quiet. Even though there was no wind or rain yet, everyone already seemed to have made their probably needless, I thought, dashes to the supermarkets and hardware stores for batteries and bottled water and plywood and masking tape.
When I crossed the town line from Barnton into Enon, the quiet and stillness seemed to deepen even further. I felt as if I were the only man on earth, as if I were floating through some uninhabited, primeval realm. Only jellyfish and I would watch the vast nets of lightning being cast across the sky above and the rains churning the ceiling of our watery kingdom into sizzling, unmappable topographies, and hear the muted roaring of the winds over the face of the water, and watch with our simple eyes the atmosphere cooking and boiling and synthesizing itself so that when the storms quieted and passed and the sun shone back down on us, we would step onto the sand with our brand-new feet and walk out of the carbonated surf onto the fern-littered shore. What was that first clot of plasma not merely cooked by lightning? What colloidal smudge shivered and convulsed at the charge for an instant? What Adamic fleck of aspic was that? What first, shocked self that then became the first corpse?
The clouds looked like fiddleheads of oily liquid curling across the watery sky.
I took two more pills when I reached home and poured some whiskey in a coffee mug that read, SOMEONE AT AYERS MIDDLE SCHOOL APPRECIATES ME. I crushed the eight remaining pills in a decorative mortar made of green onyx that I’d bought Susan for Christmas the first year we dated. I ground the pills with the pestle until they were a fine powder. I tapped the powder out of the mortar into a ramekin and added a teaspoonful of water and mixed it with my finger until it made a smooth, consistent paste. I put the ramekin in the freezer.
My daydreams about floating in primitive oceans gave way to fairy-tale equations, like spells or the sorts of drawings to which I imagined the girls drinking wine and reading tarot cards in the cemetery might at some point be or have been attracted and drawn in chalk or spent a long windless night rendering in colored sand on the lid of a crypt, enchanted that someone might come along before a breeze scattered the sand and look at the beautiful, apparently diabolical but in fact harmless design and feel a worried thrill, but perhaps even more delighted at the possibility that no one besides the owls above in the trees would ever see it before it dispersed. The bookcase at the back of the kitchen was still stuffed with old tapes of movies and kids’ shows, and with the plastic containers in which Kate had kept her felt markers and crayons. There was a round bucket full of fat, rainbow-colored sticks of chalk. I took the bucket to the living room and drew a stick of bright red chalk from it. I stepped up onto the couch and lifted the mirror hanging above it from its hook and threw it across the room in the direction of the armchair, half-hoping it would land quietly in the seat, half-hoping it would fall short and explode all over the far side of the room. The mirror landed on one of its corners a foot short of the chair. Its glass broke with a single crack, almost like a gunshot or an isolated detonation of thunder in the middle of an otherwise peaceful snowfall, and the frame tipped onto the chair and stopped dead. I stood up on the back of the couch and leaned against the wall and reached up and over as far as I could to my left.
I wrote on the wall, Let the world be W.
Below that, I wrote, Let Kate be k.
Below that I wrote, Therefore, let Kate’s death be (W – k).
Let I be me. So I is now (I – k).
I was never good at math or logic. My thoughts quickly became confused as I tried to demonstrate the calculus of grief, to draw up a circuit or graph or model written on the wall that captured the function of loss. I could barely figure out a long division problem, though, so my variables and function signs, sigmas and trigonometric equations quickly gave way to hieroglyphs, because I had to find a way to factor in the gothic girls in the graveyard, and Aloysius’s voice box (a v inside a rectangle), narcotic vectors (skulls and crossbones, color-coded, according to the pill) and blood alcohol (the old xxx from cartoon jugs of moonshine, plus or minus a number from one to five, based on degree) and the tame birds in the sanctuary and the pattern of the paths there and the shifting lights of the constellations of my sorrow. I had to attempt to fold hope (H) into the emotional tectonics, too, as subtle and rare a particle as it was, because even if at any given coordinate its value was statistically equal to zero, even if at any given moment it was no more than the hope for the return of hope, a single grain of it still contradicts a universe of despair. I drew mandalas and particle accelerators and calendars made up of concentric moving circles and ox-turn algorithms.
At a certain point in my calculations I realized that I could no longer merely draw symbols on the wall, that to catch Kate on the wing, to contrive a machine that could hold something like a part of her absence, I had to bring the figures I was making out into the space of the room.
