After Moses [NOOK Book]

Read an Excerpt

She told him he didn't need to walk her home.

"I'm not," he said.

They left the rental car and meandered together down the shoulder of the highway, not back into town, but farther out into darkness. They weren't looking at each other, but he could not have seen her anyway. She was wearing a black dress, black pearls, with a black scarf tied around the straw hat she carried in her hand, and there were no lights on that stretch of road, besides. Several times they wandered out toward the center line, until a set of headlights approached from behind or ahead and they sensed, more than saw, their error.

Once she stopped at a large rectangular sign just off the shoulder, wrapped her hands around one of the posts, and, for a long time, leaned her forehead against the metal.

"Are you all right?" he asked her. "Are you sick?"

"Johnny," she said, "I'm not like that."

So he waited silently beside her. The night air was muggy but no longer hot, and he watched a satellite glide across the sky. When a semi passed and its headlights fell upon the sign, he realized that they had crossed into Indiana. He peered up the road to her motel lit in pink and yellow. He took her by the elbow and they set out once more.

When they reached the motel, she unlocked the door of her room, then went to get some ice. Johnny turned on the TV, switched on the air-conditioning, and posted himself by the open door. He planned to make his exit as soon as she returned, but he had always had trouble parting with Emily. It didn't seem right, somehow.

Emily returned carrying a plastic bucket full of square ice cubes with hollowed-out centers. She glanced at the air conditioner, seemed to hesitate, then shut the motel room door. After she set the bucket down on top of the TV she kicked off her shoes, reached in the bucket and popped an ice cube in her mouth.

"Have some," she said, talking around it. "They're the good kind."

When he didn't respond, she lifted the ice bucket off the television and padded toward him on her bare feet. Johnny fingered the doorknob and she stopped. He felt her watching him, but when he put his hand back in his pocket and looked up, she was looking somewhere else.

"You all right?" he asked.

She was considering the motel carpet with lowered lids. "I'm all right," she said, nodding slowly.

He looked at her toenails. "Why black?"

Emily looked too. "In the beginning it was purely aesthetic," she explained. "I liked the way they looked all bruised, like I'd mashed them under a garage door."

Johnny nodded.

"Later on, it became more of a ritual."

"Shoe too," he said.

"I know," said Emily. "She had her own reasons."

Shoe was Johnny's big sister. For the last six years, Emily had been her best friend. Johnny had been scared to call Emily with the bad news, but there was no one else to call her, so he had done it. He had tried calling other friends of Shoe's as well, but some had been impossible to track down. Others said they'd fly out for the funeral and hadn't. He hadn't really thought the others would. Only Emily.

Now she extended the ice bucket toward him, but didn't come any closer.

"I hope we can keep in touch," he said.

Emily cracked one of her crooked smiles. "We're sobering up." She picked daintily through the ice cubes. "At least use the toilet before you go. I'll let you break the seal."

Johnny did not break the seal, but slipped it from the toilet seat while Emily looked on. When he handed it to her, she draped the sanitation label across her chest like a banner, then marched from the room like a proud contestant in a beauty pageant.

Now he was alone. When he had gone about his business, he put down the toilet lid and sat. Time to leave, he thought. Johnny stared at the shower stall and didn't move a muscle. When Emily knocked on the door, he rose and slowly opened it.

"You tired?" she asked. The toilet banner had disappeared. So had the funeral attire. She had changed into her nightgown and was sucking on another piece of ice. "Because if you are, maybe you should stay."

Johnny nodded.

She offered him her toothbrush. Johnny did not refuse. She stepped onto the toilet lid, turned and seated herself on the toilet tank, elbows on her knees, knees pressed together, face in the palms of her hands.

"I'll ask for an eight o'clock wake-up call," she said. "If we leave here by eight-thirty, we can get the car and still be at your house in time for the will."

Johnny lowered his head and spat into the sink. He thought about it while he rinsed his mouth, then straightened and nodded his head.

