Second Nature (20 page)

“What do you want me to do?” he’d said. “Give them a term in federal prison for kissing in the school hallways?”

Michelle had then accused him of being a neglectful father and a Casanova and a few other things, too. He’d tried his best to calm her down and promised to have a talk with Connor, but whenever he and Connor got together, he didn’t know what to say.

“I hear you’ve got a girlfriend.”

That was his brilliant lead-in, one night when they’d met at McDonald’s for a quick dinner.

“Yeah,” Connor said warily.

“Pretty,” Roy had said.

“Excuse me?” Connor had been unwrapping his hamburger, and maybe he hadn’t heard over the crinkling paper, or maybe he couldn’t imagine Lydia’s being reduced to one trivial word.

“Lydia. She turned out to be pretty.”

“Oh, yeah,” Connor had said, desperate to drop the subject. “Really.”

What Roy had wanted to say, and didn’t, wasn’t anything that would have pleased Michelle. Don’t get hurt. That was it.
Don’t let yourself get hurt by this.

In the past few months Roy had been floored by just how dangerous life was. Amazing that he had never noticed it before, since he was often the one who arrived on the scene first when there was a car accident or when a fisherman’s boat washed up on the beach, empty except for some netting and bait. He could have blood on his hands and still calmly write out his reports. It was possible to do this by compartmentalizing everything into puzzle pieces: the skids on the road, the height of the tides, the human beings who happened to be in the way. Once someone started to think, he was in big trouble, and that’s what had happened to Roy. Maybe it had begun when he started living alone and had too much free time; but whatever it was, it was getting worse.

Last Tuesday, he and George had had to go down to Poor-man’s Point on a miserable mission. A group of boys playing King of the Mountain had stumbled upon a mass grave filled with animal carcasses. Two of the kids were hysterical, the others appeared to be in shock. None of them was any older than nine, and they all seemed to feel responsible, the way people did sometimes when they were unfortunate enough to be the first to discover something unspeakable.

Roy gave all the boys lollipops to settle their stomachs, and after George threw a tarp over the grave, they drove the children home, then spoke with their parents, warning them about the nightmares most of the boys might be having that night. They drove back to the Point in silence, got some shovels out of the storage shed, then set to work lifting the carcasses onto the tarp so they could be taken to the animal hospital and destroyed properly. Some of the animals had been there for months and were nothing more than skeletons; others were not yet decomposed. Most were cats, but there was one that seemed to have been a large dog; some were birds that could now be identified only by the piles of feathers that were left. The birds had been strangled; everything else had had its throat slit. At the top of the pile were three baby raccoons set in a row; their paws looked so human that Roy went over behind the shed and threw up. When he came back, George offered him a piece of gum.

“The work of a sick mind,” George said grimly.

“How do people get this way?” Roy wondered.

George shook his head, not understanding that Roy really wanted an answer. Roy had been pacing, but now he stood directly in front of George. He was so wound up he felt as if he might explode.

“How the hell do they get this way?” he demanded.

“Jesus, Roy, I don’t know,” George said. “Take it easy.”

“Yeah,” Roy agreed. “You’re right.”

They took the whole mess over to the animal hospital, knowing as they did that they’d probably never find out who had done this. Roy wrote up the report, and that was the end of it. Except he kept thinking about those raccoons and the way their hands were closed up tight. They reminded him of Connor; when Connor was a baby he would grab on to Roy’s finger and hold on with all his might. Roy and Robin used to laugh about it and call him Superbaby. There were too many things that could go wrong, too many ways a boy could get hurt. Looking out the window of the diner, seeing his son out there with Lydia, Roy felt a moment of relief. Connor, he saw, was truly happy, at least for today, standing in the wind, grinning as he listened to everything the girl he loved had to say.

“They call it puppy love,” Roy said to his father as they fought over the bill, which Roy finally managed to get hold of.

“You were just about the same age when you started going with Robin,” the Doctor reminded him after they got up to leave. “I’d say that turned out to be pretty serious.”

