Falling to Earth (14 page)

“Whatever do you mean, Mae?” Lavinia says, looking around as if the closed door will tell her something. “He only said good night!”

“He said good-bye.”

“Well, yes, but he meant good night or good evening.” Lavinia continues laying the table, speaking under her breath. “You two will both overthink a thing, won't you. Can't let a thing be what it is.”

Paul looks out the window, but Bill is already out of sight. “I hope you're wrong,” he says.

“You know I'm not.” Mae looks down at the table, her mouth twisted into something between disappointment and resignation.

“Paul, will you please come away from that window!” Lavinia cries. “How can we have any peace at suppertime if you're standing there like a mannequin in a shop window, advertising that we're home to all callers? Children!” She bangs the table with the flat of her hand. “Supper!”

Lavinia is still frowning when everyone is seated and mumbling their way through grace, “Bless us, Oh Lord, and these thy gifts . . . ”

“Peas again?” Ellis takes the serving bowl from Mae and slumps in his chair.

“Yes, and bread and potatoes and milk,” Mae says evenly. “That other can turned out to be peaches, so you can have some dessert.”

“You'll eat what your mother gives you, all of you,” says Paul, “No one in town is eating any better than we are. Everybody gets the same food handed out every day. I'm just grateful there's milk for you kids and a stove to cook the potatoes on.”

“Heaven knows there's enough kindling these days for the stove,” Lavinia says sharply. “Nothing but kindling all around us.”

“Mother, please! Don't you see, that's just it! We should set an example. I don't mean just here at the table. Sure we can rattle the cans of food and try to guess what's inside them, laugh that the roof of the store got blown off and all the canned goods got their labels soaked off in the rain. I mean I think we should be an example to the town. I believe we were spared for a reason.”

“What reason could that be?” Mae's voice is cautious, but Paul goes on as if she hasn't spoken.

“Mother, you say you don't want me to try to find any meaning in all of this. But there is meaning! Why were we the only ones? Some families survived with body intact, but have no home; then there are others whose house is fine, but lost their families. And then there's the Graves family. What happened to the Graves family? Nothing! We got ourselves and our house muddied up is all!”

The children are wide-eyed. They hold their forks suspended, forgetting to pass the food into their mouths, and stare at their transported father.

“I wasn't sure before, but I'm getting surer. You saw how Bill came to us. You see how they're all coming to us. They want to see for themselves that we were spared. They don't want to trust the stories. They come here to see proof that while that one evil hand reached out of that cloud to smash everything up, another hand reached down to stop it.”

“Paul, be careful, now. Think about what you're saying,” Lavinia warns him. “Bill came here because he's your friend. The others are just gawkers, same kind as gather around to gape at a car wreck. Only this time it's in reverse; there's devastation all around, so they come to stare at the survivors, instead.”

“You don't think it was providential that the lumberyard was spared?”

“Of course it was providential! It was providential for us! And if you're so determined to find meaning in all of this, maybe you should come with me to a church service or two, like you did when you were a boy.”

Paul continues calmly, plainly trying to control his voice. “Mother, you of all people should be able to see this. The lumberyard is still there. All the lumber is still there for people to rebuild with.”

“And to make coffins with,” Mae says quietly.

“There! At least Mae sees sense. You have a care who you say these things to, Paul. If people cotton on that you think you were chosen somehow, well, you won't make any friends.”

Lavinia shakes her head wretchedly, wishing her Homer were still alive to shake a finger in Paul's face and make him see reason.

“I'm certain that's not what he meant, Mother,” Mae says, looking up tight-lipped at Paul.

“This house is acting like a beacon,” Paul says. “It's a reminder of what they all had before the storm and what they have to work toward now they've lost it. I sold most of them the lumber they built with the first time, and I'm still here to do it again. Doesn't that give me a duty to act a certain way?”

Lavinia looks around at the children who seem content and have gone back to eating. When she looks at Mae, she sees the same worry she feels herself before Mae lowers her eyes. You can sell them all the boards in the world to rebuild their houses, Lavinia thinks, but you can't sell them arms and legs to build new children and husbands and wives.

