Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (4 page)

From the front porch came the rattle of house keys. As the lock bolt retracted with a ready chink, Caroline dropped to his lap. She turned to watch the television and pillowed her head on his stomach.

“Home!” called Mr. Mitchell, and the door clapped shut behind him.

My brother is three years my senior. When I was first learning to speak, he was the only person to whom my tongue taps and labial stops seemed a language. I would dispense a little train of stochastic syllables—
pa ba mi da,
for instance, and he would translate, for the benefit of my parents:
He wants some more applesauce.
My brother understood me, chiefly, from basic sympathy and the will to understand: the world, I am certain, responds to such forces. It was in this fashion that I knew what Caroline told me, though when she said it she was mumbling up from sleep, and though it sounded to the ear as much like
igloo
or
allegory,
when with a quiet and perfect affection she said, “I love you.”

With fingers spidery-weak from the cold, Lewis worked the tag of Caroline’s zipper into its slide, fastening her jacket with a tidy
zzzt.
He tightened her laces, straightened her mittens, and wiped her nose with a tissue. He adjusted her socks and trousers and the buttonless blue puff of her hood. “All right,” he said, patting her back. “Off you go.” Caroline scampered for the sandbox, her hood flipping from her head to bob along behind her. When she crossed its ledge, she stood for a moment in silence. Then she growled like a bear and gave an angry stamp, felling a hillock of abandoned sand. Lewis watched her from a concrete bench. She found a small pink shovel and arranged a mound of sand into four piles, one at each rail, as if ladling out soup at a dinner table. She buried her left foot and kicked a flurry of grit onto the grass.

Brown leaves shot with threads of red and yellow skittered across the park. They swept past merry-go-rounds and picnic tables, past heavy gray stones and rotunda bars. A man and his daughter tottered on a seesaw, a knot of sunlight shuttling along the rod between them like a bubble in a tube of water. Two boys were bouncing tennis balls in the parking lot, hurling them against the asphalt and watching them leap into the sky, and another was descending a decrepit wire fence, its mesh of tendons loose and wobbling. Caroline sat on her knees in the sandbox, burrowing: she unearthed leaves and acorns and pebbles, a shiny screw-top bottlecap and her small pink shovel. A boy with freckles and cowboy boots joined her with a grimace, a ring of white diaper peering from above his pants. His mother handed him a plastic bucket, tousling his plume of tall red hair. “Now you play nice,” she told him, and sat next to Lewis on the bench. She withdrew a soda can from her purse, popping its tab and sipping round the edge of its lid. Caroline placed her bottlecap in her shovel, then scolded it,
no, no, no,
and tipped it to the side. The woman on the bench turned to Lewis, gesturing cheerily, nonchalantly. “Your daughter is a
dor
able,” she said.

For a moment Lewis didn’t know how to respond. He felt a strange coldness shivering up from inside him: it was as if his body were a window, suddenly unlatched, and beyond it was the hard aspen wind of December. Then the sensation dwindled, and his voice took hold of him. “Thanks,” he said. “She’s not mine, but thank you.”

The woman crossed her legs, tapping her soda can with a lacquered red fingernail. “So,” she asked, “you’re an uncle, then?”

“Sitter.”

From the back of her throat came a high little interrogatory
mm.
In the sandbox, her son slid his plastic bucket over his head.
Echo,
he hollered, his face concealed in its trough:
echo, echo, echo.
He was the sort of boy one might expect to find marching loudly into weddings and libraries, chanting the theme songs from television comedies and striking a metal pan with a wooden spoon. “I’m Brooke,” said the woman, bending to set her soda can at her feet. “And you are—?”

“Lewis.”

She nodded, then rummaged in her purse, a sack of brown woven straw as large as a bed pillow. “Would you like some gum, Lewis? I know it’s in here somewhere.” Her son lumbered over to Caroline and clapped his bucket over her head. It struck with a loud thumping sound. Lewis, watching, stepped to her side and removed it, then hoisted her to his shoulder as she began to cry.

The woman on the bench glanced up from her purse. “Alex
ander,
” she exclaimed. She stomped to the sandbox in counterfeit anger. “
What
did you do?” The boy glowered, his mouth pinching shut like the spiracle of a balloon. He threw the small pink shovel at a litter bin and began punching his left arm. “
That
settles it,” said his mother, pointing. “No more fits today from
you,
mister. To the car.”

