The Season of Open Water (20 page)

Luce

On a late afternoon in October, Luce comes by the house on Pine Hill Road. Noel's wagon is gone, the shop door closed. The kitchen is empty. He calls up the stairs for his mother. No answer.

He feels shredded, unglued. She has always been the place he could return to at the end of a day when the world got wild.

He comes back into the kitchen and sits down in a chair, his head in his hands. He can hear the sound of his own breathing, shallow, as if his throat is half closed and he is holding air in his lungs. He presses his thumbs into his temples to ease the splitting ache in his head, and for the briefest moment, he wishes that he could empty himself here, in her kitchen, into this worn familiar room of comfort and warmth and smells.

He stands up and walks outside.

He finds Bridge down in the garden, throwing hay over the garlic.

“Hey you,” she calls out as she sees him walking toward her down the hill. She shifts the basket onto her hip.

“Hey yourself,” he replies, managing a smile. As he comes up to her, she takes him in detail by detail: his unshaven face, unkempt clothes, an odd feverish light in his eyes.

“Where is everybody?” he asks.

“Noel's up at the sawmill.”

“Where's Ma?”

“Went to the store, I think. You feel alright?”

“Sure. Yeah. Why not?”

“You look like you're full of pins. Like you need a sleep.”

He laughs. “Sleep's been a little rocky. You k now . . . since Johnny.” He looks down at the green shoots of garlic poking up through the hay. He pushes the toe of his boot against one of them. “They're tough rascals, aren't they? Setting in like they do right through winter?”

He digs into his pocket for his cigarettes, hits one out of the pack, swears as he drops it. He picks it up off the ground and strikes a match.

“You want one?” he asks.

“No thanks.”

He inhales, a long deep breath. It seems to settle him.

“I came by the other night,” he says. “You weren't around.”

“No?”

“Where were you?”

“Out I guess. What night?”

“It might have been Sunday. Yeah. Sunday.”

“I was out on Sunday.”

He looks at her. The smoke blows soft out the corner of his mouth. He seems to expect her to continue. She doesn't. She reaches into the basket for another handful of hay and sprinkles it over the last row of garlic.

“You're seeing someone, aren't you?”

She glances up, surprised, not that he had guessed it, but by the gentle way he asked. She answers without thinking. “Yes.”

“That's good, Bridge. I could tell, you know. You've been happy.” His voice is wistful. “I'm glad for you. I really am.”

“What's eating you, Luce?”

He avoids her eyes, draws in on the cigarette, and looks across the yard. “I'm getting out of the work.”

“Did something happen?”

He shakes his head. “I can just feel it, chewing my insides right down.”

“You're really going to quit?”

He nods.

“Did you tell Ma?”

“Not yet.”

From the corner of her eye, she sees a squirrel dart across the yard. It disappears around one corner of the woodpile.

“I got something, Bridge.” She hears the shift in his voice, a low burning thrill. Her pulse quickens. She doesn't want what she knows is coming.

“Tomorrow night,” he says.

“You just told me you're done.”

“Last one.”

“I don't want to hear it.”

“This one you do.”

She starts to walk away. He catches her by the wrist. His face is on fire.

“It's an easy job, Bridge.”

She twists her arm loose. “No.”

“You can't believe how easy.”

“Don't tell me.”

“No risk. No guns.”

“Forget it, Luce.”

“I need you.”

“No,” she says sharply. “You don't.” She sees his face fall, the sudden aloneness, the silence a vast field between them. He takes one more drag on his cigarette, drops the butt, and grinds it out in the grass.

“Please,” he says, and something in his voice slides through her. She remembers mornings when she was a child, standing at the end of the drive, watching Luce and her father walk away, down the road to work at the icehouse. Every few steps, Luce would turn around and wave. “We'll be home soon, Bridge,” he'd call back to her, his voice buoyant, and she would stand there, with an unbearable sadness, watching until they had taken the bend and disappeared from view.

“Please, Bridge,” he says again to her now. “I can't do this one on my own.”

Even as he says it, she knows that with or without her he will try to pull it off. And with no help. He will end up caught or worse, end up like Asa. She hates him then, quietly, for bringing this to her and, even as she relents, she curses herself for letting her heart soften to his desperate reckless dream.

“This is the last time,” she says finally. “I've never said it to you before, Luce, but I am saying it now. This is the end.”

He smiles at her, his face coming alive again. “It'll be easy, Bridge. This one we could do in our sleep.”

Bridge

That night, after supper, Bridge goes to Henry's house. He is reading in a chair by the window. He looks up, startled for a moment, as she walks through the back door. He smiles when he sees her.

“I didn't know you were coming,” he says.

