Renny’s family had brought a lawsuit R against Orlon University. Ever careful and prudent, the university protected itself, like a creature that could only think to sting. My brother’s research was gone. Someday someone else would collect similar information and would interview lightning victims, photograph them against a white wall, but that would be then. Not now. In the now that we lived in, everything went through the shredder and was turned to dust.
I had thought of a way to give my brother some of the life he wanted to live. Something that might please him, interest him, something to remember in the ever after . I asked Nina, and she agreed, so I phoned my brother at work. I hadn’t seen him or spoken to him since Nina had told me. My brother and I weren’t exactly used to the truth. So I dodged it a bit longer.
“Before they shred it, get the Dragon’s file,” I told Ned.
I had managed to gain a referral from Craven, my cardiologist, so that I could speak with the attending cardiologist in Jacksonville. When I asked about the Dragon, the cardiologist told me the old fellow came back stronger both times he’d been struck by lightning. He was an ox of a man who still walked ten miles a day.
“We ran tests on him. He said he was too old to give us more than one day to study him. Said it was a waste of time. According to the facts of his condition, he should have stayed dead. His heartbeat was less than ten beats a minute, slower than a bear in hibernation. He was eighty-seven years old when his second strike took place. He was knocked flat on his back and received so many volts it was immeasurable. Then he got up and had lunch. He refused all medical care, and as far as we know, he’s the healthiest old bastard in the state. Go figure.”
“You want me to steal his file?” my brother said now when I phoned him. “As in just take it?”
“Right now.”
Ned laughed; he seemed pleased at the idea of a small criminal act committed against the university.
“If I get caught, I’ll say you’re the mastermind.”
I was nervous about seeing Ned. I thought I’d say something stupid. Wouldn’t that be just like me. I figured a public place might be best; with people around, I might behave myself. I might not cry.
I met him at the diner in town for breakfast and he handed over the file.
“The Dragon’s an anomaly. One of a kind. Even if he’d talked to us, he would have done nothing for our study. He’s what people doing research call an ‘anecdote’ — a great story, but meaningless in the greater scheme of research. Just a lucky old bastard. And since there’s no longer a study, it doesn’t really matter.”
“Let’s go see him,” I said.
Ned had ordered a single scrambled egg and toast. He hadn’t even eaten half.
“We’ll be back by tonight,” I assured him.
“We never had anyone go out there and examine him. We can’t even be sure he’s still alive. Plus . . .” He played with his food. “Plus, I’m not feeling so great.”
“I asked Nina and she said you could go.”
“You asked Nina? What am I, five years old? Do I need permission?”
Leave it to me to say the wrong thing. I signaled the waitress and ordered rice pudding and tea. When I turned back, my brother was cleaning his glasses on his shirt. I saw that the skin under his eyes was scaly with rosy patches.
“She told you,” Ned said. He didn’t seem particularly angry, only disappointed.
“I sort of forced her to, Ned. I mean, I’m your sister. I should know if you’re ill.”
“Like I know about your life? Let’s face it, we don’t even know each other.”
“Ned,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s exactly why I didn’t want it this way!” He really was angry. “No sorrowful ‘Ned.’ Don’t say it that way. No bullshit. No standing on the porch. I really couldn’t stomach that.”
Now I was pissed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m not coming home, either. Don’t wait for me. Don’t think anything’s going to turn out differently. Don’t think there’s something you can do to prevent it. And for once in your life, don’t think it’s about you.”
I got up and went outside. The heat was crazy. I felt as though I were suffocating. Melting, but melting into what? I had wanted to give my brother a gift. Do something he’d been wanting to do. A single memorable day. Stupid, as usual. Mistake, naturally.
My brother had paid the bill and now he came outside. We didn’t look at each other. Finally Ned spoke. “Am I supposed to apologize for dying?”
“Yes. Apologize. How fucking dare you?”
I was too loud. My eyes were hot. I really might have been going crazy. I glared at him. I hated my brother. I thought if I was left behind again, I would break into pieces. I thought about how everything came too late.
My brother and I stood there in the heat. Pissed. Sweating. Older than we’d ever thought we’d be. This wasn’t our natural habitat. I wanted to rewind things. Maybe Ned did, too. He’d calmed down.
