World and Town (53 page)

Everett waits.

“It is inadvisable.”

“That mean it’s dumb?”

Hattie sighs. “Can we come back tomorrow?”

Everett laughs.

“Think of your kids,” she says. “Think of Brian and Betsy.”

He continues to grin.

“Think how they’d feel. Have you talked to them lately?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Do you have a phone?”

He straightens a knee. “There some treetop service I don’t know about around here?”

“We’ll have to do something about that,” she says. “That’s our step one. In the meanwhile, it’s getting late.” She stands, putting on her jacket and nudging Carter.

“We’ll be back tomorrow.” Carter stands, too.

“Is there anything else we can bring you?” asks Hattie. “Besides a phone? Some nice hot bacon and eggs, maybe? Sausage? Hash browns?”

Everett shakes his head again gently, as if he’s turning gnomic, like Carter. He does not stand.

“Anything you want me to tell Ginny? If I see her? If she’s in town?”

“Nah.” He buttons a button.

Cows’ll fly before she sees
.

And when they come back the next day with a satellite phone and a hot pack full of food, they find him slumped in his chair. The fire is out; the cabin is cold. His skin is blue, his mouth open, his gaze fixed, his pupils huge.

“Oh my god, no,” says Hattie.

Guess I’ve taken all the help I want to in this life
.

Carter opens the window, though the smoke has mostly cleared.

“Smoke inhalation,” he says.

They sink back down on the bed as if to talk to Everett all over again. Then Carter stands back up, closes Everett’s eyes, and puts his hand on Everett’s forehead, fingers fanned.

“May you go to heaven if there is a heaven,” he says. “You didn’t hedge your bets. You gave your whole heart. You were right to be mad.”

He puts Everett’s hat back on his head, resting his open hand a moment on its crown. Then he sits back down with Hattie. They hold hands.

COME SEE THE KING
.

C
arter keeps waking in the middle of the night.

“Reedie,” he says. “My brother Reedie.”

“I remember Reedie.”

“They found Reedie slumped over like that.” Reedie with his RBIs and his cotton candy and his, in truth, terrible Chinese.

“Poor Reedie,” says Hattie. “Poor, poor Reedie.”

“He did all right in the end. He didn’t think so, but he did.”

She reaches for Carter in the dark, massaging his head. His skull is hard but full of little tensions, she knows, as is hers; he massages hers back. It’s a new routine they’ve developed already, and a pleasure, though Reedie, Reedie, Reedie. She pictures Reedie slumped over like Everett; then Everett himself, slumped over, his eyes open.

Twins.

The room is perfectly black—there’s no moon tonight. She nudges Reveille through the sheet with her foot. What with both dogs sleeping on her side of the bed now, it’s easy to lose territory, and Reveille’s on top of the covers, her foot below; it’s hard to get his attention. Still, she tries.

“I’ll never get over it.” Carter’s voice is husky.

“None of us will. Are you crying? Oh, Carter. Come.”

She hugs him, their knees knocking in a way hers and Joe’s never did. Or did they? She tries to remember but can’t, though she remembers very well, she thinks, how Joe snored all night—like Cato, except that Cato only snored when he was lying on his back. Joe snored in every position, as does Carter—who does snore more quietly, however, and more musically, with a little whistle.

And unlike Joe, Carter cries—something else he does quietly, with his shoulders hunched up and his chin to his chest. She kisses his wet eyes, his wet cheeks; she can still smell the cabin smoke in what there is of his hair. That smoke. “Carter.” She holds him as she held Joe and Lee toward the end, climbing into their hospital beds to comfort them. Joe. Lee. Everett. Reedie. And Cato—Cato. She’s pained for Carter, pained for them all, though she does not cry herself—having no tears left, it seems.
Dá guān
—she’s attained some sort of terrible detachment. So that even as she mourns, she’s aware how fleshy he is, how healthy and uncolonized. Never mind his hairs and moles and patches of eczema, it is a strange loveliness to hug someone with back muscles over his ribs.

Carter, at least, has come back to her.

She squeegees his eyes. “Reedie,” she says.

“Reedie.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It was terrible.”

“You blame yourself.”

