A Sudden Light: A Novel (26 page)

I was alone then, for a time, indulging in my pain, for the physical aspect was only so much. There was also the pain of having Ben treat me the way he did. My mind drifted to our first weeks on the Coast and how there was nothing in our world but us, and then this. As if our physical bodies were in our way, our physical existence impeded our real connection.

“Fair warning,” a voice said softly from somewhere far off, “it’s going to hurt more before it hurts less.”

I opened my eyes, and he was there before me. He had returned for me. My vision darkened with pain as he lifted my limp arm and folded it across my body, then gently up and, with a pop, the joint came together. “Better?” the voice asked. Oh yes, better. So much better. I wanted to thank him for fixing me, I wanted him to hold me. But when I opened my eyes, no one was there. Ben was already gone.

When the doctor arrived an hour later, I was nearly asleep on a bench in the kitchen, my head tipped precariously against the corner of the stove.

“I thought you said it was dislocated,” I vaguely heard the doctor grumble, his coat still on, his bag in hand.

“It was,” the voice of Elijah said, mystified. “He must have reset it himself.”

“Impossible,” the doctor said sharply. “Or nearly so.”

“Maybe it was a ghost,” I heard Mr. Thomas offer.

The doctor growled with dissatisfaction and clomped noisily out of the kitchen and back to his warm house on First Hill. Mr. Thomas and Elijah roused me enough to get me to the maid’s room on the ground floor, where I could sleep in one of the small beds kept for the help. As they laid me back on the hard mattress, I opened my eyes and looked at them both.

“It was Ben,” I told them. “He came back for me.”

But they didn’t hear me, for they were already gone.

April 25, 1904

I returned to The North Estate the following day with my arm in a sling. The main house was woefully behind schedule and still a skeleton in parts, though the cottage, my home with Ben, was a comforting oasis. It was our haven, as Ben had promised me. A place of spectacular beauty and peace. It was my home.

Ben stayed away for several days, and when he finally returned, he seemed to have grown smaller. He seemed tired. I was sitting at the table in the cottage eating venison stew the cook had prepared, reading some Sherlock Holmes, which was my guilty pleasure and not the sort of reading Ben would like to have me do—he was so insistent on my philosophical development, sometimes I wondered if he had lost the ability to experience guilty pleasures entirely.

“I’ve ruined it, haven’t I?” Ben said when he opened the door and saw me at the table.

“I’m not sure ‘ruined’ is the word,” I replied, not angrily in any way, but certainly reserved. “You’ve changed it.”

Ben nodded, understanding my meaning. He didn’t enter the room, he didn’t remove his coat or his boots.

“I wonder if you’ll ever forgive me for hurting you like that.”

“I’m sure you’ve suffered more than I have for these few days,” I said.

“I’ve suffered,” Ben agreed. “I don’t know why.”

“Because you acted against your nature,” I said.

“And what is my nature, Harry? Since you are the keeper of wisdom.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But trying to force yourself into a role that confounds your spirit will always break you. You taught me that, and I will always remember it.”

“But I contain multitudes,” Ben said. “So why is it difficult?”

“We don’t really contradict ourselves,” I said, trying to put meaning to Whitman’s words. “We simply don’t see the connections, and so we think we’re contradicting ourselves. I’m sure, from a distance, we would appear to be one, without contradiction. Though, from our own vantage point, we are nothing but contradiction.”

“I don’t feel that way,” he said. “I feel like I’m a distortion, a Siamese twin. I have one heart, but two of everything else.”

“Then listen to your one heart, and it will tell you where to go,” I said.

“Are you really done with me, Harry?”

“I’m sorry for saying that,” I said. “I knew it was the only thing that would satisfy your father. And maybe it would be the best for you, as none of us can live in two worlds simultaneously.”

“It hurt me,” he said.

“I know, and I’m sorry. But I’ve been seeing things differently, like I’m high in a tree looking down on what’s happening. I know you’re struggling within yourself, but I see you as perfect, and I love you for it.”

“But there’s a distance. You’re in the tree and I’m on the ground and there is a great distance between us.”

