T
hat fall hangs in my memory like a bright red maple leaf. Clinging, cloying. Electric but also precarious. It was as though everything burned brighter that autumn. I held on.
We
held on even knowing that the threat of falling was both imminent and inevitable.
This is one other thing I know: without autumn, there is no end. Without red and gold and orange there is no finality, no conclusion. Without the sudden shift in the air, without the scent of apples and the crisp chill of morning, summer could go on forever. Without fall, summer lingers. There is a marvelous limbo where I live now, without the changing of seasons. No blazing display to signify the end of everything good. Perhaps this is what drew me to California. A place where time is suspended.
The memory of that fall in particular comes to me in brightly colored patches, a handful of leaves. Eva’s hair across my pillow on a stolen afternoon. The flash of her smile as she waved to me from across the street. A sheet of rain falling outside the kitchen window where we sat drinking coffee while the children put together puzzles upstairs. There is a kaleidoscopic feeling to that fall, each recollection assembled and then reassembled, each one more beautiful than the last.
Our Girl Scout troop had been invited by the local Boy Scout troop to put on a Thanksgiving play that year, and Eva volunteered us to make the costumes. Eva had less experience with a sewing machine than I did, but in general she was more creative. Where anything beyond following a basic pattern was concerned, I relied on her. I was the worker bee, but she was the one who made the honey sweet. We made a good team.
“It’ll be simple,” she had said when I resisted the idea. “Just bonnets and headdresses, some buckles for the boys’ shoes.”
We started before Halloween, collecting fabric and feathers. Eva figured we could go ahead and make the kids’ Halloween costumes while we were at it. And as much as I truly loathed sewing, it also meant an excuse to be near Eva: to have Eva in my house or to be invited into hers. We put Hannah in charge of making the programs and signs, told her we had everything else under control.
After the fight with Frankie in the street, Ted had refused to set foot in, or even
near,
our house, and I knew (though Eva wouldn’t say it) that he’d demanded she stay away as well. She almost never called unless he was gone now, and came over only after he’d driven off to work, hurrying back across the street each evening long before he was due home, looking stricken once when we’d been so absorbed in sewing a row of red feathers on an Indian headdress that she didn’t hear his car pulling into the driveway.
On Halloween night, she somehow managed to convince him that the Wilson children and our children (being the only kids on the street) should be allowed to go out trick-or-treating together. The older kids wanted to go ahead by themselves, but Rose was still little, so Eva and I followed behind the older children with Rose and Calder.
Rose was dressed like a ghost. Eva had offered to make her a princess costume, something sparkly like the older girls, but she’d insisted on being
scary,
and so Eva had acquiesced, finding a threadbare sheet in her linen closet and cutting out two eyeholes. Rose had also insisted on a costume for Calder, so Calder was the princess, wearing a cardboard crown and a pink satin “gown.” Eva had put on a witch’s hat, and I’d taken one of the finished headdresses for the play and, upon Eva’s insistence, put it on. I felt ridiculous but festive. I wished sometimes I could let go and enjoy things the way that Eva did.
The night was warm and bright, the sky filled with an orange haze from the harvest moon, which shone like a jack-o’-lantern in the western sky. I resisted the impulse to hold Eva’s hand as we walked down the sidewalk, stopping at each house for Rose to trick-or-treat while the older kids ran ahead, filling their pillowcases with popcorn balls and paper sacks of candy.
Eva was starting to show already, her belly like a small egg. The baby was due in the spring. She had been sick with this pregnancy, sicker than she’d been with the others, she said. She also said her chest ached, where her breasts used to be. Phantom pain. Watching Eva’s belly grow was like watching an hourglass; the fuller she became, the closer we were to finally leaving. When we had discussed our plans that summer, they had felt faraway, unreal. But with each day, as her belly swelled, it was a reminder that once the baby came, all that dreaming would finally become a reality. All those fantasies would become
our
reality. It was exhilarating and terrifying.
