Fellow Mortals (18 page)

*   *   *

Henry and Sam spend the better part of three days working in the Carmichaels’ yard and finally, on Monday afternoon, Sam drives the last roofing nail and Henry helps him out of the safety rope and into the finished tree house. They sit knee to knee, sweating in the shade, in a room with a maple tree rising up the center. It’s true at every joint, big enough for two boys and a chest full of weapons, soda cans, and books, with plenty of space to lie about and share an hour’s worth of solitude.

Sam takes an overhead look at Laura’s garden, where a pumpkin vine has grown twenty feet unassisted. Her tomato plants have withered but her flowers have exploded—foamflower, coral bell, peonies, and hostas. She brought them home in April, trayfuls of pots with little tabs, and when he helped her from the car, jogging back and forth, they laid them in a pattern on the long kitchen table. They’d been living in the house for almost a year, but it was that particular morning something clicked and he imagined they would live there forever, sharing holidays and meals, airing out the rooms, pausing every spring with a garden on the table.

Sam and Henry pass the only remaining Coke back and forth, breathing in the fresh-cut fragrance of the lumber. Before they get the boys, they take a minute to themselves and for a second, just a second, Sam’s perfectly content.

“I’m sorry I knocked you down,” he says.

Henry stiffens up.

“When you first came around,” Sam says, “I thought you were trying to get yourself off the hook. Do some work, make yourself feel better. It pissed me off. And then you came back and I wanted to hurt you. I really did. But not for the fire. I wanted to hurt you for apologizing.”

Henry looks down. “I shouldn’t have apologized?”

“I’m out there trying to make sense of what happened. Blaming fate, blaming the fire. Then you come along saying, ‘Sorry, it was me.’ You must have known what would happen. But you kept showing up.”

Henry gazes at a cloud, so white it’s faintly haloed. The soda can ticks and fizzes on the floor. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure,” Sam says.

“How you holding up?”

Sam lays his hammer down without letting go. He leans against the wall, stretching out his legs, seemingly at ease but rigid as a plank. There’s a tiny thread of sunlight coming from the wallboards, running like a crack down the middle of his face.

“I don’t know,” Sam says. “It’s like an aftershock of aftershock. It’s scary looking back and worse looking forward. Fifty more years of ordinary days.”

Henry gazes at the grass through the open trapdoor, trying hard to empathize and feel it for a moment. Last night around three, he’d woken up and turned to Ava. She was sleeping on her side, face toward him on the pillow, and her head looked perfectly cocooned by her hair. He wasn’t accustomed to the silence of the middle of the night, how his thoughts, made clear, had the quality of whispers. The crickets outside seemed near enough to touch but there was something in the lulls that went beyond the room, past the neighborhood and town and everything he knew, spreading like a great broad emptiness around him.

“You religious?” Henry asks.

“No,” Sam says. “I don’t know. How do you mean?”

“You think Laura’s in heaven?”

“As opposed to where?”

“I didn’t mean … of course she is,” Henry says. “I just wanted to know … you know.”

“If I believe it.” Sam sighs, pulling into a crouch. “Even if that were real—whatever that’d be, heaven or souls and all that—I can’t feel her anymore. It doesn’t help me. The sculptures do,” he adds. “All the work along the way. I get a lot more meaning out of doing it than finishing.”

“I felt the same way about my route,” Henry says. “It was good most days just shouldering the bag.” He feels a subtle wave of vertigo, enough to shut his eyes, and an uncanny sense that the tree’s started moving.

Sam drops the hammer through the door and takes the ladder. Henry follows him and doesn’t feel secure until he’s down.

The Carmichael boys hurry outside, bang-
bang
out the back screen door.

“Is it done?” Danny asks.

“Done!” Henry shouts.

Sam laughs at their expressions—saucer-eyed, panting, almost like Wingnut’s face around food. They sprint away and scramble up the ladder, Ethan jumping onto the rungs and Danny climbing at his heels. Sam begins to wonder if they should have built it lower. But they make it up fine and shut the trapdoor, yelling and stomping around with more barbarian joy than Sam’s ever seen from either one of them.

“Success,” he declares.

He feels relieved and full of summer, clean sweat prickling in his shirt, the smell of sunlight rising like a warm bloody nose. He thinks of bike-tire rubber, waffle-cone drips, the fragrance of a small backyard after dinner.

