Mary and O'Neil Page 0,56
He passes a small house, then a second, larger one, with a gracious wraparound porch and a hammock slung in the yard, and he wonders how it would be to live up here as his sister does, to raise a family in this country of tall trees and long winters; for a moment he imagines that such a life is what he would like to have someday, believing it but also hoping that turning the idea around in his head will carve a space his jangling body can slide into. When it doesn’t, he thinks about Mary, who is awake by now and dressing for the wedding in her room with her friends, and about the children they may someday have, the kind of work they will do, and the houses they will live in. He thinks about a book he read years ago—a book he loved and had forgotten—about a boy who lives alone in the forests of Maine and befriends the trees and animals. He thinks about his sister, who will stand with him at the altar, her husband and sons; he remembers his parents, how he misses them on this, his wedding day.
O’Neil has climbed for ten minutes when the road levels and gives onto a grassy clearing with a view to the north and behind him, higher up, a field in which a herd of sheep dreamily graze. O’Neil stops and stands with his back to the field, resting his hand on a smoothly weathered fence post. Below him he can see his hotel and the town of Southwich, its grid of streets and houses and shops, and his heart expands at the sight of this happy and attractive place that exists for no reason. To the west he finds the main road where it follows the lake, a shimmering expanse two miles away, and beyond it the great sullen peaks of the Adirondacks, now socked in heavy haze. Again O’Neil looks east, toward his sister’s house, and counts seven lines of clouds drifting almost imperceptibly toward him in the lazy air. Far off, a curtain of rain falls into the hills.
It is here, alone with the town laid out below him, that O’Neil allows himself to think about his parents and remember the accident that killed them twelve years ago. This is why he has come. He does not believe in heaven, or the existence of consciousness after death, but he knows that his awareness of them is never far, like a ghost that travels beside him, always at the edge of his vision; and that when he wishes to feel close to them, as he does today, he can bring this awareness into focus, briefly, in a picture. He closes his eyes and lets his mind range. The image he selects is from his sister’s wedding, a year before the accident: his father in his tuxedo, standing on a chair to toast the gathering; his mother laughing, her head thrown back in release, her face opening with pleasure at the wit of the toast O’Neil can no longer hear. There is my father, he thinks, my father, toasting. There is my mother in her blue dress. He holds the picture in his mind as long as he can, until the colors blend and shift, the signal breaks up like a radio station gone out of range, and what remains is only a spidery light that dances against the interior of his closed eyes and the memory that they are dead. Then he says a prayer against the rain and heads down the hill.
Stephen is asleep at the bottom, and together they walk back to the hotel. By the time they return it is after ten. Mary’s parents are finishing breakfast in the dining room, and before O’Neil can hurry up the stairs they see him and wave him over. They are dressed for the wedding, and O’Neil, in his damp T-shirt and shorts, stands awkwardly by their table and eats a cinnamon roll while they talk about the weather. If it looks like rain, Gretchen wants to know, will they still hike up to the meadow? She hopes he’ll say no—Mary’s family has been a little uncomfortable with the plan all along—but he says he’s not sure; he’ll have to talk to Mary. Probably, he says, if it looks like rain but isn’t actually raining, they will go ahead with it.
O’Neil finishes his roll, takes another off the table to eat later in his