Alice Hoffman Page 11

  “Bullshit.” I snorted and looked up at the bats.

  “Is this about your health?” Ned asked. “Because if that’s what it is, maybe I should know.”

  We looked at each other. We were both extremely cautious people. We’d learned the lessons of our childhood. Ask questions, only not too many. Look before you leap. Buy new tires. Be careful whom you love.

  “I’m just wearing the heart monitor for my cardiologist’s peace of mind. I’m fine. I skip a beat. Who cares? I get to take this contraption off in the morning.”

  Ned looked relieved. I suppose he still felt responsible. He didn’t need to, but he did.

  “Now that I know you’re all right,” he said, “I just want to look at the sky.”

  Sitting there with my brother, I realized how little we knew about each other; we were like strangers who’d been forced into the same ditch during some vicious, bloody war, and as soon as it was over, we’d gone our separate ways. For an instant I felt like crying. Whenever our mother went out with her friends, Ned would read to me. I always begged for fairy tales, which he’d claimed to despise. I’d thought he read to me only to keep me from whining, to shut me up so I’d go to sleep. Now I wondered if he’d felt responsible back then, if he’d needed comfort as well. I wondered if he’d also wanted to hear those stories.

  “If she came back, would we recognize her?” my brother asked.

  A funny question from him. I didn’t think he wondered about such things.

  “We’d know her anywhere.” I sounded convinced. But in fact I wondered about that myself. If our mother wandered out from behind the hedge right now, she’d still be thirty, her long blue scarf wrapped around her, her high-heeled boots, her pale hair.

  Why are you sitting in the dark? You aren’t reading, are you? You’ll ruin your eyes. You’ll never get to sleep that way.

  I stretched out my legs in the prickly grass. My lawn was the sort of disaster no one could fix. “We’d know her,” I said. “I think.”

  “I suppose we would,” my brother agreed.

  “So, are you sure you don’t want to know any secrets?” Did I mean whether or not we’d truly know our own mother, lost so long ago, or who I was deep inside, or what his wife was reading when all the lights were out?

  “Do you?”

  “You have secrets?” I was surprised. Ned had always seemed clear to me in some way, perfectly knowable, logical, a piece of emotional glass.

  “Unknown truths,” my brother joked. “At least to you. Known to me, of course. At least in theory. What I know and what I don’t know, I’m not sure I can be the judge of that.”

  “Oh, forget it.” I was annoyed, the way I’d been with him when we were children and he seemed more interested in bats, ants, stars, blowflies, theorems, than in human beings. I got up and folded my lawn chair. “Thanks for stopping by. My cardiologist, the worrywart, told me to get a good night’s sleep. Maybe I should listen to him for once.”

  “I was thinking about the Dragon today,” my brother said. “I never got the chance to interview him.”

  “The old man in Jacksonville? The one who died twice?”

  I felt guilty about my current secret life with a dead man. But then, my brother didn’t want to know any secrets, so he wouldn’t have wanted to know about Lazarus Jones.

  “It would have been fascinating — just as an incident. I’ve tried to contact him three times for our study. He doesn’t have a phone. I guess I should give up, the way we did with that Jones character. Chased Sam Wyman off his property with a gun.”

  I wanted to get the conversation back around to the Dragon.

  “So, go see the Dragon. You’re not the one who gives up. You never do. That’s me.”

  “Oh, right,” my brother said. “Miss Chickenshit.”

  “Mr. Bullshit,” I said right back. It was the way we used to talk to each other, and it was far more comfortable than being polite. It made me miss my childhood. Of all things. I started up toward the porch. I didn’t especially want to discuss men who’d died and come back to life. Not with Ned.

  “You’d better run.” My brother grinned and pointed to the bats in a cloud up above. “Woo-hoo! They might come after you.”

  “You are so mean.” I started to trot, the lawn chair over my shoulder hitting against my ribs. So, I was still nervous about bats, big deal. My brother got up and closed his lawn chair, then followed me to the porch, where we deposited the chairs into a pile of lawn furniture. The porch was a mess, like the rest of my life. Garbage pails. Tools left behind by the previous tenant. Umbrellas. An old orange crate on its side in which Giselle liked to sleep. My brother spied the shoebox. He would.

