The Rest is Silence (14 page)

She found the
Merck Manual
that had always been on her parents' bedroom shelf and looked for an explanation for her pain. Benny had been perusing it since she was in the seventh grade to diagnose every symptom she suffered. She had asked them at the dinner table once about the book. Her mother and father stopped eating and looked at each other, seeming to want the other to speak. After her dad started to say something, then bit his lip and stopped, she let it go. Now she found a section on chronic abdominal pain and wondered what was causing hers. Endometriosis? Not likely because she still wasn't menstruating. Hepatitis? She wasn't tired or losing weight. Ovarian cyst? Perhaps. She'd have to go see someone about it soon if it kept up. She put her hands on her breasts, wishing they were even slightly larger. Maybe they'd grow when she started to bleed.

She saw a doctor, who told her it was probably anxiety and wrote her a prescription, and her pains stopped for a while.

—

Benny submerged her head again, as if she could wash off the memory, then pulled the plug. When she came out of the bathroom Leroy offered her a pair of black track pants, a dry shirt, and his cableknit sweater. They sat in his room as her hair dried. She wrapped her legs in a blanket on his bed and curled them under her.

“That sweater looks good on you.”

She was glowing from her run and the heat of the bath. He told her that the sweater had been a gift from his mother when his parents came back from a trip to Scotland. Its wool, now yellowed the colour of an old man's teeth and with a coffee stain shaped like the map of some imaginary country, had been white when he received it.

“It's from the Isle of Skye. Mom bought it from an old Macleod who spoke mostly Gaelic. She told her that each family had a unique pattern that acted as a signature to identify the fisherman who wore it. If he was drowned, and battered on the rocks, he would be recognized by his sweater.”

That sounded to her like the kind of thing that sold sweaters to tourists. He wore it raking leaves, playing Frisbee and football, and tobogganing. He had worn it until there were holes in the elbows, and he patched those holes with green, orange, and brown yarn he'd woven into a tight knit. Though he might not recognize the pattern if the sweater was lost, the patches he added had made it unique and recognizable as his.

A few days later Benny returned the track pants and T-shirt but kept the sweater. He never asked for it back.

15

Forest Garden

On the hottest day of the summer Lina and I decide to make raspberry jam. Across the road is a clear-cut that slopes toward the valley. Out of the thin, gravely soil and mounds of too-small logs left behind grows a tangle of raspberries, alders, and skinny birch. The wild raspberry canes push through the piled logs, now soft with rot, and knot them in place. We pick berries into baskets hanging from our necks with sisal we cut off the straw bales in our garden.

Once we have eight quarts we walk back and pour the mushy berries into a pot and add sugar. The sugar feels like sand against the wooden spoon as I stir it on the stove outside. Sugar-filled steam rises from the pot and lands on us as we stir the bubbling jam. We both have our shirts off and I try — I really do — to keep my eyes averted from the drops of sweat beading between Lina's breasts.

“It's kind of hard for me to focus on making jam,” I say.

“Focus on what you need to,” she says as she bumps my hip and smiles. “I'll look after the jam.”

Why can't I simply tell her how I feel?

“I love what we're doing here,” she says.

It's dark by the time we pull the final batch of jars out of the canner. We spread the last, half-filled jar on flaxseed bread from the bakery in Middleton, with Jersey butter we bought from the Reaghs.

A big moon beckons us to stay outside. Lina suggests going for a swim, so we put our shirts on and go down the hill to the pond. We stop talking as we pass the cemetery. On the shore she slithers out of her shorts and T-shirt as if shedding skin. I pull off my shirt but leave my shorts on. She looks at me and smiles.

“Coming?”

My heart is rowdy as I stand as naked as I dare in front of her. She turns and wades in. She stops when her bum, taut muscles curving up to her sacrum, is half submerged. Then she dives, arching like a porpoise, her calves and pointed toes disappearing with hardly a wave. When she emerges she calls in a whisper.

“Take off your gotch and get in here!”

I walk in with my shorts on. We swim in the moonlight as silently as we can, keeping our hands underwater so they won't splash. I get her to float on her back while I grind the soles of my feet in the coarse sand and cradle her, my hands under her neck and knees, her breasts and belly on the surface. With my eyes I trace the tattoo snake spiralling around her belly as it shines in the moonlight. It lies coiled like a blue vein under her skin. The quicksilver washes over the flesh of her stomach, over her nipples, and brushes her long hair looking like fronds of kelp swaying.

Onshore I wrap her in a towel as she shivers.

“Don't you like skinny-dipping?” she whispers.

“No.” My shorts are clammy.

We go back up the hill. I have to tell her sometime. When we get close to our place I count to three and dive in.

“There's something — . It scares me shitless.”

She stops walking and puts her hand on my forearm. Her eyes are glistening in the moonlight.

“I'm afraid once I say it, everything will change. I love this summer.”

She doesn't say, “Trust me,” she doesn't say, “Tell me.” There's a glitter in her eyes that makes me believe it's going to be O.K., that she'll go on liking me even if she might never love me.

“I, I was —” But I start to cry before I can finish.

She takes a half-step and puts her arms around me. I let her hold me.

“Lina, I'm in love with you.”

Her jaw drops and she swears. We continue past our place to our neighbour's field of mown hay and sit under the moon. Finally, she turns to me.

“This has happened to me before. I make a good friend. Then he falls in love with me and the friendship is ruined.”

I want to argue, but the illusion of our simple life has been broken. My hope that she can love me has proven as fragile as a soap bubble.

