Black Glass Part 11

SO BOBBY TOLD ME none of this. I didn't see him again that day. He did not come by, and when I finally went over, his mother told me he was home, but that he was not feeling well, had gone to bed. "Don't worry," she said, in response, I suppose, to the look on my face. "Just a chill. Nothing to worry about."

He missed school the next day and the next after that. When I finally saw him, he was casual. Offhand. As if it had all happened so long ago he had forgotten. "He caught me," Bobby said. "He was very angry. That's all. We better not do it again."

It was the end of our efforts to put a Stuart on the throne. There are days, I admit, when I'm seeing the dentist and I pick up People in the waiting room and there they are, the current sad little lot of Windsors, and I have a twinge of guilt. I just didn't care enough to see it through. I enjoyed Charles and Diana's wedding as much as the next person. How was I to know?

Bobby and I were less and less friends after that. It didn't happen all at once, but bit by bit, over the summer mostly. s.e.x came between us. Bobby went off and joined Little League. He turned out to be really good at it, and he met a lot of boys who didn't live so near to us but had houses he could bike to. He dumped me, which hurt in an impersonal, inevitable way. I believed I had brought it on myself, leaving him that day, going home to a warm house and never saying a word to anyone. At that age, at that time, I did not believe this was something a boy would have done.

So Bobby and I continued to attend the same school and see each other about in our yards, and play sometimes when the game was big and involved other people as well. I grew up enough to understand what our parents thought of McBean, that he was often drunk. This was what had made his nose purple and made him rave about the Stuarts and made him slip in his snowy yard, his arms flapping like wings as he fell. "It's a miracle," my mother said, "that he never breaks a bone." But nothing much more happened between Bobby and me until the year we turned sixteen, me in February, him in May.

He was tired a lot that year and developed such alarming bruises under his eyes that his parents took him to a doctor who sent him right away to a different doctor. At dinner a few weeks later, my mother said she had something to tell me. Her eyes were shiny and her voice was coa.r.s.e. "Bobby has leukemia," she said.

"He'll get better," I said quickly. Partly I was asking, but mostly I was warning her not to tell me differently. I leaned into her and she must have thought it was for comfort, but it wasn't. I did it so I wouldn't be able to see her face. She put her arm around me, and I felt her tears falling on the top of my hair.

Bobby had to go to Indianapolis for treatments. Spring came, and summer, and he missed the baseball season. Fall, and he had to drop out of school. I didn't see him much, but his mother was over for coffee sometimes, and she had grown sickly herself, sad and thin and gray. "We have to hope," I heard her telling my mother. "The doctor says he is doing as well as we could expect. We're very encouraged." Her voice trembled defiantly.

Bobby's friends came often to visit; I saw them trooping up the porch, all vibrant and healthy, stamping the slush off their boots and trailing their scarves. They went in noisy, left quiet. Sometimes I went with them. Everyone loved Bobby, though he lost his hair and swelled like a beached seal and it was hard to remember that you were looking at a gifted athlete, or even a boy.

Spring came again, but after a few weeks of it, winter returned suddenly with a strange storm. In the morning when I left for school, I saw a new bud completely encased in ice, and three dead birds whose feet had frozen to the telephone wires. This was the day Arnold Becker gave me the message that Bobby wanted to see me. "Right away," Arnie said. "This afternoon. And just you. None of your girlfriends with you."

In the old days Bobby and I used to climb in and out each other's windows, but this was for good times and for intimacy; I didn't even consider it. I went to the front door and let his mother show me to his room as if I didn't even know the way. Bobby lay in his bed, with his puffy face and a new tube sticking into his nose and down his throat. There was a strong, strange odor in the room. I was afraid it was Bobby and wished not to get close enough to see.

He had sores in his mouth, his mother had explained to me. It was difficult for him to eat or even to talk. "You do the talking," she suggested. But I couldn't think of anything to say.

And anyway, Bobby came right to the point. "Do you remember," he asked me, "that day in the McBean cellar?" Talking was an obvious effort. It made him breathe hard, as if he'd been running.

Truthfully, I didn't remember. Apparently I had worked to forget it. I remember it now, but at the time, I didn't know what he was talking about.

