Elevation(27)

“I almost waited too long,” he said. He sounded breathless. “I had to swim down to the chair. Breaststroke, if you can believe it.”

Deirdre could. She went to him and stood in front of the wheelchair, looking at him with wonder. “How long have you been here like this?”

“Awhile. Wanted to wait until dark. Is it dark?”

“Almost.” She dropped to her knees. “Oh, Scott. This is so bad.”

He shook his head back and forth in slow motion, like a man shaking his head underwater. “You know better.”

She thought she did. Hoped she did.

He struggled with his floating arm and finally managed to shoot it into the vest’s armhole. “Can you try to buckle the straps across my chest and waist without touching me?”

“I think so,” she said, but twice her knuckles brushed him as she knelt in front of the chair—once his side, once his shoulder—and both times she felt her body rise and then settle back. Her stomach did a flip with each contact, what she remembered her father calling a whoops-my-dear when their car went over a big bump. Or, yes—Missy had been right—like when a rollercoaster crested the first hill, hesitated, then plunged.

At last it was done. “Now what?”

“Soon we sample the night air. But first go into the closet, the one in the entry where I keep my boots. There’s a paper bag, and a coil of rope. I think you can push the wheelchair, but if you can’t, you’ll have to tie the rope around the headrest and pull it.”

“And you’re sure about this?”

He nodded, smiling. “Do you think I want to spend the rest of my life tied into this thing? Or having someone climb a stepladder to feed me?”

“Well, that would make a dandy YouTube video.”

“One no one would believe.”

She found the rope and the brown paper bag and took them back to the living room. Scott held out his hands. “Come on, big girl, let’s see your skills. Toss me the bag from there.”

She did, and it was a good throw. The bag arced through the air toward his outreached hands . . . stopped less than an inch above his palms . . . then settled slowly into them. There the bag seemed to gain weight, and Deirdre had to remind herself of what he’d said when he first explained what was happening: things were heavy to him. Was that a paradox? It made her head hurt, whatever it was, and there was no time to think about it now, anyway. He stripped off the paper bag and held a square object wrapped in thick paper decorated with starbursts. Protruding from the bottom was a flat red tongue about six inches long.

“It’s called a SkyLight. A hundred and fifty dollars from Fireworks Factory in Oxford. I bought it online. Hope it’s worth it.”

“How will you light it? How can you, when . . . when you’re . . .”

“Don’t know if I can, but confidence is high. It’s got a scratch fuse.”

“Scott, do I have to do this?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You want to go.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s time.”

“It’s cold outside, and you’re covered with sweat.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

But it did to her. She went upstairs to his bedroom and pulled the comforter off a bed that had been slept in—at some point, anyway—but bore no impression of his body on the mattress or his head on the pillow.

“Comforter,” she snorted. It seemed a very stupid word under the circumstances. She took it downstairs and tossed it to him as she had tossed the paper bag, watching with the same fascination as it paused . . . bloomed . . . and then settled over his chest and lap.

“Wrap that around you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She watched him do it, then tucked the part trailing on the floor under his feet. This time the lift was more serious, the whoops-my-dear a double flip instead of a single. Her knees rose from the floor and she could feel her hair stream upward. Then it was done, and when her knees thumped down on the boards again, she had a better understanding of why he could smile. She remembered something she’d read in college—Faulkner, maybe: Gravity is the anchor that pulls us down into our graves. There would be no grave for this man, and no more gravity, either. He had been given a special dispensation.

“Snug as a bug in a rug,” he said.

“Don’t joke, Scott. Please.”

She went behind the wheelchair and put her hands tentatively on the jutting handles. There was no need of the rope; her weight stayed. She pushed him toward the door, onto the stoop, and down the ramp.

*

The night was cold, chilling the sweat on his face, but the air was as sweet and crisp as the first bite of a fall apple. Above him was a half-moon and what seemed like a trillion stars.

To match the trillion pebbles, just as mysterious, that we walk over every day, he thought. Mystery above, mystery below. Weight, mass, reality: mystery all around.

“Don’t you cry,” he said. “This isn’t a goddam funeral.”

She pushed him onto the snowy lawn. The wheels sank eight inches deep and stopped. Not far from the house, but far enough to avoid being caught under one of the eaves. That would be an anticlimax, he thought, and laughed.

“What’s the joke, Scott?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Everything.”