Текст книги "Descent"

Автор книги: Tim Johnston

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

14

She walked in the rain’s aftermath along wet sidewalks and under dripping trees with the clouds coming apart in the sky like rotted fabric. The old brick library was gone and the new one with its soaring glass facade like a church stood in its place. There was a history. During construction, people had called it the Lindsay Suskind Library because it was Lindsay Suskind who’d gone rolling backward down the wheelchair ramp of the old building, and it was Lindsay’s mother, Jeanne, newly certified in the law, who threatened action.

Wide, smooth sidewalks now coming and going, glass doors parting at ground level, book aisles like boulevards. Walking into the building was like walking into a botanical atrium, plant life and the sound of water chuckling somewhere, bright shafts of daylight. But the smell of the new library was like the smell of the old library: paper, bindings, the faint whiff of mold. Like the smell of buses, it was a smell of childhood. Of young girls out on their own on a summer day. Long empty days of sunburn and ice cream and the pursuing eyes of boys. Of men.

Angela stood staring at the new releases. Picking one up. Putting it back. Choosing another.

On a stool behind the counter sat a plump older woman who’d been at the old library and who had a way of smiling that made you believe she remembered you, though it had been years. Angela handed her the book and looked beyond her. A seated young man with a silver hoop earring, gazing into a computer screen. That was all.

“Does Lindsay Suskind still work here?” she asked the woman.

The woman scanned the book and smiled. “Oh, yes. She’s taking her lunch break.”

Angela glanced about.

“She’ll be back in fifteen minutes, if you care to wait.”

Angela took the book and her card. “Thank you, it’s not important.”

She walked into the cafe annex and ordered a small black coffee and sat at one of the smaller tables and opened up the book.

The girl was parked at one of the larger tables, reading. Dipping her fork from time to time into a Tupperware. In a final act of amends or whatever you wanted to call it, the new library had installed Lindsay herself at the checkout desk, where she excelled. After a year, Angela heard, she earned her library science degree through the evening and weekend program at the university where her father taught and slept with graduate students, and the library had promoted her accordingly. Mike and Jeanne, separately, were prone to boasting about her in a way they hadn’t when the girl ran track.

Angela remembered the day—her own daughter walking in, hair still dripping from the Owensby pool, so brown and lean in her bikini, so beautiful it startled her. As if some undressed woman had come striding through her front door. You walked home like that? she was about to say when Caitlin ran damp and sobbing into her arms.

What is it, sweetheart, what happened? Her mind leaping to the worst—rape, pregnancy, HIV. It was like falling into blackness. Th e end of everything. A daughter was your life; it was as simple as that. Her body was the only body, her heart the only heart. Th e most absolute, the most terrible love.

Th e July sun was burning in the kitchen window. Th e air was roaring. Th e girl couldn’t, or wouldn’t, speak; her body was convulsing (the feel of that body pressed to hers, the wet and sun-hot skin, the softness and the firmness, the smell of the pool, of coconut, of the sun itself in her skin, in her dripping hair!).

It’s all right, just tell me, just tell me, sweetheart . . . She’d heard the sirens, she would remember later.

Lindsay, Caitlin said at last. Oh, Mom, it was awful . . . and Angela holding her the tighter and her heart crying, Th ank God thank God thank God, and only later thinking of her own sister, Faith, diving off the dock.

Then the day, the bright December day perhaps a week after returning from Colorado when she answered the door and a dark-haired girl was on the stoop in a wheelchair and for just a moment, just an instant, she’d thought, Caitlin.

Angela closed the book and walked over, and the girl looked up. Smiling in recognition, and then true recognition taking hold and the smile falling.

“Mrs. Courtland,” she said. “Gosh. Hello.”

“I’m sorry to bother you, Lindsay. I know you’re having lunch. I just wanted to say hi.”

The girl closed her book and set down her fork. “No, gosh.” She put a hand on Angela’s wrist. “Would you like to sit down?”

“No, you’re eating—”

“Please, sit down.”

Angela pulled out the chair and sat and the girl studied her, searching her face with large brown eyes. For a moment Angela was lost in them. Why had she come? What did she think she would say to this girl, this young woman whom she’d once picked up and dropped off, fed, watched over like one of her own?

