Here on Earth (24 page)

Richard blinks, as if by doing so he could bring into focus a vision other than the one Gwen is offering.

“I’m sorry,” Gwen says. She feels as though everything is her fault. She’s only fifteen, why does she have to feel so damned responsible? She can’t even tell her father about Hank, for fear he’ll disapprove. When her father leaves the room, to make a fire in the fireplace, Gwen decides to finish the coffee he started, and she brings him a cup, with a little milk and a little more sugar, the way he likes it.

Richard gratefully accepts the coffee, and for one delightful instant he has the sense of being fortunate. She is a good girl, he sees that. Gwen pulls up a stool for herself beside the easy chair where he’s settled. She’s a good person.

Sister sits by the window and barks, and Richard finds himself wondering if Gwen is wrong about March, if perhaps that’s her at the door now. The visitor, however, is only a rabbit, one who brazenly sits on the porch in order to escape the bad weather.

“We never had rabbits around here when I was growing up,” Richard tells his daughter. “There were too many foxes for that. If you walked through the woods at night, you’d see them. Especially at dusk. At first you’d think you were imagining footsteps.”

Sister has forsaken the door and come to join them, stretching out on the braided rug.

“Everything would be gray, even the horizon. And then you’d see it, all at once.”

“A fox.” Gwen smiles.

Richard nods. “Once in a while, in the winter, after a snow, you’d come upon a dozen or more of them, and then you’d know something was happening that no human could understand, or even recognize. They call it a foxes’ circle, a meeting held as if there were a board of directors of the woods. I think about the foxes’ circle when I do fieldwork. There’s world upon world out there, with different rules.”

“I wonder why they all disappeared.”

“They found a single rabid specimen one season and that was the end of foxes on this hill.”

It was the year when Hollis left town. Richard recalls that each time he came to call on March, he’d hear gunfire in the woods. He was grateful to Hollis back then; in leaving, Hollis had given Richard an opportunity he’d never guessed he would have. Funny the things you remember. Richard definitely remembers that March would smile whenever she opened the door and saw him. He knows he didn’t imagine that.

“When I was really little,” he says now, “maybe five or so, my sister found an orphaned fox. She kept the kit in her bedroom, secretly of course, because my mother would have had an outright conniption and made us all submit to a series of rabies shots if she ever caught sight of the thing. My sister kept an opossum one year, and then there was a crow with a broken wing that I found—she took care of that crow for months. My mother went crazy when she discovered wild animals had been in the house, but my sister was surprisingly strong-willed.”

“Belinda.”

“That’s right.” Richard regrets not telling Gwen more about his family, but for the longest time his personal history seemed extremely distant. Now, it’s back. All he has to do is listen and he can hear gunfire in the woods. He can see the way the crumbs fell down on the ground whenever his sister reached for the stale bread she kept in her coat pockets, ready should she happen to discover some homeless or injured creature while walking in the woods. This is what Richard thought when she wrote to tell him she had married Hollis. Only this time the creature she’d chosen to care for was much more dangerous than an opossum or a crow or a fox.

“When the kit was nearly full grown, Belinda let it into the woods. But it kept coming back. You’d walk out the door, and there it would be. Or maybe it wasn’t a fox at all.” Richard places his coffee cup on the table and pets Sister’s head. “Maybe it was one of those dreadful red dogs people say were bred from foxes.”

“There are still some of those at Guardian Farm,” Gwen says.

“Yes.” Richard leans his head back against the soft fabric of the easy chair. He thinks this type of stuff is called chintz, but he doesn’t know for sure. “I’m not surprised. There were always dogs hanging around, begging. My sister always set out food for them. She was much too kindhearted.”

Richard has only begun to realize how tired he is, in spite of the coffee. He has a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, which makes him think he should call Ken Helm and go back to the airport right now, but he doesn’t. Instead, he falls asleep right there, in the chair. Gwen covers him with a blanket Judith Dale bought on a trip to Ireland taken with the Friends of the Library one summer. It pains Gwen to see her father sleeping in a chair, but what can she do? Shake him to consciousness? Tell him to flee?
Don’t hurt yourself,
is what you say to a child, not a parent, and a man like Richard Cooper is not prone to take other people’s advice, not once he’s made up his mind.

