He plunges the shovel into the earth and digs up the first shovelful. She has not asked what he is doing. He does not know what he is doing either, but as soon as the shovel hits the earth he begins to be driven by the thought of the face, as he always is, the usual urgency. But this time there is someone watching. He pauses for breath, his back turned to her. His legs feel weak and he needs to urinate. It is not a good idea to go on with this. He scoops up dirt from the pile he has made and the shovel hovers with it. He cannot decide whether to drop it back into the grave. There is the feeling of a strong urge being suppressed.
For the first time she asks,
What are you doing?
But she does not mean why is he digging, she means why has he stopped. So he drops the dirt back onto the pile and begins to dig again. She has taken off her heels to keep from breaking her ankles, and her feet are on the cold ground, and her arms and legs are bare, and her blouse is thin, and she is freezing. But she will see what he digs up. At first she wonders if it is some memento from the past, if, long ago, in a kind of romantic distress, he put all the things that reminded him of her in a box and buried it here. Class pictures, valentines, yearbooks with the things she wrote in them (
I’m so glad you’re my friend
and
You were meant to do something amazing in life
and
I hope our stars stay aligned
), a hair band or barrette he picked up from her desk when she wasn’t looking. Maybe, in the same way he had always hidden his feelings, he had hidden all of these things,
buried them, and now he would show her what she’d meant to him. But in the lantern light she sees that whatever he has covered up here is far too big. The dug-out place is as long and as wide as a grave, even though he shovels just one end of it, going deeper and deeper. A wild thought takes her—he has found her father’s remains. He will dig a little further and she will see the tie, the collared shirt her father left the house in that day. Crazy, but she can’t put the thought away. He couldn’t have buried an actual
body
here. She is getting less puzzled and more afraid. And she is frozen through and through.
What are we doing, Tristan?
she says.
What the fuck are we doing? I’m cold.
He steps back and looks at her, his eyes weird in the lantern light, not speaking, the shovel held crossways in front of him.
Let me dig
, she says.
He stands there looking at her, breathing hard.
No
, he says,
I’ll do it
, and turns to the task again.
The night is a fine one, clear and starry. Helen Habersham has opened the blinds and she stands at the window. She feels good, very warm, very comfortable in her skin. It will not always be like this, she knows. The pain will return. But for now it is gone and she knows once again after a long, long time what it feels like to love someone. It is not the same kind of love she felt before, for someone else. It is less insistent but more intimate, wakeful but not restless—maybe
caring
more than love as it would commonly be defined. But there is strength in it, and it is this feeling that has made her come to the window, and it is this feeling that draws her back into the bed, where she slips one arm carefully over her husband’s waist and looks at him in the light from the window. He is an ordinary-looking man, a man devoted to routine, unexciting in the usual sense and always has been, but he has great stores of courage and
patience. Carefully again, she pulls him a little closer, and he does not move. Brice Habersham is fast asleep.
Vince Thompson gives up his vigil. He is getting tired. It is time to hit the road or he will fall asleep on the couch, and he does not want to be in this house, this town, come morning. Right now, departure is the thing. He will have to live without the confrontation. He stands, and he picks up his box, and he puts it down again. He climbs the stairs to his mother’s room and he stands in the doorway watching her sleep. She has slept in this room for nearly fifty years. Vince Thompson looks around at the familiar furniture, the familiar crocheted doilies, the feminine touches his mother has lent to this room all her life as a balance to her husband’s bristling manhood. He looks at the photographs on the walls, some of himself, taken at the ocean, in the mountains, in the desert, framed as evidence of the family’s few vacations. His mother turns lightly under the covers, her hand comes out and rests on the pillow next to her face. Vince Thompson approaches her quietly and touches his fingers to her silver hair. He turns off the TV and goes quietly down the stairs and picks up his box and leaves the house and locks the door. He pets Bomber and goes to his car and puts the box in. The wind has died down. It is a cold night but a quiet one. He looks around the old neighborhood, where everything is still. He does not know what he would have said to his father, but he knows what he would like to say—
Old man, I’ll miss you in a way, you fucker
. He gets in the car and pulls out of the driveway and heads for California, the rattle and cough of his muffler leaving a last trace of him in the dark.
