Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1) (41 page)

“Like a shepherd out on the mountain

A-watchin' the sheep down below

He's coming back to claim us

Will you be ready to go . . .”

And I joined him, opening my eyes this time, our voices intertwined in an ecstatic home, so exquisite and so comforting I hoped it would go on forever:

“The darkest hour is just before dawn

The narrow way leads home

Lay down your soul

Let Jesus in

The darkest hour is just before dawn

The darkest hour is just before dawn”

Then it was over. We had stopped singing. He had stopped playing. My molecules tingled; I was purified. Slowly, the sound around us came thundering alive, bathing us in adoration. He was crying, making no attempt to wipe away the tears. He hugged me once more, and we clung to each other.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

At home I helped Lyle into bed, his body wind-shivering like a twig of sandbar willow. I pulled covers over him and, holding his hand by the bedside, we both fell asleep.

I woke to the sound of raindrops plunking one-by-one on the roof and — our hands still interlaced — the coolness of his touch. Despite the rain the morning sun streamed into the room, across his bed. Lyle’s chest wasn’t moving. I stretched over him and tucked the hank of his hair behind his ear.

***

The day after the funeral was another cool clear spring day; smells emerging from the earth as I walked behind the farmhouse in the thicket of black ash, balsam and mostly dead-standing tamarack. Roddy tried to keep up with me. He finally halted and called out, “Goodbye,” and extended his hand to me.

I stopped.

“I’ve got to go,” he said standing his ground. “Come here, please.”

As much as I had deconstructed him into a variety of weathered or incompatible parts, he felt like family. I couldn’t deny that.

I pried away the branches and took four long, strong strides, pulling up to him quickly. Our heavy breathing syncopated and our breaths coalesced, almost visible in the moist air. He rested his hands on my shoulders and I smiled up at him.

“You’re a friend,” I said wrapping my arms around his waist. “Family too. Thank you for Lyle.”

His eyebrows lifted in mild surprise and he drew me to him, rather sadly. “Yes,” he said.

“Yes,” I repeated, still talking into his chest. “Where do you go next, back to New York?”

“New Jersey. Eliz is in New York. I live in New Jersey.”

“Aah, I see.” I gave him a little smirk.

“Yes, I’m a lawyer, in case you need one.”

“A lawyer. I’ve heard all sorts of stories about lawyers.” I separated from him, looking up, examining him. “You don’t look like a lawyer.”

“I get by on my good looks. And you?”

“Me too.” If I could have blushed, I would have.

He smiled and reached for my face. “No, I meant what’s next for you?”

“Oh, I thought . . .”

“Yes, I know what you thought and you know how I feel about that, don’t you?” He brushed the top of my cheek.

I closed my eyes. Was there ever a place for him? With so much still to learn. Reality rushed over me. I opened them. “You’re a wonderful man, and you’ll always be welcome in my home, wherever it is. But I don’t know where I’m going. The money’s run out and this isn’t my home, not really. And I’m not sure the lab’s the place for me. Anyway,” I sniffed, “we’ll see.”

“I want to see you again.”

I lowered my eyes. “Maybe.”

“No, that won’t do.”

“I can’t predict . . .”

“I thought you had a gift?”

“Maybe.”

“You equivocate on every answer. Not very scientific.”

I looked back up, admiring him. “Hanging around lawyers will do that. You know, consider every possibility, admit to none.”

“You want me to admit.” He was unflinching.

It was too much for me. I quickly put my hand to his lips. “Ssh. Please don’t say anything.”

“Then . . .” He rolled his hand over several times, meaning give me an answer.

“Okay. Okay, we’ll see each other again.”

“Good.”

I flexed both hands. “But I can’t promise when.”

He kissed me on the mouth. Hungry
and
tender. And then he was gone, out the driveway and past the caboose in that silly little blue rental car, leaving me questioning my sanity. Again.

***

“Can I ask you something?” Carly leaned out of her yellow Miata.

Momma, on the back steps, turned and went into the house.

“Sure.” I hovered over her, supporting myself by leaning against the car’s top.

“Did you kill her?”

“Do you really think I could?”

“Well, you do have a temper, but no.”

“Any other questions?”

“Yes. How the hell do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Keep going.”

“What are my options?”

She sat with that for a moment. “You know she’s gonna blame you.” She signaled toward the farmhouse.

“Probably.”

“You sure you don’t want to come with me, at least to Minneapolis?”

I skimmed over the property. “I’ve got a few more things to take care of.”

“If you say so.”

“But could we, maybe, talk every once in a while? Check in?”

“I’ve never been very good at that.”

“Could we try? I think we have things we could teach each other. We carry some of the same DNA.”

“Always the scientist.”

“Not always.”

She digested the idea. “Sure. You’re probably right. A check-in might be nice.”

“Good.” I hoped she would be the one to call but I guessed otherwise.

“Momma’ll be back on her feet in no time.” It was Carly’s way of giving me permission.

“Thanks,” I said reaching my hand to hers and gently squeezing it. “You be safe.” I stepped away from the car.

She cranked the ignition. “You too.”

***

May 8
th

“Harold,

Roddy stuck around a few days to help with the funeral while Momma barricaded herself in her room. Carly left and came back several times saying, ‘I can see you two have it handled.’ Some things don’t change.