“I heard you helped paint the room for the baby,” he said. More neutral, cheerful territory, if it weren’t so tragic.
“I would have preferred red. I’m seeing some shades of it now.”
“Okay. I apologize,” my brother said. “It’s all my fault. Fuck me with my fucking goddamn cancer.”
Now he was the one to turn away. Ruin. The word I despised. It was happening to him.
“We’ll just have to turn you around, so Death isn’t standing at your feet. Then he won’t be able to take you.”
Ned laughed. He pulled himself together. Faced me again. Once you knew, you saw it. His face looked different. Thin. Tired.
“There’s no fooling that son of a bitch.” My brother shook his head, amused. “I love that story.”
“Why? It’s terrible.”
“It’s true.”
We both thought about that.
“Well, in the story Death is tricked.”
“Only twice, little sister. Then he gets what belongs to him.”
“The Dragon’s still alive and he tricked Death twice.”
“So, we’re off to see the Dragon. Is that why? Find out the tricks of the trade? It ain’t gonna work, baby girl.”
“We’re just going,” I said. “Think of it as a field trip.”
“You’re not the only one who knows a secret. Nina told me. You’ve got yourself a boyfriend.”
“Now we’re even,” I said.
Did I sound jaunty? Did I sound as though I could make it through the conversation?
“Yeah, you get to fall in love; I die. Very even.”
I thought that the people inside the diner were in a different universe, one where there was sustenance, hope, good health. The heat could wear a person out. Maybe there was nothing I could do for Ned. I was ready to back down. Then my brother turned to me.
“Your car or mine?”
“Seriously?”
“How many times do you get to see a dragon?”
It took two hours to get up north; I drove and Ned slept the whole time. Nina had told me he’d tried chemo when he’d first been diagnosed, but it had made him so sick he hadn’t been able to work; the doctors had agreed that the treatment was doing more harm than good. He was trying to last until January, when the baby would be born. It seemed unlikely that he would.
“Jesus, I’m drooling,” Ned said when he woke up.
We got to the outskirts of Jacksonville at noon. Hotter here. Impossible, but true. The air conditioner of my car started to sputter. Overworked, pissy. We pulled into a gas station and I got out to check the directions I’d gotten off the record from the cardiologist who’d treated the Dragon. I’d begged him, as a matter of fact. I told him I was a lightning-strike survivor who needed hope. He had no reason to disbelieve me.
There were several back roads we’d have to take and I worried that the ride was too bumpy for Ned.
Every once in a while I would look at him.
“Stop that. Just concentrate on driving. Fuck it,” he added when we went into a ditch. There was a trailer and a fellow sitting outside. “Pull over,” Ned said.
He got out and spoke with the elderly man in the lawn chair. It looked as if this fellow had the same lawn chair I had. Acres’ Hardware. I guess it was a statewide chain. Ned and the old man shook hands and spoke a few words, then Ned came back to the car. “Five miles up. But the Dragon won’t talk to us without an introduction, so says the gentleman in the lawn chair.”
“What does that asshole know?”
I noticed the fellow was locking his door, heading for our car.
“That asshole’s the Dragon’s son.”
“Hey,” our new companion said as he got in the backseat. “I’m Joe.” He was about seventy years old. Minimum. “I’ll take you to see my dad.”
“We never had a father,” Ned said as I got back to driving. “Well, we had one, but he took off.”
“Son of a bitch,” Joe said, sympathetic to our plight. “My dad is right up the road.”
“Now I’m dying and leaving my own kid before he’s born,” Ned said.
My throat was drying up. That kind of talk could make you cry; you had to concentrate and start counting right away, or you’d lose it.
“That’s different.” Joe had lit a cigarette; I kept my mouth shut, even though it would be weeks before I could get the stink out of my car. “That’s not abandonment. You don’t want to leave, so you’ll probably linger.”
“Linger?” Ned said.
“In spirit.”
Shut up, old man, I wanted to say. I strained to be polite. This was too difficult. This couldn’t be about Ned. “We don’t believe in that.”
