Burn, p.15
Burn, page 15
“That, too,” Jess said. “I mean it’s strange sitting in a kitchen, preparing a meal.”
“You mean like the world is normal?”
“A little.” Jess reached up and opened a painted plywood cupboard—maroon red, like the table. Bag of brown sugar, spaghetti boxes, Cream of Wheat, handful of spices, can of Folgers coffee and a jar of Nescafé instant. Two boxes of twelve-gauge double-ought buckshot. He pulled out the can of coffee and held it up on a flat palm with a big grin, then opened the next cupboard and slid down three bowls. “Did I ever tell you about Mom’s search for the best clam chowder in Maine?”
“No,” Storey said.
“Two summers ago, she and Pop went up to visit her cousin Pete in North Haven. They drove over, took a couple of days going up Route One. She was determined to find the very best chowder, the crème de la crème. They spent five days on the island with Pete, drove home for another two days. Super-relaxed, like retired people. Stayed at the Freeport Hotel and toured L.L.Bean like it was a museum. So, in Bath, in a hole in the wall under the highway bridge, they found it. Jackpot. Not only the best clam chowder in Maine, but the best she’d ever had. The owner, who was the cook, came out of the kitchen in a stained apron to take the compliment. Mom said he needed a shave and had what looked like eczema on his forearms. You know Mom is fastidious, right? Still, she overlooked it all. The best is the best, right? ‘The soup is really superb,’ she said. ‘Where did you get the recipe?’ The cook frowned. I guess he had zero sense of irony. ‘It’s Campbell’s,’ he said, looking puzzled. ‘You never had Campbell’s soup before?’ ”
Storey tried to smile but failed. He was not in the mood.
Jess added a half-cup of water to the soup, stirred. “We could stay here,” he said.
“Stay? What do you mean?” Storey said.
“Dunno. Just a thought. With everything exploding. I was thinking that if we’re in a full-on civil war we’ve gotta get going. Find someplace safe. But nobody’s here. I mean, to our knowledge. The military or militia or whoever already came through—”
“And then we came through,” Storey said, not without bitterness.
“We came through,” Jess repeated. But he would not be derailed. He said, “Listen. They’re not coming back, is my guess. We could hang out. Wait until things quiet down a little.”
“Hunh” was all Storey said.
Someplace safe. Jess stirred the soup, let his eyes travel out the small curtained window. Someplace safe and warm was what he had seemed to be seeking his whole life. What he had found with Storey’s family, for most of his childhood. And then he had tangled with Storey’s mom and tried to pretend nothing had changed.
Why was he thinking about that now? All of it? Because this felt like some reckoning, like the end of a dream or a book? He didn’t know. But it rankled—the memory he had had on the road just an hour ago, of him and Hannah making love, and how he had tried so hard to believe that they could all go back to the way things had been.
The first ripple was when Jess finally made love to his girlfriend Gwen after three months of dating: he was horrified to find himself imagining that he was entering Hannah. Gwen was very nervous and it had taken him a while to get her ready, and so, when he finally did push inside her, he conjured Storey’s mother and lost himself in the ease and delight of the only other time he knew. That was the first thing.
Another was that once in a while, especially after dinner and after two glasses of wine, Hannah looked at him with an expression he could not read. It was always fleeting and it seemed to be shuttered quickly by an act of will. But it disturbed and upset him. Because, let’s admit it, he got off sometimes to the memory of her, especially the image of her standing in only her shirt in the light of a window that held trees and sky. The picture was burned into his soul like a brand.
The third thing was that he caught Storey looking at him sometimes. Puzzled and a little wary. He could never say, “What? What’s up?” because it was the one thing in his life at that moment he didn’t want to know.
If Hannah was also troubled she never let on, except in those rare glances, which Jess read as desire. She was as warm and lighthearted with Jess as she had ever been, and she was exuberant with Gwen. So she must have constructed a reality where it was all okay.