It was night by then. Daylight had drained from the house. I tossed the piece of chalk in my hand into the bucket and switched on the three lamps in the living room. Their light seemed not bright enough, so I removed their shades. Still their light did not seem bright enough for me to get a proper look at my drawings on the wall, so I moved them closer. Still there was not enough light, so I brought in four other lamps from other parts of the house and plugged them all into a power strip, and the light was not enough still. I stood back from the wall and looked at my drawings. They began on the upper left part of the wall as straight lines of equations and veered downward in anticline toward the center of the wall into primitive-looking pictures and icons. It seemed almost as if the characters were being pulled by some force toward the middle of the wall, and as the strata of letters and numbers drew closer to the center they spontaneously turned into the little animals and stars and bottles of cough syrup that they really were, right before they were vacuumed into a black hole.
There was no hole in the middle of the wall, though. There was nowhere for the drawings to be pulled into, no crucible, no alembic inside of which they could properly react. I could see the dead center of the wall, where it was still white and unmarked, right where a hole needed to be made to break the plane to allow the numbers and letters and animals and people to spin, move, whirl into the hole, be transformed, and possibly reemerge.
I need the hole saw, I thought.
“You are a ragpicker,” a voice said.
My grandfather’s toolbox was in the garage. I stepped outside. The hurricane loomed, bearing down toward Enon, out over the dark ocean, where fire-breathing whales plunged into valleys and breached from the peaks of the mountains of water it raised and overturned within the eons of each moment. The heavy wind sounded like waterfalls cascading in the trees. I opened the bay door of the garage. The streetlamp across the road projected pendulums of light through the trees in front of it and against the back wall of the garage, where they swung in an arc, in a steady rhythm. The wind on the serrated edge of the hurricane spun for the moment in strict tempo, and I thought that if the storm stopped traveling, and just remained, hung high above the village, spinning in place, and if it were fed the same diet of pressure and water and temperature, at a constant rate, it would be like a great, single-geared clock turning above us in the sky. We could set our watches to it. We might learn to make little hurricanes ourselves, to wear on our wrists to tell time.
“Doesn’t it sound like waterfalls, Kate?” I said. I stood before the open bay of the garage. I pretended Kate was standing just behind me, to my right.
“Some of the first clocks made were powered by water. Clepsydras, they were called. Water clocks were called clepsydras. Grampy told me that.”
I carted the toolbox into the living room. I plugged my grandfather’s drill into an outlet and fitted the drill with the hole saw. I measured the exact center of the wall with a tape measure and marked the spot with a pencil. I pressed the drill against the wall and pulled the trigger and leaned into the drill and the drill opened a hole in the middle of the wall. It felt like a seal breaking when the hole opened and I stopped panting and drew a deep breath. It felt as if the air in the room were being vacuumed into the hole. I stepped back and surveyed the wall. The hole was too raw, too inelegant, too small. I traced a larger circle around the hole, using the mouth of a mop bucket from the basement. The house moaned and sighed under the weight of the gathering wind. I cut the larger circle out of the wall with my grandfather’s reciprocating saw. The air filled with plaster dust that rippled and turned like liquid. It made paste in the back of my throat and glue in my nose. Standing back, I thought it looked like the hole gaped and gulped down everything I’d drawn, with blind, deaf, and dumb appetite. It simply devoured. So I yanked out a couple yards of aluminum foil from the roll in one of the kitchen drawers and tore it into long strips and folded the strips over three times each and pressed them flat and stapled them around the rim of the hole in the wall. That looked funny and ham-fisted, too. I wanted a whirlwind, a vortex, the eye of a storm, the crater of a volcano. I wanted the hole to spin and churn and vomit light and gulp it back up again and transform it into something I’d never seen and the light to have a voice and to speak a word that said Kate was okay and showed her well and transfigured and became the heart in my chest and the love welling up behind my ribs and the anger seizing my throat and the murder churning in my eyes and the sulfur burning in my nose and the hurricane howling in my ears and the fury in my cup and I wanted the hole to be the rent veil and even in my stupor I could see that the machine I was dumbly improvising out of candles and copper wire and brass leaf and teakwood and tiger’s teeth and heavy coins and blue pearls was a grotesque demolition of my own home and not the beautiful altar I intended.
The paste in the freezer had crystallized. I put it in a coffee filter and squeezed the liquid from the filter into another ramekin and drew it up with an old children’s medicine syringe I’d found in a plastic food container in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, among old inhalers and droppers and thermometers. I had given Kate medicine with the syringe when she’d been too young to take it from a spoon. I stood at the kitchen counter and stuck the syringe into my mouth and pushed the plunger about halfway down the barrel. The liquid was cold and acrid. Before any time elapsed for my better self to argue with my lesser self, I pushed the plunger another quarter down the barrel. Just to make sure because that first squirt wasn’t quite halfway, I thought.
“Three-quarters of eight pills; that’s, what? Jesus, it’s like five pills—no, six. Wait, is that right? And those four others. Charlie, you’re going on a ride.”
