Things Withered (15 page)

And Myra came. He heard her voice through the door.

“David? Are you stuck?”

There was such relief in hearing that voice, it was a sound of such home and comfort and pleasure, that without thinking he grabbed and turned the knob. There was only one second when—

Beddy?

—he hesitated, but it passed and the thick perfume of the place and Myra gave him the woozies, but just for the one second. And then he saw her head tilted, a little bit impatient, it showed on her face, but content at the same time. She was beautiful. He pushed the door open.

“You rescued me,” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “Save the crazy shit for after the wedding, okay?”

“Absolutely.” And he did. And they got married. And he didn’t find anyone else dead behind a door for the longest time after that.

Nearly a year. It would be his personal best.

It was Donna who brought up the odd change in the air. I had noticed too, but I hadn’t said anything about it. There was something in it, an aftertaste that shouldn’t be there after a gulp of it. Metallic, like aluminum would taste if you put it on your tongue. She thought it seemed thinner, too. It might have.

It smelled like fish.

She stopped in when she was done her walk for the day. She beachcombed. Such an old-fashioned name for it, sounding very blue and green and smelling like salt, peaceful and quaint; it was more like a reconnaissance mission or the act of a militant, scouting for signs of the enemy.

I was on the porch and saw her coming long before she called
hello
. My house faced the water, just as hers did, six hundred feet to the east.

Donna got all the way to the post at the end of my “yard,” the one with the fake seagull gruesomely nailed through the feet to the wood, before she looked up and saw me through the screen.

“Air tastes funny,” she said. She stopped at the foot of the steps and took a big breath. “Like metal.”

I nodded. I was sitting with my notebook, playing, not doing much of anything, waiting for a time when I could pour myself a drink. There was still propriety. So I got up and pushed the door open as if I was going to give it a sniff.

“Just come on up.”

She looked around up at the sky and down the beach where she’d come from and then did come up. She was tanned, her teeth unnaturally white against her skin. Outside the door the air was still. The only sound was the slapping of the waves against the shore, against each other. No birds. Not for weeks now.

The wood seagull was the only one I’d seen since June.

“Tastes like metal,” Donna said. She put her hands on her hips and looked outside. The sky was grey, like the water, and cloudless. It looked like October, and here it was the end of August.

“Want a drink?” I said. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.” You couldn’t tell by the light, but it was just a little after two. She hesitated, shrugged and then grinned
ha
. I took out glasses and poured us one each, from the bottle on the table. I’d brought it out earlier, thinking she might be by.

A glass full of wine is always half full.

“It’s almost the last of the white. There’s still at least four red. And some pretty brown whiskey for emergencies.”

“The air tastes funny,” she said. “That could be an emergency.”

I nodded seriously. “Could well. Let’s drink to that.” We did.

“I was down by Augar’s Hill this morning,” Donna said. “As far as the marina. Only thing I saw was that Marmaduke dog used to belong to Paul Burl, remember? I tried to get him to follow me, but he’s skittish.”

“Coolidge.”

“That’s right. Coolidge. If I see him tomorrow I’ll call him. See if that works.”

I nodded again. It would be nice to see a dog, I guessed, but even thinking that, I could still feel coldness in me. To what end, seeing a dog?

I would almost rather see Ann.

She tended to disappear for short periods and then reappear when whatever collapsing hell she was going through had righted itself, or at least stabilized. She was no longer the person I used to secretly make fun of the way she kept an organizer in the front seat of her car, or how she never just said
oh look at the stars
but rather was compelled to name them,
oh doesn’t Orion look fierce tonight?

Not seeing her was somehow both better and worse. The last time we ran into her had definitely been worse.

Donna and I had been chatting in front of my house
blah blah blah
ing over whether or not it was prudent to read
An Infinite Jest
while in our state of mind. I said it hadn’t done very much for Wallace, but the joke fell flat, as those thoughts were starting to. We were thankfully distracted by screaming from the east side of the beach. Our heads swung in that direction, as if on identical pivots.

