Fellow Mortals (16 page)

The thunderstorm’s passed. It’s more impressive at a distance, charcoal and guttural and burly through the trees, and only now do the flickers of the lightning make him nervous. He can see Sam and Ava in the cabin setting lunch. Wing wriggles at the door; he isn’t sure it’s safe yet but can’t bear to wait, so he runs full tilt and almost knocks Henry down. They grapple in the mud, man and dog reunited.

“I’m all right,” he says to Wing, who can tell something’s off.

Henry strides in, showing off the mess, but his smile falls apart when Ava turns around.

“Oh!” she says, deflecting his embrace with a palm. She notices that Wing is muddying her dress, pushes him away, and says, “Look at the
floor
.”

“Ah, shit,” Henry says. “Sorry, Sam. I’ll clean it up.”

“It’s a cabin.” Sam shrugs. “Come inside.”

Ava bristles.

“Nan’ll get that out,” Henry says about her dress.

“
I’ll
get it out,” she says, handing him a sandwich.

Sam sits and eats potato chips, tipping in his chair. Ava opens all the windows, desperate for the air, and pretty soon they’re being bitten by a swarm of fresh mosquitoes.

“What I say about the sculptures?” Henry asks through bologna. “Especially the lady with the wings. That’s my favorite. Not exactly my type of woman,” he adds, patting Ava’s thigh. “I’m more of a meat-and-potatoes man myself.”

She puts her sandwich down.

“You ought to use Ava as a model sometime.”

Sam eats a chip, leaning farther in his chair, staring at her face as if to honestly consider it. They all go back to eating in silence until Henry finishes up, gives the last bite to Wing, and starts talking nonstop about Nan and Ava’s garden, Joan’s puzzles, anything that zips through his head. He comes around to Bob Carmichael at the supermarket again, mentioning the boys and the bicycle rule.

“It’s different now,” Ava says. “Parents worry about abductions.”

“I never got abducted.”

“Maybe no one wanted you.”

“I’ll do the tree house,” Sam announces.

Henry gets a rush—even Wingnut stands—but it’s Ava who’s the most transformed by the news. She looks sunlit and full, gazing privately at Sam, seeming prouder of his help than Henry’s offer to build the tree house in the first place.

Henry thanks Sam repeatedly and asks about lumber, screws, table saws, nails—Billy Kane knows tools, maybe he could help them out. Sam reminds him that Billy’s real house is structurally questionable and that the Kanes, by and large, are better left avoided. If they need an extra hand, they can always use Bob. They agree to buy supplies tomorrow afternoon and have them ready for construction right away on Saturday morning.

Ava yawns through a stretch and says they ought to go. She took the day off from work to get a handle on the house and here she is, lounging over lunch and listening to tree-house plans. She’s vague when Henry asks about her housework, and when he asks a second time, her expression’s all the answer that he’s willing to pursue.

They say goodbye—Sam and Ava share a look that Henry can’t interpret—and after finalizing a time to meet at the lumberyard, they follow Wing’s lead along the trail toward the car. Cold water dribbles on their heads from the branches and it’s difficult to walk without slipping in the tire grooves. They concentrate and Henry tries supporting Ava’s arm. She pushes him away, walking in a puddle and reacting like he put her off balance with his help. He notices her cleavage, made apparent by the rain, and wishes she would brighten up and lead him off the trail again.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t do something wrong?”

She looks at him and stops.

“I know about the cabin.”

Henry sinks, really sinks, several inches in the mud. He moves his foot. It makes a slurping sound, futile and revolting. With the lunches and the tree house, the easy conversation, he’s been thinking more and more that Sam was like a friend.

“I can’t believe he told you…”

“He was worried,” Ava says, speaking through her teeth.

“He needed help,” Henry pleads. “I burned his house down, Av. Then he wants to build another one and I’m supposed to tell him…”

“But you should have told me.”

“I knew you wouldn’t let me! Don’t you see…”

Yes, she does.

“You could have killed yourself,” she says. “Where would that have left Sam? Where would that have left
me
?”

