In the kitchen Cathy handed me a can of breakfast. “Don’t forget your Bible.” When I just stared at her, she said, “Bible study on Wednesdays, right?”
God bless her, she had forgotten, or never knew, about the half day of school. I went to the bedroom and found Jenny’s Bible on the dressing table. Maybe I would read Song of Solomon to James in bed. Then I had another thought and opened the bottom drawer of the dresser. I tucked the Polaroid camera into my bag, hidden under the Bible.
As I passed the study, I caught a glimpse of Dan through the open door as he took two books off the shelf and put them in his briefcase. Something about the way he adjusted the books he’d left behind seemed peculiar to me, a man covering his tracks. He had an open accordion file on his desk chair. He packed his briefcase with an odd assortment—I glimpsed a jackknife, a few music disks, a stack of letters, a framed picture, a little wooden plaque that read: CHAMBER OF COMMERCE EXCELLENCE IN SMALL BUSINESS. This was curious, but thoughts of seeing James pushed the puzzle of Dan’s habits out of my mind.
“Where did you get that button?” Cathy asked me as we drove to school.
“They handed them out in English class.”
“You don’t have English class,” Cathy said.
“A friend gave it to me,” I told her. As if she would try to pull it from my bag to examine it for fingerprints, I rested my arm over the button.
“Why don’t you wear the button Grandma sent you?” said Cathy. “What would Jesus do?”
WWJD. That’s what it meant. “This is Dickens,” I reassured her. “It’s academic.”
“Not everything academic is moral,” said Cathy.
This struck me as a very disturbing way to live life. I felt annoyed with her suspicion of literature but kept my mouth shut.
Once at school, I unbuckled my seat belt as fast as I could.
“Behave yourself,” she warned as I stepped out.
“God bless us every one!” I said, and waved her off, feeling not a bit guilty that I would be lying to her when I saw her next.
On my way to class I bent to pick up a penny from the ground and then stood up too quickly; I don’t know which it was, that I hadn’t eaten anything since the night before, or that I remembered what I saw in Dan’s briefcase. But everything went gray for a moment, and I heard a warping echo sound like being under water. Next a janitor and a teacher I didn’t know were helping me up. After assuring them that I didn’t need to go to the nurse’s office, I put my bag back over my shoulder and slipped away into the crowd. I left the penny unclaimed and missed making a wish.
The jackknife Dan put in his briefcase wasn’t a new one. It was worn, the ivory sides scratched and brown with age. And the stack of letters was tied with a ribbon. The framed picture wasn’t a recent portrait of his family but an old black-and-white print of himself holding up a fish he’d caught. It wasn’t what you gather before you go on a business trip.
It was what you take when you know the house is going to burn down.
Like other half days I’d spent with Mr. Brown, each class was only thirty minutes long. Still, first period seemed like hours. I was too restless to sit at a desk. I didn’t go to the rest of my classes but instead meandered the paths during passing periods. When I saw something I thought Jenny would like, I opened the camera, the way I’d seen Mr. Brown do with his, and took a picture of it. The photographs sprang out all gray and turned into images like ghosts materializing. A dead leaf caught on a window, a squirrel sitting on the grass beside a sign that said, KEEP OFF THE GRASS.
And even Mr. Brown. I saw him stop and talk to a boy on his way across the quad. His briefcase was fat with his novel inside. After the night I’d flown from him to James, he seemed anxious around the eyes. Today he looked like himself. I watched from a distance and waited until he was moving toward a farewell with the student; then I caught him on film. I watched the image darken on the slick little square of paper—a stolen moment of Mr. Brown’s life. He was smiling, giving a wave over his shoulder, the white wall of the administration building behind him like a primed canvas. I put the picture into my bag, keeping it safe from bending by slipping it between two of my books.
While classes were in session, I hid in the girls’ restroom. During passing periods, I collected several black-and-white pictures, filing them away with the portrait of Mr. Brown. By 11:30 the day was nearly done, and the students were to gather in the auditorium for an assembly. I shuffled through the crowded halls with my classmates, who celebrated their nearing freedom by teasing one another, trying to trip one another, boys bumping into girls on purpose and bearing the reprimands cheerfully.
I had just entered the dim theater when a hand grabbed my wrist and James pulled me into the back row of seats.
“Does your mother know about the half day?” he whispered.
“No.”
We sat quietly, merely holding hands hidden by the armrest until the aisle cleared and everyone was seated. James leaned over toward me but stopped when a security guard stepped into our row from the other side and stood there to watch the program. The principal tried to quiet the hall. James moved close to my ear.
“Mitch is right. I am irresponsible.”
“Why?”
“For not using protection.”
The thought hadn’t occurred to me until that moment. There would be no reason these two bodies couldn’t create life. I instantly felt afraid, as frightened as I had been when Mr. Brown was naming his unborn child.
But James was not thinking of babies. “Before I came along,” he whispered, “Billy could’ve been with a girl who had a disease that could kill you.”
My pulse calmed. This seemed a trifle. The rules of this world were a wisp of smoke, easily waved away. “We’re all right,” I told him.