“Hey!
Hey!
” she screamed. It was Ann. She was a doctor, lived a couple of houses up the beach. We’d seen more of her a couple of weeks earlier and then not at all for a while. She’d played emissary to the folks on the other side of her place, when there’d still been folks on the other side. She used to bring us chocolate, and stay and have a drink. Lately she’d been getting squirrelly. A person could hardly blame her. But that shit was catching, and it was hurting my opinion of her.

She’d started dropping by at odd times and complaining about whatever was handy. We were all of certain age, the three of us. Complaining was a slippery slope. You had to stay off the edge. Particularly now.

“Mr. Kruger’s gone,” she shrieked. Donna pushed open the door and went down a step, no more. She stood there, holding the door open. Ann ran as best she could, panting and stumbling the last twenty feet. I tried not to judge but I felt a sneer on my lips and was glad I was inside the porch where she couldn’t see. Mr. Kruger? What had he ever done for us.

She panted and gasped, stopping on the sand near my seagull. “I saw him get in his car. I waved and flagged him down, but he wouldn’t stop. He’s gone and left us,” she held her chest and heaved. I didn’t react. Ann was about two syllables from hysterics, doctor or no doctor and I couldn’t take it on.

She wore a skirt, with a pretty turquoise top that I suddenly coveted. I avoided eye contact, even through the screen.

“He wouldn’t even look at me.” Her eyes bounced from my shadow through the screened porch to Donna, back and again.

“
Ann
—” Donna said. Like I knew she would, Ann Baxter grasped at this like a lifeline. Her bottom lip quivered, and her eyes washed a little with tears.

“He’s gone and left us here—” She covered her face.

I stopped it there. I put my hand out onto Donna’s shoulder. She stiffened, and shot me a nasty look over her shoulder, but she stopped.

“We’ll be fine. What difference does it make?” I said. “Want a snort?”

That shut her cake hole. She straightened up.

“It’s barely past lunch.”

“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” I said. Donna snickered. Ann side-eyed me.

“Did you take my schnapps? When I was on the pier yesterday? Did you?”

I narrowed my eyes back at Ann, theatrically. “I rarely leave my house.” Her expression shifted rapidly from stricken to suspicious and she smiled.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Do you want a drink or not?” She scanned the frightful horizon and considered this. It was dreadfully quiet, just the water slapping, which could sound like thunder if you were alone. Ann told us once that she saw a man get shot, at the hospital, a gang thing, and when the bullet left the gun, she really thought it was thunder, as if her brain had to rationalize it.

“Do you have any schnapps?” She looked at me slyly. If she had looked at me slyly with humour I might have got her some, but it was just sly as if the whole thing was just about catching me in some lie. I said I didn’t. She would have to make do with wine.

They came into the porch. We sipped and watched the sky darken to an eggplant purple on the horizon, like it had almost every day since May.

It was the last time we would see her.

Donna went somewhere every day, up and down the coast, nose poking into the few remaining boats, knocking on doors. I rarely left the house. I knew there was nothing out there for me and I was too old to prove it to myself. I had everything I needed where I was. I had my books, my papers; I was down to ink and notebook for writing, but that was probably best. It took more concentration, kept my mind off the worst of things. I tended to get morose when I wasn’t drunk, and tried not to be drunk until the afternoon.

In the mornings I worked and puttered and waited for Donna to come back from Out There.

I knew she swam in the ocean, sometimes doing laps until her arms shook. She’d come over then, her lips blue, fingers pruned, hair soaked and tangled. I don’t know how she did it, but she was the kind of woman who preferred staring into things to looking away. I was not, by nature.

I could look away from the glare of the truth without batting an eye. I could in fact toast a lie, smile in its face and drink to its health even as the truth was in the glass. This was a new skill, since Dick died.

The exception was the night of the fish.

I lost track of the days quite a while ago. I know it’s August, and it might be Thursday. It might be Friday. The night of the fish was four nights ago, maybe five. Time has gotten funny.

Donna and I were in our usual positions, parked on my veranda, feet up, drink in hand, staring out at the beach. Storms came nearly every night now, and they could be spectacular. We were storm people any way, Donna and I. Almost how we met. We’d been summer neighbours a long time, her house just up the beach from ours. Sometimes when the sky got black as shit I’d stand out on the sand as long as I could, the wind tangling my skirt around my legs, whipping my hair so hard against my face it stung, I’d stay out right up until the rumbling scared even me and then I’d watch from the veranda. When I had a husband, he’d be in there hollering for me to come in before I got knocked over. I would wait until the last minute.