"Bonnie Prince Charlie," he said, with an impatient rasp so I thought he was delirious. "I need you to go back. I need you to bring me a bottle of whiskey from McBean's cellar. There's a unicorn on the label."

"Why do you want whiskey?"

"Don't ask McBean. He'll never give it to you. Just take it. You would still fit through the window."

"Why do you want whiskey?"

"The unicorn label. Very important. Maybe," said Bobby, "I just want to taste one really good whiskey before I die. You do this and I'll owe you forever. You'll save my life."

He was exhausted. I went home. I did not plan to break into McBean's cellar. It was a mad request from a delusional boy. It saddened me, but I felt no obligation. I did think I could get him some whiskey. I had some money, I would spare no expense. But I was underage. I ate my dinner and tried to think who I could get to buy me liquor, who would do it, and who would even know a fine whiskey if they saw one. And while I was working out the problem I began, bit by bit, piece by piece, bite by bite, to remember. First I remembered the snow, remembered standing by the tree watching the cellar window with snow swirling around me. Then I remembered offering to shovel the walk. I remembered the footprints leading into the cellar window. It took all of dinner, most of the time when I was falling asleep, some concentrated sessions when I woke during the night. By morning, when the sky was light again, I remembered it completely.

It had been my idea and then I had let Bobby execute it and then I had abandoned him. I left him there that day and in another story, someone else's story, he was tortured or raped or even killed and eaten, although you'd have to be an adult to believe in these possibilities. The whole time he was in the McBean house I was lying on my bed and worrying about him, thinking, Boy, he's really going to get it, but mostly worrying what I could tell my parents that would be plausible and would keep me out of it. The only way I could think of to make it right was to do as he'd asked and break into the cellar again.

I also got caught, got caught right off. There was a trap. I tripped a wire rigged to a stack of boards; they fell with an enormous clatter and McBean was there, just as he'd been for Bobby, with those awful cavernous eyes, before I could make it back out the window.

"Who sent you?" he shouted at me. "What are you looking for?"

So I told him.

"That sneaking, thieving, lying boy," said McBean. "It's a lie, what he's said. How could it be true? And anyway, I couldn't spare it." I could see, behind him, the bottles with the unicorn label. There were half a dozen of them. All I asked was for one.

"He's a wonderful boy." I found myself crying.

"Get out," said McBean. "The way you came. The window."

"He's dying," I said. "And he's my best friend." I crawled back out, while McBean stood and watched me, and walked back home with a face filled with tears. I was not giving up. There was another dinner I didn't eat and another night I didn't sleep. In the morning it was snowing, as if spring had never come. I planned to cut cla.s.s and break into the cellar again. This time I would be looking for traps. But as I pa.s.sed McBean's house, carrying my books and pretending to be on my way to school, I heard his front door.

"Come here," McBean called angrily from his porch. He gave me a bottle, wrapped in red tissue. "There," he said. "Take it." He went back inside, but as I left he called again from behind the door. "Bring back what he doesn't drink. What's left is mine. It's mine, remember." And at that exact moment, the snow turned to rain.

For this trip I used the old window route. Bobby was almost past swallowing. I had to tip it from a spoon into his throat and the top of his mouth was covered with sores, so it burned him badly. One spoonful was all he could bear. But I came back the next day and repeated it, and the next, and by the fourth he could take it easily, and after a week he was eating again, and after two weeks I could see that he was going to live, just by looking in his mother's face. "He almost died of the cure," she told me. "The chemo. But we've done it. We've turned the corner." I left her thanking G.o.d and went into Bobby's room, where he was sitting up and looking like a boy again. I returned half the bottle to McBean.

"Did you spill any?" he asked angrily, taking it back. "Don't tell me it took so much."

And one night that next summer, in Bryan's Park with the firecrackers going off above us, Bobby and I sat on a blanket and he told me McBean's story.

WE FINISHED SCHOOL and graduated. I went to IU, but Bobby went to college in Boston and settled there. s.e.x came between us again. He came home once to tell his mother and father that he was gay and then took off like the whole town burned to the touch.

