The house is white, with black shutters; the porch ceiling is a soft blue, as though a wedge of the noonday’ sky had been caught inside the wood.
■■■
Morrow has a wicked history, one the children have no interest in, a history prettily disguised by the large white sea captains’ houses, and the town common ringed with shops, and the day-trippers up from Boston all summer, here for the wide, smooth beaches. Whether or not two witches were drowned in the pond in the center of the common is uncertain, but many towns in Massachusetts could claim that heritage. What nearly turned Morrow into a ghost town was the influenza epidemic after World War I.
Whole families perished in single rooms. Children were lost one after another, wives locked themselves in attics so they would not infect their husbands. For years afterward no one was interested-in the sea captains houses or the summer cottages, even though the -reason they were abandoned was long forgotten.
■■■
There have been times, inside Laurel’s cottage, when Polly has found herself believing in an afterlife. She tells herself it is the powerful conviction clients, all so desperately convinced whoever they have loved and lost can be reached, that affects her.
Or is it the place itself, the movement of reeds cattails in the marsh, the way the light falls and is caught inside the pearl Laurel wears on her finger.
■■■
Polly sees a hand from inside one of the showers holding onto the outside wall. Without thinking, she begins to run.
Amanda is doubled over; her blond hair looks green. She is vomiting in the shower, her whole body heaving. A towel she had tried to wrap around herself has fallen to the floor and is soaked. The water is still running. Polly feels absolutely cold. Maybe it’s all this water, the tiles, the green tint of the fluorescent lights. She puts her hands on Amanda’s shoulders and tries to support her. Amanda doesn’t seem to notice that her mother is there. She keeps vomiting until she has nothing to throw up but yellow bile.
When Amanda stops vomiting, she’s so weak Polly has trouble holding her up.
“You’ll be okay,” Polly says.
“I don’t feel good,” Amanda tells her.
Too much excitement, Polly thinks. Too much pressure. She puts her palm against Amanda’s forehead and realizes that her daughter has a fever, a high one. Polly reaches the taps and turns off the hot, then cups her hand so she can scoop cold water over Amanda’s face. They are facing each other, with Amanda leaning against her so that Polly is soaked through her clothes.
“I’m freezing,” Amanda says.
In fact she is hotter than before.
Polly drags Amanda out of the shower, sits her on a bench, then grabs a towel and wraps it around her.
She runs to the locker, gets the pink gym bag, then runs back and quickly begins to dress her daughter.
Amanda feels heavy, as limp as straw.
“Ow,” Amanda says as Polly maneuvers one leg into a pair of shorts.
Polly gently touches the back of Amanda’s knee and feels that the joint is swollen.
She finishes dressing Amanda and helps her to stand.
“You’ll be better in the morning,” Polly says.
It’s what she always says when the children are sick, and they always believe her. But this time Polly is wrong. Just after dusk the rain will begin, but it won’t bring any relief. In the morning, the last day of August and the hottest on record, Amanda will still be shivering beneath two cotton quilts.
■■■
He was wrong about a lot of things.
Laurel never tricked him into marrying her. He fell in love with her all on his own, – he chose to ignore how shy she was, how ill at ease with people, including, it’s true, himself. He accused her of so many things, Laurel can no longer remember the list, although she certainly remembers how often he insisted that she was in love with death. He was more wrong about this than anything else; Laurel is, and always has been, terrified by death.
When a baby cries, she hears a death rattle. The branches of a white birch are crossbones. She cannot look at spaded earth, even if it is only a corner of a suburban lawn dug up for a new rhododendron.
She never wanted to receive messages, it just started to happen to her when she was twelve, beginning with what she thought was a dream. She was walking down a long corridor, which became more narrow as she went along, the walls and ceiling curving until the corridor became a tunnel.. She stopped. Everything around her was cold. In the distance she could see her grandmother falling.
Laurel’s grandmother wore a blue silk dress and a long rope of pearls, and she was falling downward, as though the tunnel were vertical, straight down from sky to earth. There was no pull of gravity, so every path was a slow circular spiral.
In the morning the call came that Laurel’s grandmother was dead. She had been at a wedding and had fallen; she’d had a stroke and never regained consciousness.