I shuffled back to the living room. The floor was strewn with tools. The couch was covered in plaster and dust. I tried to read what I’d written on the wall and to follow the equations and improvised ideograms as they drained toward the hole in the plaster which looked pathetic now, fringed in aluminum like a kid’s attempt at a special effect for a homemade science-fiction movie. The first wave of the drugs swelled over my brain and I cursed myself for making such a wreck of the living room, especially the couch, where I wanted to lie down and float away.
“Ha, you just signed up for some housecleaning, Charlie Crosby,” I said. “Ah, Kate, your dad’s as big a jackass as he ever was. Bigger, in fact. Your dad’s a big, stubborn, born-and-bred chump.” I smiled. Kate loved the word “chump.” I used it once to describe someone I’d done a job for and when she heard it she clapped her hands and threw her head back and laughed out loud. “Chump! What’s that?”
“Kind of a jerk,” I said. “Kind of a numbskull. You should look it up in the dictionary.” Kate hauled out the dictionary I kept in the living room next to the couch.
“It’s the sawed-off end of a log,” she said, holding the dictionary up to her face and squinting. Why don’t I get my act together and make an appointment for her at the eye doctor’s? I thought. “It’s like ‘chunk’ and ‘stump’ stuck together! Like a block of wood.”
“A blockhead,” I said. “A block of wood for a head.”
Now I dragged the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and plugged it in and turned it on and yanked the hose from the body and began to drag it back and forth across the top of the couch and the cushions. The white dust was so heavy and fine that the hose just made lines in the fabric.
“Attaboy; make it worse. Good show, old boy,” I said. I teased myself in the cheerful tone of voice I’d used when I was mad at myself but trying to contain my anger in front of Kate.
“Your daughter’s dead, old boy—you stupid shit,” I said. “And you are a wreck of a man with a block for a head.” I sighed and tipped over onto the couch and lay there with the metal vacuum cleaner wand across my chest, listening to the motor whine, feeling its revolutions through the wand. “A block of a head soaked in ether, a stump soaked in turpentine.”
The wind roared and buffeted the house, the vacuum motor whining harmony over it. Somewhere upstairs a storm window rattled in its frame. I felt as if I were spinning head over heels. At some point, I lost consciousness, with the vacuum still running and the storm rolling over Enon like a great, kingdom-sized turbine, tilling up its trees and hedges and fences, toppling tombstones and tearing shutters from their hinges and weather vanes off barn roofs, all while I dreamed my opium dreams.
I came to the next day at noon, already bolting dizzily off the couch, nearly stumbling over the books and bottles. The vacuum cleaner was still running from the night before and its canister burning hot to the touch. I switched it off and the sudden silence made me aware that the noise from its motor had been driving me mad in my sleep for hours. My ears rang in the quiet and it seemed as if I could still hear the vacuum the way that you still see the sun in front of you when you blink after you’ve turned away from it. A bitter, cooked smell wafted up out of the machine.
From what I could see outside the living room window, the yard was strewn with fallen branches and leaves and shingles from the roof. Something like the actual world began to resolve itself out of the oneiric morass in my skull and I made my way to the kitchen. I put on an old pair of sneakers that sat on top of a pile of old newspapers and mail and opened the back door and stuck my head out. The cupola from the garage roof lay splintered on its side in the yard. The trotting-horse weather vane that had been set on top of the cupola was speared upside down in the grass a few yards away. Four of the windows in the garage doors were broken. Glass and bricks and shingles and tree limbs were scattered across the driveway. I stepped outside and walked around the back of the house. Pillars of sunlight burst down from between the speeding clouds, swept across the landscape, and swung back up into their billowy bays. The wind ran smooth and strong behind the storm and smelled clean and sweet and invigorating, as if it were cleaning up in the hurricane’s wake and not the tail of the hurricane itself, or as if it were a signal that the hurricane trailed behind itself that said the violence was over and calm and safety and order were spreading back over the world. One of the maple trees had toppled and glanced off the back corner of the house, where Kate’s room was. I stepped back from the house into the yard to get a look at the roof. Half of the shingles had been blown off. A dozen bricks had broken loose from the top of the chimney, giving it the look of a crenellated castle tower. The yard smelled rich and earthy. Sparrows flew around and chirped and found food and grass and twigs to repair their nests with. The stark blue sky and the churning, retreating clouds and the cascading sun and the bright green grass and livid blond pith wood gleaming from the broken ends of fallen limbs and the wounds in the sides of the maple trees and the silvery-gray clear rainwater collected into a wide pool in the middle of the backyard corrugating in the wind were all overwhelmingly beautiful and I smiled at it all and sat down in the soaking muddy grass and wept.
