Kathleen Goonan: Crescent City Rhapsody

A blast of cold wind hit her, and on either side of her head, massive hanging pots of ferns pirouetted in unison, a row of dancers schooled by the wind’s wild grace. Though the crowd around them was dispersing beneath the first fat drops of rain, the clowns juggled on intrepidly.

Maybe she would go to Paris. Al was quite wily, in his way. She smiled despite her worry. Could she hold the invisible reins of the city from halfway around the world? Al thought her despotic, old-fashioned. No, she told him earnestly, these are my people; this is my home. I have great plans for my city.

Your city! She could hear his snort even now.

A razor’s edge of rain hissed up the narrow street, chilling her with sweet cold wind and ozone. It swept across her tin roof with a pounding roar and steamed briefly on the street bricks below. The two black musicians dashed for cover, leaving rain-sheened chairs. Tourists huddled beneath store awnings.

The phone’s ring was faint, but she turned, gladness blossoming. It must be them. Petite Marie was safe in Al’s Paris flat.

Then a glint from the street caught her vision, an odd motion of one of the clowns. She paused because he was pointing one of the pins at her… and the whoop of the fake siren filled the air.

Paralyzed, Marie had a second to experience her heart pounding in terror, heard her own cry in the roar of the storm as if it were that of someone else, felt rough bricks skin her face and arms as she spun to the floor of the balcony from the force of the bullets. Above her one of the fern pots exploded in a shower of dirt and shards.

She heard the soft beep that signaled the shutdown of her vital functions, which would call them … even now, they were on the way. A minute, no more.

Among her ragged thoughts a thread of gratefulness spun briefly— at least Petite Marie was safe. The timing was perfect.

Then she died.

Zeb downshifted to take a curve on the two-lane blacktop; the creek had flooded the road, leaving a sheet of ice in the bend. The back wheels of his Ford pickup held steady and after the ice he resumed his previous speed. He had gone into town for a Thanksgiving party and he shouldn’t have.

He would never be able to socialize happily, but a certain excruciating amount of it always seemed to be called for. At least he didn’t go off the deep end anymore; thanks to medication and the hard work of Sally, his older sister and always his champion, his flights of manic intensity had been under control long enough for him to settle into a life of being a professor of astronomy at a rural state university. Not the glittering academic life his parents, dead for many years now, had envisioned for him, pushed him toward; far short of what all indications had been during his adolescence, when all doors were open, when every major university wooed him. The courses he taught didn’t begin to scratch the surface of what he knew; he was an astrophysicist. But it was a predictable life; even, generally, a satisfying life. It had been purchased at the cost of closing the floodgates to the infinite. It was enough. If he was deliberate and firm, there was a reason. He lived with a certain amount of satisfaction at just being able to function predictably. Most people took this state of mind for granted. It was a privilege for which he’d had to fight.

Nobody else was on the road. It was Wednesday night, and everyone had gone over the river and through the woods and were at Grandma’s now. Sally was expecting him for dinner tomorrow in Roanoke, a sixty-mile drive. He was looking forward to seeing Annie, his niece. In her second year of college, she was beginning to be able to ask intelligent questions. She was majoring in nanotechnology. Seemed like a real scattershot major to Zeb, but then he tended to keep entirely immersed in what was happening farther than the eye could see. Annie was a bright kid. Zeb only hoped that she would not suffer as he had, that his genetic weirdness would not be echoed in her.

Across a snowy field that seemed to glow faintly, an old white farmhouse threw patches of colored light onto the snow through a window—an early Christmas tree. Behind the fields rose dark ridges, trees blackly sawtoothed against a slightly lighter sky. Zeb cracked his window and lit a Camel. The blast of cold air felt clean and good.

The party had been stuffy. Zeb stood out, as usual, felt clumsy and big in his heavy boots and plaid wool shirt. He explained to his hostess when he arrived that he was dressed to go up on Angel’s Rest later and check the antenna, but he still felt out of place. He sat gingerly on one of Dr. England’s delicate chairs, wishing he could smoke, while she and her husband passed out eggnog. He didn’t see anyone else smoking, though. England had urged him to drop by when she saw him in the supermarket this morning; probably felt sorry for him, he thought now. He just hadn’t known how to say no. He didn’t want to insult her. Parties with mathematicians and physicists were tolerable, because it only took a few minutes to start a heated academic argument, but these people were all with the arts. They were nice, but he heard snippets of conversations around him filled with concerns he knew he would never be able to fathom. He took a sip of eggnog and looked around, wondering if he could slip into the kitchen and pour it out and wondering how long he had to stay to be polite. He decided it didn’t matter. He would just leave. He stood to go.

Then Terri had come in the door.

She was dressed nicely, as usual, he saw, as Judy England took her coat. A black dress. Pearls.

“Zeb,” she said, seeing him.

“Stay away from the eggnog.” After a long moment, he added, “How are you doing?”

Her eyes were slightly merry at that; a small victory, pulling two whole sentences out of him.

“Fine,” she said. “Wonderful.” Her hair was ashy blond, but he knew that she had it done once a month because a lot of it had turned white when she was thirty. The year she’d married him.

“You look good.”

“Thanks.”

Their talk was small, but it always had been. After three years of marriage, she decided she needed more words. Now she was married to a sociologist. Jim was from New York. He talked a lot.

“Well, I should go.” Zeb gulped the eggnog and frowned. It really was wretched.

She put one hand on his arm. “Take care. Are you still living in that—old house?”