■■■
When she was thirteen, the messages began to come to her during her waking hours, messages from people she had never known in life. She could close her eyes in math class and hear a child’s voice, a classmate’s sister lost at birth. She dreaded the cold, clammy way her hands felt whenever she was near someone who had suffered a recent loss. While other girls her age were thinking about shades of lipstick and Saturday nights, Laurel could not stop thinking about the brevity of a human lifespan. At night her dreams were terrifying things filled with cemeteries, silence, full white moons.
When she was seventeen Laurel made a huge effort, and, with the help of a prescription for Valium, she nearly succeeded and stopped thinking about death. She finished high school, went to college, married when she was twenty-two.
■■■
For a while her. husband didn’t mind her odd habits.
He overlooked it when she hid in closets during thunderstorms, when she refused to leave the house for three weeks after their cat was run over by a car, when she couldn’t accompany him to his father’s funeral. It was true, he had plenty to complain about, everything she did she did halfheartedly. She’d start the laundry but never finish, so that her husband wore damp clothes to work. The frozen dinners she cooked were always icy in the middle.
She was still receiving messages, but they were jumbled now, as though she had a crossed connection, and she had a constant, dull headache. What Laurel could never understand was why, when he started to notice and list her faults, her husband seemed so surprised.
■■■
Pink silk and death did not go together.
■■■
It is the last day of August, and the last day of any month depresses Laurel. She remembers now that she dreamed about her childhood, and she never dreams anymore. Her sleep is usually empty and deep, as if she used up all her dream time during her waking hours.
■■■
Laurel goes to let the cat out; then for no reason she follows Stella out onto the wooden deck. The deck, which juts out from the house, is built on stilts right over the marsh. At night, Laurel can hear crabs clattering in through holes, burrowing in the damp basement, which is often flooded at high tide when there’s a full moon.
Once, she found a starfish on the cellar stairs.
She leans on the railing and feels the sun through her cotton blouse and on her bare legs. Before she came here, Laurel Smith had never seen a kingfisher; she couldn’t tell the difference between a cardinal and a wren. In a few minutes Betsy Stafford and the new client will both pull into the dirt driveway, but Polly will not be coming to photograph the reading.
It doesn’t matter, there will be nothing to photograph and Laurel Smith knows it.
She feels a pressure on her forehead, like a hand pushing against her.
■■■
Amanda’s door is open and the room is dark. All the shades have been pulled down. Charlie stops at the door and looks in.
“Hi,” Amanda says from under the quilts.
Charlie comes into the room and switches on the light on the night table. “Mom is so crazy about keeping things dark whenever anyone’s sick.”
“Yeah,” Amanda says.
“I’m going to look for my net,” Charlie says. “Me and Sevrin are going collecting.”
“Good luck,” Amanda says.
She’s whispering because her sore throat is really bad, the worst she can remember. She feels cold no matter how many quilts are piled on top of her. This is worse than when she had the chicken pox and couldn’t sit down, not even to go to the toilet. Worse than when she cried all night because her skin itched.
“Well, go ahead,” Amanda tells Charlie. “Go meet Sevrin.”
Her throat hurts so much she may start to cry, and she doesn’t want Charlie to see.
“I’ve got to stay with you,” Charlie tells her.
“Mom,” he says apologetically.
“Oh,” Amanda says, understanding completely. Her mother’s done the same thing with her, forcing her to spend time with Charlie when she doesn’t even want to be in the same room with him.
■■■
Charlie sits next to her, thinking about horseshoe crabs. If he bikes the long way, and rides along the marsh, he may find some on his way to meet Sevrin.
Horseshoe crabs are endlessly fascinating to him, since they were here before the dinosaurs. He cannot understand why no one has discovered the secret of how they managed to survive.
■■■
“I could bring you back a newt,” he tells Amanda.
“You could keep it in a terrarium.”
He realizes then that his sister has fallen asleep.
She’s holding onto the quilt his mother always covers them with when they’re sick. It is blue and white with a border of stars and a few boxes of red in the center.
They used to believe it was this quilt that made them well, and if both of them were sick they fought over it.
Charlie reaches up and turns off the lamp on the night table. He sits in the chair, his hands on his knees. He finds himself counting the minutes until his mother comes back. In the dark he can see the white stars in the border of the quilt, whiter even than bones.
■■■
He’s right. Amanda’s fever breaks sometime in the night, and by breakfast time her temperature is normal. She’s still too tired to do much more than sit on the couch and watch TV, and that suits Charlie since she might have wanted to come to the pond with him and she always wants to go swimming.
Amanda doesn’t have the patience to watch for specimens.
