I see you everywhere (4 page)

∞

i slept till eleven, infuriating myself. Clem was gone, but she’d left out that eccentric bread, cream cheese, maple butter, and coffee in a brand-new Swedish coffeemaker. I poured a cup and took her note onto the front porch. The house wasn’t far from the street, but thanks to Aunt Lucy’s hands-off approach to the landscape, it was hidden by holly trees that had knit their branches into a daunting fortress. Clem had made plans with two guys named Hector and Ralph, and did I mind? My first reaction was,
So what if I do?
The second was,
Which
guy is she involved with?
Clem is never without a boyfriend or two. She’s not beautiful, exactly, but she’s tall and strong and has the kind of hair—

dark and dense—that lends itself to tossing. She’s physically daring, if rarely graceful, runs and throws like the boys (fast and far, which they so predictably mention, tripping over themselves with adulation). I’m not so tall, not so strong, and my hair, ruly and just barely blond, doesn’t toss. I decided that whichever guy was hers, I would do my best to steal him, just for a night. I was determined if not optimistic. After toast and more coffee, I toured the house. Clem was staying in Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 21
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the bedroom next to mine. It looked like a college lair: whirlpool of sheets, sneakers, and books. Clem’s books are detective novels and nature guides: everything you ever wanted to know (or not) about dolphins, comets, birdsong, and the endangered flora of northern New England. The dresser was strewn with earrings—wooden tigers, silver parrots, soapstone Eskimo fish—and the floor with bikini underpants, glossy and black like her hair.

But Aunt Lucy’s room was where I wanted to snoop. Partly because I wanted to see what treasures, if any, were left behind, but mostly because she’d always been such an enigma. After her sister’s death—sometime back around World War Two—Lucy started sleeping in the den, off the parlor. The furniture was heavy and dark, the linens starched and wedding white. The quilt on the bed was white on white, a grapevine, one of Aunt Vetty’s. The wallpaper, a mesh of spidery ferns, gave the room its only color.

In the past, the dresser had held only practical things. Lucy did not like displaying photographs, least of all any including herself. So, no effigies of family on the dresser, but tucked in the frame of the mirror was a picture of Jimmy Carter, a recent cover from
Time
magazine. On the lace runner below, among soft-bristled brushes and silver-capped jars, a cassette player loomed like an urban intruder, one of those new macho machines resembling a suitcase. Some of the tapes stacked beside it were classical—Chopin, Mozart, Puccini—but the ones on top included Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, the Grateful Dead. When I pushed play, Van Morrison filled the room, a song that went off in my memory like a flashbulb: back in college, a picnic in Boston Garden, roast beef subs, screw-top chablis. The swan boats gliding in a blur behind willows.

“These Dreams of You.”

Over the bed hung a kite, a dragon with a twisting tail, suspended from the ceiling with hooks and fishing line. On the side table, a wind-up alarm clock had stopped at 9:21.

The dresser drawers were empty, except for the brittle paper liners patterned with tiny violets.

“The jewelry,” said Clem, “is in the bank.” She stood in the doorway. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 22 22

Julia Glass

I closed the top drawer. “That’s not what I was doing.”

“I know.” Oddly (mercifully?), she didn’t sound sarcastic. “I’m trying to hang on to her, too. All the little details. The quirks. Really, though, she didn’t leave much of herself—her
self
—behind.” Clem walked back into the parlor and looked around. “She used to make me lunch. I suppose we’ll have to go out. We have a lifetime supply of bread, but nothing to go between it.”

“I think I saw soup in a cupboard,” I said. “When I was looking for sugar.”

Clem laughed. “That’s right. You take
sugar.
”

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh, just everything.”

“Death is funny?”

“Sometimes, Louisa, yes. As a matter of fact. But that’s not what I meant.”

∞

“avian aerobics,” I explained to Louisa. “Physical therapy.”

Ralph held a peregrine falcon while I exercised the newly healed wing, flexing it away from the body and back, away and back. Lance (Ralph gave all the birds Round Table nicknames) knew the routine by now, but still you had to be careful. Back in June, a barn owl had nailed me. I thought he was small enough for me to handle alone; next thing I knew, he snatched a leg free and sank his claws a good inch into my arm. I managed not to scream; a struggle would have ripped me to shreds. Hector, precise and silent as a surgeon, pulled the foot free one sickle-shaped talon at a time.

