“Well,” I say philosophically. “I guess it’s true.”
“What?”
“You can’t go home again.”
Livy stares at the mess as though willing it back to its former beauty. I stand mute, waiting for her to face reality. But she won’t. Why should she? Reality never stopped her before. She strips off her shirt and jeans, revealing a white one-piece bathing suit underneath. Then she hops onto a fallen tree that angles off through the hissing grass and walks like a gymnast down the rotting trunk. I call out for her to stop, but she pays no attention.
I have little choice but to follow.
When I get to the end of the trunk, I find myself stranded in a snaky morass with Livy nowhere in sight.
“Penn?” she calls from a jungle of foliage to my left. “Come here.”
“Where are you?”
“There’s a stump just below the surface of the water. That will take you to the next trunk.”
Sighting the half-submerged stump, I leap onto it, catching myself just before I tumble headfirst into the slime. From here I can jump to the next fallen tree. Landing on the end of that one, I find myself peering down a green tunnel of leaves.
Livy stands at the other end, a motionless figure silhouetted by dazzling sunlight. Her body is still remarkable, not in the willowy way of a model or the lush way of a pinup girl, but somewhere in between. Her breasts are small but beautifully shaped, her wrists and ankles slim, her hands graceful. Yet the predominant impression she projects is of strength. She could be Artemis, more at home in the forest than among people. In this moment I cannot imagine her in a courtroom.
“Here,” she beckons, stretching out her hand, her voice laced with mystery.
I teeter out to the end of the trunk like a drunken riveter working high steel, then perform the tightly pleasant maneuver of edging around Livy. She holds my waist from behind and whispers: “Oh, ye of little faith.”
The Cold Hole sparkles like a diamond on brown velvet, a pristine world in the midst of decay. The swamp must have risen over the years, its edge creeping ever nearer the oil well, but our spring-fed pool is where it always was. You just have to work a little harder to find it. Livy points high into the trees, and I follow her line of sight. Even the diving platform has survived, though damaged by the growth of the cypress. Once we spent hours kissing and touching each other up there, quivering like dryads in the high branches.
Without warning, Livy dives off the tree trunk and swims to the foot of the ladder. She climbs four planks high, then turns and motions for me to follow. I strip to my underwear and dive after her. The climb requires the negotiation of many rotten and missing steps, but before long we are perched forty feet above the water, breathing hard and laughing. From here the pool looks translucent, bottomless, like a hole in the floor of the world.
“Do you think it’s still there?” she asks.
“It can’t be.”
“The pool is.”
“Storms . . . the current from the spring . . . that bottle could be a mile away by now.”
She shakes her head. “It’s down there in the mud and the plants. And I’m going to find it.”
“Livy—”
Before I can argue, she arcs down to the pool like a falling arrow, lands dead center with scarcely a splash, and surfaces laughing. She waves and submerges again. I consider going down to help her, but I don’t think she wants that. She wants to prove to me that she can find the bottle alone.
She searches with systematic diligence, diving to the bottom and probing the mud and plants in ever widening circles, surfacing for air, then diving again, her movements supple and efficient. It’s like watching a Japanese pearl diver, except that Livy looks as unlike a Japanese woman as one can get. She is archetypally Western—Aryan even—like a hawk that has plummeted a thousand feet to penetrate the water and seize its prey. After fifty minutes by my watch, she surfaces and begins treading water, her face lifted to mine.
“I can’t find it!”
I hold up my hands in commiseration and call down to her. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t resurrect the past with a bottle of wine.”
She gives me an insouciant smile and dives again, so deeply that I lose sight of her. When she surfaces, she is at the edge of the pool, holding something in her hand. Not the wine. Her bathing suit. She drapes the white lycra over a cypress knee, then with a graceful roll pushes away from the stump and, floating effortlessly on her back, drifts to the center of the pool. This vision is more potent than any wine; it is my dream made flesh: Livy’s hair floating in a corona around her face, her arms loose at her sides, her breasts little rose-tipped islands, her abdomen a submerged reef stretching to the rise of her pubis with its twist of burnished gold. The sight of her heats the backs of my eyes. As I gaze down, she raises a hand to block the sun and calls out:
“Don’t you swim anymore?”
