• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1118 0

this shadow, this loss. He felt guilty because June was lying in the earth with a mound of dirt over her and he was still standing here; he was alive, and the breath moved in and out of his lungs; he could feel it, and his heart beat. I’ll be a doctor, he said, and his mother didn’t answer but after a while she nodded and rose, pulling her sweater close again. Davy, I need you to take the Bible and go up there with me and say the words. I want the words said formally, and right. And so they walked up the hillside together. It was dark by the time they got there, and he stood beneath the pines with the high wind whispering, and by the flickering light from the kerosene lamp he read, The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. But I want, he thought, as he spoke the words. I want. And his mother wept and they walked silently down the hill to the house, where he wrote a letter to his father, telling the news. He posted this on Monday when he went back to town, with its bustle and bright lights. He stood behind the counter, the oak worn smooth by a generation of commerce, and dropped the plain white letter in the mail.

When they finally reached the car, Norah paused to examine her shoulder, dark pink from the sun. She was wearing sunglasses, and when she looked up at him he could not read her expression.

“You don’t have to be such a hero,” she said. Her words were flat and practiced, and he could tell she had been thinking about them, rehearsing them, perhaps, during the walk back.

“I’m not trying to be a hero.”

“No?” She looked away. “I think you are,” she said. “It’s my fault too. For a long time I wanted to be rescued, I realize that. But not anymore. You don’t have to protect me all the time now. I hate it.”

And then she took the car seat and turned away again. In the dappled sunlight, Paul’s hand reached for her hair, and David felt a sense of panic, almost vertigo, at all he didn’t know; at all he knew and couldn’t mend. And anger: he felt that too, suddenly, in a great rush. At himself, but also at Caroline, who had not done what he’d asked, who had made an impossible situation even worse. Norah slid into the front seat and slammed the car door shut. He fished in his pocket for his keys and instead pulled out the last geode, gray and smooth, earth-shaped. He held it, warming in his palm, thinking of all mysteries the world contained: layers of stone, concealed beneath the flesh of earth and grass; these dull rocks, with their glimmering hidden hearts.

1970

May 1970

I

HE’S ALLERGIC TO BEES,” NORAH TOLD THE TEACHER, watching Paul run across the new grass of the playground. He climbed to the top of the slide, sat for a moment with his short white sleeves flapping in the wind, and then sailed down, springing up with delight as he hit the ground. The azaleas were in dense bloom, and the air, warm as skin, hummed with insects, birds. “His father’s allergic too. It’s very serious.”

“Don’t worry,” Miss Throckmorton replied. “We’ll take good care of him.”

Miss Throckmorton was young, just out of school, dark-haired and wiry and enthusiastic. She wore a full skirt and sturdy flat sandals, and her eyes never left the groups of children playing on the field. She seemed steady, competent, focused, and kind. Still, Norah did not completely trust her to know what she was doing.

“He picked up a bee,” she persisted, “a dead bee; I mean, one that was just lying on the windowsill. Seconds later, he was swelling up like a balloon.”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Henry,” Miss Throckmorton repeated, a bit less patiently. She was already moving off, her clear voice calming, like a bell, to help a little girl with sand in her eyes.

Norah lingered in the new spring sun, watching Paul. He was playing tag, his cheeks flushed, running with his arms straight down by his sides—he’d slept that way, too, as an infant. His hair was dark, but otherwise he looked like Norah, people said, with the same bone structure and fair coloring. She saw herself in him, it was true, and David was there too, in the shape of Paul’s jaw, the curve of his