Blackbird House (23 page)

“You want everything that belongs to me.
 
This place was mine,” he said, before he turned and stomped back into the woods.

When the jam was done, they had twenty-four jars, one for every hour of the day, Katherine said.
 
They piled up their finished product in the shade, then carried the cooking pot and what was left of the sugar through the woods.
 
They were hot and sweaty and their mouths were blue from the extra fruit they had eaten.
 
They looked for Walker, but there was nothing as far as the eye could see, except for swarms of mosquitoes.
 
There was the evening star above them.
 
Katherine asked Emma what she was wishing for.

“What I’d like most of all,” Emma said.
 
“Is for you to love Walker.”

“But I do!”
 
Katherine was shocked.
 
“Of course I love him.”

“I mean so it shows.”
 
They had passed onto the lawn,

each one holding a handle of the cooking pot.
 
In the sunlight, Emma’s hair glinted golden.
 
“Do it so he knows.”

Later, Katherine went back through the woods and loaded all of the jars of jam into a cardboard box.
 
She could see why Walker liked the summer kitchen.
 
The heat was fading, so that the day already felt like a memory.
 
There were fireflies drifting through the falling dark, and a few luminous clouds in the sky up above.
 
Walker hadn’t come down for dinner; he’d stayed up in his room, exhausted, bad-tempered.
 
Now, as Katherine walked home through the dusky woods, lugging the heavy jars, she thought, He’s ten.
 
The same age as the boy lost at sea.

Katherine went directly upstairs, where the rooms were hot and close.
 
She had the feeling that love was an anchor, that it could save you when you were drowning, that all you had to do was hold tight.

Walker was sprawled out on his bed, gazing out his window as fireflies floated by.
 
One blink and they were gone.
 
One radiant beam of light, and then nothing but the dark.
 
Katherine lay down beside her son.
 
He smelled of dirt and summer; he smelled exactly like the woods beyond their house, sharp and sweet and green.

“What do you want?”
 
He didn’t even look at her.
 
Not a glance.

“I thought I’d sing you to sleep,” Katherine said.

Walker laughed, but the sound was dry, like something breaking.
 
“You can’t sing.
 
Everybody knows that.”

“You’re right.”
 
Katherine thought of the little sailor on his sinking ship, out in the coldest ocean.
 
She hoped there were stars out that night, something to guide him.
 
“I know I can’t,” she admitted.
 
“But I thought I’d try.”

WISH YOU WERE HERE

IT WAS A TERRIBLE BIRTHDAY PRESENT,

the absolute last thing Emma would have wanted.
 
To turn thirty was

awful enough.
 
To turn thirty after a divorce, with no child, and no

career to speak of, other than the teaching job she’d fallen into at

the very same school she’d attended as a teenager, now, that was

downright dreadful.
 
But of course she couldn’t say any of this out

loud she had to be grateful just to be alive.
 
She’d nearly died when

she was six, or so her brother, Walker, told her often enough.
 
He

showered her with more details than she’d ever wanted to know: how

lucky she was,

how other children with the exact same diagnosis had died in less than six months.
 
Walker was a pediatrician now, with three children of his own and a great store of knowledge about leukemia.
 
It was his specialty, actually, and he was thrilled and proud at the strides medicine had made.
 
As for Emma’s illness, the treatments she’d had had cured her, but it also seemed likely they might have left her unable to have a child.

“That wouldn’t happen these days,” Walker had told her.
 
“They gave patients mega doses of chemo back when you were in treatment.”

Well, maybe that was fate.
 
Maybe she was meant to be alone.
 
She was a runner, and wasn’t that the habit of a person who preferred to be on her own?
 
She was no team player; she didn’t even care for tennis.
 
She liked to run along the river when the sky was still dark.
 
She thought of herself as a star shooting along Storrow Drive, measuring her strides against the flow of the Charles, racing toward Commonwealth Avenue.
 
At that early hour, Boston seemed like Alexandria or Paris, mysterious and inky, a city filled with smoke and possibility.
 
In the spring, there were scores of magnolias, like wild birds captured and caged.
 
The scent of lilacs was dizzying.

The route that Emma took had once been underwater, filled in a hundred years earlier with silt and mud, but watery still.
 
Puddles collected.
 
The air had a green tint.
 
Ducks nested in the reeds.
 
Emma was a city girl; to her, ducks were wildlife.
 
Reeds were definitely flora enough.
 
She liked soot, and heat, and grime, and, she was beginning to realize, if she didn’t actually like her aloneness, she was at least comforted by it.
 
She should be grateful; she knew, she knew.
 
She should be thrilled just to be alive.
 
So why was it she preferred to expect nothing?
 
Why was it she felt she’d already ruined everything? As though her life had somehow ended?
 
There were times when she felt so insubstantial it was almost as though people could walk right through her.
 
Lately, she couldn’t visit Walker and his family without becoming sick to her stomach.

“You’re allergic to us, Sis,” Walker decreed, but that wasn’t it at all.
 
If anything, Emma was allergic to herself Sometimes, she broke out in a rash, and she knew the reason why It was punishment for what she should have felt and didn’t.
 
Deep down, she wasn’t grateful.
 
That was the thing.
 
Deep down, she wished she was six and it was the day before her diagnosis, the hour when she still believed in things.

She was therefore expecting a horrible birthday, but she wasn’t expecting the package her mother sent up from Florida, where Emma’s parents had moved the year before.
 
