Every Last Cuckoo (14 page)

A
T SIX O'CLOCK ONE
morning, after lying awake for hours, Sarah finally threw the covers back and hurriedly dressed and called the dogs. She went outside with them, feeling jittery and walking too fast to keep her own pace.

The day grew lighter and the rivers rushed along. Sarah stood on a steep section of road beside a swollen brown stream gone mad with spring. It leapt and splashed and foamed; it tumbled with wild energy. Sarah imagined herself within the cataract, her rag-doll body flung against boulders and tree roots.

She grew cold and moved on, shivering. The sun had not yet cleared the tops of the trees, so she headed for the meadow, seeking the morning light in open space. She walked toward the barn. The dogs raced ahead like horses smelling oats. The rest of the day, they would mope along with Sarah, but in the brief moment when they reached home after these tame new outings, they ran with joy. Sarah was sure they expected Charles to be there, waiting. They understood nothing, not even their own grief. Daily they hoped and daily were disappointed, but Sarah envied them their fleeting happiness.

With the sun finally up and her nighttime anguish easing its grip, Sarah heard the bobolink before she saw him. His song was a rising and falling ribbon of bright notes that stopped her in her tracks. She whirled to the south and scanned the sky and there he was, a black and white bird with a yellow cap, flying across the meadow from the thicket of birch and hemlock toward the other side of the pond. His pathway through the air undulated like the joyous music he made in flight. Sarah watched him go, then circle around and fly back to the meadow. He landed in the top of a bare maple at the edge of the pond. His plain brown mate hopped onto a branch nearby, appearing from within the depths of the tree. They would be only one pair of several. It had pleased Charles to think that this small grassland would support bobolinks long after he had died. Their habitat was shrinking everywhere, giving way to malls and developments and forcing the bobolinks ever eastward.

T
HREE DAYS LATER A
heavy spring blizzard came down. Sarah, searching for a hat in the back of the hall closet, saw Charles's old Nikon hanging there in its cracked leather case. On
impulse, she decided to take it with her. It was already loaded, with twelve exposures left. She slung the strap over her shoulder like a bandolier and headed out with the dogs.

The camera gave her new eyes. Most mornings, she had walked in thrall to her thoughts and sorrows. Now, surrounded again by a world muffled in white, Sarah stopped several times just to look. She photographed the dogs, the woods, and a stream rushing past with new ice forming from its banks. She snapped a clutch of pines through the falling whiteness and then caught a small flock of sparrows spaced on power lines like random musical notes. When she reached a narrow bridge not far from her house, she leaned against the railing and looked down at the North Branch covered with old ice and fresh snow. She could see black water rushing beneath holes in the ice. It swallowed the fast-falling snowflakes as soon as they touched its surface.

On the way home, she took a shot of her neighbor's flock of merino sheep huddled together in the lee of his barn, their dense winter wool dirty and matted, sorrowful against the purity of the new snowfall that blanketed their backs. Then she held the camera with one gloveless hand and extended the other before her, palm up, and waited. She wanted to capture the image of a single fat flake before it melted against her skin.

D
AVID
, T
ESS, AND
H
ANNAH
came two weeks later in a different world, sunny, greening, and warm. This time, they pulled up into the barn and entered at the mudroom door. Sylvie and Ruckus were waiting, and Hannah delightedly threw herself upon them both. She had been unnaturally quiet after Charles's memorial. She hadn't understood until then that Charles was
David's father. Once she grasped that, and put it together with the fact that her own father had died, she worried. Sarah had heard her ask Tess, “Do fathers always die?”

David had brought with him some sketches for his first official commission, a bathroom mural he'd designed for a fellow teacher at his school. He showed these to Sarah after supper that night, while Tess bathed Hannah. They could hear the child giggling through the grate above.

David stood next to Sarah at the table, pointing at his drawings and explaining details and processes to her. She watched his long hands and forearms below the shoved-up sleeves of his sweatshirt. He had her fair skin but was built just as Charles had been; he had the same well-defined musculature, the same sharp angle in the joint at the base of his back-curving thumb, the same corded veins wriggling over the backs of his hands.

