Nearer Than the Sky (25 page)

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Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #Psychological, #General

BOOK: Nearer Than the Sky
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H
ere I am at nineteen. Swimming inside a borrowed sweater at six
A.M.
watching Peter coax the same swan from ice each morning for a week. The sweater was made on the wrong size needles by someone’s great-aunt. It is gray, thick with cables, and falls well below my hips. I have to roll the cuffs to keep my hands from disappearing in the long sleeves. Inside the borrowed sweater I imagine myself a swan trapped inside ice. I even feel my neck begin to arch in the same cold and precise way.
Finally, he asked if I would like to take a walk with him later in the day. If he might show me something he’d found. I remember nodding shyly; I had been quite content just to watch him chipping at ice with a chain saw. I imagine now we must have looked like any other pair of gangly teenagers scuffing our feet as we walked down the winding dirt road away from the Birches. In my memory of this day, a spectacular backdrop of paper castle and mountains jutting into the clear summer sky adds a strange effect to our silhouettes, but the truth is we could have been any other couple of kids on a hot summer afternoon. He had a way of walking a few steps ahead. I could see that he had to concentrate not to leave me behind. His legs were long and he knew where he was going. I didn’t know then that he was also counting his steps, like a metronome, keeping time. Didn’t understand yet that counting kept him safe.
The Birches charged employees a dollar an hour for bicycle rentals. The bikes were red and had one speed, more appropriate for beach boardwalks than for these mountain roads. But we made do and I followed behind Peter, my heart and legs pumping to keep up as we climbed hills and avoided the locals’ cars that sped along the dangerous asphalt curves. It took nearly an hour until we came to a bridge that overlooked what people here called a
notch,
what we might call a
canyon
out west. We left the bikes untethered and climbed over the guardrails, being careful not to tumble into the ravine below. Peter held out his hand to help me and I accepted. His backpack was bulging with something. I thought for a minute that he might have brought a picnic lunch for us, but when we got to the bottom where the stream was wider than it had appeared from the bridge, it was only a pair of binoculars and a blanket that he pulled from his pack.
The nest rested precariously in the higher limbs of an old maple near the water. It took me several attempts before I could even see it through the thick summer leaves.
“No,” he said, gesturing to the place I’d been looking.
“There.
”
Finally, I saw movement and held still until I could discern the heads of three infant robins, their heads peeking out over the top of the nest. They were small and nearly featherless. They craned their necks and opened their mouths, but no sounds came out.
“I found the mother’s body in the stream yesterday,” Peter said, sitting down on the blanket he had spread out on the grass.
I kept looking at the nest through the binoculars.
“I thought I’d try to get up there and bring them down. But the limbs are weak. They probably wouldn’t hold my weight.”
I stared through the binoculars at the limb jutting out over the cold water. I looked up at the tree and back at him. He was looking through the binoculars now, quiet. And I thought about saying,
I’ll do it. Just help me up.
But as I looked again at the fragile limb, I shivered inside that giant sweater.
Peter shrugged his shoulders and put the binoculars back into his pack. “It’s too dangerous.”
He didn’t mention the birds again. He still smiled each morning when I got my coffee and sat on the porch to watch him work. And sometimes in the late afternoons we would go swimming or ride a pair of rented bikes into town for pizza. We always bought the largest one and ate until our stomachs hurt and our fingers were greasy. He was careful not to touch me for too long, though, and I always blamed this on the birds. And so at night while my roommate snored softly in the bunk beneath me, I dreamed it over again. I felt the bark in my hands as I shimmied out on the limb. I dreamed my palms holding the prickly nest. I gave the three scrawny and featherless birds voices. The blue eggshells I offered him were the same color as my imagined sky.
By the end of July, I started to hate those birds. Each time he walked a few too many steps ahead of me or dismissed my offered hand, each time he said he’d rather stay in and read a book than drink beer on the employee beach with me at midnight, I resented their straining necks. I hated their mother for building her nest outside of my reach. Each time I waited for him to kiss me and instead he squeezed my shoulders and walked up the dimly lit wooden steps of the boys’ dorm, I was glad the birds had died.
