Every Last Cuckoo (10 page)

Josie's car broke down on a five-mile uninhabited stretch of Route 12, a two-lane secondary highway. Woods and rock outcroppings lined the road. Guardrails now and then formed squat barriers against steep drops into ravines or creekbeds. She told the reporter from Montpelier that at first she decided to keep the engine running and wait for another car to come along. She tried that for half an hour, keeping one window half open to ventilate any carbon monoxide, trying to point the heat straight at her feet and hands. The heater fought a losing battle against the frigid air streaming in. No one came, and there wasn't much gas left in the Ford's tank. Josie could be stranded all night and frozen by morning. She had to get out and walk, not knowing how far she could make it. She could be miles from help.

Utter blackness engulfed her when she turned off the ignition. She was stone blind unless she looked up at the thin cloud cover and sparse stars. They illuminated nothing on the ground. Josie found a weak flashlight under the backseat of her traitorous car, but she used it only intermittently, fearing its batteries would die
altogether. So she walked along, flashing the dim light before her, then switching it off until she reached the limit of what it had shown. She set out this way, in spurts of faint light whose black-rimmed scenes she held in memory until she could bear the dark no more. Not one car passed her on her pitch-black journey.

Josie walked for at least a thousand steps—almost a mile, the newspaper said—stumbling and ungainly, carrying her unborn child before her, oblivious in its warm bath. But even the amniotic sac was in danger of cooling down, because Josie's coat did not span her belly. When at last she smelled wood smoke and saw a single light a few yards off the road, she shuffled into a half run on feet she could no longer feel. She fell weeping into a blessedly overheated trailer as soon as the door opened. She lost two toes to frostbite, but she could well have died.

“Stupid,” Sarah muttered, putting the newspaper down. She knew what that drowning blackness was like, having once been stranded herself on a remote back road. That was in summer, and she had not feared for her life, but she had been seriously unnerved. Since then she always kept a flashlight and fresh batteries in the car. In winter she stocked the way-back with blankets, extra hats, mittens, scarves, and chemical toe warmers.

Sarah called Josie's mother to commiserate. Rose said Josie's labor had started prematurely, but her doctor had been able to stop the contractions. Josie was still in the hospital, abashed, mourning her toes but rejoicing in the safety of her child. Sarah could picture her—smiles, tears, and new wisdom mingling in her face and voice. Vermont kids could be as unwise as any, but at least they tended to own up to it.

S
ARAH AND
C
HARLES, IN
this subzero weather, were irritable, gripped by cabin fever. Each snapped like a twig at the other's least misstep. Sarah indulged in small fits of rage at a broken pickle jar, a dropped bundle of kindling. She stabbed viciously at the fire in the great room, scattering sparks, enjoying her own fury. Charles prowled the house from window to window. He peered out and hated the cold that kept him in. When Sarah spoke to him, he scarcely bothered to answer. Furious, she would heft the woodstove poker speculatively—then roll her eyes and clatter it back into its rack with the other iron tools.

Sarah remembered a much longer time, decades ago, during which she had harbored genuine bitterness, not this passing aggravation. That was the dead spot in their marriage, a bitter season when neither was real to the other; each, in the other's eyes, was the ghost of some half-forgotten being.

David was a baby when it began, Charlotte seven, Stephie almost six. Even as Sarah mothered them all, allowing no lapse in her attention, she felt severed altogether from their father. That lasted two years and part of a third. It had seemed endless, and yet an ending. In a later decade, she and Charles might have divorced. Looking back, though, their icy standoff had proved a tiny fraction of their long shared time, and it had headily spiced the relief that followed. Still, Sarah had despaired.

She was fat then, and chronically exhausted. She bore on and within her body the evidence of her four heavy pregnancies and their labors—splayed-out rays of stretch marks, mottled thighs, breasts gone low and loose after nursing. She was ashamed in front of Charles, who kept his distance, kept his silence, and—Sarah was sure—did not desire her. She undressed in the bathroom and slept with her back to him. A few times,
half-defiant, fully on fire, careful to make no sound, she had satisfied herself while he slept. Her body, which had been so filled with Charles and then with his children, three living, one dead, now swelled with loneliness and prickly anger. She grew steadily uglier with Charles, believing she was already ugly in his eyes. In this way she preempted him. Certain that he would reject any softness or longing, she showed him a hard shine in her eyes, iron in her backbone, a deliberate stillness about her hips. She carried herself carefully around Charles and let him see in these mute demonstrations that she could do perfectly well without him.