That was Hannah. Cecily built a world where her handicap was an asset, not a liability. Maybe it was. The littler sister, Annie, pretended to be visited by fairies in green hats so that she could feel special in a family that often seemed to be galloping headlong without her. And Storey shrugged off the sense of every impending disaster and pretended that soccer was what he cared about, and hunting and fishing. Jess knew that what Storey cared about most was what was true in the world, but he hid it because it made him very vulnerable—that’s what true things did—and the sensitivity in his friend made Jess want to protect him.
Well. He, Jess, got a girlfriend and pretended to be in love.
* * *
“Hey!” Storey straightened in the chair, looked around. “Where’s Collie?”
“She was just here.”
“Hold on.” Storey rose. He went out through the screen door, let it clap shut. Jess heard his boots descending the steps. Which meant she wasn’t out on the porch. Storey would be in the street, looking uphill and down. He wouldn’t call because…because who knew. They were in a world now where you didn’t shout, ever, unless you had to. Jess set the empty pot in the sink, half filled it with water, as if they might stay, as if he had reason to wash a pan, and went out after his friend.
The morning was nearly hot. He flew off the porch into bright sun. Down four steps to the street.
Despite his hurry, he was hit with the smell of the lake—cold stones and warming slabrock, and sediment—and the certain scent of an Indian-summer morning in the North Country in late September—the fragrance of yellowing ferns and leaves turning, and toasted hay grass. It hit him like a strong draft of his youth. He stopped for a second, closed his eyes. The transmigration was so visceral it was as if for a moment he inhabited two lives at once, the one in which he was a teenager stepping out into a glorious Maine autumn morning—and every love and every possibility was waiting to be tested—and the one now, in which heartbreak ruled and survival was the best hope. Two musics thrummed in the same heart and wove together without discord. As if every life was an instrument meant to play them both.
He must have turned as he inhaled the morning, because his reverie was broken by the sight of Storey running up the hill and rounding a corner. Damn. He ran after.
* * *
When he found them Storey was covering her. They were across the street from her house and she was behind the trailer. She had gone home to look for her dog. She was lying over Crystal, arms hugging her ribs and face in her bloodstained ruff, talking to her, asking her to wake up, she didn’t have to be so tired, it was time to stop sleeping. And Jess saw that it was Storey sobbing in her stead, wrapping her as she wrapped the dog, and his back was heaving and he was trying to stifle it and was helpless. And Jess knew that Storey was crying for the dog and for the girl and for his own daughters and wife, and for the odds of getting home to find them safe or getting home at all. Jess stepped back into the shade of a pine and let them grieve. They were in no hurry now.
* * *
No hurry when the compass is spinning. When you are rooted to earth. When living means taking a step but you have no idea toward what. You are alone under the wheeling season, and the best memories are drained by loss.
Chapter Twelve
They left that afternoon. Not because they had a plan of action but because they could not stay. Collie would not leave Crystal. Storey had to tear her fists from the dog’s dark fur. Her screams pierced the morning. Between screams and sobs she insisted that the dog would wake and they could not tell her no.
In the end, Storey carried her back down the hill, over his shoulder, rolled tightly in a blanket Jess had fetched from her house. Again like a crazed cat that clawed. That such a small being could wail with such volume. They could not shush her, but what did it matter, with the old man shouting and shooting, the blare of his engine as he fled? The woods, the empty houses absorbed it all without comment.
The decision to leave was made as she napped, finally, in the old man’s daybed, a pillowed platform under his one big window. He hadn’t seemed like a daybed kind of coot, but maybe it had been his wife’s. Maybe the old man slept there in her scent, curled like a hound.
They ate the cold soup in the bowls and heated more. They woke her to eat, and when she was done she insisted on wearing the lion suit. Storey helped her put it on over her fleece, and then she fell back to sleep. Good. Jess made a pot of coffee. The cream in the fridge had soured after days of no electricity, but Jess found a can of sweetened condensed milk and they stirred it in gratefully. They each drank two cups, and packed the rest of the Folgers in the wagon.
