Burn, p.19
Burn, page 19
It was an old farmhouse with no garage, and so everyone used the back door into the kitchen. She was standing in it when he pulled up and she laughed as he ran in his Crocs through the rain. She held open the screen door and said, “Wow, what a mess! Stop on the linoleum. Some fool put it down in the kitchen years ago, but it has its uses.” He didn’t know whether to kiss her cheek as he passed—plus, he was really muddy—so he just whisked by and stood dripping. Her smile was wide and relaxed. She was truly glad to see him. And she was not wearing cutoffs, thank God. She wore loose faded jeans with threadbare tears at the thighs and frayed pockets, and a flannel shirt. Her hair was loose on her shoulders. There was not a thing provocative about the outfit, and yet Jess thought she was more beautiful than he’d ever seen her. He was more confused. She was acting like his friend’s mother and yet his heart swelled and he wanted to kiss her more than anything. “Hold on,” she said. “I’m going to get you a towel. Two towels. Did you bring anything to change into?”
He was speechless. He shook his head. Her tongue went to her upper lip and her glance said, fleetingly, Still a teenager, but I forgive you. “Okay, wait a sec,” she said. “I’ll get you a pair of Storey’s jeans and a T-shirt.” She walked past him. He smelled her shampoo, same coconut scent as ever. He followed the curve of her hips in the jeans and he wondered why baggy pants with rips on the thighs now seemed so much sexier than anything else. He set up a quadratic equation in his head and tried to solve it. He wondered if she’d noticed that he was excited. If so, she did not let on. She returned and handed him two folded white towels and said, “One is for wearing now and getting muddy and the other is for after the shower you are now going to take.” Her smile was bright and somehow sad. “Strip and hand me the uniform. I’m going to hose it down. Here, I’ll turn around.” She did. She turned her back and held one arm out like a clothes tree, and he could not help but take her in, hair to hips to clogs, and all of algebra went out the window. He peeled off his clothes clumsily and placed them on her hand and arm and he wrapped one of the towels around his waist and she turned back and surveyed him head to toe and he shivered. Couldn’t help it. “Okay,” she said. “Use my shower. I think the uniform has most of the mud; you alone shouldn’t clog anything. You know where it is?”
He nodded.
“Okay, go. I’ll put out lunch. We can eat on the back porch and watch the rain on the brook. Sound good?”
He nodded.
* * *
He half expected her to come through the door into the steamy bathroom while he showered. More than half. Maybe with nothing on but black lingerie. Slip that off, too, and join him. Wasn’t that partly why she had invited him here, alone? He didn’t know. He shook, and it wasn’t just the gush of hot water driving the chill from his bones.
But she didn’t come. He scrubbed the mud off his arms and knees. He had to shampoo twice to get it out of his hair. It took a minute, but the task settled him down and he found himself relieved to be alone, and by the final rinse he was just a high-school kid who had lost a hard-fought soccer game and was about to eat lunch. Nearly. As he came into the kitchen, she was at the counter with her back to him, just setting down a ceramic bowl. He noticed her hand tremble as she reached for a wooden spoon and his heart began to canter. (A) The fall of her loose hair on the red-and-black flannel was crazy pretty, and (B) Why was she trembling? It occurred to him then, with a shock, that she might be just as nervous as he was.
She sensed him and turned. Too quickly, it seemed, because she did not have time to banish a look he would never forget. In profile, in her eye and the set of her mouth, he saw the determination and spirit of the old Hannah, and the sadness and insecurity of the new one. The loneliness. He didn’t know why, but he suddenly wanted to cry. Hannah was before him and she was not. The extended family he had relied on most of his life existed and it did not. In the doorway, he was Jess and he was not. He didn’t know who he was.
She covered her lapse with a glad surprise. There you are! Maybe she read his face. She smiled brightly. She said, “Almost ready. I know you have a hollow leg, but if you can eat all this I’ll—” She stopped. What? Give you a prize? She couldn’t find words, so she reached up to a cabinet and pulled out two tall tumblers. “The iced tea is in the fridge. In the blue glass pitcher. I mixed it with lemonade, the way you like it.” Relief. Again. Again she was in charge like the old Hannah, and he had something to do. He took the glasses and went to the fridge and took out the fogged decanter, and she said, “Go ahead and set it on the table on the porch. I’ll be right out.”
There were two place settings, both on one side of the round table, spread on a light cotton tablecloth covered in a weave of blue cornflowers. He guessed it was so they could both see the stream. The Ball jar was there, overflowing with petunias. The rain had lightened and barely sifted on the porch roof, but the brook was boisterous with runoff. She was behind him, carrying two bowls—a bone ceramic, glazed with a simple vine scrolling the edge, and a smaller blue clay vessel full of dark olives. In the bigger dish was one of Jess’s favorite meals, a chilled macaroni-and-tuna salad. She set them down in front of the place settings and she put a hand on his shoulder—warm, appreciative—and she said, “Here, you sit here.”