The older kids were two houses ahead. The girls had all dressed as princesses as well, and Johnny was a cop. This was his latest obsession. Ted had bought him a costume from Woolworth’s, complete with a fake gun and a shiny badge. Eva and I had cobbled together the girls’ costumes with scraps from my rag bag and some of Eva’s magic.
“I want to go with the big kids!” Rose said from beneath her sheet, her tiny feet stomping the pavement.
“What do you think?” Eva asked. She did this sometimes, asked my opinion regarding discipline or other issues with the children. Those moments, I could imagine us as a family, as
parents
together. She would be the fun one, the one who skipped rope with the girls and played hide-and-seek with the boys. I would be the one to lay down the law. To discipline. We would be partners. This would be our family. I had to remind myself that the decision we were making involved not only us, but six children,
seven
children. This wasn’t simple. This wasn’t something to be taken lightly.
“The older girls can watch her, right?” she asked.
“Why not?” I said, smiling. Rose was still only three now, but she worshipped my girls and her older sisters. She’d stay close.
I jogged ahead and caught up with the older kids. “Girls, Rose is going to come with you. Can you keep an eye on her?”
“Okay.” They shrugged.
Johnny marched up ahead of the girls, pulling his gun from his holster and aiming it at imaginary bandits.
“I’ll walk with her,” Mouse said. After the fight over the bicycle, Mouse had refused to play anywhere near Johnny. It was with reluctance that she had agreed to come out tonight, and I noticed that she hung back as Johnny barged ahead, always the first to ring the doorbell. Watching Rose seemed like a good excuse to stay clear of him.
Delighted, Rose skipped ahead, taking Mouse’s outstretched hand. Eva and I hung back with Calder, walking slowly, basking in that pumpkin-colored glow to the night. “Let’s go walk by the creek,” I said.
“Really?” Eva asked anxiously. She was so afraid now. Where she had once been the bold one, the daring one, she now cowered. And I hated Ted for instilling this fear in her. For making the free spirit I knew timid and weak.
“Why not?” I said. “The girls are watching Rose.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding as though convincing herself, and we cut across someone’s lawn to the public path which led to the water. But when we got to the creek’s edge, Eva asked to sit down.
“Are you okay?” I asked. Eva’s pregnancy terrified me. After her surgery, I was so worried about her health. I couldn’t stand the thought of anything going wrong, anything that might threaten her life.
She nodded and smiled and patted the place on the rock next to her. She let Calder off her leash, and she sniffed along the water’s edge while we sat.
I was overwhelmed then by this sense of being on the edge of things. The canopy above us, leaves clinging to their branches for dear life, the ground already scattered with their siblings. The air had the promise of winter to it, a cold whisper beneath the otherwise warm night. We were on the periphery of something enormous, teetering at the precipice. And I just wanted to hold on. I wanted to embrace all of this, to keep it close. I reached for her, and as if she were thinking the same thing, she leaned into me, clinging to me. I kissed her furiously, trying to swallow this moment, trying to put all of it inside me. If I could hold her inside me, I could keep her and the baby safe. I could protect her.
The leaves crunched beneath us as we lowered our bodies to the ground. Calder was oblivious, running along the water’s edge, chasing shadows.
My hands grasped and squeezed, my hips ached and moved. I wanted to undress her. I wanted us to be together, absolutely together, under these suspended stars and moon. I couldn’t stop my hands from lifting her sweater, from stroking her hair and her belly and her back. I couldn’t stop any of it; it was as though every promise and hope was spilling out of me, and I was powerless to my will.
I couldn’t hear anything. I was deaf to everything but Eva’s soft moans as I touched her. To her heart thumping against my own. I couldn’t see anything. I was blind to everything but the color of the night, the color of the leaves, the color of Eva’s eyes as they peered desperately into mine. But then suddenly there was brightness, a blinding light. And a voice.
“Mom?”
I felt my heart stop. We both froze.
Johnny stood in his policeman’s uniform, shining his flashlight at us. It was only a toy, but it was bright. I put my hand up to shield my eyes. And when he saw what was illuminated in that beam, he dropped the flashlight and it rolled across the grass. His eyes were filled with something between terror and wonder, and his hand flew to his mouth.