Storey said, “East is where the cities are, the coast. The biggest roads. The money. So I’m thinking it’s unionists probably. East and south. By all rights, that’s where we should go.”
“ ‘By all rights.’ So you don’t think we should go there. You think we should go west.”
“Yes.”
“Why? We could take the boat south. A couple of hours to the end of the lake, and then get on a new highway.”
“Too exposed,” Storey said.
“We could go tonight. Hug the shore. Go back past Randall, Green Hill. Cut across to a new road.”
Storey set his cup down so it wouldn’t tremble. “The lake has been nothing but…” Jess could tell he was seeing some filmstrip of memory.
“Hell,” Jess said.
“Right.”
Jess said, “You’ve gotta think there are sane people on the coast that can help us. And maybe the highway west from Bangor is clear.”
“We don’t know what’s happening over there. Could be total civil war.”
“So—what? Could be anywhere. Everywhere.”
“So we stay out of sight. Go west little by little. Move the way we’ve been moving. On the road and off it. The New Hampshire border’s all woods. No way they can secure the whole thing. Whoever’s fighting probably has no interest in what’s west of here anyway. It’s mostly empty.”
“What about Collie?”
“What about her?”
“She’s not exactly discreet.”
“We’ll play the quiet game,” Storey said.
“How does that work?”
“If she’s super-quiet the bad men won’t come.”
* * *
They left just after three, Storey carrying the girl, Jess pulling the wagon. They went straight across the fields, up the good road. Nobody shot at them now. By five they were in Randall, where the ashes no longer smoldered, and they met the paved two-lane highway and followed it as it curved west.
Chapter Thirteen
Jess’s mother, Carol, sensed something was up. She and Jess were not close. Carol was kind, she helped him with his homework, especially math, she cooked about half his meals—neither she nor Jess’s father, Jay, loved to cook, but they split the chore and made passable, or at least edible, meals. Carol had played violin in school, mostly old-time mountain music, and so, when Jess was learning guitar, she helped with chords and keys and kept time in lieu of a metronome, but she never pulled out her old fiddle to accompany him. She could still play, though. Once in a while, at the end of a training run, as he leaned into a last push up the incline of their long dirt drive—with nothing in the world in his awareness but a row of huge old maples and a stone wall, and his own exhortation to hold the pace, hold it, hold it—he heard the strains of a fiddle playing “Fox on the Run” or “Blackberry Blossom” and it broke his heart—in the quiet, gentle way a heart can be broken by the same person again and again. Not because the songs were painfully beautiful, which they were, or because the plaintive, climbing arpeggios were winged with longing, but because she might have taught him these tunes and they might have played them together. She never did. Either she was shy about her proficiency or she was protecting a pure, sacred part of herself from her husband and her son. Jess suspected the latter.
Sometimes he pulled up short of the house and leaned against the great rough trunk of the last sugar maple, leaned into it with a hammering heart, and felt somehow the tree’s large accepting spirit, and he listened. Listened for the end of a song, and as she began another, maybe “Tennessee Waltz” or “In the Pines,” he might close his eyes and let the sadness overtake him. It was a grief he could not name, but had to do somehow with a mother who made choices he would never understand. Who at night would choose a book on Celtic history over a game of cribbage with her son; or choose her reading over a simple conversation about the things she knew best, like the platting of the old farms when all these hills were bare of trees and flocked with sheep, or sharing stories about the tribes who once hunted and traded here, of which she knew many. And why did she call him “Son” half the time? The formality of it stung him.
As reserved as she was, Jess’s mother seemed to know that he was going through a life change. Almost as if she could smell it on the air, like an incoming tide. His allegiance may have been divided over the years between her house and the house down the hill, but his heart had never been lost. But after he made love to Hannah he found himself daydreaming more. Not just about her, though those fantasies abounded; he mused about travel, about losing himself up in Alaska, building a cabin on the banks of some river accessible only by boat, getting his moose every fall, and laying in cords of firewood. Sometimes the fantasy included a woman—okay, it was often Hannah—and they would discover that a life in the wild—ruled as it was by the ironbound march of the seasons—also held bounties of open time in which they would explore each other and exhaust themselves in lovemaking. Was he in love? With his best friend’s mother? He scolded himself and made sure he wasn’t and directed his imagination by force of will toward a pretty classmate. This was before he had hooked up with Gwen.
