Fellow Mortals Read online

  There were times he lost his mother as a child, at the beach or at the park, and he’d been told he once went missing thirty minutes in a corn maze. He can’t remember this—wouldn’t that have traumatized a child, just a little?—any more than he can remember his father, who died in a crash when Sam was only two. But hiking in the dark now, trying not to panic, he’s reminded of the year he lost his mother to an aneurysm. She’d been relatively young and reasonably healthy, and quick as a phone call he didn’t have a parent in the world. If he hadn’t had Laura to support him when it happened … well, he really doesn’t know. But he hadn’t been alone.

  The flashlight only makes the situation worse, the focused beam pointing out the darkness all around him, threatening to find something fearsome in the trees. One set of trunks looks the same as any other, but he thinks he knows the way and follows anything that strikes him as familiar. He’s aware of every sound: swishes, snaps, whippoorwills, and insects. A blood-chilling squall he hopes is only a fox. The clouds are breaking up, and now and then he sees the moon passing in the gaps. It’s arresting as it always is, common but surprising, like his own pale face shining in a glass. He thinks of Laura on a moonlit pillow on their bed. On a pillow in her coffin. At the wake and underground.

  He sees a maple in the dark, giant and profound. It’s shaped like a Y but the wind has cracked half of it away. The remainder of the left-hand fork juts up, six feet tall and pointing at a bough. At the bottom of the bough, there’s a tiny sprig of leaves. It hovers only inches from the jagged piece of trunk; he can feel it in his fingers, how they almost seem to touch. This is it—how’d he miss it during hours of exploring? Through a thicket up ahead, he spies the clearing where he sat and ate lunch, but he doesn’t want to leave anymore and turns the flashlight off, waiting for his eyes to readjust so he can watch the little sprig when it lowers in the breeze.

  4

  Henry’s reading the paper out in the yard, a well-groomed lawn with a vegetable garden and watermelon vines. Earlier this morning there was tension over tomato paste, Nan favoring a high-sodium classic and Ava holding firmly to the no-salt variety. Henry was called upon to settle the debate. He knew that Ava’s choice was for the benefit of his own blood pressure, but how could he of all people deny the Finns their favorite—and, it must be said, more flavorful—tomato sauce recipe? Ava left for work in a snit and Henry’s been hiding outside ever since, and despite having sided with Nan, he cowers when the elderly sister opens the door and joins him and Wingnut on the steps.

  “Sam Bailey bought the woods behind his property,” Nan says. “My friend Louise plays bingo with a woman whose niece works for a lawyer. The lawyer handled the closing. He’s been staying at the Chalet Motor Inn but checked out early this week. He’s living in a trailer on Arcadia Street.”

  “Wow,” Henry says, looking up to see her. Sun glints off the door and forces him to squint. He massages newspaper ink around his neck and feels a clenching in his chest, a physical awareness of the trailer, and the man, less than fifteen minutes from his own backyard.

  Nan bends as if her body is a well-made hinge, leaning down to pet Wing without compromising her posture. Henry breathes until the pressure near his heart begins to dissipate. He listens to a chickadee singing from a tree.

  “It’s the right thing to do,” Nan says, cleaning another smudge of newsprint off the side of Henry’s forehead. “If you don’t see him now, you’ll both keep dreading it will happen accidentally. You’ll look for him at gas stations, supermarkets, everywhere you go, and when you see him you’ll remember that you never made an effort.”

  “What do I say?”

  “Say you’re sorry. After that, you’ll have to feel it out. But say and do whatever you have to say and do, because you might not get a second conversation.”

  He shuts his eyes and tries to picture it—a trailer on the plot—and then imagines pulling up and knocking on the door. He stands and locks his knees and feels a tingle in his thighs. Nan hugs him with a pat and Wingnut wags, intuiting a car trip entirely from Henry’s body language, and they all go inside and feel refreshed by the coolness of the kitchen.

