“Locked in his room. He won’t even open the door for Kat Williams. She’s been hanging around, waiting for him. I finally had to tell her to go home. Not that she necessarily listened to me.” Jorie goes to her window and lifts the curtain. She gazes at the trailing peas in her garden, the flowers drooping in the heat. “I think she’s still camped out in our yard.”
“What about you?” Charlotte has come to stand beside her friend. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, yeah. I have to be, don’t I?”
Jorie is relieved that Charlotte doesn’t go on and on about Ethan’s innocence, the way her mother and sister did earlier in the day when they came to pledge their support. Jorie’s mother, Ruth, vowed to mortgage the girls’ childhood home on Smithfield Lane, along with everything in it if need be, to help pay the legal bills. Anne, always so chilly and disinterested, had hugged Jorie, insisting she was on her side, one hundred percent of the way. Jorie had thanked her mother, she’d kissed her sister, and when they’d left, she watched them walk down the path with a liar’s distance between them. She could no more bring herself to tell her family the truth than she could report that the sky was now the earth and that the blue vista above them would forevermore be the stuff they walked upon. How could she tell them that wrong had become right and everything they once believed now needed to be restrung on another cord entirely, glittering pearls of faith that have turned out to be nothing more than a strand of worthless stones.
“I’m fine,” she vows again tonight, as she sends Charlotte on her way, although when she hugs her friend at the door, Jorie is no more substantial than a bundle of sticks. She’ll break if she’s held too close; she’ll fall into splinters right there in the doorway.
“Will you call me if you need me?” Charlotte asks, but already the door has closed behind her. Charlotte walks along to her car slowly, like a woman trekking through snow even though the weather is fine and golden, with the pale evening sky falling into the darkness of the night. It is long past supper now, the time when the families in town are safe in their houses, glad that they have nothing more serious to worry about than woodchucks in the garden, mice in the basement, peeling tiles in the hall. Out in the heavens, the harp star is rising in Lyra, higher and higher, a beacon in the night. The air smells fresh, the streets are empty, and only the loneliest individuals in town are seated at the Safehouse bar, ordering a tonic for what they think ails them, hoping in vain to discover a cure for the way that they feel inside.
It is the hour Jorie once longed for, that blue hour when she and Ethan would stand in the kitchen with the lights turned off stealing a kiss before they finished the evening’s chores. Now it’s a time like any other, long minutes, tedious seconds, nothing more than flat time moving forward, like it or not. Jorie has taken to forgetting the simplest things—dinner, for instance—and so now she brings a tray upstairs. She knocks at the bedroom door, and when Collie doesn’t answer, she leaves his supper in the hallway, nothing fancy, just a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup. Decent enough fare, but wasted all the same, as she knows he won’t eat.
Perhaps Collie wants to sit in his room until the present blows over them, beyond rooftops and orchards, until it’s gone so far away they can once again open their windows and doors. But Jorie knows her poor boy can wait forever, he can sit in his locked bedroom until he is an old man, and this thing that has befallen them will not go away, It has come to settle; it is here to stay. They could talk about this if they could talk at all, but as it’s true with Charlotte so it is true with Collie as well: keep a wicked secret and soon enough there’ll be no choice in the matter. Before long, they’ll have lost the ability to speak.
Down at the firehouse on Worthington and Vine, twelve sorrowful men sit around the table, with untouched tumblers of seltzer set out before them. One seat is empty, and the other men avert their eyes from the chair Ethan Ford always took at the head of the table, as if he came by his leadership naturally. Each of these men, Mark Derry and Warren Peck included, can think of a time when Ethan saved a life, when he did something they themselves were afraid to risk. They half expect him to walk out of the night and take his accustomed place, the way time and time again he has walked out of the fire, but there is no one at the door, and the weathervane atop the firehouse, a wild racing horse that breathes metal flames, guards an empty street.
