Lightfall (12 page)

He smiled and sipped his tea. He had a beautiful head of curly hair, jet black, and a lean and musky face. His days out-of-doors made him seem outsized in the closeness of the room. He was copper from the sun and smelled of earth. For some reason, he appeared to find the talk of forces comical.

“My father
made
me come,” he said. “It was beat into my head since I was a kid. I could do what I liked till it was time, but then I would have to come here. No questions.” He held the rim of the cup against his lip, but then forgot to drink. He said: “It's like knowing the day you're going to die.”

“But why?” demanded Iris, walking past him to the window. It was as if they had to have someone stationed.

“To show you the caves,” he replied, without the slightest drama. If he'd ever approached the task with any feeling, it had fled. “I don't know what you're supposed to do with them—but that's your problem, isn't it? Meet me out by the light at dawn tomorrow. Don't tell anyone.”

“Wait,” she pieaded, for she knew he had turned to go, though her eyes stayed fixed on the mackerel sea. “Who are we?”

A momentary silence fell, just long enough for her to wish she hadn't asked. He would never love her now.

“Listen, Iris,” he said with a cocky sneer, “get something straight. I don't believe in any of that. Tomorrow night, I split. All I owe you is half a day, so you better listen hard. You aren't going to hear it twice.”

The door slammed shut. She did not turn. She parted the crisp white curtain at the side and opened wide the casement. Leaning out, she drank in the sea air like someone come for a cure. Roy had the right idea, she thought. She was better off alone. A week from now she'd be glad they'd all abandoned her. How would she ever escape if she started developing ties?

She lay in bed and watched the clock as it swept away a nervous hour by fractions of an inch. The night came shrouding down till only the clockface glowed. More than anything, she was relieved to lose the sharp edge of things. She'd started to think of herself as half blind. The blur on the left had strained her. She had no sense of depth. Now, like the hairs on a gunsight, the two sides of her vision came together in the night. For a long moment she watched the brittle stars. Sleep was the last thing on her mind. From here on in, she would not be needing respite.

At quarter after seven she gripped the bedpost and pulled herself up. As she went out into the silent corridor, stopping at the head of the stairs to listen, she thought she was merely impatient to get on to the next encounter. She could hear Maybeth in the greasy kitchen, banging about at the stove. Leaning over the banister, Iris smiled. She was hungry after all. But even as she fantasized the dinner—liver and onions, winter squash, a raisin pie—she was creeping down the hall to Maybeth's bedroom.

She realized what she was doing. Deliberately, she was processing false information, sending made-up signals to whatever force it was that read her mind. As long as she concentrated on that meal—on what she would say to Maybeth, what to Michael—she was free to wander at will. She opened the door and smelled the smell of a fat woman. Too much powder, too much sweat. Beyond the bed a lounge chair stood not two feet from the television. Beside it on the floor was a stack of magazines. The phone was on top of these.

Thinking without a break—Michael crushing a bunch of flowers, the two men passing secrets in the church—she sat down and lifted the black receiver. The number came to her fingertips without the mediation of her mind. She dialed: 1-203-231-7717. It helped that she had no notion what it meant. Even as the equipment clicked and whirred and routed her through, she couldn't imagine the other end. Her conscious self was on Michael—stripping him bare and seizing him, spinning a web about them both. She could feel the darkness seethe with satisfaction.

“Hello?” said a weary voice in her ear.

She couldn't place it. Couldn't say for sure she'd ever heard it. One thing she knew: whoever it was was just as sad as she. She stood as still as a gravestone. She understood it was forbidden to reply. Still, somehow this man was going to keep her sane.

“Hello?” he said again—more cautious, more alert. He was listening now to the distance. He raked her silence with a wave of radar. “Iris?”

Yes! Oh, thank you. P/ease, I—

Coldly, she thought of Michael selling God. She pictured him in a pulpit, raining sin. If the thin connection had broken here, and she'd heard no further word from the gentle-voiced man in the other world, she could have survived on just her name. When he spoke again, she thought they would surely kill her. But she gripped the receiver tighter till her knuckles went white as the throbbing moon that washed the walls through the slatted blinds. She would go to her death if she had to, but not till this was done.