“Mrs. Courtland, is there . . . I mean has something . . . ?”

“Oh,” Angela said. “No. No, I’m sorry, I should have said so right away.”

“It’s just, I haven’t seen you here. I mean I’ve never seen you here before. I thought maybe . . .”

Angela shook her head.

“I’m so sorry,” said the girl.

A man came to the counter and ordered something in a low voice, as though he didn’t want anyone to know, and the barista girl set to making it.

“I saw Ariel this morning,” Angela said.

“You did?”

“Yes. I was substituting.”

“You were?”

The girl didn’t want to look or sound surprised, Angela knew, but she couldn’t help it, she had no guile. Her heart had been through too much.

“I’m sorry,” Lindsay said, “I thought you were . . .”

“I was. But that was months ago.”

Lindsay nodded. “Did she behave herself—Ariel?”

“Yes.”

Angela stared at her hands where they lay upon the book. They looked like someone else’s. Her heart was aching.

“She’s gotten to be a pain at home,” said the girl.

“I’m sorry, Lindsay.”

Lindsay shrugged. “She’s what they call a teenager, I believe.”

“Not for that.” She held the girl’s eyes. “I’m sorry for the way I was that day you came to the house.”

Lindsay shook her head. “Don’t, Mrs. Courtland—I shouldn’t have come like that, out of the blue. It must have been a shock.”

“It was. But everything was. Everything. I didn’t know what to say to you.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it’s not. I never came to see you at the hospital either. After your accident. I’m sorry for that too. That was hideous of me.”

“It was hard for people . . .”

“You were friends with my daughter. I was friends with your mother. I should’ve come.”

Lindsay looked down, and for a moment Angela saw her in flight, one long leg thrown out before her and the other folded under like a wing as she took the hurdle. Effortless, magnificent.

“Caitlin came,” Lindsay said. “Every day after school. Or after practice. I’ll never forget that, Mrs. Courtland.”

Angela smiled. Lindsay smiled. Without thinking, Angela reached and thumbed the tears from the girl’s face, one side, then the other.

“I’m sorry I ambushed you like this. I’m sorry to upset you. I just wanted to talk to you.”

“I’m not upset. I’m glad to see you.”

Angela stood to go.

“Mrs. Courtland?” said Lindsay.

“Yes?”

“I know about what happened.”

Angela stood looking at her.

“Between my mom and your—with Mr. Courtland. Years ago. I know about it. I know that’s why you and my mom stopped being friends. I know that’s why you didn’t come to the hospital.”

Angela stared at her. Then she remembered—but it was like something she’d lost, or buried. She had no idea what it once felt like to know that her husband had slept with—was sleeping with—Jeanne Suskind. She thought of her own mother in the nursing home, who sometimes called her Faith, who asked, Where’s Angela? Did the mind break down or did it simply correct? Vectoring away from pain? They’d never told her mother about Caitlin and they never would. The old woman would die without ever having lost her granddaughter.

“That was so long ago, sweetheart,” Angela said at last. “None of that matters anymore.”

“I know. But Caitlin and I talked about it sometimes. I think it made us closer. Almost like sisters. Weird as that sounds.”

Angela nodded. She smiled. “I’m glad I got to see you, Lindsay. Will you please tell your mother I said hello?”

“I will. And please—” The girl’s eyes filled again. “Please come back.”

Lindsay watched her walk away. From where she sat she saw Angela pass through the library’s automated glass doors and stop to open the small brushed-nickel door of the deposit chute, lift her book, and drop it in. She seemed to listen for the dull bang, then she let go the little door and walked on.

15

A whistle shrilled and three girls burst bare-legged down the black lanes, ponytails whipping, but then pulled up laughing and loped onto the field where other girls lay strewn and twisting on the grass. Cross-country girls, not sprinters, they’d mostly been freshmen when Caitlin was a senior, yet they all knew her and they all knew him, and when one girl contorting in the grass looked up the hill and saw him, and tapped the hip of the girl nearest to her, he turned and limped away.

Deep painful blue of sky, the first stains of autumn in the elms and oaks.