I kept watching him carve the swans, though. No matter how hard I tried to stay in bed each morning, I couldn’t resist pulling on my jeans and wandering into the parking lot, where I always knew I could find him. And then, finally, one morning I decided to give up. The night before I had dream-tipped the birds’ nest over, spilling them like pebbles into the ravine below.
When the sun fell across my face I pulled the covers over my head and willed myself to stay inside.
I know now that I was responsible. That my simple willful absence must have been what upset him, what made his hands slip. I had inadvertently become a part of his intricate routine, and my absence that day distracted him. As he freed the swan from its cold prison, he might have been glancing toward my window. He might have lost his concentration when he turned his head to see if the sound behind him was me instead of a mosquito humming or just a strong late-summer breeze through the tops of the trees.
I remember only that the familiar buzz and hum of the chain saw had stopped. And the silence that followed was louder than Peter’s screams. Louder even than the sound of my heart and my feet pounding against the indoor-outdoor carpeting in the dormitory hallway as I ran to see what had happened.
The cuts were deep. The blade had slipped and traveled across the shin of his left leg and then sliced into the calf of his right. He had carved from his flesh a mangled sculpture of bone and muscle and blood.
The next day, I packed my things and got a ride into town, where I bought a bus ticket to Hanover. I had made almost a thousand dollars already, enough to rent a room in a Dartmouth sorority house that was almost empty for the summer. And every day for an entire month, I walked across the campus to Mary Hitchcock, where Peter’s legs were healing.
He didn’t seem surprised to see me the first time I arrived at the door of his hospital room. He never even asked why I’d left The Birches or where I was staying. He only smiled and held my hand when I read to him and brought him smuggled hamburgers. He only kissed me when I left him at the end of visiting hours each day. And in this way, Peter and I fell in love. In this way, I made him forget that I’d let those birds die. In the clean white room that smelled of Clorox and wilting flowers, I had never felt so needed. Or loved. Or forgiven.
W
hen we got home from the café, I went straight to the bathroom to run a bath. I dumped a handful of powdered bubble bath under the faucet and watched the bubbles multiply. When the tub was full, I took off my clothes and sank into the soapy water up to my neck. With a brand new bar of soap, I started scrubbing at the black marks all over my skin. The water quickly turned gray with ink.
After a while, Peter knocked on the door.
“Come in,” I said.
He came in and stood next to the tub, looking down at me in the water. Then he rolled up his sleeves, kneeled down, and put both of his hands in the dirty water. I could see how hard this was for him. But he didn’t wince, he just leaned toward me, kissing my forehead.
“Peter, I’m a mess.”
“I don’t care.”
“Not this,” I said, motioning to the murky water. “I mean, everything.”
He closed his eyes and opened them again.
“It’s too much . . . You shouldn’t have to deal with this shit.”
“I’m still here,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Why not?” I asked.
The cuffs of his sleeves dipped into the water.
“Careful,” I said, pulling his sleeve up over his sharp elbow.
Peter looked at me, his eyes intent, his face serious. “We’re all damaged, Indie,” he said softly.
“I don’t want to hear this,” I said, shaking my head.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Please.”
He sat back on his knees, but his arms stayed in the water. “Everybody’s dented. Everybody’s been dropped and slammed.”
“How are
you
damaged?” I asked.
He looked at me intently. I knew he was thinking about his legs.
“What? Because you have scars?” I said, snorting. “It’s hardly the same thing. I’ve never met anybody more normal than you.”
Peter pulled his arms out the water and ran one wet hand through his hair. “You think I’m
normal?
You think the way I live, counting every step, afraid of doing anything out of order, is
normal?
”
I looked down at the gray water.
“When I was six years old, I thought that I had to count to a thousand every night before I fell asleep or something bad would happen to my mother. She found me once, interrupted me, and I was terrified. I tried to explain, it made perfect sense to me, and she just kept reassuring me. I started over after she left my room. I was so afraid. Later it was other things. Left to right. All these rituals. And when the accident happened, it was like some sort of proof. It got worse. I must have spent hours trying to figure out what went wrong that day . . . whether I put my right shoe on first instead of my left? I almost drove myself crazy trying to figure out what I could have done. But finally, I had to let go. I had to just let it be an accident.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“Everybody’s got scars. But there’s got to be more to us than the accidents in our life.”
