And the Dark Sacred Night (22 page)

The last of the day’s sunlight, angled toward the picture, shows how dusty it is. Back when Loraina spent the night, she’d tell him how silly it was not to pay for weekly visits from a housekeeper. “Good for the flagging economy, not just your lungs,” she said, patting his chest as they lay in bed.

Kit’s voice rises through the house: he’s telling one of his children about the sensation of driving the dogsled through the deep snow. (Funny how you can always tell from an adult’s voice when a child is being addressed.) Jasper and Kit took turns on the way back home, holding the dogs to a moderate pace, partly to minimize the impact on Bruno’s leg. There was too much tension for even bare-bones chitchat, but once it was clear the awkward scheme would work, once the snow had stopped falling for good (and once he took three aspirins from the first-aid kit), Jasper felt the pleasure of deep winter penetrate the chill—January two months early. What this means about the rest of the season to come is anybody’s guess. Jasper laughs at the local “sages” who swear, year after year, by the
Farmer’s Almanac
. They always have good if convoluted excuses handy when its predictions clash with how the seasons really do play out.

Not that Jasper’s short on convoluted excuses of his own.

Kit says good-bye to his son, tells the boy how much he misses him, how he thinks he’ll be home within a week. “Take care of your sister,” he says. And after the boy’s reply, “I know you don’t think so, but I promise you she does.”

Jasper goes back downstairs. “Everything good at home?”

“They got six inches,” says Kit. “Not enough for a snow day, but the kids are thrilled. Enough to go sledding.”

“Or take a whack at skis.”

Kit laughs.

“I’m going to wear you down before you leave.”

“You already have,” says Kit. “And now I’m going to cook a real meal, no offense to Kyle.”

“He used the resources at hand, and that’s our good fortune.” He almost said,
And that’s a miracle
. This is it, Jasper tells himself: the end of his having so little faith in Kyle. If his faith has been resurrected only to be crushed anew, so be it. Throw the boy a wedding, he thinks—then wonders at this turnabout generosity. Maybe it’s the expansive relief he feels at having shed Raven and Bruno.

He is heading to the computer, ready to face the e-blizzard, when the phone rings. Loraina. He forgot to call her back.

“Hey, doll,” he answers.

After a pause, he hears, “Hello there, Jasper. It’s good to hear your voice.”

Not possible. He holds his breath.

“Jasper? I don’t mean to give you a scare. How are you?”

“Daphne.” Jesus Crooked Christ. “How am I? Snowed in.” The easiest answer to hand.

“Us, too,” she says. “Was that a perfect storm or what?”

Quoth the breathless bishop to the actress splayed on the fucking sheets.

“Jasper? Are you still there?”

“Here I am. Yup. Right here.”

“Okay. I called because I’m trying to reach Kit. Sandra told me he’s with you. I hadn’t heard from him in weeks, and I just …” It’s finally hit her, how wrongheaded this conversation is, at the very least how absurd. She says primly, “I’m glad you’ve stayed in touch, the two of you.”

“Matter of fact, we haven’t. Let me get him.” He carries the phone through the kitchen and into the mudroom, where Kit is poking through the freezer.

“Your mom.” When he sees Kit’s face, he says, “My guess is no one’s died, because she started off talking weather.” Kit takes the receiver as if it might burn his hand.

“I’ll be visiting the dogs.” Jasper goes outside just as Kyle drives up.

“No shortage of excitement around here!” Kyle exclaims as he takes grocery bags from the passenger side of the truck. “You were heroic, Dad.”

“Once upon a time, that was part of my job description.”

“Hero?”

“More like idiot-finder.”

“They were damn lucky.”

“They were.” Jasper starts toward the kennel, then stops. “How’s Sally?”

“Doing great. She’s smart enough to have a generator.”

“Don’t start.”

Kyle laughs. “Just saying, Dad!”

“Of all the things on my Santa list, a generator’s pretty far down,” says Jasper, but Kyle’s already maneuvering the groceries through the kitchen door, and Trixie’s barking.
What are you waiting for, slowpoke? We’ve earned two dinners today
, she’s telling him, and justifiably so.

Jasper goes up to the fence and says, “I am the decider-in-chief around here, missy. I say what’s what.” But he’ll give them extra kibble, and he’ll set aside scraps or drippings from whatever dinner Kit conjures for the humans.

