Illumination Night: A Novel

  As Simon drags a chair over to the freezer to get the ice cream, Andre walks out to the sun porch thinking, Please lie to me. Vonny has finished a vase that she sets on a terra-cotta slab to dry. She wears a yellow smock over her sweater and a pair of worn blue jeans. There’s clay under her fingernails and stuck to the soles of her sneakers. She looks up at him and smiles as he stands in the doorway.

  “How was your day?” Andre asks.

  “Great,” Vonny says. She gets up and kicks off her sneakers so she won’t track clay through the house. “I didn’t even hear you pull up. Is Simon in the kitchen?”

  “Why don’t we drop him over at Matt’s tonight,” Andre says. “We’ll go out to dinner. The Menemsha Inn,” he suggests.

  Vonny wrinkles her nose. She wears her hair pinned up, exposing the slope of her neck.

  “I’d just as soon stay home,” Vonny says. “I’m defrosting chicken.”

  Chicken which, Andre remembers, he bought last week when Vonny couldn’t go shopping because she felt feverish. As they walk through the living room they hear the hum of the blender, and Vonny runs to the kitchen to check on Simon. She sees him mixing an orange-colored milkshake and laughs in spite of the mess. Simon is both bewildered and pleased to hear her laughter.

  “What is this?” Vonny asks.

  “A snack,” Simon says. “It’s for you guys.”

  Vonny and Andre exchange a look. It is the sort of wordless communication that used to make Simon feel excluded. Now, he’s delighted. When they drink the milkshake in tall glasses, Simon watches them carefully. Unlike the wolf who turns into a gentleman, his parents undergo no immediate transformation. But that night when Vonny puts him to bed she reads him two stories and kisses him three times. Even Andre has a feeling of hope. While Vonny is washing the dishes he comes up behind her, puts his arms around her, and kisses her neck. He can feel her body bend toward him. Near midnight, when they make love, Andre believes that he can stay away from Jody. His marriage may not be ruined after all. But afterward, Vonny is shaking. She won’t let him touch her.

  “What’s wrong?” Andre says when she sits up on the edge of the bed.

  “Nothing,” Vonny insists. “Too much coffee.”

  He can’t let this go. “I mean about leaving the house,” Andre says.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she tells him.

  “You haven’t left the house in weeks,” Andre says. He considers saying months but is afraid of pushing her too far.

  “You’re crazy,” Vonny says.

  She gets out of bed and takes a cigarette from the pack on the bureau. She wonders how long she can go on with this charade. Once he discovers what is wrong with her, he will leave. Of course she’s imagined him leaving before, but she always thought she and Simon would be together. Now, she knows she couldn’t be the one to keep Simon. She can’t take care of him. She can’t even drive him to school. It is devastating to realize how much she needs Andre.

  She blows out smoke in choppy streams.

  “I’m worried about you,” Andre says.

  “I don’t have to take this kind of crap from you,” Vonny says. She stubs out her cigarette, pulls on a blue nightgown, and leaves him. She goes downstairs in the dark and doesn’t turn on a light until she reaches the kitchen. She knows she made a tactical mistake and she hopes he’ll fall asleep. Tomorrow she can charm him. She’ll try to go with him when he delivers her pottery to Edgartown.

  She hears his footsteps on the stairs. She feels sick to her stomach. She takes a frozen chocolate cake out of the freezer and tears open the box. Andre comes into the kitchen, wearing only jeans.

  “I’m crazy?” he says to her.

  Vonny knows it’s best to ignore him.

  “Prove it,” Andre says. “Let’s see you go someplace right now.”

  “It’s three A.M.,” Vonny says. She is calmly cutting chocolate cake. She is certain this is the end. The force field is vibrating outside the door. She licks the knife. “Want a piece?” she asks him.

  “Go on,” Andre says. “Let’s see you leave the house.”

  “You’re going to wake up Simon,” Vonny tells him.

  Andre goes to the back door and flings it open. He doesn’t have to be doing this. He could be on his way to Florida. He could run away with a seventeen-year-old girl who really loves him. If only Vonny would walk right past him, out into the yard, and snidely say, “See, you were only imagining things.” She is up against the counter. He can see through her nightgown.

