And the Dark Sacred Night (11 page)

“You haven’t budged. Esme put you in a coma?” Malachy was back, handing her a paper cup of water.

“Just taking it all in.”

“Yeah, this is the night we get it that we’re actually
here
. At this mind-blowing place with all these mind-blowing people. The fame! The glory! The girdles about to burst! Like, pinch me, man.”

“Did you see Natalya?” asked Daphne.

“You mean her benevolent twin? Do not be fooled, Swan!”

He sat and opened his program. Side by side, they read the next round of songs they would hear.

The lights dimmed and swelled. Spectators reseated themselves. Throats cleared; shawls were adjusted; the shushers shushed. Antony Carpenter-Rhodes stood and beckoned the campers to stand as well. The rest of the audience applauded them politely, briefly. Daphne felt herself smiling inanely. Malachy murmured in her ear, “How does it feel to be among the chosen people?”

Their wooden chairs creaked awkwardly as they sat down.

The air grew swiftly chilly, and Daphne wished she had remembered a sweater. She leaned toward Malachy, who did not pull away. The stage lights bloomed. Once again, silence fell, though only to be broken by a collective sigh when Esme appeared wearing a different but equally revealing dress, this one a column of pleated gauze, pink
infused with silver. She gave them hymns, arias, a ballad from
West Side Story
, Mozart, and Ravel. Through all of her nimble, radiant, flawless singing, Daphne became increasingly conscious of the heat she felt through Malachy’s sleeve.

When Esme finished, the audience stood abruptly and roared. Flashbulbs popped. One man stood on his chair and shouted
“Bellissima!”
at the top of his lungs. The singer bowed, blew kisses, applauded her accompanist. He was handsome, with cascading black hair and a beatnik goatee, but he was slight in build, and when he stood beside Esme, he looked like a page to her warrior princess. They held hands and bowed together. The applause did not fade. Then she spoke into his ear and, as he returned to his gleaming instrument, gestured that the audience should sit.

Like a roomful of children promised sweets by their teacher, the hundreds of spectators became instantly still and took their seats. Esme watched her pianist until he nodded. The piano began slowly, the notes sparse and halting; Esme’s voice emerged with a sleepy languor. She sang,
“J’ai compris ta détresse, cher amoureux …”
In its first lines, the song sounded decorous; Esme’s smile was coy.

Glancing down, Daphne saw that her left hand was only an inch from Malachy’s right. She returned her attention to Esme. The song began to unfurl, its tones warming in response to the passion in its plea, like a dress being gradually unfastened. Esme’s French was so pristine that Daphne could hear every word, could even translate most of the lyrics.
“Loin de nous la sagesse, plus de tristesse.”
Far from us wisdom, farther still sadness.

Carefully, she allowed her hand to roll sideways until it rested against Malachy’s, in the narrow cleft between their thighs. If she were a fool, he would snatch his hand away. But he didn’t, and while his entire focus remained gravely on Esme—Daphne glanced sideways for only an instant—his hand lay against hers for the remainder of the song.

I surrender to your wishes
, sang Esme, leaning down toward the audience so that her breasts, barely contained, must have been almost entirely visible to those in the front center rows.
Make me your mistress
, she beseeched the handsome man in the plaid jacket, who happened to be in the front row. Then she leaned back, eyelids lowered
in rapture, as the song rose to a rapid crescendo and plummeted to its blunt finale.

Esme bowed sharply the minute the pianist played the last note, and once again—more hysterically, if possible—the audience exploded. But this time the pair of performers, in single file, left the stage.

Daphne’s and Malachy’s hands had risen instantly to join the applause, but Daphne’s held the memory of his (so much warmer than hers). What a relief that her virulent blush might honestly be seen as a response to the performance.

“What was that song?” she asked him when the applause had faded just enough to permit conversation. (It continued for a long time beyond Esme’s exit. Daphne’s palms were so sore that she had to press them against her hips.)

“I have no idea, but man, whatever it was, it ought to be a controlled substance. She’d better lock her door tonight.” He laughed briefly. “Or not.”