When he goes in, Kit looks up from measuring rice and says, “I didn’t tell her why I’m here. I left her to wonder.”

Kyle, who’s accepted the thankless job of chopping onions, says, “Why
are
you here, Kit?”

The next day at the shop is hell or it’s heaven, depending on whether you see it in terms of energy expended or funds gathered. Loraina falls quickly into what Jasper calls her “honey groove,” sweet-talking customers fast and deft as an acrobat juggling torches. Stu keeps finding excuses to visit the stockroom and hide from the melee. Jasper can hardly blame him. God but people are whiners these days.

At 11:00 a.m., on the main run, there’s a collision resulting in a fractured leg and a concussion (the damage one-sided). By two the
Cocoa Hut runs out of Reddi-wip, and the line at the lift threatens to snake right through the lodge and into the parking lot. (Never mind the money. Is it worth the wait, that rush of the descent?) Complaints come in from the rink that an eight-year-old’s birthday guests are hogging the ice.

Looking out at the junior slope, where three instructors are hard at work, Jasper realizes that he’s never going to teach another lesson—though he would make an exception if Kit brought those city twins north. The remainder of his days at this place are likely to be spent indoors, checking inventory, answering phones, doing his best to avoid mastering the latest computer wizardry designed to maximize profits. (
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, his sagging ass.)

At five-thirty, by which time darkness has finally put a crimp in business, Loraina says, “Go home, old man.”

“Not time yet, darlin’.”

“I’m serious.”

“Who’s ordering who around?”

“Whom.”

“Thanks, teach.”

“Stu wants overtime. Iron Man won’t mind on a day like today. So go.”

“I haven’t forgotten about your birthday dinner.”

“Nor have I, buster.”

“Sure you want to be seen on the town with an ‘old man’?”

“You know what they say about beggars.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Y’all are so welcome, bluebird.” She bats her blue lashes.

On the drive home, when he isn’t focusing hard on the road, dreading a spinout, he thinks about his welcoming committee: those two boys in their separate forms of limbo. Time to send them home, too.

When he walks in, Kyle is setting the table, Kit putting food on three plates. They’re chatting about children. Kyle’s bragging about Sally’s girl as if she were his own: her good grades, her prowess on the swim team.

“K One and K Two,” announces Jasper when he closes the door behind himself. “You’re acting like a pair of girlfriends.” In another era, he’d have said
a pair of homos
, but time and various female companions
have taught him to watch his tongue. Can’t help it if his mind won’t come to heel.

“Hey, Dad. Right on cue. Loraina gave us the heads-up on your ETA.”

“That meat loaf?”

“Turkey,” says Kit. “A recipe I found, believe it or not, while waiting for an oil change at the mechanic’s. Some food magazine called
Lite
or
Lean
.”

“So I can’t get a doctor’s excuse to kick you out.”

Kit and Kyle look at him, then at each other.

“Joking,” says Jasper. “Half, anyways. Certainly let’s have that meat loaf. Maybe a farewell round of cribbage?”

They are so agreeable that he feels sheepish when, after dinner, he tells them he needs to get back to his routines. “Kyle, I’m sending you back to Sally.”

“Tonight?”

“No time like the present. Get up off your duff, down on your knees, and propose. Do it properly, will you? Then get back to me.”

Kyle laughs nervously. “Dad?”

“Kit here’s going to get up early tomorrow, help me finish the fine restorations”—he gestures at the corner of the living room—“then get his own duff back to New Jersey, before he turns grizzly, immune to civilization.”

Jasper must ignore the look on Kit’s face: the bookish word
crestfallen
(does anybody ever say that?) comes to mind. “We will talk in the morning,” he says, “but for now I’m done. Finito. I am sleepwalking here. You two clean up, I’d be grateful.” He wills his old-man hips to let him rise from the couch. “Alley-oop,” he says.

“And upward,” says Kit. He and Kyle look at each other and laugh.

Before they can make further fun of him, Jasper goes to his room. He hears the two men murmuring below, running water, filling the dishwasher. He is asleep before he can make sure that Kyle’s out the door.

Waking, he smells toast. It’s not yet seven. “Who beat me to it?” he calls out as he hobbles to the bathroom.

“Only me,” Kit calls out. “Kyle says he’ll phone tonight.”

“Coffee ready?”

