Every Last Cuckoo (23 page)

Mordechai applauded, sardonic. “Very clever, Peter, you manage to exaggerate and oversimplify at the very same time.”

Jonathan, usually so easygoing, said scornfully, “Peace, ha! Never happen. No way.”

Mordechai blew out an exasperated sigh. “Jonathan. You are young. If the young cannot believe in peace then the world is lost.”

“It's probably lost anyway,” Tess said abruptly. “People will
always find reasons to kill each other. It's human nature; it's in our blood.”

Charlotte shuddered, and Tom put a hand on her knee. They all looked at Tess as if they had forgotten who she was.

David half smiled at her. “Excuse me, aren't you that Quaker pacifist I live with?”

She bristled. “It's not funny, David. And it's not simple. A lot of Quakers have fought in a lot of wars. They have to weigh the ideal against the risks, and sometimes the risks are just too heavy.”

Mordechai nodded, interested. “But that is the key, you see. Weighing the risks. The ones that are right in front of you will always feel heavier than the ones your own defenses might lead to—which is precisely how sticks and stones have become nuclear armaments.”

Gathering herself, Tess said, “Mordechai, I am a pacifist, like you. But I can't forget that ninety-five percent of Jews who should be alive today have been killed or have never been born at all. There should be two hundred million Jews in the world.” Her voice dropped; she looked down at her hands. “But there are only twelve million,” she murmured. “
Twelve
.”

Tucking her arms into the sleeves of her loose sweater, as if she were freezing on this warm night, she looked straight at Mordechai. “Hatred in the Middle East started thousands of years ago. It's not about principles, it's not about ideals, it doesn't mean anything. It blows
families
apart. And when it's your family . . .”

The story of Ian's murder came out then. David told it, to let Tess collect herself.

Mordechai told his own story in return, succinctly but
without discounting the hatred he had once harbored. “I know how you feel,” he said. “It is very hard.”

“It's very hard for me to imagine
you
filled with hate. At least from the little I have seen of you tonight.”

Mordechai laughed. “Ah! Thirty years ago, I fought ferociously. I hated and killed Arabs because they hated and wanted to kill me. They wanted to destroy the little I had left, the small things I still loved.” He paused, then threw his hands up in disgust. “Pah! To hate in the name of love, to kill in the name of safety. There will be no peace anywhere until we unlearn such stupidity. No safety. Not for Jews, not for Palestinians, not for anyone.”

“Oh,” sighed Tess. “That much I do know. There is no safety. So how can you believe in peace?”

“By choosing to,” he said. “By needing to. We all have to choose, minute by minute.” He paused and looked them in the eyes, each in turn. “Hatred is a reflex. Peace is a choice. It's intentional. It takes constant thought and work.”

“What choice did Ian have?” Tess insisted. “Attacked out of nowhere, unarmed.”

Mordechai nodded. “If he'd had a gun, he would have been justified in using it. Innocence and guilt were perfectly clear. But then Ian would have carried the burden of another's death. Believe me, that is an immensely heavy burden. It changes a person forever. It harms him, turns him to ice or burns him alive, slowly, from inside.”

Sarah wondered,
Which is Mordechai today, fire or ice? Ice,
she thought.
Warm ice, a conundrum.

The air went out of Tess. She closed her eyes for a second or two, then regarded Mordechai thoughtfully. “Quakers believe
the light of God burns in every person, no matter how hateful.”

Mordechai said, “Yes. Go on.”

“I have asked myself, if Ian had killed his murderer's light, would that have killed his own, too?”

“No,” Mordechai answered. “As you say, he would not have chosen to kill but would have had it thrust upon him. To save his own life, to keep his family from suffering.”

“That's what I want to believe. Ian was a good man.” Tess looked down, pressing her lips together to stop their trembling.

David took her hand. She cleared her throat and went on. “I don't hate anymore. I managed to stop for Hannah's sake. But I am angry, and I can't forgive,” she said. “I've tried, Mordechai, but it's not in me. Even now, with David . . .” She broke off and looked at him. Then she looked around the room and rested her gaze on Sarah. “God help us,” she breathed. “We're going to bring another child into this world.”

