Threshold (7 page)

And she wanted to tell the girl that she’d
had
to come, because of what had happened to her mother, what had happened to her grandmother, because she had pulled the trigger, what else was she supposed to do but pull the trigger, but then she couldn’t even remember what it was that had happened, nothing but a sick, lost feeling where the memories had been just a second before, and, “None of it matters now,” the girl said. “You did what you had to do, that’s all,” and the earth bellowed underfoot like a bull alligator and rose in a single wave to shatter the mountainside and the pretty white house, wave of soil and broken stone and the squirming, living things caught inside, tumbling towards Dancy and the brown-haired girl helpless in the trough, and they held hands and waited to drown.

The doors slide open, and Dancy follows Chance out of the elevator, past rows of science and computer magazines, past the children’s section and a huge cardboard cut-out of a happy purple dinosaur, and there’s the crosswalk; third-floor umbilicus of steel and glass to bridge the street below, and Chance pauses, looks back at her. It’s very bright out there, two o’clock sun shining straight through smogtinted glass, and the air-conditioning doesn’t seem to reach beyond the building, hangs back like Dancy, lingering in the shadows. There are three antique wooden benches in the crosswalk, discarded church pews, maybe, yellowbrown wood bolted to the carpet, left to bake beneath the sun, and Chance sits down on the first one and sets the cardboard box between her feet. Now Dancy can see the papers inside, and that’s all they are, just old papers, notebooks, and “You’re following me, aren’t you?” Chance asks.

No point denying it, so she doesn’t, points at the box, instead. “What did your grandfather write about?” she asks, a question for an answer, and maybe that’ll buy her a few more minutes, stalling as long as she can because if she has to tell Chance anything like the truth she knows she’ll never see her again.

“Rocks,” Chance says, voice gone suddenly flat, spiritless, like she doesn’t want to talk about this, but one hand into the box and she takes out a manila folder stuffed much too full of pages. “Fossils, mostly. He was a geologist. You know, someone who studies—”

“I’m not
ignorant,
” Dancy snaps, interrupting her. “I
know
what a geologist is,” and already wishing she hadn’t sounded so defensive, knowing Chance wasn’t calling her stupid, but so few years in school and so many people who assumed that being an albino had also made her retarded.

“I’m sorry,” Chance says, returning the folder to the box. “You might be surprised how many people
don’t
know.”

And a few seconds’ worth of silence then, silence wedged tight between them while Chance stares down at the box, at her dead grandfather’s papers, and Dancy squints into the merciless day separating her and the cool, dark doorway leading into the building at the other end of the crosswalk. Maybe a hundred feet across, no more than a hundred feet, surely, and there’s Chance sitting in the sun like she’s never heard of skin cancer, like no one’s ever lectured her about melanoma, Chance and her impossible suntanned face and arms.

“Why are there two buildings, anyway?” Dancy asks, and that seems to bring Chance back a little, back from wherever her head’s gone, and she glances from one side of the street to the other and then back to Dancy.

“The one we were just in is the new library. They opened it about ’83. And that one over there,” and she motions with her head towards the far side of the crosswalk, “that’s the old library.”

“How old?” Dancy asks, and, “1925, I think,” Chance says. “It was built after a fire destroyed the original.”

“Oh,” Dancy says and steps out into the sun, cautious venture just far enough that she can see both the buildings now, the razorsharpened, polished angles of the new library, squat and featureless façade of glass and anonymous gray stone like ugly Lego blocks, the kind of building that can seem cold even under the summer sun. And across the street, something more like a Greek temple cut from limestone, tall columns to support the upper stories, and the names of great artists and scientists, playwrights and poets, carved into a frieze around the top. “It’s kind of like a time machine, you know,” Chance says. “Cross the street and you cross seventy-five years, three-quarters of a century in just a few footsteps. On one side of the street, you have Prohibition and it’s still years till World War II, and on the other side, you’ve got Ronald Reagan and AIDS.”

Dancy looks down at her, then, and Chance is staring towards the old building; “Come over here,” she says, “I want you to see something.” She gets up, box of papers hefted off the floor, and Dancy follows her across the street, cars honking and zipping by underneath them, the sun pricking at her skin, but she’s trying not to notice. “Right down there,” Chance says. “Down by the sidewalk, in the tall grass there.” At first Dancy doesn’t see anything special, just the gray strip of sidewalk, the unmown grass at the edge of the old building, until Chance points and there’s something the color of charcoal rising out of the grass, something that looks like a tree stump cast in dull smoke-colored stone.

“Is it a statue?” she asks, and no, Chance says, shakes her head no, and Dancy stoops down for a better look.

“My grandfather found that in a coal mine up in Warrior back in the forties. It’s a fossil tree stump,” and now Dancy can make out roots like stone tentacles branching off the thing, snaking away into the grass. “He gave it to the library, and they set it in concrete. So nobody could steal it, I guess. There used to be a little wooden sign next to it. Anyway, these days I think people just think it’s a rock no one’s ever bothered to move.”

“Wow,” Dancy whispers, glad they have something real to talk about. “How old is it?”

“About two hundred and ten, maybe two hundred and twenty million years or so. They’re really not that hard to find out in the coalfields,” and Chance looks back down at the soup box then, like she’s forgotten it for a moment, just remembering, and “You want to see the old library?” she asks.

Dancy nods, “Yeah, thank you. That would be nice,” but all the time she’s thinking how 1925 isn’t old at all, how 1925 is just last week compared to that lump of gray rock sitting down there by the sidewalk.