As for Jorie, she knows Ethan won’t be coming home. He won’t be turning onto Maple Street in the dark, tired from an evening with his friends after a hard day of work, ready for her arms. Jorie has always been an optimist, the sort of person who has looked for the best in people and found it. Now she chides herself for being gullible; she wonders if it’s in her nature to be fooled. When she and Anne were children, she had believed anything her sister told her. Anne insisted there was a hole in the ground that reached to the other side of the earth and Jorie had been naïve enough to treat this bit of nonsense as if it were a fixed and unalterable truth. Even when Charlotte told her such a thing was impossible, she couldn’t be swayed from the notion.
If a person dropped through such a hole, Jorie had whispered to Charlotte, why, she’d travel right through the molten core of the globe and come out on the other side, trapped in a foreign land where she knew neither the customs nor the inhabitants. This is where Jorie feels she has landed. She goes downstairs, then traipses into her garden, barefoot, feeling the warmth of the day’s sun in the earth even though night has fallen. In every summer before this, there have been neat rows, with each meandering sweet pea vine tied to a wooden post. Now. after only a few days of being ignored, the garden has been taken over by weeds and there are Japanese beetles clinging to stalks and stems. In days it’s become an unrecognizable landscape. If Jorie had been asked which way was north and which way south, she couldn’t have ventured an answer, although she has staked out every inch of this garden each spring as soon as the ground is soft enough for her to work the soil. She doesn’t know the geography of this place where she’s landed, she only knows every moment here hurts. Breathing the air is enough to cause serious damage. Walking is like treading on glass.
I’m not that man anymore, that’s what Ethan said to her, that’s the secret she keeps, from Charlotte and everyone else she loves, the words that opened the door to this realm where right is wrong and every pavement is sharper than crystal. His eyes were black, the same eyes that had gazed upon her every night as she got ready for bed. The person who did those horrible things deserves to be punished for his místakes. That’s what he told her. But listen to me: I’m not him.
It is as though a shadow had been stitched to the soul of the man she’d been married to all this time, a specter sewn to his feet and his fingertips, black, deceitful netting that can only be seen in certain light. The pale daylight washing in through Dave Meyers’s window, for instance. The moonlight in her very own garden. Look in that light, and you can’t help but see what’s there before you.
Baby, just understand. I’m a different person now.
Is it possible, Jorie wonders on this ordinary summer night, for good people to go crazy all at once? Could such an individual lose sense of what was real and what was right. precisely the way another man might lose his way in the woods? Could he take a girl’s life and keep on walking, with every footstep as good as a mile, and every mile the length of a lifetime? For that is precisely what Ethan Ford has done. He shed his past as though it were a second skin, abandoned on a road in Maryland, left to shrivel up in the sun until it was nothing more than a fine powdery dust to be carried about on the wind, then deposited in marshes and fields along the blue shoreline. Afterward, he’d been led to Massachusetts by destiny, that’s what he told her. He’d been brought to the Commonwealth for a purpose, to start anew. to walk through the cold January days, to shovel snow, to raise a child, to be the first to arrive whenever there was a fire in the village, to give thanks for the lives he’s helped save, to praise each new day, grateful for the distan
ce between himself and Maryland.
Jorie crouches down in her garden, then sits back on her heels. Tonight, the whole world seems to be calling out in a voice she can neither understand nor recognize. Crickets are singing and June bugs buzz through the air; even the moonlight seems to have a sound, like clear glass shattering under the pressure of the hot. dark night. Soon enough, the truth will be everywhere: it will fall like hail and crack their lives open. But for now, the air is heavy and fragrant. Trout lilies and hyacinths bloom along the paths. their sweetness nearly tangible in the dark. Jorie reaches to pick beetles off the leaves of her zucchini vines. The moonlight falls like a curtain over rows of lettuce, and radishes, and the tender tomato plants, thick with green fruit that emit the scent of sulfur when anyone brushes against them. There are the straggling peas, left to their own design, and the strawberry plants Ethan and Collie brought Jorie one Mother’s Day, flat after flat of heart-shaped plants. Jorie makes jam once a summer, and no matter when she chooses to boil the fruit, it turns out to be the hottest afternoon of the year. Somehow the heat of the day infuses these batches of jam with a peculiar sweetness, so that each spoonful spread upon muffins or toast in the morning can recapture the perfection of summer for a single mouthful of memory.
