There were few times in his experience when he had stepped out without a road map. Without programming. Winging it. It was antithetical to his vision of the human race. Once when he was in Europe, during a summer in college, he had been following the Tour de France, running with the riders up the mountains, dressed as Darth Vader, shouting “Allez, allez, allez!” He knew their every movement, their route to the last kilometer, his lodgings booked months in advance. But then, “Hey, Darth Vader,” a cameraman called to him at the finish one day, “come out with us!” And he had gone. Without a schedule, without a map, without knowing who would be there or when it would be over. They went to a bar where a spotted jersey was hanging in the doorway, proof that one of the top riders was drinking there that evening. He had drunk alcohol for the first and only time in his life. He had kissed a woman that wasn’t Sunny. She spoke only French and he pretended he could not. He had regretted it all in the morning.
He remembered another time when this had happened. It was the quiet moment, on the bank of the Crowder River, where he asked Sunny to marry him. For times like this, scripts had often been crafted for him by the mother. If he had to say thank you to a scholarship committee, he was taught exactly what to say, how to hold his face, how to raise his voice. At his father’s funeral, she showed him how to shake hands with the minister, what part of his mouth to show when smiling. Even the first time he told Sunny he loved her, Sunny herself had all but written the words in the air in front of him, and led him to the spot, and pointed to each syllable. And yet, that day, he made up his own words.
Sunny had come home from graduate school for the funeral of Nu. The mother had known, but the children had not known, that Nu was actually already past middle age when she came to Pennsylvania from Burma. For all those years of Sunny’s childhood and Emma’s middle age, Nu had been seeding green beans across a full acre of garden, planting corn in endless rows, potatoes, giant pumpkins; taking in bushel after bushel of harvest, canning, steaming, freezing, and marching a constant parade of food through the kitchen. She planted it, picked it, prepared, sauced, cooked, fired it, and they consumed it. For several years she even kept goats, used their milk to make cheese, yogurt, and the animals would climb on cars that parked in the driveway. She called them guard dogs, named them Brownie and Whitey and mourned when they died of fever, swore never to have other pets. Her sturdy face, her squinting face, her floppy straw hat, her no-nonsense farm boots, had seemed timeless. Maxon had thought she was thirty when he met her, and that opinion had never been updated.
“No, dear, she was a very old woman,” said Emma when she called him to give him the news.
“How old?” Emma’s voice was quavering. That meant she was sad. Maxon spoke quietly. That’s how you talk to sad people.
“She was eighty-seven,” said Emma.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
“I thank you for the sentiment,” she returned automatically. It was a fragment of conversation they had practiced for years. He had used it on both sides of the conversation, and it had never failed him. He knew just how to say both parts.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“Well, I’ll just stay here, I guess. Sunny is still in California, of course. You’re still here, for now.”
“Will she be coming home for the funeral?” he asked.
“Yes, she’ll be home. Maxon, did you tell her about the house?”
“I didn’t tell her,” he said. “Why would I?” He did not say he had been keeping it for a surprise. He had never kept anything for a surprise before in his life, but this idea captivated him, he wanted to try it, he wanted to try it on her specifically.
“Listen,” said the mother, “don’t tell her. Don’t … bring her back here. You let her go back to graduate school; it’s what she needs.”
He had nothing to say.
“Maxon,” said Emma. “She’s like your sister. You care for her like your sister, right? Say you care for her.”
“I care for her.”
“Like a sister,” prompted Emma.
“I care for her like a sister,” said Maxon mechanically.
“See?” said Emma. “There you go. There’s no need to tell her anything about the house, right? Just let her go back to California and finish grad school like she needs to do.”
“Would it be wrong,” he asked, “I mean, would it be the wrong thing to do to take her out a little while she is home? Even if it is just after the funeral?”
“Oh, no,” said Emma. “You mean, would it be socially inappropriate?”
“Yes,” said Maxon.
“Oh, no,” she said again. “Nu would not mind. And I would not mind. Sunny will need some cheering up, Maxon. You take her out. But then, you let her go.”