Louisa was finally out from under her portable storm cloud. She seemed thrilled by everything we showed her. But she was weirdly overdressed—in this practically see-through white dress, long gold earrings that Lance would gladly have swiped in a flash; I could see his cold laser glance captivated by the glint as she laughed. She stood back when I Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 23
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brought him out and turned down my offer to help feed our orphaned cygnets.

Ralph explained how Lance had been caught in a ground snare set for wolves, how he’d fought and broken his wing in two places. Lance is one of Ralph’s miracles. Unlike most of our birds, which end up in preserves and zoos, he’d get released back into the wild.

“He’s magnificent,” Louisa said to Ralph.

“They drove this guy down from Canada; they know we don’t fool around,” said Ralph. He put Lance back in his cage.

“Tell her about the redtails,” I said.

This was our favorite success story, but really it was Ralph’s. The previous fall, before I arrived, he had rescued a female red-tailed hawk with a torn foot. She’d been a star inmate at the sanctuary when I came. Ralph adored her, but he was careful not to tame her. Two weeks after I got there, she was ready to go home. “So we drive her in on this long bumpy road,” said Ralph, “in a big cage in the back of the truck, and she’s bouncing like crazy, and she’s calling out in protest—or that’s what I think till I cut the engine and I hear the calling back, and it’s coming from up ahead. And we look up and we see . . .” Tears began to fill Ralph’s eyes, the way they did whenever he told it. “It’s her mate. He’s waited all this time. Eight months! They’re calling back and forth—it’s earsplitting—and then we can actually see him up there. We let her go, and she flies up to meet him and . . .” He lifted one hand in a soaring motion.

“Off into the sunset,” I said. “Romeo and Juliet.” I got teary, too.

“Except with a happy ending,” said Louisa. “Wow.”

Ralph wiped his eyes. “I can’t believe what I
do.
”

After I met Ralph, it took me a while to figure out why he’s so likable, so effortlessly cool: it’s because he’s brilliant at what he does but without a speck of modesty, false or real. He never stops asking questions. Hector’s just as smart, but he’s shy. He has this kind of honest stealth and a soft voice that transfixes the birds into stillness whenever he holds them. A matter of soul, not technique.

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The band wouldn’t go on till ten, so after we locked up the station, we took a six-pack and a bottle of wine to the lake. We found an empty stretch of smooth gray rock, its surface striped with raised white welts as thin as twine. Louisa told Ralph about her pottery, how she’d been in a bunch of shows, though never her own. I’d seen the announcements on the fridge at our parents’ house. Louisa never sent them to me. Most of her pots are tall and curvy, like skinny people in a fun-house mirror. When you see them, you can’t resist smiling. You’d think they were made by someone who’s perpetually sunny.

At the end of telling us about her life, Louisa sighed loudly. “But the truth is,” she said, “I can’t stop missing the East. I’m hopelessly Yankee.”

And how,
I could’ve said. But I said, “So move back. Before you fall for the wrong guy and get stuck there. Isn’t Santa Barbara like the capital of golf ? That’s all you need: some golfer who can’t see his white shoes over his beer gut.”

Ralph laughed. Louisa gave me her iron-maiden look. “
You
try to change coasts when you’re always on the verge of broke.”

“I
am
always broke.”

“You’re a student,” she said. “That doesn’t count. Dad bails you out.”

“So, he’d bail you out, too.”

“I wouldn’t let him.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “You wouldn’t . . .”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“You shouldn’t be so proud, is what I meant to say.” I’d been about to say that she didn’t seem inclined to let anyone do much of anything for her.

“What I am is practical. I have to make a living. Save some money.”

“No offense,” I said, “but making pottery is practical?”

“Shouldn’t you be in New York?” asked Hector before Louisa could answer me. “Isn’t that the place to be an artist, to be taken seriously?”

“I like New York, but”—she groaned—“I wanted something different. Well, different’s what I got. Different as in irrelevant.” She shrugged. “But I’ll figure it out. I don’t mean to complain. And you”—

she turned to include Ralph—“you guys are an inspiration.”

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She asked Ralph about his thesis. He’s studying birds that nest on Lake Michigan, how pesticide residues weaken their eggshells. Tests of local topsoil show evidence of, among other poisons, a compound that was used to kill boll weevils ten years before and no farther north than Georgia. Louisa nodded sincerely, saying things like “Incredible” and

“That is such important work” and “People have no idea.” Her aggressive flattery put me on edge. I interrupted. “You know what blows me away about Ralph? He’s run the Iditarod.”

