Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [169]
“You have an idea, honey. More than you think.” Jewel pressed her lips together in thought, then spoke again. “They’ll act hurt for a minute, because they have to. But as soon as we leave and close the door behind us, they will praise the Lord. We will all praise the Lord.”
{25}
Predators
For the rest of her own life and maybe the next one after, Deanna would remember this day. A cool snap had put a sudden premonition of fall into the air, a crisp quality she could feel with her skin and all the rest of her newly heightened senses: she could smell and taste the change, even hear it. The birds had gone quiet, their noisy summer celebration hushed all at once by the power of a cold front and the urge rising up in their breasts to be still, gather in, wait for the time soon to come when they would turn in the darkness on a map made of stars and join the vast assembly of migration. Deanna clung to her perch on the rock, feeling the same stirring in her breast, a sense of finished business and a longing to fly. She had climbed up onto a lichen-crusted boulder fifty feet above the spot where the trail ended at the overlook. From here she could look down on everything, the valley of her childhood and the mountains beyond it. If she stood and spread her arms, it seemed possible she would sail out beyond everything she’d yet known, into new territory.
From the branches behind her she heard a sociable gathering of friends hailing each other with their winter call: chicka dee-dee-dee! The chickadees, her familiar anchors. Deanna would not fly away today; this thrill was only something left over from childhood, when a crisp turn in the weather meant apple time, time to hunt for paw-paws in Nannie’s woodlot. At some point between yesterday and today the air had gone from soggy to brittle. The Virginia creeper on the cabin had begun to turn overnight; this morning she’d noticed a few bright-red leaves, just enough to make her pause and take note of history. This was the day, would always be the day, when she first knew. She would step somehow from the realm of ghosts that she’d inhabited all her life to commit herself irrevocably to the living. On the trail up to this overlook today she had paid little mind to the sadness of lost things moving through the leaves at the edges of her vision, the shadowy little wolves and the bright-winged parakeets hopping wistfully through untouched cockleburs. These dispossessed creatures were beside her and always would be, but just for today she noticed instead a single bright-red berry among all the clusters of green ones covering the spicebushes. This sign seemed meaningful and wondrous, standing as a divide between one epoch of her life and the next. If the summer had to end somewhere, why couldn’t it be in that one red spicebush berry beside the path?
She slipped the small, borrowed mirror—his shaving mirror—from her back pocket and looked closely at her face. With the fingertips of her left hand she touched the slightly mottled, darker skin beneath her eyes. It was like a raccoon’s mask, but subtler, spreading from the bridge of her nose out to her cheekbones. The rest of her face was the same as she remembered it, unmoved if not untouched. Her breasts were heavier; she could feel that change internally. She turned her face to the sun and slowly unbuttoned her shirt, placing his hands like ghost fingers where hers were now. His touch on her skin would be a mantle she could shed and put on again through the power of memory. Here on this rock in the sun she let him enter her like water: the memory of this morning, his eyes in hers, his movement like a tide pushing the sea against the sand of its only shore. Her body’s joy was colored darker now from knowing that each conversation, every kiss, every comforting adventure of skin on skin might be the last one. Each image stood still beside its own shadow. Even the warmth of his body sleeping next to her afterward was a dark-brown heat she stroked with her fingers, memorizing it against