Joe leaned forward. “What do you believe in?”
We thought that over until Joe shouted, “Pull over now!”
We did, and nearly got stuck in a meadow of saw grass. It was sloppy, muddy stuff, but I found a dry place to park. There was the Dragon’s house, a cottage that looked a little like mine. When I’d stopped at the gas station I’d bought chips and soda. A little refreshment. Joe went on ahead to make sure his father was presentable, then he stuck his head back out the door.
“Come on,” Joe said.
“You’re giving a ninety-year-old man soda pop and potato chips?” my brother said.
“Oh, shut up.” I grinned. God, it was hot. “What should I bring? Pablum?”
“What do you want to bet he has no air conditioner,” Ned said.
At least there was an overhead fan, but it seemed to be spinning in slow motion. The Dragon of Jacksonville didn’t look much older than his son. Pretty spry, actually.
“You tracked me down,” the Dragon said. “I hope you brought me something to make this visit worth my while.”
He was sitting in an easy chair made out of fake leather. A good-looking old man. Still had his hair, lots of it, white.
I held up the chips and pop, and the Dragon nodded, pleased. He suggested that Joe serve us all drinks with ice.
“What about you?” he said to my brother. Ned looked at me. He hadn’t thought to bring anything. “That’s a nice watch,” the Dragon said.
Ned smiled, unclasped it, and handed it over.
“Tells good time,” Ned said.
“There’s no time like the present,” the Dragon said.
It was a joke, so we laughed appreciatively. We had Coke with ice and sat on uncomfortable stools. It was sweltering. The Dragon pulled up his undershirt and showed us where the lightning had struck first.
“Dead for fourteen minutes and forty-five seconds,” Joe said proudly. “I timed him.”
Then Joe took off his father’s slippers and showed us the Dragon’s feet. They were curled up like hooves. “Arthritis,” Joe said. “Runs in the family.” He showed us the marks on the soles.
“The lightning hit a tree, ricocheted, went along the ground, and struck him dead for fifty-five minutes flat the second time.”
“What was it like?” I asked the Dragon.
“Funny thing. It was just like this,” the Dragon said. “Like sitting here with you. Soon you’ll go away. That’s what it was. One minute it was one thing, the next it was something else.”
“And how did you come back?”
Ned elbowed me. I suppose I was being rude. But there wasn’t much time, was there? That’s why we were here.
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have bought a plot in the cemetery the very next week. It was just a preview, not the whole show. I’m back because I’m back.” The Dragon took a gulp of soda pop. “Now I’d like to ask you something.
Maybe you know — is there a reason for everything?”
We all looked at my brother, the scientist, for an answer.
“Just because we don’t know it or understand it doesn’t mean there’s not a reason,” Ned said.
“There you go.” The Dragon was pleased with that response. “My sentiments exactly.”
He held out my brother’s watch. It was an old Rolex. Nina had gotten it for him on their tenth anniversary. It had cost a fortune and she had scoured antiques shops in Orlando till she found the right one.
“Want it back?”
Ned shook his head. “No time like the present,” he said.
“Then I’m going to show you a secret. You paid for it. You deserve it. Just don’t go telling your cronies. I’m not a sideshow.”
It took quite a while to walk down the road a piece. “Down the road a piece” was far, the way things always were in Florida. Ned was tired and the Dragon was slow, especially in the soppy saw grass.
“We’re going to wind up getting ticks,” I said. “Fleas. Poison something. Oak or ivy.”
“Do you smell it?” My brother had stopped and took a deep breath. “This is where the salt water meets up with the stream and mixes.”
It was salty and fetid both. Underneath it all was a sweetness. Here we were, older than our mother had been, wandering through the muck on a day when it was over a hundred degrees, following two old men through the swamp.
“I just want you to know: if I see an alligator, I’m turning around.”
Ned laughed. “But snakes don’t count, right?” My brother nodded, and when I saw a slithery thing in the grass, I grabbed his arm. “Harmless,” he said. “Milk snake.”
I realized then that my brother seemed happy. The place where his watch had been shone, white skin, naked, new. His khaki pants were streaked with mud and saw grass.