  Joan’s sitting at the table with a thousand-piece jigsaw, a recent gift from Henry, who’s convinced that old ladies love doing puzzles. He set it up this morning right in the kitchen—another thing that irritated Ava, who uses the table more than Henry realized—and then he hovered there and cheered when Joan made her first tentative connection. She checks the picture on the box, a hedge maze with a fountain in the center, mostly shadow, leaf, and sky—a puzzle for legitimate fanatics.

  “Look,” Joan says, showing him the six-piece fountain.

  “Hey, you’re doing great! You’ll have it done in no time.”

  She smiles at his smile, says it’s “wonderfully green,” and recommits with a tremor and a small, fragile sigh.

  Henry calls Ava at the lab.

  “Lindt Diagnostics.”

  “Good morning,” Henry says, thrown as always by his wife’s professional voice. “May I please speak to Ava Cooper?”

  “What,” she says.

  “Av?”

  “It’s me. What do you need?”

  “Oh, it’s you!” he says. “Hey. How’s your morn—”

  “I can’t talk. Ruby called out and there’s a half-dozen patients in the waiting room.”

  “Nan found Sam,” Henry says. “He’s living in a trailer on Arcadia. I’m heading over now. I’ll be home before dinner. If I’m late, start without me.”

  “You’re going now?”

  “You said—”

  “I said you ought to find him. I don’t know if suddenly showing up … How do you know he’s living in the trailer? Maybe it’s construction. He’s probably rebuilding.”

  “No, he’s living there. Nan’s friend plays bingo…” and he tells her all he knows, looking up at Nan to verify the facts.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  Henry listens closely for the sound of her expression. She only gets this tone with a certain kind of face, like when he’s fiddling with an outlet or balancing a ladder.

  “What am I doing wrong?” he asks.

  “Put Nan on.”

  Henry hands her the receiver, glad of further input. Nan listens for a moment, then turns to him and says, “I forgot about the wash.”

  “I’ll put it in the dryer,” Henry says, sure thing, and then he walks downstairs on a clear, simple mission.

  “He’s gone,” Nan says.

  “Is this a mistake?” Ava asks.

  “No.”

  “It made a lot of sense last night,” Ava tells her. “But Henry doesn’t think. What if Sam snaps?”

  “Sam Bailey isn’t a violent man. It might be ugly but it won’t be dangerous.”

  “Henry doesn’t know when to quit.”

  “That’s how he got me out of the shower,” Nan reminds her.

  Joan looks up, bewildered by the talk, and looks back down, bewildered by the puzzle.

  “He’s coming upstairs,” Nan whispers. “Say a prayer.”

  Before Ava has a second to respond, Henry’s back in the kitchen. He’s forgotten to add a dryer sheet but gives Nan a big thumbs-up: mission accomplished. She hands the telephone back and walks downstairs, intuiting his oversight and heading for the dryer.

  “Don’t talk too much,” Ava tells Henry. “And don’t expect too much. He doesn’t owe you anything, remember.”

  “Geez, Av. I’m not going there for me.”

  “I wish you had a phone.”

  “It’s only fifteen min—”

  “Call me when you’re home,” she says.

  “I will.”

  “Don’t be pushy.”

  “Av…”

  “All right. I love you,” Ava says.

  He warms his ear against the phone, the softness of her breath so close he almost smells it.

  “This is good,” Henry says. “Something’s dropping into place.
”

  5

  It had been a warm, blustery day in a spring without rain. Henry lit a match. The fire looked clear in the sun and he threw it down, thinking the wind had blown it out and not thinking twice, despite the drought, despite the mulch under the boxwood hedge.

  He struck another match, fresh cigar clamped in his teeth, mailbag swaying off his shoulder. He wasn’t allowed to smoke on the route. He wasn’t allowed at all, having promised it to Ava, married all these years and there it was, she put her foot down. But it was such a fine day with the leaves sashaying in the trees, he told himself the smell wouldn’t linger in his clothes—that a few quick puffs were a very small betrayal. The flavor made him salivate. He’d found it in the truck, a single White Owl that had rolled behind the clutch, and when he finally got a light, puffed big, and sniffed it in, he drifted to a thousand other spring afternoons. He thought of Ava in a sundress, twenty years younger and firm as a plum, and then he pictured her expression if she smelled stale cigar. He saw his uniform reflected in the window of a car—gray pants with vertical stripes, collared shirt, blue sweater with the streamlined eagle on the breast. A uniform of dignity, a uniform he loved. He licked tobacco off his lip and contemplated the ember, and then he crushed the whole cigar underfoot, smiled, and continued on his way, walking to the door at 6 Arcadia Street.