THE HOUSE AND THE yard were such messes from my abuse and neglect and from the hurricane that I could not stand the idea of them remaining in that state while all of the other homes and yards of Enon were cleaned and repaired and brought back to their properly cared for conditions; nor could I bear the idea of following along in order not to be noticed and cleaning and repairing the house and yard myself. There was some irony in the fact that I felt certain I could not do the work because I actually knew how to do it and so I knew how much energy it would take, energy I knew I did not have anymore, in my condition. The idea that I neither could leave the house as it was nor fix it made me feel more hopeless than ever. On top of that, I imagined Kate standing at my side, surveying the damage, looking to me for resolve and optimism. Had she been alive, I’d have put my arm around her shoulder and squeezed her against me a couple times and said something like “Piece of cake, babe. We’ll have the farm up and running again in no time flat.” As it was, I sighed and said, “Ah, the hell with it, all of it.” I grabbed a backpack from the front hall and filled an old plastic soda bottle with tap water and started away from the house. When I was almost to the Red Orchard store, I took the backpack off and scratched around in the bottom to see if there was any money. I thought I might buy a pack of cigarettes or a candy bar if there was only a little change. I wanted to see how the store had weathered the hurricane and to say hi to Manny. I hadn’t been to the store in several weeks, maybe a couple months even—longer, in fact, I realized, not since I’d met Manny the first time, or talked with him anyway. I had a spontaneous hope of maybe helping him tape up a broken window and mop up the flooded floor and afterward sitting on milk crates and sipping cold colas and commiserating about all the work we’d accomplished. The store looked fine from the outside, so I stuck my head in the door to say hi and ask Manny how his kids were and to apologize for not having dropped in for a while, although in truth I was sure he couldn’t have cared less that I hadn’t been back in, and might have been glad for it, given the state I’d been in. There was a guy I didn’t recognize at the register, a tall kid with long hair and a bad slouch.
“Oh, hey,” I said.
“Hey,” the kid said.
“Sorry. Is Manny around?”
“Who?”
“Manny. The guy—” I almost said, with the kids. “His full name is Manprasad, I think. Works here every day.”
“Oh, that dude. He split.”
“Split?”
“Moved back to China or something. Couple months ago.”
“No kidding. Well, um, thanks.”
“No thing, man.”
Manny having moved back to India felt tragic, like the end of a sad movie, with me the guy walking away, dismayed and crushed as the credits roll. Damn, crummy little village, I thought. Crummy little footpaths and crummy little sanctuary. It’s all such a bunch of bullshit, and I’m its sorry-ass mascot. The Idiot of Enon. Fuck it.
I walked around for the rest of the day and late into the evening. It seemed I had no possible place left on this earth to go. I could not go back to the house. I did not want to spend the night in the wet, storm-tangled woods. A hotel was out of the question. I stopped walking and looked around. I was near the road across from Mrs. Hale’s estate, where I had spent summer nights stalking through her meadows with Peter Lord and my other friends, and where Kate and I had rested on our way home at dusk and watched the sun set and the beautiful, grand house settle into the dark, and where my grandfather and I had seen the amazing and for all purposes apocryphal orrery, with its ivory planets and moons and brass sun, and I had turned the wooden-handled crank and made the entire arrangement of spheres spin on their axes and around one another and the sun in perfect symphony.
I decided to break into Mrs. Hale’s house and find the orrery. Nothing in the world seemed more important suddenly than turning the crank and feeling the perfectly machined resistance it offered and the perfect ratio of force applied and degrees that the crank turned to the various periods of the celestial bodies, from the almost imperceptible orbits of the outer planets to the smallest little moons, which spun as quickly and neatly as tops. I walked in a straight line across the road and across her meadow, right toward the few lights on in her gigantic house. I made no attempt to conceal myself or to be quiet. I did not think about looking for any drugs. She’s an old Yankee nanny goat anyway, I thought. I bet she’s never even swallowed an aspirin.
“Your old pop may be headed for a stretch in the joint, kid,” I said. “But it’s time, way past time. There’re some things in this place you just have to see.” I thought about the James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson gangster movies we’d watched together, which, unlike the old westerns we’d seen, she had genuinely loved. I drew a deep breath and shook my head and smiled in disgust at myself and said, “Made it, Kate—top of the world. Anyway, what I’m about to show you is something else.”