Sarah turned to the pages he had placed before her, which showed both the main panel of his mural and a series of tiles that would border it. Each tile was a fish or part of a fish, and each design element would be embossed and then glazed to contrast palely with the background. Together, the tiles would show a school of fish, undulating, playing. They were simple and stylized, but lively, as was the main panel, in which a necklace of green islands ringed a wooded coast amid steep waves. There flashed in Sarah's mind the winding road she had tried to remember that night back in November, when she was ill. There was water to the right of the road. Surely there had been islands on the water?

“Can glazes really do this?” she asked David. “Make a slab of clay look like a painting?”

David explained that the rich effect suggested in his sketches
required layers and layers of color, each applied and fired separately. The endless firings were unbearably suspenseful. “Every time a piece goes back into the kiln it's at risk. Nothing's precise. The clay can crack. The glazes can crack. You never know.”

Sarah put her hand on David's, and he sat down next to her. “I feel kind of cracked myself,” she admitted.

S
TEPHIE AND
J
AKE ARRIVED
next, followed right away by their sons, Paul and William. On the Saturday Sarah had chosen for the scattering of Charles's ashes, the whole family, along with Vivi, Peter, Molly, Adelaide, and Leila, carried food and chairs to the meadow. Sarah held the urn against her breast. Luke and Lottie ran ahead with Hannah, and the dogs leapt beside them. Racing clouds, brisk air, and a light wind worked like wine in everyone, and there were no long faces.

Sarah and Tess spread blankets and put out food for the picnic. Charlotte and Stephie moved about from one group to another, videotaping the scene and the people. And then it was time to uncap the urn and disperse the last remains of Charles Lucas, beloved husband, father, grandfather, and friend of those present.

Sarah had thought hard about this moment, dreading it whenever she felt obliged to mark it with memorable words. She had made a stab at a speech but had given up. The two of them alone had known the full measure of their time together. She could not capture that in words, and she feared that trying would shrink the power of her memories.

She decided instead to speak about the human legacy before her, as much to remind herself that it was there as to celebrate it. “Charles was right when he said he designed his life and loved
its order,” she told her family and friends. “His life was his art, and all of you, alone and in connection with each other and with us, are his masterpieces. And mine and yours. Ours. No one has ever done a better thing.”

Sarah cleared her throat. Her eyes were dry, her hands steady. She was learning to master herself, she thought, gratified.

“All right,” she declared. “It's time.” She picked up the urn, a plain, brushed-steel vessel, and held it against her for a moment with her eyes closed. Then she lifted off the smooth round lid and reached down inside.
Charles
. His ashes were rough as pumice and light as powder, warm from the sun on the urn. She filled her hand and pulled it forth and held it straight out, shoulder high, and walked a few feet through the stubble from last year's mowing. The breeze caught the lightest dust and lifted it all in a cloud, like a ghost. A few heavier fragments fell straight down. “Good-bye,” Sarah whispered and handed the urn to Charlotte, her firstborn.

One by one, each person paced the meadow, spreading Charles far and wide, seeing him sift down into the stiff, brown grass and float lightly on the breeze and out over the pond.

“Look! The fish think he's food,” Hannah exclaimed at the edge of the water. Indeed, small circular ripples pocked the mirrored surface but left the floating bits of ash behind. “They don't like how he tastes,” she said, and buried her face against Tess's belly. That's when Sarah knew Tess was pregnant. She knew before Tess did.

H
ANNAH WAS CERTAINLY CALM
about the idea of Charles turned to ash,” Sarah said the next morning. “Or fish food,” she added, surprised by the giggle that escaped her. She looked at Tess across the kitchen table.

“We explained that Charles was more than his body. We said he outgrew his body—that he's just energy now, like a light, all done with things that could slow him down. We also told her that she would still need her own body for a very long time, and David and I would need ours.”

“That's perfect. I would never have thought of that.”

Tess looked down briefly. “Sarah, you know about Hannah's father, of course. Ian.”

Sarah nodded. “I do.”

“Well, I got a lot of help and a lot of . . . practice . . . with Hannah, during that time. And later. But she was so young, just a baby. And now, the older she gets, the more questions she has.” Tess drew a slow breath, which shook a little as she let it out. “I
don't think the questions will ever stop for Hannah. Not in her whole life.”