Emily turned out the overhead light in the main room. Johnny turned off the television. They turned down the bed and crept inside it, settling at a distance from each other. Except for the humming of the air conditioner under the front window, there was silence.

For a long time, neither of them moved and nothing happened. Johnny lay with his hands behind his head and paid close attention as, one by one, his fingers all grew numb. Under the sheets, Emily shifted. Her foot nudged his in the dark and disappeared.

"Sorry," she said.

"Oh, I don't mind."

The air conditioner rattled suddenly, violently, and he swallowed under the cover of its noise. "Do you want to talk about this?" he asked her.

Emily laughed. "I always did."

And because the world was a hostile place without Shoe in it, as they talked they crept toward one another in the dark, until she lay inside his arms, where she remained until long after sunrise, when the motel phone rang to wake them.

The rest of the family was gathered in the living room when they arrived, silently awaiting their lawyer. The two entered and took seats side by side on the piano bench. Emily still carried her straw hat, but instead of putting it on she turned it around and around until it finally settled on her knees. Johnny still wore his suit. He hadn't showered in days, and his dirty blond hair fell away from his forehead in a rakish way it never did when it was clean.

His father frowned across the room at him, and Johnny decided he must look pretty bad. But when his sister Ida stole a look, her eyes ranging slyly from him to Emily and away, he wondered if his father had something else in mind. Irritated, he got to his feet and paced the house from back to front, but the house irritated him further.

It was one of those big houses built to look old, but without success. There were approximations of a parquet floor, half-hearted banisters, and bedroom windows criss-crossed by flat strips of metal to make the glass look paned from the outside, though that did not make it paned; from the inside, anyone could tell the glass was just one big sheet. There was nothing genuine or stately about the house and the kids all figured this out. It was something that crept into their sensibility before they could prevent it, making them into vigilant anti-snobs and complicating almost all their social interactions.

Because there aren't enough noble old houses to go around, Johnny thought. Sometimes in life you had to hold out for the real thing -- Johnny understood that too -- but he and his sisters had found other real things to hold out for. They hadn't fought their battles on the material plane. And he had felt okay about those battles, and his place in them, until their fiercest warrior had gone and lost hers.

After the funeral, several people had expressed to Johnny their surprise that someone as impetuous as Shoe would have made legal arrangements already, at so young an age. But Johnny knew she was not impetuous. She was deliberate. That was what troubled him. He stopped pacing and leaned against the front door until the knock came. Johnny showed the lawyer in and stood by while the man offered condolences to Johnny's parents. He'd been their lawyer for years and apparently Shoe's as well, an old friend of the family, with wrinkled cheeks and a wandering eye. Johnny stared at his kind, worn face for comfort.

The lawyer told them the will was brief, and it was. Shoe's life insurance policy left $85,000 to Moses, her five-year-old son. Most of the paintings Ida had given her through the years would go to him as well, save three in particular that Shoe had stipulated would go to Emily. Johnny got all her ski equipment, camping and climbing gear, and topo maps. The care of Moses would fall to Ida. There was no mention of the father.

At the end came a curious specification, or request, that in the event Emily was still unmarried at the time of Shoe's death, Johnny marry her himself. To that, no one reacted much at all, save Emily, who laughed aloud.

Johnny was less amused. He'd known for years that if anything ever happened to Shoe, she wanted Ida to raise her son. Shoe had told him so late one night, a bottle of Johnny Walker between them on her kitchen table, the stove lamp the only light burning in the house. She'd told him how it would be, how Moses would learn the virtues of their small Ohio town: the quiet pleasures of walks down by the river, the twisting, shady country roads, the bird sanctuary with that brilliant indigo bunting, how to feed the horses down the hill, which cemetery was haunted, how to take the tracks to dodge the law or cross the river or hear the wild kittens mewing among the rocks after dark. He'd learn all the things they'd learned as kids. Ida would show him everything, Shoe had said, as only Ida could. Ida should have been the mom.

But Shoe had been a great mom. She had adored her son. Sitting in her kitchen at midnight, Johnny had thought it was just the whiskey talking.