*   *   *

Nan and Joan notice the unnatural silence between Henry and Ava, each of whom makes plenty of noise doing chores and it’s precisely those sounds—clinked cups, the rustle of a trash bag—that makes the lack of talk so apparent. Dinnertime’s efficient. Henry eats politely, chewing each bite and dabbing with his napkin, and it’s Ava eating briskly, finishing her meal and clearing plates and making coffee while the rest of them remain bolted to their chairs. Wing walks around the room, cowering and yawning. Nan rubs him on the head, eliciting a wag, but then he’s teary from his yawns and too alert to settle down.

The Finns agree without a word to say good night at seven o’clock. They miss their shows and spend the evening in their room reading magazines, very like the nights following the fire.

Joan’s been so preoccupied with puzzles in the living room, she’s scarcely given thought to her beloved figurines. She got her first when she was eight, an ivory turtle from her mother, and collected them religiously for seventy-two years. Animals and trees, Virgin Marys and the saints—they were a constant in her life, from her childhood home to various apartments in adulthood, throughout her long career at the paper factory, her double hip replacement and recovery, retirement and spinsterhood, the last ten years of living with her sister. None of them survived, not a single figurine. Henry got her three from a vendor at the mall: a sphinx, a tree, a Cupid he had told her was an angel. Now she holds the little tree and tries remembering the others, staring at the drab medallion pattern on the wall. Her eyes begin to well. The medallions start to blur. She hides behind her magazine and waits for it to pass and then she eases into bed and says her prayers next to Nan. The words are older than her life but still surprising, still a riddle. It’s the mysteries themselves she finds reliable and soothing.

Nan stays awake until her sister falls asleep. She expected Joan to cry and wonders why she didn’t—what it means and what to do with all her unspent care. The room is stifling but she shivers, feeling feverishly chilled. She pulls the bedspread up, hands beneath her chin, remembering the homemade quilt she used to have, each square its own design from cornucopias to wrens. She thinks of one particular square, an evergreen she sewed the day after Christmas, 1985, the year their father died of cancer. She cries a little while, softly as she can, covering her face so she doesn’t wake Joan.

In the morning after Ava leaves for work and Henry’s out with Sam, Nan leads Wingnut into the living room where Joan is at the table, humpbacked and focused, working on her latest thousand-piece puzzle. It’s the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel prior to restoration, murky brown and difficult to see, with none of the vibrant color Michelangelo intended. Joan prefers it this way, the sameness of the tones more a master-class challenge. She has the border and a number of the lesser-known figures: Amon and Manasseh, Judith carrying a head.

“We never got to Rome,” Nan says, sitting down. They had talked about it often, visiting the Vatican, touring through the ruins and museums and cathedrals.

“Mmm,” Joan says.

“Centuries of candle soot,” Nan continues, fingering a piece: a little tan elbow, maybe one of God’s. “Remember when they cleaned it? People were afraid it wouldn’t be the same.”

“I’m looking for a baby leg.”

“It’s time for us to go.”

Joan takes a long, broad survey of the table, then emerges after hours in her own private chapel.

“Where are we going?”

“We need a place to live.”

“Did Ava say something?”

“No.”

“Henry…”

“It’s been two months,” Nan says. “We’ve looked at seventeen houses.”

“None of them were right.”

“None of them were home. You’re doing puzzles every day in someone else’s living room. I’m gardening in someone else’s yard,” Nan says.

Joan’s body doesn’t move but the table has a quiver. Nan steadies it and says:

“They need their house back. They’re too young to have a pair of old ladies underfoot.”

“Where do we go?” Joan asks, teary in alarm. “Should we go to the Days Inn? Do we have to leave today?”

Nan holds her hand and smoothes the wrinkles of her knuckles, softening her posture and the color of her voice. “Take a breath,” she almost whispers. “We’re doing this together.”

Joan dutifully inhales, growing dizzy from the air.

“All I’m saying”—Nan sighs—“is that we have to take it seriously. It’s time to put our life back together, even if it’s different.”

She kisses her and leaves her on her own to think it through.

Wingnut settles on the tips of Joan’s feet. She wouldn’t dream of getting up or moving him away. She looks around the room at all her finished puzzles. Henry’s framed every one and hung them on the walls, and with her table, and her tea, and her music on the radio, the room belongs to her and no one ever claims it. She’s caught herself imagining a different shade of paint, brighter eggshell, closer to her living room at home.

