The Rest is Silence (13 page)

“I hardly saw you at all. We didn't go up Cadillac Mountain. We went to the beach once. What's gotten into you?”

I held my breath and waited.

“We used to have so much fun,” he continued, “and now all I do is sit at the campfire, listening to ball games and waiting for you to come back smelling like cigarettes and beer.”

“I wasn't smoking.”

I finished the letter and mailed it to Katharine as soon as I got home, inviting her to come and visit me that fall. Her response came a few weeks later. It was short and had none of the warmth I had been expecting. I mailed two more letters after that one, but after a lot of silence and a long winter of heartache, I had to admit that what we shared meant more to me than to her.

*

This morning I hear meowing outside my tent. Lina and the cat are making breakfast. Her paws pound the path when she runs.

“Come on, Thunder!” Lina calls to her, and the cat has a name.

Our water situation is about to improve, though it will be expensive. This morning we're having a well drilled. The rig is part of a heavy truck that makes two ruts we'll have to fill. It takes out the corner of one of our carrot beds as it wends its way over the bumpy land to the place we've identified for drilling. Lina's water-witching friend, Jake, came yesterday and dowsed an underground stream seventy feet below the surface. I show them where Jake said to drill and they begin cutting into the volcanic rock.

After they have gone through fifteen segments of pipe at ten feet per, I start pacing. They charge ten dollars per foot. I have heard stories of these rigs never hitting water and you still have to pay. I tell the boss he had better call it off as I won't be able to pay for any more but he says he's going to keep going and not to worry about the cost. They hit water at two hundred and ten feet, I give them the money I had buried, and Lina and I are left with a capped well. We both wonder what we are going to do with water that far down.

She suggests we measure where the water is now, and for some reason it's only seventy feet down, just as Jake said it would be. We have no electricity, so I had hoped to be able to use a hand pump, which functions to a depth of thirty feet or so.

I buy a solar panel, a spool of eight-gauge wire, and a pump. We wrap the excess thirty feet of wire around the well casing. We connect the wire to the panel, aim it at the blazing sun, and wait. Nothing.

Lina goes to find Martin, figuring he may be able to troubleshoot. He takes a look at our setup, unhooks the wire from the panel leads, and unwinds it from the casing. He cuts the thirty feet of wire, telling us that we have inadvertently created a magnet that prevents the flow of electricity. When he reattaches the wires to the leads we can hear the pump, faint, and within a minute a steady flow of the best water I've ever tasted is pouring onto the ground. We whoop and dance. I even hug Martin, who is grinning. Lina grabs the pipe and sprays us.

On sunny days we flip a switch and have water, clear and beautiful, which we store in gallon pickle jars.

In early July our hard-necked rocambole garlic is more than two feet high. We snap off the curled tops so the bulbs will fatten up. We begin construction on my cabin. We work it out on graph paper first. It will be ten by sixteen feet. All my life I have been schooled from books. I have memorized, and forgotten, thousands of equations, names, dates. Little of that has prepared me to grow food, let alone build a cabin. When I came here I knew nothing about pumping water from a well, plumbing, mixing concrete, or how to frame a window. In the past year I have learned the extent of my ignorance.

We design the cabin with four windows and two doors. We buy the studs from the Reagh's family mill down in Margaretsville. Like the people in this part of the world, the lumber is honest. A two-by-four is two inches by four inches, not one-and-a-half by three-and-a-half like they sell at the building supply store in Middleton.

“Good, sturdy lumber from good, sturdy Christians,” Lina says as we haul the lumber on our shoulders from the road, piece by piece. We build forms for the foundation posts and fill them with concrete we mix with a shovel in the wheelbarrow. We saw every board by hand, pound every nail with a hammer, and have the floor and four walls up by the end of July. It is magnificent to behold something we have built with our own hands.

