“And what a woman she was.”
In three more weeks, she was gone.
Soon there was nothing else left: They finished but were never finished—for they knew there was something to come.
As far as building the bridge went, though, construction and cleanup were over; they watched it from every angle. In the evening it seemed to shine longer, as if charged by the heat of the day. It was lit, then faded, then gone.
The first one across was Achilles.
He looked ready to bray, but didn’t.
Lucky for us no pacts had been made with bad or corrupting spirits; he walked gingerly first, examining it, but by the middle he’d taken ownership: Backyards, suburban kitchens.
Fields and handmade bridges.
They were all the same to Achilles.
* * *
—
For a while they didn’t know what to do with themselves.
“I guess you should go back to school.”
But that time had surely passed. Since the death of Carey Novac, Clay had lost the will to count. Now he was just a builder, without a single certificate. The proof was all in the hands.
* * *
—
By the time a month had gone by, Clay came back to the city, but not before Michael showed him.
They were in the kitchen, with the oven—and this was no ordinary boy. People didn’t build bridges this quickly, and certainly not of such magnitude. Boys didn’t ask to build arches; but then, boys didn’t do so many things—and Michael thought of the morning that flooded them, in the last of the waters to come.
“I’m going home to work with Matthew,” said Clay, and Michael said, “Come with me.”
* * *
—
First they went under the bridge, and his hand on the curve of the archway. They drank coffee in the coolness of morning. Achilles was standing above them.
“Hey, Clay,” said Michael, quietly. “It’s still not finished, is it?”
The boy by the stone said, “No.”
He could tell by the way he’d answered, that when it happened he’d leave us for good—and not because he wanted to, but he had to, and that was all.
* * *
—
Next was something long coming, since Penelope, the porch and the stories: You should ask your father to draw one day.
They were small by the bridge, in the riverbed.
“Come on,” said Michael, “here.”
He took him out back to the shed, and Clay saw now why he’d stopped him—when he’d gone for the torturous shovel that day, when he’d driven him out to Featherton—for there, on a homemade easel, and leaning slightly away, was a sketch of a boy in a kitchen, who was holding toward us something.
The palm was open but curling.
If you looked hard you could tell what it was: The shards of a broken peg.
It was in this kitchen I’m sitting in.
Just one of our in-the-beginnings.
* * *
—
“You know,” said Clay, “she told me to. She told me to ask you to show me.” He swallowed; he thought, and rehearsed: It’s good, Dad, it’s really good.
But Michael had beaten him to it.
“I know,” he said, “I should have painted her.”
He hadn’t, but now he had him.
He would draw the boy.
He would paint the boy.
He would do it through all the years.
But before that beginning was this:
In the last weeks, for the most part, it was barely her shell that stayed with us. The rest of her, out of our reach. It was suffering, the nurse and her visiting; we caught ourselves reading her thoughts. Or were they thoughts long written in us: How the hell does she still have a pulse?
There was a time when death had loitered here, or swung from up on the power lines. Or hung, slung-armed, round the fridge.
It was always here to take from us.
But now, so much to give.
* * *
—
There were quiet talks, there had to be.
We sat kitchen-side with our dad.
He said there were still a few days.
The doctor explained that yesterday, and also the morning before that.
Those days-before were endless.
We should have already had a stopwatch back then, and chalk to write the bets with; but Penny would just keep living. No one would win the winnings.
We all looked down at the table.
Did we ever have matching shakers?
* * *
—
And yes, I wonder about our father, and what it was like—to send us each morning on our way—for it was one of her dying wishes, that we all get up and leave. We all go out and live.
Each morning we kissed her cheek.
She’d kept it seemingly only for this.
“Go, sweet boy—get out there.”
That wasn’t Penelope’s voice.
* * *
—
It also wasn’t her face—that turning thing that cried.
That yellow pair of eyes.
She would never see us grow up.
Just cry and silently cry.
She’d never see my brothers finish high school, and other absurdist milestones; she’d never see us struggling and suffering, the first time we put on a tie. She wouldn’t be here to quiz first girlfriends. Had this girl ever heard of Chopin? Did she know of the great Achilles? All these silly things, all laden with beautiful meaning. She had strength now only to fictionalize, to make up our lives before us: We were blank and empty iliads.
We were odysseys there for the taking.
She’d float in and out on the images.
* * *
—
And I know now what was happening: She’d beg him for help every morning.
The worst was each moment we left.
“Six months,” she’d say. “Michael—Michael. Six months. I’ve been dying a hundred years. Help me, please help me.”
Also, it was rare now—it hadn’t happened for weeks—that Rory, Henry, and Clay would skip school and come home to visit. Or at least we were fools to believe it—because one of them often did come back, but was good at remaining unseen. He’d leave at varying time slots, and watch from an edge of window frame—until once he could no longer see her. He’d left school as soon as he’d got there.
Back home he walked the lawn.
He moved to their bedroom window.
The bed was unmade and empty.
* * *
—
Without thinking he took a step backwards.
He felt the blood and the hurry—
Something was wrong.
Something’s wrong.
He knew he had to go in there; he should walk straight into the house, and when he did, he was hit by the light; it came right through the hallway. It belted him in the eyes.
But still he carried on walking—out the open back door.
On the porch, he stopped when he saw them.
From the left he could hear the car—a single but tuneless note—and he knew in his heart the truth of it: that car wasn’t leaving the garage.
He saw his father standing, in the blinding light of the yard, and the woman was in his arms: the woman of long-lost piano, who was dying but couldn’t die, or worse, living but couldn’t live. She lay in his arms like an archway, and our father had dropped to his knees.
“I can’t do it,” said Michael Dunbar, and he laid her down gently to the ground. He looked at the garage side door, then spoke to the woman beneath him, his palms on her chest and a forearm. “I’ve tried so Goddamn hard, Penny, but I can’t, I just can’t.”
The man kneeling, lightly shaking.
The woman in the grass was dissolving.
* * *
—
And he stood and he cried, the fourth Dunbar boy.
He remembered, for some reason, one story: He saw her back in Warsaw.
The girl in the watery wilderness.
She was sitting and playing the piano, and the statue of Stalin was with her. He was whipping her knuckles with an economic sting, every time her hands dropped, or she made another mistake. There was so much silent love in him; she was still just a pale little kid. It was twenty-seven times, for twenty-seven musical sins. And her father gave her a nickname.
At the end of the lesson he’d said it, with the snow and its falling outside.
That was when she was eight.
When she was eighteen, he decided.
He decided to get her out.
But first he’d eventually stopped her.