“Whenever you are.”

No avoiding it now, and really, what is the big deal? Will there be blubbering? Is that his true fear: emotion? What emotion, after all the years, the births, the wrongful deaths (aren’t they all?), the disappointments and shamings, the switchbacks in fortune, could be too fearsome for Jasper?

He puts on two layers bottom, three layers top, a pair of thick fleece socks. The house is blessedly warm, but outdoors the air looks so clear, every pine needle in such startling focus, that he has no doubt it’s seriously cold, summa cum laude frigid.

Kit’s at the stove, making—what, fried tomatoes? And he’s found those godawful egg whites, which Jasper thought he’d hidden behind the cold cuts.

He picks up the mug of coffee Kit has poured for him. “Moment of truth,” he announces. “I just needed to poke around a little before I could be sure of what I know. Stoke the embers.” He taps his forehead. “I mentioned that your mother told me about that fellow’s family, how she had a little help from his folks after you were born. For a few years.”

Kit turns around. He looks far more frightened than eager.

“I told you that much, didn’t I?”

“Help?” says Kit. “They helped?”

“Please don’t burn my breakfast,” Jasper says.

Kit slides the skillet off the burner, turns the knob. “Just start again. Whatever you know.”

“It was the mother who helped, I mean with some money. The Other Grandmother, that’s how your mom referred to her. The money went toward your mom’s school costs. While she lived with your grandparents—I mean the ones you do know. Did know.” Jasper sighs. “I happen to be famished. Can we eat while I try to make sense of this story?”

Kit fumbles in the cupboard for plates, in the drawer for forks. Like a child, Jasper stays at the table and waits to be served. When the food’s in front of him, Kit seated across the table, he takes a bite of fried tomato, chews and swallows it before speaking again. “She got to see you a couple of times, when you were a baby. This Other
Grandmother. But according to your mom, at some point she tried to set some conditions that seemed unreasonable.”

“What conditions?” Kit hasn’t touched his food.

“Oh, Christopher, I don’t know those details. Honest to God. By the time I heard all this, your mother saw it as water way the heck under the bridge.”

Kit’s jaw tightens. “Right. That’s how she puts it to me. Water under the fucking bridge.”

“Calm down,” says Jasper. “And would you please eat something? Or don’t. But just listen for a sec. This isn’t easy, and when I say this stuff, it sounds absurd. I’ll scare myself silent if you don’t watch out.”

Kit stares at him quietly now. He’s back to his essential state of waiting, listening: the cautious child who never took to barreling down the mountain with a war cry of some sort. Suddenly Jasper sees it as sadness, not grace.

“The point I’m getting to is this,” he says. “Your mom cut ties with that family when you were still a baby. She did it when she was independent enough to take care of you. No small feat. And she did it, maybe, because it hurt too much that the guy wouldn’t be a part of her life and yours—and I swear to you I never knew his name. I think she felt like she couldn’t go forward if she didn’t do it alone. So for all the sins I will never forgive that mother of yours, don’t you start building up unnecessary grudges.”

“God, Jasper.” Kit breathes heavily, as if the air in the kitchen has grown as cold as the outside promises to be.

“What I’m saying is, you go forward, too. With what I have to tell you.”

“You know who that woman was. The grandmother.”

Jasper nods, chewing his egg whites. Kit spiced them up a bit: not bad.

“Is there any chance she’s still alive?”

“Matter of fact, she is,” says Jasper. “But I can’t vouch for compos mentis. She’d be in her eighties. She lives up north. Husband’s a state senator named Zeke Burns. Your grandfather. Also alive, if maybe barely.”

He’s probably going about this all wrong. He’s no social worker. Kit will have to cope with his clubfooted methods.

Now the boy is practically hyperventilating. “Up north? You mean
here, Vermont? I have grandparents here in Vermont? What about my father? What about him? If you know who his parents are—”

“Hold your Holsteins. I have a hunch about him, but I think we’re best off starting with the grandmother.”

“Should I write her?”

Jasper goes to his desk. “I have it all here: address, phone number, e-mail. These people even have a fax machine.”
These people
? Christ.

“I could drive there. I could drive there today.”

“Now wait,” says Jasper. “You’re not giving anybody a heart attack. Drive up to their door, you just might do that. Or they’ll peg you for some sponge-brained evangelist.”