And he muttered, “Okay,” and glanced at her, at the sunburned cheeks, the pattering of freckles, the turquoise earring…He might have fainted. Not from nerves now, but from a surfeit of beauty. The simple table with its centerpiece of flowers from just outside, the stream and the sound it made, the smell of the salad, her coconut scent and closeness and the way she had just touched him, casual but receptive—the shadow of loneliness, of sadness, had somehow been banished. He wanted desperately to believe it.
He sat down. He was glad they weren’t facing each other. She was on his right, almost close enough that their shoulders touched. She took a deep breath, as one about to dive from a high rock. She did not try to hide it. An almost silent “Whew.” He loved her for that. She reached for the pitcher and poured his glass. Had she just openly confessed that this was not easy for her, either, but that she was happy he was here? It seemed so. He relaxed.
“Skål,” she said, and lifted her glass.
“Skål.” The Mexican glasses tinked. A breath of wind shook the trees and knocked heavy drops onto the eaves where a maple overhung. The brook raised a rush of applause. Could it be possible? Could this all be okay? Even sweet and good?
“Dig in,” she said. “You first. Just leave a little for me.”
They ate. Companionably. She asked about his poems—somehow during soccer season he didn’t write many. About college—his mother and he were going on a Western tour in mid-October, he’d miss a game with Vermont Academy, no big deal. He was thinking of Berkeley.
“Why?”
“I like to say it better than Cal Poly.”
“Good enough. California, though?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t ask why. They each ate two helpings of the tuna salad. She scraped her plate gently with the side of her fork and unbuttoned the highest closed button of her flannel shirt. All in one casual motion.
She reached for the pitcher, which was on his side, and leaned over, and he could see the swell of her breasts held by black lace. A frill at the edge and a mesh crosshatched with black thread. Her slender neck was flushed, and he thought he could feel the heat of it as she leaned. The warmth held a scent of apple. He felt the vertigo again. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do and he wasn’t capable of much, anyway. She twisted in her chair and tipped the jug and filled his glass. She was inches away. She set the pitcher down and lifted her eyes to his. How could he never have noticed that they were a dark gray, slate after rain? They were steady, but where they had always held a game confidence, and a kind of music, as if she were singing to herself, now the shadows there seemed to extend to empty rooms and hallways where the song of her life echoed. And there was determined bravery there, too, as if she knew she could hide nothing and was willing to show him anyway. He was moved, and scared. And then, without dropping her eyes, she unbuttoned one more button. And she reached out and slid her fingers into his hair and urged his face, gently, an inch closer to the lace.
“You can,” she said. And he did.
They tumbled to the clean rag rug, on the porch, beneath a wicker love seat. With the up-valley breeze shaking the rain out of the trees and the tuneless, dropping two-note song of a chickadee piping out of the woods, portending the end of storm. Hannah tugged off his sweatshirt and he unbuttoned and shoved down on the waist of her jeans, and as he brushed the smoothness of her lower stomach, and the silk of her skimpy panties, his confusion was swept away in a rush of desire that obliterated everything else. As it had the first time. He lost himself more deeply, more completely than he ever had with Gwen, but this time it was to that dark churn, the current that felt subterranean and powerful and blind. There was fear down there, and abandon. That was it: the sense that he had abandoned himself at the gates.
She shuddered, and it seemed she orgasmed twice. He did not ask. As he came, and after, he felt the crash of relinquishing everything. And a tide of anger swept him that he did not understand. They did not speak. She led him to her shower, and this time she sudsed and washed him. She rinsed them both off, and she led him to the laundry room behind the kitchen and handed him his soccer uniform, which was in the dryer and dry. Not like Here are your clothes, now get out of here, but tenderly, like I love you, I have always loved you, love changes, and here are your old clothes so you can return to yourself, the one I know you just left at the door.
When he walked down the back steps and turned and saw her standing in the doorway, as she had when he arrived, but sad now, not hiding it, and all alone under the big trees, he loved her possibly more than he would ever love anything in his life. And his anger was just as strong. On the drive home he had to pull over just to breathe, to steady himself, to focus, so he would not drive off the shoulder into the trees.
* * *
Now, in another October downpour that gradually thinned to drizzle, under another afternoon sky as dark as dusk and roiled with low cloud and mist, he stood beside Storey and felt at a loss. There was no clear path. The strategy of running “back into the black,” of moving into the wake of destruction and following behind, now seemed reckless. They were not as tactically nimble, for one. If they did stumble on a threat they could no longer sprint for cover, as they had in the village when they dove behind the bronze boat. Now they had the girl. She had been a champ so far, hushing finally when it counted, but she was five and could not reasonably be depended on not to scream when frightened. They needed to be as far away from the combatants as possible. Who, right now, seemed to be everybody. And everyone was trigger-happy. Shoot first, ask questions later, was everyone’s MO.
Storey had just suggested going east again, but he wasn’t sure. Neither was Jess. Right now no option seemed very appealing. “I don’t know,” Storey said again. He looked up at the barely brightening clouds. “Good, the rain’s almost stopped.”