I am satisfied staying at home, listening to Lina's voice or nothing other than the wind or the chatter of red squirrels in the woods. From the start, however, Lina has wanted to be involved in the community. She makes friends with people I haven't even met, folks who live down by the bay or a good bike ride away, along the dirt roads that traverse the top of the mountain. They are almost all Come From Aways like us: aging hippies, back-to-the-landers, young people escaping urban life for a summer of growing some of their own food, pot heads, and those escaping a world they can't comprehend. Sometimes I go with her to a music jam or a kitchen party, but I get bored and want to be home where it is quiet.

One night we go to a campfire at the land co-op where she met Jake. It is a fifteen-minute bike ride past Art's place, not far from the shore in East Margaretsville. I sit across the fire from her, pulling the label off the bottle of Keith's that has gone warm in my hand. I feel a tight coil in my gut as I watch her laugh with a boy I met for the first time an hour ago. Charles has a ponytail and a hairy face. I try not to stare as he repeatedly reaches over to touch her arm while he talks. He puts his jacket across her shoulders when she mentions that she's chilly. Though I'm not inclined to jealousy, I don't trust this guy.

Our bicycle tires crunch the dirt as we head home in the dark along the ridge road. There are fields on both sides of us. She is singing ahead of me. We walk our bikes along the path to our garden then say goodnight as we go separate ways to our tents.

14

New York City

Benny's feet rested on the windowsill and she had her back to the lab bench. A warm cup of coffee in a paper cup in her right hand, a tedious journal article in her left. Snowflakes rushed past the window, yellow-bright as they caught the streetlights. She was glad to be inside where it was warm. She yawned. Success in research meant long hours at the bench. She dropped her feet and went through the doorway to see Leroy. She stood by the window, looking down on the street.

“I hate it when it gets dark this early. The only thing I like about this time of year is skating.”

Leroy continued to mix reagents in Eppendorf tubes at his bench. The traffic crawled on the slushy street, taking people homeward or out for drinks and dinner.

“We should go out for dinner,” she said.

“Can't,” he said, not looking at her. His lab coat had coffee stains down the front and journal references and phone numbers written in black Sharpie on its left sleeve. He reached to vortex a tube. “Where do you skate?”

“In the park at Wollman.”

He had tacked up a quotation from
Frankenstein
on the corkboard beside his desk:

What glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!

Beside that, a Canadian Cancer Society sticker:
Cancer can be beaten
. The “can” was crossed out and covered with “WILL,” also written with a black Sharpie. What he referred to as hopeful naïveté had brought him to the bench. He had told her that he had a mission to contribute to the fight to cure cancer because of his mother, who died when he was twenty-one. He had been embarrassed during his grad school interviews at the University of Toronto when he brought this up. He was told by the principal investigator interviewing him that such generalizations were innocent and emotional and had no place in the lab.

“Does it bother you to use animals in your research?” she asked.

He said it did a bit and that he never got used to killing them. Those mice that didn't succumb to the cancers they were encouraged to grow were eventually dispatched with a whack on the neck with a metal ruler. The ones that got cancer suffered, but it was work that needed to be done. With Leroy's mind and focus he was able to discover aspects of mouse genetics that nobody had known before. He told Benny that he relished these discoveries. They might be minor, some were cul-de-sacs, but they were his discoveries and his cul-de-sacs. His work involved observing the effects of DNA-damaging agents on DNA repair in normal and mutant mice. He bombarded them with X-rays, vinyl chloride, aflatoxin, UV light. These led to mutations, chromosomal breaks, and deletions of whole sequences of DNA. Most of the mice developed cancer, and he had to kill those. Some mice survived, and one, an agouti he named Chico, survived no matter what he threw at it. From Chico, he cloned a DNA repair gene, which he called AMF1. That gene, and the functional analysis of the protein that AMF1 produced, would be sufficient for his thesis. He looked forward to finishing his grad work, and not only because he disliked the city. It would mean he could go home and continue his research to find practical applications. Molecular biology gave him hope. His colleagues were developing the weapons to slay genetic demons. If they could prevent mutations from happening in the first place, or repair them after they occurred, cancer would be beaten. It was cellular eugenics, and a fight he took personally.