“Well, come on then,” Chance Matthews says. “This box isn’t getting any lighter,” and she leads Dancy out of the hateful sun and into kindly shadows, and
Maybe this
will
be okay,
she thinks.
Maybe she will listen, when it’s time to tell,
and the limestone blocks stacked and mortared one to the other since her grandmother was her age close protectively around them.

 

An hour later, and Chance has left her box of papers in the library basement, handed them all over to a jowly, pink-faced woman who smiled and gave her a yellow receipt that she stuffed thoughtlessly into a front pocket of her blue jeans. And then she led Dancy back up to the first floor, and this time the elevator is wood paneled and its gears and cables clank, shudder like an old man trying to wake up and wanting to go back to sleep. But hauling them up anyway, slow, to the huge ground-floor gallery for Southern History, all the books arranged alphabetically by state and two whole wings set aside for the Civil War and genealogy.

But the most amazing thing, a mural wrapped around three of the four high walls, figures drawn from history and myth, literature and legend, and painted there, oil-paint parade of heroes and heroines, and Chance and Dancy sit together at a long reading table, brass lamps with glassgreen shades and the sunlight filtered through the tall windows in the fourth wall instead of the antiseptic, stark fluorescence from the newer building across the street. This library the opposite of almost everything across the street, and how has she spent two weeks over there, not even suspecting this existed?

Chance points to a figure labeled SIGURD, eighteen feet tall above the books, Sigurd and beautiful Brynhild watching him from her seat on a bench carved with the image of a fanged and slinking dragon.

“Isn’t that cool?” Chance asks, and Dancy nods her head. “It was painted in the twenties, by an artist named Ezra Winter. He did it in his studio in New York City, and it was shipped all the way down here and hung on the bare walls with white lead.

“I loved this place when I was a kid. I
still
love it, but when I was a kid I’d take the bus down here and spend all day long reading in this room.”

And she stops, maybe something she didn’t really mean to say, not to Dancy or anyone else, and Dancy points quickly to another towering figure on the wall, another dragon and white blossoms on a tree, Confucius, and she smiles for Chance, smiles against whatever melancholy lies coiled like a canebrake rattler inside this girl. And that was one of her grandmother’s words, melancholy instead of just plain old sad, and suddenly Dancy feels homesick for the first time in weeks.

Then Chance is looking at her wristwatch, and, “Damn,” she whispers, librarywhisper, but urgent, and “I have to go,” she says. And Dancy almost says no, please stay just a little longer, Chance noticing the time like a demon called up by her homesickness, something to make it worse. But that’s not the way it goes, she reminds herself, not yet, too afraid of pushing and ruining everything after she’s come this far. So, “I’m sorry,” and that will have to do instead of the things she really feels, really wants to say to Chance.

“I have some errands,” Chance says. “Stupid shit, but it has to be done,” standing up, pushing her chair back from the table. And then she’s looking down at Dancy, expression like she’s just noticed her all over again. But this time Dancy knows it’s not her white skin and pink-red eyes, this time it’s her shabby clothes, her filthy hair, and “You have someplace to go, right? I mean, a place to stay?”

“I’ve got some friends,” she says, simple enough answer to forestall anything else Chance might ask, ashamed of the way she looks, the way she smells; Chance takes a twenty-dollar bill from her back pocket and Dancy shakes her head, doesn’t want to accept the money, more embarrassed now, but god it’s twenty dollars, and part of her hopes Chance
won’t
change her mind. Which she doesn’t, shakes her head, too, and, “Call it a loan,” she says, “If that’s what you want it to be. I needed someone to talk to today, really.”

So Dancy crumples the bill in one palm and shakes Chance’s hand again, less awkward shake this time, and she doesn’t squeeze quite so hard.

“Thanks,” she says, and then almost,
Will I see you again?
but that might be too much, something she could take the wrong way, and no matter how nice she’s been, it’s never too late to scare someone away, never too late to make a bad impression. Chance looks at her watch again. “I really gotta run,” she says. “But it was good to meet you, Dancy Flammarion,” and she smiles, the first real smile she’s seen from her, and the tall girl wears it well.

And then she’s gone, dashing back towards the elevator, and Dancy watches her go, watches until the doors slide closed, and she opens her palm and examines the twenty. Lays it on the table in front of her and smooths it out flat, tries to iron out the paperwrinkles, the creases, and then she slips the money inside her duffel bag.

“See you soon, Chance Matthews,” she whispers, knows that it’s true, one way or another, and then Dancy looks back up at the mute and colorful pantheon watching over her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L
ATE afternoon and one impertinent shaft of sunlight slipping between the drapes of the bar, drapes drawn against the summer heat and shine, respect for the aching eyes of daytime customers, and the sunlight stabbing its cruel or thoughtless way through drifting cigarette smoke and dust and the thick and sour smell of old beer. THE PLAZA, except someone hung the sign upside down so it reads
, but that was a long time ago, a long story everyone’s tired of repeating, or a short story simply not worth repeating again. The Plaza and Deacon sitting alone at the bar, lanky, stoop-shouldered Deacon Silvey nursing his third PBR of the day and dreading seven o’clock and the beginning of his Friday night shift at the Highland Wash-N-Fold, five immeasurable hours of rumbling dryers and washing machines like the strangling lungs of drowning men. If he didn’t still have a hangover from the night before, that would be enough to give him one, just thinking about all those goddamn washers and dryers chugging half the night.