“You moved away,” Emily said, pulling the pin back and holding the cotton to his ear. “You're bleeding.”
“It doesn't hurt at all; all I can feel are your fingers,” Eddie said, just as the high beams of the truck turned again and blinked toward them.
Lila focused the flashlight on Emily's face. “I bet he's going to drive past here all night.”
NINETEEN. SUMMER ROOMS
Emily gave Lila a chunk of cake for her parents, and after bandaging Eddie's ear, told him he could stay out till 2 A.M. John Berry kept circling. Each time the truck turned, Birdflower looked into the lights. He wanted to protect Emily and would fight if he had to. Finally, she asked him to go. He got up and started pacing. The porch floorboards creaked and she urged him again. “Okay,” he said, grabbing his jacket. “I won't stick around if you don't want me.” Outside on the walk, he looked meanly over his shoulder and muttered, “I hope you get what you deserve.”
She sat down on a porch chair and tried to lock eyes with the truck's lights. It was like looking into the sun. It has to happen, she thought. Between two people, things could be bad for months, even years, but there was always one thing that signaled the end, that made any future connection impossible. Sometimes it was violence or burlesquing an earlier time, an encounter that meant something and was important to the beginning of the relationship. For some reason, the bottle wasn't enough.
On his twentieth revolution, he slowed and Emily focused on his face folded into the angles of the dark truck. He leaned out the window. Emily held up her hands to show that everyone had left. He went up the road, rounding again. Soon the truck lights grew brighter and moved to her neighbor's house, her own bent cedars, quick over her bedroom window, and then straight to her. He pulled up the driveway and switched off the lights. The truck hummed down.
For a long moment he sat there looking at her through the windshield, then got out and walked up the stairs.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. He leaned back against the porch rail and crossed his arms.
She noticed how long his hair had gotten and that, without her to shave them, the hairs on the back of his neck had grown and curled into ringlets. His body had thinned, and there was a ravaged and bruised look about his mouth.
“All I want to know, I guess, is if you love this guy or not.”
“I don't know,” Emily said.
“Well, decide,” John Berry said. ‘'I'll wait.” He walked to the porch swing and sat down. The chain creaked back and forth.
“What do you want from me now?” she said, looking over the yard at the shaded window of the neighboring house.
“What I want is a yes or no answer,” he said.
“I never think like that,” she said. She looked down to her hands resting in her lap. Her fingers curled toward her palms and she deliberately flattened them. The truth was, it was her moods, tonight, tomorrow, and a few weeks after Eddie left, that would motivate her one way or another.
She stood and leaned against her white porch pillar. “The part I like is when you can still buy the future.”
“Buy the future?” John Berry asked.
“Yeah. Because it's easy: an empty house on some street, not a specific one with a guy's lifetime of junk spread out like guts in every room.”
“None of this had to happen,” John Berry said, shaking his head. “You could have told me anything.”
The night breeze was deepening and Emily heard the metal mobile chime delicately.
“You know that's not true,” she said.
“It is true, damnit.” He pulled at the hair on the back of his head, as if to lengthen it.
“You threw a bottle at me,” Emily said, and turned. She shivered and felt goose bumps rise on her legs and arms.
“Emily—” his voice thickened. “I'm sorry.”
She walked across the porch. “Look at these,” she said, turning her head to show him the scars scattered all over her face.
“It was a crazy thing.” He grabbed her hand and tried to pull her down to him. The chair swing rocked jaggedly.
Emily freed herself and stepped back. Even in the dark she suddenly seemed to see everything with perfect clarity — the shingled edge of her cottage, the clay pots of jasmine against it, the glints of light off the chain suspending the porch swing, the railings and the bits of bush that reached through them. And him, in the middle of these shapes and angles of wood, looking at her face, counting the places he'd marked her.
John Berry sat on the floor lighting candles. He moved from one short fat candle to the next. They smelled of honey, elderberry, or lemon. Hot wax gathered in puddles on the floor; flame shadows pulsed and jumped on the ceiling. He found shapes: animal bones, starfish, and whales. The poster women seemed to have joined hands in a circle, showed an occasional lip, earlobe, or thigh. Emily ran the spigot in the kitchen. John Berry surveyed the pans and bowls filled with water and arranged around the whole room. Together they sparked like the sea under light. The water stopped running and she carried two long aluminum cake pans into the bedroom. She moved quietly. “One at our feet,” he said, lying longways on the oval rag carpet in the center of the candles. “And the other at our heads.”
“Lay down with me,” he said. He smoothed his fingers on the inside of her wrist, then outlined her inner thigh. Her breathing changed. “Take your shirt off.”
She pulled her blouse over her head in one motion. Her loose breasts swayed. John Berry traced the blue veins branching like delicate road maps. He moved his face down and made his mouth and the movement of his tongue the center of the room.
John Berry unzipped her jeans, loosened her underpants, and with two fingers felt for wetness. Emily murmured. He was distracted again by the wineglass near the curve of her lower back. He reached over, lifted it to his lips, then tossed it into a nearby wooden bowl. Water flew up high and landed in droplets on her back. One wick sputtered, made a noise like a soul lifting from a body, and sent the thinnest line of smoke up into the room.
Emily watched the play of bluing crimson flames from inside closed eyelids. His hands were settling on her hips, every finger sending off silver. There were stretch marks there, like water, peachy currents crossing and connecting, moving under the skin then reappearing. She opened her eyes. The candle wax gave in the way mud does around high rivers and gathered on her wood plank floor. This shouldn't be happening, she thought, and pulled herself up. John Berry fell back as she rose. “Come back to me,” he said.
“You're just doing what you always do, and so am I.” John Berry sighed.
“Get up and lay on the bed,” Emily said. She watched his loose sex darken with shadow as he stood and walked in the thin passage between fire and water.
Emily took a deep breath and blew toward him. The air made everything in her room flicker with liquid light.
“Limitations,” Emily said. “I know mine better.”
“That's too bad,” he said.
“It's not bad. It's okay.”
They never touched except for once when he brushed the tips of her fingers with his lips. This summer is broken no matter what happens now, Emily thought, very late, as she listened to John Berry's breath widen with sleep. For the first time in a long while she felt still. For better or worse, the patterns of the island were taken into her completely now. Emily got up and moved about the room, nudging the water containers toward the walls with her feet. She swayed her hips; her hair twirled out. This night she had returned to herself. Spears of flame and shadow flickered over the walls as she moved, and she confused them into men and women and spirits.