Maxon hung up the phone and looked around himself at what he had done. Over the hill from the Butcher farm, off to the north and up the mountain, there was a piece of property that he had always coveted. It was the highest point in the landscape for miles around, and accessible only by a dirt road that at times achieved a grade that would make a mountain goat nervous. On this property there was an A-frame house, glass on both ends, from whose windows one could see all across the valleys and hills straight to the deep gouge that was the Allegheny River. Throughout his life he had entered this house as a squatter, as a trespasser, first alone and then with Sunny. It was their special retreat. As soon as he had some money, he bought it.
The view was breathtaking, and he had gotten the property for a song, as depressed and weak as the economy in the area had become. He gutted the house, replaced the saggy furniture and hunting gear with a few spare pieces and a bachelor’s kitchen. He had been living there during school breaks all through graduate school, shoveling out the road himself, living on Triscuits, Diet Coke, and melted snow, and during the summers working like a madman to clear a beautiful yard, mathematically precise in its layout, with a pond at one end and a garden at the other.
Nu had died in her garden, feet facing up the hill, head facing down. She had an aneurysm, and at that angle, all the blood rushed to her brain. Maxon knew this was a risk of living on a slope.
Maxon had worked on his house, his property, knowing that the land abutted the Butcher land, that they shared a border through ten miles of woodland. He wanted what he wanted from moment to moment: stumps cleared, shed painted, garage raised, shade trees lined up, rhododendrons installed in rows on the tree line. He didn’t consider what he wanted beyond that. But then, he hadn’t thought of Sunny as something to want. She had been his. They talked on the phone almost every day.
When she returned from California for the funeral, she appeared different. She, too, had been rushing through, spending summers in school, working toward her doctorate. Their time in Pennsylvania had not coincided, him going to conferences, a visiting professorship at Stanford University, the youngest person to ever do this and that. He stood in the old Butcher farmhouse kitchen, his head bent over her portfolio, looking at photographs of the art wigs she had made. One was constructed of teak shavings, forming a little Zen garden. There was a series of wigs in black and white; she had been exploring what she could do with melted swirls and plastic textures. She sat at the breakfast nook, wearing a woven scarf around her neck, a pair of faded jeans, a halter top, and giant boots. She was so certain, so eager, her hands clutched together as she waited to hear what he would say, that he could hardly look at the pictures of her work. It didn’t interest him at all. But the robot matches its facial expression to the expression of the person with whom it is conversing.
He stood there, his head almost brushing against the ceiling of the little kitchen, nodding and smiling, and constantly looking back at her, sitting there so grown, so different from every other woman he had met in the meantime. So this was the voice at the other end of the phone. He had not seen her for three years. She had changed a lot. He felt, suddenly, the urge to act. He felt himself, suddenly, want something. Want something beyond a mathematical expression or the resolution of a logical question, beyond installing recessed lighting properly, beyond closing his eyes and opening them again. He wanted her, properly his. He felt like he felt when he was hungry. He knew what was supposed to come next.
“Do you want to go canoeing tomorrow?” he asked.
“Canoeing? Like, you mean, after the funeral?” she said.
The mother had been crying in the other room. Sunny had been crying, too, before Maxon came. But she thought she would be okay to go canoeing after the funeral, as long as the mother was going to be okay without them. She said she would.
The funeral was in the morning, a quiet affair in a little white church down the valley. The service was read by an Episcopal priest from Philadelphia, one of the mother’s friends. The church was lent by the local congregation, but against the wishes of the local minister, who would not have been happy with Nu’s animist beliefs. The church was packed, full to the aisles and out into the foyer for this woman, for some the first outside their race they had ever met. A crack shot with a rifle, a master chef, and a faithful friend.
That afternoon, Maxon arrived in a truck to pick Sunny up, with the canoe in the back. He had lowered it down out of his own garage, but she didn’t know that. She wore bike shorts, a loose tank top; he could see her bikini poking out under it and it moved him in his body to see that. She slung some sunscreen into an old yellow backpack, added a water bottle, a few granola bars, and a towel. Her mother had gone to bed upstairs.
