American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [6]
Upstairs she collected her belongings. She had stayed over because Pearl had heard from her aunt that there was no room in their house with Vivian’s father sick and the nurse and so many visitors. Pearl had offered to have Vivian stay even longer. Vivian said it was wonderful to get to know each other a little after all these years but that she really wanted to be closer to Brooklyn to be able to help her family. In the kitchen Pearl was warming coffee on the stove and setting out some cookies on a plate. There was a small table in the kitchen and four chairs. From a little window facing the Hudson the setting sun sent a lavender and yellow cast over the table, the chairs, the plate of cookies. It was a soft yet acidic light. Joe sat down at the table and took a cookie. Pearl put a thick white cup filled with coffee in front of him. He took a sip. When he looked up Vivian was standing in the doorway.
She was not wearing her sunglasses. She had pinned up her hair. In the weird lavender light she looked like a luminous marble statue. Her eyes were a shade of green that he had never seen before. She stood still in the doorway as if on the threshold of an unknown body of water. She glanced at him for an instant with a questioning look, an expression that so far he had never seen on her face. It was as though she were asking him if it was okay to come in, should she brave the water, would she be safe? He held her gaze. A strand of dark hair fell in front of the outside corner of her eye and down her cheek. Suddenly he was not afraid of anything. He looked at her for what seemed like a long time and she came over and sat down at the table.
Sipping her coffee in the now more orange-tinted light she no longer had that look on her face. She seemed indifferent: to the humble apartment, the plain kitchen, the happy couple. She sat very calmly with her delicate fingers wrapped around the cup, her thin wrist sticking out of her sleeve. But Joe felt that he had been allowed to glimpse something private and that now he understood her a little bit. She was not so composed. A pleasurable weakness swept through him. It made him feel strong. He felt as though a secret had been revealed to him and he was certain that his life would go on this way, a series of revelations. He was beginning to understand things. He felt light and clear and in control of his destiny. He thought he was becoming a man. He did not think that the green eyes and the lavender light could account for such a feeling. That was not possible.
2005
At night she reads his bones. Honor watches them as they fly toward her in the darkness, spinning, burning, aflame. They arrange themselves into letters, then words. They spell out secrets that she doesn’t want to know. As each word is extinguished, it leaves a pile of white ashes. The last word flickers, glowing, for a long time. It is Fate.
CHAPTER TWO
Milo
Some lives were pieced back together. Sometimes this happened in the hospital. There were veterans who played piano. There were those who watched movies. Some read books. Some told jokes. Not all of them told jokes. In the Bronx VA hospital some of those suffering from mental and nervous disorders told jokes incessantly, and some never spoke. Many of them had sustained major physical injuries as well as psychological illnesses. Milo Hatch had sustained a spinal cord injury. At the moment, he could not walk. The prognosis was not good.