Fellow Mortals (23 page)

He spots a yellow football stranded in a maple tree, high above the road in front of the Carmichaels’ house. Danny and Ethan meet him at the screen. They’ve gotten haircuts that make them look a full year older and they’re confident around him, like he’s actually their uncle.

“Hey, guys,” Henry says, handing in the mail.

“Hi, Mr. Cooper.”

“Your football’s stuck.”

Danny nods and says, “We know.”

“Dad threw it up and couldn’t knock it down.”

“We tried everything.”

“Just monkey up and grab it,” Henry says, and then he smiles with a wink and adds, “You gotta be the best climbers in the neighborhood now.”

Danny’s freckles seem to fade. He glances at his brother. They’re a well-matched team, sharing thoughts without words, but they’re not quite masters when it comes to keeping secrets.

“What’s the matter?” Henry asks. “Something wrong with the tree house?”

“No.”

“It’s fine.”

Henry hunches till his mailbag’s resting on the step.

“What’s up?” he asks.

“Mom says we can’t use it.”

“We’re sorry, Mr. Cooper.”

“Dad’s trying to change her mind.”

“She really hates you,” Ethan adds. Danny whacks his arm.

Henry lifts his bag. He stands erect, every muscle in his body grown taut, and then the brothers straighten, too, inspired by his posture.

“It’s not your fault,” he says. “I’m sure she has her reasons.”

“Yeah, crappy ones,” Danny tells him.

“Come on, now,” he says. “She loves you more than anything.”

They listen to her heels clacking up the hall.

“Who are you talking to?” Peg asks, worried and annoyed, and when she sees him at the door her face snaps tighter than Saran wrap. “Get inside,” she tells the boys.

“We are inside.”

“Ethan.”

“Mom.”

“
Ethan
,” Peg says.

“Fine. See ya, Mr. Cooper.”

“Later, boys.” Henry waves, ignoring Peg and smiling at the twin set of cowlicks—the unaffected mosey of the brothers heading off.

Peg claps the door and locks the hook and eye, glaring with her head dark and hazy through the screen.

“I’ve already filed a complaint that you’re delivering my mail,” she says. “If they don’t listen, I’ll have to live with that. But when you’re here, you keep your mouth shut. You put the mail in the box. You walk away. Got it?”

“Why don’t you let the boys use the tree house?”

“The only reason it’s intact is that I promised Sam Bailey.”

“What do you care about Sam?”

“I pity him,” she says, proud of her emotion. “Has it ever occurred to you, while you’re out playing Boy Scout, that instead of all these useless gestures you could think of how other people feel? You gave the Finns a room, bravo. I got them a
house
. And this is
my
house, and these are
my
children. You want to drive someone nuts, go home to your wife. I pity her, believe you me.”

Henry looks down, the only thought in his head how flimsy that aluminum looks around the lower portion of the door, how thunderous it would sound with a good hard kick. Instead he walks down to the tree, gives the trunk a pat, and lays his mailbag gently on the ground. He grabs the lowest branch and pulls himself into the crook, ten feet tall and agile as a boy.

“What are you doing?” Peg asks. “Stop it.”

“I’m getting that football.”

“Oh, no you aren’t. Get down,” she says, stepping out as if to forcibly remove him. “That’s
our
tree.”

“It’s past the sidewalk,” Henry says, pointing at the roots. “It’s a public tree.”

“That doesn’t mean that you can climb it.”

“Sure it does. I’m a public servant.”

“I’m reporting this,” she tells him.

“Go ahead,” Henry says.

The branches crowd around him but it’s easier to climb, offering a better set of footholds and handles. It’s a healthy tree, well-pruned and cabled in the middle, and he wonders what Sam would make if he could sculpt it. Henry relishes the smell, the flickers of the sun, the vibrancy and busyness of several thousand leaves. He feels elated after days of flat-footed burden, gravity-defiant and relieved of obligation.

Higher up he takes a rest, considering his options. The ball’s ten feet out, high above the road, wedged tightly in a fork so he can’t shake it down. But the branch feels solid and he crawls out lengthwise, bellying along until he’s close enough to reach.

“Are you trying to impress me?” Peg asks him from the sidewalk.

“No.”

“Good, because you aren’t.”