“Will this be okay?” she asked. In high school they had gone canoeing all the time. They knew exactly what to bring. Now he was unsure. Would they need more things, now that that they were grown-up adults? She hadn’t brought marshmallows and Yoo-hoo. He didn’t think that meant anything other than being an older age. He saw the way her hips spread out, stretching out the sides of her shorts at a different angle than they used to stretch.
“It’s fine, let’s go,” he said.
The weather was gorgeous. A warm breeze ruffled the Allegheny River but otherwise it was almost like a lake in places, perfectly mirroring the dense green of the mountains on either side; the water grasses underneath the water were like mermaids’ hair, swept back in the invisible current. They talked easily, pointing out new construction on the bank between Emlenton and Parker. Pittsburgh people were moving in, building little chalets along the river, dumping loads of gravel down their driveways, laying concrete, importing Jet Skis.
When they were kids, there was a yearly raft race down nine miles of the river. The mother had always encouraged them to enter, each year building a more insane and complicated contraption. Maxon would organize the project on a concept in physics, and then Sunny would decorate it beyond the capacity of science. Once Maxon had actually had to haul their raft down the river, marching stoically along the bottom while Sunny bailed water. That year, Nu sat smoking a cigar atop an elaborate conning tower they had built, pulled down the Allegheny by the future rocket scientist. Now the raft race was a thing of the past, too dangerous for kids today. Maxon felt the memories coming in.
“Let’s stop at the flats,” said Maxon. “And go swimming.”
At the flats below Petersburg on the Crowder River, all the local kids had found a safe place to play in the river without worrying too much about current or getting over their heads. This was to the township what the beach was to any seaside town, an excuse to take your clothes off in front of your friends, a meeting place, where the girls could pretend to concentrate on tanning, the boys could pretend to concentrate on dunking each other, and the little kids could splash around on the rocks. There were a few short weeks in July where western Pennsylvania turned hot, and with no air-conditioning, the locals flew to the river for relief.
From the Allegheny, Sunny and Maxon turned upstream where the rivers converged, and after paddling hard to get under the railway trestle of the Belmar bridge, they found themselves in the calmer, clearer, shallower waters of the Crowder. Sunny peeled off her tank top and her shorts, and dove into the water, neatly avoiding the underwater rocks, and surfacing again, laughing, like a seal.
Maxon paddled on, slowly, and then rammed the canoe up onto the upstream side of a river rock that jutted out of the water near the bank. Under the water, everything was coated in fine silt, clinging to the rocks and plants. It was thick, like jelly, and you could swish it off with your hand or stamp your foot on it and it would flutter and spray through the water, turning the water muddy for a few seconds, until the current flushed it on and the river was clear again.
Maxon stepped out of the canoe onto the rock with a long flat foot, and then yanked the canoe farther up on the rock, to make sure it was stuck fast. When he turned to look at Sunny she was out in midstream, floating, sticking her toes out of the water to examine them and flapping with her arms to keep from drifting away. In the years they had spent apart, she had definitely changed. But he still recognized her. He recognized her movements, yes, and her physical shape. He recognized the tone of her voice and he noted persistent mannerisms and favorite vocabulary, although that had changed a little.
But what he realized, looking at her there splashing in the water, making a star with her body and then contracting down to do a somersault, was that he really recognized her, down inside. He knew that, if the planet was spun like a top, and stopped suddenly, and he was asked to point her out, that he could do it. There might be crowds and crowds of people all in gray, with gray hair, and gray eyes, and in order to be identified they would have to be logically processed according to age, and intelligence, and financial merit. He would not know any of them. But he knew Sunny, he knew her without looking, without asking. She would be there like a lightbulb in a basket of wool. She would be there like a red balloon in an asteroid belt. She was the only one, ultimately, in the whole world who mattered. She was the only one he would have known anywhere. How he wanted to insure that she would only be his. He had a ring in his pocket. It looked exactly like an engagement ring should look. But he had no script. He was on his own.
