Every Last Cuckoo (24 page)

Two days before Sarah's birthday, she overheard urgent whispers and muffled laughter coming from Lottie and Jordan's room near the front of the house. The sounds drifted downstairs only faintly. Sarah couldn't hear, even standing stock-still in the hallway, straining her ears. Whatever was going on involved all of them—Tony, Angelo, and both girls. She heard a loud baritone guffaw at one point and a rumbling chuckle, then more stifled talk and giggling.

Then she heard the girls' bedroom door slam and four sets of feet come tramping toward the stairs. She darted back to the kitchen and sat down with her coffee and a book, facing
the garden. She spun around when they all entered, trying to sing “Happy Birthday” while cracking up. Tony, Angelo, and Jordan each carried a cupcake with a lighted candle. Angelo's candle went out and trailed a long scribble of waxy smelling smoke. Lottie carried a big box, open at the top. She plunked it unceremoniously down on the table, in front of Sarah, and said, “Meet your new boarders, Nana!”

Sarah peered down and saw two pale orange kittens, fat fluff-balls with amber eyes registering alarm. They huddled together in one corner of the box and stared up at Sarah. One of them opened its pink mouth and mewed at her, demanding and indignant. Sarah laughed out loud and scooped them both into her hands and held them close to her chest. “Oh!” she cried, bending her cheek to their soft bodies, “I've been wanting cats! You knew!”

The teenagers looked pleased with themselves. Angelo said, “We named them. If you approve. Neo and Retro.”

Sarah blinked. “Neo and Retro,” she repeated, looking from one kitten to the other in some bewilderment. “Perfect. Who's who?”

“Neo's the one with the white paws,” Lottie answered. “He's very adventuresome. Retro is quieter. Neo beats up on him.” Neo demonstrated his boldness on cue, climbing Sarah's T-shirt to sit on her shoulder. He mewed again, loudly, right at her ear.

“We have all the supplies upstairs in Angelo's room. Litter and box and food and dishes and toys. We had these guys up there for three days, Nana! We couldn't wait any longer—we were
so
sure you'd hear them.”

“I never did,” Sarah said, setting the kittens down on the
table. She hugged the teenagers all in turn. They hugged her back, even Angelo.

Tyler and Sandy came in from the vegetable garden then. Tyler spotted the kittens immediately. “Neo! Retro!” he cried, running toward them. They arched their backs and stood stiff-legged as he approached. Neo hissed at him. “Oh, silly!” Tyler chided, picking him up and cuddling him.

“I see,” Sarah said, mock stern. “Everybody was in on this.” She picked Retro up with her hands around his rib cage and held him before her at eye level. He batted softly at her nose.

Sarah turned to Lottie. “I am officially in love,” she announced. Then she added, “They'll have to be indoor cats, given all the fishers in this neighborhood. But that's okay. We'll just be careful, all of us.” Turning to Lottie, she said, “Your mother and brother are going to have a fit.”

Lottie smiled wickedly. “I know. Isn't it awful?”

“Well, they can take allergy pills before they come over. If they ever come again.”

Sylvie scratched at the mudroom door, and Ruckus whimpered behind her. “What about the dogs?” Sarah exclaimed. “They haven't been around kittens for years!”

“All taken care of. Or mostly,” Jordan answered. “We snuck the dogs upstairs four or five times and just sort of threw them together with the kitties. When you were out.”

Sarah sank into her chair with Retro on her lap. Tyler dropped Neo down next to him. Both kittens purred loudly. Neo wrapped his front legs around Retro's neck and vigorously washed his face.

“I like to feed them,” Tyler said, putting his finger in the
way of the sandpaper tongue. “Can I be the person who feeds them?”

Tyler had flourished here, with the gardens, the dogs, and the people—especially Angelo, his surrogate big brother, and Mordechai, who told him stories of a different sort than Angelo's, stories about Israel and kibbutzim and history. Tyler was no longer shy. He was outspoken and eager to help. He was more independent. He was happy to stay with the others when Sandy visited Bob.

