She tucked the pointy tip of the gift between her lips and lit the other end. It was windy and she had to huddle in the alcove between the back door and the kitchen window, sucking hard to keep it burning. She pulled in a great gulp of smoke. Her lungs seized. Her throat burned as if she’d swallowed an ember. She remembered the unfiltered cigarettes she and her sister had choked on behind the barn in Palmyra so many years ago. She gripped a patio chair to steady herself until her lungs loosened and she could take a breath. She wiped the tears with the back of her hand, her knuckles so swollen they seemed to belong on another woman’s hand. A stranger. She stubbed the damn thing out on the concrete wall, tucked it back into the box, and clamped it shut, smoothing her housecoat as she turned to the house. Then she understood why they called it a high. She was lifted. As if a great hand had reached down from the clouds and straightened her hunched back, making her feel tall. Strong. Like Alice, she had grown. The pain was gone. In her back, at the base of her neck, in her knees and shoulders and in between the seized joints of her disfigured toes.
She stepped out onto the great wide lawn turned a silvery blue by the path of moonlight shooting from the horizon, across the sea and through the grass. Like a carpet made of mercury, she thought, and hobbled forward wanting to walk across it. And the smells. It wasn’t just the nearby lilacs she could smell, it was everything. The lavender and seaweed and white pine and bayberry. The sweet fern and pine needles that had lain toasting in the summer sun all day. And the sounds! It was just as her father had told her so long ago that she was only remembering it now. She on his knee on the old wicker rocking chair on the porch one summer night. Him explaining what life was like before they got electricity. He called it the music of the night. She could hear it now. The ba-boom of the waves breaking against the seawall. The crickets’ song. The warbling call of the night herons and the croaking chirp of the spring peepers in the wetlands. And yet something was missing. All these sounds were so clear, deafeningly so, because there was one sound absent. The caterpillars had fallen silent.
She had done it, Veronica thought. Maddie had banished the pestilence. In her current state as she stood on the mercury path that seemed to lead from her lawn to heaven (she could almost believe there was such a place), it made sense to her that a young girl full of life and love, of sex and vigor, of hope, could make magic.
“You did it, my girl!” Veronica shouted toward the thick woods that led to the Castle, not caring if she woke Bob and Ginny and Dom and that jerk, Tony. Let them witness the miracle! It was a sign. She was sure of it.
She turned back to the house. She was exhausted, quite suddenly. When had she last felt such exhilaration? She patted the pocket of her housecoat and felt the small box that held her treat. She imagined her warm, soft bed. Lying next to her husband. As snug as the caterpillars tucked in their cocoons.
30.
Jules
He woke sweating and tangled in the bedsheet. He’d had a nightmare that his hands were on fire. Now that he was awake, they still burned. His fingers were so swollen, their sides touched so he looked like one of those circus freaks. Flipper Boy.
Leslie’s side of the bed was empty. He sat up, too fast, his head spun. For a crazy moment, he’d imagined her cheating on him, screwing one of the boys from the ballroom. One of the dark boys.
He looked in Brooks’s room, and there was Leslie and their little girl. One spoon wrapped around a tiny one. He chided himself, Get your shit together, man. You’re being paranoid is all.
He checked the bathroom cabinet for the pink bottle of calamine lotion. He’d been using bottle after bottle on his hands, and the claylike smell of the cool lotion had an effect, instantly soothing him. It was missing. He must have left it in the Castle kitchen.
He found the bottle next to the brass-and-enamel-bedecked La Cornue stove Leslie’s mother, he guessed, had insisted on. Although, from what Leslie told him, her mother could make only two dishes—pot roast and chicken and rice soup. He coated his hands in the cream. Then he heard the sound from one of the rooms at the end of the long dark corridor that ran from the kitchen, past the ballroom and ended at the admiral’s study—a wood-paneled room with emerald-green upholstered wing chairs and a desk that rivaled the one in the Oval Office. It was an animal sound, a keening that rose and fell, and, goddammit, this was all he needed, a beast—a raccoon maybe—stuck in the house.
He walked past the ballroom, which seemed empty, until he spotted a few bodies slumped on the antique divan the kids had pulled into the room. He laughed quietly, imagining what Mrs. Marshall, the admiral’s wife, would think if she saw her Queen Anne furniture soiled with beer and bong water and dotted with cigarette burns.
The sound was louder now, a moaning that sounded like pain, reminding him of Leslie in total agonizing glory as she pushed first Brooks out, and then, twelve years later, Eva. The door to the study was half open and Jules could see, in the green light that spilled from the banker’s lamp on the desk, that there were people in the high-backed green wing chair in the center of the room. A couple. The girl sat with arms akimbo and legs apart, like a smug queen on her throne, and the dark-haired boy (Jules only guessed he was a boy because of his wide shoulders) knelt in front of the chair.
And then the sound escaped her lips. The animal moan. It was pleasure. The boy’s face was buried between the girl’s legs, nodding up and down. The girl lolled her head from side to side—her eyes were closed but Jules knew, from the long glossy, blond-streaked hair, that it was her, the leader of the girls. What was her name? Her limp arms came to life and she gripped the armrests of the chair and lifted her hips. Jules was hard now, his dick rising against his thin pajama pants. He was still holding the calamine lotion, but he had forgotten to put the cap back on, and as the girl’s moans reached a new height, he looked down and saw the pool of opaque pink goo spreading on the dark wood floor, and the girl was laughing, biting her bottom lip and saying, “Oh, Daddy,” and the boy was on his feet, his mouth wet and glistening, and charging toward Jules and he saw it was the same boy from the fight at the fair and he ran from the room like a fucking coward he told himself and the boy slipped on the lotion and Jules heard a thump and then the boy cursing and the girl—Bitsy, that was her name—giggling.
He was in the garden, leaning over to catch his breath, his swollen, poisoned hands throbbing, and he heard it. Or he didn’t hear it, but it felt as if the silence was a noise unto itself. No more ca-cacking of pincers tearing at young leaf. No more spit-spit-spit of their shit raining down on the forest floor. He fell to his knees and let his hands rake through the soft grass.
“Jules?”
He turned and saw Leslie standing at the top of the stone steps, like a sylph in her white nightgown.
“Sweetheart,” she said, and he heard the fear in her voice. “Are you okay? I thought you were, maybe having a heart attack.”
He laughed loud and long, his booming voice bouncing off the lush walls of his garden.
“It’s over!” he cried. “Listen.”
His beautiful wife tilted her golden head.
“What a relief,” she said quietly.
“Relief!” he shouted. “Sweet, sweet relief!”
He lifted her into his arms and twirled her around, the skirt of her nightgown ballooning.
“Everything is going to be okay,” he whispered.
PART FOUR
An Eclipse of Moths
July-August 1992