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Bev got up this time, went into the kitchen to rummage around for a bottle of red wine she’d hidden. She opened it and drank a glass right there, alone, looking out the window into a blustery wall of darkness. She loved Hugo with that superb kind of love a mother has for a male child, a love that is deeper and more pure for knowing that he’ll more than likely turn out a fool.
Maybe she had no business getting married at all. These wrong, unsettling elements were about to present themselves—she had sensed this would happen. She’d been waiting for it, even. But here and all, numb in the river, she remembered she must live, even though she was pretty sure that all the wrong things were gathering into a big ball that would come rolling at her, maybe crush her, and her chest was already bursting for air.
One reason he had become a priest was the feeling of comfort these high ceilings gave him. There was room up there for thought, for memory, for prayer, for emotion. During the ceremony people mumbled responses and joined reedily in hymn singing, but really they too were thinking. Beneath that glorious ceiling they were feeling, they were remembering. They were mulling over their mistakes and hopes, private madnesses, or worries about money.
The horizon cast up a transparent curtain of radiance. It parted and a fountain of red-gold light struck the house and trees. Her skull felt too tight for her brain and her heart too big for her chest. That I should be alive, she thought, with everything to live for, and all this boundless sky.
Kismet put the suitcase down with the softest thud possible. ‘Everything I brought is in here, Winnie,’ she said, giving Winnie a loose hug. ‘You’ll be all right now, Winnie. You’re going to be okay!’ Winnie held up her hands. ‘Wait! Wait!’ Jeniver came out and gave the keys to Stockton. ‘Kismet is going home now,’ said Jeniver with a look that was severe but not unkind, holding Winnie’s gaze. ‘Home? This, this, this is her home!’ Winnie voice rose and her hands began to clutch. ‘Listen, Jeniver, she’s married, she actually is happy, she has a garden, she’s so good for Gary. And you know, we
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‘Suicide always leaves someone else holding your pain,’ said Ichor. ‘There’s no reasoning out what happened, Gary, why the ice was rotten right there. You’ll never get an answer.’ Gary kept his head down and said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’
He was talking to Gary at the screen of a computer and they were looking at drone footage of the Red River Valley covered with amaranth. Field to field, that was all there was. His arm was big, a smooth honey bear arm, but he had the sudden childish sense of how tiny their farm was on its plot of earth, and on that plot a house, and in that house a bed with two people on it no bigger than gnats. He felt the weight of all he couldn’t control, tiny little human that he was, working and striving, without really knowing how big it all might be.
In the year that followed they did not get married. They just kept making jokes about it, even when Kismet got pregnant. Everything was still funny until Kismet went into labor. Then for a while nothing was funny. It was a crisis. But after the baby was born things gradually appeared in a ridiculous light once again, also an absorbing silent light, and the times were pleasant but also desperate. This was the world.