"It'll do Ida a world of good." In the near-dark, Shoe had taken a drink from the bottle, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "And, you know, I'll be dead. So she won't have any choice."

Now Johnny wondered if this request to marry her best friend was supposed to do him a world of good as well. Maybe he was supposed to think he had no choice either, because Shoe had gone to an early grave. But he believed an early grave was what his sister wanted, and he believed he knew her reasons. To hand over the maternal reins was just the start. The main thing was that at thirty-four, the world she'd courted so violently for so long had worn her out. Maybe dying was the only way she could return home and still save face. She seized that opportunity as she had seized them all her life.

As a result, he predicted the demise of the family. It would start with his mother, since Shoe was her safeguard against disappointment. Without his wife, Johnny's father would grow silent and ever more remote. In effect, he'd disappear, and Ida couldn't make it on her own. Though they had lived their lives as opposites, Johnny knew that at core his sisters were more alike than different, and Shoe had really been no more of a survivor than Ida. No one in the family was much of a survivor, Johnny thought, except him, and that was largely accidental. He had never made up his mind to die as Shoe had, but then again, he'd never made up his mind to live.

After the will was read, the lawyer lingered briefly to talk with Professor Tumarkin. Mrs. Tumarkin sat on the couch beside her husband and stared at her hands. She wore a tailored navy skirt and jacket despite the heat. Her nut brown hair was neatly clipped across the nape of her neck, her lipstick still in place. But now she also wore the vacant look she had worn ever since the sheriff's phone call came from Boulder County.

Her firstborn had been found off a rough mountain road west of Nederland, Colorado, dead from a gunshot wound to the back of the head. It had taken more than a week to find Shoe's body, although another body was found less than a mile away on the same day she went missing. The victim was a local drug dealer, found farther up the same dirt road, shot through his windshield and slumped behind his wheel. Her truck surfaced before she did, forty miles south of Nederland on a side street in Idaho Springs. Her gun, which was thought to be the murder weapon, was in the truck's glove compartment. There were no fingerprints on the gun, including hers, and no other connection between the dead man and Shoe, as far as anyone could tell.

That was all they'd told the family, but Johnny had his own ideas about his sister's murder. He had pictures in his mind. Not of the killer, but it was not the killer that mattered to him anyway. As far as Johnny was concerned, his sister had killed herself.

Not that her death was drug-related. He doubted it, in fact. Maybe the killer had wanted her truck and nothing more. But whatever brought the two of them together in the first place Johnny held against her, his sister's reasons for whatever she did or failed to do, whatever got her into that wrong place at that wrong time. And whether she'd lost her life with intention or quite the opposite, Moses would never see his mother again.

Emily and Johnny rose slowly to their feet and went to stand in front of Mrs. Tumarkin, whose skin was somehow gray.

"You look like you need to lie down, Mom," Johnny said. "Why don't you?"

His mother gazed past him through the long windows onto the overgrown lawn. All week there had been thundershowers. It had never dried out enough to cut, although Johnny had promised he would do that much before he left.

"I've been lying down all my life," she said, rising, and disappeared upstairs.

Johnny sunk his hands into his pockets and spread the tips of his shoes.

"Well," said Emily. "I have a plane to catch."

Johnny would not look at her. "I'll walk you to your car," he said.

They moved outside together, although no longer side by side. Emily closed the front door behind them and trailed him along the front walk. When they reached the curb, she fiddled with her key, but the car was already unlocked. She climbed in, shut the door and rolled down the window. Johnny was standing in the middle of the street, looking west.

"This is it," he said.

"I guess you're not going to marry me," she said, and smiled.

Johnny smiled too, a toothless smile directed at the concrete. "We wouldn't want everyone to think we were just doing it for her sake."

Emily sat back in the driver's seat. She draped her wrists over the steering wheel. "I don't suppose we could just issue a disclaimer with the wedding invitations."