Bob's condition was still unstable, and the daily treatments for his burns caused him terrible agony. His medications didn't touch the worst of his pain. Twice he had begged Sandy to help him die, but that was weeks ago. Now he just endured, speaking to her little. She thought he was willing himself to die, pulling away from everything he loved. He wasn't angry, just weary.

Sandy managed to protect Tyler from the worst of her fears. Often she was weary herself, but she revived in the vegetable garden, which was immaculate. Not a weed escaped her sharp eye and plucking fingers. The tomato vines never trailed on the ground, nor were their dropped fruits allowed to lie rotting. Sandy carefully husbanded every growing thing inside the tall fence, harvesting squashes, beans, and tomatoes, shining eggplants, artichokes, and even peppers of many colors and shapes, for which she had fashioned portable greenhouses from wooden dowels and clear plastic.

Sarah felt she could live on vegetables. She and the others feasted on them nightly, adding little or no meat, just rice or couscous, bread or pasta. They grilled them, steamed them, roasted them, ate them raw. They made cold soups and endless
salads. They dipped raw vegetables in hummus or baba ghanoush or guacamole. And still they could not eat them all. Sandy was canning, pickling, and freezing the garden's excesses. She made dilly beans, tomato sauce, corn chowder, vegetarian chili.

The summer was flying. August was well under way, the gardens were browning at the edges, and roadside vegetation wore an ever-heavier coat of dust. In only days or weeks, the nights would start bringing a deeper chill. Sarah wanted to lasso time and tie it down. She wanted to hold onto this summer, to hoard the long days, the voices of her boarders, her growing friendship with Mordechai. They were all her teachers. They all gave energy; they brought her out of herself.

Sarah had told Mordechai about recent reveries in the window seat, hours she'd spent gazing into the night, surprised by calm. He had informed her that she was meditating. “It is not mysterious, Sarah. Someone had to start this practice, eons ago. Some ordinary person had to notice that certain states of mind bring peace and a finer awareness of the world. The trick is to do it on purpose, and then to guide the mind without pushing or tugging on it.”

Sarah wanted to be able to induce the state that sometimes overtook her without notice. She needed its healing effects. So Mordechai had been helping her with that a few mornings a week when she joined him for meditation on the cabin's deck. He was teaching her to focus her attention without directing her thoughts or trying to stop them.

Sarah too often came up against a tumult inside her, a rush of noise and images that led not to clarity but to chaos and fret. She would rise out of herself, short of breath and frustrated.

“I'm getting nowhere,” she complained one morning. “Why
is it I can bypass all this . . . this
traffic
in my head . . . when I'm not even trying to, but the minute I sit down on this deck, it turns into gridlock?”

Mordechai raised his eyebrows. They'd had this conversation before.

“I know, I know,” Sarah groaned. “I need to quit trying. But, Mordechai, I'm trying not to try! I'm trying to trick my mind into thinking I'm just letting it go its own way. But all the while I know perfectly well what I want, and that's to elbow my way through all this noise to that quiet place.”

Mordechai was amused. “You still believe you can solve the mystery of your mind with your mind, Sarah. You wish to comprehend instead of apprehend.”

Sarah glared at him. “You told me you actually find peace and light through this process. You sit down here every morning and you mean for that to happen, do you not?”

“I do not. I invite the peace, that's all. Which sometimes comes and sometimes does not.”

“Oh.” She tilted her head and gazed at him, letting his words sink in. “Oh.” Then she closed her eyes and let her shoulders drop.

Now she could empty her mind for whole moments at a time. She never caught herself doing this; she noticed it only after the fact, after she had returned from her excursions into places both in and beyond her being. She was beginning to see paradox all around her.

M
ORDECHAI HAD BOUGHT A
car almost as soon as Lottie passed her driving test back in June. This freed the Subaru for her alone, though state law allowed her no passengers until
December. It frustrated her that Tony drove whenever they went out together. “Guys
always
drive. My dad drives when my parents go out. Papa always drove, too. Angelo drives with his girlfriend. I keep telling Tony, when my six months are up, I'm driving
all
the time! Unless he gets his own car. Then he can drive.”