Bobby was the first person that I loved and lost, although there have, of course, been others since. Twenty-five years later I tracked him down and we had a dinner together. We were awkward with each other; the evening wasn't a great success. He tried to explain to me why he had left, as an apology for dumping me again. "It was just so hard to put the two lives together. At the time I felt that the first life was just a lie. I felt that everyone who loved me had been lied to. But now-being gay seems to be all I am sometimes. Now sometimes I want someplace where I can get away from it. Someplace where I'm just Bobby again. That turned out to be real, too." He was not meeting my eyes, and then suddenly he was. "In the last five years I've lost twenty-eight of my friends."

"Are you all right?" I asked him.

"No. But if you mean, do I have AIDS, no, I don't. I should, I think, but I don't. I can't explain it."

There was a candle between us on the table. It flickered ghosts into his eyes. "You mean the whiskey," I said.

"Yeah. That's what I mean."

The whiskey had seemed easy to believe in when I was seventeen and Bobby had just had a miraculous recovery and the snow had turned to rain. I hadn't believed in it much since. I hadn't supposed Bobby had either, because if he did then I really had saved his life back then and you don't leave a person who saves your life without a word. Those unicorn horns you read about in Europe and Scandinavia. They all turned out to be from narwhals. They were brought in by the Vikings through China. I've read a bit about it. Sometimes, someone just gets a miracle. Why not you? "You haven't seen Mr. McBean lately," I said. "He's getting old. Really old. Deadly old."

"I know," said Bobby, but the conclusion he drew was not the same as mine. "Believe me, I know. That whiskey is gone. I'd have been there to get it if it wasn't. I'd have been there twenty-eight times."

Bobby leaned forward and blew the candle out. "Remember when we wanted to live forever?" he asked me. "What made us think that was such a great idea?"

I NEVER WENT inside the toy store in The Hague. I don't know what the music box played, "Edelweiss," perhaps, or "Lara's Theme," nothing to do with me. I didn't want to risk the strong sense I had that it had been put there for me-had traveled whatever travels, just to be there in that store window for me to see at that particular moment-with any evidence to the contrary. I didn't want to expose my own fragile magic to the light of day.

Certainly I didn't buy it. I didn't need to. It was already mine, only not here, not now. Not as something I bought for myself, on an afternoon by myself, in a foreign country with my mother dying a world away. But as something I found one Christmas morning, wrapped in red paper. I stood looking through the gla.s.s and wished that Bobby and I were still friends. That he knew me well enough to have bought me the music box as a gift.

And then I didn't wish that at all. Already I have too many friends, care too much about too many people, have exposed myself to loss on too many sides. I could never have imagined as a child how much it could hurt you to love people. It takes an adult to imagine such a thing. And that's the end of my story.

If I envy anything about McBean now, it is his solitude. But no, that's not really what I wish for either. When I was seventeen I thought McBean was a drunk because he had to have the whiskey so often. Now, when I believe in the whiskey at all, I think, like Bobby, that drinking was just the only way to live through living forever.

LILY RED.

One day Lily decided to be someone else. Someone with a past. It was an affliction of hers, wanting this. The desire was seldom triggered by any actual incident or complaint but seemed instead to be related to the act or prospect of lateral movement. She felt it every time a train pa.s.sed. She would have traded places instantly with any person on any train. She felt it often in the car. She drove onto the freeway that ran between her job and her house, and she thought about driving right past her exit and stopping in some small town wherever she happened to run out of gas, and the next thing she knew, that was exactly what she had done.

Except that she was stopped by the police instead. She was well beyond the city; she had been through several cities, and the sky had darkened. The landscape flattened and she fell into a drowsy rhythm in which she and the car were both pa.s.sengers in a small, impellent world defined by her headlights. It was something of a shock to have to stop. She sat in her car while the police light rotated behind her, and at regular intervals she watched her hands turn red on the steering wheel. She had never been stopped by the police before. In the rearview mirror she could see the policeman talking to his radio. His door was slightly open; the light was on inside his car. He got out and came to talk to her. She turned her motor off. "Lady," he said, and she wondered if policemen on television always called women lady because that was what real policemen did, or if he had learned this watching television just as she had. "Lady, you were flying. I clocked you at eighty."

Eighty. Lily couldn't help but be slightly impressed. She had been twenty-five miles per hour over the limit without even realizing she was speeding. It suggested she could handle even faster speeds. "Eighty," she said contritely. "You know what I think I should do? I think I've been driving too long, and I think I should just find a place to stay tonight. I think that would be best. I mean, eighty. That's too fast. Don't you think?"