“Your bucket,” said Lewis—it was dangling from his right hand, fingers splayed against Caroline’s back.

“Thanks,” said the woman, hooking it into her purse. She waved as she left with her son.

Caroline was nuzzling against his neck, her arm folded onto her stomach. Her chest rose and fell against his own, and Lewis relaxed his breathing until they were moving in concert. He walked to a wooden picnic table and sat on its top, brushing a few pine needles to the ground. The wind sighed through the trees, and the creek rippled past beneath a ridge of grass. Silver minnows paused and darted through its shallows, kinks of sunlight agitating atop the water like a sort of camouflage for their movements. Lewis tossed a pine cone into the current and watched it sail, scales flared and glistening, through a tiny cataract. An older couple, arms intertwined, passed by with their adolescent daughter. “I’m not sure I even
believe
in peace of mind,” the girl was saying, her hands fluttering at her face as if to fend off a fly.

He could hear Caroline slurping on her thumb. “You awake?” he asked, and she mumbled in affirmation. “Do you want to go home or do you want to stay here and play for a while?”

“Play,” said Caroline.

Lewis planted her on her feet and, taking her by the hand, walked with her to the playground. A framework of chutes and tiered platforms sat in a bed of sand and gravel, and they climbed a net of ropes into its gallery. A steering wheel was bolted to a crossbeam at the forward deck, and when Caroline spun it, they beeped like horns and
whoa
ed from side to side. They snapped clots of sand from a handrail. They ran across a step-bridge swaying on its chains. A broad gleaming slide descended from a wooden shelf, its ramp speckled with dents and abrasions, and ascending a ladder to its peak, they swooped to the earth. They jumped from a bench onto an old brown stump and climbed a hill of painted rubber tires. They wheeled in slow circles on a merry-go-round, watching the world drift away and return—slide tree parking lot, slide tree parking lot—until their heads felt dizzy and buoyant, like the hollow metal globes that quiver atop radio antennas. Beside a bike rack and a fire hydrant, they discovered the calm blue mirror of a puddle; when Lewis breached it with a stone, they watched themselves pulse across the surface, wavering into pure geometry. A spray of white clouds hovered against the sky, and an airplane drifted through them with a respiratory hush. “Look,” said Lewis, and Caroline followed the line of his finger. Behind the airplane were two sharp white condensation trails, cloven with blue sky, that flared and dwindled like the afterlight of a sparkler. Watching, Lewis was seized with a sudden and inexplicable sense of presence, as if weeks and miles of surrounding time and space had contracted around this place, this moment. “My God,” he said, and filled his lungs with the rusty autumn air. “Look what we can do.”

A man with a stout black camera was taking pictures of the playground equipment. He drew carefully toward the slide and the seesaw, the monkey bars and tire swings, altering his focus and releasing the shutter. Each print emerged from a vent at the base of the camera, humming into sight on a square of white paper. Lewis approached the man and, nodding to Caroline, asked if he might borrow the device for a moment. “Just one picture?” he asked, his head cocked eagerly. “Well,” said the man, and he shrugged, giving a little flutter with his index finger. “Okay. One.” Caroline had wandered in pursuit of a whirling leaf to the foot of a small green cypress tree. Its bough was pierced with the afternoon sunlight, and she gazed into the crook of its lowest branches. A flickertail squirrel lay there batting a cone. She raised a mittened hand to her eyes, squinting, and when Lewis snapped her picture, a leaf tumbled onto her forehead.

“Your daughter,” said the man, collecting his camera, “is very pretty.”

Lewis stared into the empty white photograph. “Thank you,” he said. He blew across its face until the dim gray ghost of a tree appeared. “She is.”

Though it often appears in my memories and dreams, I have not returned to the playground in many days. It is certain to have changed, however minutely, and this is what keeps me away. Were I to visit, I might find the rocking horse rusted on its heavy iron spring, the sidewalk marked with the black prints of leaves, the swings wrapped higher around their crossbars, and though they seem such small things, I’d rather not see them. The sand may have spilled past the lip of the sandbox, and the creek may have eaten away at its banks. The cypress tree might have been taken by a saw or risen a few inches closer to the sun. Perhaps a pair of lovers have carved their signet into its bark, a heart and a cross, or a square of initials. My fear, though, is that the park has simply paled with all its contents into an embryonic white; that, flattening like a photograph too long exposed, it has curled at its edges and blown away. In my thoughts, though, it grows brighter each day, fresher and finer and more distinct, away from my remembering eyes.