Jess let his eyes travel up to the lightening sky, across to the ridge half obscured in mist, to the road at the crest. “Good. Be nice to really dry out.” He pulled the hood of his rain jacket back, shook his head free. “I guess we should head east, and south. Seemed to be where those folks on the Newsboy were headed.”
“Right.”
“They said on the radio that the secessionists started up here in the big timber country of north-central Maine, didn’t they? That’s who they were punishing.”
“I think so.”
“So maybe it’s better other places. Maybe the cities along the coast are safer. Maybe it’s where the refugees end up.”
“What refugees?” Storey said bitterly.
“Right. Yeah.” Jess imagined the young woman in the lake holding a stone to her pregnant belly. “But maybe,” he said, “it’s where people like her parents are headed. Maybe we could find them.”
“Sure. A lot of maybes.”
“Hey!”
They both turned, looked down. Collie was standing beneath them. She had shed her rain jacket and stood in her lion suit. Her lips were set tight. Jess thought she looked determined, like when she was organizing her hand in Go Fish, putting the sevens with the sevens. She reached out and tugged on Storey’s coat.
Storey immediately squatted down. His face was pained. He said, “I’m really sorry I hushed you so hard before. In the trees.”
“It’s okay,” she said. She blew out, bit her lower lip, looked straight into Storey’s eyes. Her right paw went to the edge of her hood, touched her mane. “Are you really a friend of Mom’s?” she said.
Storey said, “Yes.” No hesitation. “I want the best for your mom, and your dad. Just like you do. I already feel like they are somehow part of my family. Like you are.”
His words struck home. Storey was a truth teller, and it would have been clear to anyone—any dog or horse, for that matter—that he meant every word. Her eyes welled.
“Um,” she said. She worked her lips. The fingers of her hand pinched the hem of her mane. Storey reached and thumbed the first tears off her cheeks. “I know where Mom and Dad are,” she murmured.
“You do?” Storey said, not hiding his surprise, but keeping his voice gentle.
“They said to wait two days and only tell one of our friends.” She blinked and more tears spilled and Storey held her gaze, thumbed her other cheek.
“Okay,” he said. “We are definitely your friends and we will take you there. Okay? Col?”
She nodded and pinched the edge of her hood and said, “It’s in here. In here.” And then she burst into tears and Storey put his arms around her and held her.
* * *
After she quieted, Storey brought the hood back so she would not flinch from the blade, and he felt for the slight stiffness of paper. He found it and glanced up at Jess. He flipped open his clip knife and cut the threads of the hem. “Good,” he hummed softly. “Good job, hold still, great.” He worked in a finger, then two, and pinched out a torn scrap. It was lined, probably from a sheet of composition notebook. He smoothed and stretched it in his fingers. He handed it to Jess. Scrawled hastily across the three inches of damp and wrinkled stationery were two lines of numbers that Jess recognized. They were latitude and longitude.
Chapter Fourteen
“Good job,” Storey said cheerfully. He brought her mane back over her head and palmed it and rubbed her hard through the hood. “You did good.”
“I’ll get the gazetteer,” Jess said. Storey nodded. She stepped back, looked from one to the other. Her face had mostly cleared, like the afternoon, and she seemed relieved of a burden. Storey said, “You did really good, Collie. We’re going to take you to your parents now.”
She nodded mutely.
“And I’m going to sew the tear in your mane back up in a minute. Okay?”
She nodded.
“We’re gonna look at a map.”
Jess was already at his pack, which was on its back just inside the tarp. He dug around and pulled out the battered blue atlas of Maine topo maps and a pen, and stepped out into the now rainless afternoon. He opened to the first double page, which was an overview of the whole state with the square subsection of each topo numbered. The key was gridded with lat-long lines, and it was easy to find which page held the coordinates on the paper. He squatted and flipped to page 33 and carefully tore it from its binding and laid it flat on the front of the book. A section on the coast. Half the page, the right side, was blue water and islands. Collie came behind him and leaned into his back to watch over his shoulder. He jotted the coordinates from the scrap into the upper left-hand corner of the page. Then he refolded the scrap and handed it to Storey.
“Right,” Storey muttered. And wondered again how, when it mattered, Jess’s essential nature kicked in: his mind sped up and his nerves steeled. Storey realized that Jess was thinking that he would take the folded map and Storey the torn paper, so that in case something happened to one, the other would have the precious coordinates.
“Take a picture of it, too,” Jess said. “The map. Then turn off your phone. All the way off.”
“Okay.”
Now Jess studied the longitude lines that vertically gridded the map on his knee. They were divided into minutes. A degree of longitude was roughly sixty miles; a minute was a mile. The coordinates he had copied went out not only to seconds, but past a decimal to hundredths of a second. This map could get them to a town or cove, but with a GPS they could pinpoint a single house, or dock. Jess found at the top of the page the line that corresponded to the minute of longitude and ran his finger down it. It traveled over mostly trackless country, lakes, woods, tertiary roads. And it hit the coast at one spot, north of Portland. A small town. And now he ran his finger across the corresponding latitude line, and it, too, nearly crossed the black dot of the town. Grantham. He remembered hearing the name. He rocked back, closed his eyes.
