And the Dark Sacred Night (24 page)

You could think of promises as a series of nets: some hold for a lifetime; others give way, surprisingly flimsy, in no time at all. Promises to keep secrets, those are the trickiest ones—especially when they’re secrets you don’t even know you’ve been keeping.

He walks as fast as he can through the lobby, waves at the attendant, welcomes the slap of cold air once he’s out. As he crosses the
parking lot, he licks melted chocolate from between his fingers. Maybe you could call it the taste of a good marriage, of love expressed in forbidden but wholesome pleasures. Jasper didn’t bother to correct Rayburn when he made that remark about mourning Viv too long. But come to think of it, he was on the money. Maybe Daphne never quite took hold on Jasper’s heart. Maybe that was part—just part—of why she skipped out. Maybe it’s also part of why Jasper felt reluctant to betray her long-outdated trust. Guilt.

He shakes his head vigorously, like a dog, as if unwanted memories and duplicitous emotions could fly from your head like droplets of water.

The sky is both fading and brightening: the crisp daytime blue is changing, simultaneously, to a timid grayish pink at the horizon, to a robust sapphire high overhead. The temperature is expected to rise in a few days; the snow will begin melting, then freeze. Driving will be treacherous, the skiing crummy. He and Loraina will have more time to bicker as customers dwindle. But right now the slope’s got to be crowded, the shop’s registers consuming money the way an ex-con tucks in meat.

The past few days, after nine, ten hours at the slope, Jasper has returned home, once again, to solitude—not counting the dogs. It feels good in some ways, in others not. He sleeps better than he has in a while, and his hip is giving him a reprieve, as if to reward him for coming to his sorry senses.

S
HE WALKED ACROSS THE MEADOW
surrounding the Silo, the blond surface of the empty stage reflecting the last vestige of sunlight. She stopped to stare at it, watching for the glow to fade. She imagined not the upcoming concert in which she would play her solo but a concert much further in the future, when she would return to play as a visiting artist, someone the campers would revere and discuss at a Saturday morning breakfast, coveting her dresses, guessing at her love life. In a fantasy stretched further yet, she was married to Malachy. They toured together—and lived in a penthouse near Carnegie Hall. Daphne had been to New York City just once, on a family trip when Andrew turned eighteen. They hadn’t gone to any concerts—the trip was her Neanderthal brother’s celebration, so a Yankees game was the highlight—but her mother had taken her for a walk along the façade of the legendary concert hall, to browse the posters and linger for a moment under the crimson awning of the Russian Tea Room.

“Dreaming of our glorious debut?”

She gasped and then, defying her nerves, laughed. “I wish you’d stop sneaking up on me.”

“You’ve sneaked up on me just as often, haven’t you?” said Malachy. “Isn’t that how we met?”

“I think it’s hard to take you by surprise,” she said.

He wore jeans that looked brand-new and a brown sweater over a pale blue T-shirt. “So, shall we head over early, get front-row seats?”

For the Fourth of July, they had a rare night off. Daphne was surprised; only a minority of their teachers and conductors could claim this holiday as theirs. On the other hand, who didn’t love fireworks? Most of the campers had crowded into cars to head for the display in
the nearest town, but according to the solfège master, if you went to the strip of beach, or anywhere along the lake, you could watch the fireworks go off in several towns on the opposite shore.

The spot where they had first talked—which Daphne still thought of as hers, still enjoyed alone most afternoons—was empty. Through the woods, she heard a few people talking on their way to the beach. They sounded like adults, not campers.

Malachy had brought along a blanket and a Hershey bar. By the time they settled comfortably, the sky was almost indistinguishable from the water, both a fathomless gemstone blue.

“I want my money back if the show isn’t good enough,” said Malachy. “But first. Do we save the chocolate or eat it right now?”

“Now,” said Daphne.

“I agree. Now is almost always the better choice. You never know about later.” He unwrapped the bar and broke it in two. He held out the halves, waved them around a moment, and said, “One promises fame, the other happiness. Be careful which one you choose.”

She laughed; he was always making her laugh. “Will you tell me which is which?”

“Of course not. And I’m not sure which one I’d choose.”

“Then don’t share. Take both.”

He shook his head. “Can’t have both.”

“Can’t you?” said Daphne. “So you think Esme McLaughlin is unhappy? I mean, she certainly has the fame.”

Malachy gave her a look of mock disbelief. “I am talking about the virtue of sharing. My mother brought me up to share. That is why I can’t have both.” He bit into one half and handed her the other. “There you go, Miss Indecisive. One way or another, our fates are sealed.”

There had been several concerts since opening night, but the girls couldn’t stop talking about Esme: was it fair to have so much talent and beauty at once? Talent that was
rewarded
. Because they all knew that being gifted alone promised you nothing—oh no, as their teachers repeatedly warned, not without the work.

“Work, it is zee ox-ee-gen of art,” droned Natalya when they wearied of playing the same measures over and over again.

At last it was dark. A number of boats had anchored, also awaiting the show. It began with a starburst of orange to their left, a casual crackling, a muffled boom.

“Ooh,” said Malachy. “And aah. And ooh again.”

Tentatively, Daphne leaned against him. He did not lean away.

They watched as the fireworks rose, geyserlike, from an unseen source: higher and higher, more varied in color, their reflections projecting farther and farther on the surface of the lake, as if reaching toward the two of them.

“I’ve never had private fireworks before,” said Daphne.

“Then you’re a virgin?”

