And the Dark Sacred Night (15 page)

Which only goes to show
, he can hear Rayburn say,
that she still has a hold on your gullible, lamebrain heart. Other parts of your anatomy, too, buster
.

To buy time, Jasper speaks slowly. “You know, Christopher, I remember when I met you, that day we went to the state fair, rode the bumper cars, walked through the dairy barns, ate the cream puffs. Remember that?”

Kit forces a smile. “Do they still make those cream puffs?”

“Damn right they do. Had one this summer. Two. Take that, Dr. Forster.”

Kit waits, his respect for Jasper calming him down. And yes, thinks Jasper, here is the very thing about Kit’s nature that summoned this particular memory.

“What struck me first thing about you was your patience. Little boys aren’t patient like that. We waited in line after line, and it was the worst of August days, Christ it was miserable out there in the sun. But you just waited like some little … mystic or I don’t know what. And there was Kyle, jumping from foot to foot, whining about thirsty, hungry, boring—normal obnoxious behavior. Rory, I don’t recall where he was, but he wasn’t with us that day.

“But you. Never a complaint or a sign of losing your little temper.”

“I was probably too scared to act impatient,” says Kit. “Scared of you and Kyle, what meeting you meant. I had a good idea, even though Mom just called you ‘new friends.’ I do remember that day.”

“Yes.” Jasper smiles at Kit; blushes, too, unable to dodge the smaller pleasures emerging from the memory (that skimpy dress of Daphne’s, her green eyes and their recurrent promise of
later
). “I couldn’t help sizing you up, maybe just as scared as you. If I married this woman, you’d be my responsibility, too, and just who were you?
Come right down to it, I’d be marrying you, too. So I had an eagle eye on you those first few times we met. And I thought to myself that not only were you patient, but it’s like you were waiting for something. And listening. You were a listener, that I picked up on. Some patient people are just plain out to lunch. Cows waiting for the call at milking time. None too sharp.”

Kit laughs.

“Not you, though. Nothing got past you, was my impression. You were taking it all in.”

As if he’s doing that very thing now, Kit continues to smile at Jasper but makes no reply.

Jasper’s running out of distractions from the much more urgent subject at hand. Turning to the fire, he adds two logs, bullies them into position with the poker. “I like this wood,” he says. He points out the window, into the dark void beyond their reflections. “Old apple tree, from the end of the meadow. You boys liked to hide up there at chore time. Finally gave up the ghost. A shame. Fruit trees don’t live forever.” He gestures at the gash in the corner of the room. “Guess the big old pines don’t, either.”

Silence. Kit, ever the listener, is still waiting. When he gives in, his voice is barely audible. “But you know the answer. Right?”

“In part,” Jasper admits.

“One thing I’ve been afraid of is that Mom … is that it wasn’t something she … that she might have been forced.”

“Raped, you mean?”

Kit nods. His eyes shine.

“Not at all, no,” Jasper says. “No, it was normal, healthy teenage lust. A two-way burst of passion. The old firecracker. Ordinary that way.”

Kit wipes his eyes on a sleeve. “Oh.” He laughs nervously.

“Your mother was in control—or thought she was. Like so many smart girls think. Boys, too. When they give in to their wildest urges despite the best of advice.” Jasper thinks of Kyle’s impulsiveness, his perpetual resistance to good advice; at least he never got a girl pregnant (though would Jasper know if he had?).

“So who was the guy?” Kit’s voice splinters with emotion.

“Hold on. Here’s where I have to tell you I never learned his name.” Kit’s expression turns bitter. Jasper leans toward him. “God’s truth.
As your mother said, what use was that information to me, the name of a fellow I’d never meet, a fellow she hadn’t seen since it happened, had no intention of seeing again?”

“So in fact you don’t know anything more than I do. You know nothing.”

Christ, if looks could freeze-dry your innards.

“Hold on. It’s not so black-and-white. She told me a couple of things.”

“What things?”

“She had some contact with the family.”

“What family? You mean my father’s family?”

Here is where Jasper must tell or part ways with the truth—maybe just take a minor detour? Daphne told him that she had a relationship of sorts, for a few years, with the mother of the impregnating fellow; Daphne referred to her, coldly, as the Other Grandmother. The one thing he remembers is that the woman was married to someone distinguished. That name he did know—used to know—and with some effort he could probably jimmy it loose from the lower mine shafts of memory. But surely the woman’s dead by now. What is the point?