"I really do." The policeman removed a pen from the pocket inside his jacket.

"I won't do it again," Lily told him. "Please don't give me a ticket."

"I could spare you the ticket," the policeman said, "and I could read in the paper tomorrow that you smashed yourself into a retaining wall not fifteen miles from here. I don't think I could live with myself. Give me your license. Just take it out of the wallet, please. Mattie Drake runs a little bed-and-breakfast place in Two Trees. You want the next exit and bear left. First right, first right again. Street dead-ends in Mattie's driveway. There's a sign on the lawn: MATTIE'S. Should be all lit up this time of night. It's a nice place and doesn't cost too much in the off season." He handed Lily back her license and the ticket for her to sign. He took his copy. "Get a good night's sleep," he said, and in the silence she heard his boots scattering gravel from the shoulder of the road as he walked away.

She crumpled the ticket into the glove compartment and waited for him to leave. He shut off the rotating light, turned on the headlights, and outwaited her. He followed all the way to the next exit. So Lily had to take it.

She parked her car on the edge of Mattie's lawn. Moths circled the lights on the sign and on the porch. A large white owl slid through the dusky air, transformed by the lights beneath it into something angelic. A cricket landed on the sleeve of her linen suit. The sprinklers went on suddenly; the watery hiss erased the hum of insects, but the pathway to the door remained dry. Lily stood on the lighted porch and rang the bell.

The woman who answered wore blue jeans and a flannel shirt. She had the angular hips of an older woman, but her hair showed very little gray, just a small patch right at the forehead. "Come in, darling," she said. There was a faint southern softness in her voice. "You look tired. Do you want a room? Have you come to see the caves? I'm Mattie."

"Yes, of course," Lily told her. "I need a room. I met some people who were here last year. You really have to see these caves, they told me."

"I'll have Katherine pack you a lunch if you like," Mattie offered. "It's beautiful hiking weather. You won't get nearly so hot as in the summer. You can go tomorrow."

Lily borrowed the phone in the living room to call David. It sat on a small table between a gla.s.s ball with a single red rosebud frozen inside and a picture of the Virgin praying. The Virgin wore a blue mantilla and appeared to be suspended in a cloudless sky. The phone had a dial which Lily spun. She was so used to the tune their number made on the touch phone at work that she missed hearing it. She listened to the answering machine, heard her voice which sounded nothing like her voice, suggesting that she leave a message. "I'm in Two Trees at Mattie's bed-and-breakfast," she said. "I had this sudden impulse to see the caves. I may stay a couple of days. Will you call Harriet and tell her I won't be in tomorrow? It's real slow. There won't be a problem." She would have told David she missed him, but she ran out of time. She would have only said it out of politeness anyway. They had been married nine years. She would miss him later. She would begin to miss him when she began to miss herself. He might be missing her, too, just about then. It would be nice if all these things happened at the same time.

She took the key from Mattie, went upstairs, used the bathroom at the end of the hall, used someone else's toothbrush, rinsing it out repeatedly afterward, unlocked her door, removed all her clothes, and cried until she fell asleep.

In the morning Lily lay in bed and watched the sun stretch over the quilt and onto the skin of her arms and her hands. She looked around the room. The bed was narrow and had a headpiece made of iron. A pattern of small pink flowers papered the walls. On the bookcase next to the bed a china lady held a china umbrella with one hand and extended the other, palm up, to see if the rain had stopped. There were books. Beauty's Secret, one of them said on the spine. Lily opened it, but it turned out to be about horses.

A full-length mirror hung on the back of the bedroom door. Lily didn't notice until the sunlight touched its surface, doubling in brightness. She rose and stood in front of it, backlit by the sunny window, frontlit by the mirror so that she could hardly see. She leaned in closer. Last night's crying had left her eyes red and the lids swollen. She looked at herself for a long time, squinting and changing the angle. Who was she? There was absolutely no way to tell.

The smell of coffee came up the stairs and through the shut door. Lily found her clothes on the desk chair where she had left them. She put them on: stockings, a fuchsia blouse, an eggsh.e.l.l business suit, heels. She used the bathroom, someone else's hairbrush as well as someone else's toothbrush, and came downstairs.