There’s a draft in the living room, and Sister curls up beside Richard’s feet. On the mantel, the old clock March’s father bought in Boston keeps time. The sleet continues until the roads are slick with ice and fallen leaves. It’s so bad that by the time the first pale light of morning begins to break through the clouds, March has to inch along on the back road in the old Toyota. She is staying with Hollis later and later; this time, as she was leaving, he pulled her back to him. Susie thinks he’s so evil, but he was concerned about March driving in such bad weather. People think they know him, but they don’t. They don’t know that he cries in his sleep, or that he needs to be comforted from the worst of his dreams, over and over again.

When March does finally get home, she has to carefully make her way up the frozen path, and hold on to the railing so as not to slip and break her neck on her way to the front door. She’s not taken a coat. She’s so hot these days; she’s burning up. All she’s wearing are jeans and a borrowed wool sweater of Hollis’s. She hasn’t bothered with underwear either; she’s much too overheated for even the flimsiest silk. Inside, the house feels stuffy and close; there’s the scent of coffee and of wet dog. There’s something else too, a faint odor of regret which is sifting over the floorboards and the rugs.

As soon as she walks into the room, she sees that the man she’s spent the last eighteen years with has come for her, and he appears exhausted by the effort. Richard looks so uncomfortable, folded up in that chair, in his best suit, which is now rumpled. The dog rouses and shakes itself from sleep, but Richard doesn’t hear the clink of its collar. He doesn’t hear March come closer, and crouch beside him. He’s dreaming about her though, and in his dream she is surrounded by falling leaves, each one a brilliant yellow, as if fashioned from pure gold.

Richard doesn’t wake until March takes his hand. As soon as he opens his eyes and looks at her face, he knows it’s over. She pities him, that’s what he sees, and pity is not what he wants.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to fly to San Francisco with me on Sunday?” Richard laughs. He was supposed to keep this idea to himself until they’d spoken at length, but obviously he can’t do that.

In spite of herself, March laughs. He never did like small talk.

“Should I take that as a yes?” Richard asks.

“It’s not that I don’t love you,” March says.

Richard cannot help but wonder how many times this phrase has been spoken, and how many people who’ve recited these words have believed they were being kind. What makes a person love another? That’s what Richard wonders, as March tells him that she’ll be staying on, and that she never meant to hurt him. Are March’s dark eyes the element that always gets to him? Is it the way her beautiful mouth twists to one side when she smiles?

Richard goes upstairs to grab a few hours of sleep in March’s bed. When he wakes, the bright sunshine which blasts through the ice-covered windows is blinding. He gets his suit, having draped his trousers and jacket over a chair so he will appear presentable when he goes to the cemetery. He wants to look as though nothing is wrong when he goes downstairs and kisses his daughter good morning, when he speaks cordially to March and asks if he can use the Toyota in her driveway to run his errands. March has been crying; her face is all puffy and her eyes are red. Looking at her, knowing that she’s been with Hollis and will continue to be with him, brings Richard immense sadness.

What would another man do? Carry her off, make demands, beat her until she gave in to him, stand there and cry? Richard Cooper is the same man he was before this happened to him. He’s the man who leaves a check on the kitchen counter because he worries that his wife will run out of cash. He’s the man who brings flowers to the graves of his loved ones, and says a silent prayer for each one. It’s the same Richard Cooper who trades stories with Jimmy Parrish about racehorses who’ve been dead a quarter of a century or more over lunch at the Lyon Cafe, who calls for another round of beers and some chili-cheese fries, then makes certain he grabs the check before Jimmy can reach into his pocket for his own leather wallet. He’s the man who drives to Guardian Farm late in the day and parks in the driveway where he has a good view of the house where he grew up, despite the uncertain November light.

