Part 25 (1/2)

”It wasn't your fault,” Ned said. ”It was was an accident. And he wasn't hurt.” an accident. And he wasn't hurt.”

”No. He was laughing. He was so little he didn't understand danger.”

I was thinking of Max, standing over the rus.h.i.+ng water, turning back to smile at me as if nothing were the matter at all.

”What did you do?” Yos.h.i.+ asked. ”After you left, what did you do? Where did you go? It must have been hard, you were so young.”

”Yes. It was hard. Though when you're young you don't think about that so much. You don't realize you're setting a pattern for your life. They found me-I was staying with a friend-and when I said I didn't want to come back to the house, they sent me here, to Elmira, to a Mrs. Stokley, who needed a boarder. So I went. I took a job in one of the gla.s.s factories. I wanted to be a teacher, but of course I didn't have the training. When I was twenty-one, I met John Stone at a company picnic. He was an engineer, like Ned. He was flying a kite that day.”

”My father,” Ned said. ”They were married for fifty-seven years.”

”And you never saw Joseph again? Neither your uncle or your cousin?”

She shook her head. ”My cousin, no. My uncle did come to visit. Just once. It must have been near the end of his life, goodness knows-I was in my fifties. He brought a photo from his childhood, and he took me to lunch, and he indicated that I'd be remembered when he died. I didn't put much faith in it, of course. And of course, since I never heard another thing about it, I knew I'd been right.”

While we'd been talking, the door in the foyer had opened and shut again, softly, and a young woman dressed in shorts and a white tank top had taken a seat on the step down into the living room, resting her chin on her hand and listening intently. She had long hair pulled back in a ponytail. As the conversation paused, Carol introduced her as Julie, their youngest daughter.

Julie smiled and said h.e.l.lo. I replied, taking her in. Since Ned and my father were second cousins, Julie and I must be third cousins, if there were such a thing. Even if there were, did it matter? That was the sort of cousin you might not know about even if you grew up in the same town. She was tall, not quite as tall as me, but nearly so. I stood and she shook my hand.

”So you're a hydrologist,” she said. ”That's so interesting.”

”I like it.”

”And you work in j.a.pan?”

”Well, not exactly.” I glanced at Yos.h.i.+. ”We were living in j.a.pan, but we're on leave right now. Thinking about the next thing, whatever it might be.”

”I know what you mean. I've done my share of that.”

”Julie is a teacher,” her father said. ”But she has a pa.s.sion for animals. She rescues them. That's her real love.”

I didn't know what to say-in this way we were not at all alike. I wondered if her apartment was full of stray cats.

”Exotics,” Julie said, as if reading my mind. ”I rescue exotic animals whose owners didn't know what they were getting into and finally abandoned them. So far I've adopted a boa constrictor, two monkeys, and three iguanas. The monkeys aren't at home, of course-there's a great facility in Kentucky that takes them.”

”Julie,” Carol said. ”Grandma Iris asked to get the papers out of the house safe earlier. The old photos and so forth? But we couldn't seem to get it open. Your father has forgotten the combination, and we can't find the place where we wrote it down. I wonder, do you think you could help?”

”I can try.”

Julie opened a door in the built-in cabinets and sat down at the safe, her ear pressed to the metal, her fingers resting on the dial. She closed her eyes, and my own heart quickened. The patterns of the internal mechanism flashed into my mind like a vision, the pins moving in their quiet patterns. Slowly, slowly, she turned the dial, listening to the voice of the metal. I knew how smooth and hard the safe felt against her cheek, how softly the tumblers s.h.i.+fted and clicked, each one like a breath released. She held herself still, listening, and then her face relaxed, breaking open with satisfaction. The feeling of success, of completion, welled up in me, too. She opened the little metal door and reached inside.

”Look at that,” Ned said, chuckling.

”It's a gift,” Carol agreed. ”She's been able to do that since she was five years old. I don't know where she gets it.”

”My uncle used to do that,” Iris said, her voice far away, her eyes not quite focused on the here and now, as if she were seeing the world through the dual lenses of the present and the past-like trying to navigate the world in 3-D gla.s.ses.

”Me, too,” I said, spreading my fingers. ”I can do it, too.”

They looked at me, my outstretched hands, in surprise. Then Julie pulled out a stack of papers and handed them to her father, who sorted through what looked like bonds and wills and deeds until he came to a single yellowed photograph, which my great-grandfather had given Iris on his single visit. It was a family portrait, dated August 22, 1909-the year Geoffrey Wyndham drove into the village in his Silver Ghost, a year before the comet. There were notes in pencil on the back. Rose was in the center, wearing a dark dress with a pale collar and cuffs. The other family members, also dressed in formal black, flanked her: a stern patriarch with his white beard, the older brother and three older girls who might have been cousins, their faces serious in the presence of the photographer. Rose's mother and an aunt and a grandmother sat stiffly on chairs in front of the others.

”What was the occasion?” I wondered.

”No one knows,” Ned said. ”A wedding, or a funeral, or maybe just a photographer pa.s.sing through the village.”