It was a manila envelope that arrived, too large to be a birthday card, too small to be a sweater or a shawl.
 
When she’d turned twenty-eight, the year of her divorce, Emma had slept around.
 
It was a shameful year; one of her worst.
 
Her husband, Dave, had told her he felt as though he’d married a ghost. She was so unengaged, he blamed her for the way he’d turned to other women.
 
After they broke up, Emma had wanted to prove that she was indeed alive.
 
She had brought home men she didn’t care about, as if for spite.
 
She had done things she’d be too embarrassed ever to admit aloud, even to her best friend, Callie.
 
The worst instance?
 
She’d had sex with someone else’s husband in the couple’s marriage bed.
 
She’d seen a photograph of the other woman, the wife, and her children in the bedroom.
 
The woman had been laughing; she’d thought she was happy and afterward Emma had felt like writing her a note: Run away, that’s what she wanted to tell this man’s wife.
 
What could he possibly be worth if he slept with me?

Perhaps to heap more punishment upon herself, she went on to her next humiliation and took up with Alex Mott, who taught history, and who, in many ways, she despised for his rigidity and his contempt for his students.
 
All the same, she’d gone into the utility closet with him during school hours, and she’d dropped to her knees just to hear what he would sound like when he climaxed.
 
It wasn’t much, that’s what she’d discovered.
 
It sounded as though someone was strangling, although whether that someone was herself or Alex, she wasn’t sure.

During the year she’d been twenty-nine, Emma had had two dates and no sex.
 
Frankly, she hadn’t even been approached for sex, except for that horrible Alex, who looked at her in a way that made her feel like running.
 
Emma now had tremendous sympathy for the girls in her school who’d made the mistake of going too far with the wrong boy girls who’d had their phone numbers written on bathroom walls.
 
She thought people looked at her oddly during faculty meetings.
 
Perhaps they all knew she’d had degrading, unsatisfying sex with someone she despised in the utility closet, or perhaps they simply disapproved of the fact that she graded some of the girls in her class far too easily, giving A’s to those who didn’t deserve them, merely because they’d been treated unfairly in matters of the heart.

Emma took to running at the lunch hour just so she wouldn’t have to talk to Alex Mott or anyone else in the faculty cafeteria.
 
She felt like a shadow-woman, a vapor in the hallways at school, a fleeting bit of light racing along the river.
 
Thirty, she supposed, would mean the end of all human contact.
 
Especially once school let out.
 
Usually, she traveled in the summers, often to France, where she rented cheap apartments in August and went running for hours every day But this summer, she’d made no plans.
 
It seemed she hadn’t the fortitude to call a travel agent or phone a rental agent.
 
She had stopped answering her phone when it rang.
 
Who would be calling her?
 
What did she have to say to anyone?
 
So here she was in the heat of summer, alone on her birthday, which had fallen on a beautiful blue day She was sitting on the floor of her apartment, a woman of thirty who should have been glad just to be alive, with a manila envelope in her hands.
 
A gift from her parents.

There were papers inside the envelope, a mishmash of documents, signed by both her mother and father.
 
Emma wasn’t quite certain what it all was until she read the note her mother had enclosed: Happy birthday, baby girl.
 
This was always meant for you.

It was the farm they’d bought down at the edge of the Cape when Emma’s treatment was through.
 
The very edge of the world, Emma’s father used to say when they drove out from Boston for the summer, and, certainly, it had seemed that way.
 
It was the light that Emma remembered as so very different from city light, thin and yellow, with flecks of gold as the afternoon stretched on.
 
Apricot light, her mother used to call it.
 
Peach light.
 
Summertime light that made a person forget gray skies and city life.
 
The air was sweeter there, the cardinals were a deeper scarlet than their city cousins, and when the crickets called, it was possible to feel the vibration of their song.
 
Each time they opened the car doors and crossed the grass, it was as though they had stepped off the globe, as though the world had stopped turning, as though they might, for a little while at least, be safe.

Emma and her mother had made jam every summer, up until Emma was

fifteen and Walker was eighteen and the two put forth a unified front,

arguing to stay in town and get summer jobs.
 
Really, they were selfish

teenagers who wanted to hang out with their friends.
 
They were in the

bright apex of their lives, when the past was quite meaningless and the

present all that mattered.
 
Until then, making jam had been a

tradition, the one thing Emma and her mother would do together, even

when they weren’t getting along.
 
Every year it was a new variety:

blueberry, strawberry, blackberry, mint, corn relish, and, on autumn

weekends, Concord grape made from the wild vines beyond the pond.
 
But

that was ages ago.
 
For some time, Emma and Walker had been suggesting

their parents sell the place.
 
Walker went down with his family only

for a week or two in August, Emma hadn’t been there for years, and the

renters they’d recently had had been nothing but trouble.
 
There’d been

a fire one summer, when some idiots used the outhouse as a place to set

up their barbecue.
 
The poor old outhouse, unused, but still

appreciated for the valiant way it held up the woody trumpet vine, had

been turned to cinders.
 
The apple wood floors in the kitchen had been

re-finished so many times they were nearly worn away.
 
One summer some

children, whose family had rented the place for an entire month, had felt proprietary enough to carve their initials into the window ledges on the second floor, where Walker and Emma had had their bedrooms tucked under the eaves.

“I told you you were the favorite,” Walker said when Emma called to tell him of her unwanted windfall.