But some do. I was mistaken. I’d originally assumed that Lyle had fabricated the return to Bemidji as another of his selfish ploys, with me as his protector and concierge. Now I’m not so sure.

Somewhere in that skinny self-indulgent man-boy there was a yearning, perhaps not even obvious to him that he wanted to connect with one person before he died. Why he chose me, I don’t know. Maybe he wanted Momma but knew she couldn’t handle the task, or wasn’t particularly interested. Maybe I was just convenient. Maybe he had tried in his own perverse way all along and I was his last resort.

But somewhere along the way it changed, and I’m thankful, because he did his part too. There was a poet in him. I think his last performance was his gift to me, a type of map. Anyway, I wouldn’t be here without him, not the way I am now, which is the way you suggested: a little less systematic. Certainly I’m more out and about because of him — and you.

So thank you. I wish you’d been able to see your own beauty. I wish you hadn’t been afraid of it. I’ll think of you from time to time, even consider your advice and your beautiful heart. But it’s time now to say goodbye.

Love, Eunis.”

***

Carver’s eyes followed me into the darkness. My work was almost done, and when it was I could call Anthony and he’d be able to convert the comb for Junior’s medical bills, maybe even with something left over. The hardest part, of course, was the skinning, which is why I started at the feet, where it would be least noticeable. And I counted on Carver as much as I did myself, because he inhabited the space for more than thirty years. His energy and skill were still contained in the workshop, and we both had an eye for beauty. We worked together.

“Your hair,” I said to her, “is as magnificent as ever.” And I affixed it the way she’d have wanted it, down and flowing to her impeccable shoulders. I tugged carefully at the cheeks, those ageless, transcendent cheeks, so there wasn’t a wrinkle, not even around her mouth, not even around those still provocative lips.

Her eyes, the singular most mesmerizing aspect of her beauty, of course had become clouded —potassium in the red blood cells breaking down— and were the one element that couldn’t be salvaged, but I’d had some made that came close. I owed that to Levi. Though I’d sealed the workshop from the elements, I felt air pass behind my neck and I knew that Carver was cautioning me not to make the same mistake I’d made with the skunk.

“No,” I said, “not one hundred percent symmetrical, or she’ll look mean.”

***

As with Sam’s funeral pyre, I held the flame to the corner of the workshop. And like Sam’s box it caught quickly, given its weary dryness. The flames spread and engulfed the building. It had served me well over the years but it was time to move on, time to investigate new mysteries.

Along the path to Kingdom Lake there were signs of spring, but winter’s chill still eddied through the trees, moving them left and right, not wishing to leave. The trail, too, still showed winter’s mark. Where the track dipped there were puddles, and on the sides the tall tangled grass bulged in large wet clumps, mounds of them stretching out over the forest floor. I stepped on them and water oozed, almost a swamp.

I carried nothing more than a towel. It was likely still too cold for crickets, but I could hear them in a month or so, especially if the warm temperatures returned and sustained over the next few weeks.

Around the bend and up ahead, my favorite white cedar stood alone, naked against the uncertain sky and isolated from the jack pine, black spruce, and balsam that were ringed at their base by thick moss.

The tall reeds weren’t so tall this time of year, bent by the winter snows and not yet certain of the spring. There was little camouflage. I lowered the towel to the ground beneath the cedar. I disrobed, folding my clothes into a manageable pile and placed my shades on top of it.

At the water’s edge I shivered at its overture. Goosebumps. “Okay, be kind.”
In the original Hans Christian Anderson version of
The Little Mermaid
, the despairing mermaid hurls herself into the sea and her body dissolves into foam.
I waded quickly in, my breath sucked away by the snowmelt water. Once beyond the stems and stubble, I dove in and swam vigorously toward the center of the lake, at first gasping, my wake of white hair following behind me. I was in the middle faster than I’d imagined, treading water and breathing hard, turning 360-degrees and taking in the magnificence around me. It gave me strength.

Out there I’d always felt invincible, but now with Lyle’s death,
saudade
, a longing had opened, perhaps permanently, of unending vulnerability. I would need to find a way of including it, a new way of considering
everything
. Even the pain. That included Momma and her pressing demands. Roddy would say,
“Human behavior: an acquired taste.”

I swam back to shore watching the workshop’s orphaned wisps of smoke dissolve above the treetops and, in passing, surveying Beauty’s final place as it disappeared behind tattered stalks.

I toweled off rapidly and imagined all the suspects besides me the police had had to consider, given Kingdom’s frigid temperature, which could easily have broadened the time of death by a day or two.

“Well,” Detective Sullivan had offered, “Mr. O’Brien said you could be trusted. He couldn’t imagine you were involved in all this. And Mayor King also thought you were an unlikely suspect. Naturally, I’ll be the judge of that. We have concluded that when you found her she’d been in the water maybe twenty-four hours or so.”

A single soft trill pulsed, hidden in the grass; the first of the spring field crickets. I threw the towel over my shoulder and turned up the path, my feet at home on the ground, the last vestiges of winter gusting lightly in my face, then at my neck, teasing my hair. Victor’s hearse had picked The Beauty up and she was on her way back to New York. At least for the moment it was all very orderly.

“Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures,

hover about a lighted candle.

Can the candle help it?”

Charles Dickens
,

Great Expectations