Her eyelids grew heavy staring at the steel-colored wall of water, but she did not want to sleep. She sat up and turned on the bedside light. Where was her novel? Was it too early to order room service? Why did they always hide the menu?
She walked back to the window.
Somewhere, between the two buildings across the street, there was a view of the ocean; but she had only glimpsed it for an hour before the rain began. She shouldn’t have left Belize at all with a tropical storm in the forecast. This one, Claudette by name, had been promoted to a hurricane while she was at the doctor’s office that afternoon. By the time her plane took off tomorrow, the worst would be over.
She liked hurricanes in the same way she half-enjoyed earthquakes when she was a girl and the house shook and grumbled and books fell off shelves in her father’s study. There was nothing she could do about natural disasters except live through them. She wasn’t expected to take responsibility for anything so she needn’t feel like a failure for doing nothing.
If there had been a way to avoid this trip to Rinconada she would have taken almost any detour before confronting the path down the hill through the wildwood’s bay trees, gums and oaks to Bluegang. But Gerard had said, “You cannot run the rest of your life.” He knew what she was going through. Mornings when he walked into the kitchen and found her seated at the big worktable drinking her third cup of coffee, sitting where she’d planted herself in the middle of the night because dreams had awakened her as they did several times a month, staring at the whorls in the worn surface of the worktable as if by following the lines they would lead her to a place where Bluegang wasn’t, on those mornings he saw the struggle knotted in her. He would kiss the top of her head and leave her alone. He cared but what could he do? She might have endured the dreams if they were the only disturbance; but Billy Phillips, his grieving mother, and she and Hannah and Jeanne hugging at the top of the hill had become her daylight companions too. Walking down to the quay to buy fish, Bluegang was with her; browsing at the booksellers the memory came in and all at once she couldn’t read, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think of anything but that dead boy.
“Something’s eatin’ at you,” Divina the fortune-teller said. “Best get it out, like a worm, ’fore you waste.”
There were details she recalled clearly now, which she did not remember noticing at the time. A line of dirt around Billy Phillips’s neck. His mouth open a little, as if death had caught him in midcry. That was what she heard in her dreams. That cry. That plea for help. What she saw was a coyote.
Gerard said it was impossible that she was the only one having a reaction to the Bluegang experience. “You cannot put such things from your mind forever,” he told her, sounding very much like his psychiatrist father. Under different circumstances she would have noted this aloud and he would have sputtered defensively. But why tease when she knew he was right? He said Hannah and Jeanne would probably be grateful for the chance to talk about what happened to them. Liz didn’t think so, but she’d let him talk her into flying out to California. She had to come to the United States anyway for the other business—which she also didn’t want to think about. It was hard work, not thinking.
Had she hit on a new definition of middle age? Was it the time when the secrets of the past and the mistakes of the present came together and made life miserable and sleep impossible? Maybe this was why some people died early. Middle age took so much energy to survive they had none left for old age.
Thursday
Hannah Tarwater woke at dawn when a mockingbird trilled its lyric from the top of the eucalyptus tree outside her bedroom window. Through the half-open shutters she glimpsed another cloudless October sky and sighed. Last year the Santa Clara Valley had less than fifteen inches of rain, the year before just barely twenty. There hadn’t been a drop since early March, not even a sprinkle. She thought of Africa, of Oklahoma, of California lifted by the wind and deposited around the world, grit from her own garden drifting down over Mexico.
She reached behind her to the combination radio/ tape recorder and pressed the rewind button. When the whirring stopped, she pressed play and after a moment the sound of distant thunder and rain falling on leaves filled the shadowed bedroom. She closed her eyes and dozed a little.
Dan stirred and reached for her. Pulling her back against his chest, he nuzzled the nape of her neck and growled.
From down the hall an alarm’s nervy scream was followed by a feeble ding-a-ling as the clock hit the floor.
“Eddie’s awake,” Hannah said.
They listened for the ritual noise of their teenage son’s rising: the bedroom door flung wide, the bathroom door assaulted, the clang of the toilet seat hitting the tank, the torrent of pee. Flush. Clatter.
Dan tightened his embrace, cupping Hannah’s breast in his large warm palm. He kissed the nape of her neck.
She asked, “How’s your schedule look?”
“Routine. Big bellies and bawling babies.”
“Heaven, right?”
“Wrong.” He hugged her so tight she gasped. “This is heaven.” His hand slipped down the curve of her hip and between her thighs.
She elbowed him gently. “What’s going on down there?”
They heard another door open, footsteps, several sharp raps on the bathroom door, and listened to their seventeen-year-old daughter, Ingrid, announce to her younger brother that he would vacate the bathroom instantly if he knew what was fucking good for him.
Dan groaned and rolled onto his back. “That girl’s a Marine.”
“Hard to believe she was once a sweet-tempered baby. She was so quiet in the mornings, I sometimes forgot we had her. Remember how happy she was to lie in bed and play with her toes?” Hannah felt Dan’s body tense but she couldn’t stop herself. It was like picking at a wound, taking perverse pleasure in the pain. “And the way she used to talk to herself, making all those little nonsense noises with little question marks at the end? Remember, Dan?”
“Don’t start this, Hannah.”
“I’m just remembering.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You loved her.”
“I still love her.” In the shadowed room his eyes were cobalt blue. “I love Eddie too.”
“You loved being a Daddy.”
“And I still do.”
“I don’t mean teenagers. I mean babies and little ones.”
Dan groaned again and closed his eyes, cutting the line between them, disconnecting the fuse. Depression dived into bed beside Hannah, ignored Dan and tucked around her in the bedclothes, nuzzled up. Tears sprang to her eyes and she was suddenly furious.
There had been a time when she could wangle anything she wanted out of Dan. When he was a homely, shy and bony boy in medical school Hannah knew he couldn’t believe his luck that she loved him. Back then all he wanted to do was make her happy and keep her that way. Now, she asked herself, did he care? Did he give a good goddamn how she felt since time and good bone structure had turned him into a middle-aged hunk? His shyness had become a soft-spoken charm both men and women found attractive; and no one called him bony anymore. God forbid saying he was homely. The cowlicky brown hair, his hawkish nose and square jaw, these made a strong Yankee face, friends told her. You’re so lucky, Hannah. You got one of the good ones. They didn’t know how mulish he could be. Pigheaded and half-blind.
“It’s not like we’re too old, Dan. I know that’s what you think but it isn’t true. Fifty isn’t the same as it was for our parents. Besides, when I talked to the child advocate she said the court would waive the age requirement under the circumstances.”
“Jesus Christ, Hannah, you’ve