I walked up to Mrs. Hale’s broad, oak front door, the one my grandfather and I had stood before, what, I thought, twenty years ago, waiting for Mrs. Hale to let us in. I grabbed the brass door handle and pushed down on the leaf-shaped lever with my thumb and it went down all the way and I pushed on the door and it swung open inward and I walked into her front hall. The hall was lit by a single, dim, candle-shaped bulb set in a wall sconce. It was wide and deep and receded into the darkened depths of the house. Dark paintings in gold frames lined the hall. All were portraits of men and women I took to be Mrs. Hale’s ancestors. The floorboards creaked and echoed as I walked down the hall. It turned left at the back of the house and continued lengthwise. I came to a large stairway that rose eight steps to a landing on which stood the Simon Willard tall clock I’d fixed with my grandfather. I peered up at its austere dial.
“Come along. I’m right in here,” a voice barked. I startled and turned to run but remained on the landing. It was Mrs. Hale, and she sounded exactly the same as when she’d told Peter Lord that we sledded like girls and when she’d asked my grandfather what she owed him for fixing her clock. Her voice was clear and strong, her words as composed as if set in sharp, indelible black ink on cold, blue-white paper. I went up the rest of the stairs and crossed a wide landing to an open doorway. If running into Mr. Wallace wandering around his house at night had been like finding a puzzled half-ghost, half-man, fuzzy and vague from fumbling around between realms, Mrs. Hale seemed like the pure concentration of all the light and air and earth and people of Enon, from every lap it had ever taken around the sun, not merely from its relatively brief and no doubt fleeting career as a village of colonists but from its centuries as home to more original souls and a tract of forest, and its millennia under glaciers and at the bottoms of unnamed oceans, all taken in by her ancestral house and focused through the precisely configured windows, aligned and coordinated with the clocks and orrery and rendered into the small, prim, neatly dressed figure sitting on a plain wooden settle beneath an electric candle, in the middle of the room, the temple, the dim penetralia, everything else shrouded in darkness, as if she were an artifact in a museum or a prophet in a pew.
I stood at the door dumbfounded and already abashed to the point of reform, the forthcoming speech I imagined already a formality, already perfunctory if not for the agonizing, extra efficacy of having to hear in full the details of the charges of which I already knew I was guilty. Mrs. Hale sat with her hands folded in her lap, looking straight at me, with perfect poise—with what both of my grandparents unhesitatingly would have called character. I had the impulse to check the bottoms of my shoes to see if I had tracked dirt into the house, to smooth my hair down, to tuck my shirt in. My shame doubled, trebled. It struck me how repulsive it was for me to be inside her house, the outrageousness of it made all the starker by her sitting there with such patience and self-possession that to judge by her it was as if I were prevailing upon her tact in some small matter of manners.
I tried but could not suppress a gasp at my idiocy. “Mrs. Hale,” I said.
“Do not speak, Mr. Crosby,” she said. “I know who you are and why you are here. You will find none of what you came for in this house. I am sorry for your loss, but it is time you stopped this carrying on. It is disgraceful.”
Tears brimmed in my eyes and ran down my cheeks. I was humiliated and in awe of the woman. She possessed the majesty of plain speech.
“Mrs. Hale,” I said. It would have been foolish of me to tell her I had not come for drugs. That was somehow immaterial to her.
“I know what you are doing out there at night, Mr. Crosby,” she said. “It is not a mystery. With all your crawling, you’ll soon be going on your belly. You’ll spend your days swallowing dirt and hoping for bare heels to bite.”
“Mrs. Hale,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Crosby.”
“I am sorry.”
“Well and fine, Mr. Crosby, but your sorrows are selfish.
You are a maker of dismal days. You burn your daughter in strange fires when I should think you would be grateful for the blessing of having had a lovely child. Enough is enough.”
I understood as she spoke that Mrs. Hale was not going to call the police. She was not going to report the break-in, or call the offices of The Daily Bread, or speak any more sternly than she already had, or, as a matter of fact, speak any more at all. I had been dismissed.
She sat still and erect on the settle, looking at a point high on the opposite wall, toward whatever it was that moored her to her convictions, clearly finished with the affair, clearly weakened and frail and, worst, frightened, another victim of my violence. The hardness of her consideration toward me was so nearly unbearable that I almost offered to help her lie on her bed or to make her tea or to care for her lawn for free for the rest of her life, gestures that themselves would have been violent, would have demonstrated that I had missed her point precisely, that I rejected precisely the straightforward responsibility she had extended to me, enacted for me.