A
S
S
ARAH LAY IN
bed that night, Charles felt as near as her skin. It was maddening that she could not touch him. He would have known what to say to her; he would have cooled and calmed her. What pain she had seen in all those faces! They would grieve their losses forever, just as Sarah would. And poor Tess, announcing her pregnancy. No one had known whether to rejoice or to console her—no one but Mordechai, who had stood up and raised a glass and beamed at Tess and David.

“This,” he had said, “is why I believe in peace.”

Sarah could not believe. Her faith in human nature was thinner than the skin of her own eyelids. She thought suddenly of Angelo—Angelo with his stories for Tyler—the war that his
gentler self must have to wage behind his mask of cool scorn. The mask had slipped, thank God, but his stories, though designed to instruct and delight, were all
about
wars. Donkey and monkey wars; dragon and witch wars. Evil is vanquished, good prevails, but it takes a battle to make that happen. Angelo's stories drew on habits of mind as old as the first humans.

Everything lives on the death of something else.

Sarah lay awake as images came and went before her—Tess's hand in David's; Mordechai, so gentle with Tess; Lottie, silent and intent; Tom and Charlotte, taking it all in. And then there was Charles in his hospital bed, laughing or choking, grinning or grimacing, she would never know. Her own infinitesimal life turned off center, within wheels of unimaginable size.

Eccentric, she thought idly. Ever since Charles died. All I want is to tramp the woods and take pictures, tend my garden, let my mind roam. I don't care anymore whether the sheets are smoothly folded or stuffed crumpled into the linen closet, whether dog hair piles up in the corners of the hall, whether the kids leave their books and socks strewn about, whether the stove is wiped down every time someone uses it. Those things mattered to Charles. I thought they mattered to me. She breathed in and caught the scent of the woods through the open window near her bed. I would like to be a leaf, turning toward sunlight without the least intention, so easily.

Sarah slipped into sleep, her thoughts becoming dreams. Charles appeared beside her bed and put his hand on Sarah's forehead. “Hot,” he said. He touched her again and chuckled. “Cold!” She startled awake. She sat up, her hands to her mouth. “Come back,” she whispered, then wondered whether he would still know her.

S
ARAH WENT DOWNSTAIRS
early the next morning, but David was already there, awake before even Hannah or Tyler had stirred. He had fresh coffee waiting. He sat at the kitchen table, his back to her, staring out the window. Sarah watched him yawn, roll his shoulders, and tilt his head from side to side, stretching his neck. His coarse hair was snarled and tufted, uncombed. Sarah remembered him, just so, as a small boy. Bedraggled. That was their joke. She spoke to him, and he started, as she had started at Charles's touch in the night.

“Morning, Mom,” he said, and yawned again.

“Morning.” She poured herself some coffee and sat next to him. A bunch of her photographs lay spread out before him.

“Where did these come from?” he asked, sweeping over them with his outstretched hand.

“I took them. I carry your father's camera with me when I'm out walking.”

“And those?” He pointed to several that were framed with twisted branches or weathered, peeling wood from old windows. Lottie and her friends had hung them in the breakfast area. Others hung in Sarah's office, where David must have found the unframed ones on her desk.

“Mine.”

“I thought all you took were pretty garden scenes. But these. Not exactly pretty. More beautiful, and strange. Really, Mom. Some of them I can't figure out what I'm seeing.” He sorted through the pile. “What's this one?”

He held up a photograph that had unnerved Sarah in the taking. She had felt the back of her neck prickle, as if the air still vibrated with the suddenness of killing. That was impossible, because the bones she had found were old, stripped almost
clean and weathered to a light, mottled brown. But something in the way they were scattered telegraphed a ripping of limbs. She had thought lynx, preying on snowshoe hare—the small, catlike skull and long hind legs of the broken skeleton. She had imagined the pounce, the squeal, the white fur soaked in red.

She helped David make out the image—edges of bone, unidentifiable, overlaying a melange of leaves and earth, making clean, sharp lines against the chaotic ground. Strangely, Sarah found the lines disturbing, the disarrangement behind them peaceful. She tried to explain this to David.