  “What’s this?” He opened the box; there was the little leaf of a mole. Dry and ashy now. Bone and fur. “You tried to save something,” Ned said.

  I laughed. How mistaken my poor brother was. “Idiot. Can’t you see? I killed it.”

  Ned went into the kitchen and came back with a serving spoon. I traipsed after him to the hedge, where he intended to dig a little grave. There were beetles flying about. There was the scent of oranges, even here, miles away from any of the orchards. The circle of bats was high in the sky. They looked as though they could reach the moon.

  My brother’s knees creaked when he knelt down on the ground. He was thirteen years older than my mother had been on the night she died. He finished digging the grave in no time. He was efficient. Always had been.

  Ned took the mole out of the shoebox and placed it in the earth, then covered the body with several hibiscus leaves. I realized I was crying, something I hadn’t done at my own mother’s funeral. When I deposited my heart monitor at the cardiologist’s office in the morning, my doctor would most likely find a spike at exactly this hour. The hour when my brother and I buried something together while the bats flew overhead. The time when I felt something.

  I wished my mother would step out from between the hedges. I wished I could take back everything I’d ever done or said or wished. I would throw myself at her feet and ask her to forgive me. She’d be kind, I knew that. She was that way, and would be still. She’d tell me to stand up, to forgive and forget; she’d tell me she wasn’t one to hold a grudge. That her heart was open and always had been; that she was the same as she was, not a day older; that love didn’t change like the moon or tides, that it was the single constant in the universe.

  But here was the thing — even if I did know her, I wasn’t certain she would recognize me. A strange woman in the dark, all grown up, standing in the grass, under the moon, beneath a cloud of bats, crying at a funeral for a leaf, a mole, a lost love, an idea.

  “Well, that’s done,” my brother said.

  He clapped the dirt from his hands and the bats came closer. “What’d I tell you. Poor schmucks. They’re drawn to sound.”

  He knew I was crying, but was too polite to mention it. Just as I was too polite to suggest that his wife was someone he didn’t really know.

  “Well, thanks,” I said. “I would have kept it forever.”

  We laughed at the way I held on to things. I didn’t even like to throw out my garbage; I had a month’s worth of old newspapers stacked in the hall.

  “Let go,” my brother told me.

  “You first.”

  Exactly what we used to say when we both wanted the same thing — the last cookie in the box, the last soda in the fridge.

  We looked at the moon.

  “Is it red?” I wanted to know.

  “Any color you see is refracted by the water molecules in the air. It’s stone-colored, however it appears, kiddo. It’s gray.”

  Regardless, it was certainly the most beautiful full moon of the year. In New Jersey it would be rising over birch trees, marshes turning brown, papers blowing down the sidewalks.

  It was probably the color of a human heart.

  “You’d be able to float if you were walking up there,” my brother told me.

  I thought about that af
ter Ned left to go home. I thought about how he’d called me in from the porch when my mother drove away and how I wouldn’t listen. Eventually, of course, I’d had no choice. My feet were freezing; they hurt. At last, I went inside. We were weightless that night. We had both stood at the window together, just for a second, side by side, seeing the very same thing for once in our lives: the long road away from our house, the dark horizon, the future, and everything it could bring.

  II

  I brought a candle with me when I next went to the orchard. How many women in how many stories had done this before? Mistrusted a lover, longed for an answer to a question that was not yet fully formed. If a secret was only unrealized knowledge, as my brother had said, what harm could it do? How dangerous could a tiny shred of truth be? It had no thorns, no talons, no teeth nor tail nor sting. Truth, sleeping on the other side of what I knew. Of course, there were a hundred versions of the same story: a woman who has to learn what she already knows, somehow, somewhere inside.