Charles never mentioned Sarah's ruined shape or complained about her ill temper. He never overtly confirmed Sarah's assumptions. But Sarah remembered how openly he had praised her body while it was young and taut, and she knew just when he had fallen silent on the subject, which was during her second pregnancy. He had still wanted her enough, even so, to make her pregnant twice more, but with David's birth he seemed to feel his work was done. He had given her the child who would heal her grief, and so he need not touch her again. So Sarah believed. Charles no longer came up behind her in the kitchen to nuzzle her hair. He had stopped gathering her into the hollow of his body in bed, stopped sliding his erection against her backside before turning her around for the caresses she had taught him.

The truth was much more than this, as Sarah later thought she should have known. But it took her a long time to heal and forgive, to see that Charles was not repulsed by her outward changes, but by her unkind self-perceptions and the bile with which they laced her spirit. Yes, he had found her unattractive, but not for the reasons she supposed.

Sarah never knew what prompted Charles to turn again in her direction. She never knew whether a patient of his had confided an anguish and self-loathing similar to Sarah's, or whether he was too sexually hungry to wait. Maybe he'd had an affair. Or maybe another woman had scared Charles just by letting him know she was interested.

Whatever his reasons, Charles began to court Sarah again when David was going on three. He began with small, wry gestures that at first only bewildered her. He bought books, but only for their titles. He left them lying about but never mentioned them. The first one Sarah noticed was called
The Paradise Lost-and-Found,
a novel about wayward people and the emotionally charged objects they left behind at a shabby piano lounge in a Midwestern hotel. That was the only one she actually read before she caught on. It was badly written, and she wondered at Charles for buying such a thing. She didn't remember what the other books were about or whether she had tried to read any of them, but she remembered their titles in the order they had appeared on the kitchen counter, her dresser, the table beside her chair:
The Silent Treatment, Charlie Blue, Family Man, Ice-Melt.
Many others. Eventually she began with some reluctance to enjoy the silent word game. She kept her eyes peeled for new titles and finally laughed out loud the day she found both
Pound Foolish
and
Skin Deep
on the upstairs hall table, next to a full-length mirror. Charles knew she was softening. He began venturing jokes and tentatively kissing her good morning, good night—chaste dry pecks on the cheek or lips.

Sarah wanted to welcome his patient overtures but also took some pleasure in viewing them askance, in hurting Charles back for what she saw as his betrayals. She refused to let him see her
amusement, but Charles persisted. Sarah began to see that he, too, had been hurting. The things she did to preempt his power over her had sometimes broken him. She had half deliberately shoved Charles outside the family circle, hoarding their children and only grudgingly serving up the bread he brought home. His patients, his vegetable garden, his summer nights felling trees—these were the only nurture she allowed him until finally he seized on others. His approach was entirely characteristic of him, marked by analysis, action, humor, and indirection. As he patiently worked his methods, Sarah began to see the harm she herself had done.

Healing finally took firm hold of Sarah on a chilly spring day when she caught sudden sight of Charles heading down to the woods to buck timber. There he was, any man in a buffalo shirt, small against the backdrop of the softly rounded mountains and known to her, at this distance, only by the way he held his chain saw on his shoulder. Sarah was seized with love for him. Seeing in Charles all humanity, moving about on the earth under the weight of grief and joy and the endless heavens, she deliberately chose him all over again.

Later she seduced him, also with deliberation. That initiative had to be hers; Charles could risk only so much. So Sarah waited until he was sound asleep one night and then began caressing his body, timing her movements and adjusting the pressure of her hands so that he would stir only after he was already hard. Charles would know exactly what she was doing—giving him her own greatest pleasure. She loved being slowly awakened to urgent desire unmediated by conscious thought. It aroused her more intensely than anything else Charles ever did. And now it aroused him in just the same way. He groaned in his sleep,
then he half woke and rolled toward Sarah, who was naked. He touched her with a blind man's hands, drinking her in with them, learning her all over again before entering her and crying out, saying her name.

