Fellow Mortals (26 page)

He lifts the sheet and finds the bandage dangling off his arm. There’s a damp gray stain where he placed it on the wound. The cut’s crusty at the edges, jellied in the slit, and his forearm throbs without his touching it at all. He slathers it in ointment and applies another bandage, then remembers it’s a holiday and pops a can of a beer. He drinks it with his coffee and a bowl of Rice Krispies, watching a smaller, cheaper TV until he finally has the energy to carry out his plan.

He hangs his khakis and shirt in the bathroom during his shower so the steam will get the wrinkles out. The bandage gets wet and needs another change, but he shaves without a nick and likes the style of his hair, newly cut, when he parts it with a soft-hold gel. His clothes are good to go and he knots his tie correctly first try, and after spitting out his mouthwash and cleaning up his shoes, he grabs a twelve-pack of beer and takes it to the car.

Straight to Ava’s. She’ll be lonely—major holiday alone. He can walk right up, ring the bell, and say
Hey
. She’ll be thrown at first, hanging back and patting at her gown, embarrassed by her looks in front of Billy and his tie.
Come on
, he’ll say.
Get yourself dressed. You shouldn’t be alone today, not for Thanksgiving
. He’ll take her out to eat and ask about her life and then she’ll start to understand, maybe with dessert, that it doesn’t have to be so hard for either one of them.

Her car is there, exactly like he figured it would be. He parks across the street and loses his nerve. He planned to save the beer in case she asked him inside after dinner, but he breaks open the box and chugs half a bottle, thinking it’ll seem more natural anyway, less a plan to get her drunk than just an extra box he happened to have in the car.

He scans the radio. A station’s playing “Jingle Bell Rock” and the chime of the guitar is like a warm winter balm. He finishes the beer and opens another, imagining the mall decked for Christmas in the morning with the shoppers and the smell of baked cookies in the food court. He thinks of going out with Sheri last season, splitting up to buy presents, meeting at Applebee’s for lunch. Hot chocolates on the road, fresh-cut tree. They strung the lights after dark and cuddled on the couch, drinking rum out of mugs and listening to music. He plays it all again, putting Ava into Sheri’s role—lying on the guest-room bed, sipping rum, watching her undress very slowly at the mirror.

He drums the wheel and kills the car and says, “Come on come on come on,” and then he walks across the street, dizzy from the beer and from the bright rush of air. His heart’s beating strongly when he creeps up the porch. He rings the bell and backs away—he doesn’t want to crowd her—but the bell just hangs. She doesn’t come. He rings again.

He cups his hand against the door and tries to see inside. The lights are out. He doesn’t hear a television on, and then he thinks about the dog and wonders where it is. It would bark if they were home—she must be at the Finns’. Of course she is, of
course
she is. They wouldn’t have abandoned her.

But neither of them drives and Ava’s car is right behind him. He leaves the porch and drives around the neighborhood, taking his time and checking every side street and alleyway, hoping to see her walking the dog and finding nothing but a lot of sleepy lights in all the homes. It’s the time of afternoon when people settle in. Roads empty out, meals are under way. You can stare in every house and no one notices or cares.

She isn’t here. She must be
there—
he must have picked her up this morning. Billy squeals a three-point turn and speeds away. He drives across town, skipping red lights and stop signs, pounding back a beer and picturing the cabin. She’d have walked right past when he was showering or sleeping. That’s assuming that she didn’t spend the night. He has to know. If he doesn’t, he’ll obsess about it, sitting home alone, thinking
right this second
Sam’s cutting her a second piece of pie, giving her a neck rub, saying everything—and more—that Billy meant to say.

*   *   *

Sam collects the Finns in his new pickup, a twelve-year-old Ford he purchased after selling his healthier but far less practical car. He mostly drives for groceries and supplies, the latter of which are often so big—his cast-iron cookstove an obvious example—that he’s usually forced to rent a truck anyway. The pickup has a cap and Wingnut’s behind them in the bed, free to roam and ludicrously happy, sniffing at the windows, pacing unsteadily and hip-checking walls.