”Here's Joseph,” Iris added, her finger tapping beneath the boy standing next to Rose, squinting into the camera as if trying to discern the future. She paused, her voice softer. ”And that girl must be Rose, I suppose. My mother.”

I looked more closely, thinking of Rose's letters, the girl who had stood at the s.h.i.+p railing watching her country recede into mist. She was so young in this photograph, just fourteen, her hair still down, falling around her shoulders. She wore a ribbon around her neck and she was half-smiling, as if about to turn and make a joke; she alone of all the family-the serious older girls, standing in a row, and the careworn parents and aunts, and the grandmother, as old in the photograph as Iris was now, wearing a black bonnet and a visage like a withered plum-Rose alone looked happy.

What was she was thinking in that moment? What did she dream, and how did she imagine her life? On a summer morning, surrounded by her family, she turned, about to laugh, unaware of Edmund Halley or his comet, a chunk of ice traveling through the coldness of s.p.a.ce, whose arrival would cast such a strange light across her life. She did not know that a door was about to open in the world and she would walk through it, terrified and hopeful, into a future she could never have imagined.

”I'm tired,” Iris said. She'd put the folder full of letters on the sofa, and her hands were resting on the blanket in her lap, her fingers working the edge of the silky fabric. ”I'd like to have a rest, I think.”

Ned was on his feet at once, reaching down to help Iris stand. She took his arm. I stood, too, and clasped her hand for a second. Her fingers were cold. I told her that I had something I'd like to show her, once she'd had a chance to read the letters and digest them. I explained about Frank Westrum and the windows and Rose, though I wasn't sure how much she was taking in. Ned was interested, though, and he paused with Iris in the hallway.

”You say there's a whole museum, full of stained-gla.s.s windows.”

”Yes. Rose helped design them. She knew the artist. They were very close, in fact. She modeled for him.”

”I see. Well, I think we'd all be very interested in knowing more, when my mother feels up to it.”

”Yes,” Iris said, and they started moving slowly back down the hallway to her room. ”I would like to see them.” Yos.h.i.+ and I stood for a few minutes longer, talking with Carol and Julie. I gave them the brochure I'd brought about the Westrum House, along with a description of the chapel.

”It's just overwhelming, I think,” Carol said, as she opened the door. ”I know I'm overwhelmed, so I can only imagine how Iris feels. She has to reconsider her whole life.”

She walked with us to the car, admired the Impala's sleek golden lines, and promised they would be in touch. From the end of the long driveway, she watched us disappear into the leaves.

”I'm worn out, too,” I told Yos.h.i.+ as we drove. ”I'm emotionally wiped out. How about you?”

”Not so much. It's not my family, so it's just interesting from afar. Though, you know, my mother's family is from southwest England, near Bristol, I think. So maybe we're related, too.”

”Oh, don't start.”

He laughed. ”It's incredible, though. The whole story is. And that you found her, after all these decades.”

”It really is.”

We talked about this as I drove, leaving Elmira for the blooming fields, daylilies running through the ditches like fire, the fields alive with b.u.t.terflies and insects, the lakes deep blue and s.h.i.+mmering as we drove along their sh.o.r.es.

Halfway back we'd settled into a companionable sort of silence when the car began to shake and fill with a steady thump-thump-thump. I eased the Impala onto the side of the road and checked-sure enough, the front pa.s.senger tire was completely flat. Yos.h.i.+ rummaged in the trunk-there was no spare-while I called my mother to see if she had a road service. She did, and I put in a call for help.

We were on the edge of a field high between the lakes, water visible in the distance. It was warm, and I was so worn out that I walked a few feet into the field and lay down, trying to ignore the buzz of insects, the cloud of dragonflies that lifted, translucent, from the edge of a nearby puddle and flew away. After a minute Yos.h.i.+ came and sat down beside me; I s.h.i.+fted so that my head was resting on his leg. He stroked my hair, letting his fingers linger on the soft skin below my ear. Beneath me the earth felt alive, rich with growing things, and beneath his touch I felt alive as well, alive and sleepy and nearly content. I ran my hand along Yos.h.i.+'s calf, hard and muscled, thinking how good it was to be here in this sunny field with him, the deep blue lake set like a bowl into the green fields of the earth. Then we heard the truck arrive, the door slam, and we both stood up, shaking seeds and bits of gra.s.s from our clothes.

A man in a white cap had left his tow truck and was rummaging in the Impala's huge trunk, which Yos.h.i.+ had left ajar. He'd pulled out an empty red plastic gas can, a bag of tools, a folded blanket, and my father's tackle box, and placed them carefully on the gravel shoulder. ”They don't make trunks this big anymore,” he said, looking up and smiling at us when we drew near. ”Just thought I'd take a look-see, maybe there's a compartment for the spare.” Yos.h.i.+ stood close to me, his hand warm on the small of my back, as the man searched and came up empty. He cheerfully and deftly unbolted the Impala's whitewall, leaned it against the b.u.mper, and replaced it with a temporary spare. The lake in the distance was blue, sheened with silver. He put everything back inside the trunk and slammed it shut, and we drove off once more.

Chapter 18.