He laid the gun on the dock and walked over to her. Her sweater had fallen from her shoulders, and he stooped to pick it up from the dirt. It was a pink cashmere sweater that belonged to Julie; one of the name tapes Lily had bought when they sent her down to school at Dominican was sewn in the neck. Julia Knight McClellan. Julie was as pretty now as Lily had once been. Although her fine, almost white blond hair had always reminded Everett of his sisters (“She may look like Sarah but she looks nothing like the way Martha looked,” Lily had said this summer, nearly screaming. “I don’t know how you can even say that”), Julie looked, on the whole, more and more like Lily: she moved the way Lily moved, had even the shy, hesitant smile which by now was only a mannerism for Lily. (Only about an hour ago, at the Templetons’ party, had he not looked across the room to see Julie brush a strand of hair from her face with Lily’s own rapid, tentative gesture? Lily, he had thought, his face suddenly cold with relief and shame, in that instant between seeing the gesture and realizing that it was not Lily at all, but Julie. Until that moment when he thought he knew he had refused to ask himself where Lily was. Only then did he realize that he had not moved from the room in half an hour, had stayed there deliberately so that he might believe Lily to be on the terrace, or downstairs in the room with the piano. We will thrive on keep alive on/just nothing but kisses. Julie had been wearing a white dress cut low in back, and he had stared at her sunburned back as if he had never seen it. What he had never before noticed was that her back was exactly like Lily’s. You could see the small bones. Both Lily and Julie stood very straight, holding their narrow shoulders back as if to hide the bones. He had been staring at Julie’s back as if in trance, wondering with intense irritation why she had not worn a dress which covered her bones, when he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder. In his irritation, he jerked away; it was Francie Templeton. “You need a drink, Everett,” she had laughed; he smiled and put his arm around her bare shoulders. “Sure, Francie,” he had said. “Sure I do.”) She was already gone then, he thought now, trying for the first time to make chronology of it.
The wind was rising off the river, breaking both the quiet and the still heat, disturbing the dry leaves and splashing water against the dock, rocking the little cruiser in its mooring, knocking Channing’s flashlight free from the tangled roots and into the drift of the water. Willows whiten, aspen quiver. It was the only line of verse Everett knew: he had learned it maybe thirty years before and he did not remember who had written it or what followed it, but often when the wind came up on the river he found himself repeating it in his mind. Once in Colorado he had seen aspen trembling, miles of them, and had wanted them for the ranch.
He brushed the leaves and dust from Julie’s sweater and wrapped it again around Lily’s shoulders. If a wind comes up when the kiln burns, he thought distantly, the house could go. He stroked Lily’s hair, imagining the flames flashing down through the windbreak of eucalyptus, catching the immense dusty growth of ivy on the north walls, smoldering, then flaring up irrevocably through the entire wooden frame of the house. He could not get it out of his mind that Lily would be trapped in the fire, and he shut his eyes in vain against the ugly image of her fragile bones outlined in the incandescent ruin.
“You knew,” she said finally, her dry sobs mixed with coughs now. “You knew there wasn’t any need.”
He recognized her plea and could not answer it. He wished that he could comfort her (there was no need, Lily, no need, you weren’t involved, Lily, count yourself out), because she had not, in fact, been involved. Now that it was done, now that Channing lay dead between the river and where they stood, it seemed to Everett that none of them, least of all Lily, could have been involved; that all of them, he, Lily, and Channing, had simply been spectators at something that happened a long time ago to several other people.
“You shot him,” Lily whispered.
Everett nodded, abruptly exhausted. Maybe she didn’t realize, he thought, inert with the new possibility that he would, after all, have to explain it to her. (He had thought they were at least done with that, had thought she realized that for once she had something worth crying about.) Maybe she just now figured it. Then he saw that she was looking beyond him at the dock where his gun now lay, and realized that she was doing no more than framing a question: what would he do now.
He had not thought of there being alternatives, solutions, next steps. Although he could not now focus upon how it had happened or what would happen next, he seemed to have known all along, as surely as he knew about the kiln fire, not only that it would happen but that everything he knew would be obliterated by it. Lily meant something else: you shot him, she meant. Now what.
It occurred to him that Lily had always been keyed to picking up pieces, peculiarly tuned for emergency. What eluded her was the day-to-day action. She would not buy a dress without his approval, but she had driven into the hospital without waking him the night last Christmas when they called to say that Julie had been in an accident after a dance. She had gotten a respirator down on the dock in ten minutes the night his sister Martha drowned. And once, years and years before, she had literally saved Knight’s life: he had been playing with Knight on the grass when Knight crawled away and tore his foot open on a broken Coca-Cola bottle. He had knelt there for whole minutes with Knight in his arms, helplessly watching the blood spurt clear red on the grass. Then as now, he could not think. (That time it had been Lily who had seen them from the house, had come running with a dishtowel and had known how to make the blood stop, and finally shoved Everett and the baby into the pickup and had driven twenty-five miles in to the emergency hospital in Sacramento, her foot down on the accelerator all the way in along that twisting river road. Knight nearly died and he might have died anyway, there in the waiting room of the hospital, if Lily had not slapped the attendant and screamed I don’t give a goddamn what the rules are you’re going to help my baby whether he’s a resident of the city of Sacramento or whether he’s not and you’d better get to it or my father’s going to have every one of you on trial for manslaughter. On the way home, with Knight in her lap, she had begun crying for the first time: she had forgotten, she said, that her father was dead.)
Lily’s hands were on his arm.
“Did Ryder have a gun?” she whispered.
“I can’t hear you,” Everett said harshly. Why did she whisper, knowing full well that there was only one person for miles around (Julie and Knight would still be at the Templetons’, and Liggett and the Mexicans in town; it was Saturday night) and that this one person, this single listener, the topic at hand, was dead.