He wonders how he’ll justify his recklessness to Ava. Maybe Peg’s right: who’s he trying to impress? But that’s a good yellow football stranded in the tree. There’s simply no reason why a man wouldn’t try.

“You’re going to kill yourself,” she says.

“Better me than someone else.”

He’s thinking of the boys, who might be brave enough to try it. Then he stretches too far and slips around the limb, swinging upside down and clamping with his thighs. Suddenly his heartbeat’s thumping in his head. It takes a second for his brain to reinterpret his position and it’s dazzling and alarming when the sun’s above his knees.

He reaches for a long sturdy branch to his left, its crookedness reminding him of Wingnut’s tail. Peg’s shouting and her voice sounds scissory and bright. He can almost reach the tip—it scratches at his finger—but he needs a bigger lunge to grab it where it’s strong. The head rush is equally distracting and refreshing, heating up his ears and speeding up his thoughts. He hasn’t tried an
ordinary
sit-up in a decade but he tries one now, tightening his gut. Here it comes, the extra reach to get his hand around the branch, and then he has it and he smiles at the power in his arm. He’s looking at the sky beyond the dark green leaves, and the football’s there, right there, like a fruit.

Then he’s falling headfirst. Henry doesn’t understand it. He can still feel the texture of the branch when he hits.

*   *   *

Sam stops the ATV and runs around the trailer, looking for Ava’s car amid the tumult in the street. There’s an ambulance, a paramedic, and a cop car right in front of his property. A policeman is talking to Peg, who hugs herself and looks to be in tears, and Sam continues jogging, thinking,
No, not the boys.

But there they are, safe and sound in the window of their house. They stare at him. He lifts a hand but neither waves back. The fear it seems to indicate disturbs him more than anything.

Billy’s on the sidewalk, staring at the road. A couple more neighbors stand across the street. The ambulance is leaving but the siren and the lights are off. If not for the policeman, he’d be thinking false alarm.

There’s blood in the road. It’s shaded by the tree—at first he took it for an oil stain—but closer to the curb it’s unmistakable and fresh. Billy turns around, looking stunned and even ashen, and before Sam has to ask he says:

“It was Henry.”

He’s explaining what he knows—the climb, the broken branch, Peg shouting in the road—and pointing at the football above them in the tree.

“… dead,” Billy says. “… didn’t move and then…”

Dead
.

Sam hears him but it’s cottony, a rumble in his ear. The grass along the road shifts tint, turning blue, and he can see the bits of the gravel in the concrete walk.

Billy keeps him up and says, “Whoa, take it easy.”

“I’m all right.”

“You want to sit?”

“I’m all right,” Sam says. Hot-cold, up and down, trying not to heave—he takes a hold of Billy’s arm and says, “A phone.”

“What?”

“I need your phone.”

Next thing he knows he’s sitting on he ground, limp and hyperventilating, head between his knees. He has a cell phone now and can’t remember how he got it, can’t remember any numbers, let alone who to call.

PART THREE

22

Late October, four weeks after Henry’s death, Nan and Joan sit in their kitchen with Bob Carmichael, drinking tea and sharing a plate of ladyfingers. They talk around Sam’s housewarming table, and the kettle steam and radiator ticks give the room a sleepy, twilit atmosphere even in the middle of the day. Outdoors the weather’s overcast, colored by the still-warm smolder of the trees, and they can see Danny and Ethan raking in the yard, red-cheeked with yellow leaves clinging to their corduroys.

“How have they been?”

“They’re doing all right, Nan. Doing all right,” Bob says. “School came at a good time. They’re out of the house, staying busy with their friends. The funeral helped a lot. They insisted on going and they both seemed calmer next day.”

“They didn’t shy away.”

“That’s right, exactly right.”

Joan pours them each another cup of tea and offers the cookie plate to Bob, whose timid manner, so ingrained he won’t eat without permission, makes him like another of the boys instead of an adult.

“I drove them to the church without telling Peg,” he says. “She thought it was morbid, like when they wouldn’t stop harping on the fire. But they’re resilient this age. Flexible, you know?”