The principal made an announcement, and then the cheerleaders danced to taped music. We had to speak into each other’s ears.
“When we’re married,” I said, “we should travel.”
I wasn’t sure he had heard, but after a pause he said, “By train.”
“And ship,” I said. “To England.”
“And China.”
“And Africa.”
James brushed the hair away from my ear. “We can read to each other every night.”
I rested my hand on his throat and could feel his heart beating. I tried to bring my pulse in stride with his, but mine had a faster gait. “What will we do for money?” I asked.
“I’d do anything,” he said. “I’d dig ditches for you,”
“I’d scrub floors for you,” I told him.
As the applause for the dance faded, James jumped at the roll of a drum. He looked to the stage where the band was marching in from the wings. His attention had been stolen, a suitor called from my porch by a bugle’s call. He watched the band and not me. I held the collar of his shirt, my hand hanging over his heart like a medal.
Finally the student body was dismissed, and James pulled me out the door, taking my book bag as we broke into daylight. I could feel that he wanted to run, and I did too, but we walked, hoping to avoid attention. When we got to the parking lot, he didn’t move to the bike rack but led me toward the sidewalk.
“Are we walking?” I asked.
“My chain broke.”
Half a block down at the city bus stop, we stood holding hands with our book bags at our feet. Students passed on bikes and on foot, a few laughing and yelling out the windows of passing cars, but none waited with us for the bus. One old man reading the paper sat on the bench. A car honked at a gray-and-white dog that trotted along the gutter across the street. As the animal turned suddenly into traffic, my heart jumped for the poor thing.
“Diggs!” James leaped into the traffic. A car screeched to a stop inches from his outthrust hands. “Look out!” His eyes were wild, and he was shaking as the dog shot guiltily between his legs out of the street and into an alley. Two other cars honked as well. James breathed deeply and blinked back tear
s as the driver of the stopped car rolled down his window and yelled, “Moron!”
James stepped back up on the curb as the traffic resumed.
“Was that your dog?” I asked him.
James took my hand. “I don’t have a dog.”
“Then who’s Diggs?”
“Diggs?” He looked puzzled for a moment but shrugged it off with a smile. “I don’t know.”
A woman pushing a stroller passed us. The baby’s hoarse cry sent a shiver through my heart. But then James put a protective arm around my waist, and I felt something relax inside me, like a braid unbound. I felt completely at home, as if we could go anywhere together with luggage no bigger than the two bags we had with us, and be perfectly happy until mortal age crumbled us to dust.
Even then, watching the hands of the elderly gentleman seated near us rub together like grooming birds, I wondered why old age should stop us. Could we not find two young abandoned bodies again when these bodies died?
When the bus arrived, James dropped several coins into the slot beside the driver. Up the narrow aisle we marched, making sure our book bags didn’t bump into the passengers. As we took an empty row near the back, it felt as if we were on our honeymoon, eloping, escaping by stagecoach. I wanted to kiss him, but two nuns sat directly behind us. James pressed so close to me, one of the sisters could have fit on the seat with us.
I kept my voice low. “Are you sure the house will be empty?”
James smiled but took a moment to speak. “Mitch’s last girlfriend didn’t leave him.”
This change of subject was so sudden I didn’t answer.
“He broke off their relationship because he caught her giving Billy drugs. His friend Benny told me.”
“Mitch loves you,” I said. The shadows, as the bus rattled under poles and wires, flashed across his face like a silent movie.
“Last night he was reminding me about once when Billy was thirteen and they were trying to chase a mouse out of the garage. Billy put on this monster mask to scare it. Mitch was laughing so much when he told me, he could hardly breathe,” said James. “He told me a dozen things I’d done that I couldn’t remember, of course. Silly things.”
I felt happy, imagining James and Mitch having fun together, but when he looked back into my eyes, the light still flicked over his features like the twin sides in a stereoscopic picture, one image slightly different from the other. My James and the James who came before, both hiding behind Billy’s eyes.
“He misses his brother,” said James.
My skin turned cold, for some reason. “He loves you, anyone can tell.”
“He loves Billy.”
I wondered if anyone truly missed Jenny.
“You didn’t drive Billy out.” I could hear the fear in my voice. “He ran away before you ever touched his body.”
The nuns were staring now. The way James lifted his hand to his brow, smiling at them but forgetting he had no hat to tip, warmed me again and made me want to kiss him.
Although Mitch and Libby’s cars were not in sight, James opened the door very slowly. “Hello?” We were alone, it seemed.
With a backward kick of his foot, James slammed his bedroom door behind us.
“We have hours,” I laughed between kisses. But I was actually thinking, We have forever.
“I’m sorry.” He stopped and looked at me. He was breathtaking, his cheeks flushed and his shirt half open. “No, I’m not,” he said and he was kissing me again. It was no use. I imagined having eons together ahead of us, but we still made love as if we had only a stolen hour.
We were laced in each other, clinging and damp. James was gazing at the wall where a column of type showed through a magazine picture of a sports car. The window light reflected in his eyes like the moon.
“I think I used to write for a newspaper.”