  “Leave,” Andre says. “Show me I’m wrong.”

  Vonny despises him. She walks across the kitchen, then, shaking worse than ever, goes out the door. There are no stars and no wind either. Vonny keeps going even when the pressure of the force field clamps down, hard, pushing her breath out. Andre watches her walk through the dark in her nightgown. She turns back toward him. Her face is as white as the moon.

  “Come back,” Andre says.

  When Vonny doesn’t move, Andre goes outside and runs down the porch steps.

  “There’s something wrong with me,” Vonny says.

  Andre is afraid she’ll move away when he puts his arm around her, but she doesn’t. She stands with him in the center of the force field, until, together, they carefully make their way back.

  ELIZABETH Renny’s house is much too crowded. The two boys, Jody’s brothers, will have to sleep in the storage attic. Jody’s mother will sleep on the couch. It is the Columbus Day weekend, and when they arrive they’re exhausted. Laura had forgotten to make a ferry reservation and they waited in line for three hours in Woods Hole. Laura is not herself lately. She and Glenn have now been legally separated for five months, and the separation is not at all what she expected.

  As soon as they get into the house, Keith, who is ten, and Mark, thirteen, race up to the attic to search for bats. Laura embraces her mother, then gasps when she sees Jody.

  “You’re so grown up!” Laura says in a voice that’s more accusing than she means it to be. She hugs Jody, then stands back to appraise her. “Wow,” Laura says.

  Jody has made lasagna for dinner and Laura and the boys can’t believe she can cook.

  “She’s been a great help to me,” Elizabeth Renny says.

  Jody looks down at the table and smiles. She can’t understand why all this attention pleases her, but it does. Her brothers, who are not yet settled enough to be obnoxious, watch her but do not speak. Their typical behavior when meeting a grownup. After dinner, the boys go upstairs. They set up their Gobots sleeping bags, then scuttle through the attic, checking out all the corners with their flashlights. Jody is in the kitchen, washing dishes. Her mother is watching, astounded that she even knows what liquid Joy is.

  “I’m going to faint,” Laura says.

  “Will you stop?” Jody laughs. “Go sit down. Don’t bother me.”

  Laura goes into the living room where her mother is drinking oolong tea with sugar and lemon.

  “I don’t know what you’ve done, Mother,” Laura says to Elizabeth Renny. “She’s a different person.”

  “Hardly,” Elizabeth Renny says. “Just a year older.”

  Each time Elizabeth Renny returns the cup to its saucer there is the faint clicking sound of china. Her first impulse, when Laura suggested this visit, was to say no. Now she’s nervous. More so, when Laura continues to compliment her.

  “You’ve done a great job,” Laura tells her. “If I had been forced to deal with Jody’s acting out while Glenn and I were separating, I wouldn’t have made it.”

  Laura has fair skin and the same pouty mouth Jody has. Occasionally, her little-girl’s voice creeps in, so that some of her sentences are marked by a slight whine. “But I don’t really think this is the right place for her. Life here is not what I want for Jody.”

  Laura wanted desperately to get off the Vineyard and into the world, in her case, Boston College. Elizabeth Renny vaguely remembers how hurt she was at the time. They had been c
lose and then quite suddenly they were enemies. By the time Elizabeth Renny’s husband died, five years after Laura went off to school, they could not have a conversation without enormous effort. It seems impossible that this woman, who is forty-one years old, was her baby girl. It seems just as impossible for Elizabeth Renny to imagine that she herself was ever a married woman, that every night, for twenty-eight years, she wrapped one arm around her husband’s shoulders before she fell asleep. She should feel some sympathy for Laura—they have both lost husbands, both have had to deal with adolescent daughters—but she feels none. Who is Laura, with her ruined marriage and ill-mannered boys, to insist Jody fill out college applications? Elizabeth Renny feels that Jody has a right to mess up her life any way she chooses. She considers Laura a selfish mother, which is not to say she doesn’t wonder if she’s equally selfish, if perhaps all those times when Jody climbed out her bedroom window at midnight, Elizabeth Renny wasn’t somehow going along with her, balancing carefully on the pitched roof.