Nan’s seen a similar resilience in her sister. In their months of living with the Coopers, Nan came to rely on Ava’s teamwork more profoundly than she realized, and she found herself overwhelmed with housekeeping in the early weeks of living on their own. Joan stepped up in unprecedented ways, learning—and remembering—how to wash delicates, how to sauté, how to clean grout and use the cable DVR. There were hours Nan discovered they had nothing left to do and they could sit, Joan with a puzzle, Nan with a copy of
Vanity Fair
, for two or three hours of a pleasant afternoon. And it was Joan who first remembered Danny and Ethan, doubly shaken by the fire and Henry’s death, and suggested that they hire them and grossly overpay them.

“She had me nail the trapdoor of the tree house shut,” Bob says. “She’d been saying all along that climbing wasn’t safe, then Henry came along and proved her right. I’ll tell you a secret, though,” he adds, with such a tantalizing look that the Finns lean forward in their chairs. “Danny and Ethan must have climbed up and gotten that football. I don’t know when, and I haven’t told this to Peg, but I found it in their room. How about that? Even I was scared to climb that tree.”

They ponder this awhile, looking outside. They’ve been here for over an hour, but with the leaf bombs, jumped-in piles, and nonstop shedding of the maple, the boys have cleared very little of the lawn and only a handful of bags are twist-tied full. Nan’s delighted with their progress. At this rate, they’ll have to come next week, too.

“How are you two bearing up?” Bob asks, giving Joan particular attention.

Joan’s flustered by a question that pertains to herself. They’ve been focusing on Ava every day since the accident, rarely giving thought to any struggles of their own. Henry’s death is still a shock, needle-bright when it stings, and she hasn’t found any consolation in her prayers.

“I don’t understand it,” Joan says, looking down. “He was such a good man.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Nan says. “We had a good house. That didn’t make it fireproof.”

“I think about that,” Bob says. “We’re all afraid of heart attacks and car wrecks, and then it’s something like a ball or a fifty-cent cigar. Mysterious ways ain’t the half of it. And then the article they wrote…”

“I sent a letter to the editor,” Nan says, referring to a story in the
Waterbury Times
. The writer hadn’t openly declared that it was fate, but there had been a line—he had used the word “logic”—that had almost seemed to justify Henry’s dying on Arcadia. “A journalist’s
opinion
doesn’t suddenly explain it.”

“Where’s the meaning in it, then?” Joan whispers to herself.

“
We
give it meaning if we really need to have it. What else can Sam and Ava do? What did
we
do?”

“I don’t know,” Joan says.

They talk awhile longer and the boys come inside with a clatter of doorknobs and hinges, flooding the kitchen with cold air and daylight and leaves, the color in their faces unbelievable to Nan, Joan, and Bob, who’ve grown accustomed in the gloom to one another’s pallor.

“We’re done,” Danny says.

Incredibly it’s true: the yard’s raked clean and all the bags are in a row. They join the company and talk, swallow cocoa and cookies and remind the Finns powerfully of Henry, how his appetite radiated more than it consumed. The boys are comfortable today, a far cry from their shyness in the supermarket, not only answering questions but asking about the Finns’ house, the framed puzzles on the wall, the other kinds of work—like snow shoveling and spring cleaning—that the sisters might hire them to do.

They stay another thirty minutes, well beyond requirement. Finally the sisters make excuses to release them. Bob cleans up and stacks the dishes on the counter while the boys get their coats and struggle with their laces.

“It’s good you’re learning knots,” Nan says. “Too many kids are growing up with Velcro on their shoes.”

Joan hands them each a twenty and a brownie for the road. The brothers say thanks and then, unprompted by their father, Ethan shakes hands and Danny hugs them at the waist. The hugs are delicate and quick, lacking any strength, but they’re enough to give the Finns a noticeable lift.

*   *   *

The woods are stripped except for the pines and a few late-season maples, and the fallen leaves make the ground intimate and warm, as if the trees have come down to Sam’s level and he’s close, at last, to learning some elemental secret of the place.

He’s eaten twice a week in Nan and Joan’s kitchen, and he finally has a cell phone and never turns it off. They call each other often, sharing news, trading notes, talking constantly of Ava: how she is, what she needs. He saw her every day following the funeral, less frequently of late and yet prepared at any hour, like today when she just needs company for lunch.

He’s built a fire in the clearing, a welcome light to greet her, and he sees her on the trail through the bare-bone trees. She looks petite walking in, almost like a Finn. He would have met her at the street but she asked him not to come, preferring to hike the quarter mile alone—an urge he understands and hopes will do her good.