Ben seemed so sad. I understood his internal battle—at what cost progress? At what cost happiness? I wished there was something I could do to help him, but there was not, other than be with him and support him in whatever path he chose to take.

“I know our life is a compromise,” he said. “I cannot give you what you would like: a public commitment. I have family and business obligations that prevent it. But I promise you, Harry. This place we are building. This will always be our place. I will commit to that with everything I am. And when we are gone from here, this most beautiful place on earth, the eternal forest will return to take our place.”

B
efore dinner that evening, Serena was charged up. She was on fire. She put my father and me to work washing the fancy china from the formal dining room, where we would be dining. After that, my father and I were set to polishing the silver. She had Grandpa Samuel sweeping the porch and washing windows with vinegar and newspaper.

Serena, for her part, baked and cooked and chopped and whisked—her mixing bowl clasped tightly to her breadbasket and her wrist snapping around so quickly it was only a blur. She paused to take her relaxation breaths frequently, a quasi plié with her fingers arching at the ends of her gracefully bowed arms as she inhaled and then bent over to stretch. I was impressed with her flexibility, but then, one would assume maximum flexibility from a seductress of her caliber, I guessed. We were having fresh bread and homemade aioli, orange and fennel salad, an olive spread thing, and a dish of thinly sliced raw beef, which was called carpaccio. She’d found the recipe in a copy of
Bon Appétit
, I deduced
from the frequently consulted magazine lying on the counter. I’d never eaten raw beef, but Serena assured me I would love it; it was a summery dish, she said.

All of this commotion was because Richard, a.k.a. Dickie, was coming to dinner.

Dickie was Serena’s alleged boyfriend. I thought of him as “alleged” because he had yet to make an appearance at Riddell House, and how close can you be to your boyfriend if he never stops by the house? I quizzed Serena about him, but she was less than forthcoming with details. I knew that Dickie was in real estate, and that Serena supposedly worked
with
him but not
for
him, but I didn’t know how they met or how long they’d been dating. I gleaned, through a process of deduction in which I factored nonresponses, as well as likely falsified answers and plausibly correct answers, that Dickie was responsible for the telephone-directory-size blue binder my father had been toting around since we’d arrived. Proposal for the Development of . . .

Which meant Dickie was part of the deal, which was good, because Dickie would help facilitate the reunion of my parents, insofar as exploiting the land for profit would result in everybody being happy again. But it was also bad, because the deal ran contrary to the desires of a ghost who seemed to have singled me out for direct communication and implementation of a different agenda. And, to be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to carry on a conversation with a ghost, especially if the ghost was telling me to do something that would dash my father’s plans and, no doubt, snuff out any hope I had of getting my parents back together. So it was with a certain measured caution that I anticipated meeting Dickie. Because I really wasn’t sure how Dickie would take to the latest development in the Proposal for the Development of . . . saga.

Dickie arrived, and he was a very large man. He had an incredible amount of flesh slathered over his six-foot-three frame, and all of it was packed into a lightweight suit he’d clearly bought forty pounds ago. His flesh was literally pressing out at the seams of his clothing, and I could
see the stitching of his shirt through his jacket; I could see the seams of his briefs through his slacks. Dickie’s largeness made me fear for Serena; I remember wondering if he might squash her when they had sex.

Dickie entered the kitchen with beads of sweat on his brow, and, when he sat down, I felt small and insignificant, as if Dickie could crush me with one of his ham hock hands.

“Trevor, this is Dickie,” Serena announced. “And now I must get myself together. I’ve been cooking all afternoon.”

She glided out of the room the way she did, her lovely blue toes touching the ground only to steer her. And then Dickie looked at me.

“How old are you?” he asked with an impressive baritone that resonated in my diaphragm.

“Fourteen,” I replied. “Just.”

“Call me Richard, then,” Dickie said. “You won’t be able to call me Dickie with a straight face, will you?”

“Dickie,” I said with poker in my eyes.

“You smiled.”

“I didn’t.”

“You’re pretty good,” he said. “Just one corner, but I saw it. More of a smirk.”