“Johnny,” Eva said, pulling away from me.
I scrambled to my feet, straightening my skirt, my sweater, plucking leaves from my hair. Eva stood up as well, pulling her shirt back down, tears already starting to stream from her eyes.
“Calder!” I said weakly, running after the dog, who had settled in a patch of dead leaves and was rolling on her back. I got Calder on her leash and just held on to her, as though I might float away like a lost balloon if I were to let go.
“What were you doing, Mom?” I heard Johnny ask.
Eva shook her head silently. What was there to say to an eight-year-old little boy about this? I thought about Chessy finding us, about how simple it had been to excuse. To explain. To erase. But then we had only been lying undressed together, not even touching. There were no words in either of our vocabulary to change what Johnny had seen. No lie that would make sense.
“Nothing,” she said, her head hanging to her chest as though she’d been scolded. I’d seen this same gesture when Ted got started on her too.
“Why were you and Billie
kissing?
” The word came out of his mouth like it was something poisonous. Like something bitter. It killed me that someone had seen the love between us and that it had sickened him. That it made him grimace in disgust and terror. And unable to come up with words that might make this make sense, to excuse us, to apologize, or whatever it was that he needed us to do, we could only watch as he ran. He fled back down the path, the leaves loud under his feet. The sound of all that death being trampled under his shiny shoes.
“Oh, my God,” Eva said, grabbing Calder’s leash from me. “Oh, my God.”
Johnny had come to get us because Rose had tripped on her sheet and gotten a bloody nose. We found the entire group of kids sitting in front of the Bouchers’ house, her ghost costume now balled up and made into a makeshift bandage. It was a gruesome sight. My heart was pounding so hard, the sound filled my ears and I could barely unscramble their voices, which were all speaking at once.
Eva had gathered herself together and scooped Rose up in her arms, making her tilt her head back to stop the bleeding. I swooned at the sight of all that blood, at my own blood rushing to my head with the irrefutable fact that Johnny had
seen
us, found us in each other’s arms. Our secret had cracked open like flesh on pavement, and soon it would spill out, staining everything. There would be no bandage big enough to stop this awful flow. Nothing that could halt the deluge.
As soon as it was clear that Rose wouldn’t need stitches, that it was just a bloody nose and nothing was broken, I left Eva there, following the path back toward our houses that Johnny had taken. I felt like a hunter, tracking him, following the scent of his confusion, certain that he would go straight to his father.
I stood outside in the street and watched as Johnny barged into the house, abandoning his candy sack on the porch. It gaped open like a mouth, pouring its contents onto the floor. I couldn’t see inside, but I could imagine Ted on the couch watching TV, a sweaty glass of something at his side. I imagined Johnny telling him what had happened, painting a picture of what he had seen and waiting for his father to explain it all away.
And all the while, I stood in the middle of the street, waiting for the world to end.
Finally Eva and the other children arrived back on Beechtree Street. I sent my girls into our house, and Eva sent Donna and Sally inside as well. Rose clung to her still, and I could see the blood from her nose splattered all over Eva’s shoulder.
“What do we do now?” I asked, my whole body shaking with fear.
“We go home,” she said.
“He’s going to kill you,” I said.
But instead of denying it, instead of assuring me that everything was going to be okay, she blinked hard and shook her head, holding on tighter to Rose. She leaned toward me, and whispered calmly. “If you hear anything, please call the police.” Her words were hot, palpable. And then she left me standing there and walked toward the house with Rose in her arms, like someone walking to the gallows.
I remained paralyzed in the middle of the street, watching her go, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching me. Then, when I looked up at the two upstairs windows that faced the street, I saw Johnny in the window, and his small hands were pressed against the glass.
I stayed awake all night that night, long after the sounds of older children trick-or-treating or making mischief had faded. Sleep eluded me as I lay prone in our bed, Frankie snoring as I waited for something, anything to happen across the street. But the world did not stop turning, and while sleep did not arrive, dawn, finally, did.