For an instant I thought of murdering Mrs. Hale. She seemed so impossibly decent. But her dignity provoked me into humility and silence. After bowing my head and standing mute before her for a moment, I turned from the door and walked back down the hall, the wide pine floorboards creaking. I descended the dark, narrow staircase. The grandfather’s clock on the bottom landing read one-thirty. I paused in front of it for several seconds. The silence of the house was so deep that each tick of the clock seemed to enfigure in sound the brass works rotating behind the dial. The clock seemed a device for preserving and telegraphing the heartbeats of my grandfather and my grandmother and my mother and Kate, and a coffin, and a reliquary, and finally just a plain old beautiful clock. Somewhere I could not remember the orrery sat in its room, still, latent, potent in the darkness. I descended from the landing and followed the hallway back to the front door. I stepped outside into the dark night and closed the door behind me.
I WALKED ACROSS THE meadow and into the woods, into the Enon River sanctuary near where my grandfather and I and Kate and I had fed the birds from our hands so many times. I imagined the birds dropping dead from the trees until the ground was covered in a tangled mass of corpses, the beak and broken wings and soiled feathers and needle-thin bones of one animal interlaced and looped with those of the next and all the bodies knitted together. And I imagined that the plaited bodies might be lifted in a single pane and draped over my shoulders and clasped together at my throat with claws and worn like a cape or robe. It would be very light, made as it was from feathers and hollow bones. It would be very long and I would wander from the tame boundaries of the sanctuary out into a real wilderness with a great train following me that would comb up insects and grass and bark and snag on stumps, and that would constantly force me to stop and turn to gather or yank free or untangle, only to have it catch again a moment later on another barb. Bones would snap and wings unscrew from their sockets and I would leave a trail of looping feathers and scattered limbs. My thrashings would knot the garment as much as they rent it. The garment would attract living, wild birds as I passed below their nests and they would alight on it and become entangled. Over time, the garment would be transformed, expelling those first, tame birds and accumulating dark pheasants and crows and elusive little songbirds. After many years, the cape would no longer contain any of the birds from which it had been originally formed. It would become more and more gruesome as it metamorphosed from entirely dead birds to a mixture of the dead and the living. It would writhe and twist with black and brown and flutter scarlet and yellow and purple. The snared birds would peck one another bare and pick out one another’s eyes and preen themselves and eat one another and defecate upon one another and couple, all while they screeched and sang and made nests and brooded over eggs that were not theirs but had boiled up beneath them through the thickets of bones and plumage, even as their own eggs had sifted away to hatch somewhere else or fallen from the cloak onto the ground or in cold puddles, where their quickening yolks would cool and cloud to mere jelly. Sparrows would raise waxwings and crows beget finches and there would be generations of birds that were born, lived, sang, struggled, and died wholly ensnared in that monstrous cloak.
When I came to the creek that ran from Enon Swamp to the lake, I stopped and filled the backpack I had brought with me with as many stones as I could shoulder. I walked through the woods to Cedar Street, crossed the street, and marched through more woods to Enon Lake.
The night was moonless and lidded with clouds so thick that they were invisible within the darkness they made. The clouds seemed low enough that I had to hunch down not to crack my head on them. My mind blazed with ravishing lies. I thought, I cannot accept this gift of myself, myself as a gift, of my person, of having this mind that does not stop burning, that deceives itself and consumes itself and immolates itself and believes its own lies and chokes on plain fact. Mrs. Hale is right, but I cannot stomach it. My grandfather always told me that whether or not I believed in religion or God or any kind of meaning or purpose to our lives, I should always think of my life as a gift. Or that’s what he told me his father had told him and that his father had told him, in a tone of voice that suggested that such a way of thinking had seemed to him as remote and as equally magnificent and impossible as it did to me, even as he passed it along as practical advice. But it’s a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating.
But that was only how I’d felt since Kate died. I felt as if it was always true and that I was merely deluded before, that I believed in, was enchanted by, a lie of love and goodness, simply because I had it so good for a time. But it was not a lie while I lived it. It was true. It was as true as my despair after her death. I would never have called myself an optimist, or even happy in the sense of being satisfied. I was always restless and ill at ease, running too hot. But Kate gave my life joy. I loved her totally, and while I loved her, the world was love. Once she was gone, the world seemed to prove nothing more than ruins and the smoldering dreams of monsters.
I WALKED INTO ENON Lake with the intention of drowning myself. My idea was to sink myself with the rocks in the backpack. The water was cold and pure and clean. It washed my filthy hands and my filthy face and my filthy hair. I was exhausted and scorched and the water quenched me. I could practically hear the water hiss as I immersed myself in it. I unshouldered the backpack full of rocks and it sank behind me. I waded out until I was up to my neck. My clothes weighed me down but I still had to half-tread with my arms and hands. I exhaled the air in my lungs. I ducked under the surface and sank into the cold quiet water.
