Читать книгу Alice Close Your Eyes - Averil Dean - Страница 12

CHAPTER SIX

I have always liked cemeteries. There is a calmness about them, a purposeful tranquility. I like the names, carved in marble or set in brass, the dates still visible after a century or more. My favorite headstones are embellished with epitaphs written by the family left behind, which seem a humble and endearing attempt to sum up a life like the log line of an epic novel: The heart of man is restless until it finds its rest in Thee... Now twilight lets her curtain down and pins it with a star... Little Boy Blue has gone away.

One of the first things I bought when I received the advance on Zebra Crossing was a matched pair of gravestones for my mother and grandmother, to replace the cheap brass plaques that had been set in the ground to mark the places where their ashes had been interred. My mothers deserved proper headstones; they deserved to stand upright, not laid like pavement in the grass.

I have brought my scrub brush and thermos of soapy water. I kneel before my grandmother’s grave and scrub away the dirt and bits of moss that have accumulated in the crevices since last month. I pour water over the granite surface, watch it gather into tiny pools at the bottom of her name, then trickle away and disappear into the grass.

At the edge of my mother’s grave is a spider on a half-formed web. It’s a beautiful thing, pale gold, with long delicate legs and a slender body covered with fine hairs. I put my face down close, peer into its many glassy eyes. Its front legs pluck gently at the dew-jeweled threads. A single drop of water falls to the rung below and hangs there, clinging to the corner, where the cells of the web are joined by a tiny silken knot.

With the back of my scrub brush, I destroy the web and smash the spider into the grass. I pour water over the brush to clean away the bug’s remains, then more water over the headstone. When I am finished, I run my fingers through the carved letters, over the cold arc of granite and the carved stone rose at the center.

* * *

Later that night, Jack comes back for me. We head north, straight up the boulevard, past the tiny Vashon Theater crouching beige and humble on the left, and the much larger vine-covered brick yoga studio on the right, past the auto shop and the Episcopal church, until the town peters to an uncertain end and we leave it behind. After a few minutes, Jack turns onto a narrow dirt road fringed with pines, through which the Puget Sound shines in the twilight. He doesn’t stop until we’ve reached the empty mouth of a trailhead, where the moon sits like a pearl on a sheet of hammered pewter.

Below us is the beach my mother took me to about a month after Nana died. The weather was chaotic that day, blustering and weeping from a swollen sky. Holding hands, my mother and I wobbled through the high loose sand, then turned our shoulders to the sea.

For a while, we walked in silence, bundled into our hoods, hands buried deep inside our pockets.

“Things are going to be a lot different now,” my mother said.

I nodded. Things were already different. We came up against the bewildering absence of Nana every day. Breakfast was cold now, and late. My braid had unraveled to a ponytail, and the week before the batteries for my favorite doll had died, leaving her with an open, frozen mouth where she used to chew from a little plastic spoon. Now the doll’s mouth seemed to be screaming mutely, endlessly. I had put the doll under my bed, then in my toy box, before finally wrapping her in a rag and burying her in the garbage can on the curb outside.

“Nana was good at this,” my mother was saying. “For me it’s harder. We’re—I’m going to have to figure out what to do about money. Maybe get a second job. I don’t know.”

“I can get a job,” I piped, aware this was childish. But Nana would have expected me to find a way to help.

My mom took her hand from her pocket and laid it on top of my head. “You’re a little young for that, squirt.”

She took my hand. Hers was cold and thin as a bird’s wing. She smiled down at me, her face dewed with raindrops, melted somehow, as if all the bones under her skin had dissolved. It was the expression of the smallest on the playground, the soft, malleable face of directionless fear.

Jack and I get out of the truck and stand together, blinking at the moon’s smug roundness, listening to the clicks of the cooling engine.

“Makes you feel small, doesn’t it?” he says.

“And alone.”

“You’re not alone, you’re with me.”

I look up at him. His face is all planes and lines, and skin like a tarp stretched over the bones. He lights a cigarette, holds it between two fingers while he plucks a strand of hair from my cheek with his thumb and ring finger.

“First star,” I say. “Let’s make a wish.”

He smiles from inside the cage of his glasses.

“Careful what you wish for, little box thief. You might get it.”

“What do you imagine I’m wishing for?”