“I wasn't, I guess.” She lays her coat down over the arm of the sofa.

“You couldn't help yourself,” he teases her. “You're going all to pieces over me.”

She laughs. “Not yet,” she replies, but a shy smile plays over her mouth. “I just missed you.”

He goes to her. Her hair is damp and windblown. Her face is cold. He kisses her forehead, her eyes.

“You missed me?” he says softly.

“I did.” She slips her hands under his shirt.

They go upstairs and make love, and afterward, he lies close beside her. He runs his hand over the edge of her hip and asks her softly what she thinks—if there is a difference between fate and coincidence.

“Kind of like destiny or dumb luck?” she says, and he smiles because it is the kind of phrase that she would use.

He kisses her neck. “Do you think it was dumb luck,” he asks, “that I saw you at Millie Sisson's house that night, and the very next morning, I forgot my cigarettes, walked into Shorrock's store and saw you there.”

She laughs. “Of course it was.”

“And do you think it was dumb luck your brother brought you to me that night you were shot?”

“That was common sense. Where else would he have gone?” She stretches her arm over her head, arching her back. He can feel the deep curve of her spine away from him, the cooler space left between his skin and hers.

She is turned away from him, and he touches her slowly, still tracing her hip, the ridge of the bone. He does not take his hand off her. “And do you think it was dumb luck that you walked away from me that night in the greenhouse, and told me to walk away and not to think about you. It was not practical, you said. That's how you put it. And I woke up a few days later with my brain on fire because I could not do what you asked, I could not stop thinking about you, and so I got into my car and drove up Horseneck Road, and I was almost there—do you know that?—I was almost free of you. Do you think it was dumb luck that, at that moment, I passed you on the road?”

She doesn't answer.

“Can you be so sure?” he whispers.

They have been together for four months, and sometimes when he is above her, making love to her, the light rests like a fine wax on his shoulders and the only pressure in the world she feels is the weight of his hands on her skin. He is so different from her—not only who he is and where he comes from, but how he watches her, touches her, needs her. The whole tone of his being is unlike anything that has crossed her life before—and the way he loves her— she can feel it changing her, and it is strange and beautiful. When she is with him this way, lying naked in a cool blue darkness, she has the sense that they are drifting together and at the same time, each alone. The darkness surrounds her like a shell, but at the edge of it, she imagines she can see the loose glow of a new world rolling open.

For a moment she thinks of Luce, and she feels a twinge of sadness. The sadness comes not just because she has outgrown their closeness, but rather because, in some deep and elemental way, they are still bound. Luce is a part of her. He has always been a part of her. Even if she were to cut him out of her life completely, she could not excise the part of her that he belongs to, the part of her that belongs to him.

She rolls over in Henry's arms. His cheek is against the pillow, and he is watching her. She touches his mouth, and he smiles. He does not take his eyes off her.

“Why do you watch me like that?” she asks. “Are you afraid I'll disappear?”

“Yes,” he says. “That's exactly it.”

She laughs softly. “You look like you are waiting for something. Like you are hungry and waiting for food.”

“Yes. It is that too.”

He touches the front of her belly and runs his hand between her legs. She is tired but she lets him. She wants to sink down, to close her eyes, not to think for a while, just to be still. He pulls her closer, gently pushing her legs apart, and she lets him. She will always let him. This is something that she knows.

“Are you asleep?” she asks.

“Just closing my eyes.”

That night, he tells her he has begun to dream about the dead.

He tells her this when they are lying in a half-sleep after making love, wrapped around each other in the darkness. His voice is murky, low. He tells her stories of what he remembers from the war—the trenches, the free-running sewage, the blood transfusions performed vein to vein.

He tells her that sometimes when they cut a man, they would discover other things lodged inside him, bits of metal, stone, wood. Once in a while they would find a piece of bone that had belonged to another soldier.

She touches his hands—they are hands that have seen everything—fingers strong and deft.

He tells her about the woman brought in late one night to the trench hospital at the border, the first woman who died on him. She was a nurse, with a severe case of fever—chills, quick pulse, a sudden astonishing loss of strength. He wore a mask as he cleaned her. He turned her on the bed every three hours so her blood would not pool. He fed her water with a syringe and sat with her until her eyes turned black and her hands grew stiff, her insides rose up through her chest and soil came out her mouth.

He tells her these things, these people he has seen, their dying he still dreams. He tells her that in his dreams, he is always helpless. He tells her about his fear of an empty sky. And she wonders how it can happen, on this kind of night when they are so close, lying wrapped together in this same soft darkness, she wonders how he can slip away from her into these kinds of dreams.

The wind has picked up. She can hear the hollow burn of it flooding through the crawl space above their heads.

