Crows (38 page)

“I've always been a better athlete than you,” Rudy teased.

“Go to ten,” Vincent said.

“Only if you'll go to eleven.”

Rudy scampered ten steps above where they stood, their faces turned up to him, the sisters scared and adoring. Rudy took off and seemed to stay in the air for an afternoon. His shoes didn't slap the cement in landing so much as pat it; he rocked forward, his crouched momentum nearly taking him over the side.

“Now, Vin. Eleven,” he said.

Vincent was wearing dark trousers and a crisp white shirt going soft in the heat, the sleeves rolled up. Ina could not set the year in her memory. They all were young. It was summertime and everything was green and hot. Vincent lifted one foot to look at the sole of his shoe, as if to gauge whether the leather would withstand the impact of his landing. He checked one shoe, then the other.

Rudy counted off the steps as he climbed them. At eleven, he turned with a slow pirouette of great fanfare and self-importance.

“Right here, Vincentiamo,” he called. He seemed very far away, impossibly high above them. He knelt and slapped the concrete. “Here is your step, Vin.”

Helene rescued Vincent. “If he doesn't wish to take part in your childish tests of manhood, he doesn't have to,” she said. Ina remained silent; she wanted to see someone jump from the eleventh step.

Rudy made a noise that conveyed utter contempt for Helene's opinion, and with outstretched arms and a small yelp of effort, he flew into the air. It was so sudden Vincent had to jump aside. He gave Ina a shove, clearing a small spot for the landing, but Rudy's momentum and his surprise flight caught Helene unawares and he hit her solidly. The two of them crashed like a ball of arms and legs down the stairs to the river. Ina remembered that in the course of the fall she could not tell them apart. They went down leaving shavings of skin and scalp on the stairs' sharp edges, raising welts, tearing muscles.

Vincent rushed down, Ina a step behind. Rudy was bowed like a Moslem, his butt in the air, his head buried in his hands. He was crying, but trying to hide the fact. Helene was not crying, but sat dazed, shocked, and bleeding, bits of grit impressed in her skin.

“There are six of you,” she said.

Rudy's nose was bleeding. A front tooth was chipped in the shape of Nevada. He would never get the tooth repaired, and would come to believe it lent an endearing boyishness to his smile. He cupped Helene's cheek and said, “I'm so sorry.”

Prior to the fall they had been simply a quartet of close friends with a tension of possibilities flowing among them. Ina believed with the sincerity of youth that she was as much in love with Rudy as with Vincent; she pictured herself at times with either one. But the fall changed that. It was as if in knocking Helene down the long stairs to the river Rudy had been making a decision, choosing her for himself in a way that seemed oddly touching after the pain and swelling were gone.

Rudy, who had kissed Ina dozens of times as if comparison shopping, held Helene's hand while a doctor looked into her eyes and pronounced nothing of consequence dislodged. He never really let go. He never kissed Ina again, except for holiday pecks on the cheek.

Vincent waited in another room during the doctor's exam. Ina took a paper cup of water to him.

“If you had jumped,” Ina said, “I don't think you'd have hit anyone.”

“I'm pretty clumsy. I might've taken all four of us down.” He finished the water and spun the cup like a thimble on his fingertip. Ina sat beside him. She wanted him to take her hand or put his arm around her. He went on spinning the cup, and when she glanced at him she saw that he was smiling, but trying to hide the fact.

“What?” she demanded.

“I've had my eye on you all along.”

Ina finished her second glass of beer. If she wasn't careful the beer would get the best of her. She could walk, but she would be courting the danger of falling down. She stretched out her legs. She understood that to fall down the river stairs at her age would probably be fatal.

She folded her hands in her lap and took a deep breath to settle herself. Her throat had a ragged, liquidy feel, as if she had been sobbing. She cleared her throat and looked both ways before spitting into the bushes to her left.

She had started drinking too early, too fast, this morning. It required a different set of calculations to see her through to bedtime without being overwhelmed by the beer and without losing the benefits of what she drank. She needed to be patient; let some time pass.