Johnny forced a laugh and sidled closer to the open window. This is really it, he thought, distraught and yet determined. They would not meet again. The feeling he had always had for her would remain an unnamed mystery. He'd never settle it now. And when she found what she was looking for -- because he knew she hadn't yet -- he wouldn't hear about it, and he wouldn't know what it was. He sidled away again, across and down the quiet street. When he reached the neighbor's mailbox, he stooped over and peered inside.

"I hope you don't think I put her up to this," he called.

"God, no," said Emily. "Please."

"She wrote that will with every intention to die, and then she just makes a big joke of it at the end -- and you laughed!"

"No," she said. "I never laugh at jokes."

"What?" He started back toward her, his dirty hair flapping with each step. "That's true. Why is that?" Before she could answer, he thrust out a hand to stop her. "Don't tell me," he said. "What for? She's ruined everything. Now we'll never know what would have happened. She's altered the course of history, for all we know."

Emily had been watching him in her car's side mirror. She shifted her eyes back to the open window. Beyond it, Johnny was pacing in the gutter. "Are you referring to the murder, or the will?" she asked.

Johnny shrugged, shifting his weight from one wing tip to the other. He had left his jacket in the house and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, but his tie was still tightly knotted. "Everything. What difference does it make? They're one and the same. That fucking provision -- "

"What's the big deal?" said Emily. "Since it is, as you said, a joke."

"It's not a joke." Johnny stole another look at her, then scowled and looked away.

Emily sighed. She lifted one hand from the steering wheel and held it out the window toward him, but when he realized what she was asking, he thrust both his hands deep in the pockets of his pants. She sighed again. "We'll talk about it later," she said.

"No, we won't!" Johnny's hands went to his head. He spun away. There was no way to talk any of this over with Emily. She had been Shoe's best friend. She would always take Shoe's side. "I can't even look at you now," he said.

"I noticed that. But you seem to be suggesting --" Emily swallowed, "that if she hadn't mentioned us like that in the will, you might have had something to do with me."

He was silent.

"And now you won't."

"How can I?" he shouted. "I will not endorse her death!"

They both turned and glanced up at the house to see if anyone was watching. But there was no audience. The windows of the white house were closed and empty.

"But you aren't being honest now," Emily said quietly, firmly. "This isn't about her at all. Just tell the truth."

"I am telling the truth!"

"In that case," she said, "you're cutting me off just to spite her. And that seems rather willful."

"That's right," Johnny said. He feasted his eyes on her face for the last time, before he lost that face to life forever, as he had lost his sister's to death. "Now that Shoe's gone, there's a lot more will to go around."

Emily lifted her wrists from the wheel and was about to turn the key in the ignition when she stopped.

Since she was fifteen or sixteen, Emily had seen into other people's lives. Her field of view was nothing like that of a psychic, neither eerie nor of any practical use. She couldn't see what was, what had been, or even what might be. She only saw what should have been.

These visions usually involved strangers, though she had imagined better lives for people she knew in passing: teachers, doctors, a grocery clerk. The satisfying futures that played out for her were not, she understood, intended for the light of day. They weren't likely to ever take place. But she'd always thought what she saw with Johnny was something different -- not a vision, but a daydream. Never mind that the daydream's details were fixed and a bit peculiar, like a short, haunting clip from a film without dialogue. Never mind that all of her visions were. She had thought the scene from her life was different because it wasn't relegated to something that should have been; because it still might be.

Johnny had set her straight about that today.

Because of what she saw, Emily knew that some of the world's best stories would never come to pass. While all of the raw materials existed -- the right people, places, the requisite longing -- they would seldom come together in the necessary way, because a story's rightness did not make it, in turn, inevitable. The two qualities were unrelated, and would remain forever strangers to one another, like two aging lovers she had once seen on the bus -- lovers because in her mind she had seen them, winding their way up a steep, narrow street at dusk, arm in arm, on the first trip either one had ever made to Paris -- a man and woman who got off at different stops without ever noticing each other. The fact that these visions weren't imminent was endlessly sad, but so inescapable that Emily had never fought it. And she didn't fight it now.

