Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (27 page)

He continued to look at her, continued to smile. She wondered how much he knew. Then he said, “It's tough, I know, but maybe the thing to do is to let a fella make his own way in this world. You depend too much on other people, you can go a little soft.”

“It's just that I feel so bad for the boy.”

He nodded and lost his smile. He looked across the street, then came back to her again. “People go around shooting their mouths off like it's a known fact Dylan hurt Jesse somehow. I tell them, ‘If you know so damn much, where's the evidence?' It makes me so damn mad sometimes.”

“How are Dylan's parents doing?'

He shrugged. “About what you'd expect. At least the state boys aren't saying Dylan's involved.”

“The state police?” she said.

“They're handling it now, didn't you know that? Though
handling
might be too generous a word. They're pretty much convinced that Jesse's a runaway.”

“Really?” she said.

He nodded, then looked at the packet of screws in his hand. “And maybe he is, who knows? I mean who the hell knows, Charlotte? Who the hell knows?”

“And Livvie, she's . . . she's gotta be . . .”

“Yeah,” he said, “I imagine so.”

O
N a bright day midweek, in the middle of the morning after another night of soft but steady rain, Charlotte sat on her porch swing with a slender book of e.e. cummings's poetry resting on her lap. She had read from the book well into the night and had returned to it shortly after waking. Whether it was the effect of her brief conversation with Mike Verner the day before, or the poetry, or the long night of rain, or the bottle of pink merlot that had accompanied the rain, Charlotte had slept for five straight hours, from around four A.M. to twenty minutes past nine, but instead of feeling rested, she felt undone by the combination of influences; she felt lugubrious, as unfocused as a bear stirring out of hibernation too soon. From the shaded porch, the colors all around her seemed especially vibrant, the grass green and lush after the rain, the new buds scarlet and full, and though the air was light and clean and she kept telling herself,
How beautiful, how beautiful
, still she could not shake her listlessness, the lassitude, the amorphous longing and sadness that seemed to fit no name.

It was into this atmosphere that the sheriff 's car appeared out on Metcalf Road. It slowed as it approached Charlotte's driveway, then swung down the gravel lane and came toward her. Her heart did a little somersault, so she sat very still, she took slow and measured breaths.

Gatesman climbed out of his car, looked up at her, and smiled. As he ambled toward the porch steps he said, “Darned if it doesn't appear that spring might be coming after all.”

“Officially,” she said, “I believe it already has.”

“People around here don't put much stock in what's official,” he said.

It took her a few moments to realize that he was making a joke, poking fun at himself. “Ahh,” she said, and laughed softly, and leaned back against the porch swing.

He put a foot up on the first step, laid a hand atop the rail. “How's the painting coming along?” he asked.

She looked at the book open in her hand. Laid her finger atop cummings's title, “in Just-.” “It's coming along just fine,” she said.

He nodded, then shifted his gaze slightly to the left, to the darkness behind the screen door. Then he brought his gaze back to her, smiled again, and looked beyond her to the right, over her shoulder and out the back of the porch. She watched his eyes and tried to imagine what he was seeing—the field, the shaded woods.

He said, “I like that one of yours you call
Horses in the Snow
.”

She was momentarily surprised. “
Four Horses in the Snow
? Where in the world did you see that?”

He looked at her again and grinned like a mischievous boy. “I looked you up on the Internet.”

“You Googled me?”

“I started out looking up that writer you said I resemble.”

The pressure that had been building in her chest, that heavy ache, pushed up into her throat and escaped as an uncomfortable laugh. “Is that what you came here to talk about? My work?”

“Well,” he said, and looked off toward the trees again, “I was just thinking that I need to go over to Harrisburg one of these days. Thinking I might go this Saturday. And I just figured that if you hadn't made it down there yet for sushi or whatever, maybe you'd like to ride along.”

She began to tremble then. She was aware of the pressure in her sinuses, her throat constricting. She blinked, shivered, wondered,
Where is this feeling coming from?
Later, alone, she would identify a confusion of emotions, a tenderness for Gatesman, melancholy and wistful and grateful, plus an equally warm longing, even excitement, as she looked at his hands, his solidity and size, and his enviable stillness. But what made her tremble, what made her wrap her arms around her chest and shiver was the cold, fast river of fear gushing through all else.