“Dickie,” I said again, and Dickie stared at me until I grinned. “Richard,” I said, and I didn’t smile.

“See?”

“But what happens when
she
calls you Dickie?”

“Collateral damage,” he said. “You know what that means?”

“Unintended civilian deaths in a military strike.”

“If you laugh when
she
says it,” Richard said, “I can’t complain. But if you laugh when
you
say it, I want to smack the grin off your face, and I have some difficulty with my impulse control. So call me Richard. You know how to open a bottle of wine?”

He handed me a wine tote with six bottles of red wine in it. I took one of the bottles, found a corkscrew in the drawer, and channeled my
father—wine corking I’d seen as a child—and uncorked the bottle with a certain deftness that impressed even me.

Richard poured himself a glass. He swirled the wine by holding the base of the glass between his fingers and moving his hand quickly in tight circles. He lifted the glass and examined the wine in the light. He sipped.

“You’re not drinking?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m drinking,” I said. “I’m just—it’s a little early for me.”

“It’s five o’clock somewhere,” Richard said. “Get a glass.”

I got myself a glass, and Richard poured a little wine into it. He showed me how to put my fingers around the base and swirl.

“You want to aerate the wine,” Richard said. “It’s a bit young. You want to open it up. You decant old wines for the sludge. You decant young wines for the aeration.”

He lifted his glass and examined it at eye level. I mimicked his moves.

“See the legs?” Richard asked. “The wine that lingers on the sides of the glass. That gives you an indication of the alcohol content.”

I studied my glass, looking for legs.

“When you drink, you slurp,” he said. “You want that extra aeration. It releases the aroma, which, of course, is how we taste. If you plug your nose, you don’t taste very much at all. Right? If you have a cold.”

“The olfactory senses work in conjunction with the taste buds,” I confirmed. Science. “It’s symbiotic.”

“You know of which I speak. Now take a slurp and tell me what you think.”

I slurped. It tasted like wine.

Not that I’d had a lot of wine. A couple times I’d had it. When my father got drunk at Thanksgiving and poured me a few tablespoons in a jelly jar glass and my mother scowled at him. That was pretty much it. He said I shouldn’t be taught to think alcohol was taboo or I’d start binge drinking in college.

Still, I wasn’t sure my palate was very sophisticated when it came to wine. To me, it tasted red.

“Impressive,” I said.

“Parker gave it a ninety-three,” Richard boasted. “That’s big. Twenty-one bucks a bottle at Pete’s. I got the case discount. Ten percent off. That’s what they do at Pete’s: they give the case discount for half a case. That’s how you get loyal customers, Trevor. Can I call you Trevor?”

“My friends call me Clever,” I said.

“Do they? All right, Clever. It’s about customer loyalty. It’s about the personal relationship. It’s about shaking a man’s hand and looking him in the eye and giving him your word. These lawyers. They’re everywhere. They’re like locusts. My contract with a guy like you, Clever? My contract is here: in my handshake, in my eyes, in my heart.”

“That’s solid,” I said.

“Solid.”

I took another sip of red juice. I slurped to aerate and noticed the approving smile on Richard’s face.

“Richard,” I said.

“What?”

“Just practicing.”

“I know why they call you Clever,” he said, leaning back, taking a sip of wine, and admiring the garnet color as he held the glass to the window so he could examine the clarity; I imitated his moves. “You know what your aunt said to me? She said, ‘Clever is the kid I would have had, if I’d had a kid.’ ”

I thought about it a minute, but not too long. Because it was a compliment, but it also reminded me that I was fourteen and not twenty-three. I would forever be a kid to Serena’s adultness.

“You don’t want kids?” I asked. “I mean, with Serena?”

“I have kids,” he said. “They’re incompetent losers; everything I worked hard to give them is wasted. I spend more money in car insurance and in alimony to that she-wolf mother of theirs than I spent on their education. Adult children are always looking for the first opportunity to force you into a retirement community in Arizona. And, believe
me, they’re praying you’ll die quickly so they can have the money you worked hard for but won’t give them.”