They filed out of their row and walked side by side on the pebbled path that led toward the girls’ dorm and, farther along, the estate’s old dairy barn, where the boys endured primitive sleeping quarters in scarcely converted stalls.

“I feel like my ears caught fire,” he said. “Like I need to put them out.”

“I know what you mean,” she said.

They walked fast, arms folded tight against the chill, silent till they reached the fork in the path. Now, she thought. She didn’t have to stretch far to kiss him on the cheek. When he reacted by stepping backward, off the path, she was mortified.

He looked at the ground, but when he raised his face, his expression was happy. He stepped close again and kissed her back, on the cheek, startling her almost as much as she had startled him. “That’s her effect on us, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Daphne said. She willed herself to hold his gaze. Their arms were still folded against their bodies, both of them visibly shivering.

“Night, Swan,” he said, almost a whisper.

T
HREE KNOCKOUT SURPRISES
in one blessed week. Possibly a threat to Jasper’s heart, and what’s going on here anyway? Has he landed smack in a fairy tale? Not three gold coins or three dancing princesses, no such luck, but three tasks for the would-be hero. Two of them obvious in their solutions—but both hard, neither pleasant, one a point-blank tragedy. Difficult, unpleasant tasks are otherwise known as ordeals. Ergo: two ordeals followed by a wild card.

First, the biggest of the pines came down. Not like he hadn’t been warned of its demise. Hadn’t looked healthy for years, that tree, so maybe it succumbed to one of the dread blights spreading north with warmer winters. (Rumor has it the maples are already toast.) More likely it was crippled by the natural decay of aging; Jasper can sympathize there. It fell hard, shearing off the northeast corner of the house, gashing open his bedroom and the living room below. Came down, on a day of wicked wind, while he was at work, or no doubt his wonky ticker
would
have slammed to a halt. He dragged out the big ladder, yanked off dangling boards, and managed without breaking his neck, God knows how, to staple plastic tarps across the splintered wounds. Not good how touch-and-go his breathing felt after climbing that ladder a dozen times. Not good at all. Now he has to sleep through the flapping sounds, the sneaky drafts, the weird blue glow pulsing across his bed at dawn.

Second: no more Pluto.

Four days ago, the dog stopped eating; wouldn’t touch the chicken cooked up with rice. Day before yesterday, he stayed inside the shelter, wouldn’t get up. He was panting heavily, eyes oozing, ears limp. Without wasting the time to make an appointment, Jasper carried the dog to the truck, all hundred-some pounds of that almost-wolf,
drove him over to the vet in Rutland, the space-age clinic with the fancy-pants diagnostic machines.

He got the one he thought of as the Baby Vet: how old was she, twelve? And those frosted nails, for God’s sake; did she come to work expecting to type and file? But Jasper had no choice. He watched her listen to Pluto’s heart, her brown ponytail twining around the cord of her stethoscope. She frowned. “Sounds like it’s beating behind a pillow. He’s what”—she glanced at the chart—“eleven? That’s pretty old for a working husky, a dog this big.” She stroked Pluto’s thick fur and crooned, “Handsome guy, you are. Handsome, handsome guy. Sweet fella.” When she scratched the magic zone behind his ears, he registered no pleasure. Miserable, that’s all he was.

X-rays, as Jasper had feared. He sat in one of the hard plastic chairs, desperate for distraction, though fat chance he’d pick up magazines called
Cat Fancy
and
Bird Talk
—or pamphlets urging him to brush his dog’s teeth, buy something called the “gentle leader” (Obama springs to mind), consider the wisdom of pet insurance. (Ha. Deductible, at least, the bills for a working dog’s health.)

When Baby Vet called him into the room with the machine, she stood in front of a computer screen showing the image of Pluto’s organs and bones. The tense set to her Bazooka-pink lips telecast the verdict. “Mr. Noonan, I am so sorry. Pluto’s heart is encased in fluid. There’s a massive growth in his thoracic cavity, and whether or not it’s benign, I’m afraid …” She stood in front of the screen, arms crossed. Did she think him too dim to look at the evidence himself?

She read his expression. “Do you want to look?”

“I most certainly do.”

She turned to the computer and, with one of her pearly nails, tapped at the alien shape, a cloud of smoke confounding the clean arc of Pluto’s rib cage. No mistaking the abnormality, its fatal placement.