“Okay, here we are,” the Dragon said. “I can spit fire, you know that, right?”
Well, I’d seen Lazarus set fire to paper, burn me with a kiss — I thought I was ready. But the Dragon actually spit, and where it landed flames rose out of the saw grass. Joe ran over and stomped them out.
“Well, that’s physiologically impossible,” my brother said. All the same, he sounded excited. He looked wide-awake.
“So I’ve been told,” the Dragon said. “And I figured out how you can stop it.” The Dragon reached into his pocket and brought out something that looked like a tulip bulb. “Straight garlic. Takes the fire right out of a person. But I don’t want to do that now, ’cause I’m going to show you something worth seeing. You didn’t come all this way for me. Now promise you’ll keep this to yourselves.”
My brother crossed his heart. My eyes were burning. I thought of him in New Jersey, watching the bats in the sky. I thought about the colony of ants he’d had to leave behind when we moved in with our grandmother. I didn’t care about the things I couldn’t take with me, but my brother was different; after my grandmother put her foot down, Ned went out behind her house and set the ants free. I watched from the bedroom window. I never mentioned it,
but I’d seen that he was crying.
“Cross your heart,” my brother told me.
I did so. I didn’t wish for anything, want anything, say anything. I was in present time, standing in the muck, my shoes ruined, my skin itchy.
There was a log, no, a tree, the one hit by the same lightning that had struck the Dragon the second time around. An old moss-draped oak, dead now and pale, pale gray. Ice-colored in all this green, this muck, these leaves, this water, this heat. The Dragon walked toward it. He was knee-high in the water. He took off his undershirt and I saw the tree patterns the lightning had left on his arms and his torso. Like Lazarus. I felt a twinge of something sad. As if everything that was happening now had already happened, only to someone else.
The Dragon turned around and nodded. “Watch this.”
He spit at the old log and there was a spark of fire. The Dragon waved his shirt around and smothered the flame, but the smoke had done what he’d expected. Dozens of bats rose from the log. They seemed pure black at first, but in the sunlight they shone, a glinty blue, then purple. It was like seeing the face of the world, like seeing every possibility there had ever been. Out of smoke, out of fire, out of wood, out of ice, they arose in a cloud.
Ned blinked. “Well, what do you know,” he said.
“They’re around all day long, only we never see them. You walk along and you think you’re alone. But they’re here,” the Dragon said. “Along with all the other things we don’t see.”
The bats disappeared into the sky; from underneath they were gray-brown, like leaves falling upward, like time reversed.
My shoulders were sunburned, I could barely breathe in the heat, there was a tick walking along my shin, but it was worth it. If I hadn’t learned my lesson, I would have wished we could stay there forever. But I knew better now. We’d seen what we’d come to see. The way to trick death. Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch as it all rises upward, black and blue into the even bluer sky.
I called Frances York to apologize for never showing up for work. In my past life, before moving to Florida, I was the dependable one, the great co-worker, the planner of parties. As it was, I hadn’t been to the library in a week. Hadn’t called in once.
“Well, don’t come in now,” Frances told me. “Come to my house at six-thirty. Thirteen Palmetto Street. The house with the big yard.”
“Look, if you want to fire me, I understand. You can do it over the phone. It’s fine. I deserve it.”
“I have never fired anyone in my life, and I am not about to start now. You’re coming for dinner.”
I didn’t quite believe her. I dressed for the occasion of my firing. Somber. My hair combed back, a red headband that I’d picked up at the drugstore, and then, last-minute bribery, a plant from the florist. A Venus flytrap. Useful in Florida. Practical. The old me. The dependable girl. Maybe Frances would see she needed me, although the truth of it was, there was barely work enough for one of us at the library.
I’d never been to Frances’s house; it was on the older side of town, where the yards were bigger and the feel was more rural, less suburban. Her house was old Florida, tin roof, shutters, cabbage palms. I parked and got out, carrying the potted plant, wearing good black shoes that were uncomfortable. I stopped on the path. There was something that looked like a bear on the front porch. It was growing dark and my vision wasn’t great. I had a moment of panic. Then I realized it was the pup in her desk photos grown to a monstrous size. A Newfoundland. Not a breed that would do well in Florida, and as it was, I could hear the creature panting. When the creature woofed, Frances came out of the house. She was wearing blue jeans, an old shirt, a scarf around her head. She didn’t resemble her library self.
