The Smoke Jumper (37 page)

She stared at him and slowly lifted her hands and pressed her fingertips to her temples and he saw her mouth tremble.

‘Oh, Connor. Oh God.’

She closed her eyes and started to sob and the sound was so deep and harrowing that it seemed to come not from her but from some dark netherworld of long-forgotten sorrows. With her eyes tight shut she slowly opened her arms to him and he moved toward her and held her and held her head to his chest and felt her tears wet against him and felt tears of his own begin to run. She lifted her face and kissed him and said that she loved him too and had always loved him and she kissed him again and kissed his tears and Connor kissed hers.

How long they stayed like that, he didn’t know. All he could think of was that these few precious moments were all he would ever have of her and that he must live them and feel them with every particle of his being. And then store them away and treasure them for the rest of his life.

PART THREE

21

A
my Constance Tully was an angel. She even had the wings to prove it. One of them, however, was looking a little lopsided right now and neither went too well with the black Yankees T-shirt her godmother had sent her for her birthday. In truth, her whole demeanor, as she stood there on the kitchen table, sulking and kicking her heels, was something less than beatific.

‘Amy, will you stand still?’ Julia said, through a mouthful of pins.

‘It looks yuck!’

‘It does not look yuck. It looks fine. At least it will if you’ll just stand still a moment and let me do it.’

‘I’m not going to wear it.’

‘You’re supposed to be an angel. This is what angels wear. Honey, please! Keep still. These are pins here, one of us is going to get hurt.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Well, I do.’

Julia was trying to pin the hem of the silvery skirt which Amy had decided to despise. As the daughter of the composer and musical director of the school’s Christmas show, she had been able to pick her part - at least, among the supporting cast, for bigger stars with better agents from the fourth and fifth grades had bagged the leads. Six weeks ago she had unequivocally declared that she wanted to be an angel. Not a chipmunk, not an elf, not even the front end of the orca (though what the heck an orca was doing in the show, Julia still had no idea). Nothing but an angel.

Of course, seeing as the school was a multicultural, politically correct and altogether right-on kind of a place, this naturally didn’t mean angel as in hovering-over-the-baby-Jesus-in-his-manger sort of angel, such as Julia herself had once been dragooned into playing when she was a kid. No, the entire show was more, as Ed had put it to Mrs Leitner when pitching the idea back in the fall, more
pantheistic
: a spiritual celebration of nature and its bounteous wonders.

Privately, to Julia, he described it as pure eco-anarchist propaganda. Accordingly, the angels were much more of the avenging, in-your-face variety and though Ed was having second thoughts about giving them Uzis, by the end of the show they had disposed of several evil loggers and an oil slick called Mr Gloop. And it was this, in all likelihood, that lay at the root of Amy’s present tantrum. In the considered opinion of this particular seven-year-old going on seventeen, the costume was just too damn sissy.

‘What’s the problem here?’ Ed said. He’d been sitting at the piano in the next room, trying to concentrate on some changes to the finale. ‘You don’t like your outfit?’

‘It sucks.’

‘Amy!’ Julia said. ‘You do not use that word, okay?’

‘Kevin Lucas says it all the time.’

‘Well, you are not Kevin Lucas. Ed? Will you talk to her?’

‘Tell me what you don’t like about it.’

‘It looks yuck.’

‘Yuck’s not good enough. Tell me what it looks like.’

‘It’s all stupid and . . . splivvy.’

‘Splivvy?’

‘I look like Barbie,’ she sneered. Amy didn’t much care for dolls of any sort. The only Barbie she’d ever been given was promptly decapitated.

‘What color is the skirt?’ Ed asked patiently.

‘All white and silver and stupid.’ She twisted it in her hands as she said this and there was a sound of ripping.

‘Okay, that’s it,’ Julia said.

She took the pins from her lips and put them back in the box. Then she hoisted Amy from the table to the floor and unceremoniously stripped her of her wings and skirt.

‘I thought it was going to be, kind of, darker,’ Ed said quietly. ‘You know, like gunmetal or something.’