“But it's practical work. I don't want to just add to a pile of information.”

“As we're doing?” she suggested, raising one of her eyebrows.

“No, from what I hear, Leach is going to solve the world's environmental woes.”

She laughed. They had both sat in on departmental seminars in which Leach had waxed poetic about his microbes. He bragged that they would be able to clean up everything from oil spills to nuclear waste, from dioxin in rivers to CFCs in the air. The more soiled our nest, the sexier bioremediation became as a research topic. Yet, Benny and Leroy knew results were coming slower than her professor's promises.

Leroy bought a pair of Bauers and he and Benny went to Wollman Rink in Central Park that night and almost every Friday night that winter.

The next afternoon Benny stood in Leroy's doorway, shivering, water dripping from her hair onto her shoulders and down her back. Her hands were cold and pink.

“Come in.”

Warm air blew in from the vent, a constant bronchial exhalation loud enough to cover the splattering rain and the hiss of traffic where she had been running. The crazy wind drove heavy rain first in one direction, then another.

“Annika said she'd be there when I got back, so I didn't take my keys. I've got to get warm.” She peeled off the sweatshirt, her damp long-sleeved cotton shirt, and a T-shirt, leaving her white running bra covering pale skin, pruned as if she had been in a bath too long. Drops landed on the vinyl floor, where they made small puddles.

Leroy told her to take a bath. Once in the bathroom, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her heart had slowed since she arrived at his door, out of breath from running the stairs, but it continued to beat against her sternum. What did Leroy see when he looked at her? Her finger traced her clavicle to her throat. She was thin and knew that, though she was attractive enough, she was no Annika. She had seen Leroy staring at her roommate as though he had been hypnotized. The water in the tub was too hot for her chilled feet. She turned the cold faucet on and lowered herself into the tub. Once she was in, she turned off the cold and felt the heat on her legs. Benny closed her eyes and submerged her head. Her heartbeat under water had the rhythm of wings flapping. She moved her head from side to side, her long dark hair flowing between and around her fingers. The tendrils of hair, graceful and slow, moved like the tentacles of a squid.

She lost her virginity the spring of her freshman year of high school. It was painful to think too closely of that time. It reminded her that something was missing. Leroy had once told her that gin had become his drink of choice after his mother died because it reminded him of her. As Benny sat up, a wave sloshed over the edge of the tub. He said he liked its earthy tang and the way it made the sharp edges of some memories blur. Perhaps gin would blur the memories of inadequacy that were coming to her now.

He was two grades ahead of her. He was nice enough, and she thought for a while that she loved him. On one of the first warm nights of May they lay on the football field behind their school. Her arm was falling asleep under his head. As they kissed, his hand slid along her belly and moved under her sweatshirt. She didn't wear a bra. Her breasts had always been tender, but his calloused hand made her gasp. He pulled back. She told him it was all right and led his hand back to where it had been and kissed him. He told her that he loved her as he groped her, then pulled off her pants. When he entered her, it was sharp and abrupt. He seemed to mistake her moaning for pleasure. He came quickly, then flopped onto his back beside her and stared up into the murky sky. She stroked his face as she lay on her side, wondering at the distance between them, at the warmth between her legs where she had felt such pain. It wasn't long before he was hard again and wanted her. She asked him to go slower. It hurt, but not as much, and she wondered if sex was always like that. She shivered and pressed herself against him. The next day he passed her in the hall without even looking at her.

For a week after that night Benny was in bed with abdominal pains. She had had pains like this before but never this sharp. Was this her period, finally? She hoped so. She had friends who menstruated at eleven; she was seventeen. Benny faked cramps at school and kept a bottle of Midol in her locker for show. She occasionally gave one to a classmate in need.