Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [29]
‘Maybe it’s time we had a kid,’ he said one day.
They were on the porch, half asleep, while below them Joey squatted with a drawing pad, sketching fat bees homing in on the huckleberry bushes.
‘We could do with a little brother. Or sister. For Joey.’
‘Why not,’ Nancy said, after a pause.
He sensed tension. ‘We’ll work at it,’ he said and brought out a little laugh.
His parents had never laughed much. They plodded along, expressionless. They had cared for their children dutifully, never neglected any aspect of their material needs; but Joe and Martha Pinkerton went through their days at a steady pace, no spring in their step. As a boy Ben had felt disloyal to have these thoughts but there was no tender place in his heart that the two of them occupied.
One day a lifetime ago they took him to the State Fair. In a daze of pleasure he wandered through the crowd, the music, breathing in the smell of sugar and vanilla. He gazed up at the twirling carousel, but his father declared it to be an unseemly extravagance and walked him towards the cyclorama of the Civil War. Then they went home.
They took his hand when necessary, to guide him safely across city streets. Hugging did not take place. And when Charlie was killed in action, Ben got the feeling that between him and his parents a sheet of glass had grown: they could see one another, but not touch.
Later, when Joey appeared on the scene, they had effectively disowned Ben.
There were moments in his life when he longed for something different: for excess. For freezing cold, driving winds, blinding rain. Fierceness. The sea. Within the house, confined by the yard, he sometimes found difficulty in breathing, needed more air, felt an urge to hit out without having any particular object he wished to punish. Occasionally he snapped at Nancy. He wondered now: were he and Nancy turning into his parents?
As though sensing his thoughts she suddenly stood up and called out,
‘Joey? How about some ice cream? I’ll fix you a fudge sundae, wouldn’t that be fun?’
Sometimes in the early hours, after lying awake for too long, Ben went through the house from room to room, as though checking, like some watchman marking the boundaries of security: doors locked, windows secured. Everything safe. But then again, what did the Good Book say? Forget treasures on earth, store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Tonight, hot and sticky, he got out of bed, moving quietly, leaving Nancy sleeping. She lay, as always, on her right side with one knee bent, the fingers of her left arm lightly clenched on her cheek.
Earlier they had spent a while attempting to produce a kid sister or brother for Joey; nice work as Ben said, and he was grateful for the soft, accommodating body lying beneath him. But afterwards they had disengaged quietly, moved apart, seeking cool, uncrumpled sheets.
He went to the window and stared down at the dark street. He had a sense of other streets, those that ran parallel, those that crossed, stretching out, further and further until the tarmac and the houses stopped and the fields took over, roads heading out into a flat landscape; Oregon all around him, land on three sides that led across borders and mountains to more land, and one border that defined itself in cliffs and sandy dunes and a seashore, the curling lip of an ocean stretching out to the horizon, beyond which lay the rest of the world.
They used to have picnics, family gatherings on the beach; Nancy in her bright pink sundress, lying back, eyes closed, face raised to the warmth, while he padded across the sand to the surf frothing between his toes, tiny mouths sucking at his skin, waiting to engulf him.
He recalled the moment: the racing dive into the water, the cool tingle as it washed over him, the salt catching on the fine hairs of his skin. He would head out, a steady crawl, each arm in turn curving in a beckoning movement as though encouraging