■■■
“Just think, tyrannosauruses might have hung out here,” Sevrin muses. “They could have attacked a brontosaurus right here where we’re sitting.”
Charlie opens his can of soda and drinks deeply. He doesn’t bother to tell Sevrin that tyrannosaurus and brontosaurus lived eighty million years apart, and that no fossils of either have been found anywhere near Morrow. Charlie’s been told he’s a know-it-all enough times for him to have learned when to keep his mouth shut.
■■■
There is a plunk in the water, as if the kingfisher had dropped a stone into the pond. When Charlie narrows his eyes he sees that the stone is moving. He nudges Sevrin again, and Sevrin automatically looks up, toward the kingfisher.
“I’ve already got him,” Sevrin says.
From this distance it looks like a plank of mossy wood, or an empty barrel. F-xcept that Charlie can see its eyes now. Charlie has not dared to tell Sevrin what he hopes. It’s so irrational, so unscientific, but he hopes they have stumbled upon a cryptodire, a turtle that developed in the Triassic period, alongside the dinosaurs, two hundred thirty million years ago. And when he thinks about it, it doesn’t really seem so impossible for one to exist when all modern-day turtles are relatives, virtually unchanged from the ones that survived what the dinosaurs could not.
■■■
Water sloshes against the thing that looks like a barrel. Charlie kicks Sevrin, hard, and Sevrin turns to him.
“Hey!” Sevrin says.
Charlie nods toward the pond and Sevrin follows his gaze. The turtle is getting closer.
“Holy shit,” Sevrin says.
“That’s him,” Charlie whispers.
Sevrin begins writing furiously in his log. Charlie watches as the turtle gets even closer, before it veers away and dives.
“No one would believe us,” Sevrin whispers.
“Who cares,” Charlie whispers. “We know what we saw.”
They stay for another two hours, forsaking lunch, but the turtle doesn’t resurface, or, if it does, it’s hidden by weeds.
■■■
“How about you guys helping out,” Sevrin’s father, Frank, says when he comes into the kitchen.
Sevrin’s father is big on asking them to help out, although Charlie has noticed that Frank never seems to do much of that himself.
“We’ve had an exhausting day,” Sevrin tells his father.
“Oh, really?” Frank says.
“Oh, yeah,” Sevrin tells him. “A mammoth day.”
“A cryptodire of a day,” Charlie says, and he and Sevrin both laugh hysterically.
Betsy dishes out reheated lasagna, and when Frank looks displeased she says, “Sorry. I’ve been working.” Betsy and Frank are going to fight tonight, the boys can tell. They fight over just about anything, Charlie thinks it’s sort of like watching TV for them.
■■■
When the howling stops, Ivan sits motionless behind the steering wheel and he holds onto it. It crosses his mind that he should kill Ed Reardon. Ed is the one who diagnosed Amanda’s appendicitis. There was unexpected bleeding during her surgery; Ivan remembers being told she needed a transfusion. That was when she was given the contaminated blood. For five years Ivan has been losing her without knowing it. Every time he has sent her to her room for being fresh, every time he missed a gymnastics meet, every hour he has spent looking at dead stars, he has been losing her.
And now, on a Thursday morning, as blackbirds light on the brambles that grow alongside the road, he has lost her.
■■■
In a hard-backed chair, on the other side of Amanda, Ivan is motionless; he’s like a man made out of stone. The window is open and the city sounds of Boston are jarring to someone used to the quiet of Morrow. In Morrow, the wind makes more noise than anything else; it rattles the leaves from the trees in November, it whooshes down the chimneys on wild January nights and breaks the thin, blue icicles off the rain gutters. A long time ago, ages ago, when Polly was a little girl in New York, she never noticed the sounds of traffic. Now, she hears not only the traffic but also something underneath the whir of engines and the horns honking. She could swear it was the sound of someone screaming.
■■■
When they told her, she stared at them as though they’d gone crazy.
“No, I’m not,” Amanda had said, puzzled. “I’m not sick.”
While Ivan explained about the blood transfusion and the virus, Amanda chewed bubble gum and stared at the ceiling. When he was done, she sighed and said, “All right. How much school do I have to miss?”
“We don’t know about school,” Ivan had said.
The look Amanda gave him raised goosebumps along Polly’s skin.
“What!” Amanda had shouted. “You have to know.”
Polly tried to put her arms around her, but Amanda bolted from the table. She stood between the sink and the refrigerator, cornered, a wild look in her eyes.
