A Peculiar Grace (4 page)

Hewitt was thinking he should be feeling ground down but he wasn’t—all he wanted was to sit there holding her hand and feeling the length of his back against hers when she said, “You still have one of those mighty joints?” Wearing not only the flannel shirt she’d
brought with her but an old Hot Tuna sweatshirt he’d had in the trunk of the car. Hewitt still in his cutoffs and denim shirt and watching the gooseflesh on his legs but not at all cold. He said, “I’ve got the makings.”

“Look out at the water.”

He did. The sun was striking down against the far shore.

“What do you see?”

“The sun coming up.”

She said, “I really do believe if you reach down in the front pocket of your shirt you’ll find a joint waiting.”

He did and there was and they scooted around to face each other as they smoked and she ran her hands over his now cold thighs and pulled off his sweatshirt and placed it over him and tugged tight her flannel shirt and when the joint was done she said, “Look back at the water now.”

“Do you want to swim?”

“Hewitt.”

He studied the lake and then said, “The surface isn’t flat anymore. It’s broken up.”

She nodded. “There’s a chop.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Feel the air, turn your head or wet a finger and feel the air.”

After a moment he said, “There’s wind. Not much but there’s air moving. Is that it?”

“I think,” she said, “we should go sailing. Do you sail, Hewitt?”

“I’m sailing right now. But if you’re talking about boats—”

She was up on her feet. “You wait right here.”

A few minutes later the boathouse door next to the dock cranked slowly up and from the invisible depths she used a single paddle to bring out a small sailboat, an exquisite wooden craft he would learn was a catboat with not only a mainsail but a small flying jib and brought it alongside the dock and he climbed carefully down in. Emily paddled out and then was up all darting motion as she dropped
the centerboard and raised the mainsail and hauled in the sheets and settled back beside him as the wind took the sail and away they went. She didn’t ask him to do a thing and he knew enough to sit still and be happy watching her. She fled back and forth over the boat as they got on into the full morning breeze, adjusting ropes and slipping knots and for one beautiful moment stretched up on tiptoe facing into the wind, one hand raised to steady herself against the mast, her body as alive and separate from him as it could ever be and yet she was there showing him this of her. Then she came back and settled into the cockpit, one hand on the tiller and the other holding the sheet as air and water and girl all ran together and she looked at him and grinned and called out, “So, Hewitt Pearce. What are we doing? You and me?”

“Flying. We’re flying, Emily.”

She grinned and called back, “You betchum, bub.”

When they finally quit the morning was well along and other boats were out, sailboats and speedboats with big rooster-tail wakes trailing water-skiers. As they drifted toward the boathouse with the sail flopping and Emily paddling, pushing a straight course, Hewitt jumped out as he saw the bottom coming up beneath the water and guided the boat into its berth. He waited while Emily stowed everything and furled the sail and wrapped it all up and last thing cranked down the boathouse door. Then she said, “I think it’s time to go to bed for a while.”

He only nodded which was a good thing because although she stripped down to her underwear and made no objection as he shucked off all his clothes once he slid in beside her she kissed him once, then kissed his forehead and said, “Good morning, Hewitt. I’ll see you in a bit,” and turned away from him and within minutes was asleep.

It took him a bit longer but not as much as he expected. And when he woke she was propped up on one elbow, with the sheet pushed off for the heat of midday and studying him serious as a science project. He reached for her and they tangled together sweet mouths and tongues until he slid one hand along her thigh and she pulled back
and with delicate resolve stopped his hand, holding it in hers and drawing it up to her mouth to kiss and said, “No. Not yet.”

He couldn’t help the groan. “Why?”

She smiled. “Because we’ve got other things to do right now.”

“Like what? Emily, I—”

She put a finger to his lips. “Don’t think I don’t want to. But not yet. Not here.” She paused and when he was silent, absorbing, she went on. “Right now we’re going to get dressed and I’m going to make this bed up not quite right but almost and you’re going to go down the hall to the next room and pull apart the bed and then make it up again but not quite right. Then we’re going to drive up to Farrell’s and you’re going to get some jeans instead of those shorts. Although bring the shorts with you.”