She was stunned. Her arm, against his, felt glued in place.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m prone to bad jokes. That’s how I am.” He put his arm around her shoulder.

“I like how you are.” She kept her voice level. When he didn’t make another joke, she put a hand on his leg. “Can I just say it? How different you are? From the other guys here? Like you’re older. Even if you’re not.” Of course, maybe it was just that he had finished high school a year early, while Daphne still had a year to go.

“I told you. I’m a weirdo.”

“Maybe I’m one, too.”
Takes one to know one
, she could have said. “Not you, Swan.”

“Maybe you should stop calling me that.”

“I thought you liked it.”

“I do. Or I did. But it’s like …” She wanted to hear him say her name, hear
how
he would say it. Would that tell her how he felt? Her friends at home said that if a guy wanted you, he’d make the moves on you the first chance he found:
jump your bones
, she’d heard her brother say, typically crude. But Malachy was obviously different. Maybe he was courtly. Maybe he was shy: clever but shy. Why did boys have to be the ones to make the moves?

Awkwardly, but with an optimist’s determination, she faced him, took hold of his face, and turned it toward hers. (Not as if she hadn’t made out before—though never with a boy like this one.)

He kissed her back, but carefully. It felt as if he were studying her lips with his; a few seconds later his mouth opened, just slightly. He groaned, the way boys always did when they realized they had your permission, and he put his arms around her. They lay back on the blanket, laughing briefly at the impact of the rock when their heads met the ground. They kissed for a long time, and at some point the
fireworks ceased, the chorus of crickets rose, and the air grew colder around them.

He was the one who stopped. “Daphne.”

“You said my name,” she whispered.

“Daphne, is this …”

“Are you going to ask if this is a good idea? We wouldn’t be the only ones. Mei Mei and Craig …” Don’t talk, she told herself. Listen. Did he have a girlfriend at home? If he did, he had never mentioned her.

Malachy sat up and rubbed his face, looking out at the lake.

She sat up beside him. “I just. I want …” She could hear her friend Lucy saying,
Never tell them, never be the first one to say it! It’s the kiss of death!

But Malachy said, “I know. I like you, too. I do. Daphne.”

She ran a hand along his back, his knuckled spine. He stroked her shin.

“But this summer,” he said.

“I know,” she said quickly, before he could continue. “My mom says it’s the time of our lives, and we need to focus on our work, I know that. But we’re
doing
that, and we won’t blow it. We won’t stop working as hard as we are.”

“I’m not worried about that.” He sounded suddenly cold, almost indignant. “I’m just thinking that all this … intensity, that how we feel about everything here, everything and everybody, it’s so …”

She hadn’t known him to struggle with words, and it made her feel powerful. “If it gets in the way of work, we’ll stop. But it won’t.”

To her dismay, he stood up. But he took her hand and pulled her to her feet.

“So that song,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s Erik Satie,” he said. “Esme’s song. I ran into Esme’s piano player on my way over. Aren’t you impressed that I remembered to ask after all this time?”

Daphne stared at him, openly confused.

He touched her forehead with one finger. “ ‘Je te veux.’ The encore.”

How could she have forgotten? She thought of Esme leaning down as her voice plunged into its lowest register. If someone had taken an
EKG of Daphne’s heart just then … “Erik Satie,” she said as lightly as she could. “I don’t really know his work. Honestly, not at all.”

Malachy led the way through the bushes, back to the path. He held up a branch so that Daphne could pass beneath it. “Always more to learn,” he said. “That’s the pain and the pleasure.”

T
HE MEN FROM THE
medical equipment company were exceptionally kind for deliverymen: unrushed, careful to wipe up the snow they tracked onto the front hall carpet. In the living room, they offered to move the long damask sofa into the back hallway. Lucinda had already managed, in this reorchestration of furniture, to move the gateleg table from the hallway to a corner of the den. Passing down the hall will be awkward now—the sofa is much wider than the table—but Lucinda is the only one who needs to get to the pantry.

Now, like a tyrant who’s pulled off an overnight coup, a hospital bed commands attention where the sofa has defined the room’s commerce for more than forty years. She could have banished Zeke to the den, but he’ll be happier with the view he loves best: the patchwork of irregular fields, stitched with stonewalls, that represents the last of his father’s once-sprawling farm. By the time Zeke Senior died, he owned land that straddled the borders of two adjacent towns. Since this is New England, not Iowa, his green empire included tracts of judiciously timbered woodland, but his main enterprise, the source of his pride, was the herd of Jersey cows that grazed the hilly pastureland: a firm stand against the encroaching Holsteins, champion producers but only in quantity. “Milk as thin and tasteless as wash water,” Zeke’s father would say. “Though modern fools care only about how much, not how good.”

A glass case crowded with trophies and ribbons, many won by her husband and his brothers when they were boys—a few, and this still amazes her, won by her own sons—serves as a museum to her father-in-law’s standards. When he was alive, the case monopolized
the longest wall of the living room; after his death, Lucinda lobbied for it to be moved to the den. The living room wall now displays four landscapes by an artist who paints the natural beauties of Vermont.

Jersey herds have gone the way of most independent farms. Nevertheless, when Zeke faced selling off some of his inherited share of the land—a decision both practical and thrifty—he sold most of it to idealistic entrepreneurs, typically rich New Yorkers and Bostonians who wanted to try their hand at growing heirloom kale or fussing over goats. Zeke once described such ventures as “the number one New Age hobby-loss line item,” but he finds them far preferable to the housing developments that pour down the picturesque slopes on the tract of land left to his older brother.