The woman inside always ran out to join the others, although sometimes it was not until the very last minute, just before the cottage collapsed into a heap of flaming twigs. It was in this way that the mother discovered that she still had the will to live, even now, and she was usually the first one to help when the cottage was rebuilt.
Lila could not stand for April to affect her this way. Every day she felt more alive, but if anything this made her more bitter about her own ability to survive. There was nothing that did not remind her of her daughter: the new bark on the lilac tree outside her window was the exact same color as her daughter’s newborn slate-gray eyes. The moss that grew near the back steps was as soft as her daughter’s hair. It did no good to stay inside because there the lace doilies on the easy chair felt like baby blankets and the small silver teaspoons were exactly the right size for a child to hold as she ate cereal and pears. And so, one day in the middle of April, Lila left her aunt’s house for the first time since she’d arrived at the railroad station in February. Each time Lila took a long walk she felt more hopeless: for no reason at all she was terribly alive. In town people smiled at her, as if she was some young girl with her whole future ahead of her. And so, Lila made certain to walk away from town, out by the potato fields where there were nothing but sea gulls, who were so brave they actually swooped down to take bread right out of her hands. And if it was early enough, the time of day when fog rose along the white line in the center of the highway, there were sometimes small deer who stood perfectly still for a moment, before turning to run back into the woods.
What Lila hoped to find, as she walked along the East China Highway, was a reason to go on living. She had turned nineteen only a few weeks earlier, and she’d been surprised to realize that she was still so young. The days were long now; sunlight lasted past suppertime. At night there were falling stars, and even when armfuls of lilacs were cut from the trees more and more blossoms appeared.
Lila was faced with her past each time she chose a long-sleeved blouse from her closet to hide the scars on her wrists. But spring distracted her, she began to feel that her scars were not enough, and so each day she devised a new way to remind herself of her suffering. When she sewed she made certain to jab her fingers with the needle, when she cooked she picked up pots by their handles without bothering to use a potholder. All that remained pleasurable in her life were the long walks she took, until she realized that she could ruin these, too. The very next time Lila left the house she slipped her shoes off and left them underneath the porch of her aunt’s house. She would have to walk far, but by late afternoon the tar on the road would be hot enough, and Lila knew that her feet would burn.
She had walked more than eight miles, and was halfway between East China and Riverhead, when Lila stopped at a gas station. She had come so far on the burning tar that there were blisters on the soles of her feet. She bent down and dusted off some of the pebbles and dirt, and when she looked up she saw Richard sitting in the shade outside the office of the gas station. He was twenty-one, and even from fifteen yards away, Lila could tell how handsome he was. She lowered her eyes immediately, angry at herself for imagining she had the right to look at a man.
“The best thing for hot feet is to pour cold water on them right away,” Richard called to her.
“I don’t happen to have any water with me at the moment,” Lila called back. Even though she wasn’t looking at him, Lila felt herself grow embarrassed.
When Richard stood up, the metal chair he had been sitting on creaked, and Lila felt herself shudder, as if she’d been touched. Richard walked over, and as he passed the gas pumps he picked up a pail. He handed the pail to Lila, then stood there and watched as she emptied it onto her feet. The water was so clear and so cold that it made her gasp.
“Is something funny?” Lila said, annoyed when she looked up and saw that Richard was smiling.
Richard backed away from her, stung by her tone. He was more than six feet tall, but he was terribly shy. And right now he was also confused—he didn’t know what on earth had made him call out to Lila, it just seemed like something he had to do.
“Nothing’s funny,” he said. “It’s just that you’re so beautiful I can’t stop looking at you.”
Lila turned and she ran all the way home. She ran so fast that by the time she reached her aunt’s house her feet were bleeding. That night she locked herself in her room, and she swore that she would never again walk west on the East China Highway. But as she sat in her dark bedroom, the constellations in the sky were so bright they burned through the cotton curtains, and Lila knew that if she saw Richard even one more time, she’d be in danger. If she wasn’t careful she might just fall in love with him, and that was one thing Lila did not intend to do.
At first, when she heard her aunt’s friends talk about Richard’s family, Lila assumed it was no one she knew. These friends were old Russian women who had come to East China by accident. All of them had immigrated long ago with hopes of being in Manhattan, but all had in common a cousin who helped pay their fare, and then insisted they come to live in East China. This cousin had raved about the soil that was so rich potatoes seemed to grow overnight, and it was he who first brought a band of migrant workers to the area. Even though their cousin had been dead for nearly thirty years, all of the relatives he had helped to bring over were still in East China. Every one had planned to move into the city after his death, but Manhattan had faded until it was nothing more than a dream; it was less than a hundred miles to the Midtown Tunnel, but it might as well have been on the other side of a black forest guarded by wolves.