And sometimes in these flights of romance he would abjure any partner and find solace in a spartan solitude, in braving the storms on the tundra, hunting the taiga, paddling the streams with wind and rain and raptors as his best companions. Even then he had intuited that this was how he would give to his life the best of himself. And later he would understand that hunger for wild country and solitude might have been why he had lost his wife, Jan. Apparently, she was sick of sensing that there were other worlds in which he felt much more at home, and it occurred to him after it was too late that she was feeling something like what he had felt with his mother, Carol. That many parts of the person she loved most were being withheld.
One evening, after a soccer game down in Northfield which Hannah had attended—she didn’t come to many, but this was a qualifier for the state championship—she dropped Jess off at home. Carol must have seen the headlights, because she came out the front door and waved Hannah in. Hannah, hand on the shifter to back up, blew out her cheeks, huffed. It was brief but he noticed. Then she forced a quick smile and nodded and flicked off the lights, turned off the engine, pushed out of the car.
“Why don’t you come in, Hannah?” Carol was saying. “Do you have time for a cup of tea? I was thinking it would be nice—we haven’t seen you in a while. Jay is at a meeting with a client, it’s just us.”
Just us. Though they were close neighbors—close for these hills—and their sons were best friends, the two couples rarely socialized. Jess understood that Storey’s family thought his own parents reserved and dry, if not stiff, and his own father and mother thought of the Brandt clan as…what? Undisciplined? Sloppy? No, Storey’s parents were a working doctor and an accomplished equestrian. Bohemian? Not exactly. Jess’s father and mother thought of the Brandts as whatever it was that was raucous and unpredictable, whatever made a habit out of disturbing the peace. That was enough to keep social interactions to a polite and sparse minimum.
Jess pecked his mom on the cheek quickly at the door and said, “I’ve gotta shower. We got soaked, Mom, in a thunderstorm.” He dropped his cleats under the bench by the door, said, “Thanks for the ride, Hannah,” and hurried to the stairs in back of the house, and up them to his loft room.
He was grateful he did not have to sit through the rare meeting with a glass of chocolate milk, though he craved one after the hard-won game. He was famished, and he knew that after Hannah left he could dig into the meatloaf that he could now smell. He thought, from the way his mother had been looking at him lately—the way Hannah had, too—that the conversation might be halting and tense. That his mother, who was not the most socially adept person on earth, might be awkwardly probing Hannah for whatever she knew about the changes in her son. Was he in love? Finally? Did she know with whom? Or was it something on the team, with the boys, or some experimenting with weed, or alcohol? Did she know?
He took a shower and let the gushing hot water obliterate him for a couple of minutes; then he toweled off and pulled on jeans, flip-flops, a flannel shirt. He kept listening for the sound of the car starting up again and he kept not hearing it, and finally, starving, he came back down. The two women were at the table leaning together, his mother’s hand on her teacup, Hannah’s hand on Carol’s forearm. Hannah was in profile, head tilted down into its own pleasure at something just heard, and he saw something on her face he had never seen: eye delighted, a smile so relaxed, so relinquished of expectation or hunger or disappointment, a smile just glad to be floating there in another’s company. He heard the laughter—not the hilarious hoots of Hannah’s family, but a gentle chiming of mirth. He stopped still, unsure of whether to go forward or back. Was he jealous? A little. He realized that he would badly like to prompt Hannah to this species of pleasure. It was the sense that nothing else at all right now was wanted or needed. How had his reticent mother done it? To Hannah? And his mother—why would she not share this strangely free-flowing contentment in his company?
