A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [118]
“They’re quiet up there,” she said. “They played so hard today I guess I’m not surprised. Let me go make sure they’re okay.” She moved across the room to the stairs. I had forgotten what it was like, to be drawn to a person. I didn’t know how I could have stood in the doorway day after day looking at Theresa without actually seeing her as I was now. I’d forgotten how your blood flows toward a person when they move, so that all at once you know what the pull of gravity feels like. And you know that this is something strong and important, something that you need for life, this woman moving through the room.
When she came back down I was at the sink, waiting.
“I don’t want to leave her,” she murmured. She stood across the table from me. “You know that.”
“Stay a little longer,” I said. “I’ll carry her up the hill. I’ll carry her home in a minute.” I mentioned that it was cooler out on the porch and that there was a moon.
“I don’t care about the moon,” she said.
“Come out on the porch.” I could feel her behind me as I went, feel my blood drawn to my back.
“I need to go home,” she whispered.
We stood in the middle of the dark porch, on the rag rug that Alice has always especially liked. “Sometimes,” Theresa said, “I’m certain about the goodness of God. Sometimes I’m sure that Lizzy is in safe keeping. But tonight, I’m really scared, Howard. Tonight, everything feels as if it’s tipping. Tonight,” she said, coming closer, “it’s so confusing. Everything feels dangerous because of you, and at the same time everything feels dangerous except right where you are.”
She flew into my outstretched arms, hit hard, and stayed there. That is how I remember it. I meant to draw her in and she was already against me. “They put her in the ground,” she cried into my chest. “It was hot, that yellow windy night she was buried. It was blowing, blowing. I couldn’t stop them from burying her. I couldn’t stop it.” We held each other, swaying back and forth. She was so heavy, too heavy to hold up. We sank to the hard porch floor, nothing between us and the stone but the thin rug woven from old jeans and shirts. We held each other against each fresh racking sob as it came.
Chapter Fourteen
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I LEARNED EARLY ENOUGH, when I was six, that the world is a sorrowful place. Our neighbor, Peter Nicols, was messing around on the tracks a few blocks from home. He got electrocuted by the third rail. With the windows open that summer I occasionally heard his mother. She made an exhausting noise. I thought she was singing up and down the scale even though I knew what she was doing had no relation to music. It scared me for years after, that the boy had been alive one minute and was dead the next. It was unacceptable. How was it that he couldn’t take back a one-second mistake? After all this time it still seems impossible that a person can be killed instantly, without knowing. I tried to say to Theresa the night she came down that I had not yet been able to get beyond the shock of Lizzy’s death. I didn’t know that she was gone unless I thought hard about it. “I don’t understand,” was what I managed to say.
We lay on the rug for a good part of the night. We held on to each other. We had to thrash, with the sadness. It was inside us, beating inside us. We couldn’t hold still. When we thought we were at last done we’d slowly work up to begin again. It was a cycle that didn’t seem to have an end. At one point Theresa cried, “I don’t think we’re ever going to finish, that we’ll ever get to the bottom of this great, fathomless reservoir.” I couldn