“Accidents?”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. It made everything wet. When I squeezed my eyes shut, I saw the stars on Benny’s celling.
“You lasted, Indie. Bumped and bruised, but you came out alive. Isn’t that worth something to you?”
“I didn’t survive, Peter. I ran
away.”
A sob caught in my throat like a knot in a rope. “I ran away and borrowed somebody else’s life. And now, it feels like . . . like an overdue library book or something, and every day I’m afraid somebody will ask me to give it back.” I was crying so hard now my chest was lurching forward with each sob. “And they weren’t
accidents.
Nothing that happened was an accident. Accidents are things you can’t stop from happening. Somebody could have stopped it.”
Peter came toward me again and held onto my shoulders, gently, keeping me steady. Keeping me from sinking underwater.
I looked down at the gray water, at my pale body trembling in the cold.
“Ma could have stopped it, Daddy . . .” I said, looking at him hard. “I could have stopped it. That’s the difference, don’t you see?”
Peter helped me out of the water. He wrapped me in his old robe, bandaging me in flannel.
He brought me to our bed and stroked my hair until my chest stopped heaving. And then he unwrapped me from the robe like a gift and kissed all of the sore places: the lids of my tired eyes and the palms of my hands.
“I don’t want to make muffins anymore,” I said, later, as I was drifting off to sleep.
“That’s fine.” And he didn’t seem to notice that his arms were stained gray from my bathwater.
 
Peter had to pick Esmé up at the bus station at midnight. He asked me to come, but I told him I wasn’t feeling well. I offered him vague symptoms and hoped that it would be enough. He felt my head with the back of his hand, and even though I didn’t have a fever, he brought me two aspirin and a cup of chamomile tea.
After he left, I curled up in our bed (sheets so clean they still smelled of soap) and wished I had gone with him. It would have been nice to drive through the woods, which were now laced with snow from an early storm. It would have been nice to watch for Esmé coming down the steps of the bus into the hot and smelly bus station, to have offered her a hand with her heavy backpack. It would have been nice to be anywhere but here, alone. If Jessica had curled up in the bed with me, I might not have felt so lonely, but she refused to get off the dryer, which was warmer than the woodstove. She’d made a nest out of Peter’s boxer shorts and my pajamas. I was glad when they finally came home. But I told him I still didn’t feel well when he breathed questions into my bare breasts. And I stayed in bed with my imagined fever the next morning, listening to them making pies and bread in the kitchen.
Peter had brought the TV into the kitchen so he could watch the Macy’s parade while he made Thanksgiving dinner. I could hear the sounds of a high school band from the bedroom when I finally reluctantly pulled myself out of bed. I could also hear the faint twinkle of Esmé’s sweet voice, rising like a parade balloon.
THANKSGIVINGS. Mountainview, Arizona.
Benny liked cranberry sauce in a can. He loved the sound it made as it broke the vacuumed seal and came slithering out of the can into the bowl. He would push his finger into the ridged cylinder until it pierced through the gel.
Leigh Moony was still in the hospital. There had been some complications because of an allergic reaction to one of the antibiotics they’d given her to ward off infection. I was alarmed by how small she looked inside the hospital bed. Chuck had said she could carry a keg of beer all by herself. She could carry a whole keg of beer but not a baby. I wondered how she felt now in a hospital, and empty.
The Macy’s parade sounded like memories of other Thanksgivings. The last parade I went to was when I visited my father in San Diego. Christmas lights strung in palm trees, lighting the way of surfers and VW buses and Harley Davidsons decked with antlers. In the kitchen Esmé was running cold water through the slimy, hollowed-out bird as the announcers glowed pink before Broadway understudies costumed and lip-synching in the city streets.