The Subaru was Lottie's reward for her energetic help. She and Sandy ran the house now. Lottie, with help from Angelo and Jordan, managed the general housecleaning, and Sandy took care of the kitchen and the grocery shopping. Jordan liked the lawn tractor. She mowed everything outside the backyard fence except the long meadow, which a nearby farmer hayed twice each year. Angelo hauled trash to the recycling station, stacked wood, and weeded Sarah's perennial garden, assuring her that he used to help with his mother's. Tony helped randomly but often, with whatever chores needed doing.

Sarah now headed for the toolroom in the barn to look for her triangular hoe, ready to attack a patch of weeds that Angelo had not yet discovered. Tony and Lottie pulled into the front part of the barn from the village road just as she was about to leave, and, hidden from view, she saw Tony lean from behind the wheel to kiss Lottie, cupping the back of her head and pulling her close.

Sarah remembered Charles's kiss in the woods, the way he had stirred her banked passions with surprise. As she carried her hoe outside, among the tall phlox, she remembered other kisses and everything they had led to, her body tangled with Charles's time and again. She conjured the soft friction of the hair on his young legs, then saw that dense cover disappear slowly over the years, worn away by the rub of trousers and socks and by vigorous toweling after showers. Charles's body had sagged, like her own, though he was so lean. No gut had ever lapped over his belt
nor had love handles ballooned above it; but his backside all but vanished, his scrotum drooped, and the skin went loose over his muscles and bones. Charles, young, had been wiry and strong, with the long lovely body of a swimmer. He had been tireless in his desire to please Sarah with that body. She had loved the way her belly contracted under his touch and the swollen feeling of her mouth and cunt. The word startled her, forming uninvited in her mind. She had never said it out loud in her life. “
Cunt!
” she whispered, grinning. She could recall the rush of blood that swelled her flesh and the way Charles pulsed with each burst of his ejaculation. “Oh!” she cried softly, straightening over her work.

“Nana? You okay?” Lottie and Tony came out of the barn, their hair disheveled, their own lips swollen from kissing.

Sarah smiled at them. “Yes, dear.”
You've no idea
. She watched them mount the stairs onto the deck and go inside. How it all goes on, she thought. She had known six generations of relatives and friends, and here she was in the middle of them, her time drawing short. She could remember one great-grandmother, dimly, from her earliest years. She had known all four of her grandparents. It was possible she would know one more generation before she died, if William or Paul became a father by then, or Lottie a mother. Seven generations, three on each side of her own. Her own was now called the Greatest Generation, which exasperated her.

Yes, by their teens, Sarah and her peers had seen worldwide economic depression. By their twenties, world war, rationing, carnage, and loss. But Sarah questioned this popular notion of unique greatness. Her doubts took her back repeatedly to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to the dreadful,
postwar revelations of the Holocaust. Everyone had reeled before the images of calculated mass slaughter. Everyone had wept over the sticklike bodies piled up, the hollow-eyed heads lolling upside down against the starved bellies or sunken chests of strangers.

Lottie and her friends had never known real trials. They'd been born well after the struggle in Vietnam, the race riots at home, the worst of gender inequity. In their childhood the Berlin Wall tumbled, the Soviet Union broke apart, and the economy prospered. Starvation, war, genocide, and massacres had taken place elsewhere, in the Middle East, the Balkans, Somalia, Rwanda, China. Americans had rarely fought on their own soil, but this generation seemed more removed than ever. Was it just that so much time had passed since real dangers had arisen at home? None of the young people Sarah knew seemed to expect to fight, ever. Sarah hoped they would indeed, miraculously, avoid war, but she had little reason to expect it.

Hearing Tony and Lottie laugh inside the kitchen, scuffling near the open windows, Sarah wondered,
Will it all go on?

That, she suddenly knew, was why hers was not the greatest generation. They had courageously stopped unprecedented slaughter, at dreadful cost to themselves. They had cleaned up after the horror. But they had not prevented it. If any generation could make the leap away from the primitive human past, if it could neutralize hatred, if it could make peace a way of life and not just a passing dream between wars—
that
generation would be the greatest.

V
IVI AND
M
OLLY PICKED
Sarah up at six on her birthday. They were heading to Adelaide and Leila's for dinner, eager
to celebrate. Sarah had not had a birthday without Charles since her twenty-fourth.