“Quiet, Harry,” she said to her dog. “Poor thing, some students got him, then realized they couldn’t take care of him and left him behind when they went home for the summer. Happens every year. Abandonment.”
“Good it wasn’t a pony,” I said.
When I approached, Harry sniffed me politely. He was slobbery, but gentlemanly. Not the pet I’d expected Frances to have.
“I thought you’d have a cat,” I said. “The stereotype.”
“Do you?”
“It’s not officially mine. It belonged to a co-worker. It thinks it’s mine when dinnertime comes around. And I had a mole. Adopted as well. I just released it into the wild. The hedge in front of my house, actually. I thought I’d better set it free before I killed it. I have terrible luck with living creatures.”
“They came looking for Seth Jones,” Frances said.
“What?” I couldn’t have heard quite right. We were talking about pets, weren’t we?
“Let’s go in,” Frances suggested.
I followed her, and the dog followed me. Had she said something about Seth Jones?
We sat down in the kitchen. Frances had made lemonade. Poured cherry juice into the pitcher, a faint blush, a sour pink. I could see it even though it was so pale. This was going to be worse than being fired. She wanted to talk about Lazarus, the man I never spoke about, the man I knew I would lose. Just not now. Not yet.
“The Orlon sheriff ’s office got a call from some character at a feedstore. That’s how the whole thing started, and now they’re convinced some crime has been committed. No-body’s seen this fellow Jones, not since he was struck by lightning, and now a deliveryman from the feedstore swears he recognized a man in Jones’s house who wasn’t Jones. It was someone who worked at the feedstore a while back. So now they’re digging around.” Frances let that all sink in, then she asked, “I suppose you want to know how I know all this.”
“Yes, how?” I suppose I looked stunned. I certainly felt it.
“They came for his library information. His card.”
Frances poured me a glass of lemonade. 180
“It was missing from the catalog, but I found it on your desk.”
She knew a lot. More than I would have expected. She’d been seeing through me all along.
The dog was sitting beside me, hoping there’d be cookies to go with the lemonade, I suppose, breathing on my leg.
I thought about which sort of lie would fit best.
“Don’t bother,” Frances said before I could even begin. “I don’t care how you’re involved. We’re going to burn the card, and just so they don’t think we did so intentionally, we’re going to burn all the others as well.”
We went over to the pantry. The boxes of catalog cards had been stacked inside, including the ones from the basement. There was the musty, sad odor of paper. Frances had spent all week carrying boxes of cards home.
“Because what someone reads in a library is nobody else’s business,” Frances said.
We waited for the sun to go down. Then we dragged the boxes into the backyard, dumped some cards into the barbecue, then poured on some fire starter. It was pitch-black now, a hazy night. I had my backpack; I unzipped it and took out Seth Jones’s cards. The ones I’d swiped.
“I appreciate your helping me,” I said. “And just so you know, there hasn’t been any criminal activity. Nothing like that.”
“Don’t tell me anything. I’m not helping you. It’s something I believe in. Let them find their man some other way.”
It took nearly three hours to burn all the cards. We drank all the lemonade, then switched to whiskey.
“The sheriff will be back tomorrow. I insisted I needed time to look up the gentleman in question’s card. I’ll let him know that over the years records have been lost.”
I worried for Frances, putting herself on the line this way.
“Oh, I know our funds will be cut. If they close the library, people in town will have to go to the Hancock Public Library, or maybe the university will let them use their facility. Maybe I’ll go to Paris. If I do, you can take care of Harry.”
I laughed.
“I’m serious.”
She just might be. We both had soot on our faces, under our nails, along with paper cuts from ripping up the catalog cards.
“He likes you,” Frances said.
The dog was at my feet, a mountain of fur.
“I’m totally unlikable,” I insisted.
The Newfie sighed and Frances and I both laughed.