There had been so many times when I had felt embarrassed for my daughter that I was her father, mostly times when, after I’d been fired by a client or had failed to make enough money to last the winter without having to dip into the money from selling my mother’s house, Kate would hug me and kiss me and tell me, “It’s okay, Dad,” and I’d have to act comforted by her while being overwhelmed by what a wonderful kid she was and how humiliated I felt at having put her in the position of consoling her own parent. I realized that what I had been doing since Kate’s death was nothing short of violence. It was not grieving or healing or even mourning, but deliberate, enthralled persistence in the violence of her death, a willful preservation of the violence imparted to her and to our family by that car battering her and dispatching her from her self and from this world, and my perversity—that was the word for it, I realized in that instant, under the cold water—my perversity was perfected by the fact that I knew better, that I had known all along that the drugs and punching the wall and breaking my hand, on purpose, of course, of course, of course, I thought—and ravaging my family’s home and digging around in the dark and ruining the peace of other people’s homes and terrorizing them was the deliberate cultivation of the violence of the instant of the collision of the car with my girl and, worse, the deliberate, angry sowing of it on neighbors and strangers and worst of all Kate, whatever that name now meant—memory, angel, voodoo doll. And yet I knew better. I had known every second of every day that what I was doing was wrong and I had done it anyway.
The water’s mercies were brief. My breath gave out. The foreign, submarine world suddenly alarmed me. I surfaced and gulped at the air and scrambled back toward the shore, reaching the edge of the water on my hands and knees. When I attempted to stand, I tottered under the weight of my soaked clothes and sprawled on my back, my legs still in the shallows. I unzipped my sweatshirt and peeled out of it like I was shedding a bloated second skin. Exhaustion overtook me and I lay panting and freezing on the sandy gravel. The last tatters of storm clouds streamed across the bright summer stars. I barked a laugh.
“Mercy, mercy me; this is sad,” I gasped. “Enough is enough is right. Charles Washington Crosby, you have got to get your shit together.” I would have curled up and fallen asleep where I lay if I hadn’t been so cold and dismayed with myself. Instead, I got to my feet and started back toward home, dragging my heavy, limp sweatshirt by the hood over the ground behind me.
When I had crossed the golf course and reached the top of the hill behind the cemetery, I paused and looked down at the irregular ranks of headstones. From where I stood, Kate’s stone was obscured behind the maple tree. No matter, I thought, glancing at my dark, dirty sweatshirt. I look like an old ghoul dragging around some fawn I snatched from its mother’s bed. I’ll get some dry clothes and some sleep and come back tomorrow.
Directly in front of me, halfway down the hill, maybe seventy-five yards away, a spark of light flashed and backlit two or three large rectangular headstones, so quickly that had the afterimage not pulsed its way across my vision, I’d have been convinced that it hadn’t happened. I squinted at the dark. The light sparked again, and again, and blinked into a tiny flame. A young girl’s voice laughed and another shushed at it. I realized it was the two girls I had seen drinking wine and reading tarot cards and talking about boys. I could just make out a cigarette and a face in the light for a second before the lighter went out again. One of the girls laughed again and the other tried to hiss her quiet but started laughing, too. They hushed each other but I could still hear them talking in delighted, hurried undertones and it was charming, how happy they sounded to be together, raising a little hell, acting up a little. I thought about the nights when Peter Lord and other friends and I used to range all over Enon, not really even a little truly feral after all, maybe, but boisterous and happy. And I thought about what fun I’d had with Kate hiking all over the village, too, and how when she’d been younger, how thrilling it had been for her whenever we’d wandered off a bit too far and had had to walk home in the dark.
I started back across the hilltop, intending to sneak away without the girls noticing me and maybe getting scared, ruining their good cheer. I must have grunted or something, I’m not sure what, but I made a noise and the laughing stopped. I froze and the girls froze.
“Carl?” one of the girls called. “Carl, is that you?” For all I’d been through in the past year, I felt more petrified than at any other time. Christ, I’m going to jail tonight after all, I thought, imagining the girls shrieking and being frightened half to death at the sight of me, soaking and strung out and wretched.
“Carl, cut the shit; I’m serious.”
As idiotic as I felt, I croaked out, “Um, no. Ah, hi. It’s not—Carl. I’m—”
The girls got up on their knees. I dropped my sweatshirt and started walking toward them, with my hands out at my sides, almost like I was approaching a skittish animal. I didn’t know what else to do.
“Who’s that?” one of the girls asked.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak—I mean, I didn’t know you guys were there.”
“Who are you?” the girl repeated.
“Well,” I said, “I’m Charlie.” It sounded so strange to say that. It felt so odd that there was nothing else I could say to these young girls, girls near to my daughter’s age, that the only appropriate thing for me to say seemed to be nothing more than my name.
