She hopes Valley stays upstairs, because it’s stupid to cry over a quilt. She’s thankful Everett’s gone. Neither of them understands that it’s not just a quilt to Rose. It’s the death of a perfect idea. Now, no matter who raves about the quilt—even if it takes another first at the county fair—it will always look second-rate to Rose.
She hears water rushing through the pipes. Valley is in the shower. Rose goes into the kitchen to get sandwich bags for her little piles of triangles and squares but forgets what she’s after and opens the refrigerator. The sliced turkey will only go bad if she doesn’t eat it. Everett isn’t coming home and Valley doesn’t like it.
She makes herself a turkey sandwich with cheese and lettuce, spreading mayonnaise to the edges of the rye bread with her favorite spreader. A bite at a time, she savors each mouthful as if it’s her last. Rob asked for her. Helen said so. She washes her sandwich plate and pictures his backlit figure walking toward her down the sidewalk. A gold chain glints at the neck of his green T. His jeans bulge slightly at the zipper. But it’s that moment when their eyes met she wants to capture. Her insides flutter as they had in junior high—before a test, when a cute boy walked by or whenever she saw Mary Sue Horton come toward her. “Stop it!” Rose says aloud to the dish brush. She dries the plate, puts it back on the shelf and hurries to her cell as if Rob is in hot pursuit. The air is close in the little room. That’s okay. It’s part of the discipline.
Kneeling beside her bed, Rose bows over her rosary. She says the Apostle’s Creed on the crucifix—fingering the sharp angle of Christ’s knees, the prickly points of the thorns on his brow—a Hail Mary on each of the little beads and an Our Father and Glory Be on each of the larger beads. She repeats them for Mr. Flannigan’s soul. All of it is exhausting, her crying, her praying. She wonders if it’s wrong to pray lying down. What did sick people do? Stroke patients? Mr. Flannigan? He certainly hadn’t knelt. She lies flat on her back, her palms together, upright over her ribs. Her shirt absorbs the sweat on her back. She recites the questions and answers of the Baltimore Catechism, drilled into her by Sister Mary Thomas beginning in second grade. “Who made the world? God made the world. Who is God? God is the Creator of heaven and earth and of all things.” When she’s repeated all of lesson one, she repeats the Ten Commandments, the seven sacraments, the seven virtues and the seven deadly sins. She intends to confess on each one, beginning with gluttony and citing the box of chocolates, but before she gets to lust, Rose dozes.
In the dim light of consciousness she sees bicycle wheels turning, turning, revolving so fast the spokes become a blur and disappear. Valley is a baby, strapped into a child seat fixed to the rear fender. Rose is naked, perched on the seat, steering. She rounds a corner, bicycle leaning until it tips over and the curb reaches for the two of them, smacks her in the jaw and dislodges her teeth. She wriggles each tooth in turn, finds she can remove it, looks at the disgusting V-shaped root, then fits it back into its socket. Valley is sprawling on a lawn overgrown with enormous dandelions that make soft yellow pillows for her head. “Poor baby,” Rose says, picking Valley up, but Valley cannot hear her. Rose looks in her ear. There’s a dandelion inside. Rose plucks at it with her fingers first, then with tweezers, but only manages to shred it. Fragile yellow fibers stick to the tweezer tips like duck fluff. She digs deeper into Valley’s ear, gouging at yellow, tweaking, pulling. But the dandelion is stubborn. It gives up its nap, but it will not budge.
CHAPTER 5
P ort Clinton is new to Everett, but the AAA magazine has a good map. The air is much cooler by the lake. Drier, too. Good thing with the dog. Everett drives to the docks, parks in the shade of a large tree, rolls the windows partway down and pats the dog. “I won’t be long. You’ll be fine,” he says in the singsong of doggy talk. She wags her back half, barks once and watches while he grabs a jacket from his trunk.
Everett buys a ticket to Put-in-Bay on the Jet Express, a jet-powered catamaran said to cross the harbor in twenty-two minutes. Onboard, he stands with the other tourists and watches wake spew from the engine before churning back into the bay. The passengers wear colorful windbreakers, orange and yellow, green and pink. Women pull hoods up over their blowing hair. Everett leaves his jacket hanging open. Cold is a woman thing.
Up ahead, the Perry Memorial rises from the center of downtown Put-in-Bay like a giant pencil, poised to connect the plump clouds into meaningful patterns. Everett thinks like that—connecting poles, configuring electrical circuits, though he rarely insists the patterns have meaning. Not like Rosie, who finds significance in every event. He finds her interpretation of coincidence silly and trivial—the abracadabra of child play, like expecting sense of nursery rhymes or jump-rope chants.
When the Jet Express docks and its engines shut down, the organ band of Kimberly’s Carousel—noted in the AAA guide for its all-wood horses—mixes with the seagulls’ laughter. At King’s Island Amusement Park Valley used to cling to the carousel pole, her neck craning to spot Rosie every turn round the circle. That’s not what he came for.
He spies the parachutes billowing from their anchors down on the beach. He hurries to the dock to register, but when he arrives there’s no line. The air is too chilly. He won’t bother changing into swim trunks.
Everett pays his fee and signs the waiver before he loses his nerve. Out in the water, the boat motor revs while bare-chested boys with Greek letters on their caps snap him into a life vest. The boy maneuvering the boat keeps it pointing into the wind. The motor settles into a glubbing gurgle Everett can hardly hear over his heartbeat. He is about to do it. To take off…to fly…to soar with the seagulls—free of earth, gravity, his body. The boys tell him to step into a harness. He threads one leg, then the other through the leg straps. His bare feet look white. One boy tightens the cinch belt under his gut and adjusts the strap that runs between his legs. A red-yellow-and-blue chute billows out behind him, not yet clipped to rings on his harness. The wind riffles the edges of the chute. His mouth is suddenly dry. Two boys clip his chute on, holding him down with all their weight. “Hold on to those straps by your ears,” the tall one says.
“Have fun, big guy.”
They halloo to the driver. Release him as the boat takes off into the wind. Cold air rushes his face as the chute lifts him into the air. His weight settles into the sling seat. His knuckles whiten around the handholds. The beach disappears and he is over water. The waves reach for his feet, then curl into white fringe. He kicks his feet at the nothingness that suspends him. The water drops farther below. The waves look like ripples. He glances back. The shoreline forms a crescent behind him. The Perry Monument is not so tall after all. The red-and-white carousel awning rotates slowly, its pie-shaped wedges emerging from a stationary center point. Its calliope is silent now. Even the noise of the boat motor has faded away.
It is very still.
The article hadn’t mentioned stillness. His skin breaks out in goose bumps. He’d expected rushing wind, rocking him in the harness swing, his hair blowing every which way. Everett has never heard such silence. Even in farm country in the middle of winter there are sounds—the echo of a car door slamming, a train whistle, the snap of icicles, the wind wiffling across stubbly fields or snapping frozen branches. The silence threatens to swallow him. He can’t relax and enjoy the view in the face of such calm. How does he know he’s still living? That he hasn’t died of heart failure? Maybe he was wrong about heaven—all his visions of angels and cherubim, the many-headed monsters from Revelations, the only book of the Bible he’s read. Maybe the giant throne room, the old man speaking in a booming voice amidst sulfur and magical creatures and terror and judgment is Oz, not heaven. Maybe heaven is a lot of nothing. A total void.
“Anybody home?” Everett calls into the stillness. The question goes nowhere. Maybe it’s trapped in his head, like the sound of his voice when he plugs his ears with his fingers. Maybe he hasn’t spoken at all. He lets go of the strap and holds his ears