It has gone terribly wrong for Tristan Mackey. Kelly Ashton is watching him dig and there is not much left to dig now and the time is growing short. He has ruined everything. He has
put it all in the hands of someone else. There will be no more private world at the lake house and no more silent moments between himself and the dead girl for whom he is responsible. Already words are taking shape in his head. Already a story is forming. Already he can see this life he has lived for the past month, this short turning of spring into summer, from the outside. He is determining where he went wrong. He is labeling himself the guilty party. Everything is crashing down. He shovels automatically, as if he has no choice, and every now and then he glances back at Kelly Ashton in her bare feet and short skirt and sleeveless blouse, rubbing her arms to keep them warm, the lantern showing the light working of her muscles. She is really a beautiful girl, and a smart one, and braver, it turns out, than he is. He thinks of how many times in the past he has thought of her, and he tries to think of how well he knows her and why he asked her out to this place and he tries to find in what he knows of her what she will say when she looks into Liza Hatter’s eyes, but all he can hear is that same question—
Tristan?
—and he wonders how he will answer it this time.
There is a chill in the air and the night breeze has died down to nothing. He can almost feel the fog take shape, adhere to his skin in tiny particles. There is nothing in the world but the sound of the shovel, and the cedars with their barely perceptible motion, and the slowly pulsing stars. He has to get on his knees now for the shovel to reach, and he pauses there over the grave. For a moment everything stops, and his eyes are windows through which he can see this frozen moment, feel it on his skin, as if the moment and he himself are separated by some transparent veil between his body and the air, and he
feels one last time that he can make his body do something different, that there is still a decision here.
But no alternative presents itself. He goes on digging. The shovel snicks again in the earth. He is going ahead. He judges he is nearly there. He is embarrassed, almost, when he hears her moving behind him and knows that there is a smell. It is something he has grown used to without realizing.
Please stay back
, he says.
And she does. She is very cold but her blood is racing, and she can in fact feel sweat on the back of her neck and under her arms, and as Tristan drops the shovel and begins to dig with his hands she can almost feel the dirt beneath her own fingernails. He scoops the area out wider where the walls he has dug tumble in. He is close, she can feel it, and she is not thinking of Russell Harmon who might as well be a million miles away, and she is not thinking of Tristan Mackey, or even of Hayley, only of what it is Tristan will show her, and she knows that she is still seeing her father’s face, that what her thoughts tell her lie just before her are the tie, the shirt, the face just as she used to see it, and she knows this is wrong, that it can’t be, and yet she thinks that this discovery is what the night has been leading to all along, that this is what every twist and turn has been leading to, that there is something here that will change her life.
He has come on it, the last of the earth has been scooped away, but she cannot see what it is he’s found. With one arm he invites her forward from her place, and as she moves it is not what she sees but what she smells, there is a sickness in the air as she gets down to her knees but still she cannot see it,
and with her left hand she reaches back for the lantern, and she holds the lantern over the hole in the earth, and what she sees in the light is not her father’s face but her own face, pulpy eyes sunk in their sockets, flesh drawn in toward the bone, greenish and blackened. For a moment she is dead. He has brought her here to see her own death. The blankness, the remoteness, the disappearance. And then the face is not hers, it is a young woman’s, it is the face of a young woman who could be her but is not her, and she can’t understand what this means, kneeling there with the lamp held in her hand, the light shining on the face, the smell hitting her in wave after wave. She rises to her feet, backs away.
Tristan?
she says, and she feels him behind her, and now she is afraid. The dead girl’s eyes seem to warn her, the girl’s bloodless lips say a name. Her body wants to scream but she can only choke, a dry, soundless choking, and she feels something behind her, her skin is almost burning, and her arms drop down and her legs give out and she is kneeling on the ground again, her whole body gone slack and numb and motionless, but what she feels is only Tristan’s hand on her back, then Tristan’s hand taking the lamp from her fingers.
