Part 8 (1/2)

That night, Neil Belson makes a bonfire. He gathers sticks and branches and dry gra.s.s in a pile on the sand. His girls drag over what they can, and he thanks them loudly and makes a point of adding it. Celia brings out the potatoes in their foil and special pointed sticks for roasting.

All of us gather around to watch it burn. Fire wraps the sticks and leaves and crunches them to nothing. It makes a sound like laughing. Mr. Belson puts one arm around each of his girls, and Peggy holds on to Sheila and Meg. She touches her palms to their hot faces. I lean against my dad. ”Look at Bradley,” he says, shaking his head.

Brad is on the other side of the fire, sitting alone. Heat twists the air between us, so it looks like water running. Dad stares over the flames and smiles hard at Bradley, telling him with his face to come over, that he's welcome with the rest of us.

Say it, I want to order Dad. Call over to him.

But Dad just keeps smiling, and when Bradley doesn't move, Dad looks down and smiles in that direction, like he and the sand are sharing a sad joke. Meg wanders over, and he pulls her hair back and wipes the sweat off her upper lip.

I stand up. So many things are wrong I can't sit there. I feel crazy, like worms have crawled inside my bones. I go to the water and let it soak my shoes. Then I stomp through the sand so it sticks to my feet and turns them into blocks. I look up at where firelight smears the branches of the tree I climbed today. I stare at that tree a long time. Then I walk toward the house, double back, and start climbing it from the side no one can see. I want to look down from above. I want to keep my eye on Bradley.

The first long limb is high above the flames and a little to one side. On my belly I slither along to its end and look down. No one sees me. Smoke floats past in a column. Bradley doesn't watch the fire, he keeps his eyes on Dad and Peggy and the Belson family.

Sweat drips down my face, and I feel it running inside my clothes. The fire makes a panting sound, but it looks smaller from above. Watching Bradley and the rest, I think to myself: How can I fix it? I remember what he said about the models, how they're broken and it's his job to repair them. One right piece, I think, and everything will turn good, like the soldiers dropping their guns on the battlefield. Just one piece. But what is it?

Then Bradley looks up. Maybe he felt me watching him. He doesn't say a thing, we just look at each other a long time, neither one of us moving. Fire lights his face and makes his eyes look hollow. The only sound is wood cracking in the fire.

I rise halfway to my feet and jump. I stay calm until the second my shoes leave the branch and I see the bonfire coming at me like a giant orange mouth. People are screaming. I hear the crash I make, and there's wild, rippling heat in my hair and clothes. Then I'm on the beach, rolled and pounded by a weight that is Bradley, pus.h.i.+ng me into the cool sand, smothering flames with his body.

Everyone tells the story, how he pulled me out so fast the fire barely touched me. Like he knew I would fall, and was waiting to catch me.

”A premonition,” Peggy calls it, narrowing her eyes with respect.

”Reflexes,” Dad insists.

Bradley's stomach got scorched. Not badly enough for the skin to be grafted, but red and blistered where he put out the flames in my clothes. At Lakeside Memorial Hospital they wrapped him in white bandages and told him to rest. They said the scars might last. I think Bradley hopes so.

My hair got burned, nothing else. It's short now, and when I lie in bed at night, I think I can still smell the smoke in it.

Bradley has to stay in bed. I sit in a chair right near him. We don't say much. It's peaceful in his room, with the cars and planes and trucks twisting quietly over our heads.

”What'll you make next?” I ask him.

He looks up, taking in all the years of projects. ”I might quit for a while,” he says. ”Try something new.”

”A stunt?”

”That's old,” he says.

I glance at the door and see Dad watching us, holding a deck of cards. I realize Bradley's talking to Dad more than me.

I have the oddest feeling then. I feel like our mother is there, like the four of us are together again in that room for the first time in years. As Dad deals out the hands, I see her, like she's sitting beside me: her dark waves of hair, the thin gold coin she wore around her neck, her cigarettes that smelled like mint. I remember her warm hands and sliver of wedding ring.

What I notice most, though, is how different I look. My hair is pale and straight. My skin is darker than hers, and a little s.h.i.+ny. I have freckles on my arms, and when I try to sing, I hit every wrong note.

I lean over to say this to Bradley. You were wrong, I want to tell him, you imagined that part. But there's a peacefulness in his face that I haven't seen since before the accident. He feels her, too, I think, and he knows she's not inside me. She's gone forever. But she would want us to be happy.

THE WATCH TRICK.

Sonny drove his boat straight into the middle of the lake and cut the engine. They rocked in silence, the deep, p.r.i.c.kling hush of a Midwestern summer. The lake was flat as a rug, pushed against a wall of pale sky.

The four of them were celebrating Sonny's engagement to Billie, a girl with soft hair and a Southern accent. She kept to herself, leaning back in a chair with her legs propped on the rail. She had met Sonny the week before, at a party before her own wedding to someone else. This turn of events would have been more shocking in some lives than it was in Sonny's; he was a man who lived by his own egregiousness, who charmed, offended, and was talked about at other people's dinner parties. Stealing a bride was right up his alley.

