White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,31
of a boys’ choir. Churchy. She told him so, and he looked very slightly hurt. She’d meant no harm. She thought if they were ever together, their lives would begin to weave just like this, one small hurt, a backing down and recovery, another and another until a tapestry was woven, as complicated as any other. The euphoria of newness would last a month, two months, a year, and then they’d be caught in something of their making and beyond their making.
She felt him pulling back. Had he thought she could be something to him? They seemed to realize simultaneously that they were not destined to become each other’s saviors. They’d been shot out of cannons, two hurtling objects meeting in midair. “I’ll drive you home,” he said.
“No, please, I want to walk. It’s a beautiful night.”
“I’ll walk with you.”
“No, I feel quite safe. Thank you, you’re very sweet to offer.” Her eyes told him it had been good with him, and it was over. She kissed him again and shut the door behind her softly.
There was something necessary about putting one step in front of the other in the shadows of moonlight, her flashlight searching for movement at her feet. Puff adders were the most dangerous snakes at night: sluggish in the cool of dark and unable to move out of the way. Along the road, she wondered, What just happened? Did I go there to even the score? She hoped that wasn’t true. She didn’t think it was. She was drawn to the music in him. He made love the way he made music: sensitively, expressively, holding more than a little in reserve. However much had been held back, though, she felt deeply grateful to him, as though she’d been seen again.
She found her mind tracing the pathways that had brought her to this road on this night—as though each step could be unraveled and retraveled—the men who’d touched her, taught her something, and left.
Michael was the first. In the spring of her junior year, they’d both quit their cross-country teams, and every day after school, he took her home to his room. He was shy, tender, perfect. For the junior talent show, he came on stage in his thick glasses and dirty white sneakers and a baggy Sherlock Holmes double-breasted raincoat. He carried his cymbals, one in each hand, his glasses glinting in the spotlights like fevers of the brain. When he clanged the cymbals together, the audience went wild. She felt in that moment that she loved him as much as it was possible to love anyone. But she was wrong. Then there was Drew with the bad reputation, and Zachary, the aesthete, and Brandon with the beautiful, sad eyes. And a while later, Lawrence.
She undressed and lay in bed, with the moon passing across the window. The lights of the Gordons’ house shone across the boundary fence. She thought of Hasse, his kindness, his sweet lovemaking. And then an image of Erika and Lawrence flashed into her mind. She imagined a hotel room, and her face grew hot with shame and fury. Her heart pounded, and finally it slowed. The moon passed out of sight, and she slept.
The following day, Alice came home from work at lunchtime. Isaac was still among the missing. The house was very still, except for the trilling of the crested barbet in the tree. Daphne was asleep, visibly pregnant. Alice patted her, asked her how she was while Daphne thumped her tail against the floor and panted, too hot to stand up.
Alice sat down at the wooden table in the kitchen with a glass of water, gulped it down, and refilled the glass. She was losing weight, not because she wanted to. Her head, her whole body, was dizzy with memories. In those early days of being together with Lawrence, her love for him had been a spring colt, a shiny, shy thing. He was a man for whom words came hard, like water at the bottom of a deep well, with only one bucket to the top. She’d been patient, thinking there would be words worth waiting for.
In graduate school, they’d moved into a scantily winterized outbuilding ten miles outside of Providence, part of a nolonger-working farm. The windows rattled in the wind. In May, the lilacs dwarfed the building they lived in, dwarfed everything in sight. They were almost frightening when they bloomed, throwing their scent into the air so insanely, there was nothing to breathe that wasn’t