A day of ecstasy for Wing—first a supermarket trip, then a morning out at Sam’s, where he ran around the cabin in the inch-high snow and marked a dozen trees, master of the woods. He ate a liver, not quite frozen, when Ava dropped giblets on the floor, and the smell of warm turkey’s had him ravenous for hours. Then he got to ride again to go and get the Finns, and now they’re all together, driving back to Ava, and he’s starting to believe that Henry might appear.

The Finns are wearing slacks and cashmere sweaters, Joan brown and green, Nan brown and orange. They’ve had their hair done and smell very faintly of salon. It’s overcast today, spiritless and pale with the roads wet-black and slushy in the gutters. They make it to Arcadia, where Sam’s prepared a flatbed, covered with a blanket, for the Finns to ride behind him on the ATV. Wing’s leashed between them and they have to take it slow, but despite the bumps and dips, Nan and Joan are happy on the passage up the trail, reminded of years they used to visit Christmas-tree farms, smitten with the woods’ spare beauty in the snow.

They give a heart-deep sigh when they come upon the cabin, admiring its tininess and firelit glow. Ava’s at the door and waves when they approach. She’s rosy from her work and wearing a blue vintage housedress, and even though she’s quite a bit thinner than she used to be, she doesn’t look drawn or malnourished anymore. She takes a pie from Joan and leans forward at the waist, giving each of the sisters quick little kisses on the cheek. There’s a smell of burning oak and turkey in the stove, newborn ice and frostbitten leaves. Sam frees Wing, who gallivants about, biting at a few stray flurries in the air.

“How’s the bird?” he asks.

“I don’t know.” Ava laughs. “We have another hour if you want to walk around.”

“You want to see the sculptures?”

“Of
course
,” Nan says with the tender irritation Henry used to prompt.

It won’t be easy for the Finns—the way is poorly beaten and the ground’s grown slippery—but they’re both wearing boots and winter coats and look determined. He offers each an elbow and glances back at Ava, guiding them along beyond the clearing, nice and easy.

He starts them at
The Reacher
, still grasping for the bough, the oldest of his work and so familiar to him now that he’s affected by the genuine amazement on their faces. It happens all the way without diminishment or talk, and every time another figure comes into view—partially obscured or suddenly appearing—Joan makes a sound, like an in-drawn “oh,” and points it out to Sam as if to savor
his
reaction.

Each of them is blanketed in fine clean flakes, delicate enough to scatter with a breath.

The Pusher
at the rock, now holding up an ice floe.

The Strongman
burdened with the extra weight of fall.

The Lover
like a sepulcher in some forgotten graveyard.

The Prisoner
with his heart-hole mended by the snow.

The Field of Limbs
, like a terrifying vision of the spring.

The Gazer
at the brook, water frozen to a trickle.

The defacement of
The Weaver
is concealed by a veil, and the great white web sparkles when it moves. They see the others he completed in the warmer weeks of autumn. There’s
The Carver
at his work, sinewy and twisted, in the process of sculpting out his own hidden legs. Then
The Fire
, which he shaped from a gathering of logs. He finished it in stages all throughout the summer, adding to the ripples and the ribbons of the flames. Now it stands enormous, sinuous, and dense before an evergreen bush representing smoke.

They reach the final figure that he carved before the freeze. It’s a freak growth that awed him when he found it: two giant oaks, one dead and one alive, fused together at the trunks and sixty feet tall. He carved a woman in the deadwood but didn’t cut the green. It’ll foliate in spring, unaffected by his work, and be a fully living sculpture with a canopy of leaves.

She’s climbing with a bare foot lifted off the ground, her other leg buried in the dirt, mid-calf. Her only clothing is a long, sheer gown, fine as silk, and her hair unspools down the middle of her back. She’s looking at the sky with a radiant expression, but her limbs have weight—there’s a gravity about her—and the roots around her ankle are inflexible and cruel.

By the time they come around and see the clearing just ahead, the woods feel numinous and gracefully alive. Joan’s reminded of her long-lost set of figurines, and even at the cabin she expects something more, certain that another strange marvel will appear. Even Nan feels hypnotized and doubtful of her senses. They’re reliant on his arms, glad of his support.

Back inside the cabin, Ava takes their coats. Nan stands frozen at the stove, her hands so numb they barely register the heat, until her fingers start tingling and her joints begin to thaw.