  I’d brought matches as well. In my pocket, snug against my hip bone. It was a plan, not an accident. There was no chance involved, no circumstance. It was what I thought I wanted, needed, had to have. I had spent the day waiting for the dark, looking forward to it, the way bats must pine for the last bits of sunlight, green, gold, disappearing from sight. I’d dropped off my heart monitor, then stopped at Acres’ Hardware for the candles; I was in the notions aisle when I saw the man who’d been attacked by the bulldog, the patient my physical therapist had told me about. Bitten, torn apart, he was now shelving cans of paint. Even from a distance I could see the marks on his face, tooth and nail.

  “I’ve got the Mandarin Orange,” he called to a customer, just as though he were unscarred. And maybe he was. He had managed to be the reverse of most people. In his case he showed the deep, dark riddle; inside, he might be as clear and pure as water.

  I went home and waited for the end of the day. My stomach was jumpy. I couldn’t eat supper. Renny’s project was still in my kitchen. He phoned to check in and I swore we would finish the temple on Sunday; the due date of the project was Monday and without the temple Renny would surely fail. Well, failure was something I knew about. So I promised him, my one and only friend. I assured him we had time. It was Friday now. I had all night. All day tomorrow. Plenty of time to prove my doubts right or wrong.

  The sky was even darker than usual, cloudy, no moon in sight. I drove out, my foot heavy on the gas pedal. Florida whirred past me, a dizzying globe. Heat and darkness, beetles hitting against the windshield. I used to walk home from the library in New Jersey feeling lost even though I knew my way. Now I felt found. I passed exits with names I didn’t know, towns I’d never been to, but I knew exactly where I was going. Gold and green and black, like a bat drawn to clapping hands in the darkness, against all logic, a love song it was impossible to understand.

  He was waiting for me. That surprised me. I couldn’t imagine myself mattering to anyone. There was something suspicious in his desire for me. I saw him when I got out of my car, slammed the door shut, smelled oranges. There were moths in the night along with the beetles, and little gnats and mosquitoes. Something bit me and it hurt. I ran to the porch. I wanted to get this over with.

  “Hey, you.” He rose from the old wooden bench left on the porch for fifty years or more. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, jeans, old boots. I saw him shining there, like a star.

  “Hey, you,” I said back.

  “You’re late. I was going to make you some dinner.”

  Just like normal people. He seemed to want that.

  I went to him, reached my arms around him, stood on my toes, started to burn.

  He backed away from me, looked into my face. It was just me. I leaned up and kissed him. Once, twice, then I had to stop.

  “I missed you,” he said.

  He kissed me again, hard.

  Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Everyone had teeth and claws.

  “Baby,” I said. I called him that. He was so beautiful, his hands, his ashy eyes, his throat, his everything.

  “I could still make soup.” He’d opened the screen door for me. I thought I would probably always remember how it sounded. It was the opening into the after. It sounded like wind on a quiet night.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, the way a starving woman might, so as not to give herself away.

  Into the dark hallway, past the coatrack, the jackets, the rain boots, all of it belonging to Seth Jones, whoever he was; Lazarus stopped, ran his hands over me, let me feel how he’d been missing me. It was all so strong, the way the before always is. The ice click-clacking on the plastic porch roof. The way your feet hurt after you stomp them and you’re barefoot.

  “You know what I want,” I said. Said it to his face. He had no idea, of course, but he thought he did. Hoped he did. Kissed me to prove it. “I need a minute first,” I told him.

  I went into the bathroom. My breathing was off. The huff and the puff of all liars, even those in search of the truth.

  I ran the cold water in the tub and took off my clothes. I was standing there, looking in the mirror. My pixie hair had grown in. My skin was pale. I turned off the lights, turned off the tap. I didn’t want anything to scare him off, not a wash of light under the door, not any empty tub. I had the marks of the heart monitor on my skin. My heart skipped a beat, but the cardiologist had told me that was now its normal rhythm, abnormal.

  I called, “Come in.” I said it the way I usually did, like I wanted him, no matter who he was or what he was hiding. By now we had sex perfected, at least for us. Hot but not burning, or burning just enough. I knew to put vinegar on my fever blisters, knew how cold the water had to be for me to take him in my mouth without a scalding, knew him in the dark, the pieces that fit together, the whole man who’d walked with death and had come back to me, for me, with all his secrets.