Diana watched Sonny measure, shake, and pour martinis with the ease of a cardsharp shuffling. She was forty-two, with a worn, pretty face. Her husband, James, sat beside her, looking amused. He and Sonny had been best friends since the army. James leaned back and looked from Sonny to his bride. ”So tell us how you two happened,” he said.

Sonny just grinned, his eyes fine and vacant as crystal.

Billie swung down her legs and leaned forward, animated for the first time that day. In two sips she had finished half her martini. ”Let me tell,” she said. ”I'm dying to.”

On the night before her wedding, she explained, her father had thrown a party aboard an old steamboat. Sonny had pursued her, flirting openly whenever he found her alone, eyeing her from a distance the rest of the time. Late in the evening they were standing alone on the deck when abruptly he took off his gold Rolex, held it up in the moonlight, and threw it in the water. ”Baby, when I'm with you,” he said, ”time just stops.”

Billie narrowed her eyes as she spoke. She was very young, and strands of roller-curled hair spiraled like ribbons down her back. ”I'm like, please,” she said, ”could you possibly be more corny? But”-and here she seemed to struggle, reaching for Sonny's hand-”it was like when you're half asleep and you hear voices, you know, from the real world, and you just think, No, I want to stay asleep and have this dream.”

She paused and tried to catch their eyes, but James and Diana were looking as far away as possible. They'd been hearing the story for years in various forms-from the Hawaiian tour guide Sonny fell in love with while gazing at the view from Kaala Peak, threatening to jump unless she agreed to come back to Chicago with him; from the astrologer who had obsessed him from the moment she divined that his mother had been killed in a small plane crash when Sonny was five. This very boat-a 34-foot ChrisCraft flybridge-he had bought twelve years before in the certainty that he would marry a professional water-skier he'd seduced the previous night. That was Sonny: music, a few drinks under his belt, the light falling a certain way, and any pretty waitress might receive a declaration of love, an impa.s.sioned lecture on their two converging fates. If she was smart, she would laugh it off and bring him his change. Not that Sonny didn't mean it-he could mean almost anything. But his attention span was short.

”So we escaped in a lifeboat,” Billie concluded. ”Daddy was mad as h.e.l.l.” She grinned irrepressibly now, a young, mischievous girl whose life had taken a sudden turn for the thrilling.

”That's quite a story,” James said, with a sly look at Diana.

Sonny mixed another round of drinks. It was August, one of those hot, hot days when the sky seems to vibrate. Diana longed to strip down to her bathing suit, but her legs embarra.s.sed her. Veins had risen to the surface in recent years. These seemed more offensive now, in the presence of Billie, who had long, gleaming legs and knees delicate as teeth.

”I hope Daddy will forgive me after Sonny and I get married,” Billie said, suddenly despondent. ”And Bobby, too, my fiance. I've known him since the fifth grade.”

”Your ex-fiance,” James reminded her.

”Oh yeah,” she said. ”Ex.”

James and Diana's friends.h.i.+p with Sonny had had its perfect moment twenty years before, in the early seventies, when Diana wore short polyester dresses and thick pale lipstick. Sonny would squire them from one Chicago nightclub to the next, and each time they went inside she felt they were expected, that the party could really begin now that they had arrived. In pictures from those days James and Sonny looked surprisingly big-eared and eager. They were typewriter salesmen for IBM, and had started a side business marketing inventions-a solar bicycle, aerosol tanning lotion-that failed one by one and left them nearly bankrupt. In the end James quit and went to law school; Sonny later cashed in on fast-food investments he'd had the prescience to make early on. But in those first days they'd been convinced success was imminent, and would wedge fat cigars between their teeth and talk about the good life. Diana pictured it coming suddenly and with violence, a shock that would leave them reeling. But like so many things, success took longer than they thought to arrive, and by the time it came, it merely seemed their due.

After a second round of drinks, Diana went down to the cabin. The sun hurt her eyes-it had been like that since she'd started researching her dissertation, ”Crisis and Catharsis in the Films of Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k.” She had promised James she would cut down the hours she spent viewing, but lately she found that everything in her life-the telephone calls, the endless, hopeful pounding of their son Daniel's basketball against the garage door as he struggled to match his father, the bills and invitations-seemed like nothing but distractions from Hitchc.o.c.k's tense, dreamlike world, where even the clicking of heels was significant. Diana often felt weirdly nostalgic as she watched, as if her own life had been like that once-dreamy, Technicolor-but had lost these qualities through some misstep of her own.

James came down to the cabin. He glanced up toward the deck, smiling, and shook his head. ”Nothing changes,” he said.

”Am I crazy,” Diana said, ”or is it more romantic this time?”

”You're crazy,” James said.

”I guess it's always romantic when two people fall in love,” Diana mused. ”Even if it turns out not to be real.”

”Turns out!”

”Well, never was.”

”It's been a long time since the last one,” James said, was.h.i.+ng his hands in the sink. ”I thought maybe he was outgrowing it.”

”Oh, let's hope not!” Diana said.