“I understand the beds. You want to explain the rest? You’re not trying to get rid of me, are you?”

She was smiling. “Even if I wanted to you wouldn’t be easy to get rid of.”

“I’m glad you know that.”

“Listen—it’s Sunday so my mother is at church with my grandparents but because it’s warm and dry with that good breeze my brother Einer’s out tedding the first cut we’ve got down and Dad’s following him with the siderake and right after lunch they’re going to bale that hay. And you and I are going to get you into some work clothes and eat some lunch and then you’re going to help the boys put that hay up. Which will be good for you—”

“I’ve done my share of haying.”

“It’ll be good for you in more ways than one. I might be pretty much free to call my own shots but I was out all night with you. So you can sweat some of last night out and gain a point, because you’re maybe two or three points down now if you understand. And since it’s Sunday, once that hay’s on the wagons, or in the barn if there’s time, Dad’ll milk a little early and then we all come down here to swim and wash off the hay dust and chaff and cook burgers or whatever
Dad decides out on the grill. And then maybe, just maybe, if it feels right we could slip off for a bit. Even if it’s just to sail again.”

He was quiet for a bit, thinking.

“Hewitt,” she said.

“Emily.”

She spoke carefully. “It’s your choice. It’s just I think it would be a really good idea.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“You know what.”

She stood from the bed in her underwear and pulled on the leotard and worked it up over her torso. She said, “And I’d really like it if you did. There. Is that what you wanted?”

He lay on his back with his hands laced behind his head. She was stepping into her jeans and there was a moment when they were half on and she raised her other leg and inserted her foot and went a little off balance and his heart lurched—that inelegant instant penetrated more deeply than any single moment since the afternoon before and he said, “I’ll do anything you want.” His voice thickened beyond all expectation.

She looked at him. He grinned and stood and reached for his clothes and said, “So the bed down the hall. Is your mother really going to look that close? We could’ve been anywhere.”

“Oh, Hewitt,” she said, and he knew she heard and understood all of him once again. “Bear with me. Okay?”

He went to her and kissed her and she wrapped up against him hot and hungry and then he pulled back himself this time and said, “I’m a little crispy. It’d be good to sweat. And food. Food would be good. What were you thinking about?”

“I get a discount at the drive-in.”

“That’s perfect. Any problem if I smoke a joint along the way?”

“Not as long as you share.”

* * *

T
HE SUN WAS
at its afternoon best and the heavy apple limbs were cool with the shade of new leaves and blossoms but his mood was off. It was no mystery that those long days of young adulthood would stand in vivid contrast to the otherwise downpouring of the years—not only moments but entire days etched forever vivid as if that very morning. He was a man alone and statistically at least growing closer to death than when those years fashioned and formed his life, but he was free of bitterness and knew this to be an odd blessing. He understood too well how bitterness seeps and poisons as if life itself was a liquid moving through old lead pipes. Yet the one passion most remote and untouchable was not static but grew and changed within him. He still had dreams where she was young as he remembered her daytimes. But the woman who increasingly replaced her girl-self for those night visits was more than his dreamworld keeping pace with age.

This was not merely some inner maturity of his brain. He cheated.

Although he didn’t think of it that way. His method was he thought not only exemplary but clever and clean. No drunken phone calls late at night. No letters to be returned unopened or not. No surreptitious visits even in the years when he was still legally empowered to drive an automobile. None of that for him. Behaviors all perhaps equal to his passion and devotion but smacking clearly of violation. Passion has no degrees. It’s either the wildfire raging in your heart or it’s nothing. All else is simply control and respect. You have to respect the one you love. You have to drop to your knees daily at the silent invisible altar of your passion. And that’s all that’s allowed. His own code of honor.

He subscribed to the Bluffport weekly paper.