‘Exactly,’ Amy sneered. She was sheltering beside Ed, with an arm hooked around his leg.

‘That
is
what it’s going to be. I told her ten times already.

First we make it, then we spray it. Okay? Jesus.’

Ed held up his hands. ‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry.’

‘You shouldn’t say Jesus,’ Amy muttered.

‘Really? Why not? Kevin Lucas says it all the time.’

An hour later Amy was tucked up in bed looking every inch a regular angel and happy to be one. Her cheeks glowed pink from her bath and her mop of blond curls was brushed as neatly as it ever allowed. The color was clearly from Connor but nobody had a clue where the curls came from. Ed teased her that in a previous life she must have been a flue brush. Her eyes were dark brown like Julia’s and she had the same olive tone to her skin. In the wholly objective eyes of her mother, she was the most beautiful child ever to have graced the planet. Yet if asked, as occasionally she was, to say which of her parents, in character, Amy most resembled, Julia would reply without a moment’s hesitation that it was Ed.

She was boisterous and funny and quick-witted and in each case sometimes too much so for her own good. Like Ed, she could floor you with a smart remark from a hundred yards and there were times at school when it landed her in trouble, especially with the more lumpish boys whose only resort, when snagged and bound by her verbal knots, was to violence.

Then there was the music. Whereas Julia could hardly hold a note and Connor, as far as anyone could recall, had never been heard even to whistle to his horse, Amy was naturally musical. She had picked up Ed’s habit of singing to herself when she was doing something and when she pulled out the stops, her voice could be exquisite. Long before she was out of diapers, Ed was teaching her songs and sitting her on his lap at the piano, which by now she played as proficiently as some of his pupils two or three years her senior.

On long car journeys, the two of them would drive Julia nuts, singing every wretched song from
The Jungle Book
or
The Wizard of Oz
or, worse still, from one of Ed’s old favorites like
Kiss Me, Kate
or
Oliver!
and Julia, at the wheel, would have to beg for mercy or earplugs and end up being blackmailed into promises of elaborate treats to make them stop. Ed liked to joke that some of his genes must have snuck in there after all. If not, Amy Tully was walking scientific testimony if not to nurture’s triumph over nature, then at least to it having given it a damn good run for its money.

Julia was lying on the covers beside her now in the cluttered cavern of Amy’s room. The multicolored wallpaper with its animal motif was all but obscured by Amy’s paintings and drawings and family photographs as well as the strings of beads and necklaces and bits of ribbon that she hung from pegs just as Julia hung her jewelry. There were dozens of little glass and ceramic animals and jars crammed with feathers gathered from the riverbank and books spilling from shelves and stacks more on the floor among the jetsam of toys and discarded clothing and bric-a-brac. The mess was a first-class hazard for Ed but they had both grown tired of nagging her about it, persuading themselves that it showed character and was better than having a child who was obsessively tidy. Ed had grown used to picking his way through it like a soldier looking for land mines. Amy’s bedside lamp was a large illuminated goose that Julia’s mother had given her and its glow made the room feel cozy and womblike.

Together, by its light, they were reading Amy’s favorite Dr Seuss,
The Butter Battle Book
. They were best friends again, mostly thanks to the fact that after Amy had stomped off upstairs for her bath, Julia had gotten out the spray can of gunmetal paint and some glitter and transformed both skirt and wings into something that even Linda in her Neo-Gothic heyday would have proudly worn. Grinning sheepishly from the tub, Amy said she loved it.

‘Sorry, Mommy.’

‘Give me twenty years and I might forgive you.’

As usual, Julia was doing most of the reading. Amy always read more to Ed than to her, describing any pictures in intimate detail. She often read to Julia too, but with this book especially, although she knew it by heart, she preferred to listen. She liked the different funny voices that Julia put on for the Zooks and the Yooks as they escalated their crazy war over which way bread should be eaten: butter side up or butter side down.

