Fellow Mortals: A Novel Read online

  Ava yawns through a stretch and says they ought to go. She took the day off from work to get a handle on the house and here she is, lounging over lunch and listening to tree-house plans. She’s vague when Henry asks about her housework, and when he asks a second time, her expression’s all the answer that he’s willing to pursue.

  They say goodbye—Sam and Ava share a look that Henry can’t interpret—and after finalizing a time to meet at the lumberyard, they follow Wing’s lead along the trail toward the car. Cold water dribbles on their heads from the branches and it’s difficult to walk without slipping in the tire grooves. They concentrate and Henry tries supporting Ava’s arm. She pushes him away, walking in a puddle and reacting like he put her off balance with his help. He notices her cleavage, made apparent by the rain, and wishes she would brighten up and lead him off the trail again.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t do something wrong?”

  She looks at him and stops.

  “I know about the cabin.”

  Henry sinks, really sinks, several inches in the mud. He moves his foot. It makes a slurping sound, futile and revolting. With the lunches and the tree house, the easy conversation, he’s been thinking more and more that Sam was like a friend.

  “I can’t believe he told you…”

  “He was worried,” Ava says, speaking through her teeth.

  “He needed help,” Henry pleads. “I burned his house down, Av. Then he wants to build another one and I’m supposed to tell him…”

  “But you should have told me.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t let me! Don’t you see…”

  Yes, she does.

  “You could have killed yourself,” she says. “Where would that have left Sam? Where would that have left me?”

  * * *

  Nan and Joan notice the unnatural silence between Henry and Ava, each of whom makes plenty of noise doing chores and it’s precisely those sounds—clinked cups, the rustle of a trash bag—that makes the lack of talk so apparent. Dinnertime’s efficient. Henry eats politely, chewing each bite and dabbing with his napkin, and it’s Ava eating briskly, finishing her meal and clearing plates and making coffee while the rest of them remain bolted to their chairs. Wing walks around the room, cowering and yawning. Nan rubs him on the head, eliciting a wag, but then he’s teary from his yawns and too alert to settle down.

  The Finns agree without a word to say good night at seven o’clock. They miss their shows and spend the evening in their room reading magazines, very like the nights following the fire.

  Joan’s been so preoccupied with puzzles in the living room, she’s scarcely given thought to her beloved figurines. She got her first when she was eight, an ivory turtle from her mother, and collected them religiously for seventy-two years. Animals and trees, Virgin Marys and the saints—they were a constant in her life, from her childhood home to various apartments in adulthood, throughout her long career at the paper factory, her double hip replacement and recovery, retirement and spinsterhood, the last ten years of living with her sister. None of them survived, not a single figurine. Henry got her three from a vendor at the mall: a sphinx, a tree, a Cupid he had told her was an angel. Now she holds the little tree and tries remembering the others, staring at the drab medallion pattern on the wall. Her eyes begin to well. The medallions start to blur. She hides behind her magazine and waits for it to pass and then she eases into bed and says her prayers next to Nan. The words are older than her life but still surprising, still a riddle. It’s the mysteries themselves she finds reliable and soothing.

  Nan stays awake until her sister falls asleep. She expected Joan to cry and wonders why she didn’t—what it means and what to do with all her unspent care. The room is stifling but she shivers, feeling feverishly chilled. She pulls the bedspread up, hands beneath her chin, remembering the homemade quilt she used to have, each square its own design from cornucopias to wrens. She thinks of one particular square, an evergreen she sewed the day after Christmas, 1985, the year their father died of cancer. She cries a little while, softly as she can, covering her face so she doesn’t wake Joan.

  In the morning after Ava leaves for work and Henry’s out with Sam, Nan leads Wingnut into the living room where Joan is at the table, humpbacked and focused, working on her latest thousand-piece puzzle. It’s the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel prior to restoration, murky brown and difficult to see, with none of the vibrant color Michelangelo intended. Joan prefers it this way, the sameness of the tones more a master-class challenge. She has the border and a number of the lesser-known figures: Amon and Manasseh, Judith carrying a head.

