Hank had let out a groan. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Would you ever lie to me?” Gwen had asked then.
“What are the circumstances? Is it that I know you’re kissing a horse who has terrible breath? Or is it that I know there’s going to be a nuclear war and we have only twelve hours to live, and I have to decide whether to ruin the last twelve hours of your life with fear, or let you enjoy the little time you have left?”
“Nuclear war.”
Gwen had climbed onto the stone wall, then had pulled herself onto Tarot’s back, where she stretched out, as though the horse were an extremely tall and comfortable couch.
“I’d tell you.” Hank had grabbed the lead and they’d begun a slow walk back to the Farm. He didn’t even have to consider; that’s what impressed Gwen most. “What about you?” Hank had asked. “Would you tell the truth?”
Tarot had stumbled then, and Gwen had been forced to hang on to his mane: then she’d jumped off, so that Hank could lift Tarot’s rear left leg and see to the problem. There was a tiny, sharp rock wedged into the frog of the horse’s hoof, which Hank removed with a penknife. Gwen never did get to answer. Just as well, since she hadn’t known what to say at the time. But now, in this kitchen, watching her father crouch down to search the cabinets under the counters for coffee filters, it has all become quite clear. It’s not the lie that’s the problem: it’s the distance the lie forges between you.
“Daddy, don’t bother with the coffee.” This is what Gwen has to say, even when she sees the look on her father’s face. “She won’t be back until late. She never is.” Gwen swallows; but it doesn’t help. Words such as these always hurt when you say them. “She’s with him every night. She may not come home at all.”
Richard blinks, as if by doing so he could bring into focus a vision other than the one Gwen is offering.
“I’m sorry,” Gwen says. She feels as though everything is her fault. She’s only fifteen, why does she have to feel so damned responsible? She can’t even tell her father about Hank, for fear he’ll disapprove. When her father leaves the room, to make a fire in the fireplace, Gwen decides to finish the coffee he started, and she brings him a cup, with a little milk and a little more sugar, the way he likes it.
Richard gratefully accepts the coffee, and for one delightful instant he has the sense of being fortunate. She is a good girl, he sees that. Gwen pulls up a stool for herself beside the easy chair where he’s settled. She’s a good person.
Sister sits by the window and barks, and Richard finds himself wondering if Gwen is wrong about March, if perhaps that’s her at the door now. The visitor, however, is only a rabbit, one who brazenly sits on the porch in order to escape the bad weather.
“We never had rabbits around here when I was growing up,” Richard tells his daughter. “There were too many foxes for that. If you walked through the woods at night, you’d see them. Especially at dusk. At first you’d think you were imagining footsteps.”
Sister has forsaken the door and come to join them, stretching out on the braided rug.
“Everything would be gray, even the horizon. And then you’d see it, all at once.”
“A fox.” Gwen smiles.
Richard nods. “Once in a while, in the winter, after a snow, you’d come upon a dozen or more of them, and then you’d know something was happening that no human could understand, or even recognize. They call it a foxes’ circle, a meeting held as if there were a board of directors of the woods. I think about the foxes’ circle when I do fieldwork. There’s world upon world out there, with different rules.”
“I wonder why they all disappeared.”
“They found a single rabid specimen one season and that was the end of foxes on this hill.”
It was the year when Hollis left town. Richard recalls that each time he came to call on March, he’d hear gunfire in the woods. He was grateful to Hollis back then; in leaving, Hollis had given Richard an opportunity he’d never guessed he would have. Funny the things you remember. Richard definitely remembers that March would smile whenever she opened the door and saw him. He knows he didn’t imagine that.
“When I was really little,” he says now, “maybe five or so, my sister found an orphaned fox. She kept the kit in her bedroom, secretly of course, because my mother would have had an outright conniption and made us all submit to a series of rabies shots if she ever caught sight of the thing. My sister kept an opossum one year, and then there was a crow with a broken wing that I found-she took care of that crow for months. My mother went crazy when she discovered wild animals had been in the house, but my sister was surprisingly strong-willed.”
