Peter Landesman: Blood Acre

Nathan's beeper, like everything else, is quiet now. Even Serena. He snaps open his cell-phone and tries for a dial tone and hears only the dead plastic of the earpiece rustle against his ear. The circuitry, the lifeline, is quiet. Everything is quiet.

Letting his head drop against the headrest, he sees now the Coney Island pier where he and Isabel began to fight. He had wanted to bring her there. He had wanted to show her, tell her about the old times with Milton: This is us, he wanted to say. This is the you you don't know. But he can still hear his bitter accusations, his voice louder than the rest-there seemed to be more people in the car than just the two of them; there seemed three people, five, ten people in the car-he thought he spoke for them all. But one of the voices was Isabel's. Another was Claire's. They were both pleading. But it was Isabel who was kissing him beautifully. Her hand was on his thigh. Why couldn't they be married, have a baby, live like human beings?

He hears his pathetic somethingorother reply.

She went on, her reasons accelerating, making perfect sense: It would be a fairy tale. Like a movie, like one of those operas you always go to see. My mother worked for your father for years. Errol would be so happy, it would bring you two together like the brothers you once were… grew up together… practically family anyway… no one knows you better… husband and wife…

What, again, did he say?

She began to cry.

There are no tracks where he goes now. Slow and solitary, the road out of town is cracked into geometric sections like melting ice floes. In the mirror the streetlights fade behind columns of standing mist. The tires rip through the steady sleet-

After his brilliant arguments in his own defense, he had opened the door and strolled to the boardwalk. She didn't move in the passenger seat. Then she did. She came after him. He stood at the rail, the water below so black, so cold, so still it seemed a sheer drop down to the bottom of a ravine. The heights were terrifying. He held on to the rail. She held on to him. He closed his eyes. How long ago, how strange, how sad, distant as his memory of first love, Claire stood by the window of the printer's shop picking out their wedding invitations; then Claire left his mind and the hands he held to his face were Isabel's and the eyes that met his were Isabel's, were his, really, his father's, actually. Maybe Errol's, too, for all he knew. He saw only faces. Enclosed and surrounded by faces. And the faces seemed to be mirrors in which he saw and watched himself. And he knew them all better than he knew himself, the fear and puzzlement and the fatigue. He was so tired.

In the rear-view mirror headlights dart in and out of the trees, patient, staying back. Blades of light in the corner of his eye, pinlights twirling before him. Closer, they hold steady in ordered pairs. Elfish eyes. The headlights illuminate snouts, racks of antler, breastplates of white fur; a doe's nose no bigger than a rubber doorstop.

We are finished, he said, waving his hand. Tell her, he said. She asked, Tell me what?

Their father authored their humiliation but the orders Nathan followed were no one's but his. There had to be, Nathan knew, some things for which fathers cannot be accused and held responsible.

But I love you, Nathan, she said.

How many times had they slept together? He was going to be sick. His thinking began to slow. It slowed like a wheel turning through the sand and finally hitting the water, slowing and grinding down and stopping. And then he was sick-

He hears the explosion before he sees it. The steering wheel raps him squarely on the forehead. Baron spills into the front seat, kicking in all directions with panic, clipping Nathan across the cheek. A squealing spiral of brown and white fur in the glass. Nathan throws up his hands when the car is already stopped and a small doe is splayed across the hood, its loose head, cleaved above the eyes, slapped back and forth by the wipers. Bloody snow rinses across the glass. The doe's round eyes stare in, then blink slowly. Still alive. Howling, Baron jumps the seats, back and forth, wanting at it. Nathan puts the car into reverse and spins the wheels, but the car jolts hard; the back fender has crumpled; a tree spotlit red in the brake lights. The doe doesn't slide. Wheels spinning, Nathan pulls forward and skids to a stop and reverses again but the doe won't move. Baron is turning circles in the back, looking to unload.

Cursing, Nathan is out in the sleet, shielding his eyes, instantly soaked, his shoes full of slush. In the ambient glow of the one headlight left he can see the doe's chest fluttering. He staggers forward waving his hands, and, grabbing above the hooves, pulls hard. Corded mouth snapping, the doe pours off the hood and flips to its back. Nathan stands over it, blinking in the driven snow. Tiny convulsions beneath its fur. It kicks once, twice, then ills, head back, legs upright, like the legs of a table. The eyes glass over, their sight gone. Nathan exchanges the stare, dead with dead, and again finds himself low to the ground, on his knees, filled with a disquietude and unhappiness that is like a deep, twisting visceral pain. The snow showers the back of his neck with a child's kisses; like those of some angel, some mother's desire to treat him gently, like those perhaps of his and Claire's nameless an cries, and, boy's, to announce himself: I am. "I didn't-" Nathan cries, and, blinking, opens his mouth and on his knees he releases the doe and opens his hands before him to find nothing, and the night filled with no reply. I am. He grabs up at the falling snow, grabbing at her, at the doe-it was dead-at Isabel, but she was already gone. She was clip-clopping down the boardwalk, pausing finally to unstrap her high heels and throw them into the surf, barefoot on the ice, quickly fading out of his view. He started after her but he couldn't breathe, his knees wouldn't hold, and he ran until he couldn't, and he stopped. Then she stopped. They stared down the boardwalk at each other, panting, expectant, terrified, like gunfighters. Behind her the dark Wonderwheel and serpent-backed roller coaster like the ruins of a great city. Against his heels he felt the edge of that steep ravine, at his back the interminable drop to the bottom. He stepped away, toward her, and she stepped back and he stepped back against the edge again and she stepped forward. She would not move. Then his cell-phone rang. "Krivit," he said. "I'm glad you called. I’m having a little trouble here. I can't meet tonight. We'll do it tomorrow. Don't worry, yes, I'll be there." Then he was sick again and hanging over the rail and she came at him and he lifted his head and she slapped him hard. His glasses flew off his head. And she was crying. He closed his eyes from that and when he opened them she was in his arms and he first hugged her then took her around the neck, aware of the murderous power pulling him on, forcing him while he remained dispassionately aware of the consequences. He could almost hear his father: Do me the favor. Her teeth were up and down his arms. Pleading up at him with his own eyes. He released her. Coughing, she clutched her throat. He thought for a minute, with a detached, almost amused calm, of the infinite night that waited for him no matter what he did. Leave her, love her, marry her, kill her, they would both burn. And he would drop, into that ravine. But if he could release her, he knew, at least she would live. Then he left her.

In his rear-view mirror he saw her standing against the rail. She was alive. And down Surf Avenue, she was alive still.

At Famous's, as he turned for the Belt Parkway, a car along the curb turned off its headlights. Nathan slowed and saw it was Krivit's car. Krivit was sitting with his hands on the wheel, staring ahead and through Nathan to the boardwalk. Of course he'd have to be somewhere nearby. They were to meet, after all. Krivit had probably watched Nathan while he made his call, his excuses. Nathan drove on.