Eddie laughed in agreement and said he remembered that.
His mother sought out his hand and looked down when she found his prosthesis instead. An unspoken shame for having momentarily forgotten the past seemed to radiate from her; she skipped over the apparatus, and her fingers made gentle contact with the skin of Eddie’s forearm.
It’s okay, he said. Forgiveness never ends, he thought to himself. Either it’s a bottomless cup or it’s nothing. Black—no milk, no sugar. Come up next month, Ma. I’ll take care of the airfare. Immediately he chided himself for having made this offer before clearing it with Ruth.
Really? she said.
Maybe I’ll make dinner for you and Ruth and Nat, maybe Bethella will come by.
Let’s not go too fast! she exclaimed at Bethella’s name.
Darlene locked eyes with her son. Eddie tried not to smile or cry. The longer they held this look, the more it expanded, seeming to contain everything—the events of their past as well as the consequent emotions: pain, joy, betrayal, estrangement, love, hate. Then the moment blew like an overloaded fuse.
She spent a moment trying to remember the subject of their conversation, then said, Sirius! So me and Sirius, we turned into a couple of black blobs out there that night, squatting to pick strawberries, turning invisible.
The moon hadn’t come up yet. In that sable darkness they found an advantage. Sirius knelt in the dirt behind her to rest, an act that, had How seen it, would’ve earned him a severe reprimand. He had stopped picking anything in favor of shaking the vines in order to make a noise that sounded like work. Darlene stopped too and raised her hand to wipe her brow and take a whiff of the strawberry residue that coated her fingertips, the only pleasure the job had to offer, and a dubious one at that, given the stickiness that accompanied it. In the midst of his rustling, Sirius quietly begged her to join him, and she inched her way in his direction, still squatting, duck-style. By this time, the dusk glowed a striking pink stroke against the black of the distance, and stars revealed themselves like champagne bubbles along the inside of a vast fluted glass. When she arrived at his side, placing her hand on his sweaty back through the cutout sleeve of his shirt, he pointed out various constellations, the centaurs and scorpions in the sky that she had never quite believed in.
He explained to her again the concept of light-years: light traveled six trillion miles in one of our years. Somehow that sounded slow to her. She found it disturbing and difficult to fathom when he repeated that the starlight they saw that night had really happened hundreds of years in the past and only reached their eyes that day. It offended her that the past could intrude so literally on the present yet never return. It made her think of everything in her own past that had brought her to Delicious and that she wanted to reverse, and how the light from the stars had come from long before the time she had been with her son, even from before the time when Nat had been alive. Only then could she faintly accept the romance of it; of human beings, all by themselves on a wet rock in an outpost of a universe whose size they couldn’t comprehend, staring into the heavens to make primitive pictures in the air based on lights that might not even exist anymore. And one of these days all of it would disappear, at least the way Sirius described it: space would collapse, the planet would get torn apart by a comet, the sun would fry the solar system with a supernova, some catastrophe would obliterate human history and civilization. We’ll be lucky, he said, if our bones become somebody else’s fossils.
Darlene absorbed all of this information from him but could find no hope in it whatsoever. Why, she asked, if all these small things we do, all this work that gets dumped on us day after day, if all our love and our attachments mean absolutely nothing and everything will eventually get incinerated, why do we bother to do anything? Is there any reason to keep on living? Is that why it’s better to smoke our lives away, why oblivion and death seem to call to us continually, like they’re summoning us home? How do we do it? How do we go on?
Before Sirius could respond, How turned on the lights, a pair of those bright white spotlights mounted on stands in clusters of six, and unleashed the type of dazzling illumination you might normally find on a Little League field in a suburban town. The two of them must have felt electrocuted. They froze for an instant, then their limbs unclenched, and as if falling out of the cosmos, they reset themselves to the task of foraging in the low plants and vines and dirt to find unbruised, pristine specimens and gently place each berry into one of the small boxes they carried for that purpose.
So I never got to hear his answer to the question, Darlene said. I found my way, but I wanted to know what he thought.
I reckon I heard the answer, Eddie said, and he began to relate how during Sextus’s trial, he and Sirius had gone with Michelle and a couple of people on the prosecution team—a lawyer and a young clerk—to a diner a few blocks down the road, the kind that looks like an Airstream trailer, wrapped in aluminum that’s been polished and faceted into diamond shapes, flooded inside with that pleasantly unpleasant odor of many years of hot bacon grease. Somewhere in the course of a freewheeling conversation, loosened by the sense that the team no longer had a chance of losing the case and by the solid beams of sun chopping through the space, the clerk turned to Sirius and questioned him about his escape the way someone young and brash would.
The slim kid had on a short-sleeved shirt with a light blue grid pattern, exactly like graph paper. The energy in his body looked like life when he turned his whole torso to ask Sirius, How the hell did you get through all that?