"You can't go hiking dressed like that," Mattie told her, and of course Lily couldn't. "You have nothing else? What size shoe do you wear? A six and a half? Six? Tiny little thing, aren't you? Katherine might have something that will do." She raised her voice. "Katherine? Katherine!"

Katherine came through the doorway at the bottom of the stairs, drying her hands on a dish towel. She was somewhat younger than Mattie though older than Lily, middle forties, perhaps, and heavier, a dark-skinned woman with straight black hair. On request she produced jeans for Lily, a sleeveless T-shirt, a red sweatshirt, gray socks, and sneakers. Everything was too big for Lily. Everything was wearable.

Mattie took her through the screen door and out the back porch after breakfast. Beyond the edge of Mattie's sprinklers, the lawn stopped abruptly at a hill of sand and manzanita. Mattie had stowed a lunch and a canteen in a yellow day pack. She began to help Lily into it. "You go up," Mattie said. "All the way up. And then down. You can see the trail from the other side of the fence. Watch for rattlers. You hiked much?" Lily was having trouble slipping her left arm under the second strap. It caught at the elbow, her arm pinned behind her. Mattie eased the pack off and began again.

"Oh, yes," Lily a.s.sured her. "I've hiked a lot." Mattie looked unconvinced. "I'm a rock climber," said Lily. "That's the kind of hiking I'm used to. Crampons and ropes and mallets. I don't usually wear them on my back. I wear them on my belt. I take groups out. Librarians and schoolteachers and beauticians. You know."

"Well, there's just a trail here," said Mattie doubtfully. "I don't suppose you can get into trouble as long as you stay on the trail. Your shoes don't really fit well. I'm afraid you'll blister."

"I once spent three days alone in the woods without food or shelter and it snowed. I was getting a merit badge." The day pack was finally in place. "Thank you," Lily said.

"Wait here. I'm going to get some moleskin for your feet. And I'm going to send Jep along with you. Jep has a lot of common sense. And Jep knows the way. You'll be glad of the company," Mattie told her. She disappeared back into the house.

"It was in Borneo," Lily said softly, so that Mattie wouldn't hear. "You want to talk about blisters. You try walking in the snows of Borneo."

Jep turned out to be a young collie. One ear flopped over in proper collie fashion. One pointed up like a shepherd's. "I've heard some nice things about you," Lily told him. He followed Lily out to the gate and then took the lead, his tail and hindquarters moving from side to side with every step. He set an easy pace. The trail was unambiguous. The weather was cool when they started. In an hour or so, Lily removed her sweatshirt and Jep's tongue drooped from his mouth. Everyone felt good.

The sun was not yet overhead when Lily stopped for lunch. "Eleven twenty-two," she told Jep. "Judging solely by the sun." Katherine had packed apple juice and cold chicken and an orange with a seam cut into the peel and a chocolate Hostess cupcake with a cream center for dessert. Lily had not seen a cupcake like that since she had stopped taking a lunch to school. She sat with her back against a rock overhang and shared it with Jep, giving him none of the cream filling. There was a red place on her left heel, and she covered it with moleskin. Jep lay on his side. Lily felt drowsy. "You want to rest awhile?" she asked Jep. "I don't really care if we make the caves, and you've seen them before. I could give a d.a.m.n about the caves, if you want to know the truth." She yawned. Somewhere to her left a small animal scuttled in the brush. Jep hardly lifted his head. Lily made a pillow out of Katherine's red sweatshirt and went to sleep, leaning against the overhang.

When she woke, the sun was behind her. Jep was on his feet, looking at something above her head. His tail wagged slowly and he whined once. On the ground, stretching over him and extending several more feet, lay the shadow of a man, elongated legs, one arm up as though he were waving. When Lily moved away from the overhang and turned to look, he was gone.