She had lived in her neighborhood longer than anyone she knew of. First her family—mother, father, Helene, herself—then Helene marrying Rudy Bolton and moving just blocks away, then Ina marrying Vincent Lockwood. But rather than taking a house together, she and Vincent lived in three rooms upstairs at the invitation of her parents. They were getting old and her father was sick, and they wanted the comfort of having them nearby in exchange for the house when they died.

Ina looked to her right, at the Strodes' house, with its lush gardens and rose-laden trellises and the striped awnings over the windows, through which Ina sometimes glimpsed Po Strode regarding her with a glare of disapproval. On the lot to her left, across a street perpendicular to the river, was an odd sight: an empty plot of ground, grass trimmed, enclosed in a chain-link fence. The lot was a quarter-acre, the shape of a keystone. The gate in the fence was fastened shut with a burly lock, though kids routinely hopped the fence to sit in the corner farthest from the street and have their little parties.

It was a shrine to a dog. A house had stood on the lot until one damp autumn night when a gas explosion effectively obliterated it. Ina had been asleep; Vincent was downstairs reading. The furnace was running for the first time since summer. Ina was awakened not so much by the noise of the explosion as the shaking of their house and the powder of glass that was blown onto her bed. Po Strode reported later that the concussion had knocked her to the floor while she was returning from the bathroom.

Vincent ran upstairs, still holding his book. He cut his feet on the glass and cried out. He kissed his wife at finding her safe. He put socks and shoes on over his bloody feet. Wind swung the curtains into the room, wind full of a rain already heated by the burning house.

The street crowded with running figures and figures merely standing in amazement. Cold rain made every speck of hot debris hiss and smoke. A man who lived two blocks away told of hearing the explosion, then moments later a hammer's sizzling head came through his bedroom window.

Wind-fed, the fire sucked the house under. Sparks swirled in great typhoons above the trees. The rain kept the neighborhood safe. There was no hope, no responsibility to do anything, and it became like a block party. Ina put on a heavy coat and took her glass and an umbrella into the street to stand with Vincent and the other men. The house burned like a candle gone wild, melting down into itself, the spectacle diminishing as the fuel was consumed.

Ina returned to their bedroom and shook the glass from their bed, then swept up. Vincent's blood was dried on the wood. She snuggled deep into the covers and polished off her beer. She fell asleep, but awoke a short time later confused by Vincent's absence. For a moment she was petrified. She thought she had dreamed the fire, dreamed Vincent's very existence. But she went to the window and saw him standing under her umbrella talking to Hector Strode. The fire had burned down to a thick bed of coals on the basement floor.

The house belonged to Stu and Becky Crabb. They were believed to have been incinerated in the explosion with their Doberman pinscher, Jupiter. But in fact the Crabbs had gone out for dinner and dancing that night. Only Jupiter was at home when the house lifted off. The sun was coming up when the Crabbs returned from their night on the town. They might have had every intention of capping the night with sex, then sleeping until noon.

Two firemen stood in the street smoking cigarettes and watching over the cooling remains. Stu Crabb, coming upon a smoking hole in the neighborhood where he had left his house, screamed, “Jupiter!”

The front half of the Crabbs' lot was visible from where Ina sat. A dump truck had brought topsoil to fill the hole, and a bulldozer planed the dirt smooth as a grave. Stu put up the fence and then snow fell. In the spring he planted grass.

Ina went inside her house and opted for a very, very brief nap on the front-room divan. She was annoyed with herself for falling out of step so early. On her best days she never lost touch, or else maintained it until she was under the covers with her glass and her reading materials, and to lose touch then was almost as fulfilling as love.

She stretched out on the divan and groaned, it felt so luxurious, embracing and nonjudgmental. She toed off her shoes and let them fall. She lay for a minute with her hands folded on her abdomen, and it occurred to her that she was missing something; there was something she should be doing.

Like that, she was asleep. In sleep her movements, her twitches and shifts, lost their aged determination and became numerous and quick, almost girlish. Her breathing turned smooth and light. She dreamed of younger days, of lovers arching over her, of Vincent, and phantoms she never got a clear look at.