I scoot to the edge of the platform and drop forty feet through space, plunging deep into the pool. When I float to the surface, I find Livy treading water beside me. She splashes me playfully and says: “I really thought I could find it.”
“Even if you had, it wouldn’t make things like they were before. We have to talk about what happened.”
She looks off through the silver cypress trunks. “I can’t. Not yet.” She stops treading and lies back, half floating, gazing into the hazy blue sky. “I’ve thought about that bottle sometimes. Over the years.”
“Me too. During low times. Four o’clock in the morning, wondering if I ever made a single right choice in my life.”
She seems amused by this. “Not me. I thought about it during good times. Or times that were supposed to be good. I thought about it on my wedding night.”
“Your wedding night?”
She turns her head slightly, watching me as she floats. “There I was, supposed to feel some profound completion as a woman, and all I could think was that I was closing off forever an option I’d always thought I had.”
“And you did.”
Her eyes narrow. “You hadn’t exactly made me feel wanted the last time we’d seen each other.”
I look away, unwilling to explain my actions on the night of the ball without reciprocal explanations from her.
“We should have drunk that bottle twenty years ago,” she says. “The extra time it would have taken might have changed everything that came after.”
I shake my head, unwilling to grant her this easy revision of history. “Then I wouldn’t have Annie.”
For a moment she looks as though she might make some cruel remark, but her face softens. “I didn’t mean it like that. We’re here now. I’m not complaining.” She brings herself upright in the water, flips a wet strand of hair from her eyes, then reaches out and touches my nose. “Will you do one thing?”
“What?”
“Kiss me.”
Livy has given me nothing that I need, not a single answer. But I want to kiss her. Between the fatigue of treading cold water and the proximity of her naked body, I feel as though every capillary in my skin has dilated, magnifying sensation. She swims closer and slips a hand behind my neck. I lean forward and press my lips to hers, gently at first, then harder in response to her passion. Treading water is impossible now. I take a quick breath through my nose as we slide beneath the surface.
Undulating in the slow current of the spring, time is the oxygen remaining in our lungs and blood, but there is enough to remember her taste, the pressure of her breasts against me as we sink like a single creature, an incarnation of salt water, only slightly denser than the fluid surrounding us. As my chest begins to burn, I feel the soft roughness between her legs, pressing against my thigh, seeking more complete union, and I swell with unthinking eagerness. Then my lungs betray me, sending me fighting toward the shimmering surface. I smash through gasping for air, resenting the fact that I need it. Livy gently breaks the surface beside me, her neck and shoulders flushed the color of broken seashells. She pulls b
ack her hair, then treads easily as her clear blue eyes search mine.
“I want you inside me.”
I shake my head.
“I love you, Penn. I always have. I just didn’t have the courage to choose you.”
Her words are like needles thrust into my heart, triggering emotions too intense to withstand, much less interpret. Caitlin’s warning on the plane sounds in my head: She could really mess you up—
“You don’t have any right to say that, Livy.”
“I know. I won’t say it again. But I had to let you know.”
I roll away from her and swim back to the fallen tree that leads to the shore. As I climb onto it, I turn and see her perched on the cypress knee where she left her bathing suit, slipping on the white lycra as gracefully as she does everything else.
“Where next?” she calls across the water, making no attempt to cover herself.
“I think it’s time we got back.”
“Home? But the day’s not half over.”
“I need to check on Annie.”
She nods somberly. “I understand.”
I turn and make my way carefully along the slippery log. For any other woman I would wait, but Livy Marston can take care of herself.
As I swing the Fiat back onto Highway 61, I realize with a dull shock that guilt is not among the torrent of emotions rushing through me. A moment’s thought tells me why: my past with Livy predates my life with Sarah. Intimacy with Livy is not a new experience. It’s like walking through a checkpoint to a country I visited long ago and to which I now return, older and—hopefully—wiser.