  This is what I knew about him: the cage of his ribs, the rope of his veins, the hardness of his stomach, the hardness of him inside me, the way our mouths fit together, the burning, the heat of the words he said, the rhythm of the sex we had, watery, overflowing, don’t ever stop, it’s not enough and then it’s everything. Was there more to know? I faltered for a moment. I thought of all those women who had sex with monsters in the dark. Men without names who were bears or ogres, men who were enchanted or enslaved. Men covered with sealskin or deerskin, men with claws, men who could not tell a lie, men who could tell nothing but the truth, though it might damn them. Angels disguised, angels exposed; men who had been dead and came back forever changed, forever altered, hiding what they knew. Who they were. The deep inside. The ever of the after.

  He came in the room, already naked. I couldn’t see him; I could feel his presence. His flesh, burning. His step on the floor. I was standing with my back against the tile wall. Ready. I suppose he trusted me, as a mole trusts a cat, seeing what awaits only as a shadow, not as a predator who wants what she wants, needs what she needs, has to have it. He got into the tub. I could hear the water; I could hear him settle against the porcelain. Cool against his burning back. Soothing him, probably, like rain on the night when it happened, pouring soaking rain.

  The water around him sloshed back and forth. The tiles under my bare feet were cold. So dark I had to feel my way.

  Wasn’t that part of the story? It is not what you feel or see but what you know in your heart? But my heart was abnormal, the rhythm was off. It thumped against me like a rock against bone. Cold thing, stone thing, thing that would not be red if I ripped it out of my own chest. A piece of ice. Clear. See-through.

  I took the candle and put it on the ledge, where there were shampoo bottles, soap. I could feel the bottles with my long clumsy fingers. My bitten nails. The bottles knocked against one another. Time was slow. It was the before that I was in, that I was leaving. I could feel myself making my own future, a spider at work on her web. There was a finished woven pattern, one I thought I knew.

  Whe
n I lit the match, the gleam was so bright I couldn’t see anything for a moment. I thought it would be easier this way, less harsh than switching on the light, but I was wrong. I lit the candle and it flared. Blue. Yellow. I was nearly blinded.

  “What are you doing?”

  I could hear his panic before my eyes adjusted to the light. He was angry. He was shocked. I knew I had to look. Wasn’t that the plan? I saw him as he stood, dripping water, lunging forward to grab the candle. Wax fell onto his chest; he didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed at the flame, extinguishing it between his fingers. I could smell him burning.

  “Well,” he said. “This is how it is.”

  The burning man, cold now. I heard the betrayal. There it was. What had I expected? What had I done?

  Now that I had seen what he’d been hiding, I continued to see it through the dark. Branded, is that what they say?

  Memory that is stronger than the present, that stays imprinted behind your eyes, layering itself over everything you see in the present, in the here and now. I still saw it in the dark.

  Lazarus was marked by the moment of his strike, covered by what were called lightning figures. I’d read about them in a book my brother gave me. Usually they were treelike images imprinted on the body of someone struck by lightning. No one was certain if the images were actually trees or if instead they were some interior path of the veins and arteries. Some experts felt that these designs were shadows caused by extreme bright light; similar images could be produced on glass by large charges of electricity. Handprints appeared on trees, or the perfect shadow of a horse might be captured on the side of a barn; the last image a person had seen as he’d been struck by lightning was cast onto his skin, his soul. All that remained.

  “Want a better look? You wanted to see. Look! Go on!”

  He was out of the tub, dripping water. He flipped on the light. I blinked, a cold, untrustworthy fish. I could see myself as well. My reflection in the mirror, a pale woman who was quite capable of repeatedly destroying her own life. I grabbed a towel, covered myself. I felt like crying. You do something and you can’t go back, can’t rewind. I knew that, didn’t I? Ice on the porch, tires on the road, make a wish, light a candle, ruin your life.