Bob saunters out and meets them on the lawn. He grins and shakes his head, enchanted by his sons, who spot him on the lawn and wave before ducking back down, keepers of the tree, perfectly at home.

“I always wanted one of those.”

“It’s strong enough to hold you, too,” Sam says.

“That’s good to know,” Bob murmurs, nodding at the thought. “You guys ought to go into business. That thing’s a work of art.”

“You ought to see the cabin,” Henry says. Then he pales.

“What cabin?” Bob asks, eyes widening and darting. “You don’t mean…”

Sam sighs. “I’ve been keeping it a secret.”

“Wait till Peg finds …
ah
. Well, she doesn’t need to know.” Bob straightens out his shirt and offers Sam a hand. “Thanks for this.”

“You’re welcome,” Sam says.

Bob turns to Henry, who refuses to be thanked.

“Not a word!” he says to Bob. “It’s the least that I could do.”

“Did the boys says thanks?”

The three of them pause to look at the tree, where the unspoken gratitude is wonderfully apparent.

“Listen, Henry,” Bob says. “The way Peg’s been acting—don’t take it personally. There’s sides of her I married, sides of her I’m married to. She has her own moral compass and it doesn’t…” Here he pauses, taking time as if to see the tiny compass in his mind. “She’s a good woman,” he says. “Good people make mistakes.”

He and Sam look at Henry, who accepts it with a nod.

Bob remembers something else and perks back up.

“Peg just called. Nan and Joan pulled the trigger.”

“Holy smoke,” Henry says.

Sam stares across the lots.

17

Ava moves the Finns’ new table again, just a few more inches to the left with her hip, before deciding it was better as it was. She has a bag full of spice—cinnamon, oregano, rosemary, ginger—and readjusts her grip so she can pull the table back. It was Henry who had pointed out the humor of it all, Ava’s fussiness in rearranging someone else’s home. He’s said it more than once, right in front of Nan, and she’s been conscious and embarrassed of the fact ever since.

Nan carries a tray of silverware into the kitchen, with its bleached sink, avocado fridge, bare countertop, and this—the table Sam built them as a housewarming gift, complete with two straight-back chairs that fit the Finns’ posture to a T. Joan cried when Sam and Henry unexpectedly revealed them, and even Nan grew tearful after weeks of practicalities and paperwork and
paperwork
. They can make a new home from a table like this, organize the kitchen in relation to its placement and from there … well, from there, the whole house will come together.

Wing hurries through the kitchen, clattering his nails.

“Slow it down!” Ava scolds, speeding him along.

He’s come from out front, weaving through a maze of cardboard boxes and dashing into the yard, one of many paths of action he’s been trying all day. He’s sniffed his way around the bedroom, bathroom, living room, and dining room, thrilled by the newness of the house and by the constant activity of Henry, Ava, Nan, Joan, and Sam moving furniture and boxes from the truck—a truck with a
ramp
that he can scamper up and down. He looks around the yard and trots back in as if the thrill of going out were all he really wanted.

Nan fills a water dish, inordinately pleased with the pressure of the stream. She turns the spigot once more, just to hear the hiss.

“
Oh…,” Ava says—she wants to say
shit
. “I forgot the nutmeg.”

“I’ll put it on the list,” Nan says.

“I
had
it on the list. I should run back out.”

“I can see the story now.
Two elderly sisters were abandoned this weekend without nutmeg.
”

Ava grabs her in a hug, too impulsively for Nan to see it coming, but it’s Ava who’s surprised and off-balance when they separate.

“I’ll help you with your garden next spring.”

“I mapped it out last night,” Nan says. “I’m growing red bell peppers just for you.”

“I hate that we gardened all summer and now you’re here with an empty yard.”

“Tabula rasa.”

“Terra firma,” Sam says, easing in behind them.

He lays a box on the table, squaring up the corner like it’s staying there for good, and easy as that, the table itself looks faultlessly arranged. Ava smiles at him, standing with his handmade gift. He’s done the lion’s share of lifting for the sake of Henry’s heart but looks as ready to assist as if he’s only just arrived.