It intrigued Julia that this was Amy’s favorite Dr Seuss, for it wasn’t by a long way his funniest. In fact, it was downright chilling, telling as it did of a world sliding toward apocalypse because of a fatuous disagreement. In both of their minds there had always been an association with Connor.

Buying the book, about two years ago, had prompted a long discussion about war and why people sometimes hated and wanted to kill each other. Julia reassured her that hardly anyone nowadays expected the kind of world war that was depicted in the book. But there were wars she said, smaller ones, that were always going on in dlfferent parts of the world. She found herself telling Amy that her biological father (Bio-Dad, thank heaven had never caught on) often went to these places and took pictures.

‘Of people fighting?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Shooting each other?’

‘Sometimes, yes.’

‘Do people try and shoot him?’

‘No, sweetheart. He’s not a soldier, he’s a photographer. He has to be careful though.’

‘But he’ll be okay because he’s really brave, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘Like when he saved your life.’

‘Uh-huh. That’s right.’

When Amy was still a baby, Ed and Julia had spent a whole evening discussing at what age they would tell Amy about various things. They wanted her to know about having two fathers right away, before she could even begin to think about it. But they hadn’t felt that way about the fire. They worried that it might traumatize the child and agreed that they would tell her when she was, say, twelve years old. It was the kind of ludicrous resolution that parents make before they get real, when they still think that they would never, ever, do such awful things as bribe their kids with candy or tell them to shut up.

And of course it crumbled. At the age of four and a half, Amy asked Ed how he came to be blind and the story - at least, a censored version of it - came pouring out. And instead of upsetting her, it only seemed to make her proud of them all, especially of her two superhero fathers who jumped out of the sky to rescue poor old klutzy mom.

Amy didn’t talk about Connor so much anymore. It was hard to keep a memory alive when there were only photographs and stories and the occasional letter to feed it with. He still wrote to Amy and sent exotic gifts from far-flung corners of the world. But never once, since the christening, had he come again to see her. This seemed neither to upset Amy nor to anger her and Julia supposed that this was because it had always been that way. He had never been more than an idea, like a character in an old movie: intriguing, a little dashing and, like his photographs, mostly in black and white. Occasionally Amy would peruse Connor’s pictures in magazines - at least, those that were suitable - and ask questions about him which Julia and Ed would dutifully answer, trying always to sound warm about him and never to reveal their hurt.

Among the photos pinned to Amy’s bedroom wall were several of Connor, including the only one that existed of the two of them together. Taken by Julia at the christening, it showed him standing on the deck, holding this funny, chubby-cheeked cherub in his arms and smiling down at her, while Amy, ever the star, looked straight at the camera.

For a long while she and Ed had kept in touch with Connor’s mother and a few times had taken Amy over to see her at the ranch in Augusta. But as the years went by and still Connor didn’t come, it seemed somehow pointless. Like Hamlet without the prince, as Ed said the last time as they drove home. Maggie claimed that he never came to see her either, but Julia knew it wasn’t true. Nor did Maggie any longer call them with news of Connor or to tell them of papers or magazines that had his photographs. Perhaps he had told her not to or perhaps she knew why he kept away. Mothers were like that, Julia knew; even the mothers of monsters closed around to defend them. Whatever the reason, it was now more than two years since they had seen Maggie or spoken with her.

And with Connor it was more than seven. Amy’s entire lifetime. And sometimes it seemed to Julia like the whole of hers too. They were all different people and their world a different place and the sorrow that was Connor had shifted around it like the sun. Once it had risen hot and harsh and for a while had glared down on them, impossible to behold except briefly through shielded, squinting eyes. Now it had cooled and though not set, was lowering itself through a mellowed sky, casting shadows longer yet less painful to the eye.

During the first year she had written him several letters but destroyed them all. At first she thought it was simply because she couldn’t find the right words. And then she realized it was simpler still and that there were no words to find. In those days she had thought about him all the time. Barely a waking hour went by without her replaying in her mind that last image of him, sitting beside her in the cold moonlight, confessing his love and then holding her and kissing her tears.