It had been four years between when he last saw her and that moment of staggering brilliance. So he’d missed her return to Bluffport. Thus mercifully both the engagement announcements and wedding pictures. And he’d had to take the chance to renew his subscription after a fruitless first year but had been rewarded halfway through that
second year with a photograph and story of the opening of the new Bluffport clinic under the direction of Dr. Martin Nussbaum and read the article which noted the doctor’s wife Emily and their two young children. Hewitt did some quick calculations and realized the children would’ve been born while Martin and Emily were in medical school. So he’d knocked her up and knocked her out of her dream. That had been a hard strange day that sent him briefly back into his old dark dreaded self.

Several years later a short paragraph with a photograph detailed how Emily Nussbaum was now a therapist and would be working in her husband’s clinic. The newsprint photo seemed to Hewitt somewhat grim and set, as if her achievement were only partial. He knew this could be his own simple reduction.

The most recent photograph was three years old and of her alone. In shorts and a polo shirt. This time her smile was as it ever had been. She’d won the single-hand sailing regatta on the lake. She held no trophy but the water was visible behind her and she was standing on a dock of considerable size, speaking of a club or other such organization. She had cut her hair.

He followed the scholastic and athletic achievements of the Nussbaum children. The perfect boy and perfect younger sister. John and Nora. He did not clip these pieces but read carefully through. Not admitting he was searching for some glimmer of discord, some registered childhood unhappiness. The boy looked like his mother while the girl—poor child!—resembled her father with dark hair and a round moon face. He wouldn’t admit that running across her picture and not knowing her parents he would have thought her pretty and likely to be one of those girls who comes into her own significant beauty later than her school companions. Sometime in her twenties.

And no way to know that even as he sat while the day sank toward evening, in the Bluffport pressroom an obituary and news story of a tragedy were being composed. All he knew was he was hungry and ready for a beer and only then remembered the girl left sleeping
in a guest bedroom. He stood and stretched while he surveyed the yard below. Then headed down to see what he would see.

T
HE
VW
SAT
where they’d left it that morning but she was now walking on a stretch of the hardtop road beyond his driveway up and down similar to her walking in the woods earlier; a to and fro that had something of the mnemonic in it. Wearing his sweatpants which as he came close he saw bagged and dragged so her bare feet were covered in coiled bunches and his T-shirt so big the neckline almost revealed her left breast—the shirt twisted as she had made some attempt to tuck it in but only in front so it was badly skewed and flapped down behind her butt. Her hair was pressed flat on one side and high over her crown from sleep. A red pickup with work racks went by her, slowing and crossing the solid line to give her space—Roger Bolton would be talking about her next morning with his coffee at the store but if not Roger then someone soon.

Going down the drive he noted where it emptied into the road marked a rough halfway point of her march so he simply walked out on the blacktop and waited for her. At the moment she was still walking away from him. Her head down and her arms not flailing but describing patterns balletesque in the air before her. She turned and saw him, dropped her arms and stopped.

He knew she was not going to move. It was warmer here, out of the breeze and the blacktop radiated the day’s sun warmth back upward. The road curved beyond her. If not for that he would’ve waited her out but all it would take was one person to come too fast around that curve. So he walked, slow as he could make himself down to her. Three feet away he stopped. Hoping not so close to threaten but close enough to grab and drag her tumbling into the roadside ditch if he had to. She’d locked her fingers together over her lower belly and was digging them gently into the folds of his shirt. He guessed this was for comfort not for hurt. Someway to keep her sense of where she was. He had no idea.

“Hey, Jessica,” he said easy as if they were on the porch. “I set out those old clothes of mine because I didn’t feel comfortable putting yours in the dryer. You get some sleep?”

“You gave me a blanket too.” She went right on. “That room downstairs scared me. And my feet were cold so I came out to walk.”

Already knowing he said, “What room downstairs?”

Now the bright fire of earlier came back into her eyes. “The red room. It’s strange in there.”

Steadfast externally he recoiled inward, not wanting to know her assessment. He said, “I sort of know what you mean. But my father did that work and we all doubt our father’s wisdom. What do you say, why don’t we walk back to the house and I’ll get some supper cooking? If you want we can walk together through that room and maybe I can explain it a little bit.” He reached out and feather boxed her shoulder. “Come on Jessica. Unless you helped yourself to something you haven’t eaten since early this morning and truth told I haven’t either.”