Fellow Mortals: A Novel Page 16

  “Fine,” she says.

  “I just thought…”

  “But not with Sam. He’s not a little child. You can see him all you want, but I’m about finished doing penance for the fire.”

  Henry shies away, wary of her tone.

  “You can shower,” Ava says, standing up and walking to the door. “I’ll dry my hair downstairs.”

  “I don’t mind waiting.”

  “We have two bathrooms again. We may as well use them.”

  She leaves him there and finds the house sadly uninhabited, amazed at how much life a pair of old women took away. She wonders how they’re doing, together in the clean little house across town, Joan with a puzzle, Nan watching television with a mug of mint tea. Then her thoughts turn to Sam and the cabin and the trees. She imagines how it looks with the lanterns all aglow—maybe, if he’s brave, with a fire in the clearing. Would he sit there alone, surrounded by the dark, and think of Laura and the Finns? Does he ever think of her?

  She sees the window of the guest room reflected in the mirror. Even here, after dark, night presses in. The woods are different in the daylight, though, with the warm smell of pine and the sparkles in the water trickling from the rock. There are chickadees and squirrels and the quiet has depth. She moves the dryer in a swirl, pretending it’s the wind, and shuts her eyes when the air makes ripples in her gown.

  19

  Ava surprises Sam when she arrives unannounced, carrying a cooler and a folding chair, and finds him in the middle of a thousand feet of grapevine. The vines are cut and tied and spread around the ground, like a complicated net, inside a clearing in the pines. There’s a fresh-cut trunk inverted in the center and it’s this he means to carve. She’s interrupting everything.

  He reaches for his shirt as if she’s caught him in the bedroom, flustered by the sight of her and frowning at the vines. She hasn’t seen him since the moving day, and even when he’s calmer and she hastens to explain herself, he’s hesitant to answer, like he’s talking to a stranger.

  “I can go,” she says. “I should have let you know.”

  He steps around his work and says it’s fine, not a problem. Ava can’t decide if it’s sincerity or manners, but she can’t second-guess him now that he’s accepted her. She situates her chair precisely where he tells her, in a corner in the sun where she won’t be in the way. He doesn’t mind the company but says he has to concentrate.

  “I promise,” Ava says. “I’ll be quiet as a leaf.”

  She watches him in silence, looking down when her staring feels apparent, reading magazines and trying not to fidget in her chair. An hour in, she shuts her eyes and relishes the sun. The pinkness through her lids feels enveloping and womb-like. She listens to him hammering a chisel at the trunk, but the mallet’s made of rubber, not at all harsh, and the softness of the blows complements her mood.

  She moves her chair now and then, following the sun, an inconvenience she enjoys because it keeps her half-drowsy, half-alert, a perfect balance for a day she wants to savor. A week like this could be a miniature summer and she’s happy to have come, happy to be with him.

  “There’s a big pool of sun over here,” Sam says, pointing to a heavenly expanse near the sculpture.

  The overturned trunk is five feet tall. Its roots splay wild in profusion out the back, higher than the rest, dirty and bizarre. What it looks like, really, is a full-sized tree that someone’s flipped so the bulk of it is buried in the ground. Sam’s cleared away the bark and started roughing out the figure but it’s early yet, genderless and mostly undefined.

  Ava puts her chair just beyond the chippings, drinking seltzer from a can and smiling at the fizz. She likes to see him work and tries predicting what he’ll cut, what exactly he’ll remove with each little tap. His boots are worn, his T-shirt’s ripped, and his jeans are like the sanding cloth he uses on the curves. He needs a haircut, too—he hasn’t gotten one since Laura was alive—and how would he react if she suggested more deodorant?

  He asks about Henry going back to work.

  Ava saw him off earlier this morning—straightened his shirt, fixed his hair, did her best to reassure him when his nerves went awry. “I know it seems new,” she told him at the door, “but it’s still the same job. You’re the thing that’s changed. But you’re ready. You’re okay.” And then she walked him to his car and saw him on his way and she’s been anxious ever since, despite her efforts to forget him.