  It was Sam and Laura Bailey: married, late twenties, childless, and relatively new to the block, still getting junk addressed to the previous owners. They got a water bill, a medical journal for Laura, and a sculpture magazine for Sam. He guessed that Laura was a doctor, having seen her a few times in the early afternoon, as if her shifts were different hours than a regular person’s hours. She was willowy and pale with warm, smoky eyes, as if he’d woken her from dreaming or she hadn’t yet slept. He handed her the mail one day and felt transfixed, comfortable but weirdly self-conscious in her gaze. She was quiet in a way that made her seem smart, and when she turned, he saw the beautiful knot that she had fashioned in her hair.

  Turning from the Bailey house, he caught a whiff of smoke. It was one of his favorite parts of spring, everything fragrant for the first time in months—grass, dirt, tulips, sunlight softening the asphalt. All he missed was rain, though as a mailman he hadn’t begrudged so many weeks of dry weather. He’d been a carrier for two decades but only had his current route a handful of months. Arcadia was one of the smaller streets, a cul-de-sac with sixteen houses, tightly packed Capes with long backyards, the east-side homes bordering the woods and giving the block a special kind of privacy—rural and remote, separate from the town.

  Everybody worked except for Nan and Joan Finn, there at number eight with the floral lace curtains flapping at the screens.

  Five catalogs, a Medicare notice, a handwritten letter, several flyers, something from the bank, an envelope of seeds, and more junk mail than anyone under eighty was liable to get in a week: a typical day for Nan and Joan. They were both skinny and tall, with noses so hooked he once saw a pair of umbrellas hanging on a rail and thought of the Finns.

  He found Joan sitting in the living room, surrounded by shelf upon shelf of figurines: songbirds, saints, miniature trees.

  “Afternoon,” he said. “Beaut of a day.”

  She smiled and looked around like maybe Jesus had addressed her. Then she noticed Henry standing there and smiled just as warmly. He thought of her hair as butterscotch-gray, same as her teeth and skin, but her sweater and her eyes were cornflower blue.

  “Spring has sprung!” Joan said.

  “It sure has. You have some letters here.”

  “Thank you!” she said, not getting up. “The weather’s saying rain tomorrow.”

  “April showers,” Henry answered, sending her into ecstasy. “Say hi to your sister.”

  “I will!”

  Henry walked off, admiring the sky. He cut across the lawn and prechecked the mail for number ten: Billy and Sheri Kane. Power bill, phone bill, credit report, and something from the courthouse: a black-letter day. The grass turned scrabbly right at the property line. There was a band of dirt that led to a newly poured sidewalk square, another span of dirt, and finally a road patch—probably the scars of a dug-up sewer pipe. The house itself looked worse. Cockeyed steps, decrepit siding, an American flag so grubby Henry felt they ought to burn it out of respect.

  He left their mail inside the screen door, which was so badly dented that it wouldn’t fully shut. Kicked, Henry thought, and then he registered a sound—a crackling he’d been hearing for a while unaware. He looked up the street and there was fire in the bushes—in the little group of boxwoods at Sam and Laura Bailey’s—sending smoke and orange flames into a hedgerow of yews. The yews were burning, too, right against the house.

  “Holy shit,” Henry said.

  He dropped the mailbag and ran. It must have been a match, he thought, remembering the mulch, but even with the drought he couldn’t believe how ferociously it spread. He squinted at the heat from several feet away, moved closer upwind, and beat the fire with his sweater, but the sweater caught, too, and he was forced to let it go. The boxwoods vanished in a flare. Then the fire caught the yew and really cut wild, covering the wall like water rushing up.

  He ran to number eight and looked for Joan, who was exactly where he had left her, smiling in her chair.