  “We never got to Rome,” Nan says, sitting down. They had talked about it often, visiting the Vatican, touring through the ruins and museums and cathedrals.

  “Mmm,” Joan says.

  “Centuries of candle soot,” Nan continues, fingering a piece: a little tan elbow, maybe one of God’s. “Remember when they cleaned it? People were afraid it wouldn’t be the same.”

  “I’m looking for a baby leg.”

  “It’s time for us to go.”

  Joan takes a long, broad survey of the table, then emerges after hours in her own private chapel.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We need a place to live.”

  “Did Ava say something?”

  “No.”

  “Henry…”

  “It’s been two months,” Nan says. “We’ve looked at seventeen houses.”

  “None of them were right.”

  “None of them were home. You’re doing puzzles every day in someone else’s living room. I’m gardening in someone else’s yard,” Nan says.

  Joan’s body doesn’t move but the table has a quiver. Nan steadies it and says:

  “They need their house back. They’re too young to have a pair of old ladies underfoot.”

  “Where do we go?” Joan asks, teary in alarm. “Should we go to the Days Inn? Do we have to leave today?”

  Nan holds her hand and smoothes the wrinkles of her knuckles, softening her posture and the color of her voice. “Take a breath,” she almost whispers. “We’re doing this together.”

  Joan dutifully inhales, growing dizzy from the air.

  “All I’m saying”—Nan sighs—“is that we have to take it seriously. It’s time to put our life back together, even if it’s different.”

  She kisses her and leaves her on her own to think it through.

  Wingnut settles on the tips of Joan’s feet. She wouldn’t dream of getting up or moving him away. She looks around the room at all her finished puzzles. Henry’s framed every one and hung them on the walls, and with her table, and her tea, and her music on the radio, the room belongs to her and no one ever claims it. She’s caught herself imagining a different shade of paint, brighter eggshell, closer to her living room at home.

  She connects a bare foot—the foot of the Delphic sibyl—and sifts around the table for the body and the robe. The sibyl looks familiar when she’s finally put together. It’s Ava, Joan thinks, beautiful and strong, healthy in her youth, with a luminous expression. Lips parted with a breath, all the rest of her in motion. She hasn’t seen Ava this summery in weeks.

  She holds another piece, airy as a wafer. When it clicks into place she feels a flutter of delight, still surprised when a pair of odd shapes interlink. She thinks of challenges ahead: Easter Island, Norman Rockwell, never-ending beaches, and the surface of the moon. She finds herself envisioning a brand-new room, permanently hers, any color she decides. They could host Thanksgiving with the Coopers, maybe Sam. She could decorate every last wall with a puzzle.

  16

  Sam and Henry arrive in a rental truck at 8:57 a.m. and Bob, Danny, and Ethan meet them at the curb, the boys light of foot, their father antsy but at least superficially enthused. They’ve been parked around the corner for the last half hour, waiting for Peg to dri
ve away and clear the coast, and all five conspirators are mindful of the challenges ahead, especially once they start unloading the truck and all the lumber starts mounting in the grass.

  The yard is long and narrow, chain-link-fenced, meticulously mowed and thoroughly boring, with a couple of lilac shrubs and a flower bed of wilted marigolds. There’s a bare patch of dirt where the swing set had been and a Japanese beetle trap every twenty feet. Henry sets the table saw under the tree, an egg-shaped maple with a straight, thick trunk, and after running an extension cord across the lawn, he stands back, admiring the two-by-sixes, two-by-fours, plywood, decking, nails, screws, hammers, saws, and drills they’ve strewn around the whole back section of the yard.

  “This is a tree house, right?” Bob says, finally grasping that even with Sam and Henry working full bore, construction’s liable to take longer than the weekend. “How can I help?” he asks, and though the boys are of a similar mind, eager to grab a board and start hammering, Henry won’t allow it.