We finished the whiskey, then had coffee to sober up. Now that we were done with the burning, we wet the ashes and scraped them into garbage bags, which I took with me when I left. No evidence. Harry followed me to my car and watched as I drove away. Nice dog, but I already had a pet.
I drove until I felt I’d found a safe place; I tossed the bag of ashes in the bin behind the diner. Then I headed out of town fast. I hadn’t thought to phone Lazarus; I’d thought we had time. Now I wished I’d called him from Frances’s house. I simply hadn’t expected the authorities to move so quickly. When I got there I knew something was wrong before I turned into the driveway. I pulled over onto the shoulder of the road. From here I could see there were no longer any red oranges. Everything had turned black. Oranges were dropping from the trees, like stones. Through the trees, I saw the whirl of blue light.
There was a sheriff ’s car at the rise of the drive, so I kept going; I doubled around and drove back to the Interstate. By then, I was shaking. I wasn’t sure if I’d done the right thing. Should I have driven right in and demanded to know what the hell was going on? Maybe I’d panicked. Or maybe I was smart. Either way, I was now on my way home. I stopped at the gas station in Lockhold and considered going back for Lazarus. I sat in my car for almost an hour, debating, and then I headed to Orlon.
I would hire a lawyer — that’s what I’d do. I would stand beside him even if they thought he’d murdered Seth Jones. Perhaps I would be an accessory to murder in their eyes. Perhaps Lazarus wouldn’t even be charged with anything. I stopped at another gas station. I didn’t know if I should go backward or forward, so I just went nowhere. This time I got out and called the police station in Red Bank, New Jersey. It was a crazy thing to do and I wasn’t sure why I did it. Some decisions you make and some seem to be made for you. I suppose I called the person I trusted most. The one whose opinion mattered. I stood near the restrooms in the dark, pushing quarters into the pay phone. Trucks rumbled by on the Interstate. When I got Jack Lyons on the phone he was quiet at first. He didn’t seem to believe it was me.
“Of course it’s me,” I said. “The parking lot. You and me.”
“Okay,” he said. “You and me.”
“I need to ask you some reference questions.”
In our small town Jack had been in charge of death of all sorts: homicide, suicide, double homicide, death by misadventure and by accidents, death by natural causes. When folks saw him walk into the old-age home, the residents crossed themselves, turned to look in the other direction, knew one of them was gone for sure. When he went to talk to the elementary-school kids about safety — no sticking fingers into electrical outlets, no grabbing pots off the stove — some of the children got hysterical and had to be taken to the nurse’s office. All that time Jack had been calling me with reference questions, he could have looked up the answers himself. I’d come to understand that. He knew it all already, so maybe he simply liked my pronunciation of asphyxiation, nightshade, West Nile virus.
Or maybe he just wanted to speak to me in my own language.
“Where are you?” Jack asked. “You disappeared. I wrote you a note, but you never wrote back.”
“I moved to Florida. Better weather.” What a joke. It was about a hundred and five degrees and so humid my usually straight-as-sticks hair had curled. The night smelled like poison.
“I know you moved. You think I didn’t take it upon myself to find out what had happened to you? I mean, where are you right now? I hear traffic.”
I thought about the way he used to look at me. He had wanted something from me and he never got it. I thought I’d been humiliating myself, but maybe I’d been doing the very same thing to him. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
“You’re sorry that you disappeared and never bothered to write? Or you’re sorry that you never gave a shit about me and how I felt?”
“I didn’t know what I wanted.”
“As opposed to now.”
I laughed. Maybe he did know me.
“So, what is it you want to talk about?” Jack went on. “Or let me guess. What did we always have in common? Oh, yeah. Death.”
He sounded different, or maybe I’d never listened to him before. Maybe those times in his car and in the parking lot weren’t exactly what I’d thought they were. Maybe he’d noticed the ice, the stones, the way I believed I deserved to be hurt.
“Are you making fun of me?” I wasn’t used to feeling this way when I talked to him. It had been a long time, after all.
“Hey, baby, I am Mr. Death. Ask me your questions.”
I’d called to ask him about Lazarus, about how I could help him if he was accused of murder. Should I help him flee, or tell him to stand up to everyone? But as it turned out, that’s not what I really wanted to know.
