Every Last Cuckoo (15 page)

Sarah lowered all the miniblinds and adjusted the louvers to
soften the blinding light. She stood back, her body striped by sunlight and shadow, and conferred with Tess about how to proceed. Tess offered to transfer Charles's electronic files to CDs so that Sarah could donate the computer to some worthy cause. Sarah would sort through the paper files, and the two of them would empty the bookshelves.

By early afternoon Sarah had gone through six out of eight file drawers. The seventh was crammed with manila envelopes full of photographs. Some, creased and faded, dated from Charles's childhood. Most, thank goodness, were labeled on their backs. Otherwise Sarah would never have known which aunts and uncles, in which years and parts of the country, were posed against their boxy cars or on their front steps or on beaches in baggy, modest bathing costumes.

Sarah lost herself in the whole collection, going motionless inside a stream of time that seemed to slow around her like resin gelling to amber. She first went still when an image she hadn't seen in decades fell from an envelope. It was a formal portrait of Charles and his mother, Eliza, dated 1920. The soft sepia had faded, but the faces and forms were in no way obscured. Charles, less than three years old, much younger than any of his own grandchildren, looked out with serious, pale eyes from under his Buster Brown bangs. He wore short pants and a tiny waistcoat with a broad, round collar. Shiny little boots, ankle high. He stood on fat toddler legs on a wooden stool, with his mother's hand on his shoulder. How beautiful his mother had been! Sarah had scarcely known her; she'd died only a year after Charles and Sarah were married.

In the photograph Eliza wore a loose, straight dress, belted at the hip and closed at the throat with a cameo. She wore a long
strand of pearls as well, and pearl earrings. Her brown hair had not yet been bobbed—that would shock the family later—but was pulled back into a heavy twist that left waves draping softly over her ears and above her high forehead.

And now, in a time that young mother could never have imagined, the elderly wife of her small boy was sifting through hundreds of photos that covered more than a century. There were even images of Charles's paternal grandmother, who had died before Charles was born. There were heartbreaking scenes of Charles's brilliant, lively sister, Diana, who had died of breast cancer in her forties, leaving no children. There were dozens of Charles in his boyhood, on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, on the Belgrade Lakes in Maine. Then there was Charles on Albert Graves's farm, a young, strong, grinning Charles on a ladder, or loading milk cans, or holding up a wheel of cheese he had made himself. Charles in uniform, looking stern to hide the raw green fear he later confessed to Sarah. Charles the medical student, asleep in his chair, surrounded by books. Some of the later pictures had never made it into the albums—failed shots, near duplicates. Not many of the candid shots included Charles, who was usually behind the lens. Nevertheless, there were a few in which he was holding his babies, putting toys under the Christmas tree, hammering or sawing or stacking wood. So many snapshots, over such a long, long time. Charles and Sarah at a cabin in the Green Mountains, with friends, a year before their wedding. Their first apartment, in New York. Sarah and Addie. Leila, introduced as Addie's roommate, nothing more. So young, all of them.

Time slid through Sarah's hands, one slipstream image after another. She remembered her small David's questions about
time. You
could
see time. There it was in front of her, more of it than she could comprehend. So many dead people who had carelessly allowed their effigies to survive them. How many arrested images, all over the world, in envelopes, shoeboxes, albums, frames, and now digital files?

All those generations. Charles was dead and Sarah would follow, either soon or less soon. Tess had a baby coming. All of Sarah's children were parents now, and before long some of her grandchildren could be, too. Sarah pictured Christmases with four generations gathered at the tree. It made her dizzy, this sense of being dead still within the flow of time, which, having slowed around her, now picked up speed again. Endless others had come before her, thousands of ancestors whose sad or passionate, arranged or happenstance unions had all led inexorably—as it turned out—to her, to Sarah Alice Everett Lucas sitting there sorting photographs. Countless others would come after her, if the world did not end first. Sarah's own blood in unseen future bodies.

It was odd to think that she, Sarah, represented a multitude in both directions. How could both past and future narrow down to her, to Sarah her very self? As, of course, they narrowed down to every person, sooner or later, one way or another.