It is a tragedy when lovers are torn apart. But where lies the tragedy in a love affair that never comes to pass?

The tragedy, Emily reflected, was hers alone, just as the vision had been. And yet the picture she saw in her mind of a single rainy afternoon, the same slow-moving Saturday that she had seen for years, was not improbable. It not only should have been, but could have. Until today.

"I saw us," she said suddenly. "The two of us together."

When she stole a look at Johnny's beautiful face, it had gone still. He stood just out of reach with his eyes downcast, willing her, perhaps, to stop.

"I don't mean to upset you," she said. "It's only that I saw it all so clearly and I never have before, not in my own life. I have to tell you what I saw."

Johnny nodded carefully, as if he were balancing something on his head, or as if he were afraid his head might crack apart.

"It's a Saturday," she said, then switched to past tense, so as not to alarm him. For her, the rainy Saturday was still to come, but that would have to change. She'd recast the future as a memory, and then let it fade. "The rain came in the night, just before dawn. At first there was thunder and lightning, but by daybreak the noise and spectacle had stopped and it was only falling softly. It fell all morning, and into the afternoon. And we didn't want to get out of bed. We just stayed in bed."

"Sounds depressing," Johnny said.

"It wasn't, though. We had a big four-poster bed against one wall. That bed was our kingdom. It was late summer. All the fruits were coming ripe on the trees outside. We could smell them through the open window."

"I thought it was raining."

"It was. The window was stuck. It was one of those windows like they have in school, the long rectangular kind that hinges at the top and swings out at the bottom, but without the mottled glass. The rain slapped the glass, coming down, but none of it fell inside the room. And we didn't care anyway."

"Because of the smell?"

"That was part of it," said Emily. "We also liked the noise." She smiled suddenly. "We had a pear in bed with us."

"Red?"

"Yellow. It gave off this scent, like from the fruit trees, but because it was so close and dry, also very warm. We thought it might still be alive. We'd been smelling it for hours, but we were waiting --"

She broke off when she saw him squirm. Gently, she raised a hand and pressed the palm against her own head. This somehow seemed to help.

"Go on," Johnny said.

Emily shook her head. She was thinking that she talked all wrong, that she secretly despised the way she talked and had for years. She sounded stuffy. Serious. Like no fun at all. It was no wonder he didn't want her. If she were him, she wouldn't want her either. "I have a plane to catch," she said.

Another careful nod from Johnny.

But it is very bitter, she thought, just the same. Because she could only tell him what she'd seen, and it was this translation, this poor execution, that was objectionable. The vision behind her eyes was lovely and without fault.

She looked at him once more, because his face was very dear to her.

"That's all," she said. "Now I'll be off."

When this met with no objection, she was.

As she drove along the old bricks of Main Street, past the water tower and out onto the highway that would take her once more past last night's bar and their motel room, she reminded herself that of course, the same held true for almost everyone. People have broken hearts the world over, she told herself. And I've broken one or two of them. I've disappointed men by rejecting them as he rejects me now. That's probably why my visions always embrace lonely people, not happy ones. Because there are so many.

Not that her visions helped them. She understood that. They only helped Emily herself, and only for a few minutes, while she basked in the glow of what might have been. When it came to other people's lives she would keep on dreaming; from now on she'd be more disciplined about her own.

Emily didn't know if other men would follow him. Surely she couldn't love them, but she made herself no promises. She would take them as they came and perhaps settle for someone less than he, someone more like herself. Whatever happened, she'd seek no sympathy for her situation. There was no use. People would tell her there was nothing to mourn, and that was what she mourned, as much as anything.

But it was in the produce aisle at the grocery store that real despair seized her. After that day in August, Emily stopped eating pears, for she had already known the perfect one, that rainy afternoon in their bed. She recalled the tender tautness of its skin, how far their teeth pressed into the warmly speckled surface before it broke, that first run of juice. There was no use in buying other pears. She knew full well they never would suffice.