Paul scraped paint all afternoon and into the early evening. His wrists, shoulders, and back would be sore tomorrow—his sprained wrist throbbed—but he didn’t want to stop. He kept thinking, One more patch. Iris and Sean came home in the afternoon with a sack full of library books, and Paul took a break to eat a sandwich and read to his son. When Sean went down for his nap, Paul went outside. He stepped up and down the ladder to refill his water bottle and reapply sunblock, making sure to reset the ladder each time. He took a break when the monsoon swept through, a brief furious rain that washed away the green flecks of paint and cooled the air. He breathed. He breathed his way to calm, the way his counselor taught him when he’d finally agreed to go at Caryn’s insistence.
Iris called to him to come in for supper, and he waved her off, told her he’d be in in a minute, to get started without him. He wanted to finish the last stretch so he could start priming tomorrow. He was still working when the sun set. His mother called to him again.
“Paul!” she said. “Come on. Sean’s going to need a bath before bed.”
He sighed. “One minute!”
He thought he heard her say, “Jesus Christ.” She turned on the outdoor lights. The house lit up with twinkle lights. Those lights. She left them up all year.
They had been Jess Winters’s idea. He could still see Jess out here with his mother, twisting the cords around the posts, his mother locking them in place with a staple gun. The night she’d disappeared had been a Sundown night a few days before Christmas. Usually one of their busiest times but slow that weekend because it had been pouring rain for two days. Almost a foot of snow had dumped on Flagstaff, closing I-40. He remembered the details because he’d had to tell the police several times. He hadn’t seen Jess that night, not at all, but that wasn’t a surprise; she hadn’t been coming to the orchard since Thanksgiving—the last day he’d seen her.
The details of Thanksgiving were less clear. He’d barely slept after he returned from the orchard, trying to make sense of what he’d seen, trying to figure out how to tell Dani. The rage had simmered all night. Rage, plus a sick sense of shame for being turned on by seeing them, plus a strange feeling of betrayal. Adam wasn’t the father he’d believed him to be. And his father: still gone. Nothing was all right after all. He’d not planned to make a scene, but at dinner, as he watched them smile and pass heaping bowls and share pleasantries, the boiled-over rage blindsided him, pushing him out of his chair. He could still feel the cold weight of the butter knife in his hand, the satisfying thud it made against the wall. He could smell the cinnamon and nutmeg of the crushed apple pie. He could see the terror on Jess’s face, hear the whimper in her throat. Her hands, thrashing like a hummingbird trapped against a window. When the memories crept in like this, the two moments sometimes conflated: Jess against a tree in the orchard, Jess frozen at a dining table. Trapped, he realized now, first by Adam, and then by him.
It was almost dark when Paul finished scraping. Twilight. Dusk, Caryn called it. Her favorite time of day. The time when things slip through, she said. He heard her voice in his ear, something she’d murmured in her last days. Meet me in the dusk, love. I’ll be there.
Paul stood on his father’s ladder and he called out, “I’m right here.” Right here. Right, here. A comma could change everything. And everything could change in the smallest space, the smallest breath of time.
He looked at the lights twined around his mother’s house, at the lights of Jerome up on the hill. Ethereal, Dani had called them, when they sat in her car and watched them together. Before she’d stopped seeing him, stopped talking to him altogether. Here he was, at his family’s house, in the ethereal dusk. Home.
He took a step down, and his foot slipped. He missed the step. In a panic, he flung his right arm out away from the roof, and the ladder lifted. He lunged forward, trying to correct, and for a moment the ladder hovered and seemed to stop straight in the air. But then gravity won, and Paul was falling. He let go of the ladder and jumped, some twelve feet off the ground. He tried to turn his body to land on his feet so he could take the tumble in a forward roll. He almost made it. Almost. He landed on two feet and rolled forward, but his shoulder wrenched beneath him.
Stunned, he lay in the grass—thank god it wasn’t cement—and assessed the pain. Ankle, a little twisted, but he could move it. Shoulder, throbbing, on fire. But he was breathing. He lay on his back, not yet touching his shoulder. He groaned as the pain rose to the surface, and he choked back tears. What: A father, an idiot man not paying attention, crying like a boy on the lawn. Where: Right here. Home. If he could ever make it right. Why: Because too many people he loved were gone, buried in the earth, leaving him—boy turned man, man turned father, but still a son, always—lying faceup in the grass, weeping, alive.
At the Front Door
At sunset, Rachel Fischer hurried home from the theater, half skipping, half running down the sidewalk. She was late for dinner. Hugh was cooking them an anniversary meal—eleven years!—and she forgot. Forgot! Though it was summer and she was technically “off”—ha!—she was helping stage-manage the town’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof because many of her students had roles. Dress rehearsal was tomorrow, the opening in two days, and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were they behind. She’d been marking the stage, rolls of neon spike tape shoved up her arms like bracelets, her knees and spine screaming from crouching and kneeling on the wood, when the clock tower struck. She’d run out of the black box and into the fading sunshine, wincing at the brightness, the tape rolls clacking around her wrists.
She darted up the driveway and checked her watch. Ten—well, fifteen—minutes late, but that wasn’t good. They had just spent three days—three days she couldn’t afford to take off from rehearsals—with Dr. Steve in Prescott talking about their exasperating habits: her constant lateness and absence, her tendency to be distant, her obsession with work; his neediness stemming from lack of self-esteem, his hypersensitivity to perceived criticism. She shoved the tape rolls in her bag.