“Was there something I could have said. Was there something I could have done. About how he saw the world—about how he saw himself. Of course, to do that, I would have had to see him. And I didn’t see him, did I? You said that once. And now Everett. Was there something we could have done about Everett?”

She holds her tongue, or maybe sleep does. Exhaustion. It’s been a long day. Her body is a dead weight. A steady thing, though, at least. A thing that can be leaned against, snuggled into. Big as he is, Carter nestles into her like a child, crying himself to sleep, only to wake again.

“Chhung,” he says. “It could have been Chhung.”

“Chhung?” says Hattie, groggily.

“The only difference between Everett and Chhung,” he says, “was you. You saw the Chhungs. Sarun. Sophy. They were part of your picture.”

Hattie opens her eyes, then closes them—nothing to see in the dark.

“If only Everett had been as clear to me as the Chhungs,” she says.

“Could we have saved him, do you think? Was there something we could have done? Something we could have said? People say you can’t stop them. People who are going to kill themselves, that is. That they just have trouble with impulse control. But I still wonder if there’s something we could have done.”

“Maybe.” If only it weren’t true! But that moment they could’ve taken a different tack—maybe it was. And her anger at Ginny, which she sees now was one part Ginny’s reminding her of Carter—
keeping you around when it was convenient but kicking you out when it wasn’t
. And what about Carter himself? Contributing for better and worse to her life, and to the lives of others. “Let’s talk about it in the morning,” she says.

Half expecting he’ll say, Now, let’s talk about it now.

But he turns over instead, taking the covers with him. They recede like a tide in thrall to a moon on his side of the room; she has to pull and pull to keep covered. Yank.

He wakes again.

“I’m not Everett,” he says.

“And thank goodness for that.” Hattie struggles to wake herself again—that lead apron. “Poor Everett’s dead.”

“I didn’t even know what that was. To be Everett. I was so unable to imagine such a man, I didn’t even know that wasn’t what I was. I only knew I wasn’t Anderson. Reedie wasn’t me, and I wasn’t Anderson.”

“That was hard enough.” She opens her eyes out of habit. Blinking, though there’s nothing to see.

“He really loved Ginny, didn’t he? I gave my life to science. He gave his life to her.”

Annie makes a snuffling noise.

“He stuck with her through a lot,” says Hattie, slowly. “Too much, maybe.”

“A man like that was beyond my ken. Do you know what I mean? He was beyond my ken.”

They are lying on their backs. She straightens out her nightgown, which has bunched up under her, then finds his hand. His hand is not papery, as it tends to be, but almost moist. Warm.

“He was a madman,” she says.

“He could have used some of your what. Your Confucian moderation,” agrees Carter. “If you don’t mind my bringing up your sage.”

Her sage.

“He was a vet, you know. Everett, I mean,” she says. “Vietnam?”

“Yes.”

“Which explains something, everything, or nothing. Something, everything, or nothing.”

“Exactly.”

“He had my number all the same. What was that he said? ‘You’d have thought better of that plan.’ ”

Hattie hesitates.

“He knew I couldn’t love like that. Love you. Another person. In that headlong way. Regardless of the consequences. He knew I’d second-guess myself. Weigh and consider. Cut my own heart out if that was required.”

How wrong it would be to cry as hard at this as at Everett’s death, or at Reedie’s. Yet Hattie feels as though if he goes on, she might.

“What a match we were,” he goes on. “Two smart people who cut their own hearts out. What did Everett say?
All them years
. We were as good a match as they were, weren’t we. As good a match as they were.”

“
All them years,
” repeats Hattie.

Carter snuggles up to her, turning on his side. His arm reaches across her body like a shoulder belt.

“Why did you leave the lab? Tell me. I should have asked you this years ago, I know, but let me at least ask you now. If I may. Why did you leave research?”

How wide awake he is; that Hatch intensity. She should have known he would be this way even in the middle of the night—a train. Whereas her breathing is still slow and rolling, her thoughts still stuffy. “Let’s talk about it in the morning.”

“No, now,” he says. “Now. Don’t back away. Don’t shy away—that’s the word, isn’t it? You don’t stonewall, you shy away. Maybe as a matter of nature, though it could be nurture, too, of course. All those years as an outsider. As a—how do you say it in Chinese?”

