The Grief of Others (9 page)

Ricky objected to none of this. She actively encouraged it. The shadow of her affair with Parker had proven durable, stretching its pall forward through all these years to chill them now and again, even without its being named. It seemed to Ricky that sewn deep inside the lining of every argument she and John had burned her infidelity. And so when Jess’s mother somewhat surprisingly granted permission for Jess to accompany the Ryries on their August camping trip, Ricky found the prospect not unwelcome. She imagined that Jessica’s arrival on the scene, her physical presence in their lives (even if only for a few weeks), might balance out that old wrongdoing of hers, serve as bodily reminder that John’s own past was not spotless. With self-interest, then, as much as goodwill, Ricky had embraced the plan, submitting herself wholeheartedly to sharing their holiday, sharing what was after all her old family cabin, with John’s daughter. If the girl turned out to be a nightmare, Ricky would have suffered it gladly.

In fact, Jess turned out to be a dream. In looks, she’d been a young fifteen, gangling and shy in her bathing suit, makeup-less, with yard-long braids and braces on her teeth. But in character she’d proven mature, stepping eagerly into the role of big sister and proving genuinely helpful with the kids, Paul especially. The two of them had developed, even in that short time, an undeniable bond. Nearly every afternoon during Biscuit’s nap, Paul had tramped off adoringly to the beach with his new relative, who somehow got him to swim underwater and jump off the dock without holding his nose. She wove him wreaths of clover, which he’d actually worn, even allowing himself to be photographed thus festooned. The whole family had been absurdly symbiotic, John teaching Jess how to chop wood; Ricky teaching her how to paddle stern; Jess teaching them card games they’d never heard of—Russian Bank, Liverpool, Beggar My Neighbor—and strumming her guitar, and baking John’s birthday cake in the propane gas oven, which Ricky showed her how to use.

That had been part of the holiday’s success: the cabin itself, built by Ricky’s grandparents half a century ago. She’d gone there with her parents every summer of her life, and up until last year the Ryries had spent two weeks there each August. It was fairly isolated; the forest grew thick around it, so you could not easily walk to any of the other cabins that dotted the banks of Cabruda Lake, and the town was a thirty-minute drive over marginal roads, so that once you were there at the cabin, you were
there,
the little group of you, alone together. The northern woods held, for Ricky, a feeling of timeless virtue, a quality that had charmed her as a child, but which, in adulthood, sometimes struck her as daunting. The cabin had neither electricity nor plumbing; the sleeping bunks were built into the walls; the woodstove got lit for warmth each morning, even in July; the original tin-lined cold pit dug into the ground beside the cabin kept the perishables cold.

Ricky had guessed Jess would feel put out by the lack of amenities—admittedly this was in part because she herself, as a teenager, had hated the imposed separation from shower, hair dryer, television shows. But from the day she arrived there with them, Jess had embraced the spirit of the place, seeming to understand beyond the capacity of most modern adolescents that physical labor was a large part of this spirit. She’d assigned herself the job of hauling buckets of wash water from the outdoor spigot to heat on the stove, and after supper when Ricky did the dishes, Jess had stood beside her with a faded orange towel and dried. She’d delighted in being allowed to feed items into the garbage fire they had outside each evening, delighted in being the one to sweep the previous day’s sand and pine needles out the front door each morning. Seeing Jess take to these tasks, Ricky was reminded of the way life at the cabin—its scale, its primitive specificity—had the feel of playing house; now it lent itself to their playing family.

For Ricky there had been one unpleasant aspect to Jess’s model behavior: she felt shown up by it. That was ridiculous, of course, not only because Jess could have no knowledge of Ricky’s disappointing history—all those summers she’d gone to the cabin with her parents only to gripe and sulk the entire time, refusing to help with chores, doing a deliberately sloppy job when she did help, and volubly scorning everything she knew they loved about the place: the tall, piney woods; the wobbly cry of the loons; the broad, inky lake, the pleasures of performing simple tasks by hand. It was ridiculous, too, because John had not known her during those years, and would be in no position to draw unflattering comparisons, yet it was he she feared being shown up in front of. As though Jess’s genuine graciousness might be just the thing to stir loose the ghost of Ricky’s former self, exposing it to John, resulting in his certain disenchantment.