Of course there was one woman, the daughter of a distant cousin, who had managed to leave East China, although she hadn’t gone any farther than the outskirts of town. Twenty-five years earlier Helen had married a migrant worker, a Shinnecock Indian whom the Russian women referred to as the Red Man. The Red Man had taken Helen to a small unheated farmhouse where the pines were so tall and their shadows so dark that not even potatoes could grow. When Helen came to town to do her grocery shopping everyone said hello, but nobody really talked to her, and there wasn’t a soul in East China who didn’t know that Helen’s mother had died of shame.
In the winter, when the ice was treacherous, many of the old women didn’t venture out of their houses. When April came and the old friends were reunited, gossip flowed. On a particularly clear night, when Lila’s feet were still bloody and blistered, four of Belle’s distant cousins came to visit, and the conversation turned to the Red Man and his wife. It was a well-known fact that Helen had been cursed with a curious inability to have children, except for one, the son. Everyone wanted to know what had happened to the son during the winter—for years the old ladies had been waiting for him to be shipped off to the penitentiary, and none of them would have been surprised if he had murdered both his parents with a shotgun and then disappeared into Connecticut or New Jersey. However, there was not much news, even after the winter: Helen’s son was still working at the gas station his father, the Red Man, had somehow managed to buy. And later in the evening, one of the old Russian women admitted that after an ice storm in January, when she was stranded and out of groceries, Helen’s son had come to fix the engine of her Ford, which wouldn’t turn over. After having a cup of tea laced with whiskey, she shocked them all by adding that he really was quite handsome.
Lila served the tea that night, but when her aunt’s friends asked her to read their tea leaves, she excused herself—she said she had a headache and couldn’t possibly see into the future that night. But really, Lila was simply too excited to sit still in a room full of old women. She was nineteen years old, and in spite of everything, very much alive. That night, Lila slept better than she had in months. For the first time since the birth of her child she dreamed. In her dream she found that lilacs were growing in the middle of winter, their blue petals pushing through a slick cover of ice. In the morning, when she woke up, Lila got dressed while it was still dark. She wen
t downstairs quietly, even though her great-aunt wouldn’t have heard if she had slammed the doors. Before she left, she stood out on the front porch for a moment, not yet ready to leave her sorrow behind. In the middle of nowhere, between East China and Riverhead, there was a man who might be able to make her forget. Suddenly there seemed to be a reason for everything, and although Lila started off walking slowly, she wound up running down the two-lane road which for the very first time seemed like a highway that led you somewhere you might want to go.
They were married on the edge of East China, in the parlor of Richard’s parents’ house. It was July and orange lilies were blooming everywhere, even beneath the huge pine trees where the shadows were deep green. Richard’s mother, Helen, cried from the beginning of the ceremony to the very end. The only guest was a high-school friend of Richard’s, a boy named Buddy who was so nervous about his duties as best man that he nearly fainted during the justice of the peace’s speech about fidelity.
After the ceremony Helen took Lila aside in the kitchen and she held her hand. “I hope you understand that no one in town will ever speak to you again,” she told her new daughter-in-law.
In fact, Lila’s own great-aunt had asked her to leave the house as soon as she was told about the marriage, and Lila had spent the last week and a half at a motel in Riverhead. But after losing both her child and her parents the disapproval of neighbors was meaningless.
“Richard’s the only person I need,” Lila told her mother-in-law as she reached up into a cabinet for some plates. There was a luncheon following the ceremony, but with the exception of the still shaky Buddy, there were no guests.
“Just wait,” Helen said ominously. She took a tub of potato salad from the refrigerator, then sat down at the kitchen table, as if the weight of the potato salad was too much for her. “You’ll be the object of every conversation in town. They’ll find out every piece of gossip about you and spread it all over the Island.”
The screen door was open and they could hear the sound of bees. Lila stood still and held the china plates to her chest. She had not stopped to think about her past resurfacing out here in East China; she had not even thought how she would explain the scars on her wrists when she undressed in front of Richard that night.
“Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining,” Helen said. “But my life hasn’t been easy. What saves me is I’m in love with my husband. But sometimes,” she admitted, “I’d like to hear another person’s voice.”
Lila was no longer listening to her mother-in-law. She was sure that if Richard ever found out about her past he would leave her, and she vowed then and there never to let him know about her baby. She came to him without a past, as if she herself had been born on the day she first saw him.
Richard’s father, the Red Man who was gossiped about in so many living rooms and parlors, came into the kitchen for champagne and glasses. He was the same height as his son, although Richard was convinced that his father was several inches taller. No one in town cared, but his name was Jason Grey, and when he saw how sad his wife and new daughter-in-law looked he popped the champagne cork right there in the kitchen and the sudden noise and gush of dry champagne made both women gasp and then laugh out loud.
That night Lila and Richard moved in to the bedroom on the second floor. Jason Grey had put up new wallpaper, and Richard had refinished the pine bed. But even after the lights were turned out, Lila refused to get undressed. It was impossible to see any stars through the pine boughs outside the bedroom window, but somehow the moonlight managed to get through. The room was so well lit Lila was certain that the moment she took off her clothes, Richard would be blinded by the scars on her wrists.