Caroline was nestled in bubbles. Sissing white hills of them gathered and rose, rolling from the faucet to each bank of the tub. They streamed like clouds across the water, rarefying as they accumulated, as those bubbles in the center, collapsing, coalesced into other, slightly larger bubbles, which themselves collapsed into still larger bubbles, and those into still larger (as if a cluster of grapes were to become, suddenly, one large grape), which, bursting, opened tiny chutes and flumes to the exterior, and there sat Caroline, hidden in the thick of them, the tips of her hair afloat on the surface. When she scissored her feet, the great mass of the bubbles swayed atop the water. When she twitched her arm, a little boat of froth released itself from the drift, sailing through the air into a box of tissues. She looked as if she had been planted to her shoulders in snow.

Lewis shut the water off, and the foam that had been rippling away from the head of the tub spread flat, like folds of loose skin drawing suddenly taut. The silence of the faucet left the bathroom loud with hums and whispers, and intimate noises were made vibrant and bold: effervescing bubbles, gentle whiffs of breath, metal pipes ticking in the walls. Caroline leaned forward and blew a cove the size of her thumb into a mound of bubbles. The bathwater, swaying with her motion, rocked the mound back upon her, and when she blinked up from inside it, her face was wreathed in white. Lewis pinched the soap from her eyelashes. He dried her face with a hand towel— brushed the swell of her cheeks and the bead of her nose—and dropped her rubber duck into the bubbles. It struck the water with a
ploop,
then emerged from the glittering suds. “Wack, wack,” said Caroline, as it floated into her collarbone. She pulled it to the floor of the tub and watched it hop to the surface.

Lewis squirted a dollop of pink shampoo into his palm and worked it through the flurry of her hair. Its chestnut brown, darkened with water, hung in easy curves along her neck and her cheek and in the dip of skin behind each ear. His fingers, lacing through it, looked as white as slants of moonlight. He flared and collapsed them, rubbing the shampoo into a rich lather, and touched the odd runnel of soap from her forehead. One day, as he was bathing her, a bleb of shampoo had streamed into her eye, and she had kept a hand pressed to it for the rest of the day, quailing away from him whenever he walked past. Ever since then, he had been careful to roll the soap back from her face as it thickened, snapping it into the tub. When it came time to rinse, Caroline tilted her head back and shut her eyes so tightly that they shivered. Lewis braced her in the water, his palm against the smooth of her back.

With a green cotton washcloth and a bar of flecked soap, he washed her chin and her jaw, her round dimpled elbows, the small of her back and the spine of her foot. His sleeves were drawn to his upper arms, his fingertips slowly crimping. His hands passed from station to station with careful diligent presses and strokes. Caroline paddled her duck through the water, then squeezed it and watched the air bubble from under its belly. He washed her arms and her legs and the soft small bowl of her stomach. He washed the hollows of her knees, soaped her neck and soaped her chest, and felt her heart, the size of a robin’s egg, pounding beneath him. Her heart, he thought, was driving her blood, and her blood was sustaining her cells, and her cells were investing her body with time. He washed her shoulder blades and the walls of her torso and imagined them expanding as she grew: her muscles would band and bundle, her bones flare open like the frame of an umbrella. He washed the shallow white shoulders that would take on curve and breadth, the waist that would taper, the hips that would round. The vents and breaches, valleys and slopes, that would become as rare and significant to some new husband as they now were to him. The face that, through the measure of its creases, would someday reveal by accident what it now revealed by intent: the feelings that were traveling through her life. He washed her fragile, dissilient, pink-fingered hands. The hands that would unfold and color with age. The hands that would learn how to catch a ball and knot a shoelace, how to hold a pencil and unlock a door, how to drive a car, how to wave farewell, how to shake hello. The hands that would learn how to touch another person, how to carry a child, and on some far day how to die.