A question from Tess broke Sarah's reverie, and she was relieved to escape the vastness. They took a late lunch inside the house, talking little but eating companionably. At four, when they declared themselves finished, Charles's computer was ready for its next owner and all of the bookshelves, desk drawers, and file cabinets were empty. Seven boxes held paper files, letters, and other memorabilia that Sarah would keep for the rest of the family to deal with. Twenty-six boxes of books sat ready for any
school or library that wanted them. Five boxes contained books that Sarah would either store here or transfer to shelves in the house—books she knew Charles would have kept or one of their children might want. She had resisted the sad temptation to leaf through those. She stayed businesslike after her time travels, her trance.

This was not possible the next day, when Sarah and Tess dealt with Charles's personal belongings throughout the house. They removed his items from the bathrooms and pulled his clothes from closets, drawers, and pegs. Sweaters and jackets carried his scent, and Sarah now and then buried her face in the folds of well-worn corduroy or wool. “I wish I could bottle this and wear it as perfume,” she said to Tess, weeping as she stood next to the window seat, which was strewn with garments and shoes and empty hangers. “I will lose the smell of him the way I've lost his voice and face and body.” Looking away, through the window and down across the meadow, she wailed, “I just can't imagine where he's gone.”

L
ATER
S
ARAH FLED TO
town on unnecessary errands. She wandered past familiar brick buildings, among pale people welcoming spring. Around the bowl of the town, the mountains rose up, round and wooded, hazed now with the barest hint of a soft red veil, the buds of new maple flowers. Sarah strolled idly, poked around in a bookstore and a clothing shop and stopped to pick up the photographs she'd taken with Charles's camera. She put off looking at them, afraid to see what else was on the roll of film—the last shots Charles would ever take with his camera, the last images his eye would ever compose.

Just before dinner, lying in a steaming, scented bath, Sarah
dried her hands and reached for the packet of prints. She steeled herself and slid the photos out of their envelope. The first ones were Charles's, and all but three, which showed their quiet Christmas, were from Thanksgiving, taken before Hannah's accident. David and Tess stood in the fenced backyard, next to Hannah, who sat in the tire swing, her light hair tangled from flying high. Lottie and Luke flanked Hannah on the deck, each of them holding one of her hands and bending toward her. Hannah wore her red jacket, and the shoes they later threw away. Peter and Vivi, in another picture, set out their hors d'oeuvres. Finally, everyone sat at the table, which was laden with food and color, the chestnut brown of the turkey, the greens of broccoli and salad, the russets and yellows of sweet potatoes and squash, the ruby of cranberries, and the flame tones of fall flowers. As usual Charles himself was nowhere in view.

She turned next to the
after
images, the ones she'd snapped on that recent snowy morning. She was startled to see them starkly black and white—just snow and the dark shapes of trees and rocks and utility lines—after the colors of Hannah's jacket and the holiday dinner. Fitting, she thought.

Most of the photos were just what Sarah expected, pretty shots of winter, well composed but anticipated. She slid the pictures one by one to the bottom of the stack, until she came upon one she didn't remember taking. At first she wasn't sure what she was looking at, but then she recognized the North Branch as it had looked when she leaned over the railing on the bridge. There were the dark waters, surrounded by melting ice, with snowflakes falling down into them. She'd stopped the waters in their rushing just as they'd broken into milky foam over rocks beneath the surface. She could make out the image now—now
that she remembered. Yet it could just as well be a portrait of the night sky. The blackness of the water was so complete that it could be the dome of the heavens; the stopped, falling snowflakes, stars. The borders of thick ice, rounded and irregular, could be layers of dense cloud against the night sky. The pale, blurred streaks, created by the stream breaking over the rocks, could be thin cirrus clouds.
Terra Firmament,
Sarah thought, surprised at the instantaneous appearance of the words in her mind.