“I'm sure you know best, Paul,” she says instead.

L
avinia puts her hat on in front of the mirror while she waits for Mae to come downstairs again. Mae comes down slowly when she's ready, and Lavinia looks her over. “Much better,” she says. “Somber, not funereal. We're going to visit the living, after all.”

Mae stops before the bottom of the staircase, face and eyes turned down.

“You look like Ellis,” Lavinia says. “You look exactly like he does when it's time to go to church.”

“I think I feel like Ellis.”

“I can see that. What's wrong?”

Mae looks up at Lavinia, but looks away just as quickly. “I don't see how this will help anyone, least of all Alice.”

When Lavinia holds out Mae's hat, Mae comes the rest of the way down and puts it on distractedly. Lavinia lifts Mae's face up to look at her. She smoothes Mae's hair along the sides of her face and adjusts the hat. “You know we have to pay them a call. We really should have done it before the funeral.”

“I won't know what to say.”

Lavinia applies her lipstick, chin tilted toward the mirror, then frowns after she points to Mae's handbag and Mae shakes her head, refusing to do the same.

“We'll only make her feel worse,” Mae says. “Think of the last two times we saw her.”

Yes, Lavinia thinks, Alice was screaming for her baby both of those times, and she may be screaming still, and that's part of what we have to find out. She wants to tell Mae that the thing making her hesitate is only herself, that she's too young to have gone on many calls like this before, if she's gone on any at all. That what she's afraid of is feeling worse herself.

But Mae meets Lavinia's eyes in the mirror and says, “I hear her voice in my head. It wakes me up at night, and I think I must have woken myself with screaming, but it's Alice's scream I'm hearing, and it's only been a dream.”

Lavinia has no answer to this. She's so easily undone by Mae's candor, which always comes so unexpectedly, so inopportunely. She can only respond with a truism: “The longer we wait, the worse it will be.”

 

Lavinia knocks once, twice on the door of the house the Duttweilers have been staying in since the storm. Mae is looking down at the porch boards, holding her purse in front of her with both hands. Nash Duttweiler opens the door finally, but then he stands there without saying anything, looking puzzled as if he's neither sure who it is who's standing there or even why he's standing there, himself.

“Hello, Nash,” Lavinia says. “I guess we found the right house.”

Nash nods and says, “I guess you did.”

Lavinia looks at him in consternation, resisting the urge to speak slowly and a little louder than usual, as if she were addressing an idiot. She prompts him, “May we come in? We hadn't planned to stay long.”

“It's just Alice and me here today,” Nash says. “No one else, just us.”

“Well, that's fine, Nash. It was you and Alice we wanted to see,” Lavinia says, in spite of feeling her stomach fall at the realization that the Duttweilers' hosts will not be there to relieve the mood, to force a superficial formality on the conversation.

Nash turns and walks away from them calling, “Company,” up the stairs, and they follow him. He forgets himself again and leaves them standing there in the living room, and Lavinia and Mae stand there together, side by side in their coats and hats, throwing identical, kindly smiles up at the stairs at Alice, who slows coming down when she sees them, and frowns. She laughs then, a hollow, too-loud laugh that bounces back at them off the walls, forcing them all to hear it again.

“I didn't recognize you. I thought you were more ladies from church.”

What little smile there is on Alice's face falls quickly away, and she gestures toward the davenport for them to sit down. Lavinia sees the indifferent look in Alice's eyes, as if Alice is both absent and yet somehow more fully present than any of them. Alice's expression unnerves her, even more than the frankly vacant look in Nash's eyes. Nash doesn't seem to be seeing much of anything, but Alice, Alice looks as if she sees them all quite clearly, even as she's looking right through them to something else.

“Have you had many visitors from your church?” Lavinia asks.

“Oh my, yes. Every day for a while there, telling us about God's plan and how we needed to come back to church.”