Things fall apart, 1993

The last spring I lived at home, the final semester of my last year of high school, my father let his flower beds go. The tulips at the end of the driveway bloomed in April like an echo from the time when he was happy. For a week when I walked home from school I passed the fading tulips, watching their petals droop and fall to the ground, hoping he'd do something with them. I cut lilacs, purple and white, from the path to my old school and put them in a vase on top of the bureau in my room. I'd have to tend his flower gardens by myself.

I dug up the bulbs and stored them in a box in the garage, as we always had, then replanted the triangular bed with petunias. The lilacs took on a funky smell by the third day, a pungent note of decay, and I threw them out before the water grew stagnant.

I tended his peonies, roses, and dahlias all summer. I didn't ask for help and Dad didn't seem to notice. The purple-flowering clematis climbed the light pole of its own volition. The ants crawled on the pregnant peony buds, preparing them to open once again, and the roses bloomed provocatively whether or not he chose to smell them.

I was without a job that summer, choosing instead to stay home to be near Dad before I went to college. Perhaps I should have moved out, but it felt as if someone had clipped my wings and I could not fly in a straight line.

He was disinterested in me and in what I was doing. I stayed out of the house as much as I could. When I was home we circled each other like tired prizefighters in the twelfth round, morose and taciturn. Or I went to my room to read or smoke a joint and listen to Dad's old records. Dylan, The Band, The Allman Brothers, Clapton, Bowie, The Who.

Since our last camping trip to Maine, he rarely asked me to go for walks with him, complaining of being tired all the time. When he did have the energy to go, he either overcompensated by being garrulous or he made no effort to talk and there were long silences I wanted to fill but couldn't.

In the evenings, when my bedroom was stuffy with the day's leftover heat, I sat on the back porch. Sometimes my friend Steve joined me and we listened to a ball game and talked. But I was usually content to be by myself, and on those nights I'd smoke some pot and brood. I liked sitting in the dark after washing the dirt and sweat off my skin from my day in the garden. The sun stayed stored inside me, radiating its heat outward as my skin cooled in the dark.

One night in early August I couldn't sleep. I got a can of ginger ale from the fridge on my way out to the patio. I sparked up a joint and had been there less than ten minutes when the breezeway door opened behind me. I threw the joint on the flagstones and ground it out under my flip-flop. I stood too fast, tipping my chair backward with a slap on the stones. I bent to pick it up, then bumped the table with my hip.

“Smooth,” he said, then laughed.

It was the first time he'd sought me out in weeks. He held a bottle and placed it, along with two highball glasses he held with two fingers and his thumb, on the round table. Gin. How could he drink that straight?

“It's too damn hot to be inside. I can't sleep.”

He unscrewed the bottle and began to pour. He asked if I wanted some. I shook my head.

“Not your drug of choice?” He winked.

His breath was heavy as if he'd just come back from a jog. Something about the still night and him joking about catching me smoking dope made me feel closer to him than I had in a while. It made me take a chance.

“Do you think Mom left because of me?”

He looked at his glass and then at me.

“I got the feeling sometimes that she didn't think I was all right,” I said.

“There's nothing wrong with you, Bean.”

He hadn't called me that for such a long time that my eyes filled with tears he couldn't see.

“Something is wrong, though,” he said.

“With me?”

He shook his head. He poured himself a bit more and drained the glass.

“Tomorrow I'll show you what to do with those raspberry canes. I've let them go and they need pruning.”

He picked up the glasses, wrapped his fist around the neck of the bottle, and disappeared into the house.

The next day I waited in the garden, but he never showed up.

Steve and I were wrestling on the lawn the day after my birthday. Dad came home as I pinned Steve. Dad got out of the car and stood staring at us as though he were trying to remember where he'd met us before. It was weird. I jumped off Steve and waved at him.

“Hey, Pop!”

He stared a moment longer, then yelled at me. “Stop your childish nonsense.”

He looked miserable as he turned and went inside. I felt like he had kicked me in the gut. I sprinted down the driveway and along the road. I kept running until I was exhausted.

My father was quiet at supper, solicitous, and he avoided my eyes. With my head cradled in one hand I pushed food around my plate with the fork. I could feel his eyes on the top of my head but I couldn't look up. I went to my room and wept.

The noxious cloud that crossed between us that afternoon lingered like a bad smell. His anger came and went without obvious provocation. It was inexplicable to me. I had passed through some door of my childhood and was being pushed into a dark space as the door locked behind me. He moved into the spare room in the basement with its pull-out couch in front of the TV.

I left home for college that September. My father pulled himself together long enough to help me pack my boxes in the car and drive me there. He was reminding me of the man who had always been my best friend. We talked the whole way, he joked with me, but I couldn't relax into the belief that he had come back.

We stopped outside my dorm. He turned off the ignition and faced me.

“You know I'm proud of you, right?”

I assumed that, but it was hardly enough. I imagined him alone in our house.

“Are you going to move back upstairs?” I said.

“Probably.”

My new roommate was not only unpacked but seemed to have been living in that room for months. There were pizza boxes stacked on the floor by the door, a wet towel on the unmade bed, a lacrosse stick on the windowsill, an empty Pepsi can on the desk. Dad rolled his eyes and smiled. Once all my stuff was in neither of us could think of a good reason for him to stay. I followed him into the hall and down the stairs to the entrance.

“Is everything going to be all right?” I said.

He squeezed me hard, then left. I ran up the stairs two at a time and to the window of my new room. He got into the car and sat there. He gripped the steering wheel with both hands, then rested his head on it.
Come on, Dad, pull it together.
I looked away and prayed for the car to start.