He was in a fury when we reached the room.
The clerk would come to us in the night, he was convinced, with a potion, a bludgeon — what would prevent her? — a blade. She would plunge an ax into his skull.
Could I not see how easily?
How stupid I had been to boast?
No ferry at such an hour, a fog sweeping in.
What hours, what years he had labored and saved — to have it come to this.
“To this!”—he was trembling, and shook me.
She would set him adrift in the sea.
Impossible — that I might calm him. He could see no means of escape. Was he to tie his trousers around my neck, cart me over the oyster beds, reckon a course by the stars?
I saw myself slung across a pony, drenched, my dark hair drifting prettily and fouling in the weeds.
She was a clerk, understand, paid to greet us, paid to sort out keys. She was nothing to me, a service to me, I had scarcely seen her.
But he had seen her. He spoke of patches of yellow where her scalp showed through — she had cut her hair like a boy’s. The skin had split on her knuckles and bled. And she had bitten herself — bitten herself! — and what in God’s name would I say to that, how did I mean to explain away that — the deep print he had seen in her arm?
I saw her clearly then. She would swim him beyond the breakwater away from the windward shore. I saw his arms swinging gently from their sockets, the mound of his back above the sea. The surfers would arrive by morning — careless, brown-limbed boys mounted on their boards. They would not see him. They would lay him cleanly open with their fins.
It was only the ring she would covet at first. But give her time, give her leisure. Who would there be to stop her, with him bobbing in the sea?
She would make me her pet, her kin, quick to shame, obedient, her creature, the bones parting in my knees.
He drew the knot of rope from his satchel and, with this, lashed the door to the bed to the stop to the sink and back to the massive bureau. He lashed the window shut. He fashioned a rattle of the shells we had found to hang from the door should she shake it.
I did not think that she would shake it.
A night clerk, a girl.
I slept. The air, the sea, I had no trouble sleeping.
In sleep I built him a crown of nails. The nails were mildewed. We could push them home with our hands.
Such a man as he.
I waked to find him. He sat in the chair in his shabby briefs and picked at his cheek, at his knees. He crossed his legs at the knees and the ankles… twice.
And this surprised me.
Old captain, mine, old suffering school.
In such a way the night passed, in such a way the years.
someone is always missing
The baby was sleeping. The sisters had gone to the garden. There was flagstone around the garden. Lemon thyme bunched up between the slabs of stone. The dog lay down in the shade in the thyme and watched the girls in the garden.
The older sister said, “Listen for the baby, big dog.”
It was the older sister’s baby. It was the older sister’s dog, the older sister’s garden, beside the older sister’s house. The house was built in the sage and pine that grew on the slope of a hogback that tilted out of the plains. You could see across the plains from the garden.
“And these,” the younger sister said, “are these keepers?”
The older sister, Libby, nodded. She knelt on the flagstone and pointed.
It had been an easy birth. But it was hard still, bending. It was still hard for Libby to get herself around. “That’s heartsease,” she said, pointing. “There’s motherwort and feverfew. This is hound’s-tongue, here; rue. The rest of this is garbage.”
The beds were dusty. The dust that lifted away from the plains and the chalky dust of the concrete plant coated each leaf and bloom. The sisters knocked the dust off as they weeded; they heaped the weeds on the slabs of stone that Libby’s husband had lain around the garden.
“I’m glad you came,” Libby said to her sister.
The younger sister was Rose. She was the taller, the prettier one. She was the one their father kept moving from school to school. “Did you hear that?” Rose asked.
“What is it?”
“I thought I heard the baby.”
Libby stopped and listened. She heard the wind moving the limbs of the trees and the dog, when it let its mouth drop open, breathing. But she could not hear the baby.
“Will Daddy come see the baby?” Rose asked.
“He says so. As soon as he can.”
Rose’s shorts worked up as she weeded until her underpants showed, the elastic slack and useless. There were dusty streaks on the back of her shorts where she had wiped her hands.
“I mean it,” Libby said. “I really am glad you came. It helps me. With the baby and all.”
The dog rolled onto its back in the thyme. It showed the girls its body.
The days were growing hotter. The snowmelt was over, the runoff not plunging out of the mountains anymore.
The sisters moved on into the flowerbeds, into the bed where the iris was blooming. They had planted the iris the year before, not long after Libby married, before the baby had begun to show. It was a year winter came all at once. The girls had dug the new bed with a mattock in the falling snow, guessing at the borders of the older beds, the wasted leaves from the older bulbs the iris would bloom among. The iris had grown straight and healthily, sending up tall, sturdy stems whose blooms — this was why the sisters were digging them up now were a murky, riverish brown.
Rose chipped the dirt up, twisted her spade to pry up the roots. “I’m so thirsty,” she said. “All this digging.”
“We’ll be finished soon,” Libby said. “If we go in, we’ll wake the baby.”
Rose dropped her spade. She walked to the hose, turned the faucet open and drank until the water that had been left in the hose and been warmed by the sun ran out. She let the water, running cold, run out into the iris bed to make the bed easier to dig in.
“You can’t do that,” Libby said. “They won’t let you water when it’s dry like this.”
“Who is they?” Rose said.
“You know.”
Rose turned off the faucet. She knelt again in the iris bed. “You know why they bring flowers to the hospital?” she said.
“Should I?” her sister said.
“Because then they don’t have to smell you.”
Rose leaned into the stand of blooms. She dipped her nose among the petals of one of the blooms, the crest and beardless falls.
It had always amazed her — that things knew when to grow. All those months in the ground in the snow, she thought, and she remembered the snow of the year before suddenly, earnestly falling. Rose had been between schools that year, their father going from job to job.
It was their father who had sent her out. He sent her to Libby with a dachshund, which Libby gave away, and with a shopping bag full of rhizomes which he guessed, in his note, were tulips. At the very least, the note read, these should keep jour sister out of harm’s way.
Libby said, “They teach you that in school, I guess.”
“I guess so.”
Rose tossed a muddy clump she had pulled free onto the heap of weeds on the flagstone. Libby squatted behind her. She picked the iris up by the handful, and the weeds, loading her arms from the top of the pile. She saw the nubs of Rose’s spine underneath her shirt, poked out from her curving back. Rose was thin, thinner than Libby had seen her get, boyish and hard. Libby, this soon after the baby, felt thick and slow and swelled still. She squatted until her knees hurt and stood up slowly behind her sister and said to the back of her head, “You didn’t have to go through with it. Nobody made you.”