“
Yángrén
. Though today people mostly say
wàigāorén. Wàigāorén
or
yángūizi
, but not
yĭngrén.
” She should explain the differences, but yawns again instead.

“There was something else you used to say.”

“
Wàiláide
, maybe?”

“
Wàiláide
, that’s right. ‘Come from outside.’ You were
wàiláide
. Though it isn’t even from everything, is it? That you back away. Only from things close to your heart’s wound, as Meredith would say.”

You always were well insulated, Hat. Probably you had to be
.

She doesn’t answer.

“The lab,” he says, gently. Not putting her back on track like a grad student—just returning to the subject. Drawing her out. “Why you left the lab.”

“I needed a home, and the lab wasn’t a home. It wasn’t—what did you call it?—an experiment in living. It was an arena.”

“An arena.”

“That’s what Amy Fist called it. She said I could love the lab, but it wasn’t going to love me back. And I thought she was right about that.”

“But a lab is like a lake, Hattie”—Carter forgoing, for once, a dig at Amy. “You can love a lake, but it’s just for swimming. You don’t leave it because it doesn’t love you. You leave because you’re done swimming.”

She can feel him breathing behind her. They’re holding hands, their fingers interlocked.

“It was about me, wasn’t it?” he goes on.

“I suppose you were a factor,” she says. “In the final analysis.”

“A factor in how you viewed the whole enterprise.”

“I suppose. Yes.”

“What a shame.” He squeezes her hand. “What a goddamned shame.”

“It wasn’t the disaster you imagine,” she says. “I was sick of repeating experiments anyway. You had more stamina for all that what-went-wrong.”

“We did have some terrible luck with our samples.”

“It drove me crazy. And I was good with kids. I changed a lot of lives—broadened their horizons. Made them see reason.” She pauses. “They loved me.”

“I’m sure. But did you love it. Did you love it. Did it enlarge your spirit, was it what you were put on earth to do. Did it draw more out of you than you knew you had, did it change your very substance. Was it a gift.” His free hand strokes her hair.

“It was satisfying, Carter,” she says. “It was worthwhile. I am not going to let you tell me it was a waste of my life, because it wasn’t. I gave a lot and got a lot back. You should have seen my retirement party. I had some fifty kids come back.”

“But no molluscs.”

Molluscs.

“How many people came when you retired, Carter? Tell me. And of the people who came, how many people came who didn’t have to? How many came wholeheartedly?”

Reveille parks his head on her foot.

Carter goes on as if he didn’t hear her. “And there’s something special in those moments of discovery, isn’t there. When it’s not you and your circumstances. When it’s you and the universe, and you feel that. That you’re engaged in a most worthy enterprise and have come to stand on some isle of certainty, to boot. Some small, lovely bastion of certainty.”

She rolls a little away from him, freeing her hand. “You know, Carter, not everyone can have such exalted work. You’ve always worn special boots and done special things. Other people have regular boots and regular jobs.”

“But you can’t deny you know what I mean.” He grips her waist. “About the petty world we deal with every day but that we can hardly bear calling our lives. And the feeling that you’ve escaped, and are finally in the right precincts. The precincts we were made to inhabit.”

She hesitates.
The precincts we were made to inhabit
—no. That
you and the universe
, though—you and the universe, you and the unknown, which you were helping to make known for now and forever: Maybe it was just a web of significance, but it did seem like more than that. You did feel that you were adding a brick to an important and immortal edifice—to a cathedral worth building. Who knew what its final meaning was? Who knew but that its truths were as partial as any the mind perceived? Still, it was far larger than you, and descriptive, too, of something yet larger and more beautiful. Beyond you—it was descriptive of something so far beyond you that you could see why some people believed it divine.

Yet still, she asks, “Were you loved?”

“Hattie, listen. What you did was worthwhile. It was a reasonable way to spend your life. Or more than that. It was noble. It was a noble way to spend your life. You had fifty students come back for your retirement, and I’m sure there were five hundred more whose lives were changed by your class. They were lucky to have you—that’s a fact. Very lucky. And they loved you, I’m sure. Loved you as no one in the lab ever loved me, probably. So, all right. But what went on in the lab through this time period, Hattie—can you not admit it to have been something special? Can you really not admit it?”