  “Oh!” she said, surprised to see him back.

  Henry glanced next door, dizzy at the sight.

  “I need your phone.”

  He banged the door and strode halfway into the living room before noticing her face. Joan backed away, smiling but alarmed, growing smaller by the second near a shelf of figurines.

  “There’s a fire,” Henry said. “You got to leave. Where’s your sister?”

  “In the shower.”

  “Where—”

  “There’s a fire?”

  “Where’s the shower!?” Henry yelled. She pointed up. “Call 911,” he said.

  He took the stairs two at a time and stumbled at the top, slipping three steps and murdering his shin. He found the bathroom door and knocked with his fist.

  “Nan!”

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Henry Cooper … the mailman. You got to come out.”

  The hall was narrow and dim. Smoke drifted in—he could feel it in his eyes. The window by the stairs darkened intermittently. He leaned against the door and heard the shower curtain slide.

  “Who’s there?” Nan said, closer to his ear.

  “You got to get dressed, we got to go.”

  A smoke alarm tripped. He heard Joan calling from below, and when he hurried to the stairs and leaned over the rail, she was looking up and quaking like a child he’d forgotten.

  “Did you call the fire department?”

  “Where’s Nan?”

  “Did you call 911?”

  She clasped her hands and nodded.

  “Get out of the house,” he said.

  “The porch…,” she answered, looking out front. He ran downstairs. Fire rippled at the door, billowing the curtains, more than he expected. Another smoke alarm blew, right above his ear.

  “Wait in the yard,” he said, moving her along. “Go, I’ll get your sister.”

  He ran back up and checked the window at the top. The Baileys’ whole wall was hidden by the smoke. He returned to the bathroom and rattled the knob.

  “Miss Finn.”

  “Go away!” Nan said. “Joan? Joan!”

  “Back up!” Henry yelled.

  He rammed against the door.

  It was flimsy hollow-core and fractured when he hit it. Screws and bits of wood skittered off the sink. Nan trembled in a robe, hair raggedy and wet, all collarbone and eyeball and wispy in the steam. She aimed a hair dryer level to his head, like a gun.

  “Whoa,” he said, showing her his palms.

  The window up the hall trembled at the heat. He moved fast, stooping low to get his arm around her hips, and then he tipped her up and hauled her out the bathroo
m on his shoulder. She hit him with the dryer, hard enough to hurt. He thumped downstairs as quickly as he could, trying to catch the dryer with his free hand and getting rapped on the knuckles and the wrist.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she quit attacking him and sagged. He took her out back, where the smoke had risen high enough to shadow out the sun. Joan, waiting helpless in the corner of the yard, thought her sister had collapsed and started sobbing.

  “She’s okay,” Henry said, standing them together.

  Nan turned and saw the Bailey house, heavily aflame. She hugged the dryer to her breast and wobbled on her heels.

  “Don’t move,” Henry said.

  He ran around the house toward the sirens out front. A crosswind of fire hit him at the porch. He wasn’t seriously burned, only flashed on the cheek, but he staggered with his hand clapped to his face.

  Fire in and out the windows, flaring up the eaves, roaring with a sound like wind through a tunnel. The flames had jumped a hedge to number ten—Billy Kane—where he noticed that the flag had withered on the pole.

  Trucks jammed around the road but no one seemed to rush. Firefighters walked instead of ran, their lack of energy surreal but almost comforting to see. Henry found his mailbag lying on the ground. He grabbed it out of instinct and ran toward the Baileys’ house, stepping on a fire hose and awed by the colors.

  Number four had started burning: the Carmichael family—Peg and Bob, two young boys. Someone yanked him by the arm until he stood across the street, where his bowels turned feeble at the full panorama. Henry clenched tight, scared he’d have an accident, jellied in the legs and fighting for a breath. He didn’t recognize the neighborhood. Red and white lights, fire in the windows, diesel fuel blowing off the engines of the trucks. Smoke towered up and carried for a mile, tall enough for anyone in town to see it rise.

  An ambulance arrived, police and paramedics. Henry took a firefighter roughly by the arm. He was young, just a rookie with a red goatee.