Souvenir (36 page)

Sixty-one

“W
ELCOME BACK
,” C
ARSON TOLD
M
EG, NERVOUS AS HE HELD OPEN THE
door of the shed. She didn’t go in right away but stood on the step looking into the main room, leaning on her cane. The cane was new since Hawaii. He could tell she hated it, but without it she was too unsteady to walk more than a few steps, and that was worse.

“It looks just the same,” she said. “If only I did too.”

“You look even better,” he said truthfully. Except for the cane and sling—things that looked like aids for recovering from an injury, say—she appeared fine. He could hardly believe she was dying; such a thing made no sense. He said, “You’re more beautiful than ever, in fact.”

She held up the cane. “It must be my accessories.”

“Here,” he said, scooping her up. “Let’s do this right.”

He carried her inside, just as he’d once imagined doing after their wedding. If only they had long years of togetherness awaiting them—but who ever really knew whether that’s what they would get? He read in yesterday’s paper a sad story of a newly wed soldier struck and killed by a truck while crossing Route A1A in Pompano Beach. If anything, the bride would’ve been worrying over the soldier’s upcoming assignment to Iraq, not his jog across the road to a convenience store for grapefruit juice. Like Meg had said, life gave no guarantees.

He set her down in the kitchen. “I took the liberty of anticipating your every desire,” he said, opening the fridge. It was filled with all the things he remembered she liked—orange soda, pineapple juice, chocolate milk, Hostess Ho Hos—and whatever else he’d seen at the store that he thought might appeal. Wine, beer, soda, key lime pie, deli meats and salads; the idea was that they wouldn’t need to leave the place at all the entire week.

“I don’t know,” she said, peering inside. “Not
every
desire’s in there.” She turned and put her arm around his waist. “But I’ll start with an orange soda.”

“Let’s start with this,” he said, and he kissed her. As on the day he’d kissed her on her back stoop so many years ago, her lips were both foreign and familiar—but a sweeter, more longed-for kiss he had never known.

They spent the evening outside, lounging in new chairs he’d bought for their stay. The cypress tree, some 125 years old, made a cool, intimate canopy for watching birds flit back and forth to orange trees now heavy with late-season fruit. Convincing his father to take a week’s vacation—to Paris, where his mom had wanted to go since forever—had hinged on the oranges being just shy of ready. “Call it an early anniversary trip,” he’d told them, to sweeten the deal. It was important that Meg not feel like his folks were watching over them while she was there. When he dropped his mom and dad at the Orlando airport, his mom hugged him and said, “I’m proud of you, you know.” His dad had nodded. “Yep. The right thing’s usually the hard thing.”

It wasn’t hard, though, to see Meg here next to him in the evening shade, her body relaxed and languid and brown from her weeks in the Pacific sun. It wasn’t hard at all to think of how in a few minutes he would take her inside, upstairs, and show her how desirable she still was. The hard thing, right now, was waiting. He wanted to meld them back into a single being, one pulse, one love—wanted his love to save her, foolish hope though it was. He wanted to give her timelessness if nothing else, and he believed their lovemaking would at least do that.

“Do you remember when we met?” Meg asked.

“On the school bus. First day of first grade.”

“Kindergarten, for me.”

“You were showing everyone a picture of your baby sister.”

She laughed. “Kara. I was as proud as if she were my own.”

“I remember asking Mom and Dad later why we hadn’t met your family yet—of course it was just us kids who hadn’t met.”

“Imagine them not putting our social lives at the top of their agendas!”

“I made up for lost time, though. God, I must’ve lived at your house every summer after that year,” he said. “It was so much more
fun
than being alone here at home.”

“So that’s all I was to you, huh? A good time. A diversion from boredom.”

“Absolutely.” He kissed her palm, the inside of her wrist, and then leaned over and nipped her neck. “What did you think it was about?”

“I think you ruined me for all other men,” she said softly.

God, he adored her. “All part of my diabolical plan.”

A flock of monk parakeets flew toward them and landed in the branches above, a bright green-and-gray swarm of cheerful chatter. Meg studied them, or seemed to. Then she said, “What do you think comes after this?”

“Oh, something I think you’re going to like a lot,” he said, leering.

“Incorrigible man. No, I mean, after
life.
Or life as we know it, anyway.”

“Ah. Well…I’m all for reincarnation. I like to think there’s some kind of holding pen for souls, and when it’s time—however that’s determined—you get to be born again.”

“As a human? Or could you be any living thing?”

“Human. I think there’s a sort of predetermined electrical structure for everything—you took chemistry, right?”

“Um, yeah,” she smiled. “Lots of chemistry.”

“Right, so I figure we’re all about electrons and protons and neutrons and stuff—preformulated and unchangeable, except maybe by cosmic accident. You know, like, if there’s a sunstorm or something when you’re in the pen, you might end up as a carp or, I don’t know, an earthworm.”

She laughed. “Not very reassuring.”

“What do
you
think comes next?”

“Peace—if you’ve done right in your life. If not, I think there’s some kind of accountability. Not Hell, but maybe a kind of purgatory—maybe that’s what ghosts are all about. People can see them and take them as a warning.”