“Comfort. Same as the rest of us.” He peers at me through the smoke. “Or maybe not. Maybe it’s something else for you.”

He produces a stack of blankets from the backseat, lets down the tailgate and makes a nest in the truck bed, between the wheels of his pickup. I wait, smoking his cigarette, tracking a satellite across the sky. Nana used to worry that satellites and meteors could come down and crash on our heads. You’d never see it coming, she would say with a shudder and a sidelong glance at the sky.

Nana was pretty superstitious all around. Not only didn’t she step on the lines and cracks in the sidewalk herself, she kept me from doing so. No black cats, no number thirteen. As if she always knew the end would come at her fast.

When he’s finished, Jack helps me up and we settle together against the wall of the cab, our legs tangled on the blankets, my head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. The moon rises and retreats as though pulled by an invisible string into the starry sky.

“I like your house,” he says unexpectedly.

“Yeah? You’re the first person to see it inside.”

“It looks like you.”

“A hot mess.”

“Emphasis on hot.”

“I’m surprised you’d like it. Being an architect and all. It’s not exactly an original.”

“Not outside, no.”

“Have you ever lived in a house you designed?”

“No. I’ll build one for myself one day. I’m making payments on a plot of land south of Portland, near the coast. Waiting for zoning to approve the plans.”

“I’d like to see them.”

“Yeah? They’re in the truck.”

“Well, break them out.”

Prompted by my interest, he lays out the blueprints and describes the design—a modern Craftsman, with a wall of windows overlooking the sea, which will extend all the way through the bedroom, to open that side of the house to the ocean breeze and the patio. Lots of golden wood, he says, lots of glass. But for all the house’s delights, it’s the kitchen that enchants me most. A long soapstone counter faces the open window without obstruction, inset with a deep, wide sink and built-in cutting board.

I run my fingers over the delicate lines of the blueprint.

“You did all this?”

“You sound surprised.”

“Shocked. I can’t imagine where you’d even begin.”

“With an idea. Like writing a book, I’d imagine.”

“That’s not at all the same thing.”

“No? Why’s that?”

I shake my head, spread my fingers wide. “Well, because a book is only ever an idea, and then a refinement of the idea. What you do requires mathematics, physics, logistics. Books are just an arrangement of words, anyone can do that.”

“Bullshit. I couldn’t.”

He rolls up the blueprints.

“I’ve been reading Zebra Crossing. It’s more than an arrangement of words.”

I’m surprised, and touched. I’ve never known a guy who’s read my work after meeting me. It’s usually the opposite: the minute a man hears I’m a writer, he’ll bolt in the other direction to avoid having to read a book in which he has no interest.

“I think that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile,” he says, watching me.

I resume my poker face and clear my throat.

“This house looks expensive.”

“Yeah, it will be. But a lot of the materials will be repurposed and I can do most of the work myself. It will take a while, obviously.”

I want to know where a carpenter will find the money to build a house like this. It feels intrusive to ask, but Jack reads my mind.

“My family has some money,” he says. “My dad owns a chain of liquor stores back East. He settled me fairly well.”

“He’s still living?”

“Yeah.”

I frown, trying to get the lay of the land.

“We had a falling-out,” Jack says. “He basically shoved some money at me and told me to get the fuck out.”

“But if you have money, why do you work as a carpenter?”

“Well, it’s not Hilton money. And a man should always work, whether he needs to or not.”

“Only, not as an architect.”

He takes off his glasses, folds them and sets them aside. Then he slips one arm under my legs, the other around my shoulders, and shifts me in one fluid motion so I’m flat on my back.

“Carpentry is good for upper body strength,” he says.

He stretches out next to me. Twines our fingers together and turns them this way and that to see the effect, a herringbone pattern in brown and white. His hands are rough with calluses, wide and flat and strong. Mine seem like a child’s in comparison.

He tips my face to his and kisses me. His mouth is firm against mine, but supple, seeking. He catches my lower lip between his teeth, nuzzles into the ticklish skin under my jaw. Goose bumps blossom on my neck, and I tuck up my shoulder to make him stop. Smiling, he smooths them away with the palm of his hand and begins to unlace the neckline of my peasant blouse.

“Beautiful,” he says as he uncovers me. “Like an anime doll that fell into a rag bin.”