  She didn’t tell Henry she was coming here today. She hadn’t planned it. She’d intended to remain around the house, but the minute he was gone, she’d packed a bag and started off.

  “I feel like a worried mom,” she says. “I keep telling myself he needs to do it alone, but sending him off like that, looking so small after such a long summer … I can almost sympathize with Peg. I wouldn’t let a child out of my sight.”

  Sam steps down and hones a chisel on a stone. “I’m surprised you don’t have kids.”

  “We couldn’t,” Ava says. “It broke Henry’s heart.”

  “Amazing. That’s the last thing I would have expected of Henry.”

  “He had the highest sperm count the doctor ever saw,” Ava tells him. “It was me.”

  She’s been facing into the sun and when she looks at Sam he’s pausing with the chisel, hard to see and more of an impression at her feet. He reminds her of a teenager, hesitant to speak. He is in fact younger—quite a lot, she remembers, possibly enough to view her as an aunt.

  “I never would have guessed,” he says. “You seem so fertile.”

  “I have breeding hips.”

  He laughs and says, “That isn’t what I meant.”

  She puts a hand to her stomach, following a breath, picturing her body full of daffodils and fruit. He’s sharpening the blade again. There’s oil on the stone. He sweeps the chisel up and down with a swift, silky motion and it’s slippery in his fingers, wonderfully controlled.

  “Did you ever think of adopting?”

  “We tried it with a pair of old sisters,” Ava says. “What about you? Did you and Laura want a family?”

  “Eventually,” he says. “We were wait—”

  He’s cut his finger with the blade.

  “Let me see,” Ava says, coming off the chair. She kneels and takes his hand and says, “It isn’t too bad.”

  “It’s a little bad,” he says, immediately faint.

  “Tense your muscles. It’ll raise your blood pressure.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m a lab tech,” she says. “I see it all the time. Here, keep squeezing it. I brought a first-aid kit.”

  He laughs at her preparedness but wobbles on his heels. Ava digs through her bag and finds the plastic box under the sunscreen. She takes a water bottle out of the cooler and pours it over the cut. Sam gets his first clear look at it and groans.

  “You aren’t tensing,” Ava says.

  The cut is relatively deep but the slit looks clean.

  “Distract yourself,” she tells him.

  “How?”

  “Talk about winter.” Ava dries his finger with her shirt, holds tight, and says, “How are you preparing?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam says.

  He has an outhouse. She knows he has a mattress now, too, and a tank to run a sink …

  “What about heat?”

  “I’m ordering a woodstove.”

  “What about a cell phone?”

  “Who would I call?”

  “Us,” Ava says.

  She lets his finger go and dabs a little ointment on the bandage, doing it by feel so she can keep Sam focused on her face. The dullness in his eyes interrupts her concentration. Ava drops the bandage; now she has to start again.

  “What if there’s a bear?”

  “I can wrestle it,” he whispers.

  “What if skunks have a litter underneath your floor?”

  His head begins to loll. Both her hands are occupied.

  “Sam,” Ava says, inches fr
om his face. “What if you look in the mirror one day and you’re a scraggy old hermit with a long dirty beard.”

  “Like Rip,” he says.

  “That’s right. You’re Rip Van Winkle waking from his nap. You’ll stagger out one day and there’ll be flying cars and microchips in everybody’s head. You’ll try to get a job and nobody will hire you. You’ll walk around town and all the children will be scared of you. Everything that used to be familiar will have changed, and your only real choice, the only way to go, will be coming back here to live with all your statues.”

  She finishes the bandage and there’s color in his face again. She gives him back his hand. He accepts it like a present.

  “Have a drink,” Ava says, handing him the water.

  He finishes it down and dribbles on his chin.

  “Thanks,” Sam says.

  “You’re welcome.” Ava smiles.

  “I’m never good with blood.”

  “It’s a specialty of mine.”

  He reaches for her shirt with awful fascination. Ava lets him pull it very gently from her skin. She watches him and wonders if she’ll have to throw it out. Even Nan would have trouble cleaning this kind of stain.