With so much moonlight illuminating the yard, a person can take note of details that might not be revealed on any other night: how soft, pink clematis climbs along the fence, how the water in the stone birdbath turns silver at this hour, how the wings of the beetles clinging to the vines are a shiny blue-black, glimmering scarabs trying their best to eat their fill before daylight. Oh, how Jorie wishes she could evaporate in the moonlight the way dew vanishes in the glare of full sun. Night after night she has slept with a shadow, an impostor formed out of ashes who rested beside her on clean white sheets and kissed her beneath the same apple trees she walked past when she was a girl. She never made anything of the winter evenings when he went off by himself or took note of the way he often looked behind him, as if there was danger even when traversing the most familiar of streets. She never wondered about a history devoid not only of parents, but of aunts and uncles, cousins and friends.
But perhaps no one would have noticed such things. Perhaps Jorie is no more or less observant than anyone might have been. For although it is dark, she spies something white fluttering at the edge of her garden. It’s as if a single icy bloom has grown up in the last few hours, there to console her. Jorie walks through the rows of vegetables, then leans down to see what’s been left behind. It’s only a piece of wrinkled paper, What she thought were petals are merely lines of blue ink. Jorie reaches for the paper the way another woman might pick a single rose. She recognizes the mark of a young girl’s handwriting, and she thinks of Kat Williams, standing here in the garden, peering up at Collie’s window until she was chased off like a sparrow or a jay.
I’m sorry I called after I saw him on the TV show. I shouldn’t have done it, but now you know and there’s nothing I can do to take it back. I wísh I hadn’t done it, because I think I ruined your life.
Jorie smooths out the paper, then closes her eyes and listens to the June bugs. In their humming she can hear the rattle of her own destiny; it is coming after her, like it or not. This is the way things happen: a girl watches a show on TV and everything falls apart. Such are the consequences of a single act, no matter what you might wish afterward. Surely if circumstances had been different, Jorie would have walked down another path, but this is the course her life has taken, and it has led her to this place, a world where some people tell you too much and others tell you nothing at all. Here in her garden, the Japanese beetles glitter like stars and the sky is endless and black. It is impossible to stop some things, rainfall, for instance, and love at first sight, and the slow and steady path of sorrow. Jorie’s life as she’s known it is over. Tonight, in the old section of Monroe. Massachusetts, where people have never locked their doors before this summer, in a town where there are more apple trees than can be counted and the children have always slept peacefully, Jorie is well aware of what has happened. She can close her eyes, she can dream for a hundred years, but one thing remains certain: now she knows.
The Unwise Man
WHEN HE TOLD HIS WIFE THE TRUTH, he felt as though he were recounting the story of another man’s life. Who was Bryon Bell, anyway, but a boy who had been a sleepwalker? Who was he but a soulless being left behind in a shallow grave in the rich Maryland soil? In his short lifetime, he had loved nothing but baseball and himself, although in time he learned to despise both. He was a small-time individual, but a big shot all the same in a town as humble as Neptune, a tiny speck of a place on the outermost edge of the Eastern Shore, where the bulrushes grew to be as tall as a man and fish crows and grackles wheeled through the sky, ready to steal whatever catch the fishermen might bring home on any given day.
Bryon himself was a fisherman’s son who hated the sea. He was contrary and vain, the sort of boy who smiled politely, then did whatever he pleased, no matter the cost or the consequence. His father had died young, disappearing into a storm, and although his mother doted on him, she often watched her son as though he were a stranger who had come to call only to stay on, uninvited, to take over the house. Here was a child who destroyed whatever he touched; everything near him turned into ashes. By the time Bryon was twelve, he was rifling through his mother’s purse for money and staying out half the night. At sixteen, he quit school and could be found down by the docks, as much an opportunist and a scavenger as the fish crows screaming from their perches on the pilings. As he grew older, he grew more handsome and more selfish as well. After a white, the boys Bryon had grown up with refused to be on the same baseball field with him, for he played not just to win, but to hurt his opponents. And yet the girls in town seemed unable to refuse him, and the way they looked at him only served to raise his opinion of himself People said that Bryon Bell carried a mirror in his pocket. The better to see himself, that’s what they whispered. The better to know exactly who he was.
