Daniel had silently taken the bottle down from a high shelf. “Do you love him?” he said. “That's all I want to know.”
Emily tried to answer honestly, to piece together all those afternoons. The details slipped away like water into the ground and Emily felt as if she too was somehow evaporating. Yes, she said. Not because it was true, but because she knew it would give her a foothold in whatever came next.
Now she'd come to the highest point of the ramp and looked out to the dim shore. No moon. Just a million pinpricks of light. She heard the roar of water and felt wind mixed with rain against her skin. She turned her back and walked quickly off the ramp and started to run in what felt like long elegant strides up the beach highway.
Their cigarette tips glowed, moved up to their mouths then down as they sat in bed against the cool wall in Birdflower's cottage. Emily said, “It's always been like this: from one bed to another.”
Birdflower took a drag. “Does he have a gun?”
Emily felt the heat and closeness of his legs. “I don't know,” she said, tipping her ashes over the side of the bed. “He's not what I knew.” She flinched at the sound of a car's tires and then saw the lights flash quickly over the wall. ‘'I'm sorry,” she said, pulling hard on the cigarette, trying to make herself, the bed, and the room all into smoke. Her spine was getting sore against the headboard so she slipped down under the sheets. “I have things to think about,” she said, pressing her head to the pillow.
Birdflower looked down at her. “So do I,” he said.
“This is me,” she said.
“I know.” He let his fingers brush her shoulder.
“You'll never know everything,” she said.
“I don't need to know but so much,” Birdflower said.
“There are things—”
“I don't care,” he said. “Just tell me if you feel like doing it with anyone else.” He rubbed his eyes and tipped his head back to the wall. “I might hurt you.”
“No, you wouldn't,” she said.
“We've been up too long,” Birdflower said. “I don't even know what I think.”
“The light will help,” Emily said. “Everything will change then.” She saw a big pink shell on the rag rug. She held it to her ear. “Do you hear me?”
The ocean roared and she pressed the big shell into her temple — she knew the trick; her own pulse magnified in the caverns of the conch shell.
Ten years was a long time, especially on an island like this one. She was familiar with the seasonal routines. Summer heat's steady work, the pause and seep of fall, cedars sculpted by winter, then spring's rustling pulse and the peeling back again to summer. Each had its own grooved ways, familiar as sisters to her. And this was the first time — besides that December years ago when a man had offered to take her to Barcelona — that she had tinkered with the thought of leaving. She knew John Berry never went farther than Norfolk. Emily watched the bars of light on the ceiling; she shook her head.
Anywhere it would begin again. She held the shell close to her ear and after another hour or so, at the first rise of gray light, let it lull her to sleep.
AUGUST
Lets ride a gull's wing. First in the direction of an August moon, then rounding back attracted by movement somewhere in the valley between dunes. It's a nude couple on a white sheet that whips up and molds around them. The man lets his hand rest on her stomach and watches for falling stars; the sleeping woman dreams of the sheet lifting, floating them over the water as if they were some great bird. The man pulls her close. From this vantage, high over the water, the moon is ahead, and the embracing couple hold light like a lantern.
FOURTEEN. LILA'S WORRIED
Lila imagined being inside of herself, watching her tiny baby opening its mouth to the size of a grain of sand, then wider like a penny, a quarter, a rubber ball, a Frisbee, Hula-Hoop — Lila felt her hands go up and a pull at her fingertips. The mouth still opening, the swamp ponds, the round inlet, and then the whole night sky as she watched her feet disappear into the baby's mouth.
“I'm still talking to you,” her father said as she held her fork, peas quivering, in front of her mouth. “Don't get your heart all sick over that boy.”
Lila chewed and watched her father push his chair back. Her father looked like a piece of beef jerky from being the focal point of the sun on his boat for so long. His skin was hard and thick, especially on his forehead and at the top of his shoulders. He was skinny, too, and Lila attributed this to drinking whiskey and waking so early every day of his life.
“You tell her,” he said to Lila's mother, who stood scraping a plate into the garbage, her housedress moving about her knees.
“No use,” she said, not looking up. “Love is blind.”
“And deaf too,” Lila's father said.
Lila watched a thin version of her father's face in the knife by her plate and phrased the way she would tell Eddie tonight. They would sit on his stoop in the light of the porch lantern and she would say it right out, each word solid as apples lined up on a kitchen counter.
“You meeting him tonight?” her father asked, getting up. He spun a toothpick between his teeth.
Lila nodded her head and said in a French accent, “Of course, Papa.”
He shook his head and moved to the screen door. “It's not all as great as it seems now from your angle,” he said.
“I'll be the judge of that,” she yelled after him. She heard him settle himself in a porch rocker.
Alone at the table, Lila sipped milk from a beer mug. She was five days late. In the bathroom, twenty times a day, she would kneel on the cool blue tiles, make promises, and ask for favors. “I'll become a nun,” was the latest. “I swear I will,” she'd whisper to the toilet seat, clenching the shag lid cover with both hands. Lila pushed the pork chop bones around and made a cross. She saw herself like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. In black robes, her head bowed to the rail, she would hear the voices of children chanting in a low, holy way behind her. Then a sound like the pump of birds’ wings and she would turn her head to the stained glass window, to the blue sky above that, and thank him for taking it back.
Lila's mother came from the sink and put her fingers in Lila's hair. “You look tired. Why don't you go lay down?” she said. Lila thought maybe she'd go with him to Tennessee, move right into his room — sleep curled around him in between football sheets. Every day her belly would balloon until her stomach was between them like a hard, round basketball. When her time came, she would know and rise early to walk through his father's field of seedlings.
“I remember my first one,” her mother was saying. “His name was Dean. He scooped ice cream at the stand they used to have up near the beach road.” Lila watched her mother's body expand with breath. Her face was still flushed from leaning over the dinner pots and her hair was sloppily knotted at the back of her head. “He told me about the lizards and cactus they had in New Mexico.”
“What happened?” Lila said, hard-pressed to believe her mother had ever had a teenage boyfriend.
“Not much,” her mother said, moving back to the sink's running water. “After the summer I got a few letters talking about the desert, but he never invited me.”