The Season of Open Water (21 page)

Noel

Once when he and Hannah were quarreling over something, Noel had dished out a remark so back-handed and vicious that, as soon as it was out of his mouth, he regretted having said it. Hannah had just looked at him. Her eyes filled, and she pushed her face into his shoulder.

“Be nice to me,” she said quietly. “You'll only have me once.”

He remembers this waking up. Perhaps he dreamed it. He tries to remember what else, if anything, she might have said, but his brain is tired. It cannot seem to hold all that it used to. He loads the wagon and heads down toward the beach. The day is unnaturally warm and there is a stillness to the road. Once in a while, a quick breeze wriggles through the grass.

He can smell wood smoke as he takes the turn past Ben Soule's house on the knoll onto East Beach Road. He can smell the dank reek of weed trapped under the sand.

He almost missed the carcass—nearly drove straight past it, and would have likely, if he had not heard the cry of the other one.

She crouches in the brush—a small black shape—a young cat, pink mouth, slight white teeth like baby knives. She eyes him warily, then takes up again with her crying. He looks and sees the dead one lying farther in some grass at the shoulder of the road. He can tell right away it has been hit. An easy read. On another day, he might have left it, he might have passed on. But something about the other one and her crying makes him stop. He climbs out. He takes his spade from the wagon and digs a shallow pit at the edge of a lawn. He has just finished digging when he notices that the other one, perhaps sensing his intent, has come and gripped the scruff of the dead one in her teeth and is dragging it by the neck back into the brush.

She licks its face to wake it up, and on another day, he might have let them be. But he goes toward her, and she being shy, not tame, skits away. He takes the carcass, drops it in the hole, and lays the dirt in until it is covered. He stamps the earth down hard. And still, he can hear her, crying in the brush. He looks in the direction of the sound, and he can see her pale eyes watching through the shadow of the leaves.

Henry

As he walks through the high-ceilinged rooms of the mill, he finds himself looking up at the timeclock, down at his watch, then toward the window, the blue dusty light streaming through, and he has the sense that she is out there, somewhere in that light, in that free sky. Again, he looks at the clock. The second hand has barely moved, is barely closer to the end-of-the-day bell, but still he cannot stop thinking of her. Through the drone of the machines, the soft talk of the workers standing by the bins, he thinks of her. His mind is filled only with her, and finally he walks into the office of one of the other bosses and explains that he is leaving, for the day at least, perhaps for the rest of the week. He gives no excuse, no explanation. He takes his coat, his hat, and walks outside. He gets into his car and drives.

He drives away from the city. The trees thicken along the road. The fields open out. He is barely aware of the wheel in his hands. The car twists, making the turns on its own, slow, hypnotic, his foot down on the gas, gaining speed. The last autumn leaves cling to their branches. The shade bends toward him, then away, a stealth, slow-moving wind, he can feel it through the open window, and the world is drenched with color, stunning fluid gorgeous, and he drives, thinking of her, his mind spinning with the trees, sky, leaves falling, the sun and the shade and her body, this thought of her, the tincture of every other thought infused by her. He takes the last hinge of the road. He climbs the hill toward the sudden drop of the fields down to the ocean. The sky is stark, blue and endless, colors, trees, stones, wheeling and alive, the fields gold and shimmering underneath him, laid out in the midafternoon sun, and it is so beautiful, so breathtaking, this first glimpse of the view from the top of the hill, that he stops. He pulls over and gets out of the car. He stands at the edge of the road watching the wind as it works through the tall thick bleached salt hay and, for the first time since the night he was with her in the greenhouse, he has a sense of peace. From where he stands at the top of the hill, he can see the fields stretching down to the sea, the low and gentle shelter of the sky. There is a soft ache to the light. This is the moment he has been traveling toward. He is standing on the brink of it now, on the brink of the rest of his life with her. He will be with her tonight. He will hold her tightly. He will hold her tomorrow and the day after that. He will not let her go.