“I don’t want to wait for thirteen months,” I told him.
At this he looked at me, pulling my leg around him. “Billy might know someone who can sell us fake licenses.”
I brightened at the idea but saw a shadow cross James’s smile for a moment. I knew what it was, though he covered it. He imagined us running away together, but he also imagined Mitch finding that Billy had left him. I was stricken with envy. If only I felt that sort of love for Cathy and Dan.
He recovered his smile and rocked on top of me, slipping his hands beneath my hips.
Then I remembered what I’d brought. “Can you reach my bag?”
He shifted me under him, as ready to fill me as when he’d kicked the door shut. “Why?”
I laughed and climbed out of his arms, pulling the camera from my bag where it had been shamelessly dumped among our discarded clothes. I snapped the latch open and pointed the lens at him.
Quickly he pulled the sheet over his lap. “Miss Helen, I’m shocked.”
“Smile.”
“No. Come here.” He waved me back into the bed. As delighted as a child on Christmas morning, I jumped into the sheets, and he put his arm under my head as we lay down. “We can both be in the picture,” he said.
I tried to hold the camera far enough away from us and still manage to push the button. James, who had a longer arm, took the camera from me. We nestled our faces close together and just as the flash of light hit us, I pulled the sheet off him. He laughed and the camera spit the blank photo out at us like a metal frog showing its tongue. He gave me the camera but kept the picture away from my hands, flapping it above me as I fought to snatch it away.
“That’s mine,” I told him.
“We can both see,” he said finally, lying back down, holding the picture up as it faded in. I lay with my head on his shoulder, watching the faces appear—two laughing, slightly out-of-focus lovers, their expressions so the same, naked shoulders and wild hair against the white pillow.
We spent a long minute admiring it, then James said, “May I keep it?”
“Yes.”
He lowered the picture to his chest and let it rest there. “You and I were left behind on earth for a reason.”
My blood cooled so suddenly, I felt ill.
James drew me in close. “But we’ve found each other now. It’s all right.”
I knew he was trying to comfort me, and himself, but there was still something wrong.
“Why do you think that is?” he asked. “Why were we haunting this life?”
“I did something dreadful,” I confessed.
“What was it?” he asked without a moment’s apprehension.
“I can’t remember.” Why would you want to remember a horror? I didn’t know whether God had stolen my memories as a punishment, but it felt like a blessing.
“Whatever it was,” said James, “I forgive you.”
The simplest of words, but they squeezed at my throat. A fever-hot tear escaped my lashes and mixed with the salt on his chest.
“God doesn’t forgive me,” I said.
James turned his lips to the curve of my ear, his breath trembling my hair. He said one word, one I hadn’t expected.
“Stubborn.”
James was in love with me, and that made him a gentle judge.
I couldn’t remember my sin, but I knew it was deep. My banishment from heaven was proof of it. He stroked my hair, but I felt as if I were falling away from him, as if we were being uncoupled by gravity.
“Perhaps if we could discover why we were marooned here, we could be free to be together,” he said.
“How do we do that?” I asked.
James raised himself up on one elbow and looked at me. “What do you remember? Before you were Light?”
I saw dark water rushing past a broken plank. “Only what I’ve told you,” I lied.
I thought he would sense my dishonesty, but he didn’t. “After I went into Billy, I remembered little glimpses of things, but from the moment I first spoke to you, I’ve remembered more. This morning I remembered reading at my mother’s sickbed. I read her children’s books. That was all she wanted.?
??
“What’s the last thing you remember?” I surprised myself by asking such a thing. He might loathe recalling his last hours as much as I dreaded mine. But he didn’t flinch.
“My father remarried and my cousin and I went to New York.” He frowned, as if bringing back the images gave him a headache. “I worked at a newspaper. And we lived over a bakery. Our rooms always smelled of bread. We joined the army on the same day.” He stared into the air in front of me as if adjusting his telescope. “I remember a tree.” He was staring through me, his vision resting on the hollow of my throat. As if hibernating, his breathing slowed. I felt his flesh cool. “It’s cold,” he said.
I tried to warm him with my leg over his, my hands on his arms.
“I made a mistake.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He was bone white. I knew he was seeing more than he was saying. He rolled onto his back. I was terrified of the fear crystallizing in his eyes. I took his face in both my hands and turned it to mine, so he’d have to see me.
“They all died,” he said.
With a jolt, he looked deeper into my eyes, as if I had become someone else. His hand shot to my ribs and he pressed my stomach with his palm as if he saw some phantom wound. “Oh, God,” he whispered. Fear was shivering through his hand into my chest. I pressed his forehead to mine, praying that this illusion would stop.
A flash of white, so bright it stung, turned into winter sky. I found I was Light again. I was floating formless beside a man I knew was James, though he was not in Billy’s body. His eyes were darker, his hair lighter, but his smile was James. He straddled a thick limb and clung to the black trunk of a huge leafless tree in a landscape as bare as the moon. I stayed close to his shoulder, watching him as if he were my host. He looked down twenty feet to a small face that peered out of the trench. Both the young man and the hole he crouched in were powdered with ash.