The table’s fully set and dominates the room. Wing’s underneath, watching everybody’s feet and waiting for the next dropped morsel on the floor. Turkey saturates the air, along with cinnamon and yeast, coffee and a myriad of spices and aromas. Nan helps Ava with the meal, organizing bowls and discussing the reliability of meat thermometers. Sam and Joan talk about the cabin, and the Finns’ own home, and the use of black pepper in a good pumpkin pie. A pair of deer pass the window and they all stop to watch, admiring the quick white flickers of the tails. Wing naps until Sam starts sharpening a knife. They heap the plate with breast meat and fill a bowl of stuffing, set the carrots and potatoes out, pass around rolls.

Nan says grace. It’s traditional and brief, a single-sentence prayer, but she almost starts crying when she says the word
bounty
. She watches Sam and Ava all throughout the meal. They sit together, opposite the Finns, a widow and a widower that look too young, too alive to play the roles. A stranger coming in would see them as a couple, with the nearness of their chairs, the automatic way they hand each other food, the subtle touch of elbows that neither seems to notice.

It worries Nan, thinking they’ll be devastated later when the night sets in and they remember who they are.
Let it go
, she decides.
Let it breathe for a while
. All five of them deserve an hour of reprieve.

26

The Carmichaels are due at the restaurant in less than an hour. Peg wants to leave early in case there’s holiday traffic but Danny’s been sitting on the toilet for the last twenty minutes when he ought to be tying his shoes.

“Get off before you give yourself a rash!” she hollers through the door, with the same breaking-point tone she used on Bob when he left his whiskers in the sink, and on Ethan, moments ago, when he groused about putting on a belt.

“I want to hear a flush in ten, nine, eight…,” she says, faster than actual seconds, and when she gets to three and hasn’t heard the toilet paper roll, she opens the door and walks right in.

Danny’s wide-eyed with fear, tears streaming down his cheeks, standing at the sink in his little shirt and tie. His pants are on the towel rack over the heat vent and his underwear is hidden in a ball behind the garbage. He wet himself and panicked. He’s been trying to correct it and he cries without a sound while his mother looks around and registers the scene.

Peg hugs him so abruptly that he sobs even harder. His fingers on her back make
her
cry, too. She contains it with a sniff and reassures him with a smile.

“It’s okay,” she says, closing the door before Bob or Ethan happens to wander by. She gets him undressed and puts him into a quick warm shower. Once he’s toweled off, she helps him with his shirt and tie, kisses him twice, and checks his pants. Even in the dryer they’ll retain the smell of urine so she folds them up and says, “You’ll have to wear your jeans.”

Danny almost starts to cry again.

“It’ll be cool,” she says, assuring him it’s really very stylish. “You’ll look like a teenager. If Dad or Ethan ask, we’ll say the slacks didn’t fit.”

She gets the change of clothes and he’s immediately calm, and then she sneaks his pants into the washing machine and follows him up to the boys’ shared bedroom.

“I want to talk to you two,” she says, and whether it’s her mildness of voice or Danny’s lack of worry, Ethan comes to her with confidence—a slightly bigger version of his brother, handsome in his dress clothes and old, so much older than she comfortably admits. They look at her together and she kneels on the carpet, holding hands with each of them and turning face-to-face.

“I’m sorry for everything that happened this year. I wish I could have kept you from it all,” Peg says. “I know you think that I was mean to Mr. Cooper. I know you’re mad about the tree house and all my other rules…”

They shake their heads because they’re young and she’s their mother, not from honesty. She understands the difference and continues all the gentler.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I don’t expect you to like every one of my decisions. But I worry you’re afraid of me … afraid to disappoint me. And you shouldn’t be afraid of that. I love you more than
anything
.”

They hug her, both at once, in an awkward clutch of arms.

“Does this mean we can use the tree house again?” Ethan asks.

“No.”

“Can we order two desserts?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Why does Danny get to wear jeans?”

“I peed my pants,” Danny says, smiling in his shame.

Peg tenses when they openly discuss it, very crudely, but instead of redirecting them she watches them together, how they laugh and seem to instantly forget her in the fun.