Bridge of Clay(137)

But there was no more watery wilderness.

No more wine-dark sea.

Just a single boat gone rotten, but unable to sink completely.



* * *



—

But yes.

Yes, Goddamn it!

Sometimes there were good times, there were great times.

There was Rory and Henry, waiting outside Clay’s math class, or science, just coolly leaning: The dark-rust hair.

The swerving smile.

“C’mon, Clay, let’s leave.”

They all ran home and sat with her, and Clay read, and Rory spoke: “I just don’t see why Achilles is being such a sook.”

It was the smallest sway of her lips then.

She still had gifts to give.

“Agamemnon stole his girlfriend.”

Our dad would drive them back again, lecturing at the windshield, but they could tell his heart wasn’t in it.



* * *



—

    There were the nights when we stayed up late, on the couch, watching old movies, from The Birds to On the Waterfront to things you’d never expect from her, like Mad Max 1 and 2. Her favorites were still from the ’80s. In truth, those last two were the only ones both Rory and Henry abided; the rest were all too slow. She’d smile when they whined and moaned.

“Boring as bloody bat shit!” they’d crow, and it was safe, a routine.

A metronome.



* * *



—

And finally then, the morning I’m looking for, and she must have known she was close—and she came for him at three o’clock: She carried the drip through the door of our bedroom, and first they sat on the couch.

Her smile was hoisted up by then.

Her face was in decay.

She said, “Clay, it’s time now, okay?” and she told him the edits of everything. He was only thirteen years old, he was still too young, but she said the time had come. She told him moments way back to Pepper Street, and secrets of sex and paintings. She said, “You should ask your father to draw one day.” Again, she lifted, and dropped. “Just ignore the look on his face.”



* * *



—

After a while she said she was hot, though.

“Can we go outside to the porch?”

It was raining, and the rain was glowing—so fine it shone through the streetlights—and they sat with their legs out straightened. They leaned against the wall. She gathered him slowly toward her.

She traded her life for the stories:

From Europe to the city to Featherton.

A girl named Abbey Hanley.

A book by the name of The Quarryman.

She’d taken it when she left him.

She said, “Your father once buried a typewriter, you know that?” In perfect, near-death detail. Adelle and her starchy collar—she’d called it the ol’ TW—and there was a time when they’d both traveled back there, to an old-backyard-of-a-town, and they buried the old great Remington—and it was a life, she said, it was everything. “It’s who we really are.”



* * *



—

    By the end, the rain was even softer.

Her drip had nearly fallen.

The fourth Dunbar boy was stunned.

For how does a just-thirteen-year-old sit by and gather this up? And all of it falling at once?

But of course he’d understood.

He was sleepy, and also awake.

They were each like bones in pajamas that morning, and he was the only one of us—the one who loved their stories, and loved them with all his heart. It was him she fully trusted. It was him she’d imagined would go one day, and dig up the old TW. How cruel those twists of fate.

I wonder when first he knew:

He’d give those directions to me.



* * *



—

First light was still half an hour away, and sometimes good fortune is real—for the wind began to change. It came shadowing sideways through to them, and held them like that on the porch. It came down and wrapped around them, and “Hey,” she said, “hey, Clay”—and Clay leaned slightly closer, to her blond and brittle face. Her eyes were sunken closed by then. “Now you tell the stories to me.”

And the boy, he could have fallen then, and bawled so hard in her lap. But all he did was ask her. “Where do I even start?”

“Wherever,” she swallowed, “you want,” and Clay stalled, then helped it through him.

“Once,” he said, “there was a woman, and she came with a lot of names.”

She smiled but kept her eyes closed.

She smiled and slowly corrected him.

“No—” she said, and her voice was the voice of dying.

    “Like this—” and the voice of surviving.

A momentous effort to stay with him.

There was refusal to open her eyes again, but she turned her head to speak: “Once, in the tide of Dunbar past, there was a many-named woman,” and it came a great distance from next to him, and Clay now called toward it; he had something to add of his own.

“And what a woman she was.”

In three more weeks, she was gone.