“Christopher, by the time I met your mom, this was old news. She’d lost touch with those people, or so she said, and I had no reason not to believe her.”

“Lost touch?
Lost touch?
” Half plea, half accusation.

“Listen. Jesus.” Jasper contemplates pretending he has to pee again, giving his cowardly self the third degree in Daphne’s goddamn mirror. “Listen. The way I saw it, seemed a good bet her memories of that fellow—the one who got her in trouble, and believe me, it was trouble with a capital
T
—looked to me like those memories weren’t something she wanted to press in an album.”

“So he was some kind of hoodlum?”

Jasper sighs loudly. “Give me some oxygen here, would you?”

“Sorry.”

“He could’ve been a friggin’ Eagle Scout. That is not the point. Again, please, we are talking late sixties. ‘Choice,’ to the extent women had any choice, you are talking a whole other kettle of fish than today. Kettle of sharks.”

Kit thinks about this for a moment. “Do you think she was sorry?”

“Sorry?”

“About me. Having me. Because she had
no
choice.”

Jasper wonders if this is the first time Kit has ever thought of his existence as something other than a free, all-things-being-equal proposition. “No way did she regret you. No way. That’s certain. She could’ve put you up for adoption. That
was
a choice lots of girls made back then. You know enough to figure that.”

Jasper finds Kit’s naïveté surprising, even a bit silly. Rayburn says their children are all so damn spoiled—by the times, more than the parents—that they have yet to face the no-fun, no-justice, ice-water facts of adulthood. This daisy chain of thought returns Jasper, predictably, to Kyle. Stop! he scolds himself.

Maybe Daphne has resisted Kit’s questioning (her stubborn streak deep and wide as a ravine), but hasn’t he ever snooped through her drawers and closets, the way most kids would do? Is Daphne really so cunning at hiding secrets?

Well now. Is she indeed. Jasper would have a good long laugh if he were alone. All those nights, the last year or two, when she called to say she’d be staying over with a “friend,” not making the drive home because she was dead tired or the rain was too heavy—or, gosh, it was somebody’s birthday.…

Kit frets with the afghan on the sofa, a relic of Jasper’s mother. (All these doggone mothers!) He pokes his fingers through the apertures in the yarn. He lets out a shaky sigh. “It must seem like I’m here just to pry something out of you. I’m sorry.”

“I have a child who comes by mostly looking to pry loose my money. Or my sanity, not sure which. Family secrets are a good deal more fun.”

“Fun? I wish.”

Can Jasper ever get it right, the dad thing—the almost-dad thing in this case? “Now I’m the sorry one. I don’t mean to get coy about this. I am dead tired and sore as all get-out after that work today. You did more than your share, and I’m thankful. I was going to make a joke about your not going soft after all, but that would fall flat, too. So I just say let’s sleep on it. I honestly need to think. Reconnoiter with this stuff I haven’t thought about in ages.”

Kit nods, drained of anger. “Go to bed. I’ll follow you soon.”

“Watch TV if you like. I’ll conk out dead as a granite slab.” He labors to stand. “Alley-oop and upward!”

Kit makes himself smile. “See you in the morning. I’ll be ready to get back at it.”

“Better be,” says Jasper. He forces himself to turn away from the pitiful sight of that boy, looking so forlorn, so … in fact, so like a
boy
.

Christ but that woman’s reach is long.

He thinks of a fancy phrase Daphne once used:
filer à l’anglaise
. She told him it meant to depart from your hosts’ home without a proper good-bye. Not quite Jasper’s act, but still. He didn’t sleep well, and when the sun began to ooze through the tarp (a problem they’d better amend today), he crept downstairs (funny to creep in a house you rarely share), ate a fat-free muffin with his coffee, and then, out of guilt but with vicarious pleasure, cooked a panful of bacon for Kit, pouring off the grease to save as a treat for the dogs. He left the strips draining on a paper towel, alongside a note saying he’d be back after lunch to resume work on the house. Jim could help Kit set up the sawhorse and tools.

Driving through the village, he stops on impulse at the bakery and the mini-mart—and still he arrives first at the shop, pleased that his early arrival will startle Loraina. Maybe he should plan a Daily Don’t to drop on
her
when she walks in the door.

