And the Dark Sacred Night Read online

He doesn’t answer. The assumption (even his, if briefly) is that he will.

  Kit does the autopilot things: puts dishes in the sink, turns off the coffee machine, turns off the lights they switched on two hours ago when they woke in the thick residue of night. (Soon, once the clocks change, the sun will rise before they do. That will restore at least a degree of normality to their lives.)

  But when he hears the car recede from the driveway, he sits down on a stool at the counter facing the window to the yard. He watches a brawny-looking squirrel attempt to flatten its body just enough to shimmy under the door to the shed, where Sandra keeps the birdseed. It tries for a good long while before it gives up, thrashes its tail in scorn, and sprints up the nearest tree.

  Theatrically, Kit shakes a finger toward the upper branches. “That’s what you get for eating my daughter’s pumpkin, fatso.” His teaching voice. A voice he hasn’t used in a classroom for ages.

  The children’s sink, he tells himself. The leaves. The clothes in the now-silent washer. He rises and moves toward these tasks, but he pauses at the kitchen table, where he sits again. There is no newspaper to reach for; he canceled their subscription to the Times a month ago. The only available text is Will’s forgotten math homework, a sheet of penciled scrawl that feels, in Kit’s hands, like a permission slip for despondency.

  When he hears Sandra’s car pull in, he knows he could make a dash for the second floor or the backyard—grab a plunger, seize a rake—but he doesn’t. Sandra enters the kitchen and stops. When he looks at her, she is unbuttoning her long green sweater; her bushy peat-colored hair cleaves to the hood. The room is so quiet, Kit hears the prickle of static.

  “Could you at least,” she says quietly, “carry my bales of hay from the car to the shed? I’d be grateful for that.”

  “Sure thing,” he says. Being outdoors in the chilly sun feels hopeful, wakes him up all over again. But when he goes in to take care of the laundry, Sandra’s done it. Over the purr of the dryer, the intermittent clicking of a zipper against the metal drum, he hears her raking leaves.

  He goes upstairs, finds the bottle of drain opener in the linen closet, takes it into the children’s bathroom. He pours a slug down the drain and listens for the hiss of decomposing hair balls. Stepping into the hall, he glances through the door of the front bedroom. He happens to notice that the air conditioner is still in the window and, to his own surprise, feels the urge to take it out—as he should have done weeks ago.

  He fetches the necessary screwdriver, along with a flattened cardboard carton from the recycling bin, something to protect Sandra’s favorite kilim from the corroded seams of the metal box. He has no right to feel proud of himself, but he does, just a little. (How pathetic is this, congratulating himself for doing a task that Sandra did not ask him to do?)

  Once he’s wrestled it out of the window frame and onto the cardboard, once he’s lowered the three storms in the wide bay (another unbidden chore, one to be repeated throughout the house), he goes into the hall and pulls the cord that summons the ladder of stairs leading into the attic—an act that once delighted the twins, who would shout “Presto!” every time they had occasion to witness this quaint open-sesame feature of their home. They are not allowed in the attic, where nails protrude, porcupinelike, from the underbelly of the roof. But when they were small, they would watch Kit ascend, eagerly awaiting his reappearance, as if he were Jack climbing down the beanstalk to bring his family a pouch of gold coins. (Oh, for a pouch of gold coins from on high.)

  “Presto,” he says to himself as the spring in the trapdoor yields to release the stairs. “Presto change-o. Molto change-o.”

  He carries the air conditioner braced against his torso, which is softening ever so gradually since he lost privileges at the college’s weight room. He maneuvers it up by hefting it from one tread to the next. At the top, he will slide it straight back to its appointed place against a wall, cover it snugly with a thick plastic bag.

  Kit has not climbed into the attic since midsummer, when Sandra was sure she heard wasps through the ceiling. They do not store many possessions up here, because this is the only house they’ve ever owned: furnished from scratch, as Sandra likes to say. She is a bargain huntress, a follower of haphazard handwritten yard-sale signs, an agile hoister of armchairs and tables onto the roof of her station wagon. A morris chair here, a ship’s lantern there; a set of horn-handled steak knives, a tablecloth printed with lobsters, even—a triumphant find, a nod to their courtship—a small hooked rug depicting a polar bear beneath a crescent moon. One practical yet artful possession at a time, Sandra filled their house, each new object an unmeasured though rarely impetuous risk; nothing was saved if it didn’t work.

