David Hopson - All the Lasting Things

Claudia turned to face him, her mouth declaring that no matter how slowly he drove, Mr. Anselman would eagle eye their every fingerprint, even while her hand was plunging past the elastic band of his underwear to grab hold of what stabbed her. Luckily, Nick didn’t mind mixed signals. As he got down on his knees on the wine-colored floral rug, Claudia followed. They were out of their clothes in minutes, rolling back and forth across a field of finely woven gold primrose with a hundred inscrutable rabbits silently looking on.

Claudia shook herself back into the idling car. She slipped into gear and drove on, trailing behind her the memory of that afternoon — rutting among the glass menagerie — until she hit the main thoroughfare out of town. The road followed the great, iron-colored vein of the river, where houses that had seen better days looked as though they might at any moment abandon their foundations and slide into the water. Eventually, as the houses grew more derelict and the yards more dirt than grass, Claudia came to Alluvia’s only stoplight. Here the village proper, which was not without its charm, met the more sprawling town, in which one was hard pressed to find anything like it. To travelers on Route 4, the light was a Cyclops’ eye forever blinking yellow, a warning to those passing through, Claudia and Benji joked, not to stop, to keep going no matter what, but on this morning, Claudia stopped. Ahead was Saratoga and Bemis Heights, the sites of bloody historical interest her teachers had taught her to revere as a child. To the left, across a camelback bridge painted an apocalyptic shade of gray, lay open country. Dairy farms, an abandoned drive-in theater now used to store fireworks, and, beyond that, the offices of Amato & Sons.

She made the turn. Fifteen minutes later, oblivious to the paint-by-numbers beauty of green fields rolling gently under a pink, post-storm sky, she turned into a large paved lot. A low, unassuming building marked “Office” stood surrounded by a compound of garages and warehouses enclosed by a chain-link fence. Other than the sign that sat atop the roof, the A in Amato topped with a jaunty hard hat, the place had all the appeal of a military barracks: dreary, anonymous, beige. The puddled lot was empty, but she chose a space close to the front door and turned off the car. At rest at last, a safe distance away from Max and her uncertain but unshakable responsibility to him, she felt the tension that had seized her over the last day suddenly release. A giant cable that ran through her body and pulled every muscle to the point of snapping suddenly went slack. She sensed the relief, but the relief was too much to bear, and she startled herself with a terrible, shaking sob. But crying inside the car proved impossible. How could she cry when she couldn’t breathe?

Shouldering open the door, Claudia jumped out and paced the blacktop, up and down, restoring herself to order with a few greedy mouthfuls of air. There was time to turn back. She could do so now, and Nick would be none the wiser. Wiping the tears from her face, she took her place behind the wheel. She turned the key in the ignition but couldn’t bring herself to shut the door. The alarm, a vexing ding, ding, ding, that drill, drill, drilled its way into her brain’s last reserve of equanimity, let loose a torrent of anger and enmity that swept her poise, her polish away. Grabbing the door handle as though she meant to strangle it, she pulled the door shut with such force she thought the window might break, an idea that held a certain and sudden appeal. To feel it shattered by her hands! Claudia opened the door and slammed it again. She smashed it shut as quickly and forcefully as she could, again and again, like a woman caught in some malign meme, like a woman gone mad, until an unignorable pop in her shoulder made her stop. She whimpered, rubbing the knot with a pathetic gaze into the rearview mirror. “Ow!” she cried.

The reverend doesn’t know what to make of it. He stands before us in the modest luxury of George Newland’s living room, looking at the woman who one day long ago he held over the baptismal font. He has watched her childhood pass in the patent leathers and pastels of Easter. He has pinned the confirmation cross to her dress. Though she is thirty-five, to him she will always be a child of God, and though God had not yet made manifest what she should be, the reverend cannot imagine that this is it. She is too old to be a hippie, to stand before him in a ragtag dress with flowers in her hair and a new, self-selected name. But the road she travels seems to have led to the same place, the very place it would have if she’d christened herself Starshine or China Rose, to the side of a man six years her junior and a baby that (Evelyn admitted to him in confidence) belongs to a woman who’s disappeared. He looks on her with his sad, worried eyes and sees that she loves me as if I’m the only man left to love. He sees that she loves me though I love another. That she loves me out of all proportion to what I deserve. He sees it, as I see it. Though, for this, he alone is inclined to forgive.

Max sat on the top step of the porch, peeling paint from the board beneath his feet. He told himself to stop, but no sooner had he flicked away the evidence of his petty vandalism than his jangly and sleep-deprived nerves sent him back for another. And another. At this rate, he’d have the porch picked clean as bone by the time Evelyn appeared to refill his coffee. He took a deep breath and dug his phone from the pocket of his hoodie to check the time. Ten o’clock. She was, according to the schedule that she laid out, an hour late. But the thought of dialing her, of bothering her with his “where-are-yous,” withered under the memory of yesterday’s call. He had the feeling he’d offered her a prize to a sweepstakes she hadn’t entered.

He unlocked his touch screen with a laughably simple code and tapped a hasty message to Arnav.

She’s latte.Then: Late.

Patiencecame the immediate reply. A pale white talk bubble blossomed silently under Max’s apple-green one. He couldn’t stand the packaged noises that alerted him to incoming calls or, with the sound of a speeding jet, escorted outgoing e-mail, but he appreciated the tiny vibration, the heartbeat, that pulsed in his palm as Navi’s words appeared. She’ll be there.

Behind him the screen door croaked open, and out stepped Benji, debuting an ivory-handled cane he’d rescued from a box intended for the church tag sale. He wore gray sweatpants and a torn Radiohead T-shirt, over which he’d pulled a silk robe of navy-and-gold paisley raided from his father’s closet. If the robe, an ancient gift from Roger that Henry would neither wear nor throw away, made an absurd statement, the cane was its exclamation mark. “G’morning, Nephew,” he said, aiming with his best British accent for upstairs Downton Abbey but landing somewhere closer to Eliza Doolittle.

“G’morning, Uncle,” answered Max.

Benji planted the cane’s rubber tip and lowered himself gingerly, as if by lever, onto the step next to Max. “How did you sleep?” he asked.

It seemed more polite than deceitful to lie, to not mention how he’d tossed and turned, running a finger over the blistered minutes of conversation with Claudia. Like pulling teeth, he’d told Arnav, who enjoyed trumping one clichéd phrase with another. Like getting blood from a stone. Like rolling a rock uphill. Unsettled first by Benji’s insistence that everything would be fine, then by Evelyn’s endless shock and weeping, then by the rising din of a confounded Henry being chased through the house, Max had whispered a play-by-play into Arnav’s ear, until, finally, at three, he’d taken a pill to fall asleep. Three hours later, he’d taken another to wake up. Along with the lithium, Neurontin, Zyban, and quarter tab of Klonopin. “Fine,” he said.