Alice Hoffman - Here On Earth

The door behind the stranger opens again, and light floods the walkway. Two women, leaving Susie’s party, are laughing, but the laughter falls onto the ice and onto the sidewalk, where it cracks open into silence.

“Honey?”. one of the women calls when she sees Hollis and the stranger facing off. It’s the sports editor’s wife or his girlfriend, March realizes this from the measure of concern in her voice. “Honey?” The woman blinks several times, as if what she is seeing right in front of her eyes couldn’t possibly be so.

“Let’s go,” March says. Now she’s the one to grab Hollis, but he jerks away. When he turns to her, she would swear he doesn’t know her.

“Are you telling me what to do?” Hollis asks.

Susie’s three guests are watching in silence; all anyone can hear is snow falling.

“Please.” His favorite word in the world, and March knows it. “Please,” she whispers, so that those people watching don’t see that she’s begging.

When they get to the truck, Hollis steps in front of March, and for an instant March thinks he’s going to open the passenger door for her. Then she sees the look on his face and she lurches away, so that her back is flat against the door. In spite of herself, she cries out. Her eyes are closed when he slams his fists through the window on either side of her head; she hears glass falling as though meteors were raining from the sky. March cries out again, then hunkers down to protect herself, until she realizes what has happened. She’s not the one he aimed to injure. He has purposely crashed through the glass, and when he withdraws his hands from the shattered window they are covered with blood.

“Oh, no,” March says when she sees what he’s done. She rises to her feet. If this is what love can do, they’d best give it another name. There is blood on the concrete, and in the snow, but Hollis doesn’t seem to notice; that’s what’s scaring her most of all. He pulls her to him, with all that blood on his hands.

“I would rather hurt myself than hurt you,” Hollis says. “I never want to hurt you.”

“I know that,” March tells him.

“Hey!” the man on Susie’s porch shouts. “Are you all right?”

They are so far from that, March doesn’t waste her time answering. Her attention is riveted on the way blood spreads. It’s on her boots; it’s pooling beneath her feet.

“I know you didn’t mean it,” March says.

Those guests leaving the party are still watching from the brick walkway, uncertain as to whether or not they should intervene. It is still possible to hear the festivities inside the house. Someone must have told a joke, because several people are laughing, and the laughter circles upward. In spite of the snow, March can see stars in the sky, the way they used to when they dragged the ladder out to the chestnut tree and climbed as high as they could.

March takes her scarf and tries to clean the glass out of the gashes in Hollis’s hands, but there’s too much blood, and Hollis’s blood seems far too hot in the chilly air. March can’t stop shaking; it’s as if she had some rare disease for which there’s no definitive diagnosis. Maybe it’s terror, maybe it’s regret, maybe it’s only the cold night, the last of the year.

“It’s all right,” Hollis tells her, but it’s not. He wraps the scarf around his hands. “See?” he says. “It’s nothing.” But that’s not true either.

March’s mouth is so parched that her lips hurt. Hollis insists on driving, even though the pressure from the steering wheel must cause him pain. They take the back road home, although the snow has made for treacherous driving. The gears of the truck grind; the tires slide over patches of ice. All the way there, March tries to see him in the same way she had before, but she can’t. No matter what she does, no matter how she tries, there’s a man of more than forty with bleeding hands who is driving too fast and who still has no idea of what he’s done to them.

When they get to the house, all the dogs are seeking shelter on the front porch. The snow is coming down harder. Hollis unwraps the scarf from his hands and washes up in the kitchen sink. When he’s done, they go upstairs to their bedroom. They don’t have to speak. Hollis, after all, is tired, and frankly March is too. As Hollis unlaces his boots, March watches him. He looks so old tonight, so completely worn out. Would she even recognize him if she met him on a crowded street? Would she know him at all?

Looking at him now, March sees that the boy she loved, the one who kissed her in the attic and promised to love her forever, is no longer inside him. That boy is separate. He’s taken on a life of his own. There he is, sitting at the foot of the bed, moving aside so Hollis can pull down the quilt and get in between the sheets. March lies down beside Hollis, but she keeps her eyes trained on that boy, the one she loves beyond all time and reason. Just as she suspected, he’s tired too. He rests his beautiful head, then closes his eyes.

March tries her best to be quiet; she doesn’t cough, doesn’t move. She listens for the sound of Hollis’s even breathing, and soon enough there it is, slow and easy. The boy she loves is now curled up on the extra quilt, lonely, the way he’ll always be, with or without her. He told her once he did not trust the human race and he never would. He told her he never meant to hurt her, and that, she knows, is true.

Although it’s not easy to leave that boy on the edge of the bed, March grabs her clothes and her boots and goes downstairs to dress in the dark kitchen. There is the teapot on the rear burner of the Coopers’ stove; there is Hollis’s black coat, where he left it, thrown over a wooden chair. There are his gloves, on the shelf, and the glass he last used to drink water, rinsed out and drying on the drain board. Everything March sees is a shadow in the dark, even herself: her scarf, her hand turning the doorknob, the way she shivers when she feels the cold against her skin.

She slips out the door so quietly that the dogs curled up on the porch don’t hear her pass by. When she gets to the very end of the driveway, she turns to look at the house. If she didn’t know better, she would swear that a girl with dark hair was standing in the place where the roses used to grow. If she didn’t know better, she’d hesitate. Instead, she turns and runs.

At first, she counts her steps the way she used to, but after a while she stops counting. She paces herself so she won’t become exhausted; she avoids the road and goes through the woods. The air is so cold it snaps; the clearing sky is filled with stars. March hurries; she’s going so fast that she might have missed seeing the foxes if her coat hadn’t been snagged by a branch. When she turns she spies them in the meadow, more than a dozen foxes, all in a circle, just as Judith Dale had told her. Here was a meeting of the last specimens on the hill, the descendants of those few who managed to escape in the year when open hunting season was declared.

Judith Dale used to swear that at gatherings such as these, each fox would rise on his hind feet and walk about, just like a man; if you listened carefully, you could hear each one speak, in measured and somber tones. What you overheard might change your life and rearrange all you once believed you knew for certain. A fox’s secret was one worth knowing, worth waiting for, worth its weight in gold, or so March had always been promised. But Judith Dale was wrong, and now March is glad to discover that she was. These creatures are nothing like men; they haven’t a word to say, and no secrets to tell. When March leaves, several of them follow for a while, as though they were dogs-not that she needs their guidance. She knows the way, after all. She’s been here before.