  “Jody is the one who’ll have to decide where she’ll live,” Elizabeth Renny says.

  “Of course,” Laura says.

  “You have to think about your life now,” Elizabeth Renny says.

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing,” Laura snaps. “That’s what I’m trying to do.” She laughs. She leans forward, to her mother. “I have my whole life ahead of me now,” she says to her mother. “Isn’t that true?”

  Elizabeth Renny’s failing vision softens her daughter’s features. Laura’s face is pale and formless. As a child she had beautiful skin that always seemed flushed.

  “Can you come closer?” Elizabeth Renny asks.

  Laura is puzzled, but she gets up and walks toward her mother. She stands in front of Elizabeth Renny’s chair, unsteadily. She doesn’t quite know what to do with her hands, so she crosses them in front of her.

  “I feel silly,” Laura says.

  Upstairs, the boys are thumping around like monsters, scaring each other in the dark.

  “Please take my advice,” Elizabeth Renny says. “Don’t make a fuss about Jody.”

  “God, Mother, I think I know how to act with my own daughter,” Laura says.

  Elizabeth Renny wishes this had been true for her, but she never knew how to act. She is still worried about offending Laura; whatever she says will be wrong. Later, when Elizabeth Renny has gone into the parlor for the night, Jody comes into the living room and helps Laura make up the couch with worn pink sheets.

  “We miss you at home,” Laura says casually. “I guess you know I’d like you to come back and finish your senior year. Maybe apply to school in Boston. Or in Connecticut, if you want to stay at home and commute. Your father has to pay your college tuition whether he likes it or not.”

  “Mom,” Jody says.

  Laura bites her tongue. She cannot believe that her husband is annoyed at the amount of child support he has to pay. If she isn’t careful she’ll badmouth him so horribly Jody will simply turn her off, the way’the boys do.

  “I’m not trying to pressure you.” Laura pulls a pillowcase over a down pillow. “I’d just like you to come home.”

  Jody reaches for a thin cotton blanket. “I guess I’ll stay here,” she says, not daring to look at her mother.

  “I’ll bet it’s too cold for us to have a picnic tomorrow,” Laura says quickly. “I can’t remember the last Columbus Day weekend when we had good weather.”

  Laura and Jody each take a corner of the blanket. From her hospital bed, Elizabeth Renny sees the blanket balloon up in the air, then settle over the couch. Elizabeth Renny doesn’t often think about winter or her blind eye anymore. There are birds, she knows, who live their whole lives in the dark, who drink from night-blooming flowers, guided by scent alone. When she first lived in this house she often left dishes of honey on her windowsills on summer nights. Each time she did, the honey would disappear by morning. It may well have been squirrels or mice she was providing for, but she has always preferred to believe night birds found those porcelain bowls.

  SIMON is awakened by the sound of the metal exercise wheel turning. He rises up through sleep like a swimmer, frightened by the creaking. He has forgotten that the hamsters’ cage is on his dresser. Now he learns the hamsters’ secret; they may hide during the day, but at night exercise is their mission. On Tuesday Simon will no longer be the hamster monitor; this weekend is his farewell. Simon pulls a chair over to the dresser. One hamster runs on the wheel, the other perches on the coffee can, waiting his turn. Either they don’t see Simon in the dark or they don’t care, not even when he presses his face closer to the glass.

  The night-light is on and a stream of light from the hallway filters beneath the bedroom door. The house is so quiet it’s almost frightening. Simon knows his parents are asleep. He has begun to have hopes for them. Sometimes, he walks into a room and finds them deep in conversation. They look up at him, as though they’re surprised to see him. He is certain that by the time his birthday comes things will be all right again. He may even get the rabbit he wants. By taking care of these hamsters he has tried to prove that he is ready for his own pet. He has cleaned the hamsters’ cage twice, washed their lettuce, doled out their food pellets with a thimble. If he gets a rabbit he will train it to sleep on his pillow; he will make it a collar out of pipe cleaners and beads.