  * * *

  In the late afternoon, Sam walks her out and carries her shoes; she likes going barefoot and doesn’t want her soles dirtying her bag. Arcadia Street’s abandoned when they exit the woods. Ava’s timed it to the last half hour of the workday, the longest she can wait before the neighbors make it home. It’s also one or two hours after Henry would have passed and they can see the day’s mail at several of the houses.

  Sam walks her to the curb and stands behind her at the car. Her hair is sweat-dried and loose, she’s wearing one of his clean shirts, and when she leans in to situate the cooler on the seat, the bottoms of her feet are dirty as a kid’s. Her face and arms look nourished by the sun but he can see the whiter skin just within her sleeve and smiles at her modesty, the way she sunbathed for hours fully dressed and now, going home, has a farmer’s tan exactly like her husband.

  “Tell Henry I’m thinking about him.”

  “I will,” she says.

  Ava starts the car and Sam shuts her door. She rolls the window down, bathing him with air-conditioned air.

  “You can swim here, you know. There’s a pond farther back.”

  “Henry mentioned that,” she says. “Is it clean?”

  “Clean enough. There’s a lot of fresh water from the brook.”

  “I’ll bring a bathing suit.”

  “Bring a few of those pepper sandwiches, too,” he says. “I’m feeling dangerous.”

  “All right.” She laughs. “Don’t forget to change that bandage. And when you do, look away.”

  He watches her go until he can’t hear the car and takes his time walking back, enjoying the solitude and the prospect of sausages over a fire. Evening birds appear—finches, jays, titmice, and woodpeckers—and back in the clearing, where the sunlight’s long and marmalade warm, he notices a bright patch of leaves, high in the uppermost branches of a maple, that have already begun to redden with the season. He starts a fire first try, sips a beer, and plays the radio. Chipmunks skitter over leaves beneath the trees. He feels unusually at ease, no chatter in his head, and his muscles have the smooth, prickling warmth he’s used to feeling after working with a chain saw. The woods sound the same way, sumptuous and peaceful, and his thoughts turn fluid in the calm, in the soft light glowing on the pines and in the music, very small, coming from his radio. It’s a station Nan and Joan enjoy. He wonders if they’re listening together in their kitchen. Ava must be home by now, washing her feet and opening the windows, and Henry’s finished with his first day of work, undoubtedly relieved and probably boisterous, letting off a summer’s worth of steam and clowning around with Wing.

  Sam pictures them together, talking through their days, taking pleasure in the old predictability of dinner. He imagines it’s the same kind of light around their yard, the very same birdsong filling up the rooms. He glances at his finger and the blood through the bandage. When he presses it, it stings. He presses it again.

  He sees a rusty nail and thinks of Halloween, God knows why, and just as strangely it reminds of him of a sea-green bikini. Why a nail? Why this? It’s always the same, the evening calm giving way to memories he won’t be able to shake, a stupor that’ll deepen till he wakes the following morning.

  He throws his bottle at a tree, hoping it’ll break, but it ricochets and lands unbroken at the roots. He wishes Ava hadn’t made her joke about the skunks because he honestly considers it—he wouldn’t know what to do. Fall’s arriving any day. He can smell it right now. He hasn’t prepped the cabin, hasn’t gotten his supplies. Summer’s curled away and he’s afraid of what’s to come.

  Instead of slipping into a funk, he runs a couple laps around the clearing. Once his blood freshens up, he opens another beer and finds some country on the radio—newer stuff, poppier and brighter in its sound, not his usual thing but just the ticket right now. For the first time in months, he’s looking forward to tomorrow. He can worry later on about the winter and the snow.

  * * *

  Wing goes berserk when Henry makes it home, yelping like a pup and nipping his hand after eight unexplained hours of abandonment. He’s been staring out the window all afternoon and couldn’t even tell you how many squirrels he saw, and now he trots ahead of Henry into the kitchen, eager to run outside, eager to eat, proud of his work on the business page and doubling back, breathless, to give his Dad another welcome-home pounce.

  “All right, all right, I’m here,” Henry says. “Atta boy, you’re okay. You’re okay,” mussing Wing’s head but troubled, once again, that Ava isn’t home.