“Charlie, huh?” the other girl said. They both stood up. One of the girls was noticeably taller than the other, very slim, with dark eyes. She wore a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled over her head. Her long, snaky, jet-black hair cascaded out from the hood and down the front of the sweatshirt. She stood a step in front of the other girl, who was fairer, with lighter eyes. The other girl’s hair had been dyed black, too, but she’d let it half-revert back to its natural red color. She wore a black leather jacket that had a white skull with a Mohawk and the word EXPLOITED spray-painted across the front of it. She wore a black skirt with black leggings and high, heavy black leather biker boots. They were trying to be cool, but they were nervous. I thought of Kate and felt like they were not being nervous enough. I walked toward them until I stood about ten feet away. I deliberately kept my body turned a third away from them, to show that I wasn’t going to move any closer in their direction.
“Sorry, guys,” I said. I looked down at my soaking, muddied self. “Sorry. I’m not having”—I wasn’t sure what to say—“such a good night.”
The shorter girl elbowed the taller girl and the taller said, “Ohh; it’s you.”
“Sorry—” I said. “It’s me?”
“Yeah, it’s you—Kate’s dad.”
I knew they knew. It was as simple as that, but I still feigned a little. “ ‘Kate’s dad’? What are you talking about?”
“Kate’s dad,” the girl said. “You’re Kate’s dad. The kid—the girl—that died last year. The eighth grader. You’re her dad, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Yeah, that’s right, but—”
“Don’t worry, man,” the girl said. “It’s okay. Kind of everyone knows.”
“Everyone knows what?” I said.
“Yeah. I mean, the guys know. I mean, these older guys we kind of know, at school, and some girls; they’ve seen you walking around at night a few times. Everyone kind of knows about you. I mean, not the cops or the parents, just some of us. No one told them it was you that did that break-in. We know you walk all around at night. Everyone kind of thinks it’s cool.”
The other girl said, “We know right where Kate is, right down there. We talk about her sometimes.”
“Talk to her sometimes.”
“Yeah, to her.”
“We saw her once.”
“Right down there, by her stone.”
“She was, like, made of the shadows.”
“Yeah, or like inside the shadows, but we knew it was her.”
“We could tell from her hair.”
“Yeah. Her hair was really pretty. Really, really black.”
“But black because of the lights moving around in it, kind of.”
“Yeah, it was really weird. But she was so beautiful. I mean, really, really beautiful.”
“Yeah, we really kind of fell in love with her.”
Just like Kate fell in love with the idea of Sarah Good, I thought. The taller girl took a drag of her cigarette. She took a half-step forward and offered it to me.
She said, “Dude, you look like you need a smoke.” But then she stepped back and dropped her face a little, as if suddenly remembering her manners in front of an adult.
I said to her, “Your name’s not Sarah by any chance, is it?”
“No, I’m Lilly,” she said.
“And I’m Caroline,” the other girl said.
“How many times did you say you’ve seen my daughter?”
“A bunch—”
“A couple—”
“Once for sure.”
I thought: Jesus, these kids know about me? I thought: Jesus, Lilly and Caroline, in the cemetery, drinking some white wine you pinched from your moms, playing with tarot cards, probably getting okay grades, probably going to decent colleges in a year or two, trying to work things out, trying to be good kids, really.
“Lilly and Caroline,” I said. “What a couple of lovely”—I wasn’t sure what to call them: girls, women?—“souls you are.” I felt mortified, too, though, soaking wet and strung out, talking and sharing a cigarette with teenage girls in the cemetery late at night, with evidently half the kids in the village aware of what I’d been doing for the past year, and these two not as frightened by me as they rightly should have been. But it felt like a spell had been broken, too.
I stammered a vague thank-you, suddenly not wanting to explain the facts of the night, charmed by these kids but suddenly wanting nothing more than to be home. So I told them that they didn’t know how much they had helped me and I didn’t know what else more to say but thank you.
“No problem, my man,” Caroline said.
“That’s what we’re here for,” Lilly said.
“Well, your secret’s good with me, you guys. Just—ah—be careful, okay? Take it easy with the booze and those smokes, all right?”
“Okay, Mr. Charlie.”
“Okay, Dad.”
I laughed out loud at that. As ridiculous and reduced and outrageous as the whole situation was, it was nice to be called dad, and in that funny, smart, sarcastic girl’s voice.
“Bye, guys,” I said. I turned away and limped down the hill toward the road.
Lilly called out in a loud whisper, “Hey, Mr. Charlie?”
I stopped and turned around and whispered back, “Yeah?”
“We’re really sorry Kate died.”
Caroline whispered, “Yeah. We bet she was a really good kid.”