Th e buses were long gone and there was nothing to see or hear at the front of the building but the snap hooks lashing at the high barren flagpole with that silvery hollow sound, and when he reached the street he turned south toward the railroad tracks. VFW stood for Veterans of Foreign Wars and the old vets would hail him and arm him with a pool stick and tell him stories of shitstorms in the jungle where men, boys really, not much older than he, best buddies, brothers, were there one second and gone the next. Headless. Cut in two. Th ey wouldn’t let him smoke or drink. Th ey called him the Young American. Th ey swore they would find the piece of shit who did that to his leg and make the cocksucker beg them to put a bullet in his cocksucking eye. Th e old vets knew nothing about Caitlin—there one second and gone the next.

Before he reached the tracks a truck pulled alongside him in the street, and the passenger’s window descended and behind the wheel was his father. Th e boy stopped, and the blue Chevy stopped too.

I was up at the school, his father said. Up and down those halls. Where were you?

Just walking. Th e boy felt dizzy. Th e sun appeared to yo-yo in the sky. What are you doing here?

Came to talk to you.

Th e boy waited.

It’s not about Caitlin, he said. Hop in, he said, and the boy breathed. He slipped the backpack from his shoulder and hauled himself up into the cab.

Where were you going?

Nowhere. Just walking.

Just walking, his father said. Th at knee must be feeling pretty good.

Th e boy shrugged. Th ough the windows were down, the cab held a humid personal odor like a bed just vacated. It was the smell of a man’s long drive alone. His uncounted cigarettes and coffees. His souring skin and all his human emanations, including his thoughts, all the miles and miles of them collected within the cab like a dew that would lift from the glass on the tip of a finger.

Th e Chevy joggled over the tracks and Grant turned left and drove past the old VFW lounge with its antiaircraft gun aimed at the sky. Th e faded flag lifting feebly from the pole and falling again.

You’ve got your aunt Grace pretty concerned with all this just walking.

Is that why you’re here?

No, I was coming anyway.

Why?

To talk to you, like I said.

You could’ve called.

Th at only works when the other party answers his phone. Did you lose your phone again?

Th e battery died. So you drove all the way here to talk?

Do I need a better reason?

Th ey drove south, out of town, on Old Airport Road. Grant had just come from seeing Angela, from sitting across from her at Grace’s kitchen table, a mug captured in her thin hands, her eyes dark and strange. As if watching a scene that had nothing to do with that kitchen, with him. Th ere was one morning she couldn’t forget, she said.

A twin-engine Piper raced the Chevy on a parallel course and rose from the runway and immediately banked and headed for them as if in attack. It droned overhead, darkened them in a blink of shadow and went wobbling off into the west. When Sean was small they would come here to watch the small planes take off and land, and Grant had told him the story of Sean’s great-grandfather who had been a navigator on raids over Germany and whose plane had been shot down. How one of the crewmen came home two years later to tell that he’d seen the boy’s great-grandfather parachute out just ahead of him but had lost him in the night sky, and when the crewman was captured he expected to see the navigator in the camp, and when the war was over he expected to see him at the army hospital, and then he expected to see him back in the States, but he never did. No one ever did.

Th e story had put into the boy’s mind the story of a man who dropped into a forest far from the war and the cities, a black forgotten forest where a man could walk for years and never come across another man nor the end of the forest. Back home his young wife and his son wept over his gravestone but the man was alive in the forest and he lived there for so long that he forgot that there were such things as wars and cities and families. He simply became, like the deer, the owl, the fox, a thing of the woods. And like them he one day died, not from war, or the violence of another man, but because he’d grown old and could no longer hunt and could no longer protect himself from the other things in the forest.

I think you should come back with me to Colorado, Grant said.

Why?

You don’t seem very happy here.

Am I supposed to be happy?

Grant looked at him.

Th e boy took hold of the brace he wore over his jeans, the steel bars to either side of his knee, and gave an abrupt, adjusting jerk. What about Mom?

What about her?

She needs me here, remember?

Grant nodded, absently. I think it would mean more to her right now if you came back with me, he said. To help look.

For a time the boy said nothing. Th en he said: She bought me something, out of the blue. Guess what.

What.

A model airplane.

Grant studied his son’s face—grown thin in the last year, like the rest of him. Th e soft blond mustache he ought to just shave. His son had lost interest in model planes years ago, he knew, though dusty fighters still patrolled the skies of his room.