I hesitated. That wasn’t like me, I was overwhelmed with feeling.
“Go on. Shoot,” Jack said. “Make it a good one. Give me a what-if.”
So I did. I made it the only one.
“What if your brother is dying and you can’t stop it. What do you do?”
All I could hear were the trucks. The gears grinding. So many people going somewhere. I was standing in a gas station in the middle of the night in Florida. It was as though I’d never talked to anyone before. I could hear Jack breathing. I wanted to cry. I’d never even really given him a chance. Dealing with so much death had given him the ability to find logic in an irrational world.
“You help him find something that makes him feel that he still wants to be alive. Only thing to do.”
“Maybe you should have been the one at the reference desk.”
I could have been anywhere on earth. I was that lost.
“Not me,” Jack said. “It was always you.”
When I got home, I knew someone was there. Giselle was on the lawn and I had left her inside. There was a spare key under my mailbox. Not very hard to find; when I slid my hand under the metal, it was no longer there. I crouched down beside the cat and rubbed under her chin and left her out a while longer. She didn’t hate me as much, or maybe she’d grown used to me. Lazarus was asleep on the couch, one foot planted on the floor. He looked young, and tired, like a man who’d hitchhiked and walked all night. I locked all the doors, unplugged the phone. He had a duffel bag with him, which I took into the kitchen. You shouldn’t do these things, I know, but I did it anyway. I unzipped the bag, looked through it. I suppose I was just making sure he was who I thought he was. There were some clothes, a wallet with a few hundred in cash, a plane ticket to Italy, a passport with Seth Jones’s name and Lazarus’s photo; at the very bottom I found the wooden box filled with ashes.
I replaced everything and put on some coffee. I got a new bag of coffee beans from the freezer, and I noticed the electricity must have gone out sometime during the night. My house was a mess. I’d paid no attention to it; but then, I’d never felt as though it belonged to me. I’d never really lived here. The closest thing to something familiar, something that belonged to me, were the few pieces of Renny’s Doric temple still on the table. Giselle liked to play with the columns, batting them around until they fell on the floor.
I went to the back door to call her in now, but she wouldn’t come. I had to go to her, out by the hedge. The sky was inky. The center of the horizon was the color of the bats I’d seen in pure daylight, deep blue, streaks of black and purple. When I bent down I saw that Giselle had gotten Renny’s mole. I recognized it because of the bite out of its ear. We’d tried to save him and we couldn’t. The little pet who had cheated death; it wasn’t moving now.
“Bad girl,” I scolded Giselle.
I sat cross-legged and picked up the mole and held him in the palm of my hand.
By the time Lazarus woke up I had buried the mole, made coffee, and telephoned my sister-in-law. My brother was still recovering from our trek to see the Dragon, but he was happy that we’d gone. Ever since, he’d been dreaming of bats and butterflies, Nina told me. He was writing a paper on chaos theory in fairy tales. He was writing like mad, up half the night. Things had become clear to him and he wanted to get it all down before it was too late. The tiniest action, the smallest creature, the most minute decision had huge ramifications. One mole dies, one is saved, only to die again. One word is spoken aloud and the world changes. An arm becomes a wing, a beast becomes a man, a girl is silent for a hundred years — frozen in place and in time — a young man has to search the world before he discovers who he really is.
I lay down beside Lazarus on the couch. His eyes opened. Ashes to ashes. They were so dark.
“Hey,” he said to me. He was about to embrace me, kiss me, then he thought better of it. “I’ll burn you.”
I shook my head. I remembered what the Dragon had told us about fire. I handed Lazarus two cloves of garlic that I’d peeled in the kitchen. “The remedy,” I told him.
Another man might have questioned me, might have failed the test. Lazarus looked at me, then ate the garlic. I put my head against his chest. I didn’t feel the same heat from inside him.
Lazarus had seen the delivery truck from his window and he’d also recognized the driver, Hal Evans. He knew him because they’d had an altercation when they were working together at the feedstore. Hal had come in drunk and had been saying this and that, goading Lazarus. Lazarus had left some bags of fertilizer in the other man’s path and Hal had stumbled. Hal Evans was the worst of all people to come sniffing around the orchard. Maybe he’d heard the rumors the farmworkers had spread, that they worked for a monster, a man who refused to be seen, that there was something not right in the house where all the window shades were drawn.