Ma’s Thanksgivings were made from boxes and cans. Stovetop Stuffing and cranberry sauce and crispy fried onions sprinkled over uniformly shaped green beans. Benny had a headdress he wore. A forgotten Halloween costume turned him from a boy into a savage. What he didn’t know was that there were Indians everywhere around us. When he dreamed Thanksgiving, he dreamed Technicolor tomahawks and Tonto on TV. The feathers fell out one by one, littering Ma’s kitchen like autumn leaves.
Chuck Moony married Leigh because of her strength and stoicism. He told us he loved her because she was unbreakable. She wasn’t fragile the way some girls are. You didn’t need to worry about her falling to pieces in your hands.
When Esmé was a little girl, Peter used to bring her everywhere. She liked to ride on the handlebars of his bike when they went out to visit their father at the docks. He carried her piggyback around the house. He let her ride in the front seat of his car when he first learned to drive. Peter’s face lit up when she was around. He missed her when she was gone.
Benny’s laughter might have sounded maniacal to anyone who didn’t know him. He threw his head back and opened his mouth and let out a sound that could pierce eardrums, break glass. His skin flushed red with the effort of laughter. I think he knew even then that in our family joy was hard work.
I brought Leigh a bunch of yellow daisies, which she seemed to like. When she took the bundle from me, the plastic crinkled in her hands and I noticed that her veins were like fishing lines. It must have taken several attempts to puncture her skin with the IV needle. Chuck says that Leigh is like a good tree. Not too beautiful and not too tall but trustworthy and strong. A little wind wouldn’t do much but whistle through her branches. I wondered if she felt hollow. The rotten pulpy insides gone now.
Peter was almost thirteen when Esmé was born. She was an afterthought, Peter says.
Accident,
Esmé always laughs. Usually siblings with that many years between them lack the shared childhoods necessary for bonding, it seems. The closest brothers and sisters seem to be the ones who were necessarily allied in the great childhood war against their parents. But Peter and Esmé have that closeness. I can see it in the way they easily curl around each other, in the speech patterns that sound like music when they tell stories. I think it’s difficult for Peter to understand that Lily and I have never been allies. That it was always she and Ma. Even after Benny died and Daddy left, it was still Ma and Lily. Impenetrable and united. Sometimes I still think of myself as an only child. A
lonely child,
Chuck Moony once described it. He was one, too; his brother was more than ten years older than he. I could hear Peter asking Esmé to preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Cymbals and trumpets and horns. Marching bands and majorettes, cold instruments and batons.
I wonder sometimes what would have happened if Benny had lived. I like to think that he would have kept growing until he towered over us: over me, over Lily and Daddy, and over Ma. That he wouldn’t have been able to fit under the table or porch or even inside the house anymore. That his hands would have eventually become as big as the silver sleds we dragged up the neighbor’s hill to slide on. That his smile would have become as big as a canoe. That he could have carried me away in the palm of one of those giant hands.
I got out of bed and realized that I had talked myself into a cold. The fever Peter had been looking for in my skin had become real. I stuck the thermometer in my mouth and sat on the toilet waiting for the evidence. 102 degrees. I shook the glass tube and dipped the end in peroxide. The bubbles hissed as they fought whatever germs I’d left there. I splashed some water on my face and pulled on my favorite slippers.
In the kitchen Esmé and Peter were peeling potatoes.
“Hi Indie!” Esmé said, setting down her half-peeled potato and reaching for me. I took her hand and she squeezed it. “You look horrible.”
“I
feel
horrible,” I said. And as I said it, it became true. I felt a chill and the scratch of a cold at the back of my throat.
Peter sliced his potato into perfect cubes and dropped them in a large pot of water on the stove. He smiled at me.
“Do we have any Vitamin C?” I asked.
“In the fridge.”
I reached into the refrigerator past the covered casseroles and pies. I knocked a bag of cranberries to the floor as I pulled out the family-size bottle of vitamins. I felt shaky, my hands and knees unsteady.
“You can leave those out,” he said. He grabbed another potato from the wicker bin and ran it under the cold water.
Esmé said, “Peter was saying you might start doing some writing on your own. Do you miss the paper much?”
I hadn’t thought about the paper or about writing for a long time.
“I’d love to read your stuff. I have E-mail at school.You can send me anything you want to.”
“Thanks.” I smiled. “I will.”

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