Connor opened the door for Lydia, without noticing that his father and grandfather were approaching. Today, for the first time, he and Lydia had talked about their future—not just tomorrow and the next day, but their whole lives. They’d been tentative at first, both afraid to admit what they hoped for until they knew the other hoped for exactly the same thing. They would spend their lives together; they had vowed that on the corner of the town green, and kissed each other twenty times, and then found themselves too shy to speak. Lydia finally suggested they celebrate, and they’d come to Fred’s for Cokes and French fries and a warm place to hold hands under the table. Connor had turned to look for a booth in the back, when Lydia nudged him.

“Relative alert,” she whispered.

“Hey there, buddy,” Roy said as he came up to them. “Hey, Lydia.”

Connor mumbled something no one could hear, but Lydia smiled brightly at Roy, then turned to the Doctor.

“I’ll bet this wind is murder on any saplings you put in this summer,” she said.

“Precisely.” The Doctor was impressed. “Hold on to this one,” he suggested to Connor. He elbowed Roy. “Come on. They don’t want old farts like us around.”

“Speak for yourself,” Roy shot back.

Roy could see that Connor couldn’t take his eyes off this girl. When she laughed and headed for a rear booth, Connor began to follow as if she were a magnet. The boy had it so bad Roy would have laughed out loud if he hadn’t remembered exactly how it felt. And maybe that was why Roy grabbed Connor’s arm, even though he knew he wouldn’t be able to say what he wanted to. The best he could do was pull his son close as he handed him a twenty-dollar bill.

“My treat,” Roy told Connor. He was glad that his own father was out of hearing, because he would have really enjoyed this one. “Just don’t run off and get married,” Roy advised his son.

In the middle of the month, when the moon turned orange and every windowpane was thick with frost, Richard Aaron dreamed he was alone in the woods. He didn’t recognize the sort of trees that grew here, huge dark things with trunks large enough for a man to hide in and roots so coiled it was impossible to find secure footing. He was walking fast and his breath came hard; it was amazing that he had this much strength in his arms and legs. It was impossible, and yet it was true. Something had happened to him. He removed his thick leather gloves and discovered that his hands were no longer bony and twisted. He touched his forehead and found that the skin was smooth. He called out just to hear his own voice, and there it was: a bellow edged with the pride of a young man, a truly beautiful noise.

He walked on, over the hard earth, the frozen pine needles breaking beneath his boots. He was lost, he knew that much, just as he knew he had to go forward. The birds above him were calling, signaling the end of the day. Soon he would no longer be able to see, and he had to hurry through the woods. As he went on he grew younger and stronger; he could snap the branches blocking his way with his bare hands, he could leap over the gray rocks that littered the path. He was much younger than he had been the day he got married; his full height had come back to him and his hair was dark brown, a chestnut color the girls had all admired.

Richard Aaron went on through the woods, and finally he reached what he’d been searching for, the white horse that was waiting for him. The horse was so white his eyes hurt just to look at it, but he couldn’t look away, not now, not after he’d come this far. He stopped at the edge of the clearing, out of breath and terrified. He knew he would have to ride this thing, a horse twice as big as any he’d seen before, but first he’d have to catch it. He tried edging up to the horse slowly, but the horse whinnied and backed away, tossing its huge head. Richard Aaron kept walking forward, slowly and gently, but the horse grew agitated and began to trot away. That was when Richard Aaron knew why he’d been granted these legs; he’d have to chase this horse down. He’d have to run for it one last time.

He followed the white horse through the woods as darkness fell; several times he was close enough to grab on to its tail, but the horse always pulled away. At last they came to an open field, where the grass was as high as Richard Aaron’s waist, and he knew this was his last chance to do this right. The horse was galloping now, black hooves shaking the ground. It was breathing smoke in the cold, dark air, challenging Richard Aaron to race. He was as fast and as strong as he’d ever been. He ran with all his heart, and the wind followed along behind, slapping against his back. Straight ahead was an even deeper wood, with trees impossibly tangled and black; he would never be able to catch the horse once they entered that forest. He had to do it now, in this field, where the grass whipped against him and smelled sweeter than any lawn he had ever walked across. With his last, best effort he came up beside the horse, keeping pace, but that was not enough and he knew it.