I can’t help laughing.

“Why does no one like my clothes? This is style.”

He draws the fabric aside and runs a finger along the lace edge of my bra. “I like your clothes just fine, so long as they’re on the floor.”

He unhooks the front of my bra and pushes the cup aside. Then he settles over me, his warm tongue curving around my nipple, his dark hair curling around my fingers. I watch his mouth, entranced by the contrast of his darker, stubbled skin against the pale swell of my breast. He takes my silver hoop in his teeth and tugs gently as he gathers slow handfuls of my skirt and finds the bare curve of my hip, grinning at my thigh-high striped socks.

“I take it all back,” he says.

I get to my knees and take off my blouse and his shirt, my skirt and underwear, run my hands over his chest and the hard slope of his shoulder. I unbutton his jeans and reach inside, wrap my fingers around the solid, dew-tipped length of his cock, and move down his body to take him in my mouth. His skin tastes clean, faintly salty, like the back of my hand before a shot of tequila. I weigh his testicles in my palm, run a thumb across their wrinkled surface and follow the fat speed-bump under his dick with my tongue as I take him to the top of my throat. We fall into a natural cadence, his hand at the back of my neck.

He leans against the cab of the truck, holding my hair aside, watching. His face is impassive, but his body begins to shift. His breathing picks up. The texture of his skin feels smoother and more taut. I want him inside me and worry that he’ll finish in my mouth, but he stops me, pulls me away with one hand tangled in my hair.

He digs a condom out of his wallet and rolls it on, motions for me with his fingers. I straddle him and ease down the length of his cock. I close my eyes. I have never had sex outdoors before, never felt the night wind on my bare breasts or felt this cool lick of air on my clitoris as I am spread apart. It’s electrifying. The heat between my legs crackles like molten lava spilling into the sea, hot meeting cold.

Jack groans and holds me in place. “Jeeeesus,” he says. “Wait, baby...”

I am still, imagining what distraction he turns to at times like this. Work, maybe. Measurements and angles, building codes and deadlines and the drying time of a slab of concrete. I wonder what this feels like to him, how wet, how tight I am around him. Already my cunt is clenched like a fist, contracting in upward ripples as if to draw him deeper inside me.

I open my eyes and he opens his. His gaze sweeps over me with dark appraisal, a fierce masculine pride, proprietary and urgent, and my body answers with an almost painful thrill from someplace low and deep inside my belly. He lifts me up and presses me down, fixated on the connection point between us, his hands splayed wide over my hips.

I lean forward to brace myself on the rim of the truck bed. The tips of my breasts graze his bare chest. He guides my nipple to his mouth, pulls me closer with one hand around the back of my neck, the other stroking my ass, sliding between my legs.

My breasts grow heavy, tingling, wet from his tongue and cold from the night air. My breath whistles past my teeth. He flexes his thumb against my clitoris and lifts me with each thrust of his hips, up and down. I feel him growing thicker inside me. I open my legs, arch back, leaning on my hands with my breasts raised like an offering to the sky. The stars seem to circle overhead. The night air moves over my skin like a cool cotton sheet, catching at my breasts, sliding across my thighs.

He turns his thumb so the tip is pressed right into the cleft of my clitoris, and that feels so good, unbearably good, as though he’s tripped a wire inside me, cut me loose and catapulted me into a rush of pleasure that shoots through my limbs and right to the top of my head. I come and he is chasing me with long hard strokes, clutching at my hips as if he can find more of me if he tries. A deep groan stutters from the back of his throat. His abdomen contracts under my hand.

It takes a few minutes for him to soften, for me to get my bearings and enough strength in my thighs to crawl away. He wraps the blankets around me and we share a cigarette as the moon beams down upon us and the crickets resume their song.

* * *

“Watch yourself,” Jack says.

“Watch your own self,” I tell him, picking my way across a cluster of damp rocks. “You keep watching me, you’re gonna wipe out.”

It was Jack’s idea to go hiking today, up the Chulapai Trail where the flat, loamy footpath wanders through an undergrowth of ferns, and gradually upward between slabs of mossy granite, rising like the ruins of a long-dead city in the forest. He is sure-footed as a mountain lion, graceful and swift, with an inaudible loping gait that makes it difficult to tell where he is when he follows behind me.