“I can’t be sick!” Amanda screamed at them.
“Don’t you understand anything! I can’t miss school!”
She ran up to her room and locked herself in, and they let her. They let her sit in the dark and cry, they let her listen to one cassette tape after another, and when she came back downstairs at a little after nine that night, they nodded when she said her eyes might look funny because she was tired. They sat around the kitchen table, eating chocolate ice cream.
But they didn’t look at each other,- they didn’t dare speak above a whisper. They’ve become sleepwalkers, wandering through their own nightmares, each avoiding the others for fear that a word, a conversation, a kiss will make them realize they aren’t dreaming.
things, and, if she’s lucky, she will be asleep before she runs out of wonderful things.
Soon it will be impossible to sleep with the windows open, except for those few miraculous Indian summer nights when the moon is orange and the air
is deceitful and warm. But now, it’s still summer, at least on the calendar. It’s good to think about apple pies, and silver gypsy bracelets, and pink silk bathrobes, the kind with lace that are too expensive to buy. It’s good to think about rabbits on the grass and the way her father smiles when they meet someone on the street and he introduces her as his daughter. Someday she’ll drink beer, she’ll have a scarlet dress with a wide silver belt, and earrings so long they’ll brush her shoulders.
The field mice stare at Polly as she gets out their bag of food. They’re not white, like pet store mice, but small and brown with black eyes/ if one ran across the floor you’d think it was a shadow, nothing more.
The one thing Charlie insists on is stopping at the gift shop. There he buys a tyrannosaurus patch for Sevrin and then, on impulse, another just like it for himself.
That night, Charlie has trouble falling asleep, and when he does he dreams he is no longer human.
He dreams there are red stars overhead and bursts of fire. The earth shakes with something deep within itself. He thinks water, because he can smell it. Water means warm, so he tracks the smell. He is lucky to be alive; the eggs of the others like him were more exposed to the cold, and each one froze.
He has trouble remembering anything before now. What it was like following the thing that was like him but bigger, feeding on whatever it left behind, panicking whenever he lost the scent of the thing that was like him but bigger because he knew, if he lost it, it would never turn around,to look for him. Turning around, stopping, means the end.
At the very beginning, there were the eggs of the others for him to eat until he could follow the thing that was like him but bigger. They were together until the thing that was like him but bigger wouldn’t let him near its kill and he struck out at it. He heard a roar from his own throat, and he was so hungry that he wouldn’t give up. The thing that was like him but bigger ran away, leaving behind a pool of blood. He was alone then, he no longer followed the thing that was like him because it was no longer bigger.
He knows enough to keep going. Sometimes, he is almost tricked by sunlight. He lies down and feels it soak into his body, feels it could nourish him, but if he stays in one place too long the cold will kill him.
There are times when he kills his food, but more often he eats what he finds. Things that no longer move because they have been frozen. He breaks his nails tearing apart their frozen hides. He searches inside their bodies for some warm core, perhaps a den of flesh to sleep in, but he finds nothing that brings him comfort.
Everywhere he goes there were once swamps, water so warm steam rose from the reeds. Things were alive. There was heat, things smaller to kill and eat, endless green plants. That was before his time.
He has always been cold. He feels black inside/ outside, scales fall from him and freeze as they hit the ground. He doesn’t look up anymore when he hears things explode in the sky. He used to run and hide. He used to claw at the hard, cold earth. Now he just keeps moving. Now he is going toward water. He is looking for something warm. He cannot eat enough to fill his huge body. When he sees others like him he is ready to fight if he has to, but he doesn’t want to use up his strength, so he waits and often the others look at him and flee.
Tyrant lizard is what he will be called, Tyzanno-saurus rex. But he is no tyrant; he has trouble lifting his legs to walk because the cold starts at the bottom and goes all the way up. Water. He can smell it. He keeps following the scent, the same way he used to follow the thing that was like him but bigger. The earth he walks on is as cold as ever; a thin layer of ice clings to his back and tail, but somewhere, deep inside him, there is still heat.
They take the turnoff for the New England Thru-way. Charlie stares out the window and imagines the tyrannosaurus in his dream. It is taller than any of the trees along the road, taller than the lampposts and the water towers. The sky is clear, the luminous blue it turns on summer evenings, just before dark.
Charlie thinks of teeth and claws, blood and bones.
He always thought he was smart, and now, quite
suddenly, he sees that science has made him stupid.