“Have you ever seen a ghost?”

“No…but I’ve never seen radio waves or satellite signals, either, and that doesn’t make them fictional.”

She had a point. “So maybe we’re both right.”

“Maybe we are.”

Above the orange trees, in the darkening sky, he spotted the night’s first star. He pointed at it. “Make a wish.”

She stared up at the star and then said, “Okay. Did you make one?”

“Yep, but I can’t tell you, or it won’t come true.”

“Of course.”

“I can show you, though,” he said.

“I wish you would.”

Sixty-two

H
E’D THOUGHT OF EVERYTHING
. F
RESH, COOL SHEETS, CANDLELIGHT, EVEN
Miles Davis on the stereo, which he said was a bit of a cliché but he hoped she wouldn’t mind.

She didn’t.

She also didn’t mind the vine tattoo that wound from his left forearm up over his shoulder, across his back and down to his waist. She didn’t mind the calloused pads of his fingers moving over her eager skin, or the way he lifted her hair off her neck to kiss her there, or the urgency of his hands, his hips, when it came to that. It was just as it had always been and just as it had never been—so much
more
, in some ways; they weren’t kids anymore, in the flush of discovery. Now they knew their bodies, knew their preferences, knew where the boundaries of pleasure had once been—and found out how to cross them. It was a reunion of spirit as much as flesh, and Meg savored every sensation.

They made love like it was an art, Carson pressing into her as if his life,
their
lives, depended on it. As if he could secure eternity.

And maybe he had. She would find out before very much longer, she thought, lying beside him later, when the candles burned lower in their votives and the moon shone in through the window. The answer she’d been looking for, the
how,
came to her in the lazy, happy aftermath of their lovemaking. Came unbidden, as if she’d needed only to be sated, physically and emotionally, in order to recognize it. She thought about it while she watched the moon rise higher and disappear above the cypress branches, deciding also
when.
And then she slept.

I
DYLLIC DAYS FOLLOWED, REMINDING HER OF THOSE SUMMERS WHEN THEY
were children, in the years before she knew how poor her family was, before Beth was born, before she got yoked with more responsibility than a girl that age ought to handle. She and Carson read and talked and ate and napped, and made love often. They went to their tree, where the swing still hung, and told every story of their days there that either of them could recall.

“Remember when the rope snapped with Jules on the swing, and she fell and broke her wrist?”

“Remember that time we caught the baby coral snake, and then you took it to school for show-and-tell?”

“Remember the striped horse blanket?” Carson asked, and then he produced it from behind the tree and made love to her there on the shady ground.

They talked about his idea to build a house on the far side of the groves, as if she would be there to see it, to share it, a harmless fantasy she didn’t mind indulging. She practically lived in her pajamas—the John Deere T-shirt and a pair of light cotton drawstring pants. No shoes. No jewelry, save for her chain. No interruptions from pagers, no phone calls except from Savannah.

On Wednesday morning, their seventh day, Meg sat out behind the shed, the journal in her lap, the letter from the lab tucked inside. Next to her, Carson was reading
Moby-Dick
, which he said he’d always meant to read, having been given to understand that he and Ahab shared some personality traits. “Intensity of purpose, obsession with the past—Gene told me to read it,” he said.

“You’re not Ahab,” she told him, smiling at how intellectual he looked in his reading glasses. “You know when to quit.” He said no, he never quit things; he just changed tactics. “Okay, then,” she cautioned, “just make sure you never end up in the whale’s mouth.”

He smiled. “Don’t spoil the ending—and don’t worry about me.”

“It’s my privilege.”

She hadn’t mentioned the letter to him, the tests, and she hadn’t opened the envelope yet either. It had come while she and Savannah were away; when she’d found it in the pile of mail Manisha dropped off for her, she’d eyed the envelope as if it was a basket holding a cobra. What if the analysis said Brian was, in fact, Savannah’s father? Each day, when she wrote in the journal, she thought about opening the letter, and each day she held off. She looked at it now, a white envelope, nothing at all extraordinary about it, and then, making sure that Carson was involved in his book, she slowly wrote across the back:

My love,

That day of my wedding, I deceived you and Brian both. I wanted your child if I could have it, a souvenir of the love I still had for you but thought was otherwise lost to me forever. Please forgive my selfishness. Inside this envelope are the results of a DNA comparison showing whether or not Brian is Savannah’s father. I thought I had to know, but now I can’t bear to look—I want so badly for you to be the one that I’d rather not know if you aren’t.

If you decide to open this, know that neither of them is aware of the test; if she’s your daughter, you can reveal the results or not—I trust your judgment. I know she loves you anyway.

Yours Always…
Meg

She tucked the envelope back inside the journal. Later, she’d put it with the other letter she’d written to him, along with notes she wanted him to give to her sisters, to Manisha, to her father, notes she’d been crafting little by little these past several weeks. In the early mornings this week, she’d finished up Carson’s letter while he slept. Better that
he
not know too much ahead of time, either; she couldn’t bear for him to worry over it or, out of love, try to stop her.