“Belinda.”
“That’s right.” Richard regrets not telling Gwen more about his family, but for the longest time his personal history seemed extremely distant. Now, it’s back. All he has to do is listen and he can hear gunfire in the woods. He can see the way the crumbs fell down on the ground whenever his sister reached for the stale bread she kept in her coat pockets, ready should she happen to discover some homeless or injured creature while walking in the woods. This is what Richard thought when she wrote to tell him she had married Hollis. Only this time the creature she’d chosen to care for was much more dangerous than an opossum or a crow or a fox.
“When the kit was nearly full grown, Belinda let it into the woods. But it kept coming back. You’d walk out the door, and there it would be. Or maybe it wasn’t a fox at all.” Richard places his coffee cup on the table and pets Sister’s head. “Maybe it was one of those dreadful red dogs people say were bred from foxes.”
“There are still some of those at Guardian Farm,” Gwen says.
“Yes.” Richard leans his head back against the soft fabric of the easy chair. He thinks this type of stuff is called chintz, but he doesn’t know for sure. “I’m not surprised. There were always dogs hanging around, begging. My sister always set out food for them. She was much too kindhearted.”
Richard has only begun to realize how tired he is, in spite of the coffee. He has a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, which makes him think he should call Ken Helm and go back to the airport right now, but he doesn’t. Instead, he falls asleep right there, in the chair. Gwen covers him with a blanket Judith Dale bought on a trip to Ireland taken with the Friends of the Library one summer. It pains Gwen to see her father sleeping in a chair, but what can she do? Shake him to consciousness? Tell him to flee?
There’s a draft in the living room, and Sister curls up beside Richard’s feet. On the mantel, the old clock March’s father bought in Boston keeps time. The sleet continues until the roads are slick with ice and fallen leaves. It’s so bad that by the time the first pale light of morning begins to break through the clouds, March has to inch along on the back road in the old Toyota. She is staying with Hollis later and later; this time, as she was leaving, he pulled her back to him. Susie thinks he’s so evil, but he was concerned about March driving in such bad weather. People think they know him, but they don’t. They don’t know that he cries in his sleep, or that he needs to be comforted from the worst of his dreams, over and over again.
When March does finally get home, she has to carefully make her way up the frozen path, and hold on to the railing so as not to slip and break her neck on her way to the front door. She’s not taken a coat. She’s so hot these days; she’s burning up. All she’s wearing are jeans and a borrowed wool sweater of Hollis’s. She hasn’t bothered with underwear either; she’s much too overheated for even the flimsiest silk. Inside, the house feels stuffy and close; there’s the scent of coffee and of wet dog. There’s something else too, a faint odor of regret which is sifting over the floorboards and the rugs.
As soon as she walks into the room, she sees that the man she’s spent the last eighteen years with has come for her, and he appears exhausted by the effort. Richard looks so uncomfortable, folded up in that chair, in his best suit, which is now rumpled. The dog rouses and shakes itself from sleep, but Richard doesn’t hear the clink of its collar. He doesn’t hear March come closer, and crouch beside him. He’s dreaming about her though, and in his dream she is surrounded by falling leaves, each one a brilliant yellow, as if fashioned from pure gold.
Richard doesn’t wake until March takes his hand. As soon as he opens his eyes and looks at her face, he knows it’s over. She pities him, that’s what he sees, and pity is not what he wants.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to fly to San Francisco with me on Sunday?” Richard laughs. He was supposed to keep this idea to himself until they’d spoken at length, but obviously he can’t do that.
In spite of herself, March laughs. He never did like small talk.
“Should I take that as a yes?” Richard asks.
“It’s not that I don’t love you,” March says.
Richard cannot help but wonder how many times this phrase has been spoken, and how many people who’ve