Lavinia knows she can fill in the rest for herself and turns her eyes toward her lap as a signal to Alice that she won't be mentioning any of those things. She can imagine everything the ladies would have said, how they would have tried to vary it each day, thinking some days that simply sending a different set of women would render the message convincing and suddenly do the trick. And from the hardness that has overtaken Alice's face, she can also guess what Alice said to stop the visits: that they could keep their kindness and their God if he was the one who had sent the cloud that snatched her baby away and left her without a single bone to bury. Lavinia can well imagine the women stopped coming rather than face Alice again. She recognizes in Alice the same capacity Mae has for inconvenient candor, but fueled in Alice by rage and grief. She guesses that Alice has now more or less stopped being polite to people, decided on it one day as a policy, and if she had not yet behaved rudely towards them, she was prepared to do so if they gave her reason.

Lavinia supposes Alice might well be entitled to a little belligerence, if people are going to behave so clumsily. But how it will serve her in another month or even a year is another matter. She could easily enrage Alice herself right here if she wanted to. Tell her all the things she knows to be true about grief and youth and life and living. That neither she nor Nash have even hit thirty and that they will likely have another child and even children. That an enraged stupor is no mood for her to make her way through all the years remaining to her.

Alice turns to Mae and says, “I imagine you still have folks sheltering with you.”

“No,” Mae says. “The McKinney's were the last ones, and they're out in one of the tent cities now.”

Alice nods. “We heard how your porch got used.”

Lavinia knows then that Alice is still living freshly in the moment of the storm. That she hasn't moved forward in any meaningful way from that first terrifying night when they laid out the corpses on porches around town. This house has a good porch, too. Lavinia wonders if Alice and Nash arrived to shelter here before the bodies were laid out, if either one of them was then able to look among them for the baby or if they just waited to be told. And she wonders how in heaven a person moves forward from a thing like that, from baby to no baby. There isn't a word like widow for mothers who have lost a child, she thinks. There should be.

“What will you do now?” Mae asks. “Are you going to rebuild?”

“We can't stay here forever. There's insurance money coming on our house, but we can't even stand to look at the place, so I don't see how we can rebuild it.”

Lavinia shakes her head. She wonders if either of them would remember the day last summer when she and Mae were out hanging laundry and they saw Alice leaning heavily on a tree in her yard. Lavinia had rushed over, seeing Alice hugging her belly with one arm and pushing against the tree with the other, thinking she was losing the baby, but Alice had only been looking down at something in the grass, working out the best way to get low enough to pick it up. Alice had laughed at her awkwardness, at her belly that made her ponderous and slow, and pointed to the remains of a robin's egg laying at the base of the tree. Lavinia had picked it up and put it in Alice's hand, and they had both stopped thinking whatever else they had been thinking; they had stopped entirely to marvel at its fineness and color.

Alice had laughed and closed her hand around the broken shell, and then opened it flat again and held it up higher. “I'd like a room painted that color,” she had said.

“Well, you take that to Nash and tell him,” Lavinia had said. “He'd paint the whole house that color if he thought you'd like it.”

Alice's smile, the hot breeze in the green yard, the bright blue shell already saved in her pocket.

“I imagine he would.”

P
aul is standing in the upstairs hall looking at Ruby's and Ellis's bedroom doors, both closed against him. He hears Mae coming up the stairs and wonders how many minutes will pass before he's out here again and Mae is hiding behind a third closed door.

“You told them?” she says behind him when she's standing on the top stair. He nods without turning around, without saying anything more about it because he's got bad news for her, too. He'll keep this much to himself, he thinks, and spare Mae a description of Ellis sitting on his bed and refusing to look at him, fighting to control himself until Paul was out of the room and he could close the door. Or Ruby, who looked suddenly younger when he told her, her eyes and mouth gone wide open so that she looked as she had at two or three when she was caught up in listening to a story. But then her eyes darted with worry, and Paul could see her mind working, picturing her friends' faces and wondering how those people could be dead, how a father could promise that they would never come to the house again calling for her to come out to play, when she could still perfectly conjure their faces in her mind.