Ava worries what’ll happen when he learns the secret news—such a coincidence, in the very week the Finns are moving out, that she can’t stop trying to interpret it as fate.

“Coming through!” Henry yells.

He bumps a box through the door and shoves it on the counter, knocking all the spice jars askew. A bottle of vanilla extract shatters on the floor.

“Whoops, what I hit?” he says, stricken by the sound. He sees the wreckage underfoot and says, “My mistake, I’ll get it. Give me the paper towels.”

Sam tosses him a roll and Henry squats, bumping Ava with his head and smearing extract with no apparent notice of the glass.

“At least it smells good!” he says, tossing a dark wad of towels into the pure-white sink. “Hey, I’m bleeding.”

Henry rinses at the faucet, sure he’s cleaned it up. Ava grips the towel roll and kneels to do it right.

“Watch your fingers,” Sam says, right beside her ear.

He’s holding out a dustpan, breathing at her cheek. She sees him indistinctly through the curtain of her hair. Before she has a chance to say thanks, Sam spots Wing coming from the yard and heads him off before he runs through the spill, catching his collar and standing there backlit and tall inside the door.

“I’m okay,” Henry says, almost trampling on her hand and squeezing a towel—an actual towel they bought for the house—onto his cut.

“I’ll go around front and check on Joan,” Sam says.

Ava sweeps glass into the pan, the odor of vanilla cloying in her nose, and when she turns to look at Sam he’s already gone, the door is full of sky, and Henry scrapes the table right against the wall.

*   *   *

Joan lingers on the sidewalk, persuaded by a whisper. She’s heard it before, often at night and right before sleep: a still small voice, more a cipher than a word—a reminder that a person or a thing needs attention. The neighborhood’s quiet, an avenue of bungalows and tall silver maples, and it’s not until Sam and Wingnut come around front that she remembers when the Baileys, just last year, moved into their own new house and stood outside admiring the leaves.

“You missed the christening,” Sam says. “Henry broke a bottle of vanilla.”

“I’ve been thinking it’s a miracle how much is still intact.”

“So here you are, home at last. How do you feel?”

“Ready,” Joan says, the firmness of her voice drawing his attention. “What about you?”

“I’m beat,” Sam says, stretching out his arms. “You have a lot of heavy stuff for people who lost everything.”

“Will you teach again?” she asks.

He holds his wrist behind his back and stretches out his shoulders. His vertebrae crackle when he pulls himself taut and then he seems to loosen up and looks around the block.

“I’m taking the school year off. All I need are groceries. I don’t even have a water bill. But listen,” he says, giving her a Peg Carmichael smile. “This is
your
big day.”

Joan stands in admiration of her new front porch. Three doors down, a family named the Mitchells files into their car. They introduced themselves today, a portly couple in their thirties with a pair of skinny daughters that remind her of them—Nan and Joan—when they were girls. They wave to her again and Joan waves back, having missed the sight of children in the last few months.

“There was one afternoon,” she says to Sam, turning back. “Nan sat down and said we had to go. We were comfortable. We could have kept looking all year. But we had to get a house, and it wasn’t just for us. We were burdening the Coopers and they wouldn’t dream of telling us.”

“You shouldn’t think that,” he says. “They were happy to help.”

Wing stands beside her and she bends to pet his ear, grinding at her hip and causing it to pop.

“The worst of it,” she says, “is that I hadn’t even noticed.”

Joan looks at him and pauses, drawing out the thought.

“Eventually,” she says, “you have to give them back their lives.”

Sam’s scalp ripples up, broadening his forehead. He squints as if the sun were glaring in his eyes.

“You think I’m burdening Henry and Ava?” he asks. “That’s the opposite of what I’m doing out there. I even helped
him
when he had to build the tree house. I’m helping them today, lifting all the heavy boxes.”

Joan frowns, standing up. Wing presses on her leg.

“I haven’t asked for help since he offered,” Sam insists. “I never ask for anything.”

“Neither did we,” Joan says, “once we all got used to the routine.”

Now that no one’s petting Wing, he moves to Sam for more attention, where he wags unregarded and eventually sits, content to occupy the dead space between them. The earlier constriction has returned to Sam’s shoulders and he stands with a hunch, refusing to respond. Joan’s tired on her feet and eager, truth be told, to see them all away and share the kitchen with her sister.