Blood from the birds soaks into the cotton laces as Ray ties them around all seven glistening necks. The other end he wraps around his hand. “Good memories,” he says and starts walking again.
I’m thinking, poor Billy, those are his only shoes, the ones he’ll wear to school on Monday. He gets enough teasing already, and when the laces dry they’ll be brown with blood. But Billy’s just jogging along like that’s okay, shuffling his feet to keep the shoes on.
By the time we get home, it’s pretty dark out and it’s started to snow. Ray stays outside to clean the ducks. As we go inside, Billy starts to shake and he hugs himself like he’s trying to hold his body together. Mom’s sitting in the living room, leaning forward, piecing together a puzzle that shows an old log cabin in a field of flowers below some huge blue mountains. Her dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail and she looks so young, and I think maybe she’s right when she says she had me and Billy before it was time to be a mom, and that really she’d rather be our sister. Her hand is outstretched, hovering over the puzzle pieces as she looks for the perfect one.
“You ought to hide those mallards, Mom. Only six allowed in a freezer at a time, and we got more than that just today,” Billy says.
But she doesn’t look up like he was hoping she’d do. Her eyes scan the pieces and she says, “Ah, no one’s gonna come way out here and check. We don’t need to worry.”
So Billy bonks me on top of the head like he does sometimes, then goes into his room to take off his wet clothes. I sit down next to my mom and pretend to look for a piece she needs. As soon as she fits one and I see her smile, I touch her shoulder. “Billy had to go in the pond and get the birds. It’s so cold out.”
She’s thinking about this, I can tell, gauging how cold it might be, gauging if it was a wrong thing for Ray to have Billy do or not.
“He had to swim with all seven ducks, and Mom, he needs a new pair of tennis shoes.” All of a sudden, even though I don’t mean to, I’m crying hard and leaning into her shoulder and I can feel her surprise, and I just keep gulping in air and the words keep coming out when there’s air enough to form them. “His shoes are so old, and I need a new coat and it’s so cold, and he shouldn’t have to be swimming, he’s not a dog.” I’m just pouring out everything, but I manage to keep quiet about the main thing I’m thinking, which is, “How come you never notice any of this?”
Which is a good thing, because as long as I don’t say it, she’ll keep rocking me and holding me to her and saying “Yes, yes, you’re right. You’re all I’ve got” and kissing me on the head. I keep crying and it feels like I’ll never be able to stop until I melt and dissolve into everything around me.
But then I hear the door shut and the crack and fizz of a beer being opened, and I lean against my mom and try to make it look like I’m just curled against her, taking a nap, and I try to even my breath and let the snot drip out my nose instead of sniffling it up, and I hold still. I can picture Ray leaning against the doorway with the beer in his hand, looking down at us. He says, “Ah, my two young, pretty ladies.”
My mom is still deciding, I know. Is it worth it? After all, it’s nothing too bad, nothing serious, just a swim in a cold pond. I feel her body relax under me, so I know she’s made her decision, and I shudder when she does this, because I want to start crying again. I think she feels me because her body grows tense and now she’s smiling up at Ray, probably cocking her head, trying to look pretty. She says, “Looks like Billy was wet and it sure is cold out. Isn’t there any other way you could get those ducks?”
Ray’s considering, deciding if he should get mad, because he thinks Billy is a wimp, and he probably thinks one of us complained, which I did, after all. He finally says, “Nope. No other way. I can’t swim, as you know, because otherwise I would. Or we could get a dog.”
She says, “Maybe we should, then,” and I smile, because that means that we will. But I’m feeling a little sorry for that dog, because he probably doesn’t want to swim in cold water, either. I’ll love him so much, though. Enough to make up for everything else.
I decide that when Ray steps out of the doorway, I’ll get off this couch and run to my brother. I’ll tease him till he laughs, wash the blood from his shoelaces, have him look out his window at the falling snow. I’ll love him so much it will make up for all the bad that comes his way. But I know, like my mom should know, that it won’t ever be enough.
SUMMER FLOOD
LEX IS BACK IN town. This is why, no doubt, Carolyn has been dreaming of him, of his hands sliding into her jeans, insistent, pushing their bodies together.
These dreams are simply her way of working through her fears, her understanding that she is growing older. She knows this. She knows that she misses that falling-in-love love, the first time someone leans forward and oh, God, demands a kiss kind of love.
As she lies next to her husband, whom she really does love, she dreams of her old boyfriend reaching out for her. She is young and he is young, and the intensity that comes from youth and desire fills her pelvis and her heart. She wakes throbbing with the knowledge she is both in love and loved intensely. Then the pang of waking, of finding Del beside her. She is filled with an odd intense yearning, the kind of pain that refuses to dissipate, even now in the afternoon sun.
She’s sitting in a lawn chair, watching the knife in her hand as it slices through the white meat of an apple. These are the tart and bruised apples from the tree beside her, the ones with worms, the ones partly rotted. She refuses to let them waste. Instead she slices them, scatters the thin pieces across baking sheets, lets them dry in the sun. This winter she’ll feed them to the horses as a treat. She promises herself this: in a few months, when she walks out to break the ice on the stock tank and greets the horses, she’ll hold out a handful of withered apple slices in the palm of her gloved hand and remember this day and what it is to be warm, and remember this ache pulsing through her body.
She hopes that by then, the dreams will be gone, along with the heat of summer. The dreams are only a phase, after all, simple enough to dissect and understand. She stops to look up at the mountains and asks herself, quite gently, to quit these dreams. Then she grows a little angry and scolds herself for this self-made torment night after night, these visions that make no sense.
She picks up another apple from the pile beside her lawn chair and slices it into a big bowl that’s balanced on her tanned knees. At the same time her son, Jack, and his girlfriend, Winnie, gallop up to the edge of the fence that separates the lawn from the field.
“Watch us,” Jack shouts at her. He and Winnie look flushed and bright from riding, and the horses are lathered slick with sweat.
“Go help your father,” she says, pretending to ignore them.
“Ah,” Jack says, waving her comment away with his hand. “Watch us first.”
“Hey, Carolyn,” says Winnie. “You’re getting burnt.”
“I know it,” she says, looking down at her arms. They feel tight with the sunburn of yesterday, and today will only add to it. The heat is pouring down and seeping into her skin. She pulls her shirt away from her damp skin and holds it out, hoping for a breeze to waft in and touch her belly. The shirt is her daughter’s black tank top, pulled from the laundry this morning. The day is too hot for a shirt, too hot for black. If the kids weren’t around, she’d think about pulling the shirt off and working topless, and this makes her smile, the image of herself in this lawn chair, slicing apples, wearing no top.
“Are you watching?” Jack demands. “Are you going to watch?”
She stabs the knife into the apple and sets it on the wooden armrest of the lawn chair. “I’m watching,” she says.
“Stand up so you can see better,” he says.