Often as not, when I was running back inside, getting wet, I would see Donna doing the same thing, the two of us the only living things out in the storm.

When it got the way it finally got out here, she just came over and we’d watch from my veranda.
Fill me up and let’s see this
, she’d say. We’d drink a bottle of wine watching it, then maybe another one brooding about it.

It was just like that the night of the fish.

Fill me up.

If I think about it, it had been an odd day, too, maybe the second or third day in a row where the sky never lightened past the dull silver it was nearly all the time now. But the fish had been less than a week ago. It wasn’t a case of the sun never breaking the clouds so much as it was the sun having lost its brightness. What remained was weak and grey. Donna had done a little beachcombing that day and had come around with a bag of goodies, including a can of cheese she’d taken from a boat she’d found banging against the Bushnell’s dock. She said the inside was done in this hideous pink-and-blue décor as if by a pregnant teenager. There was also a ratchet set, some blue sea glass and a pristine set of four wine glasses, which she presented to me with a
ta da
like a gift. I was delighted. So many of the glasses from my old life had ended up broken, thrown hard against walls and into sinks, the leftover wine in them spreading out at the site like a splatter of blood, eventually swept into corners. Dead soldiers.

We used the new glasses that night, filled with a nice red, with a white on deck for when the red was drained.

The storm started way far out on the horizon, so slow that we could watch it come in at our leisure, like ladies at lunch.

I must say.

Oh yes please do.

They’d all been strange, the storms. One day the sky had stayed a brilliant azure blue even as hailstones the size of golf balls tore through the top of the canvas gazebo Jeb and Heidi Keenley kept in their back yard on the slope. Heidi would have had a chicken if she’d seen it like that, but Heidi had been MIA for at least two months, gone along with the rest of the neighbours and that didn’t bear thinking about. And one day the sky had just stayed that near-black all day, one bright beam of sun stabbing through and hitting the beach. Could’ve burned an egg on the sand right there on that patch of sun. It was crazy, right down to the bloody sky

But I was talking about the night of the fish. So when the clouds grew black on the horizon, there was not much to remark on. In fact, in general, it began as an unremarkable storm, which was sort of nice, calming. For a while.

The clouds moved in, across the water, never rising above the horizon line, not even when they were close enough to make out the asymmetrical blooms like blackened cauliflower that made up the clouds, they still seemed to be resting on the top of the water. The sky hadn’t brightened in weeks by then, being colourless rather than grey or silver, really, but the clouds were so sooty and fulsome, the contrast against the sky so complete, there was a kind of eerie beauty to it. The kind of beauty that can, for a moment anyway, make you gasp a little and clutch your chest.

I must say.

Oh yes please do.

The wind came up and turned the water nearly as black as the clouds, so the only way to see the difference between sky and lake was through the angry, foaming whitecaps that swirled and fell into darkness.

Rain came in a burst, torrential, coming down so hard and thick it obscured everything else, a veil of water, a wall. It was like being under the falls at Niagara. Just after the rain started, the sky
exploded
.

We had been in our usual positions, lounging in my pretty wicker chairs that in another lifetime had been a special joy of mine. I used to change the cushions by the season, pretty green-and-white pin stripes with pink-and-green pillows for spring; blue Wedgewood through summer; gold-red-burgundy-brown for fall. Red and white through the winter. Of course this changed every season also, when I got bored or tired of the old look, I shopped for new cushions. Shopping seemed a surreal concept now.

Since everything changed, the cushions had become lost in the fog. Maybe since Dick had died. That seemed unlikely since I could hardly remember when Dick died, and I surely remembered putting out the blue cushions. But a couple of those had torn, or been stabbed with scissors and tossed to the floor of the veranda, fluffy white guts kicked into corners with the shards of broken wine glasses.

Me and Donna were lounging on a mix of the green-and-white, the red ones, and the few blue cushions that had survived my lapses of sanity, and drunken raging against the unseen. Feet up on the ottomans. Wine glasses dangling elegantly from our veiny hands.