“Iris,” he said again. Certain now, with a strange and melancholy urgency. “Honey, listen. I don't know what it is, but I promise we'll survive it. Just remember I'm right here. I won't stop waiting.”

She heard the door open behind her and felt her stomach knot. There were no more empty spaces now between her and what she'd started. Her mouth was slack against the mouthpiece. Her breath came heavy, and her front teeth knocked on the plastic. She feared she would start to cry. After all this clarity, she would leave him lost and frightened. She bit down hard on the raw of her inner cheek.

“There's a phone up the street by the fish house,” Maybeth Blue said darkly, coming close. She hovered a hand at the bedspread as if she had housework yet to do. As if to say she would rip the cord from the wall if the thing went on a moment more.

“Good-bye, darling,” whispered the far-off voice, “take care.” He knew their time was up, yet there was no accusation. “I love you,” he said.

Iris clicked the connection dead herself before the older woman could interfere.

“You don't belong in my house,” Maybeth said defiantly. “You're lucky you got the room. Be satisfied.” So saying, she opened a drawer in her dresser, letting out a cloud of lavender sachet. She pulled from among her neatly folded woolens a salt-and-pepper cardigan, the buttons all hand-crocheted. She drew it on against the evening chill. She was a pragmatist at heart. “You'll survive this thing,” she cautioned, “if you just stay inconspicuous.”

“What
is
it?” said Iris fiercely. “Tell me what's going to happen.”

“No one knows,” the other replied with a shrug. She moved to the doorway as if to go, but stopped as she crossed the threshold. In the dimness of the hall, she turned and eyed her boarder. Clearly, she was torn.

Iris reached out to the open drawer and lifted from it a pale green shawl. She threw this across her shoulders, hugged it close, and realized she'd brought nothing fit to wear around the house. She refrained from further cross-examination. A war was going on in Maybeth, and Iris stood a better chance of winning it by simply standing back. She passed a casual hand among the silver-backed brushes and cheap ceramics that littered the top of the dresser. It was as if she hadn't heard the earlier remark, evicting her from the room.

“See, the people who live here,” began the landlady, halting and grim-faced, taut as a witch, “they're all from somewheres else. Most of 'em don't turn up till they've already got a foot in the grave. They're living off a pension, see, and they need a place to die.”

It wasn't just the retired folk who were out to find a bargain with a bit of an ocean view thrown in. Young people came as well—migrants from city apartments who preferred to receive their welfare checks in the coastal wilds, where their kids stood a chance of growing up whole. Iris listened intently, sorting the populace out as Maybeth rambled on. On the face of it, the people here were innocent of darker motives. Most had chosen the village for its poverty.

But if everyone had a good reason for coming, no one could quite recall when or why the ones who called it home had moved away. The outdoor types began drifting in to island themselves in virgin woods. The weathermen transferred north for the sake of their careers. Even Maybeth Blue had come from Kansas City fifteen years before to flee a bad divorce and find a climate gentle on asthma. In the end the village had found itself without any natives at all.

“I guess there's some sees more than others,” said Maybeth, thinking aloud as she stared off down the stairs. “They keep it to themselves. Mostly, we're all just waiting. We don't know why.”

“But you all know
me
,” retorted Iris vehemently, stepping forward out of the lamplight. Half in, half out the door, as if to browbeat Maybeth deeper into the dark. In a minute they'd be querulous as spinsters, locked up all their lives in their father's gabled house. “I can feel it wherever I go,” she said. “Even here. If everyone's so dumb, then what do they want from me?”

“It's not you, dear,” Maybeth said in a soothing tone. She put a hand on the newel-post and descended a single stair. “It's the time of year. Come along, now. I've got chowder on.”

“Wait,” called Iris sharply. “Finish what you were saying. Remember—no one survives unless I say so.”