  Ten years ago, pregnant with the twins, she came home one day with a hexagonal deco mirror, its frame inlaid with ivory. “Front hall!” she exclaimed with fierce delight as Kit unwrapped it on the kitchen table.

  “A find,” he said, holding it at arm’s length to reflect his upper half. “A little scary, though. Like the gravestone that reads AS I AM NOW, SO YOU SHALL BE. But maybe that’s the idea. Take our vanity with a dose of humility. Mortality.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sandra’s face entered the frame from behind his left shoulder. For an instant, it felt as if he were holding their wedding portrait. A portrait by Grant Wood.

  “Earth to Sandra. It’s shaped like a coffin.” A coffin for a small child.

  In the mirror, she stopped smiling. She stepped out of the picture.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Kit. “I’m not superstitious, and neither are you.”

  “Speak for yourself. I don’t know if that’s true anymore about me.” She spread her hands across the prow of her belly.

  So away the mirror went, even though it could not be returned to the consignment shop where Sandra had found it, by accident, on her quest for a bureau to hold the babies’ clothes.

  In summer, the attic is unbearably hot, but on a cold bright day in the fall, it hoards a genial warmth from the sun pressing down on the shingles. The window in the rear gable presents a view of the small wood behind their yard. A patch of four acres became a park—pretentiously called the Green Sward—when the farm that once occupied this land was sold and divided into house lots in the heady 1960s. Reportedly, the park was a simple meadow back then, but since it lacked the amenities of modern recreation—no baseball diamond, no swings or climbing structures—few people used it, and random saplings took hold. (It is now a breeding ground for the villainous squirrels: a parallel development of sorts.)

  Kit and Sandra’s house, at the end of its cul-de-sac, stands out from the curving rows of ranch houses (some sullen and faded, others preened and sprawling with twenty-first-century additions). Though the developers razed the main farmhouse (reputedly riddled with termites), they spared a second, smaller dwelling. “Back in the day,” the broker said, “this would have been a house for the help.” She sounded confessional, even guilty, when she told them that it had been built in a modest, even miserly fashion for a house in 1910, “but by today’s standards, it’s a classic. Solid as you please—I mean, look at these floorboards!—and charming in the most totally understated way. Don’t you think?”

  She kept laying her palms on the walls and windowpanes, even stroking them, as if she were selling a horse or a gown, something far sexier than a tall but compact three-bedroom house with burlap-colored walls, gray carpeting, and appliances so heavily veneered in cooking oil and cigarette smoke that you couldn’t tell if they’d once been yellow or pink—or might, if you bothered to scrub rather than discard them, turn out to be white.

  “We can do it” was Sandra’s way of telling Kit, back then, that they could do more than merely afford the house: they could make it perfect. Or (he knew this full well, and so did she) Sandra could.

  The broker raved about the “possibilities” of the attic—“Pop out a couple of dormers, put a bathroom here, and you’d have the dream master suite!”—
but Kit and Sandra knew they would never have the means to turn it into anything more than what it already was: an oversize, inconvenient closet; a rarely visited limbo between their sleeping selves and the sky.

  So each time Kit goes up, he gives the place a brief inspection. He has never, even when Sandra thought she heard wasps, found anything amiss. The house has no fireplace and hence no chimney running through the open space, but a previous occupant built a cedar closet beside the front window. Casting a glance toward that end of the attic, Kit sees a long water stain stretching from the top of the closet all the way to a cardboard carton against its side.

  The stain runs down the closet wall like the map of a rambling stream. Its source is a visible lesion at the apex of the roof where it meets the front wall of the house. The carton beside the closet, dry but warped, is labeled TAX RECEIPTS ’03–08. Kit pries it open. The stench of mold rises from the clotted mass of pulp within.