He felt awkward in her silence and said, “It's all right if you're not interested. It was just an idea.”

She leaned forward over the book, her eyes on the book now—
mud-luscious
, she read,
whistles far and wee
—and she thought about saying, “I want to, I do.” And when she turned her head just enough to regard him, she almost did say it because it was so easy to imagine the pleasing scrape of his cheek against her own, to smell the clean, soapy smell of a man like Marcus Gatesman, a man who would never buy a ninety-dollar bottle of cologne, never pay more than fifteen dollars for a haircut, never even contemplate getting hair plugs or cosmetic surgery. She thought of all that in an instant, how wonderful it would feel to have him balanced above her, slowly pushing closer, the rush of heat radiating out from him and all through her to chase away, eradicate, obliterate the chill.

But it was all impossible and she knew it without a doubt. Bent over the book, holding on to herself, her head cocked to the side so that her eyes held his, she burst into tears.

He had no idea what to do. He started toward her, a tentative step. “Charlotte, I'm sorry, I . . . I didn't mean to say anything to upset you. I just . . . all I was doing was . . .”

She laid a hand over her eyes and kept sobbing. Her body shook and the swing shook and the chains creaked like rusty bones. When she heard him coming toward her again, two quick steps against the porch boards, she raised her other hand in the air, extended the palm toward him, and his footsteps ceased. “I'm okay,” she said. “Just please . . . please . . .”

“Do you want me to go?” he asked.

No!
she wanted to say, but instead she nodded once, then more adamantly again.

“Are you sure?” he said.

Each sob felt excruciating, a burst of agony in the center of her chest. She could no longer speak, could not look up at him. She felt capable of one action only and flung herself up off the swing, threw open the screen door, and all but dove into the house. She was halfway up the stairs before the screen door banged shut.

From her bed, face pressed to the pillow, she heard his car engine start. Heard the slow crunch of tires as he drove away.

Later that day she wrote a note of apology, sealed it in an envelope, and carried it to her mailbox. Halfway back to the house, the sobs bubbled up again.
Foolish foolish foolish woman
, they said, and she retrieved the note and crushed it in her hand and staggered back through the jagged sunlight to the concealing dimness of her house.

G
ATESMAN asked himself,
Why should you care?

The sunlight glared off the windshield and stung his eyes.

He told himself,
You should have asked, “Is it me you don't like, Charlotte? Or is there something else wrong?”

He told himself,
You shouldn't have left.

He told himself,
Just do your work.

S
OMETIMES the house was full of light and sometimes fully dark. The usual demarcations of day and night had lost all relevance to Charlotte, and most times she could not recall how many days had passed since she had last known what day it was. Charlotte seldom left her house unless it was to sit on the front porch or the rear patio, and once a day to gather the mail from her mailbox at the end of her driveway. She had no curiosity about the mail and, after a glance, usually dropped it unopened on her desk or the kitchen counter and collected it each day only so that Lyle, the postman, would not grow suspicious or concerned to see it accumulating in her mailbox.

Sometimes the sound of crows cawing at daybreak or dusk caught her off guard, seized her as if the sharp cries were as real and cold as knives. Other times she would sit waiting for the birds to cry out, and when they finally did she would be taken by an overwhelming grief. She had read that crows were known to hold funerals for their fallen comrades, that they would gather around the flightless body and caw loudly, keening and mourning, only to fall into a sudden and empty silence akin to silent prayer. Then, in an instant, in perfect unison, they would fly off, a cloud of dark sorrow returning to the trees or sky.

Sometimes she would have to read or watch a movie or turn music up very loud. Sometimes she would drink an entire bottle of wine with Sinatra's or Bublé's or Harry Connick, Jr.'s voice blasting through the rooms. She ordered Ambien and Valium from an online pharmacy in Canada, and Ambien and Prozac and Vicodin from another. Sometimes when she took Vicodin and Valium together she would sit in her studio with the curtains drawn and she would imagine that she had shoved the past and the future down the steps into her basement. She heard little from the future, so she believed that it had been killed in the fall, but she could hear the past on the other side of the basement door, breathing heavily, summoning strength for another attempt at shattering the dead bolt.

Always there was a pain in her chest the weight of a cannonball. Always there were shadows in the corners.