“What questions?”

“The usual, of course. ‘Where did I come from, where did my daddy go, where did Charles go?' But with Hannah, I don't know, the questions are . . . demanding. Like she's forgotten something and it's driving her crazy.”

“She forgot about Sylvie talking.”

Tess blinked. “Yes. She let go of that completely. But other things seem to come back to her, and she can't quite get hold of them. Or she'll remember things she's never even known. Like Ian, for example. She smelled some soap at a friend's house recently, and she said, ‘That smells like my daddy.' She couldn't have remembered that. And I never kept that soap around after he died; I couldn't bear it.”

Sarah hesitated, revisiting her certainty that Tess was pregnant. “Haven't you ever known things you had no way of knowing?”

“Yes—just not the right things. I didn't know Ian was going to die. I couldn't save him.”

“Maybe we're not supposed to know things that could change someone else's fate.”

Tess looked at her sadly. “You'd have changed Charles's, too.”

Sarah nodded. “Maybe we're all born remembering another world, which we have to forget in order to live in this one.”

Tess regarded her curiously. “Or maybe intuition keeps us connected to that other world. I wonder if we remember it at the end of life.”

Sarah, oh, you wouldn't believe what I . . .

Tess went on. “All I know is Hannah is obsessed with where she came from. She wants to know if she was made of light, like
Charles, before she grew inside Mom's tummy, before she had a body.” Tess shrugged. “I tell her yes, she was. It's a good Quaker thing to say. But I'm not sure I believe it myself.”

“David was a lot like Hannah at that age. Or maybe a little older. I would find him sitting perfectly still, on his bed or outside on the steps. And then he would try to ask me something and couldn't get the question out the way he wanted to. I remember he asked me about time once. How did we know it was there if we couldn't see it? How could we tell how much of it there was? Something like that. Only he got very, very angry because he couldn't make me understand what he was really after.”

Tess brushed her hair back. “I'm not surprised.”

Sarah bent her head to her coffee, then asked, “How did you handle it, Tess? Losing Ian.”

Tess hesitated, then said, “Poorly. I crawled into a dark, angry place. It felt very tight and small, much too small for all the hatred I felt. Hatred for the person who killed Ian. Hatred for myself, blame, too. My family took over for me. Someone was always with me. They loved Hannah and kept life as normal for her as they could. I'm grateful to them and grateful that Hannah was so young, just a year old.”

“Do you still feel the hate?” Sarah asked, turning around to face Tess.

“No,” she said, “I don't.”

“How could you not?”

“I don't know.”

They both went silent. Sarah got up and poured more coffee. Tess took hers black; Sarah poured half-and-half into hers and watched the pale liquid move like smoke.

“Charles was lucky, and so am I, and yet I can't bear it that
he's gone. I see him out of the corner of my eye, I talk to him, I reach out to touch him in the middle of the night.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, but she couldn't meet the younger woman's eyes.

“You spent most of your life with Charles. It's a lot to mourn.” She rose and dumped her coffee into the sink. “If you'd like, I could stay a few extra days and help you go through Charles's things. If you're ready.”

T
HEY BEGAN THE NEXT
morning with Charles's office. They had the day to themselves, since David had driven back to Cambridge to teach his classes, and Hannah had gone off with Vivi. Tess followed Sarah up the dim, narrow staircase inside the barn door. At the top they stepped squinting into dazzling light. Three pairs of mullioned, double-hung windows faced east-by-northeast, all their panes ablaze. The room was awash in sun.

Tess stopped and stared around her, clearly surprised by the spacious room that opened up after the cramped, unpromising stairway. Charles had built it about ten years earlier. Its ceilings were high, its walls a pale blue-gray trimmed with natural wood. Hardwood floors were bare except for two large, worn kilim rugs in shades of red, tan, and blue. This was Charles's aerie, well stocked with coffee and staples, equipped with a tiny kitchen and bath, and furnished with a shabby hide-a-bed couch, a matching wing chair, and a cast-off coffee table. Beneath the windows, which were flanked by tall bookshelves, was a long desktop made from an irregular slab of polished maple. It sat on a pair of low cupboards with shelves and shallow drawers.