Falling (19 page)

She went out of the carriage house, walking quickly through the wedding guests, though some of them had
dispersed. A group had gone into the kitchen, where Marilyn was singing “Both Sides Now” in her clear, high voice. In a while, someone else would start playing the spoons. They would be up all night, and then, finally, she and Greg would leave. They’d get in the car and drive to Vermont under the sweet curve of moon, and the pale dawn, and at intervals Ingrid would hum “Both Sides Now.”

She went around the house and down the slope of the front lawn. She crossed the street, but once she was on the sidewalk on the other side, it was clear Elvis wasn’t anywhere to be seen. She leaned against the wall for a moment and looked down to the mysterious shadows deep in the gorge. Far below, the water swirled, making white calligraphy across the dark green of the river.

Crossing back over the road, she began to run along Bampfield. Elvis could be on any of the side streets; she had no idea where to begin, but she didn’t slow down. She kept going.

Do you feel different, being married? Greg had asked Ingrid as he drove and she hummed.

No, not very different.

Things open up, he said. From this point on.

She’d been watching the mist as he said this. All over the state of New York the mist was rising. She’d seen it in the fields that dipped down to a creek they passed and might never pass again. It rose, gently, and there were large white pines standing at the place where the road twisted away in the distance, into the generous, expansive world.

She stopped running and bent over, as breathlessly as if she’d just finished a race. How upset Damian had been, she thought.

The tears slid down her cheeks; she wiped them quickly. More, there was always more. There was no end to it. Why had she made the cake? Why had she gone to the trouble of doing all of it for someone who was not her own daughter? Why couldn’t she have made a cake that said “Happy Birthday Lisa”? Her own daughter, who would never be nineteen.

She sat down on the sidewalk, halfway up the street. A car passed at a snail’s pace, as if the driver was wondering whether or not to stop. She didn’t care. It shouldn’t have been Lisa; it shouldn’t have happened that way. Ingrid should have been the one who’d tipped the four-wheeler and fallen under it; Ingrid should have been the one who’d drowned.

How she’d failed. Everything had been turned to stone: father, mother, bride and groom, each of the wedding guests, the fields of New York State, the white pines, the road curving to the east, the faint moon. Her own daughter. Rigid, cold. She knew it; she could feel the hardness under her palms. She scraped her palms back and forth against the rough surface of the sidewalk.

God, she cried.

Gradually, very gradually, her crying subsided. She grew quiet and her breathing grew steady. She became aware of someone sitting next to her. Someone was beside her, and because of it she dared not open her eyes. It made her feel tranquil. But she didn’t open her eyes. If she opened her eyes, the vision would disappear; the vision of a hand next to hers, a hand with tapered fingers, much like her own, and on the slim wrist, the bracelet Damian had made.

DAMIAN STOOD, ASHEN-FACED
and sweating, in front of Wang’s Variety. A man passed, glancing over his shoulder at Damian as he went into the store. The light was beginning to fade from the sky, but the air was leaden, filled with the smell of tar from the newly paved lot between the convenience store and a rambling house that had been divided into three rental units.

He had no idea where to go. He had no idea where Elvis might have gone. The man who had passed him came out of Wang’s with a large bag of potato chips. He put on a pair of sunglasses, swung into his red
SUV
, and thumped the door shut. A dog barked sharply. Someone revved a motorcycle, and a car passed with a chain from a trailer hitch dragging on the pavement, making a spray of red-gold sparks. A muscular arm hung out a car window. A mother walked with a baby in a stroller; she dangled a bottle of water between two fingers. She was lightly singing a song.
The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round
.

Daddeee, Daddeee, called a jumping child.

The velvet heat lay thickly on the leaves of the oaks and mountain ash trees, and on the small mulberry trees,
Japanese maples, and juniper bushes by the front doors of the houses.
Round and round, all around the town
. Heat lay on the grass of each lawn, on the sidewalk, and on the puddles of oil in the street. It was an aureole around a man with a red baseball cap, who had dropped his keys as he was leaving an Italian restaurant. He bent to retrieve them, while a child jumped from one side of the sidewalk to the other. Damian started running.

Daddeee
, called the child.

The night before Damian’s father left, he came and sat on Damian’s bed. The light from the hall fell across the pillow and his father closed the door a little, so it wouldn’t bother him. His father’s eyes gleamed, even in the half-light.