No messages on the answering machine (the phone’s become disturbingly quaint), but he has to sift through twenty-some e-mails, only five related to booking lessons. Some guy’s looking for an ice-climbing jaunt at New Year’s, a daffy-sounding gal wants yoga while her husband skis; out of luck, these two. He clambers around a pile of empty cardboard cartons—which Stu is supposed to flatten every day before closing—to get a pot of coffee started.

His good years with Daphne he wouldn’t trade for anything: nights of drinking wine, that meek Italian stuff Daphne liked, while listening to records and taking the risk, three boys sleeping above them (often snoring audibly alongside the music), of stripping off their clothes and making love everywhere from the couch by the chimney to the deck overlooking the meadow, its surface so dense with fireflies that it resembled a vast sheet of golden foil, a mirror to the starry sky. Daphne was, no matter what else she turned out to be, damn fun.
Vivian he’d loved, and a painful vacuum still forms in his chest when he pictures her body on the living room floor, the swarming of the ambulance crew, the pointless rush to the hospital, how his voice had threatened to quit when he told the boys … but Vivian had been the kind of woman you choose when you’re ready to settle down, as sensible as she is warm, more circumspect than sexy. Daphne was an older version of the girl you choose halfway through high school, the kind who doesn’t mind when you drive too fast late at night, aimed at no particular destination, whooping out the window at all the sedate housebound citizens who frown at your shenanigans while secretly wishing they had your crack-the-whip spontaneity. It occurred to him, a month or so after they married, that for Daphne this was effectively a do-over. It was Jasper’s second go-round at marriage, while it was far more than Daphne’s first: it was the kind of beginning she didn’t get to have when she ought to have had it, ten years before.
I am so completely yours
, her every kiss, her every loaf of bread, her every combing of her sex-tangled hair said to Jasper. Not like he’d “saved” her, no, but like he’d opened the lockbox containing her heart.

He had been obtuse to think that she held no grudges about being weighed down early and alone by motherhood, especially a girl with so much talent and spunk. He liked her parents, and boy did they ever like him back, but to hell with how “nice” they were. Daphne’s whole life had stalled when she stayed home to have a kid and care for it in her childhood bedroom while her friends went off into the wider world—a place, back in the late sixties, of tumult and color and high-minded, footloose defiance. Before Kit, Daphne had hoped to try for a career as a performer in, say, a small-city orchestra. She’d been offered a scholarship at a music school in Boston.

All of that she surrendered for Kit, though of course he wasn’t yet Kit, he wasn’t anybody definitive, when she made up her mind to do so. Jasper had no firm beliefs on the morality of abortion; he wasn’t religious, and he was of the mind that it was women’s business, deciding “when life begins.” And who could ignore that governments sanctioned the taking of lives under a Chinese menu of special situations?

Not that such noble or ignoble questions had much to do with Daphne when she was pregnant. Or so he could only gather. There
was, to Jasper, a kind of no-fly zone around that time in her life. He respected the selective silence she chose to maintain, chalking it up to “dignity.” But how could she not have been angry, sorry for herself, felt like she deserved some kind of compensation from fate? (How vainly Jasper had actually believed, early on, that
he
was that compensation. Fate had a thing or two to show him in return.)

In the cramped corner of the stockroom that serves as a kitchen, Jasper rummages in the cupboard till he finds a tray. He rinses it in the sink, dries it with the hem of his shirt; does the same for a cream-and-sugar set so dusty it looks medieval. He dumps the basket of strawberries into a bowl (no woman around to insist on the ritual of washing fruit), puts the warm scones on a plate.

On cue, he hears Loraina’s key, the confusion of someone trying to unlock a door already unlocked. When she steps inside, he grins at her. “Whatever you do, do not tell me I am the best boss in the universe.”

She tries not to smile and almost succeeds. “Okay. Won’t do that. I’ll tell you instead that you need to start taking your shirts to the cleaners. The rumpled look isn’t working.”

He looks at his shirt. It’s flannel, for God’s sake. Who irons flannel shirts?

Loraina sees the tray beside the register. “What’s this,
Masterpiece Theatre
?” She looks around. “Where’s Alistair Whosieface?”