She doesn’t speak as the Spyder thrums northward in the afternoon sun, but I feel her eyes upon me, trying to penetrate my thoughts. What really brought her back to Natchez? Caitlin’s belief that Livy has returned to persuade me to leave her father alone is not impossible. But Livy would not declare her love for such a cynical reason. That is the one gift she’s reserved through the years, if indeed she has given love to anyone. She certainly must have said the words more than a few times, probably while trying to believe them herself. But why did she want this reprise of a perfect day twenty years past? And why does she think she loves me? Is it some strange analogue of a man wanting to marry the only girl who wouldn’t sleep with him?
As we pass St. Stephens Preparatory School and join the traffic heading into town, Livy touches my knee and says, “After you check on Annie, let’s do something else. We still have our picnic.”
Her voice is calm enough, but I sense anxiety beneath it. She is reluctant to let this day end. Tomorrow things will not be so simple. It’s one thing to pretend for a few hours that we can evade the past, as this town somehow evades the future. But it will be quite another when I insist on asking the questions she didn’t want to hear today. And what will happen after I tell the world that her father ordered the murder of Delano Payton? When I commence my campaign of attrition against him? How will she feel then?
“I think we’ve done a lot to think about already,” I say evenly.
She bites her lower lip and looks away.
The whine of a siren overtakes us from behind, and I glance at the rearview mirror. Traffic is parting on the highway behind us. We’re at the turn for my parents’ neighborhood, so I swing right off the bypass, clearing the way.
“Penn?” Livy says, her voice tinged with fear. “Look.”
A column of gray smoke is roiling out of the treetops in the distance.
“Penn, that’s a fire.”
I hit the accelerator hard, knowing that a neighbor could be in trouble. Most of them are older now, and it doesn’t matter whose house it is: I’ve probably known the family all my life.
“Where is it?” she asks, her voice tight.
“Close to my parents.”
I press harder on the gas, roaring up the street, with every yard becoming more afraid of something my brain does not want to consider. It couldn’t be our house burning. It couldn’t be.
Fifty yards from the corner, I see that it is.
CHAPTER 26
I drive the Fiat right into the yard, where my mother stands with Annie and a dozen neighbors, all pointing helplessly at the burning house, all in various stages of shock. I jump out of the car, run to my mother, and take Annie from her arms.
“Daddy, the house is on fire!” she cries, more amazed than frightened.
“The fire engine’s right behind me,” I tell Mom. “Is everybody okay?”
She grabs my arms, her eyes wide with terror. “Ruby’s in there! We heard a boom and then smelled smoke . . . when we saw the flames we ran but Ruby fell. Penn, I think she broke her hip. I couldn’t drag her out. I brought Annie out, and by then it was too bad to get back in. But that off-duty policeman—Officer Ervin—he went in anyway. He went after Ruby, but he never came out!”
“How long ago was this?”
My mother is close to hyperventilating. I put my hands on her shoulders and squeeze hard enough for her to feel pain.
“Five minutes . . . maybe more. I don’t know.”
As I stare at the house, a runner of flame races up the roof shingles. That’s no kitchen fire. The whole house is burning. The house I grew up in.
“Where was Ruby when she fell?”
“By the back bathroom.”
There’s no exterior door anywhere near that bathroom. And going through the front door would be suicide. I wouldn’t even make it to the bedrooms before being overcome by smoke. I hug Annie and pass her to Mom, then kiss them both.
“When the firemen get here, tell them to look for Ervin.”
My mother blanches. “Penn, you can’t go in there.”
“I’m not leaving Ruby in there to die.”
Livy grabs my arm from behind. “Penn, it’s too late. Wait for the fire truck.”