  “This is my gift to you. Our gift,” he hastens to correct, looking around for Sam. “I don’t want any Carmichaels getting so much as a splinter until it’s done. Pull up a chair and watch us work.”

  Sam disagrees—it’d be good for Danny and Ethan—but he keeps it to himself and maybe Henry’s right. If there was a little injury, even just a splinter, they’d be equally responsible explaining it to Peg. It’s bad enough already, simply being here to help. Sam regretted volunteering from the moment he committed. He was quiet when they drove to rent the tools and buy the lumber, waiting to explain—as if he could—the reason he had broken Henry’s trust about the cabin. Only Henry didn’t ask; he was upbeat as ever. Either Ava had forgiven him or what? Who could say.

  Sam lingers out front, having gone to get the last box of tools and finding, after the hubbub of showing up and leaping into action, his first real chance to soak it all in. He had met Bob’s eye and taken his condolences, and yet before the handshake had gotten too warm, before Danny and Ethan were required to say something nice, he found a practical excuse and walked toward the truck.

  Now he turns and sees the compost pile in the distance, right beside the trailer where he’s learned to overlook it. He remembers how it was—leaves that he and Laura had piled over watermelon rinds, coffee grounds peppering banana peels and eggshells. Apple cores. Sawdust. Jack-o’-lantern. Grass. There were parts of every meal they had eaten last summer and the mound had been enormous, colorful and loose. It had all turned to rich black soil in the spring, smaller than a tenth of its original material. Laura would have spread it in the garden with her hands.

  “How do you start the saw?” Henry hollers from the yard. “Whup, there it is! Never mind … never mind!”

  Sam listens to the sounds—power saw whizzing in the open air, a tinny radio. He thinks of dropping everything and walking to the cabin. Then he hears Danny’s voice calling out his name.

  They start by measuring, cutting, and organizing platform beams while Bob and the boys play Wiffle ball. Ethan hits a line drive off the top of Henry’s head and everybody laughs, most of all Henry. They build the platform six feet off the ground using ladders, safety ropes, and hex screws, a crosshatch of planks fastened to the trunk. They cut support beams and fasten them securely at the corners, and the Carmichaels watch when Henry stomps around the edges, testing every inch with absolute faith in Sam’s abilities. It’s late morning by the time they’ve decked the floor and gotten Danny and Ethan up to have a look—no walls or roof yet, but a platform with a view—and they’re up there still when Peg explodes out the back screen door.

  “What the hell is this?!”

  She’s wearing heels and hasn’t put her portfolio down, having walked through the house, seen Henry in the yard, and marched straight out in one brisk motion from the car. She doesn’t stop until she’s right in front of Henry, who stumbles backward over the two-by-fours, landing on the wood with his sneakers off the ground.

  She sees the lumber, the platform, her sons overhead, Bob with a Wiffle bat and Sam with a drill, unable to parse it all and focusing on Henry.

  “I’m calling the police. This is trespassing. This is harassment. Get down,” she says to Danny and Ethan. “Did he touch you? Did he touch you?”

  “I said it was okay,” Bob says, barely audible but shocking her anew, and then she goes to work on him, gesticulating so wildly that most of her portfolio scatters on the ground. Bob holds the bat feebly in defense.

  Henry’s on his back, dark red, almost crying—is he crying? No, but terribly familiar in his fear. Peg snaps her papers up, squatting in the grass with her slacks stretched tight along the furrow of her buttocks.

  “Get down!” she tells the boys, angry they’ve defied her.

  “No one’s steadying the ladder,” Ethan says.

  “I don’t care.”

  Bob holds the ladder till the boys reach the ground.

  Sam breathes through his nose, helps Henry off the wood, and picks a paper off the ground, handing it to Peg.

  His being there confuses her and forces her to focus.

  “Sam,” she says, almost like an answer to a question.

  “This was my idea,” he says.

  “What idea? What?”

  She blows away her bangs except they tumble round her eyes again.

  “The tree house,” he tells her. “I wanted to do something nice for Danny and Ethan.”