Charles, in his forties, and Sarah, at the end of her thirties, spent the next year in a sexual haze whose tendrils still could bind them, even today, now that they were old. Their memories never aged. They still reached for each other.

A
T LAST A LATE
January thaw broke the hold of bitterest winter. The temperature climbed almost sixty degrees on that first morning, from twenty-five below overnight to freezing by noon. Thirty felt tropical, and Charles went out hatless into the sun, grinning at Sarah as if the two of them had not spent those past weeks as edgy as two knives in a drawer. The dogs followed as Charles set off on a short walk into the woods. They leapt and ran in the sun and grinned like Charles, like Sarah as she answered his eagerness with her own.

Sarah had an outing planned, too. She needed things in town, and on the way she would stop to see a neighbor who raised merino sheep. He sold hand-dyed, hand-spun wool, and Sarah wanted to take some to Josie Koval, still confined to bed. Sarah knew from Rose that Josie was a knitter, and she remembered eyeing a lovely tweedy yarn, spruce green flecked with cream and brown. If any was left, it would be just the thing. Sarah had
wanted it for herself, but she could no longer knit without pain streaking through the base of her right thumb.

In town Sarah bought a box of clementines, which prompted thoughts of gingerbread to serve with them. She decided to invite someone to dinner. She thought Molly Chalmers, with Adelaide Jones and Leila Briggs. Sarah was in the mood for female company after her long confinement with Charles. Old females, she thought, smiling. Addie and Leila were her own age. Molly was thought to be nearing ninety, a benevolent crone schooled in forestry, herbs, and gardens, a lifelong environmentalist, stooped and white-haired, with pink scalp showing at the crown of her large head. Her halo of white fluff inevitably brought to mind dandelion seeds, delicately spoked before the breezes carried them off. Molly had been big once, before the decades had shrunk her. Her broad knuckly hands were scarred and gnarled with use, but elsewhere her skin was heavy old silk, fine-lined and softly folded, bearing no spots or stains. She must have prized her rose white skin, the way she always covered it with long gauzy garments and broad hats in hot weather. It was her only outward beauty. She had never married or seemed to regret it. She wandered as she pleased, and Sarah could recall Molly's figure trudging roadsides and meadows for as long as she and Charles had lived here. She made ink drawings of local trees and flora and used them on labels for the infusions and decoctions she sold from her home. The income from that couldn't possibly be enough to live on. No one knew for sure how Molly supported herself—probably with an old, well-managed trust.

Adelaide had been Sarah's best friend through high school. Long after their giddy flight from college to careers, long after Sarah had returned to Vermont with Charles, Addie had stayed
in the city, climbing the marketing ladder at a prestigious publishing house. What no one in Vermont knew was that Adelaide stayed for the sake of Leila, her lover, a book designer in the same publishing firm. Later Addie would wonder aloud to Sarah which of her sins would have shocked Vermonters more, lesbianism or miscegenation—assuming it was still miscegenation when no progeny could result. Leila was black, and in those days some Vermonters went their whole lives without ever meeting a black person, let alone contemplating the scandal of a lifelong, interracial, homosexual liaison.

Sarah settled on her guest list, adding Vivi and Peter so that Charles would not be the only man amid sharp-tongued old women. She set the date for Saturday, a few nights away, then made her calls and got a yes from everyone.

S
ATURDAY AFTERNOON
, S
ARAH WAS
taking gingerbread from the oven when she heard a loud
whump!
and nearly dropped the pan. She went to the window and looked out. A heavy icicle had hit the railing on the small kitchen deck, punctuating the deep note of impact with the crack of splintering wood. Impatiently she pulled on a down vest and slid her sock feet into loose boots. She grabbed a snow shovel and traversed the perimeter of the house and barn, knocking icicles down over every entrance. Just what they'd need, a friend speared through the scalp while bearing food indoors.