“There’s a cardiologist up in Burlington,” she said. “I could shoot these over to him. But honestly, Mr. Noonan?” She looked genuinely mournful, as if she knew what a hard worker, what a profoundly good dog, this animal was; as if she had the faintest notion what Jasper would be losing.

She told him Pluto would die on his own in the next day or two. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen; he would suffocate. “I can be
blunt with you, I’m guessing,” she said. “Euthanasia is what I’d recommend.”

“Ain’t no youth to it,” he muttered. “Oughta call it decrepitasia. Endatheroadasia.”

Her anxious smile tipped toward a smirk. You could bet she had a boyfriend, this twiglet of a girl: likely another vet, a muscular type who doctored boutique dairy cows or pleasure horses, hobby livestock of the New Vermont. Once they had babies, she’d devote herself to them. The manicure told you as much.

“Do you want to be alone with Pluto?” she asked. “You can take your time. All the time you need to say good-bye.”

As if he’d never been through this before, the holding of a sick or maimed dog, too big for a lap, down on the cold steel table. The one-two punch of the drugs. The brief spasms, the palsied letting go of every ligament and muscle. Followed by the absurd request about cremation, ashes to take home in a carton or urn like some morbid souvenir. Jasper mourned his dogs when they died, he damn well did, but put them on the mantel or bury them in a childlike cemetery plot? What sort of treacly pantomime was that?

“Prolong his pain?” Jasper shook his head. “Fetch the drugs.” He resisted calling her
honey
. Loraina had set him straight on that. (“I can call
you
honey—or buster or boss—but not vice versa, hon,” she had informed him the day she started work at the shop.)

Like his teammates, Pluto was a kennel dog, but this did not mean that a great deal of love talk and physical affection hadn’t passed between Jasper and Pluto, all the way back to puppyhood: training, working, pulling cart or sled up and down the mountain trails, over logging roads, through meadows feathered with Queen Anne’s lace one season, pillowed in snow the next. Pluto’s death meant more than sorrow, however; more than reminders of Jasper’s own less-than-reliable heart. It meant, to begin with, the cancellation of that bachelor party over Thanksgiving. Jasper needed two full teams, with two solid leaders, for a gig like that. He’d have to return the deposit, tell Jim he’d have one less job. Could he offer those rich boys an alternative? A midnight ski party? Unlikely. Unwise. The boys would want to be drunk as bees on thistle. That was the nature of these rituals. Some things change too fast to keep up with, others not a whit. Knuckleheaded customs tend to stay the same.

Third, and this surprise was of a different order, the wild card: Kit had sent him an e-mail. Jasper found it when he returned from putting an end to Pluto, after he greeted the other dogs in the kennel, promised them a run before dark, told them that no, Pluto hadn’t returned from town, wouldn’t be back. “He’s gone, crew.” Jasper would fry up a couple of steaks, spread the drippings on their kibble. Steak sandwiches for a week: to hell with doctor’s orders.

Now, Jasper realized, he’d have to make the decision he’d been putting off: whether to roll up his sleeves for a new batch of pups or let the veterans dwindle into retirement—something Jasper himself should consider, according to Dr. Forster.

But Kit. Kit was asking to visit—alone, no wife, no kids. Just “taking a break.” (Who was that boy fooling? He had to be getting the boot.) The professor professed he’d be happy to help Jasper around the house, make himself useful. He felt guilty they weren’t in better touch, wanted to amend that.

Kit belonged, in Jasper’s life, to what he wryly—not bitterly; never bitterly!—called the Daphne Decade. Of course it wasn’t the boy’s fault that his mother had fled, decamped, traded Jasper in for the younger model—leaving Jasper with the awkward dilemma of a mostly (but not entirely) grown child whom he had actually adopted, had partly (well, half attentively) raised through the bumpy years, the ones you dream will be easy when you’re up all night with bawling babies, assuring yourself,
This is the hard part, it’s all downhill from here
. Downhill via slalom and a few rocky drop-offs that first steal your breath, then slam you down hard. Avoid an avalanche, you’re lucky.