And then Richard Aaron realized that there was a man running beside him, a young man, like himself, whose face was filled with concern. This young man had no trouble keeping up with the horse; he would have run right past, if he hadn’t slowed his pace to talk to Richard Aaron.

“Are you all right?” the young man said. He spoke as if it were the most natural thing in the world for them to be running alongside the horse. He wasn’t even sweating.

Richard Aaron was too out of breath to speak. The horse’s legs were much stronger than his; in the dark the horse looked like a cloud.

“Are you all right?” the young man continued to ask.

There was the moon, shining through the window. There was the wood, looming just ahead.

“Help me up,” Richard Aaron shouted over the sound of the hooves hitting against the earth. “Just help me up.”

Stephen grabbed onto Richard Aaron’s hand and held on tight.

“That’s it,” Richard Aaron called as the young man lifted him onto the horse. It was the instant before they reached the endless woods, and quite suddenly the field was green, and it went forever, forever and ever, and because the horse would now do anything Richard Aaron told it to except turn back, he never had the chance to say thank you.

 
 
 
They buried Old Dick the day before Thanksgiving, in the spot he’d chosen himself when he first came to the island. Nearly everyone in town came out to the cemetery, in spite of the sleet that was falling. The ice was so stubborn the gravediggers had been forced to work all morning just to loosen the top layer of dirt. Every shop in town was closed that day, except for the market—since people still had to pick up their fresh-killed turkeys—although the butcher cried as he wrapped each of the birds in waxed paper. He remembered when Old Dick had been his best customer, he remembered when Ginny Thorne would come in and smack each lamb chop before she bought it, to make certain it was fresh enough for Old Dick.

Robin wore her black dress to the funeral, the one with the silver buttons. She combed her hair and put it up neatly with clips shaped like stars. The only good coat she had was meant for spring, but it was black and would just have to do. Of course she’d known this day would come—how long could someone live, after all—and yet she could not truly believe it was Old Dick inside the coffin. The box seemed absurdly small, much too small to ever contain him. Robin stood with Connor on one side of her and Stuart on the other, with Kay beside him, her arm hooked through his. Connor’s face was pale and he looked reed-thin; Stuart may have been crying, but it was difficult to tell—his shack was so chilly, even with the insulation he’d put in, that his nose was red most of the time.

After the service, they took turns shoveling the frozen earth back into the grave. A chair had been brought to the gravesite so that Ginny would not have to stand. Her daughters hadn’t wanted to drive her down from New Jersey, they’d said it was bad for her health and pointless besides, but Ginny had insisted. She clutched her purse and was completely composed, gracefully accepting people’s sympathies, but when they started to shovel the dirt over Old Dick’s coffin she began to weep, and her grief was strong enough to chase the sparrows from the trees.

“That’s the end, isn’t it?” Ginny said.

Robin went to her and hugged her, then reached into her coat pocket for the tissues no one in the family had used. Ginny blew her nose, but her tears continued to fall and each tear melted a little hole in the ice on the ground.

“There won’t be another like him,” Ginny said, and nobody could argue with that.

Just before Ginny’s daughters took her home, claiming it was too much of a strain for her to go back to Kay’s house for supper, Roy walked them to their car. Robin came up beside him as he handed Ginny’s daughter the bankbook Old Dick’s attorney had given him. In the years before his fortune had been lost, Old Dick had set some money aside in an account he never touched, not even when he no longer had any accounts of his own. It was all in Ginny’s name—thirty-seven thousand dollars. Robin was furious, not because Old Dick had left Ginny the bank account, certainly she deserved that, but because the attorney had gone over Old Dick’s will with Roy. As soon as they were alone, Robin turned on Roy, even though Connor and Stuart were already waiting for her in Kay’s car.

“You’re not even related,” she told Roy.