Sarah turned to the next shot. This was the picture of her own hand stretched before her, a single snowflake hovering just above her palm, not yet melted by the heat of her skin. Sarah studied the image of her fingers curled upward and saw that they could be grasping the snowflake or letting it go; it could be falling or rising. She thought of Charles, the last time she had seen him, either grinning or grimacing.

T
ESS COOKED FOR
everyone on Wednesday night, when David came back up from Cambridge. It proved easier than Sarah had thought to let her take over the kitchen. The two of them ate tuna sandwiches for lunch with Hannah, then Sarah obediently sliced vegetables and located utensils for Tess. Otherwise, she sat drinking tea at the kitchen table, sometimes talking with Tess, sometimes reading to Hannah from a book of myths and folktales. The rest of the time, Hannah amused herself, covering half the table with paper, coloring books, crayons, and pencils. She grew bored with coloring ready-made pictures, preferring to create her own, and she drew skillfully for a child not yet four, adding unusual detail to her work, especially when she drew people. The figure of a little girl bore rows of small parallel lines at the wrists and waistline that clearly stood for the ribbing on a sweater. Faces had eyebrows and sometimes dimples, as well as the usual cluster of eyes, nose, and smiley mouth. Hannah even drew ears,
which she shaped like question marks and filled with a couple of squiggles. The effect was remarkably earlike.

Next she drew a tree. She started a little below the line that represented the ground; then she drew upward and branched her line just as a tree would branch. Each time she added a new branch, or thickened one she'd already begun, she started her line back down near the ground. With each repetition of this action, the trunk broadened and developed a rough texture; the branches took on weight; the impression of roots became stronger. When Hannah was satisfied with the shape of her tree, she added leaves. These she drew individually, oversizing them and letting their outlines intersect so that they overlapped each other and the branches and trunk. Then she handed the tree to Sarah and said, “I made this for you.”

“Thank you, Hannah, how beautiful. Tess, look,” said Sarah, holding it up. “I've never seen anyone make a tree
grow
like that, right on a piece of paper.”

“David taught me,” Hannah said. “He showed me how to make tree trunks and branches. But I figured out how to do leaves by myself.”

“The leaves are wonderful,” Sarah told her. Remembering David's sketches for the mural, she added, to Tess, “David's become quite a good artist, hasn't he. He never used to draw as a child.”

“Really?” Tess sounded surprised. “I guess he did start late, come to think of it. He told me he used to be afraid to draw freehand, for fun, but he made himself practice. In college, I think he said, or maybe after. I'm not sure.”

All the hours, adding up to years, that Sarah had spent as a mother, and now she barely knew her children.

“What does he draw?” she asked Tess.

Tess, busy whisking milk into a bubbling
roux,
answered absently. “Oh, lots of things. Mostly people. He likes the body's engineering.” She picked up a bowl of freshly grated cheese and sprinkled it into the sauce, still gently whisking. “Maybe he gets that from Charles. He told David he became a doctor because he liked the way the body
worked
.”

Sarah nodded. Charles had loved human mechanisms, the beautiful interlocking of bones and muscles, the touching interdependence of organs, the looping around of blood vessels, the rhythms of it all. David, it seemed, was able to translate a similar love into art. But where did his talent come from? Not from Sarah, and not, as she now realized, from Charles. It must have originated with David himself.

D
AVID DROVE IN AT
five, an hour before the others were due for dinner. He had put in his day of teaching and had graded the papers that had piled up. He was caught up, for now.

A roasted-pepper lasagna was assembled and ready to bake, as were stuffed portobello mushrooms. The dough for a focaccia was rising, fragrant with rosemary beneath a striped tea towel. Only the salad still had to be made before everyone sat down to dinner, and Sarah was in charge of the salad. Tess was upstairs taking a bath.

When Hannah heard David's car, she ran through the mud-room and into the barn and flung herself at him as soon as he got out from behind the wheel. Sarah got to the mudroom's far end in time to see David lift her into the air and kiss her cheek with a noisy smack and set her back on the barn's dirt floor. He tickled her lightly, with brief little boxerlike jabs, and she spun
away from him, then spun back in, grabbing his left hand and giggling.