Tell me a story, said Damian, looking up at his father’s glistening eyes.

I love you. His father cleared his throat after he spoke. You know that, don’t you?

Yes, said Damian impatiently. Tell me a story. He didn’t want his father to go to bed and leave him alone.

No. I can’t.

You always do.

His father laughed a little, but it wasn’t his usual laugh. He ran two fingers along his lips. Well, let me see, he said. Let me think for a minute.

Damian waited. It was a long silence. A minute’s up now, he said.

I don’t think I have a story tonight, Damian. I just don’t think I do.

Damian ran up Clifton Hill, past the Guinness World Records Museum, with its huge, granite ball floating on water outside the entrance, like a planet. World’s Tallest Man, the World’s Largest Pencil, the World’s Most Tattooed Lady. Bees covering someone’s face. Shortest, fattest, oldest, biggest, smallest. A yellow funhouse, its red clock set to no time, numbers out of order, with a large plaster dog, dressed in lederhosen, on the roof. Rainforest Café, Ride Over the Falls, Travelodge, Arby’s, Wendy’s, the headlights of the cars streaming down the hill in the twilight. The smell of exhaust, the screech of a baby.

And then, accompanied by a pretty jingling of bells, came a group of people on bicycles. There was a police car leading the way, and a cluster of cyclists, with a pink van drawing up the rear. Down they went, down to the Falls, the pink-clad cyclists floating down the street, all with pink helmets –
The Coast to Coast Bicycle Adventure for Breast Cancer Research
– and dancing bells announcing them.

Elvis wasn’t at the tattoo parlour; the lights were out and the door was locked. The sign looked cheap in the last light of day, with its badly painted hand. The Ornamental Hand. In the middle of the green hand was a loose knot of red: a glowing scarlet serpent. He watched as someone in the dim interior changed the sign from
Come In, We’re Open
, to
Sorry, We’re Closed
.

Damian crossed the street and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, where he stood drawing breath in ragged gasps. People made arcs around him as they passed, but he didn’t move. Jasmine had stood in a cone of light when he’d first seen her through the window. When she finished her drawing she had moved, gracefully, between the
coloured strands of beaded curtain. Maybe he should have left her alone.

Try, Damian had said, when his father couldn’t tell him a story.

Well, said his father. There’s a story about – it’s about a dragon and a little boy. The dragon is hideous. In fact, this dragon is so hideous he scares himself when he sees his own reflection. He’s green and purple. Let’s see, he has green fur on his stomach and purple fur on his back. His eyes are –

One is green and one is purple, said Damian.

Yes, one is green and one is purple. And he doesn’t smell very good when he’s afraid. He smells like a skunk when he’s afraid. But when he’s happy, he smells of delicious things. He smells like violets in the woods, or sometimes he smells of woodsmoke, or cedar, or grass when it’s been freshly cut, or the salt smell of the ocean. And other things, lots of other things –

Chocolate chip cookies, said Damian.

Yes, chocolate chip cookies. He smells of that too. And, well, let’s see, one day he meets a little boy who is eight years old. He meets that little boy out in the woods, in the snow. It’s a very cold day in the middle of January, and the little boy is unhappy.

Why?

Well, because his father has to go away for a long, long time and this is something the little boy doesn’t understand. So one day he goes outside in his snowsuit to kick snow around. He doesn’t want to slide down the snowbank. No, he
just wants to kick snow. And then, lo and behold, a hideous dragon appears on top of the woodpile. This dragon is so, so hideous that most people would have run away in fright, but not this little boy.

What’s his name? asked Damian.

The little boy? His name is Sam, and his mother won’t call him anything else but Samuel, or sometimes Samuel John, which he doesn’t like.

I wouldn’t like that either.

Well, Sam is just Sam. But there he is, face to face with the hideous dragon, and since he thinks the dragon has seen him crying he says, in a big, loud voice, What do you want?

The dragon doesn’t answer.

So, Sam tries again. What do you want?

Damian would have punched Elvis if he’d had the chance. Didn’t Elvis understand? He must have known that taking the box was wrong. He must have.

But, still, Damian would have hit him. He’d have kicked him. His foot caught a soda can on the sidewalk and sent it spinning; a teenaged girl, wearing a strapless top and a tiny pair of shorts, gave him a withering look as the can rolled in front of her and off the curb onto the street.