As Lila stood by the window, Richard sat down at the foot of the bed and took off his boots. He was so much in love that he was actually afraid to blink, even once, as if Lila might just disappear. Lila’s back was turned to him, and in the moonlight Richard could see that her posture was as straight as wire. All of a sudden she seemed shy, and because she was, after all, a new bride who had just moved into her in-laws’ house and because she had promised herself to a man who was really still a stranger, Richard felt his heart go out to her. In that moment he fell even more deeply in love.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said softly. “Since we’re married and we’ve got the rest of our lives together, we don’t have to make love yet if you don’t want to.”
Lila wanted to more than anything. She knew that she was about to cry, and she couldn’t imagine an explanation that would satisfy her new husband once he saw that she had tried to take her own life. Because she did not know what else to do, Lila quickly unbuttoned her white dress, let it slip to the floor, then stepped out of it. She held up her hands, wrists together like a hostage. She had not yet unpacked her suitcase, and if Richard insisted she tell him about her past, she had decided she would have to leave him.
When Richard came over to her and held her, Lila closed her eyes and arched her neck, as if getting ready for some great pain.
“I can’t believe how beautiful you are,” Richard said.
Lila opened her eyes and backed away. Just then she wondered if she hadn’t married a fool.
“You’re not looking at me,” Lila said sharply.
Richard bent down and kissed her. “Oh, yes I am,” he said.
Lila pushed him away and she raised her hands until her wrists were directly in front of his eyes. The jagged lines along her wrists grew whiter and whiter; no one in his right mind could ignore them.
“Look at me,” Lila urged her husband.
Richard had spent his whole life in the odd circumstance of being both well loved and lonely. His parents were so much in love that no matter how deeply they cared for him, Richard was somehow excluded. He didn’t care if he was considered an outcast in East China, all he needed was one person, someone of his own. Now that he had found Lila, he didn’t intend to lose her, even if the scars that she now showed him meant he had gotten a little more than he’d bargained for. Richard Grey wasn’t a fool, and he certainly knew something about death. When he was ten he accidentally saw a man kill himself. It was out in the woods behind the deserted army barracks used as a camp for migrant workers. Richard had been born in the barracks, and even after his parents had bought the gas station and moved into the house they still lived in, Richard felt drawn to the migrant camp, if only because there seemed to be more deer there than anywhere else in East China.
He was in the woods, late in October, sitting motionless so that he would not frighten off any deer, when he saw a migrant worker walk into a clearing in the woods with a shotgun in his hands. Richard assumed that this man was an out-of-season hunter searching for deer. But then, quite suddenly, the migrant turned the gun on himself and fired.
Even after he had run for miles, Richard could still hear the shot. And when he had to go to the district attorney’s office to testify to what he had seen, Richard humiliated himself by crying in public when he was questioned. Afterward he couldn’t seem to make himself go into the woods; he stood at the edge of the backyard where the lawn disappeared into brambles and pines, unable to take another step.
And then one day Jason Grey came out to the yard.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said to Richard. He pushed some brambles aside, stepped into the woods, and signaled to his son.
Richard swallowed hard, but he followed. It was darker in the woods than he’d remembered, and each time a branch broke under his father’s boots, Richard shuddered. It didn’t take long for him to realize that his father was leading him right back to the exact spot where the migrant worker had shot off his head.
“Come on,” Jason Grey said when he noticed that his son had stopped walking. “What’s keeping you?”
In the shadows of the pine trees, his father suddenly seemed like a stranger. “You can’t make me go there,” Richard said.
Jason walked back to him. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a cigarette. “I
guess you’re wondering what made him do it,” he said.
“I don’t care,” Richard said.
Jason Grey inhaled on his cigarette and then coughed, and his cough made Richard ache with the sudden knowledge that one day his father would be old and sick.
“If we wanted to,” Jason Grey said, “we could find out everything about that man who shot himself. We could find out how much money he owed, and if his wife had left him for somebody else. But we’d never really know what went on in his mind. It’s not our right to know what goes on in another man’s mind. But whatever it was, we know one thing for sure—he just couldn’t fight it any more. And that’s his right, too.” Jason finished his cigarette and motioned to his son. “Come on,” he said.
Together they walked the rest of the way to the clearing. The few leaves left on the trees had turned yellow, and when the sunlight filtered through them the air seemed to shine. Richard felt the urge to grab his father’s hand; instead he stood in the clearing and watched the yellow light.
“People have private places in their minds,” Jason Grey said. “That doesn’t mean they’re crazy. It doesn’t even mean they’re cowards if they run from something awful.”
They could hear leaves falling. Jason Grey stared straight ahead, but he reached down and took his son’s hand.