It unsettled her. She supposed that a seasoned hiker would have known better than to sleep on the trail. She turned to go back to Mattie's and had only walked a short way, less than a city block, when she saw something she had missed coming from the other direction. A woman was painted onto the flat face of a rock which jutted up beside the trail. The perspective was somewhat flattened, and the image had been simplified, which made it extraordinarily compelling somehow. Especially for a painting on a rock. When had Lily ever seen anything painted on a rock other than KELLY LOVES ERIC or ANGELA PUTS OUT? The woman's long black hair fell straight down both sides of her face. Her dark eyes were half closed; her skin was brown. She was looking down at her hands, which she held cupped together, and she was dressed all in red. Wherever the surface of the rock was the roughest, the paint had cracked, and one whole sleeve had flaked off entirely. Lily leaned down to touch the missing arm. There was a silence as if the birds and the snakes and the insects had all suddenly run out of breath. Lily straightened and the ordinary noises began again. She followed Jep back down the trail.

"I didn't get to the caves," she admitted to Mattie. "I'll go again tomorrow. But I did see something intriguing: the painting. The woman painted on the rock. I'm used to graffiti, but not this kind. Who painted her?"

"I don't know," said Mattie. "She's been here longer than I have. We get a lot of farm labor through, seasonal labor, you know. I always thought she looked Mexican. And you see paintings like that a lot in Mexico. Rock Madonnas. I read somewhere that the artists usually use their own mother's faces for inspiration. The writer said you see these paintings by the roadside all the time and that those cultures in which men idolize their mothers are the most s.e.xist cultures in the world. Interesting article. She's faded a lot over the years."

"You don't often see a Madonna dressed in red," Lily said.

"No, you don't," Mattie agreed. "Blue usually, isn't it?" She helped Lily out of the pack. "Did you get blisters?" she asked. "I worried about you."

"No," said Lily, although the spot on her heel had never stopped bothering her. "I was fine."

"You know who might be able to tell you about the painting? Allison Beale. Runs the county library but lives here in Two Trees. She's been here forever. You could run over tonight and ask her if you like. I'll give you the address. She likes company."

So Lily got back in her car with Allison Beale's address in her pocket and a map to Allison's house. She was supposed to go there first and then pick up some dinner at a little restaurant called the Italian Kitchen, but she turned left instead of right and then left again to a bar she'd noticed on her way into Two Trees, with a neon martini gla.s.s tipping in the window. The only other customer, a man, stood with his back to her, studying the jukebox selections but choosing nothing. Lily sat at the counter and ordered a margarita. It came without salt and the ice floated inside it uncrushed. "You're the lady staying with Mattie," the bartender informed her. "My name is Egan. Been to the caves?"

"Lily," Lily said. "I don't like caves. I can get lost in the supermarket. Wander for days without a sweater in the frozen foods. I'm afraid to think what would happen to me in a cave."

"These caves aren't deep," the bartender said, wiping the counter in front of her with the side of his hand. "Be a shame to come all the way to Two Trees and not even see the caves."

"Take a native guide," the other man suggested. He had come up behind her while she ordered.

She slid around on the bar stool.

"Henry," he told her. He wore a long black braid and a turquoise necklace. The last time Lily had seen him he had been dressed as a policeman. She'd had no sense of his hair being long like this.

"You're an Indian," Lily said.

"Can't put anything past you." He sat down on the stool next to hers. Lily guessed he was somewhere in his thirties, just about her own age. "Take off your wedding ring and I'll buy you a drink."

She slid the ring off her finger. Her hands were cold and it didn't even catch at the knuckle. She laid it on the napkin. "It's off," she said. "But that's all I'm taking off. I hope we understand each other."

The bartender brought her a second margarita. "The first one was on the house," he said. "Because you're a guest in Two Trees. The second one is on Henry. We'll worry about the third when you get to it."

Lily got to it about an hour later. She could easily have done without it. She was already quite drunk. She and Henry and the bartender were still the only people in the bar.

"It just intrigued me, you know?" she said. The bartender stood draped across the counter next to her. Henry leaned on one elbow. Lily could hear that she was slurring her words. She tried to sharpen them. "It seemed old. I thought it intrigued me enough to go talk to the librarian about it, but I was wrong about that." She laughed and started on her third drink. "It should be restored," she added. "Like the Sistine Chapel."

"I can tell you something about it," the bartender said. "I can't swear any of it's true, but I know what people say. It's a picture of a miracle." He glanced at Henry. "Happened more than a hundred years ago. It was painted by a man, a local man, I don't think anyone remembers who. And this woman appeared to him one day, by the rock. She held out her hands, cupped, just the way he drew them, like she was offering him something, but her hands were empty. And then she disappeared again."