It was too hot to run any more. His arms didn’t belong to him, his legs were not his own. His head was not on his neck, he was not holding himself up. He walked until he saw Jasmine and Tarah’s rundown bungalow on Stanley Street. He hadn’t seen Jasmine since the night he’d made such a mess of things, and it had been five nights and six days since then.

The house looked the same, with the awning over the front door, and the limp stalks of long-dead irises by the steps, and the uncut grass of the pocket-sized front lawn. Inside the house was her room, a room he could see in his mind, with its mattress on the floor and the miniature ballerina on the lamp stand. He could see Jasmine’s body: the flat stomach with its three dark freckles. He’d kissed that stomach, the triangle of freckles.

What did it feel like, she’d asked him once, to be a man inside a woman? He couldn’t describe it. He’d asked what it felt like for her. Like being filled up, she’d said. He’d held her close to him and kissed her hair, her ear, her neck. He’d kissed her wrists: first her left, then her right. He’d kissed her stomach again. Her knees, each ankle, and the soles of her feet. He recalled the curtains at the window; how they’d billowed, then slackened, making the soft sound of breath.

A slim girl came out the front door of the bungalow. She put her head down and then tossed back short magenta-coloured spikes of newly washed hair. Drops of water sparkled as she flung her head back, flying diamond-bright into the air. So Tarah hadn’t been at the Ornamental Hand, after all. She was turned away from him; she didn’t see him.

He almost shouted her name. But he kept walking, past the gleaming white horse and the motel swimming pool on one side of the street, and Tarah brushing her hair with a yellow-backed brush on the other side. If she saw him, she didn’t call out. Cars streamed between them. He went as far as the monastery, with its wide lawns, and took off his sandals to walk through the grass, feeling the coolness under his bare feet, but the air was oppressive, even here. Dusk had fallen, but he could make out the trees looming
above him as he crossed the lawn, wiping his face with the sleeve of his T-shirt.

The statue’s face seemed uglier than he remembered. There were roses in a new mayonnaise jar at her feet, but the petals were edged with brown. Little Flower. The statue regarded him benignly, sweetly, despite her jaundiced face, and spread her arms, as if to gather up the world. Little Flower. Daisies, hawkweed, clover. Wild roses above the sea. Little wildflower, flower of the wind. Sweet Little Death, blown on the wind.

It defeated him. He threw himself down on the lawn near the statue.

He thought of Elvis tossing the box over the wire mesh of the observation platform at the Skylon Tower. The box fell lightly, almost gaily, to the earth below. He saw it falling from a helicopter, or tossed from a gaudy striped balloon that rose and slowly descended. There it was, opening in the darkening sky, with the ashes drifting out in a long tail of sparkling dust.

Or maybe Elvis had simply tossed it into the trash, the flaps of the box torn, the urn cracked in two, ashes spilled among the candy wrappers, cans, cigarette butts, tickets, crushed napkins, ends of hot dogs, ketchup, coffee cups.

You can’t stop there, Damian had said, looking up at his father.

What?

You can’t stop there. Tell me what the dragon wanted.

Oh, but I don’t know what the dragon wanted. What do you think the dragon wanted?

He wanted dill pickles.

Yes, said Damian’s father, standing up. Dill pickles.

You can’t leave. Not in the middle.

His father looked down at Damian. I love you so much, he said. Do you have any idea how much I love you?

Damian looked up at him, his eyes large. If he was as quiet as a mouse his father might stay.

La vita nuova
, murmured his father, but he was looking out the window. He wasn’t speaking to Damian.

If Damian stayed where he was, he’d fall asleep. Evening was turning to night; the world had become almost completely dark. He got up.

Time had a shape, he thought drowsily. It began in one place and turned back on itself. Here he was going down through the ravine again, just as he had on the first day he’d come to Niagara Falls, descending the steps of the ravine through the shadowy trees. Just as he’d done with Jasmine. Now he’d returned, at the end of a long, sultry day. In the parking lot, cars were precisely slotted into place. Damian crossed the road to the brilliantly lit plaza at Table Rock. He walked along the path by the railing, without caring about the Falls shimmering with coloured lights for the tourists, and even though he felt the river rushing past, he didn’t look. He was tired, and all he wanted to see was Elvis’s large, solidly built body, in his bizarre clothes that didn’t quite fit: his bell-bottoms, his unbuttoned shirt. He wanted to see Elvis’s big hands holding a box.