He really believed that, given enough time,, science could answer any question, but it cannot answer what is most important: What if there’s no time left?
As he walks to his father, the patch Charlie’s grandmother stitched on his jacket begins to glow like a piece of ashy, forgotten meteor.
Charlie does his best not to talk to anyone for the rest of the evening, and as soon as he can, he escapes up to his room. When Amanda comes to his room, the light is off and she can’t make anything out. – “Are you here?” she says.
The window is open and the white rice-paper shade moves back and forth, hitting against the sill.
The children’s grandfather is spending the night, and he and their mom and dad are out on the porch, drinking beer and talking low. So low, Amanda is pretty certain that they’re talking about her.
“I’m here,” Charlie says.
For some reason he doesn’t want to take any of his clothes off before going to bed, not even his jacket. Amanda sees the phosphorescent dinosaur patch and she follows it to the bed. She sits down on the edge of the bed, and, though her eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark, she can feel Charlie’s presence.
“I guess you didn’t get to spend a lot of time at the museum,” Amanda says.
“Two hours,” Charlie says.
“That patch is pretty neat,” Amanda says. She can see his face now.
“How do you feel?” Charlie asks Amanda formally.
“They’re all crazy,” Amanda says. “I’m fine. I’m great.”
“Yeah,” Charlie quickly agrees.
“I wish I could have gone to New York instead of going to that disgusting hospital,” Amanda says.
Amanda is the one who really should have gone to New York. She’s the one who’s so wild to live there.
“See anybody famous?” she asks.
She is a maniac for famous people and has already seen George Burns, James Taylor, Sting, and Carol Channing all walking down the street, and nobody, except for Amanda, even stared at them.
“Nah,” Charlie says. “It’s too close to Labor Day. All the famous people go to their vacation homes.”
“Mick Jagger goes to Montauk,” Amanda says wistfully.
They listen to the rice-paper shade hitting against the sill.
“I wish it was the beginning of the summer,” Charlie says.
They can hear their father’s raised voice outside; he is arguing with someone, their mom or Grandpa Al, but they can’t make out the words. They don’t want to.
“Don’t tell Mom,” Amanda whispers. “My throat hurts.”
Charlie reaches into his pocket; behind the dinosaur patch he bought for Sevrin there’s a roll of Life Savers.
“Here,” he says. He puts the roll of Life Savers into Amanda’s hand and recoils when he feels how cold her hand is.
“You can’t catch it from touching me or anything like that,” Amanda tells him.
“I know,” Charlie says, embarrassed. He wasn’t afraid of that, he was afraid of the cold. He thinks of his tyrannosaurus walking on the icy ground as the sky fills with shooting stars. “You can keep the whole roll,” he says.
Amanda takes a cherry Life Saver and pops it into her mouth. “Thanks,” she says.
Since they told her, Amanda has been afraid to go to sleep, but she’s always tired early. She stands up now. Her eyes have adjusted and she can see Charlie, huddled against the wall, still wearing his jeans and his jacket and his sneakers.
“I just wanted to find out how New York was,” Amanda says.
Charlie reaches into his pocket and feels the edges of Sevrin’s dinosaur patch.
“I got you a present,” Charlie says.
“What’s the joke?” Amanda says.
“No joke,” Charlie tells her.
He moves to the side of the bed and throws his legs over, so his feet reach the floor. He hands Amanda the dinosaur patch, which glows through its cellophane.
“I’m going to put this on my gym bag,” Amanda says.
faces and giggle. Some anti-mother crack, no doubt.
Polly was never taken to shops to be outfitted for school. Her mother made everything by hand, and Polly despised every stitch! The clothes Claire made were too sophisticated; when the other girls were wearing pink plaid, Polly wore a black velvet skirt with a matching cloche. She had dropped waists when crinolines were in. She wishes now that she still had those clothes, realizes that her mother had a real talent for fashion. Nothing her mother made could have survived; Polly treated them all horribly, spilling ink on them, tearing hems as she undressed.
“You big careless girl!” Claire had yelled once, when she found a white satin blouse she’d finished only days before where Polly had left it, jumbled into a ball on the floor. Later, Polly had seen her mother crying as she ironed the blouse. Her mother was then the same age Polly is now. Ironing, her hair pulled back with combs, Claire had seemed so old. Polly
remembers thinking how ridiculous it was for a grownup woman to be crying in the kitchen.
hexafu 