When he sees Hollis slam through the front door, on his way to collect bills and circulars from a mailbox set out where Richard’s mother’s roses used to grow, Richard doesn’t step on the gas and careen through the fence to run his rival down. Instead, he watches as some Canada geese pass by, high overhead. In the pastures there are still a few red dragonflies, the kind Richard used to collect when he was a boy. He used to keep them in a jelly jar, until he realized that whenever he caught one he damaged its wings, which marked it for death. That’s what he thinks about now as he watches Hollis, who has lifted one hand to shade his eyes against the sun as he tries to figure out who’s there, parked in March’s car. By the time Hollis does understand who it is in his driveway, Richard will have already made a U-turn. There’s no point in staying any longer. He’ll leave a note for Gwen if she’s not at the house when he stops to drop off this car, then call Ken Helm for a ride. He intends to trade in his tickets for a plane that leaves tonight. He’d just as soon sleep somewhere in midair, high above Chicago or soaring over the Rockies, as he would in someone’s easy chair.

Gwen is in the barn when the Toyota makes that U-turn. She knows that her father will be gone before she gets back to Fox Hill. Standing there. watching him, she feels like crying. Maybe she should have insisted on going on his errands with him; maybe she should have tried to talk her mother into leaving. Gwen now considers herself to be a guilty party. She didn’t say,
I want to go back with you.
She didn’t take his side. Difficult as it is to admit, she wants to be here, saddling Tarot, meeting Hank later in the day at the library, where’s he’s working on his senior thesis. Traitor that she is, she doesn’t run after her father. She lets Tarot eat sugar from her hand while waiting for Hollis to go back inside the house. That’s one thing she’ll do to honor her father—she’ll avoid Hollis at all costs. When Hollis has finally slammed the door shut behind him, Gwen leads the horse out of the barn. She’d planned to walk him to the sunniest pasture, where the ice has already melted, but seeing her father makes her want to go miles away.

The footing is too slippery for riding, but Gwen doesn’t care. She’s completely unschooled and does everything wrong, but it doesn’t matter with a horse like Tarot. He makes his way over the ice, then onto the packed dirt in the driveway. Gwen feels sure enough of him to give him his head, and let him take charge of matters. When he goes into the woods, right before the devil’s corner, Gwen doesn’t protest. Tarot walks quickly over brambles and fallen leaves; when they pass under low branches, Gwen ducks and rests her face against his neck. She can feel his blood, just beneath his skin; when he breathes, the air fills with smoke. He’s like a dragon, ancient and fearless. He doesn’t spook at anything, not when pheasants fly out of the bushes, not when they come upon a deer, drinking from an icy stream.

Gwen can only guess what they must have done to this horse to make him mean enough to kill two men. He was a machine, a winning machine. Hay in, shit out, and run like hell. Run so fast they can never catch you. She has seen marks in Tarot’s flesh. He’s been beaten, long ago, in another life that will always be a mystery. History is personal, Gwen understands that now. All you are seeing is what’s before you, the rest is guesswork. Still, she believes that he was beaten with a chain, at least once. There’s a circular indentation on his flank, and each time she runs her hand over that wound, Tarot throws his head back in a move so serious, so potentially killing, that Gwen’s respect for him is renewed.

Now, as he jumps a fallen tree, Gwen holds on for dear life. She tells herself riding Tarot isn’t any more dangerous than being on the back of Josh Krauss’s out-of-control Honda roaring down the El Camino at midnight. All the same, she closes her eyes when they come to the thickest part of the woods, and when she opens them again, the Marshes are before her, all gold and brown. Herons rise from the grass. Ice covers the inlets. They’re trotting through frozen mud now, over hermit crabs and minnows. Maybe it’s the old apple tree which calls to the horse, or maybe it’s the wild berries; either way, Tarot has come to graze in the Coward’s front yard.

“Not here,” Gwen tells the horse. “Let’s go.”

When Tarot refuses to move, Gwen kicks him, but she hasn’t the heart to do anything more than tap, and Tarot doesn’t even notice her boots against his flanks. He’s come upon a pile of frozen apples, and Gwen had better settle down, since he’s not leaving anytime soon.

The Coward sees the girl as she slips off the horse, and for a moment, he thinks it’s Belinda out there, who used to ride this same horse when she came to visit him. Other people brought food and clothes—Judith Dale, of course, and Louise Justice occasionally—but Belinda brought him what he truly yearned for. Photographs of his son. School papers. Spelling tests. Paintings of boats and of starry nights. The first tooth his boy lost, which the Coward still keeps in a saltshaker beneath his bed. Locks of pale hair, retrieved from the kitchen floor after a haircut.