  She watches him but never stops grasping at the ground. He’d like to chuck the folder like a Frisbee at the tree. Instead he helps her finish and says, “Come on, let’s talk a little closer to the house,” guiding her over by the elbow and trying not to squeeze.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam says. “I should have let you know.”

  “You’re goddamn right.” She struggles for composure. He can see it’s quite a battle by the sharpness of her pupils and the count, one to five, she takes to calm herself down. “I don’t understand.”

  “It was an impulse,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about your boys. How the fire must have scared them.”

  Yes, you’re right. Peg nods. “I had to make a rule: no more talk about the fire. It isn’t healthy, dwelling on something negative for weeks on end. My college roommate’s a psychologist now, she told me the same thing. We’ve been trying to redirect them.”

  “Exactly,” Sam says. “Give them something fun, something built instead of burned. I’m pretty good with wood and thought, What about a tree house?”

  “I appreciate the concern, I really do…”

  “Peg,” he says, lowering his voice. “I want to be honest here.”

  “Okay?”

  “I meant what I said, about doing this for them. But I’m also doing this for me. I haven’t been myself. The fire’s all I think about. I thought if I could build this tree house, if I could force myself to be around people for a change…”

  He clenches both eyes until it looks like tears.

  “Sam…”

  “You’ve been so good to Nan and Joan, helping them find a new place. We’ve all pulled together,” he says. “Now it’s my turn. We were a neighborhood. A real community. I know you can appreciate that.”

  “I’ll be honest, too,” Peg says, drawing herself together like a proper truth-teller. “I don’t think it’s safe.”

  “Oh,” he says dismissively. “This is what I do. They’ll be safer up there than in your actual house.”

  Peg blanks a few seconds, wobbly in the grass, until her heel sinks deeper in the lawn like a stake.

  “Not with him,” she insists.

  “It has to be him,” Sam whispers, sounding both weary and mysteriously wise. “Like it or not, Henry’s part of this. Why do you think the Finns are letting him help? Listen, Peg,” he says, moving in close. “I’m not saying you have to forgive him, but you see the way he is, how he’s always showing up. If we let him do this, for you and me, for Danny and Ethan … this is everybody’s chance to move forward. One tree h
ouse and we can all get on with our lives.”

  She gazes at him, sweating at the corners of her eyes. A heat bug’s drone seems to issue from her head.

  “How long?” she asks.

  “Three days.”

  “That’s what the siding people said.”

  “Trust me,” Sam says.

  “He doesn’t speak to me. He doesn’t come inside, not even for the bathroom. Especially not for the bathroom.”

  “He’ll use the trailer. I appreciate this, Peg. If there’s anything else that I can do…”

  “No, you’re doing enough,” she says, sounding like she’s giving him a break from obligation. “Danny, Ethan. I want you out of the yard. Now.”

  Henry and Bob, unsure of where things stand, huddle arm to arm when no one gives them orders.

  “You can stay,” Peg announces to them both, sanctioning Henry and banishing Bob with one all-encompassing decree.

  Sam smiles at the boys. They discreetly smile back.

  As soon as Peg takes them in and shuts the door, Sam says, “We’re back in business,” clapping his hands Henry-style and grinning at the two men’s amazement.

  “What did you say to her?” Bob asks, looking at Sam as if he’s some kind of mystic.

  “I appealed to her decency,” he says, raising far more questions than he answers, and it’s only then, having tried whatever he could to win her over, that he finds himself believing everything he said.

  * * *

  hey hot stuf. tnx 4 lst nt. Sx pty sun.

  Billy reads the text on Sheri’s phone several times. All he did was hear a chime and pick it off the table. Now he’s trembling in the heat, breathing shallower and shallower, caught between a double urge to sit and walk around.

  He sees her out the window, lying on her stomach in a candy-red bikini with her top pulled off. Hey hot stuf. She was late last night—ninety minutes, unexplained—and she didn’t say good morning when she shuffled to the yard.