And though this last was whistling in the dark, it had the effect of draining white the older woman's face. For a moment she looked as if she'd bolt. Or else lunge forward, to drag this foreigner down the stairs and heave her out in the night. Of course, she did no such thing. Instead, she blurted out without a moment's thought: “It's just—you look like all the others.”

“What others?”

“Every year,” said Maybeth tightly, “about this time.” She stopped and swallowed hard. It was fear that made her speak, but something deeper still made her passionate and blunt. She has no one, Iris thought. “They always come in separate cars,” the landlady went on tensely. “A man and a woman. They rent a room in the village.” Then, by way of keeping a bit of distance: “Thank God they never stay here.”

“And they come every year? Are they here now?”

“No, no,” Maybeth corrected her. “You don't understand—there's new ones every time. They just
look
the same.”

“Like me and Michael.”

Maybeth nodded.

Iris, suddenly brisk, brushed past her and down the remaining stairs. It was as if she'd had enough magic. She went on into the kitchen where she took a seat at the table set for three and waited for her dinner. A moment later the landlady followed. She resumed her place at the stove and gladly began to clink her pots and wooden spoons. No more was said between them until she'd ladled out two steaming bowls and served them up. She brought a black tin from the oven, puffed high with a fragrant corn bread. As she sat down to eat, she passed to Iris a mason jar briny with homemade pickles.

It almost seemed like an afterthought. Iris paused, the soup-spoon full of crumbled bass, and said: “How does it end, exactly?”

“What I always say is, it's
their
business. If people want to die, there's nothing to stop.” She chewed her food precisely, taking care in case a stray bone had escaped her in the cooking. “Things are meant to be,” she said. “There isn't any why.”

“But how do they die? Do they kill each other?”

Maybeth shook her head. She made a gesture as if to toss her spoon into the air. “They jump,” she said.

Suddenly, Iris wasn't sure: was the gesture meant to mimic the act itself, or point to where it happened? Because she knew, with a sickening certainty, that it all must end at the lighthouse on the point. The man and the woman held hands and leaped, year after year after year.

“How long before it happens?” Iris asked. Her throat was dry as dust. She could not imagine jumping. Couldn't feel the spring of it. Yet it must be making ready even now, gathering force on the ragged cliff—even as she wasted these last hours.

“A week,” shrugged Maybeth. “Sometimes less. They're all buried up behind the church.”

“And there's nothing I can do? I can't get out?” She asked these things as a matter of form, to hear her doom rung down.

“But it's not going to happen to you,” insisted Maybeth, shaking her head in disbelief. It pained her to be so misperceived. “Don't you see—this time it's different.”

“Why?”

“Because
they
always spend the week in bed.” She averred this with a certain pity, as if she were talking of invalids. “They never come out. They don't even eat. Not till they're ready to end it. You understand? Most of us never
see
them.”

Here a silence fell that lasted till they'd finished. They ate their soup in a huddle, as if food had grown quite scarce. The evening lengthened out to perfect calm. For a while, they stood together at the wide and pitted slate-stone sink and washed up three days' dishes. After that, they repaired to the parlor. They stoked the cedar fire and sat in a pair of wing chairs drawn up close to the hearth.

Time ceased to hunt her. She pulled the shawl snug like a blanket and stared into the flames like a schoolgirl. Later, she started asking questions, drawing Maybeth out. Nothing to do with the fatal strangers. Nothing about herself. Just a steady thread of inquiry, designed to open up the other woman's heart.

Slowly, shyly, Maybeth gave her back the tale of a life lived in dread. Disaster and illness had plagued her youth. Those she loved were snatched in the night. She went hungry for months on end. Having come this far alive, she trembled now at the thought of getting old. One false move, and she'd break a hip. Then be consigned to a dungeon cell, to moan till the end of time. It was as if she hadn't ever spoken it aloud and thus could hardly keep it straight which agonies were current, which gone by. Later on, about midnight, she started to cry. Later still, she pulled a bottle of muskat wine from a cupboard under the stairs.