“Once,” said Ralph, his mouth full of pretzel. “It was fantastic, but once is plenty. I like my toes and fingers very much. I find them useful.”

He wiggled his salty fingers in front of his face. He glanced at Hector, who blushed and smiled.

“The what?” said Louisa.

“It’s a thousand-mile race by dogsled,” I said. “It makes the Boston Marathon look like a game of Old Maid.”

I started to describe how the route retraces the relay that carried a vial of diphtheria serum to snowbound Nome back in 1925, but Louisa cut me off by turning to Ralph and saying, “Did you win?” This is so her, the A student ranking everything in sight.

“Second to last, but you had better believe it, I finished.”

Louisa took off her gold sandals and stepped into the water, ankle deep. The low sun shone through her dress. “Do you realize how beautiful this is?” she said, gazing across the lake. She looked good—sexy; tall and curvy like one of her pots—but she also looked absurd, like a Greek goddess who’s dropped in to make a little trouble for the mortals below. Ralph punched me on the arm. “Hey, tomorrow. Let’s take her out to the gorge. It’s supposed to be a scorcher. I’ll bring the boys. And some tunes. You bring lunch.”

“Oh. Like, we’re women, so we do food?”

“How about, I’m your boss so you do what I say? I’m the one with the four-wheel drive? Clement dear.” He’d heard Lucy call me that.

“What gorge?” asked Louisa.

“A place we go when we’re tired of the lake,” Hector told her. Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 26 26

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“When we want a touch of danger,” said Ralph in a menacing whisper.

“People dive off this tall rock,” I said. “It’s incredibly stupid, but too much fun. I did it once, for the rush. A guy was killed last year when he boomeranged back in midair and smashed his skull. He thought he could do a somersault. On top of stupid, he was totally trashed.”

“Didn’t someone get sued?” Louisa looked queasy. Ralph said, “This is Vermont, baby. The risks you take are all your own. You break it, you bought it.”

Everyone laughed except Louisa.

∞

i get weary just looking at dreadlocks. I keep thinking, How
heavy
is all that hair? How on earth do you wash it? We sat near the stage, so the music was loud enough to boil your blood, and the smell of dope was a fourth dimension. I’m no big fan of Jah, whoever he is, but I did my best to feign a glow. Clem must have caught on when I failed to sing along with the Natty Lads’ cover of “No Woman, No Cry.” She suggested (she had to yell) that we head over to a bar called the Galaxy, which had, she said (yelled), a “jukebox for white girls.”

Well, I said to myself, be what you are.

On the way over, the guys walked together in front of us. Clem whispered to me, “Are you just alone too much these days or what? You are like so . . . I don’t know, antsy?”

“Is that a question?” I asked.

“Well, see what I mean?” she said loudly. Ralph turned around to smile at us, then waited to throw an arm around Clem’s shoulders. And then we were, thank heaven, at the bar. Because she was right, about my being alone too much. I knew I was being obnoxious, and I didn’t care, but what if I couldn’t have been otherwise? What if I’d tried to be agreeable but couldn’t? When Marvin Gaye came on, Ralph asked me to dance. He spun me around with such certainty and speed that I was dizzy, but in that happy way when you know you’re in the hands of a man who won’t bungle the Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 27
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moves. Who dances so well that you do, too, no matter how clumsy you are. He had to be the one, I decided—the way he put his arm around Clem and whispered in her ear—but I liked him, too. I liked the way his thick dark mustache moved when he talked, I liked the passion he had for the minutiae of his work: measurements, in millimeters, of feather-shaft diameter, egg circumference, the width of fledglings’ skulls. At first I’d thought of it as a game—a taste of revenge—but now, with the wine singing in my ears, I decided, both overjoyed and mournful, that I was falling for the guy. That morning I’d worked out a scheme: Saturday the view, Sunday the kill, Monday the jewels, Tuesday split town to visit my parents. Now it didn’t look so easy. Between his deft moves, Ralph liked to talk, so he sounded a little breathless. “Nice you two are friends.” Spun me out, snapped me in. “I have a brother in Chicago, can’t stand the sight of me. Once in a while I try again, but no cigar.” Under his arm I soared, as if cast on a reel of silk ribbon.