One evening early in their two-week stay stood out in Ricky’s memory. Jess had taken it upon herself to light the gas lamps, airily declining John’s offer of a preliminary tutorial. She knew how, she said, from watching him and Ricky do it. On her first try, she’d touched the tip of the match to the mantle, with the result that it promptly disintegrated into a pile of white ash. Teary with embarrassment and contrition, she had declined to try again, but Ricky said quietly, “No. Now you have to,” and she’d taken a fresh rayon mantle from the drawer and demonstrated how to hold the match so that only the flame made contact, and John’s daughter had then succeeded in lighting the rest herself. Ricky’s feelings toward the girl were never warmer than in that instance, with her own firm benevolence burnishing the image. But the memory’s real source of heat derived from the impression, almost physical, of John observing her throughout. She could feel, as clearly as if he’d spoken it aloud, his adoration of her, and, in it, something like absolution.

She’d thought of that summer as giving them a new beginning, a clean slate. She was startled now to think how young she’d been: only twenty-nine.

Idyllic as it was, Ricky was not dismayed when the holiday at Cabruda Lake had failed to lead to more like it. The Safranskys moved away and Jess moved on, her need, her curiosity, whatever it had been, apparently sated. She’d drifted backward out of their lives with nary a ripple. John had seemed only mildly let down when the phone calls and letters waned. Life was busy, and he had Biscuit and Paul on whom to lavish his paternal energies. All in all, Jess’s withdrawal from their lives was as seamless, as easily accomplished, as had been her brief appearance.This, perhaps, was the crux of Ricky’s unease, the reason her excitement was edged in shame: children are not supposed to be easy to lose.

N
early midnight, and no one is asleep.

Biscuit had been asleep, but now her voice broke seamlessly into the quiet of her bedroom, without any indication (no little clearing of the throat, or yawn, or sigh, not even any telltale gravel to her timbre) that she had transitioned from one state to another. In fact, she was not aware of waking, simply of being, all at once, awake. “Are you praying?” she said.

Jess opened her eyes.This strange young woman who was yet familiar—who was, as Biscuit had been informed that afternoon, her half sister, out of the picture for eight long years—sat lotusstyle on the air mattress Biscuit’s mother had made up with flannel rosebud sheets on the floor of her room. The glow of the night-light cast Jess’s shadow high on the wall behind her, a silhouette at once epic and primitive, like a cave painting.

“I thought you were sleeping,” Jess gasped, hand flying to her heart.

“What religion are you?” No preamble, was the Biscuit way.

“Not any.”

“Then how come you were praying?”

“I wasn’t, I was only thinking.”

“What about?”

“About . . . the last time I met you.”

Biscuit doubted this, but the topic interested her nonetheless. “I don’t remember it.”

“You were very small.” Jess eased out of her lotus position and leaned back on her elbows. Biscuit sat hugging her knees.

“What was I like?”

Jess gave it a moment. “You had a pocketbook.”

“I did?” She loved this answer.

“You went around with it all the time, dangling off your arm. You’d go around in just a diaper and your pocketbook. It was white, kind of shiny.Vinyl.”

“What did I keep in it?”

“Spare diapers. Canadian coins.”

“Canadian coins?”

“And mints.”

Then Biscuit said, very slowly, “I think I remember that purse.” She did no such thing, but wanted to play along. She had a hunch it
was
a matter of playing along; that Jess had made it all up out of whole cloth. “Did it have one of those metal ball-clasp things you pinch open?”

Jess laughed softly. “Mm-hm.”

Emboldened, she tried: “And sequins?”

“In the shape of a bird.”

“I thought it was a bug.”

“What kind?”

“A ladybug.”

“Yes.”