They come then. Suddenly. A shocking blackness. Heavy pulsing wings. Crows. They burst out of the tall grass of the field. They shriek and rise. Four. No, five of them, six. They swoop and dive and rise again, chasing a smaller bird, a cowbird, out of the tall grass. They chase the cowbird high, higher, up into the unprotected sky. They form a loose circle around it to keep it contained, and then they begin to move in, a tightening knot. One swerves toward it, then another, beaks, claws slashing. The cowbird pauses once in midair, then darts suddenly, its wings swift, a small dark lightning, it skirts between two crows and it is out of the ring. The crows screech, scolding one another as the cowbird flies low to the ground across the field into the thickets. They chase it, still squawking among themselves. They hover around the thicket. Quietly they wait, but the cowbird is gone, deep in the brambles.

The field is silent. The wind rakes softly through the salt hay. Silent. The world, the sky, the stones, the sea, all of it silent. Henry climbs back into his car, shaken. He drives the rest of the way home.

She is not at the house. He finds the note she has left for him by the jasmine.
Tonight, after ten,
she has written. Just those words. He folds the note and puts it in his trouser pocket.

He fumbles in the kitchen. There are crows trapped in his chest. He can feel the furious hack of their wings. He cuts off a piece of bread from the hard loaf, but he cuts it too thick for the toaster slats, his hand rough with the knife. He tries to cut the edge of one slice down, fails. He tears off a piece and gnaws on it, but it is too dry. He leaves it and goes outside onto the porch.

The sun is settling into the sky. It moves deep, receding. It hangs low over the water tower on the far side of the harbor mouth. The light chaps the surface of the ocean. He sits on the porch steps— still with those wings in his chest—water, colors, light trembling, wild, uncertain.

A couple walking passes by. A girl and an older man. Her father. He has seen them before. They live at the Point. He does not know their names. The man walks with a stick. He pokes it into shells, a bit of driftwood, a dead horseshoe crab. The girl drifts behind him in a long wool coat, her body thin, feet like minnows. She glances up at Henry as they pass by. She smiles. She is shy.

Young gulls hover in a loose pack on the dry sand. The sanderlings have begun to flock up in their tribes. One rogue fish hawk, solitary, restless, casts long circles over the beach.

The waves scour in, then fall away. Henry watches as the light shifts down through tidal pools, skates' eggs, flat gray rocks and stones so white they seem to hold the moon inside them. The sky breaks down into a fire, and he looks west again. Far off, at the end of the beach, he can see the pair walking, the older man and the girl, still apart. They are close to the breakwater where the land hooks back into the dunes. Henry follows the girl with his eyes, cuts the details of her shape. She is as black as a doorway in the dying light.

He goes inside. He picks up the newspaper, opens to the sports page to read a few scores, but the numbers are a mess in his head. He throws it down again. He flips through his records, picks one out, and winds the phonograph. He sets the record on the turntable, draws the arm across and locks it in place. As the record starts to turn, he sets the needle into the groove. Music fills the room.

He lies down on the daybed. Through the long window, he watches the darkening sky. The wind has shifted. It brings the fog in.

Bridge

Before she leaves to meet Luce that night, she goes into the shop, sits on the stool near the door and cleans her gun. She works the bolt back and forth and empties the unused shells into a pile on the workbench. She slips out the bolt, takes the cleaning rod, snaps in the wire brush and works it through the barrel to take down the flakes of old powder. Then she strings a strip of flannel rag into the rod, dips it in alcohol, and runs it up and down the barrel. She does the same once more with a second rag dipped in oil, and thinks of how when she was a child Noel had taught her to shoot woodchucks from the shadow of the backhouse door—she remembers the look of astonishment on his face when he saw how easily she snapped them off as they munched down the heads of his broccoli. Afterward he would gather them from the garden rows. He would find them among desecrated leaves, their small chests blown open.

She rubs down the stock, smoothing the rag and working it into the wood with the gentle attention she has always used caring for her guns.

Luce had told her that tonight she wouldn't need it. “It's not that kind of job,” he had said. “You're bringing yours,” she had replied. “No reason for me not to bring mine.” Although the truth of it was, it really didn't matter to her either way. Now all she wanted was for the night to be done, so she could get back to Henry. It makes her happy, thinking of him, his eyes on her face, his hands on her body—it fills her with a quiet joy. Sometimes when he looks at her, she feels like he is seeing all that she has seen and felt and grieved and wondered. Later tonight, when she meets him at the cottage, she will tell him this. She will tell him how she had felt that morning in his house, even after he had gone. She had felt that she belonged there. It had become familiar to her, almost home.