Lazarus packed a bag as soon as Hal’s truck pulled out. He’d been waiting for something like this for a while; now he waited for what came next. Later that day, someone he didn’t recognize was talking to the workers in the field. He saw them looking at the house, conversing with the men he employed. That afternoon he walked out the back door. He figured any phone calls he made would be traced, but walking, he knew what that did: it made you a free man.
Lazarus was shivering, so I covered him with a blanket. The morning was bright. We blinked in the light of it. I told myself not to make a wish, or if I did, if I had to, if I just couldn’t stop myself, then to make one for him. Lazarus fell back asleep; he was exhausted and couldn’t wake up. I wanted to let him dream for as long as he could. He had walked for miles. I looked at him. I could taste the garlic, the cure, the end of everything, the beginning of everything.
I got dressed and went to the bank. Peggy, my physical therapist, was there on line and she congratulated me on how good I looked. “You worked hard,” she said to me. “The comeback kid.”
Had I? I suppose I had. Those exercises that made me want to cry, dragging my left side along. It felt almost normal now, only not quite; there was still a metallic feeling along my ribs, around my heart. You couldn’t see it, but it was there, just as surely as Renny’s hands were filled with strands of gold.
I withdrew everything in my account except for a hundred dollars.
“Big purchase?” the teller asked me. Everybody knew everybody in this town. Even me.
I smiled. Very big. I said I wanted cash because I was buying a used car. An old Corvette.
“I’m jealous,” the teller said.
I had fifteen thousand dollars left from the sale of my grandmother’s house, but it fit neatly in my backpack.
“It’s red,” I said.
“The best,” the teller said to me.
I walked to the parking lot. There was my Honda. The one with the good tires, the safe tires my brother had chosen before we left New Jersey. When I got home, Lazarus was still asleep. I understood. He didn’t want to wake up. I sat in a chair. Maybe I cried. I loved him in a way that was over. A way that was the beginning of something. The sort of love that opened you up for more.
When it was late afternoon I got onto the couch beside him. I whispered that it was time for him to go.
I won’t, he said.
You will, I thought. You want to.
This would be the moment I would never let go of, even though it caused me the greatest pain. When I was old, when I couldn’t walk or talk or see, I would still have this.
He assumed I was going with him. We’d leave the cat outside and someone would find her, care for her. Wasn’t that the way it went? Cats made their own homes, found their own way. I could send my brother a note, mail it from the road, not until we got where we were going, all those places, Venice and Paris, everywhere I’d ever wanted to go.
He packed the cash into his duffel bag. I watched his hands. I couldn’t look at anything else.
This was what it was. The ruin of it. The depth of it. Have it once and you can have it again. That’s the riddle. That’s the truth.
***
Lazarus took a shower, drank iced coffee, had a bowl of cold tomato soup. It was humid outside and when the day was over, the night was sticky hot. It was late when we left and the sky was dark. We drove to Jacksonville, on the side roads. I knew the way there. A place where no one would recognize us. We drove for an hour, then two. It seemed that we were going somewhere together. His hand on me as I drove. I could feel him, but it wasn’t enough. He should have known I wasn’t going with him: he should have noticed I left the cat in the house, something I would have never done if I hadn’t been coming back. I wasn’t somebody who left that way.
I took him to the bus station. All he needed to do was find someone who could change the date of birth on his passport and then he’d be Seth Jones. But for now, he needed to get out of Florida. I bought one ticket for the next bus; it was headed to Atlanta.
We sat at the bus station together till five in the morning. That was when the bus was leaving. And here’s the thing: We didn’t look at each other. We didn’t beg each other for anything. We’d already given each other all that we had.
“So, this is the way it ends,” he said.
People around us were sleeping. They had their own stories; they weren’t listening to us. There was a child in a red sweater in her mother’s arms. There was the sun through the dirty foggy window.
Not at all, I thought.
This is the way it begins .