“Mmm,” he said, still sorting through Sarah's prints. “The ones you can't quite make out are the most unsettling. You know they're actual images, but images of
what
? It's kind of a tease, but serious. Menacing, even.”

Sarah shooed his comments away with a fluttering hand, though she noted with pleasure how different his reponse was from Charlotte's. “David, they're not
art,
you know. They're just, I don't know. Necessary. To me, for some reason.”

“Since Dad died.”

“Yes.”

“What's this one, then?” He held up a swirled, pink and brown image flecked with tiny light spots, like grains of sand. Or stars. Diffuse light glanced off whorled edges, suggesting a nebula.

Sarah burst out laughing. “You'll never guess!”

“So tell me,” David prompted.

“It's bear shit! Raspberry bear shit!” She pointed. “See the seeds?” She showed him the photo of the moose marbles, too,
and another of fisher scat stuck through with bloody porcupine quills. Only a fisher would eat a porcupine.

David snorted. “Bones and shit and dead things. You sure you're all right?”

“Absolutely. I don't know why I'm so drawn to this stuff. I just know I'm not afraid to go into the woods anymore. With the dogs, of course. I never would have dared while your father was alive.” She told him about meeting Stallone. She told him there might be a catamount in their woods, but he seemed not to hear.

He sobered. “That wasn't the most joyful announcement last night, about the baby. Tess felt bad about blurting the news that way.” He regarded Sarah anxiously.

She put her hand on his. “David, is Tess all right? Are you?”

“She's all right now,” he said. “But it was tough. This pregnancy was a surprise, whereas Hannah was planned. Tess and Ian were both so happy.” He drank some coffee, lowering his eyes, but Sarah had seen the shadow in them.

“And now you and Tess . . . are you happy?”

“Yes,” David said. “Now we are. But Tess wanted an abortion at first. She was terrified, of what I'm not sure. More love, maybe. She panicked.”

“She's afraid of loss.”

David nodded. “That was part of it. She also didn't know whether I could live with Ian's death. His ghost, rather.”

“Can you?”

He nodded again. “Yes. Surprises the hell out of me, I'd never have thought it. But something shifted, just like that, soon as I knew Tess was pregnant, soon as I saw how high the stakes were.
I just suddenly started thinking of Ian as if he'd been my friend. A close friend. It was easy because we
would
have been friends, if we'd ever met.”

“What changed Tess's mind about the baby?”

David looked directly at Sarah. “They caught Ian's murderers.” Quickly he added, “We were going to tell you last night, but things took that whole other tack.”

Sarah closed her eyes. “No wonder Tess had Ian on her mind.”

“There were two guys. They almost killed another driver—a woman—in another carjacking. But she survived, she identified them.”

“And Tess feels safer now?”

“Something like that, I guess. It's still a bit of a tangle, but Tess is tugging away at it.”

“She's a good person, David. You both are.”

David's eyes lit up. “Hey, Mom, I'm gonna be a daddy.”

She beamed at him. “David, you're already a daddy. You're Hannah's daddy now.”

“Well, then,” he said. “December. Maybe we'll have a Christmas baby.”

His look of amazement reminded her of the sudden surprise she herself had felt back in April, beside the pond. “David, . . .” Sarah began.

He glanced over at her. “What?”

“David, I've known for months that Tess was pregnant. I was wondering why you hadn't said anything.”

“Mom, we never told a soul.”

Sarah lifted her hand lightly off the table and let it fall again, a small wry gesture. She described the moment near the pond,
when Hannah buried her face against Tess's belly. “I just knew. I mean, I really
knew,
David. I could almost see that baby inside her. That tadpole, I should say.”

David grinned. “Aha! Ponds! Tadpoles! The connection is made!” That set Sarah off, chasing the last of her midnight fears.

L
OTTIE AND HER FRIENDS
were up to something. They fell suddenly silent around the kitchen table when Sarah entered. Lottie ran to her room with Sarah's cordless phone when calls came in for her. Lottie and Tony brought bulky packages in through the front door and hustled them upstairs. Sarah pretended not to notice, but she was curious.