She works the bolt again back and forth to make sure it runs loose and free. She loads the bullets, puts out the lamp, and leaves the gun leaning in the shadow against the outside wall of the shop. She goes into the house. Noel is in the kitchen, pieces of the old can opener on his lap. With his pocketknife, he works at the screw in the handle, trying to tighten it up.

As she washes her hands in the sink, he glances up and notices how beautiful she looks. Her clothes are neat, her boots polished.

“Where are you off to tonight?” he asks.

She points to the can opener parts on his lap. “How many times are you going to fix that piece of junk?” she says with a smile. “Don't you think it's time to break down and splurge for a new one?”

“This one here's an old friend,” he answers. “You watch, Bridge. I'll get it fixed right this time.”

Before she leaves, she comes to the chair where he sits and bends to kiss him on the cheek, in her quick way, that constant way. Then she goes out, and the door settles onto its frame behind her, and Noel is left alone in the kerosene light.

He cuts wood later that night. He takes two axes down to the woodyard. He works with the heavy one first, and when his shoulders grow sore, he switches to the lighter one. He stacks the last cords into the pile. As he is passing back through the yard toward the house, he sees that Cora has left a shirt out on the clothesline. Its arms twist white as if there is a spirit trapped inside. Its chest fills with the wind.

The grass is wet with the stiff green smell of rain. The fog has cleared. The moon has begun to press through the clouds.

Henry

Half past nine, and there is no sign of her. After ten, he reminds himself. Her note had said,
After ten.
He tries to arm himself with this. He keeps the phonograph playing, and he reads by the kerosene light. When the lamp burns down to a beaten glow on the end of the wick, he takes the empty tin out to the woodshed and refills it from the drum.

At quarter past eleven, he puts down his book, goes over to the phonograph, and switches it off. The needle grinds to a halt. He lifts it, slides the record into its case, and closes the lid of the box. As he starts to walk back toward his chair, he sees a pool of wavering shadows from the lamplight on the floor. He stops, transfixed, staring at those strange elusive shapes. The smell of the jasmine spills through the room—that dusky, everywhere scent reminding him.

He hears gunfire. Shots out of the west. He goes up to the second floor, then takes the narrow flight of stairs into the attic. He goes to the window and looks west toward the end of the beach, the harbor mouth and Charlton Wharf. He can see the orange bursts of light, the lean bright slice of tracers through the dark, shadows scuffling on land by the pier, masses of craft on water—several smaller boats, the shape of draggers, spar-ring off the larger black hull of a Coast Guard cutter, its lights thrown on full beam. And as he is watching—it seems impossible at first—a trick of sound—but he hears another round of shots, fainter and more distant, from the east. He crosses the attic to the opposite window, the window that looks toward Little Beach. Again he sees orange flashes and masses of shadow on the sea. He is frozen, his hands pressed against the cold glass. He knows she is out there somewhere in that darkness, but he does not know where to find her. He is aware of the sound of his own breathing, and silence. He is surrounded by the heavy stiff black silence of the indoor night, every sound from the world outside muffled through the walls, the world outside moving so fast, her, somewhere out there in that darkness, in that danger. Somewhere in that night she is not safe.

He remembers what she told him once about decoys—how they are always in the shape of their own kind. She had described two ponds baited with wood-carved birds and a duck blind, her brother Luce's blind, set on the marsh between them, “he would always wait between them,” she had said, and then smiled, the slow and melting smile that he loved, and her eyes had glanced away from him as if for a moment she were turning back toward that still water and the decoys placed in the reeds, the other flock, the live flock, moving in.

“My brother is a good thief, because he always works against what you'd expect, what you could imagine.”

Slowly now, Henry turns toward the third window, the south window under the dormer that looks out onto the dark ocean, her words still in him: “He always finds the last place anyone would think to look, and so often, you know, it is the place that is most obvious, most exposed.” And Henry looks out into the deep well of the dark moving ocean, toward the long slung arm of Gooseberry Neck that divides the bay.