She opened the journal to a fresh page and wrote to Savannah. The effort it cost her arm and hand was like that of trying to push a boulder across a field, but she wouldn’t let herself get frustrated. There was time, yet.

A
T ONE AM THE MOON, NOT QUITE FULL BUT JUST AS BRIGHT AS IF IT WERE,
was edging into the western sky. Meg slid out from under Carson’s arm, trying not to wake him. He murmured, “Hmmm? Where you going?”

“Bathroom,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

He drew her back down to him and kissed her sleepily. “Love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He let go, and she stood, steadying herself with the bedpost, while he bunched his pillow and settled back into it, eyes closed. His lips were curved in the sweet smile she’d known almost all her life. He looked purely content.

Making her way down the stairs, she concentrated on not falling. She went into the kitchen, keeping the lights off. The journal, the letters, all were waiting for her in a drawer, and she put them out on the counter, next to the coffeepot. Thinking better of it, she moved them to the table; he wouldn’t bother with coffee.

The door squeaked when she opened it, and she paused, then pulled it almost closed, stopping before the squeak could voice again. To make sure Carson wasn’t following, she sat on a chaise and waited. A chorus of frogs and crickets and cicadas made the night surprisingly loud; an owl hooted repeatedly in the distance. Moonlight trickled between the cypress branches, making spiky shadows all around her. A truly beautiful night.

Relying heavily on her cane, she made her way through the grove. James McKay’s careful upkeep made the walk easier than it might have been, the pathways kept trimmed and clear of fallen fruit and branches. Startled fruit bats winged past her now and then, surprising her at first. As she neared the lake, the frogs’ song grew louder. Carolyn’s dog, Shep, came trotting over when he saw her come out of the grove.

“Good dog,” she said, patting him. He sniffed at her bare legs and then sat when she stopped at the water’s edge, as if to join her in admiring the glossy black surface, the reflection of the moon lighting the middle of the seven-acre lake.

Shep was the latest in a line of dogs trained to help James keep the lake free of alligators; the McKays still swam there occasionally, and had offered it for use to the two adolescent boys whose family bought her farm next door. Even so, she’d looped a powerful flashlight over her wrist before leaving the shed, and took it off now, shining it slowly across the water’s surface in search of telltale pairs of shining eyes.

No gators. She sat down on the sandy bank, then lay back and looked upward into the clear night sky.

For eons, humans had done just as she was doing now, had compared the brightest stars to the dim ones, had noticed patterns and pictures, had wondered what it meant to be
here
instead of
there.
Uncountable stars, uncountable people…. She was no different, in essence, from a woman of ten thousand years ago, a hundred thousand. All of them had the same chemistry she did, the same two hands, two legs, two eyes, two ears, the same capacity for hoping that death would bring a magnificent knowledge. Enlightenment. Completion.

How lovely that the sky, so black and vast, wasn’t fearsome; it was surprisingly welcoming, in fact. The blackness wasn’t real—the telescope on Mauna Kea had proven that to her. All the apparent black space was filled with ever more points of light. Endlessly, astonishingly filled; the blackness was an illusion, a limitation of human sight.

Somewhere out there, unseen, the energy of souls collected. Or maybe that energy was everywhere, like light.

She stood up—an awkward process even without her arm bound by the sling—and waded into the lake. It was warm in the shallows, like bathwater, but cooled a little as she moved farther out. Shep paddled in after her. When the water got deep for him, he turned back, but she kept on, walking slowly until the bottom dropped away beneath her. She lay on her back and pushed out to the middle, her left arm and leg doing most all the work, their counterparts little more than rudders. Finally she floated there, her hair streaming out around her head—halolike, she imagined, thinking how she would look from above.

When the idea of coming out here had first occurred to her, she’d thought of how babies, before their births, lived like amphibians in their underwater enclaves. Right up until their removal from the womb, babies were cushioned and caressed in a liquid nest. Their exit was a shock; they wailed, they sputtered, but soon they were soothed and quiet, ready to go on with whatever came next. It was reasonable to guess, then, that the process might work very well in reverse.

Tonight, the lake would be her mother.

After a few minutes, even her good arm struggled to do its part in keeping her afloat and her legs were begging for rest. She treaded water weakly for a minute more; then, when she couldn’t keep her chin above the surface, she allowed her body to sink with relief.

Eyes open, breath held, she fixed the watery moon in her sights. The Holy Mother’s night-light, her mother had told her sisters and her, when they were young.

When her lungs, too, begged for relief, she gave up her air in a sudden, instinctive gulp, a weak, ineffectual thrash. Better this, she thought, calming herself, better this than months of slow-motion drowning in full, helpless view of the ones she loved.

The ones she loved…

She kept her eyes on the moon’s reassuring light, and before long, sooner even than she expected, her body and mind relaxed. She wished only that she could tell Savannah and Carson, her father, her sisters, even Brian, how easy this was for her now, how right. Cradled and soothed, she lay still in the deep water and watched in fascination as the light grew closer, wider, welcoming, pure.