Sean, he said. Did Mom ever tell you about her sister, Faith? Her twin?

Th e one who drowned.

Yes.

No. Caitlin did.

What did she tell you?

Th at mom had a twin sister named Faith who drowned when they were young.

Grant nodded. Th ey were sixteen, he said. Your age. Th eir folks, your grandparents, would rent a house on the lake for two weeks every summer—swimming, suntanning on the dock. One day they left the girls alone to go into town. Th ey left little Grace with them. Grace was walking by then and she walked right off the end of the dock. Do you mind if I smoke?

No.

He lit the cigarette and went on, describing the day as Angela had described it to him one night just before their own daughter was born (long wretched night of no sleep, of fears bursting all at once from his wife’s breast): the two teenage girls on the porch painting their toenails, talking to a boy on the house phone, accustomed to their mother watching the baby. Th e moment when something splashed and they looked at one another—each seeing in the other, in her twin, her own face of immediate comprehension. Immediate fear. Two girls running as one to the end of the dock and diving in. Angela could see little Grace down among the rocks like a sunken doll. Th e water wasn’t deep and she quickly had her in her hands and she came up kicking, reaching for the dock, calling out, I got her, I got her. But Faith hadn’t come up. Was still down there looking, she thought. She got Grace onto the dock and turned her on her stomach to push the water out and then turned her over again and as she blew into the tiny mouth, filling the tiny lungs, she was thinking about both sisters: the one she was trying to save with her breath and the one who wasn’t there, who wasn’t coming up. She had this feeling that, as a twin, her twin self ought to be able to dive in after Faith, her actual twin. She thought she ought to be able to be on that dock and in the water again, both places, at the same time.

Th e ember of the cigarette flared, and he let the smoke out slowly.

Finally Grace coughed and began to breathe, he went on. And as the life came back into her baby sister, your mom told me she felt another life going out. Going out of herself. She dove back in the water and searched, and she came up to make sure Grace was still on the dock, still crying, and dove under again. It took too long. She could feel that other part of herself slipping away. Just slipping away.

Grant stared into the distance as if into those waters. Faith had misjudged her dive, he said. She hit a rock on the bottom and her lungs filled with water and she drifted under the dock, into the shadows.

He took a last drag on the cigarette and crushed it out.

Th e boy had found photo albums in his aunt Grace’s garage, the plastic pages separating with a loud kiss of time on the twin girls as babies, as blonde birthday girls, as teenagers who with their pure, rudimentary features looked more like daughters of the grown woman he knew than his sister did. After sixteen, it was one blonde girl alone, and to study pictures of his aging mother was to wonder if, in some other, ongoing world, some divergent world, that identical sister once so happy and pretty remained happy and pretty, or must she grow as well into the same tired, beclouded woman who went on in this one?

He didn’t know what to say. He understood that his mother grieved not only for a daughter but for the lost half of herself.

But it didn’t change anything.

School just started, he pointed out, and Grant said they would get him into school up there or down in Denver; they’d have to look into it.

You’ve got your license now, don’t you?

Yes.

And you can drive all right? He glanced at his son’s knee.

Yes.

He handed him a key and took three twenties from his wallet and handed these over too. He told him to go over to the house after dinner and get the old green Chevy and gas it up and drive it back to Aunt Grace’s. Pack up his things. Be ready to go at 7 a.m. sharp.

Your mother knows the plan, he said.

16

It was a modest but handsome house, gable-roofed, with large ground-floor windows that caught both the morning and evening light. There was a time, pulling up to it, when her heart would fly out of her, like seeing the ocean, like seeing the mountains. Here was the shape of her life, of all she loved. A solid house. Nothing in disrepair. The house of a carpenter. Grant had done the bedroom over the garage himself when Angela was pregnant with Sean, and when it was finished, Robert and Caroline across the street, who’d watched the whole process, said they couldn’t believe it hadn’t been there all along.

It was late and the sun was dropping through the washed and dripping trees. Above her reached the long arm of the sycamore where her children once swung. She became aware of a dog barking but only when it ceased. Lights coming on in the houses. Yellow-warm lights in houses where once they’d gone for dinners, drinks, to see new babies. Birthday parties in the backyards. She was almost surprised to see no lights in her own windows. No boy doing homework at the dining room table. No woman at the kitchen sink.