She connects a bare foot—the foot of the Delphic sibyl—and sifts around the table for the body and the robe. The sibyl looks familiar when she’s finally put together. It’s Ava, Joan thinks, beautiful and strong, healthy in her youth, with a luminous expression. Lips parted with a breath, all the rest of her in motion. She hasn’t seen Ava this summery in weeks.

She holds another piece, airy as a wafer. When it clicks into place she feels a flutter of delight, still surprised when a pair of odd shapes interlink. She thinks of challenges ahead: Easter Island, Norman Rockwell, never-ending beaches, and the surface of the moon. She finds herself envisioning a brand-new room, permanently hers, any color she decides. They could host Thanksgiving with the Coopers, maybe Sam. She could decorate every last wall with a puzzle.

16

Sam and Henry arrive in a rental truck at 8:57 a.m. and Bob, Danny, and Ethan meet them at the curb, the boys light of foot, their father antsy but at least superficially enthused. They’ve been parked around the corner for the last half hour, waiting for Peg to drive away and clear the coast, and all five conspirators are mindful of the challenges ahead, especially once they start unloading the truck and all the lumber starts mounting in the grass.

The yard is long and narrow, chain-link-fenced, meticulously mowed and thoroughly boring, with a couple of lilac shrubs and a flower bed of wilted marigolds. There’s a bare patch of dirt where the swing set had been and a Japanese beetle trap every twenty feet. Henry sets the table saw under the tree, an egg-shaped maple with a straight, thick trunk, and after running an extension cord across the lawn, he stands back, admiring the two-by-sixes, two-by-fours, plywood, decking, nails, screws, hammers, saws, and drills they’ve strewn around the whole back section of the yard.

“This is a tree house, right?” Bob says, finally grasping that even with Sam and Henry working full bore, construction’s liable to take longer than the weekend. “How can I help?” he asks, and though the boys are of a similar mind, eager to grab a board and start hammering, Henry won’t allow it.

“This is my gift to you.
Our
gift,” he hastens to correct, looking around for Sam. “I don’t want any Carmichaels getting so much as a splinter until it’s done. Pull up a chair and watch us work.”

Sam disagrees—it’d be good for Danny and Ethan—but he keeps it to himself and maybe Henry’s right. If there was a little injury, even just a splinter, they’d be equally responsible explaining it to Peg. It’s bad enough already, simply being here to help. Sam regretted volunteering from the moment he committed. He was quiet when they drove to rent the tools and buy the lumber, waiting to explain—as if he could—the reason he had broken Henry’s trust about the cabin. Only Henry didn’t ask; he was upbeat as ever. Either Ava had forgiven him or what? Who could say.

Sam lingers out front, having gone to get the last box of tools and finding, after the hubbub of showing up and leaping into action, his first real chance to soak it all in. He had met Bob’s eye and taken his condolences, and yet before the handshake had gotten too warm, before Danny and Ethan were required to say something nice, he found a practical excuse and walked toward the truck.

Now he turns and sees the compost pile in the distance, right beside the trailer where he’s learned to overlook it. He remembers how it was—leaves that he and Laura had piled over watermelon rinds, coffee grounds peppering banana peels and eggshells. Apple cores. Sawdust. Jack-o’-lantern. Grass. There were parts of every meal they had eaten last summer and the mound had been enormous, colorful and loose. It had all turned to rich black soil in the spring, smaller than a tenth of its original material. Laura would have spread it in the garden with her hands.

“How do you start the saw?” Henry hollers from the yard. “Whup, there it is! Never mind … never mind!”

Sam listens to the sounds—power saw whizzing in the open air, a tinny radio. He thinks of dropping everything and walking to the cabin. Then he hears Danny’s voice calling out his name.

They start by measuring, cutting, and organizing platform beams while Bob and the boys play Wiffle ball. Ethan hits a line drive off the top of Henry’s head and everybody laughs, most of all Henry. They build the platform six feet off the ground using ladders, safety ropes, and hex screws, a crosshatch of planks fastened to the trunk. They cut support beams and fasten them securely at the corners, and the Carmichaels watch when Henry stomps around the edges, testing every inch with absolute faith in Sam’s abilities. It’s late morning by the time they’ve decked the floor and gotten Danny and Ethan up to have a look—no walls or roof yet, but a platform with a view—and they’re up there still when Peg explodes out the back screen door.