Descent Read Free Page A

Sean.” She crossed an ankle over her knee and snatched at shoelaces and swept the shoe from her foot and shook it as if it were full of beetles, and then she fit her hand into the humid cavity and felt around. She pulled the shoe back on and retied the laces. “Then what happened?”
    “Nothing. The girl—the woman—got off the desk and shook my hand and went away. He told me she was a client.”
    “So what gave you this
screwing around
idea?”
    “I don’t know. Shit.” He rezipped the pack with a violent yank and sat staring at it. “Forget it, all right? Let’s just get outta here.”
    Caitlin stood and looked down on him. “Don’t bite your fingernail. It’s gross.” She brushed at her bottom and walked toward the graves.
    Sean looked at the Virgin, and then got up and followed.
    She stood at the edge of the little graveyard with her arms crossed, an elbow cupped in each palm. Her body was cooling. She needed to get running again. The boy stood next to her.
    “It wasn’t anything,” he said. “Forget it.”
    She rubbed her arms. She remembered a line from a poem she’d read the night before,
I cease, I turn pale.
    Then she told him about the time their father had stopped living with them—three, maybe four months in all, though it had seemed much longer. Sean had been very young and wouldn’t remember. Their mother said it was nothing to worry about but Caitlin had heard the way she spoke to him on the phone, and she remembered her mother’s face—this new face she’d never seen before. She remembered the words her mother said into the phone too but she didn’t repeat them now.
    She was silent, and Sean stared at the old tombstones. At the base of one, in the grass, lay a small black bowl, or saucer. After a moment it became what it was: a plastic coffee lid with a sippy hole. A piece of trash, the only piece, come to rest here, at this stone, way up here, and nowhere else.
    “When he finally came back home,” Caitlin said, “his fingers were missing. I always thought that’s why he came back—because wherever he’d been was a place where you lost your fingers.” She shivered, remembering. She hadn’t cared about the fingers, all she needed was his arms, the sandpaper of his jaw, the thrill that rolled through her each time he said
Caitydid, my Caitydid.
    “He used to tell me—” Sean gave a strange snort of laughter. “He used to say they fell off from smoking.”
    “Did you believe him?”
    He didn’t answer. In an instant everything was changed, each one of them.
    “What do you think will happen this time?” he said, and Caitlin released a breath that seemed to stir the spangle leaves of the aspens into their dull chiming, a sound like rain.
    “Nothing,” she said. “Let’s go,” she said.
    THE DRAPES WERE DRAWN and sunlight leached from them along the wall and upward in a bright coronation. Naked under the bedsheet, Grant stared at this. He’d dozed a few minutes and then popped awake with his heart kicking. What bed was this? Whose arm across his stomach?
    Now there was a gasp, a spasm, and Angela said,
“No,”
and he said, “It’s all right,” and touched her shoulder. Long ago, she’d described a dream she’d had longer ago still, in which a voice told her she needed to be with her sister.
Which one?
she’d asked the voice,
which sister?
but there was no answer.
    “—What?” She lifted her head, her brown eyes.
    “You said no.”
    She drew the hair from her face, unsticking it from her lips. “I did?”
    “Yes.”
    She shifted, resettled her head on his chest. She breathed. Somewhere a door slammed and a joyful stampede shuddered the hallway, many small bare feet racing for the pool. The high summer voices.
    “It’s going to be weird, isn’t it,” she said. She was looking beyond him to the other bed. The scrambled heap of bedding, the illusory suggestion of a body within it. She spread her hand on his chest.
    “What is?”
    “You know