  He left her here this morning in her bathrobe and slippers. They were almost out of coffee but she said to him specifically she wasn’t going out—would he please pick some up? Which he did, along with aspirin and another tube of sunscreen, assuming she’d be resting in the yard all day.

  And what a day, Henry thinks, moaning through a yawn. So many good, familiar faces on the route, people he hasn’t seen in three or four months. The widow Mrs. Lansing, who colored her hair jet-black in the interim and looked pleased when Henry didn’t recognize her. Old Ray and his cataract glasses, sitting in a lawn chair exactly as he’d been the day of the fire, greeting Henry with a wave as if they’d seen each other yesterday. Here and there, however, there’d been icier receptions. Becky the crossing guard, with whom he’d always shared early-morning comments on the weather, had given him a look as if he might be a danger to the children, and the Dobermans on Sycamore had barked more ferociously than usual.

  In general, though, people had greeted him warmly, and Mr. Cousins had given him a free turkey sandwich at the deli, saying, “Good to have you back. We haven’t had the mail before noon since you left.” The job itself—sorting, driving the truck, remembering the idiosyncrasies of houses—returned to him at once, but it was all so habitual he kept having doubts, thinking he had skipped a block or mixed up letters.

  During lunch, out of nowhere, he wanted a cigar; he threw his sandwich out and left as if the turkey were tobacco. When he finally reached Arcadia Street and started up the block, his chest became a brick and he was forced to take a breather. That was when he noticed Ava’s car in front of Sam’s. What a thrill to read the license plate and recognize the numbers—he assumed she’d come to bolster him and be a friendly face. Except she wasn’t in the car and wasn’t near the trailer and he stood awhile, hoping she and Sam would come and wave. But he couldn’t cross the lot and certainly couldn’t venture up the trail, and after finishing the block and waiting as long as he could, he left Arcadia a good deal lonelier and lower.

  He takes his shoes off now and feels the cool white linoleum. Once Wing is done with the yard, Henry opens a can of Alpo, cleans the newspaper off the floor, and roams around the house, unsure of what to do. He hangs his uniform and wonders what they ought to ha
ve for dinner. Chicken cutlets in the fridge, asparagus and corn. Cooking’s out of the question, much as he’d be willing. He could barbecue the chicken but he doesn’t know a thing about seasoning, and while he’s pretty sure asparagus and corn are both boiled, he doesn’t want to risk doing something wrong. He spreads the food across the counter, along with a stick of butter, salt and pepper, and utensils. He shucks the corn and finds the little corn-shaped holders, rinses the asparagus, and preheats the grill. When he starts through the house to wait up front, Ava walks in before he’s gotten to the door.

  “You’re home!” he shouts, and Wingnut’s ballistic all over again, pressing up close and jumping on her legs. “I saw your car,” Henry says. “I thought you said…”

  “I changed my mind.”

  She has a cooler in one hand and a bag in the other, and she’s clammy and disheveled and younger than he’s seen her all season.

  “Let me take that,” he says, grabbing the cooler before she lets go and almost pulling her over. “You look great, look at that sunburn. Hey, you’re wearing Sam’s shirt,” he says, noticing a small familiar rip along the shoulder.

  She blows her bangs and Henry feels it.

  “Mine was bloody,” Ava says. “Sam cut his finger.”

  “How? What happened?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “I handled it,” she says.

  Henry takes her bag and smacks her on the lips. She tastes like Spear-O-Mint and sun, Banana Boat and sweat.

  “It went all right today?” she asks.

  “Yeah, I gotta say, all things considered. It was weird to see your car! Wing pooped on the papers, he’s been jumping out of his skin wondering where you were. You should have taken him along, he would have loved it.”

  He dumps her items on the couch. Ava’s bag topples open. Wing tinkles on the rug, too excited to contain himself, and Ava doesn’t notice till she’s kneeling on the spot.

  “Dinner’s ready if you’re hungry.”

  “Really?” Ava asks.

  “Yeah, I laid it all out! The barbecue’s on, everything’s set to go,” and when he shows her in the kitchen, proud of his array—what a breeze it’ll be to whip it all together—he doesn’t understand why she looks so deflated. Are you supposed to shuck the corn after it’s been boiled?