  He measures out a little more food for the hamsters and lifts off the wire mesh on top of the cage. The hamsters look up briefly as he pours the food inside, then continue as though Simon didn’t exist. He watches them a little longer, then gets down and pulls the chair away from the dresser. The window shade is up, and on his way back to bed he sees there is a full moon and stops to look. The sky is dark blue and the trees, though they have all turned color, look black against the sky.

  Simon is falling asleep on his feet. He wears one-piece flannel pajamas with a zipper and plastic feet, and the warmth makes him even drowsier. The moon, the turning of the exercise wheel, the fan of light beneath his door, these things all may be a dream. Out in the yard next door there is a giant. He has blond hair and a dark jacket that is too short at the waist and wrists. The Giant stops near the pine tree, and Simon notices that he has to duck so his head will not hit the lowest branches. Simon rubs his eyes, but the Giant is still there. What is under his arm? A harp that speaks? A sack of gold? Simon watches, hypnotized. He is motionless, the way he is when he studies an anthill. The hamster on the exercise wheel is slowing down. The clock on the living-room mantel chimes four times. If Simon were not so tired he would stay up and watch the Giant, but the yard is dark and it’s difficult to see, so Simon gets back in bed and pulls the covers up. In the morning, he will not be able to remember what he has dreamed and what he has actually seen. When he goes to check the hamsters they will be sleeping. Next door, Jody’s brother Keith will stumble over a basket of brown eggs as he runs out to the car to get his robot collection. The eggs will fall down onto the grass, unbroken, and will remain there until Jody kneels down and gathers them, stretching her nightgown over her knees to form a white hammock.

  Chapter Six

  THE SAFE PERSON

  SIMON’S rabbit is a white lop-ear named Dora. After just one month she is already trained to use a litter box and only occasionally chews on quilts or jumps on the table to eat out of the sugar bowl. It was pure good luck that when the rabbit was let out of its wicker basket Nelson didn’t even lift his head. He still ignores Dora, except for moments when an uncontrollable urge to chase her strikes him. Then, Nelson’s claws clatter on the floor, but as soon as the rabbit stands absolutely still, Nelson stops and casually looks over his shoulder, making certain no one has seen him acting like a dog.

  Vonny had expected to hate the rabbit, but she finds she likes her. The rabbit seems affected by the force field, too. One day Simon leaves the door ajar and Vonny finds the rabbit on the doorstep, terrified by the cold open space stretching out in front of her. Vonny picks her up and can feel the rabb
it trembling. She puts Dora up on the kitchen table and pours her a small dish of sugar. Lately, Vonny has found that she can leave the house, she can go almost anywhere, as long as she is with Andre. She has no idea why, but when she is with Andre the force field dissolves. By early December not only can she go with Andre to Simon’s school, she can walk down the hallway to Simon’s classroom with him. Andre begins to believe Vonny’s been cured. He’s delighted when Vonny calmly helps him pack so that he can deliver a motorcycle to Providence. But at the door, as he’s about to leave, Vonny panics and begs him not to go.

  From where Jody stands on her grandmother’s porch it looks to her as though Andre is leaving for good. She has not kept her promise to herself to tell Vonny, and, for a moment, it seems she won’t have to. Jody stands perfectly still, waiting for Andre to run to her and grab her by the arm. She’s almost relieved when it appears that Vonny has persuaded him to stay.

  What has stopped her from trying to break up their marriage is the basket of eggs the Giant brings to her once a week. At first, she dreaded his gift. She wanted him to reveal himself, to harass her outright if that’s what he meant to do, to frighten her on a dark night. She did not feel safe even in her own bed. She can’t figure out what he wants. What does he think he’s buying with these eggs? Maybe he doesn’t expect anything in return. Growing braver, she wakes early and waits in the kitchen, hoping to catch him in the act, but she’s always too late. She thinks she hears him at night when it is only raccoons rattling the garbage cans. The winter is rainy; with slick patches of ice rather than snow, and the Giant doesn’t leave footprints. Were it not for the eggs, she would think he had never existed in the first place.