  He opens the closet, which contains mostly woolen and down-filled coats not yet retrieved for the coming winter—and also, segregated to one side in a clear garment bag, the wedding dress worn by Sandra and, before her, by her mother. Fanny already has fantasies of wearing it herself.

  The dress, like the box of receipts on the other side of the closet wall, is saturated with water. Its thick folds of satin, cocooned by its confinement, are no longer ivory but a mottled brown, as if the dress has been marinated in coffee.

  “Christ,” says Kit. “Fuck.”

  He hurries down to the second floor, as if there is still time to prevent this small calamity. He doesn’t even bother to take the steep stairs backward, as he should, and he stumbles forward into the hallway, his momentum carrying him through the door to the master bedroom and almost onto the bed. Grasping one of the tall bedposts to regain his balance, he looks up at the ceiling near the bay window, the space beneath the cedar closet.

  The paint is unblemished, blank as ignorance.

  “Fuck,” he says again. Because now he must decide whether—or shouldn’t it be when?—to tell Sandra … who wondered, a year ago, if it wasn’t time to think about a new roof. Back then, even Kit believed there was no way he wouldn’t be working full-time again by now.

  Out front he sees Sandra, wearing his work gloves, packing great cushions of leaves into the paper sacks she must have remembered to buy at the garden center. He imagines her, one morning or night in the next few weeks, lying in bed and pointing up at the stain that will inevitably, water having its meddlesome way, penetrate the ceiling. “What is that?” she will say. But she’ll know. A leak in the roof they cannot afford to replace or even patch—unless one of them learns how to do it.

  In the small room off the kitchen that Sandra and Kit share as an office, the phone rings. He starts toward it, but he stops before descending and sits on the top stair. He lets the answering machine take the message—a muffled female voice—and then he stands. Gently, he lifts the attic stairs until the spring takes over and the ceiling reclaims them. He watches the cord sway in an oval until it comes to a halt. “Presto,” he whispers.

  He will make lunch for both of them: grilled cheese, a salad. He will tell Sandra he missed a call that was almost certainly for her. Then he will go online and cruise the various sites that he knows will never yield real work.

  A month ago, at the open house in the twins’ school, he overheard two mothers discussing a fantasy site called Second Life, where people create alternate existences, just for fun, with dream jobs, dream spouses, dream houses or apartments furnished with a giddy selfishness, their spacious closets filled with clothing in dream sizes, sleek equipment for dream sports. In such a place, however virtual, Kit could write his dream book and teach his dream students (all tall, big-chested women who do not giggle or speak in a language as sparse as Morse code or pierce their tongues or text every minute they’re not required to make eye contact with grown-ups). He could report to a dream department chair, drive his dream car (maybe one of those snotty little Coopers; why the hell not?), drink his dream beer in his dream bar (no giant screens showing Eli Manning at twice his already massive size).

  Would Kit be allowed to keep his own, actual children, or could he do better than Fanny and Will? According to those mothers at the open house, the father of one of their children’s classmates had left his wife for a woman he met online in that other, orchestrated life. Later, Kit wondered if maybe that man’s first life, the one he actually lived, had begun to feel adulterous. Kit knows what it’s like, in a different way, for life to turn itself inside out.

  Downstairs, he finds that Sandra has driven off again. He could call her on her cell phone and ask where, but he won’t. He makes himself a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich. He drinks a glass of low-fat chocolate soy milk. When Sandra has still failed to return, he goes into the office—ignoring the blinking numeral on the answering machine, fending off the specter of Sandra’s ruined wedding dress—and scans the New York Times online. He checks the five-day forecast. Very little chance of rain: one small gift.

  The children return before their mother, entering the house cranky and hungry. Fanny is accusing Will of having stolen the Almond Joys from her trick-or-treat bag. She checked that morning. She knows there were two.

  “I stole them,” says Kit, “and promise to replace them.” He’s happy to be the brunt of a rage stirred by something as minor as a candy theft.

  “Dad, you’re just covering for him. Will is the one, I know it.”

  “Innocent before proven guilty!” says Will. “Unless you’re from someplace like China.”

  Kit tells them it’s time for a snack. He takes the last apple from the fruit bowl and goes to the fridge for the peanut butter.