Helene's worried call awoke her. The light in the room was turned down considerably, as if someone had stolen in and pulled the shades halfway. The phone was ringing on the table at her feet. She sat up and composed herself. She licked her teeth. She was angry with herself not so much for being caught stuporous by her sister, but for taking two naps in the span of hours. All the extra sleep would keep her awake that night.

Ina stuck out her tongue and picked a pill of fur off it, only to have the pill come to life and leap off the tip of her finger. She stepped on the tiny spider when it landed and scraped disgustedly along her tongue with her teeth, lest it had laid eggs.

Knowing only that she was late, Ina picked up the phone.

“I really need to get to the store today,” Helene said with great forbearance.

“What time is it?” Pressed to her ear, warmed, the phone felt almost like a human touch. Like a bit of dream left behind, she was assailed by an instant's memory of Vincent sliding his tongue into her ear.

“It's about half past two,” Helene said. “I called the time number before I called you. To see how late you really were.”

“I'll be over within the hour,” Ina said, and hung up.

She checked the mail and the box was full. She carried the bundle without inspecting it down the hall and into the bathroom. She balanced the mail on the rim of the sink and brought it to her lap when she was seated. The day's delivery felt substantial; she saw stamps in the pile, indications of some trouble taken.

All she really wanted was something from her children. A letter or a card was so much nicer than a phone call. A call left nothing to savor. Her children had moved so far away, as if caught in a wind they did not bother to fight against.

The top envelope was obviously computer-mailed, her name printed in a futuristic typeface whose time had come, the letters hard black, squared off, cold. She cut the envelope open with her nail and read the contents (a pitch for hospitalization insurance featuring the blandishments of a former TV actor) as carefully as a love letter.

Next was her gas bill, with a brief thank you for paying her account promptly. Then a bulk leaflet from an electronics wholesaler, a pushy outfit that mailed her notices of sales every other week, a picture of a missing child on each card.

The first stamped envelope she reached was from a mom-and-pop candle company, the stamp like a stab at warmth in a metered age. The only other stamp was on a request to sample a revolutionary truss for thirty days. It was addressed to Vincent. She dropped everything but the gas bill and catalogs into the wastebasket. The catalogs she put in the alcove cut in the bathroom wall by the old milkbox.

Standing at the mirror with a vain watchfulness, Ina scooped two fingers through a jar of Noxzema (the jar was her favorite blue, the blue of her glass) and spread the goo over her face. She worked in the pattern she had learned from her mother: from the forehead down, ending with one white finger poised at the point of her chin.

Her eyes, in the white glare she applied, were not the perfect blue of the jar. But the cream made her young. Its smooth application (and she worked it like sculptor's mud with her fingers) shielded the lines, the shadows and sags in a coat of white, like ground fog, and left only her eyes, which had so far refused to yield.

Her mother had stood at her side and instructed Ina in the proper method of washing a lady's face. Helene might have been there; Ina couldn't remember. The only phrase she could recall clearly—she could hear it spoken in her mother's voice—was “circular strokes.” Wash the skin with circular strokes. They raised the dirt like a wind.

Ina wondered if her own daughter had a memory filled with just those sorts of elementary instructions. Ina clearly remembered explaining menstruation to Annie, feeling confident and rooted in the biological specifics of that process. With the topics of men and sex she had felt less confident; emotion was such a difficult concept to put into words. Annie had never mentioned those things again, except in a way that implied politeness, a sense of duty to include her mother in a decision she had already made.

Three years before Vincent's death they had flown west to visit Annie and Ray and Meg. While at Annie's, Ina had gone to the desk to collect something her daughter had requested. The desk was cluttered. Out of the stacks of bills, receipts, notes, and open address books slipped a piece of pink paper labeled
THINGS TO TALK ABOUT W/MOM
. Weather. Meg. Don. Money. Aunt H. Health. Ray.

It was the script of a recent telephone conversation; it could have served for any of their calls. She returned to Annie having forgotten why she had gone to the desk.