As the years went on, the girls in Neptune became wilder in their pursuit of him. They drove by his house at odd hours and telephoned day and night, until his poor sleep-deprived mother got in the habit of leaving the phone off the hook. Such girls knew they were fools; surely they’d only be hurt by Bryon, like the others before them, yet when he smiled, even the smartest girls in town grew convinced that no matter what had happened in the past, this time he would remain true. They paid for his new clothes and for the gas in his truck, they loved him in their own single beds after he’d sneaked through their windows in the hours past curfew, or they went with him into the woods, where the loblolly pines howled at night, like men trapped in the darkness, fated to stand in the same place for all eternity.
By the time Bryon was seventeen, two local girls had tried to commit suicide because of him, and a third was up in Baltimore, at a home for unwed mothers. None of this bothered Bryon Bell in the least; he looked at girls and saw only sweet little fuckboxes, there for him to use, no hearts involved, no souls, and, most assuredly, no responsibilities. In time, the girls in town wished on him a sort of curse: they hoped he would one day know the sort of love they themselves had experienced the first time he kissed them, the cruel and desperate variety that always accompanies yearning for someone you’re bound to lose.
Throughout his youth, Bryon worked odd jobs, learning a carpenter’s trade, but he knew he was meant for more than a town where there wasn’t a single movie theater and a person had to drive a good half an hour before he found a decent bar. He dreamed of baseball, of money and fame, and his dreams stuck to his skin and made him shimmer, so that even grown women who should have known better found their heads turning as he passed them by on the street. Why, his mother’s friends couldn’t keep their eyes off him when they came to the house to play cards. He’s trouble, they said, their tongues practically hanging out, no matter that he was years younger than many of their own sons. Have pity for the woman
who wins this prize, that’s what these women warned one another, and as it turned out, they were right.
It was Marie Bennett he wound up with, a pretty forty-year-old who should have known better. When his own mother kicked him out. Bryon moved in with Marie and stayed in her house overlooking the shore for the next two years. Marie gave him too much money and she didn’t reprimand him for his selfish deeds, not even when she knew he was meeting young girls down at the dock. She bought him a leather coat, fine boots that would last a lifetime, a gold chain that he quickly traded for cash at a pawn-shop. She could give him every gift money could buy, but Marie understood he would never be true.
She never said a word when he didn’t come home until two or three in the morning, and then, when he stopped coming home altogether, except to eat or to get clean clothes or to demand a loan to tide him over. Bryon stayed with Marie until two weeks after his nineteenth birthday, and when he couldn’t bring himself to go to bed with her one more time, he forged her name, then went down to the First National Bank and withdrew ten thousand dollars. After he’d gone, Marie didn’t tell anyone what he’d done to her for months; w hen she finally admitted what had happened and that her life’s savings had vanished along with Bryon, the other women in town told her she was lucky. Good riddance to bad rubbish, the) said. Bryon Bell had only taken her money they reminded her, but from the look on Marie’s face they knew this wasn’t the case, and no one was surprised when she had that accident out by Cove Road. By then, she was drinking too much, and to her most intimate friends she’d already confided that she had nothing to live for now that Bryon Bell had left town; everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Marie crashed in one way or another.
With Marie Bennett’s money in his pocket, Bryon knew he had a chance for something better than Neptune, so he drove to Baltimore, hoping for a chance at the minor leagues. He rolled down the windows of his truck, relieved to no longer smell the sea, happy to be on a road that led to a city where no one knew him and he’d be free to spend Marie’s money however he liked. But when he tried to sign up for the tryouts, the manager just laughed at him. There were boys there from college, stars of their university teams who had practiced for up to six hours each day. There were young men who had traveled all the way from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, individuals so serious and focused, they didn’t move a muscle until their names were called, and then they hit ball after ball out of the park, so that the blue sky above was filled with blinding white circles. until each one fell into the grass. where they sat smoldering. like stars.