  “So tell him what you are guilty for, show him the paper,” he hears Fanny say to her brother, sounding like a child whom Kit would gladly exchange for another, given that Second Life.

  Will calls his sister an asshole. Kit scolds him for using such a word (which he’s sure his son heard, uncensored by any adult, on the football field).

  “Tell him,” says Fanny. “You have to, you know.”

  When Kit delivers their plates to the table, Will hands him a note from his teacher. For the third time in two weeks, he has failed to turn in his math homework on time. Also, his subject binder is “unacceptably messy.” Would a parent please e-mail or call to arrange a meeting so they can “coordinate a strategy” to improve Will’s organizational skills? Before Kit can respond, Fanny flourishes a note of her own. This one informs him that she’s been cast as a Sugar Plum Fairy in the school’s Nutcracker ballet. Would a parent please sign the permission slip committing her to after-school rehearsals for the next six weeks?

  Kit has no choice but to congratulate her, though it feels as if he’s rewarding her for hitting her brother over the head. When, as quietly as he can manage, he tells Will that he and Will’s mother will discuss consequences for his chronic failure to remember his homework, the boy breaks into wretched sobs and declares himself the “dummy of the family, the stupidest, stupidest one of all.” When Kit reaches to comfort him, Will runs upstairs and slams his bedroom door.

  “He’ll get over it,” Fanny says in a smug, pretend-adult voice.

  “You need to be more sympathetic,” says Kit. “Your brother has a harder time with schoolwork than you do. It doesn’t mean he’s less smart.”

  “Boys usually do. That’s just the way it is.”

  Kit wants to be appalled by her attitude, but he knows she’s aping something she heard from an adult—maybe even Sandra or himself when they thought they were out of earshot.

  What, he sometimes wonders, if one child grows up to be a success and the other falls by the wayside? He once had stepbrothers, with whom he’s lost touch, and he has a half sister who’s little more than half his age, but he’s always been, at heart, an only child. Learning that he would have two children at once was thrilling news—they’d been through so much to get Sandra pregnant—yet it filled
him with panic to think of all the extra things he would have to learn along with becoming a father, things familiar to people who had real, lifelong siblings.

  Sandra walks in the door and stops. She can hear her son wailing from his room. “What’s going on? You’re both just standing here? Why are you letting him cry like that?”

  Fanny, still eating her snack, says, “He’s sad because he’s in trouble.” As she licks her fingers, Kit realizes that he did not ask the children to wash their hands, which reminds him that he never flushed their bathroom drain with water after filling it with whatever toxic potion eats through ossified toothpaste. He imagines a hole corroded in the pipe, which in turn recalls the leak in the roof. He says to Sandra, “There’s just a lot going on right now.” He picks up the note from Will’s teacher to show her, but Sandra is sprinting upstairs. Kit sighs.

  “Dad,” says Fanny, “can I read you a new poem?”

  Of course she can, he tells her. Fanny has fallen in love with memorizing poems. She begins by reading them aloud, several times, to her parents. Kit sits across the table from her and listens to the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay and then of A. E. Housman. The Staten Island ferry; English cherry trees in redolent bloom. So much exquisitely phrased nostalgia. For now, Kit assures himself, he can let go of the fear that she will become a punk rocker.

  After reading the two poems twice—an encore for Sandra, who comes downstairs followed by a defeated-looking Will—Fanny turns automatically to pulling her homework from her (exceedingly well-organized) binder. Sandra sends her to work upstairs in her room while Will sits at the table, waiting for his parents to decide his fate. Kit, feeling as if his own crimes are yet to be revealed and judged, lets Sandra do the talking.

  Is it the trick of dwindling sunlight that makes late afternoons in the fall pass more quickly than they do at other times of the year? Or is it the way in which school, still new, greedily consumes the prime of nearly every day? By the time both children are silently working and Sandra is in the office, it is dark. Kit turns on the radio to hear if a new war has begun or another oil tanker’s split open; no hurricanes this late in the year, no significant elections in the offing, no movie stars falling off the wagon. He prepares to chop an onion, wash lettuce, grate cheese. He feels a measure of calm.