LATER, THEY STRETCHED OUT on a wide, warm stone. Sunny ate a granola bar, but Maxon couldn’t eat. He gulped the water, wiped his mouth, and lay back in the sun. She had been talking, talking, talking like she always did, the sound of it as pleasant to him as the breeze ruffling the pine trees. The sky was blue above his head, an impossible Pennsylvania blue of mid-July. It was as perfect and safe a moment as he could recall in his life. If only she would never stop talking, then he would never have to begin.
She lay back, finally, with a deep sigh, and it was quiet. He had no idea what she had been saying, but she seemed relieved.
He went up on one elbow, turned his body to face her. Now was the time for him to create an utterance, something to say.
“Sunny,” he said. His voice caught and he coughed. She went up on one elbow, too, now facing him. Her brow furrowed.
He looked at her, the big dark alien eyes, the delicate nose and rosebud mouth. He traced the fine line of her jaw, saw the soft wrinkle where it met her ear, the skin of her neck so pale and invisible, her jutting collarbone, her beautiful tiny breasts. He felt a feeling in his heart that was powerful love.
“Yes?” she said.
“Sunny, are you all finished with having sex with other men?”
She smiled. She laughed.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Are you all finished having sex with other women?”
He stared at her. He didn’t know what to say back. He hadn’t had sex with any other women.
Her eyebrows went up; that meant she was surprised. “Maxon?” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Oh, baby, are you telling me you haven’t had sex with anyone but me?”
“I have not,” he said. He was unsure whether she was pleased or disappointed.
“The very last time you had some sex was with me at the 4-H fair?”
“Yes.”
“All those years ago?”
“Yes.”
“And no one else? Oh, Maxon.”
No one else. He saw her eyes get wet, and her lips pursed together. She put one finger on the back of his neck, and traced it down past his shoulder, over his rib cage, down the side of his hip, and the outside of his leg as far as she could reach. He said nothing, did not move, but inside he was shuddering with relief, being touched by her again. She reached over and put her lips on his face, on his eyebrows, on the side of his chin. His breath came faster. But he had to stop it. She was so warm, so near to him, that he might go into a dream. He might fall off a precipice and wake up to find himself still unmarried, still on the same rung of the ladder, no closer to the top.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait.”
He sat up, and reached into the pocket of his shorts where they were folded in a neat stack of his clothes next to him on the rock. She watched him, saying nothing. She had what people call a twinkle in her eye. He pulled out a shining metal cylinder and said, “Sunny, will you marry me?”
She pushed herself up on one hand, her legs elegantly drawn up against each other. “What’s this, Maxon?”
“Oh, this? It’s a titanium capsule. You use it to store unstable compounds. It’s waterproof, I thought the ring might get wet so…”
“So is that a titanium capsule in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” she laughed. Her smile was wide, her face beautiful. Her body was lithe like a long coil, it swung toward him in a wave. She put her hand on his chest and drew it down, down his front, where her fingers feathered over the front of his boxers.
“Sunny,” he said again, “will you marry me?” He unscrewed the container and drew out the ring, carefully, carefully; it must not fall into the water.
She slipped her hand into his shorts and with the other hand in his hair, she pulled his mouth to hers, and put a burning kiss on him. She was now next to him, her body pressed to him, he could feel her pulse elevated, her breathing frequency intensified. Her fingers went around his testicles and softly rubbed there, underneath. This was a new thing. She must have learned it at college.
He broke away from her kiss, and said, his breaths coming in gasps, “Sunny. I need you to look me in the eye. And answer me. I need an answer.”
Look me in the eye. Answer me. I need an answer. All times this had been said to him. Now he was saying it.
“Yes, you ass,” she said, throwing her arm around his neck and wrapping the other around his waist. “Yes, I will marry you. I am all done having sex with other people. Yes, yes, yes.”
They would get married. They would move into their beautiful A-frame. And even if Maxon’s work called them away to the big city, they would keep their house, on their hill, forever. He knew it.
He put the ring on, and then she fell on him like a starving dog, and blew his mind.