Not bad. Biscuit studied her half sister. Jess had removed her glasses, which had the effect of making her look, in the four peachy watts of the night-light, oddly featureless and smooth, like an ancient statue whose face has been worn to mere suggestion. Her pajamas were a pair of scrubs, like the nurses at the hospital had worn. Jess’s were pale blue. Around her neck she wore a thin gold chain with nothing on it. Biscuit knew that Jess had come by bus from California, and that she’d brought with her a single, very fat duffel bag. It was over there now, in the corner by her bookshelf. There’d been a guitar, too, when she started out, but that had been stolen along the way, Jess said. Somewhere outside Julesburg. Biscuit didn’t know where Julesburg was, why Jess had come without telling them, or how long she was staying. Apparently no one knew that last bit, not even Biscuit’s parents, not even Jess herself.

“Can I ask you a question?” Biscuit whispered.

Jess let out the tiniest laugh: a breeze blown through grass.

“What?” Biscuit didn’t get the joke.

“You’ve already asked me like thirty.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No. Do you?”

It did not sound like teasing. Biscuit experienced a kick of pride. “No.”

After a bit: “Thanks for letting me stay in your room.”

“Oh,” said Biscuit. “You’re welcome.” This was not an adequate response but she didn’t know how to say that she was thrilled and unnerved to have Jess sleeping on her floor, that it felt like a prize, like something she’d won in a drawing, but also it felt daring, potentially dangerous, not least because her gladness did not seem evenly shared by the rest of her family. She had observed them closely at supper: her mother’s special brightness, her father’s near-silent watchfulness, and Paul’s desperate chameleoning between acting bored and acting clever. Biscuit wished she could protect him from trying so hard. If she were magic she would make his acne vanish, and all his extra fat, and also the blond fuzz above his lip. She would make his voice reliably low, make him smell the way he used to smell, and she would make him nice.

“Can I ask
you
a question?” Jess whispered.

“’kay.”

“What were you doing today? When you cut school?”

Every
one wanted to know.The thought clutched Biscuit’s insides with something like glee, but an awful glee, secretive and inside out, glee’s nasty, stunted cousin. She imagined her parents at that very moment sitting up in bed and talking about her latest antic. Today’s had managed to be more serious than the others. Thanks, in large part, to the man and his dog. Biscuit conjured the moment of Ebie’s pushing her into the river. In truth, Biscuit might have made more of an effort not to go in; there was a moment, minuscule but definite, when, instead of resisting, instead of fighting against gravity and the slippery moss, she’d let it happen, given in to the fall. Not because she wished herself harm, but more from a sly curiosity, a wish to see what would happen if she took this whole thing one step further. She would not have done it if not for the man, Gordie, glimpsed from the corner of her eye, standing back on the path. As it was, he had been witness; because of him, the story had traveled back to her father, and she was pleased with this, the fact that he’d been told about the ashes and bone.

Biscuit knew Gordie had told, although he’d waited till the end and till he thought it was private, standing with her father on the front porch just before he left. She knew because she’d hidden herself inside the front hall closet, a spy among coats and boots, smells of caked mud and damp wool. She’d heard them clearly through the half-open door. When Gordie said it was none of his business and then proceeded to describe in detail what he’d seen, she’d had to bite a mitten to keep still. It wasn’t laughter, exactly, that threatened to erupt. She didn’t know what it was.

“Biscuit?” prompted Jess.

She did not answer. She made her breaths long and slow. She thought of the stolen library book under her bed. Did she dare show Jess, dare explain about the egg in the water, about the ashes and the cloth? About
its last earthly ties
? Who was this woman, this girl, her half sister, who came unannounced and served them tea, who made up easy lies about a white pocketbook, a sequined ladybug? Was it possible she would be of help to them?

“I know you’re not asleep,” whispered Jess, doubtfully.

Yes. No. She was a spy again. Russian, like in movies. Svetlana. She had straight black hair like velvet drapes, smoky eyes, a beret. She specialized in feigning sleep.
Shhh,
Svetlana told herself
. Keep eyes closed. Wait and see.

Behind her lids she saw peppery specks drifting, flitting through rain-speckled sky, floating on heathery scallops of water.
Blessed be, blessed be
.
Wait and see, wait and see
.

 

 

TWO DOORS DOWN Ricky and John whispered, John with his head resting in the space between Ricky’s stomach and breasts, turned so that he could see her face, which was made ethereal by the bluer-than-white streetlamp outside their window.They had been talking softly in this half-light for close to an hour, ever since bidding Jess good night.