He is lying on his side, faced away from her. She looks past his shoulder to the window and the hanging ivy plant. She cannot see the birds. He must have turned it. Sometime in the past few days, in the span of time since she has been away, he must have turned it to even out the growing of the leaves.

“Are you asleep?” she asks again.

No answer.

She runs her hand between his shoulder blades and lightly down his back, along each vertebra, each disk of bone bound to the one before and the one that follows, the fluid space of softer tissue in between. Her fingers pause at the base of his spine, and she remembers then what he said to her that first night as they lay together on the hard, cool floor of Alyssia Borden's greenhouse—how he told her that he needed her and he wanted her to need him.

She listens for his breath, the slow rhythmic sound of it. She listens and realizes that if she were stealth enough, if she did not love him the way she has come to love him, she could steal it. She could pull his breath hand over hand up from his lungs until it is gone.

The wind howls through the walls. It is a new wind, and fierce. She can sense the cold edge of the coming winter on it.

The next morning, before Henry leaves for the mill, he makes her breakfast. She watches him from the chair across the room. He cuts a thin pat of butter off the quarter pound, sets it in the shallow tin eggcups.

She watches how he stays close to the stove, close to the pan, his fingers near the knob to adjust the flame as the upper rim of the cup begins to shake. He has a sensitivity to food, she has noticed this, a thoughtfulness, a mindful patience, his kindness, she has called it, and it occurs to her now, watching him, that the way he stays close to those small tin cups and the shuddering, broken eggs inside them is not unlike the way he might turn a dying woman over in her bed, the way he might strip the soiled sheets from her body and gently wash her with a cloth. Bridge has seen him do this—she realizes it now—she sees it even in this moment, as he is standing by the stove across the room, she sees how he will fold that woman's bladed hands and wipe away the uncertain color that has begun to leak out of her mouth, how he will close gently, with his fingertips, her dilated eyes.

She bites her lip and looks out the window toward the sea, a light-distressed surface. The jasmine is set on the writing desk. He has replanted it into a larger pot. He has dug new holes for the roots in the dark earth with the blunt end of a drawing pencil.

“The flowers are gone,” she says.

He answers her without looking up from the stove. “I've noticed they don't seem to last more than a day.”

“It's growing though,” she says, and it might be something in her voice, a stumbling, a catch he has not heard before. He looks up.

“What's wrong?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“Something is.”

“No.”

But that morning as he is leaving, after they have eaten and he has drawn on his coat and they are standing together by the door, he holds her and it is suddenly unbearable. It is breaking her heart. Even though it is just like any other day, any other simple inconsequent leaving, she does not want him to go.

Her body stiffens, and he feels it. He holds her away from him at arm's length. He studies her face.

“What is it, Bridge?”

She shakes her head.

He touches her neck, her throat. He tilts her face up toward him. Her eyes are wet, and she looks away.

“You wanted this,” she says quietly.

“I do want this. I would give up everything for you,” he says.

“I don't ask you to.”

“This is all I want.”

“You'll be late,” she says. “You have to go.”

“I don't have to go.”

“You do.”

He puts his arms around her and holds her then, his face buried in her hair. He grips her tightly.

From the doorway she watches him crank the engine on the car. It stammers once, then turns over and starts. He climbs in, unrolls the window, and waves as he backs out of the drive. He heads off down the road. She stands in the doorway watching his car, and all the things she has not told him flood through her, incomplete thoughts, ragged and brief, nearly realized. She finds the words for them at last. They come to her now as she watches the old-style square black roof of the Model T pass between the trees and down the road away from her.

Just as he bears around the turn that will take him out of sight, she sees his arm come through the window, his hand closing, the fingers crimped, then opening again, as if he were releasing something to her on the air.

When he is gone, she steps back inside and closes the door. She looks around the room, and for the first time in the four months since she has been with him, she feels like she could stay here, in this house that is his. She could brew another pot of coffee, drink it, make the bed, sweep the kitchen, beat out the rugs, tend the plants and straighten the shelves. She could wait for him to come home.

She drinks off the rest of her coffee and collects her things. She writes Henry a short note. She leaves it folded by the jasmine.

She steps out the door. The day is warm. Dry air. Sharp light.

Halfway across the yard, she hears the sound of a wagon coming toward her down the road, the steady beat of hooves, the familiar creak of the wheels. She freezes. Above the boxhedge, she glimpses the top of his head, the set of the beaten sea-man's cap, unmistakably his.

He will see her. He is ten feet from the end of the hedge and he will see her. She slips into the shadow of the garden shed. Quietly. She presses herself against it. There are tears in her eyes and she bites her lip to stop them. Her mouth washes warm with the sweet light taste of blood. He passes by.