Then she is up on her feet and running. Her legs shake and she can’t keep them underneath her and she is just wild motion, not accomplishing anything. There is nowhere to go to—the truck, the house, the lake down below, they are all the same, and he is behind her, and as she falls headlong down the hill and then gets to her feet again he has grabbed her, the lantern crashing down in a gash of light and then going out and everything is dark, and still she cannot get any sound to come out but she turns into his arms and hits him with both fists, his shoulders, his face, the side of his head, and she knows
she is crying now, there is the sound of her crying even though she can’t feel it coming out. Now he has her arms and he is squeezing tight and he is asking her to calm down, settle down, can she please just let him tell the story, can she please just let him explain, it is not as bad as she thinks. Now he is all talk, all words, and her eyes are closed, and her body is held tight so that she can no longer hit him, and there is something comforting in the tightness, the way he holds her with the words, she feels warm and he is not hurting her, and this is
Tristan
, she wants to tell herself,
Tristan
whom she has known all her life, not some insane character from one of her mother’s TV shows. The words keep coming. He needs to tell her. Will she let him tell her. Please.
The lantern is lit again. She looks at him in the light and he is not so frightening. He looks as scared as she is. In his hand the lantern shakes. She can almost imagine that, like her, he has seen the body for the first time, that he had nothing to do with how it got there. He wants to take her to the house, but she will not go. She agrees to be led down to the dock. What choice does she have? He will run to the house and get a blanket. But having him go away is even more frightening than having him not go away. He has seated her on the dock and he is standing and she grabs his arm. She feels as if she’s choking still, but she should not be hysterical, there is need for caution here. There must be some explanation. There are logical things to do and say.
“Tristan,” she says, “who is she?”
“She’s a girl I knew named Liza Hatter,” he says. His voice breaks a little on her name. “She drowned in the lake.”
He does not say anything else and she rocks back and forth,
her cold hands held to her face, until the crying stops, and now she is shivering. “What happened?” she asks him.
He tells her it is a long story. He wants to get her a blanket. He sets the lantern down and holds his hands out in front of him, as if making the shape of her shoulders can hold her there. “Please just wait,” he says. “Please just stay.” He walks off a few steps, the boards of the dock creaking and swaying, then turns to her again. He says her name. He tells her it is just him, it is just Tristan, he swears that it’s OK.
He hurries toward the house. She is alone with the dead woman on the hill, a woman no older than she is, a woman Tristan brought out here the same as her, probably, and she drowned, and now she is up on the hill in a grave. Liza Hatter—she is, Kelly Ashton realizes, the girl from college who has been on the news.
She wants to call her mother. She has been gone from home a long time and she needs to check on Hayley. That is what concerns her. She knows that means she is not thinking right, but she cannot think any other way, cannot think of what it is she should be thinking. Maybe she should be trying to escape over the cliff. Maybe she should be hiding in the woods. And then it occurs to her that she can tell her mother to send the police. She looks up at the house and she does not see Tristan inside there and the blood rushes to her head and she wonders if she can get up to the truck to grab the cell phone. But she could probably not get a signal. And then it is too late. Here he comes from the house, carrying a blanket. He is back beside her in no time. She takes the blanket and wraps it around herself and it feels so good that she will never let it go. She does not say anything.
He sits and dangles his feet off the dock, into the cold water. She looks out into the cove where the girl must have drowned. She looks up at the sky and she has not seen so many stars in her whole life.
He brought her here the night before his graduation, he tells her. He talks slowly and softly, as if he is unsure that even this simple statement is correct. She had wanted to go for a swim. He had gone out a long way and didn’t realize she was still behind him. She called out to him for help. He swam back to her, and he got there in time. He could have saved her, but he didn’t. There is something wrong with him, he supposes.