A minivan rounded the corner with its lights burning and Angela went up the walk fishing in her tote bag for keys. Finding them and getting the right one in the lock and opening the door as the car prowled by and stepping in and shutting the door as if casually behind her.

In that first moment, that silence, she heard the clicking of little toenails as Pepé came skating around the corner. But Pepé was years ago, his crooked little body buried out back under the elm in a pine box that Grant and Sean had built. Such a profound absence for such a small creature. Days of grief and Sean lobbying for replacement.

We’ll see.

When? When will we see?

After Colorado.

She stood looking up the stairs into the shadows. The absolute stillness of the house. Silence like a pulsing deafness. Smell of some depleted candle perhaps but otherwise nothing, not even the smell of dust.

She poked at the thermostat and listened for the furnace to kick in, and then she went into the kitchen and turned on the light and ran water in the sink—something to do with the traps, you had to keep water in them. In the basement she filled an old plastic pitcher at the utility sink and poured water down the washing machine drain and into the floor drain. Finally there was nothing to do but go up to the second floor. Three sinks up there. Two showers. Two tubs. Two toilets.

We need to talk about the house, Angela.

All right, let’s talk about it.

Neither of us has worked in over a year.

Th at was the point of the second mortgage, I thought.

It was. But we’re burning through it. All these flights back and forth. Th e bills. Th e hospital bills.

Grant.

It’s just a house, Angie. It doesn’t mean anything.

Just a house?

You know what I mean.

Is that what we tell her? Sweetheart, it was just a house? It didn’t mean anything?

She stood before Sean’s door at the end of the hall. Her impulse was to knock, and she shook her head at that and opened the door on a fantastic scene: military airplanes swarming in outer space. The sun’s last rays flaring along wings and stabilizers against a backdrop of stars.

He strode before the wall-sized map like a little explorer, Here’s Polaris, Mom, the North Star. Here’s Andromeda.

Just above her in diving attack was a fighter plane with its wicked shark’s smile. It banked and shuddered at her touch.

She shut the door and took a few steps and stood before her daughter’s door. Her hand on the knob.

You don’t have to, Faith said.

I know.

She turned the knob and stepped inside.

Posters. Pictures from magazines in the way of young girls since there were magazines. Wild-haired crooners at the microphone, one shirtless guitar player, but mostly athletes, caught in one marvelous instant or another, the unbelievable physiques.

The white girlhood vanity stood as Caitlin had left it. Scattering of makeup. Books, CDs. Small gifts from friends: a rubber heart with legs and arms, standing on clownish shoes and waving hello. An open jewelry box holding mostly hair bands. Pictures of family, pictures of friends. Lindsay Suskind and three other girls in the air, in casual stances, as if levitating.

Angela saw her movement in the mirror but did not look, her gaze landing instead on the silver brush, a thing she’d always loved. The rich weight of it, the raised cameo of a young woman on the back, head slightly bowed as if to receive some blessing. Burnished by generations of young girls’ touching. Our family hair-loom, Caitlin called it when she was little. It rested on its back. After a long moment Angela reached and touched. Fine lacings of hair deep in the bristles. Hairs still eighteen and silky. Hairs that would never age.

Here were her trophies in a fine dust. Here the layers of ribbons, so many of them blue. The handsome small Christ on his cross. The neatly made bed. The pillows. A stuffed ape with gleaming eyes, a lapsed, shabby bear of countless washings and dryings, propped like a couple, just as she’d left them.

Dusk had come into the room. She was so tired.

She slipped the tote bag from her shoulder and set it on the bed and reached into it for her phone, the bottle of water from the market, the amber vial, placing each of these with care on the white lamp table by the bed. Then she moved the ape and the bear and lay down with her hands over her stomach, over her womb. The room slipped into darkness. Heat breathed in the vent. The dog began yapping in the backyard, mad little Pepé, tormented by the neighbor’s fat gray tom. In the metal building a blade hummed to life and went singing into a length of hardwood—oak, maple perhaps—Grant calling to Sean to feed it smoothly, smoothly, and any moment now the front door would swing open and her gym bag would drop from the height of her hip to the floor with a joyous whop and she would be so hungry, she would be famished, my God, Mom . . . when do we eat?