I yank my arm free and sprint toward the garage before either of them can say more. In the garage I grab a shovel, then race around to the back of the house. As I near it, I begin smashing windows, trying to give the trapped smoke as many outlets as possible. I may be feeding oxygen to the blaze, but if I don’t get some smoke out of there, I’ll never reach Ruby alive.
The back bathroom has no window, but the adjacent bedroom does. A high, horizontal one about five feet wide and eighteen inches tall. I smash the glass with the shovel and stand back as thick gray smoke explodes through the opening. After thirty seconds, the plume thins a little, and I put my hand through the window. The heat is intense, but when I stand on tiptoe and put my face to the opening, I see no flames.
Taking off my shirt, I soak it in water at the outdoor faucet, then tie it around my face. I am scraping the window sill clean of glass shards when the scream comes. The sound is an alloy of animal terror and human agony, a child’s wail from the throat of an eighty-year-old woman. An eighty-year-old woman who showed me more love and kindness than anyone but my mother. I feel like someone stuck my fingers into a 220-volt socket.
“Ruby! Ruby, it’s Penn! I’m coming to get you!”
Hooking both hands over the sill, I swing my right leg up into the window and pull myself into the frame. The smoke that looked thin from outside instantly scorches my eyes, throat, and lungs. Breathing is pointless until I get my face down to the floor. I roll off the window frame and drop to the carpet.
There’s air here, but the smoke is still too thick to see through. Before I lose my nerve, I shut my eyes and crawl around the bed toward the door that leads to the hallway. If I hadn’t lived in this house for fourteen years—and stayed here for the past few nights—I wouldn’t have a chance of finding Ruby. That’s why Officer Ervin didn’t get out. He’s probably lying unconscious in the hall, if he even made it past the den furniture.
At the doorway I pause and shout again.
“Ruby! Rubeee!”
All I hear is a living roar, the sound of fire devouring wood and carpet, curtains and glass, photos and china, silver and books— Books. My father’s library is burning. If Ruby
was not somewhere in this house, I would probably risk my life to save those books.
The bathroom, I remember. Ruby fell by the bathroom.
Thankfully, the heat is more intense to my right, toward the central hall. I put my nose to the carpet, take a breath, and crawl to my left, toward the bathroom. It’s two rooms, really, a narrow dressing room and linen closet with the commode and bathtub in a smaller cubicle beyond. I go through the door on my belly, groping forward like a soldier clearing a minefield.
The dressing room is empty. As I crawl toward the commode, my nostrils start to whistle with each breath. Panic ambushes me, like a wild thing tearing around in my chest. Maybe Ruby isn’t here at all. Maybe Ervin got her out. Maybe the scream I heard was the sound she made as he dragged her out. I can’t search the whole house. That’s how firemen get killed, trying to save people who aren’t there. I grope around the commode and inside the bathtub, then scramble back to the bathroom door.
The roar is closer.
“Ruby! It’s Penn! Are you here?”
At first there is only the roar. Then a whimper floats out of the noise like a leaf from a bonfire. It came from the central hall. My lungs feel near to bursting, but I alligator along the carpet toward the corner, my eyes shut tight. The heat is nearly unendurable. Forcing my stinging eyes open, I look down the hall.
Dancing tongues of red and orange caper out of the black smoke like laughing demons. Primal terror seizes my muscles, paralyzing me long enough to fully comprehend the danger. Then my reptile brain shrieks: Death! Run!
But I don’t run. I can’t. When I was six years old, a German shepherd got out of a neighbor’s backyard and trapped me in a corner of our carport. That dog weighed ninety pounds, and when it bared its teeth and lunged at my face, all I could do was throw up my arms. When its teeth ripped into my flesh, I was too panic-stricken even to yell for help. After a seeming eternity of gnashing teeth and blood, I heard a sound like a hatchet hitting a watermelon, and saw a black woman as tall as our house swinging a shovel like a broadsword, bludgeoning that monstrous animal within an inch of its life. Ruby Flowers was terrified of dogs, but when she saw “her baby” in danger, she pressed down her fear and charged out of our house like the wrath of God.