Illumination Night: A Novel Read online

  HE planned to take the long way home and show her Lambert’s Cove, but it took Jody more time than he’d expected at the grocery store, and as soon as they get back he carries the bags into her grandmother’s kitchen. In the truck, she didn’t take her eyes off him. With Vonny there has never been the carelessness he associates with young lovers, the intensity of not caring what happens next, of looking no farther than the backseat of a borrowed car for a frantic embrace.

  In Mrs. Renny’s kitchen he feels as if he’d been slapped in the face. What is he doing here? Now all he wants to do is get home, though he wonders what price he’ll have to pay for this ride to the store. It’s not a crime to give a young girl a ride, to imagine, briefly, that you’re kissing her.

  “I just wish I could thank you some way,” Jody says to him.

  His silence is extremely embarrassing; they both know what she means. When Andre doesn’t answer, Jody quickly adds, “I could babysit for your little boy sometime.”

  Mrs. Renny comes into the kitchen and thanks him too.

  “I hope it’s not all frozen foods,” she says to her granddaughter, and Jody wrinkles her nose and keeps loading the refrigerator with diet soda and oranges and eggs.

  When Andre looks out the window he notices his house is dark. Usually, at this time of night, the kitchen light is on, the porch light turns a pale gold, an illusion caused by dozens of moths. He remembers their picnic, and with a sinking feeling knows Vonny and Simon haven’t waited for him.

  “I forgot an appointment,” he says suddenly.

  Jody turns to study him. It’s as lame an excuse as she’s heard. Once, when a boy she didn’t want to talk to called her, she shouted that a truck had just pulled up on her front lawn, then quickly hung up on him.

  “Seriously,” Andre says. “It’s Illumination Night.”

  Jody closes the refrigerator door and wipes her palms on her shorts. She doesn’t know what Illumination Night is, and she doesn’t much care. All she knows is that he’s about to leave her.

  Though she has not been to the Grand Illumination for years, Elizabeth Renny remembers that the first time she went she wore a pale pink skirt, a blouse with a wide collar, small gold earrings. Although she was already married, she thinks she may have fallen in love with her husband on Illumination Night. Stars had been plucked out of the sky and set into lanterns. She broke the heel of one of her shoes and walked down Trinity Avenue barefoot.

  “I wish I could take you there,” she says to her granddaughter.

  Andre fervently hopes they will decline but, cornered, he invites both Jody and her grandmother along.

  “We couldn’t impose on you,” Elizabeth Renny says.

  Jody grabs her pocketbook off the back of a kitchen chair and swings it over her shoulder.

  “Oh, well,” Elizabeth Renny says. “You two go on. I’m too old.”

  Jody waits in the truck while Andre goes to check his house and make sure it’s empty. Then they drive without talking. Jody knows he doesn’t want her there, but there’s always the possibility that he’ll change his mind. Bugs hit the windshield and Andre turns on the wipers; soon the glass is streaked with their remains. There is no place to park, but Andre keeps going anyway, and he parks illegally, blocking a driveway. Getting out of the truck, Jody stumbles. After such a promising start, everything has gone wrong. They walk down the road in the dark and she thinks how stupid she is to be wearing shorts. Her legs are freezing. She has to struggle to keep up with Andre.

  “Hey, wait up,” she says, casually she hopes. If she’s left on this road she’ll never find her way back. She runs and grabs Andre’s arm and imagines that everyone they pass assumes they’re a couple. She wants him in some strange, deep way she doesn’t understand. When they reach Trinity Park, Jody blinks in the sudden pools of light.

  If she had grown up here, Jody thinks, she might have been happy. If every night there were red stars and pink paper lanterns. They walk up and down the streets, looking for Simon and Vonny, Jody hoping not to find them. On a crowded corner, Andre suddenly stops. He stares beyond the Tabernacle, then turns to Jody. He puts his hands on her arms, and for one dizzy instant Jody thinks at last he’s going to kiss her. Instead, he bends down so he can be heard above the noise of the crowd.

  “There they are,” he says.

  Vonny is watching the band. Simon looks like a baby sleeping crossways on his mother’s lap, his legs pressed against the sidewalk. In the morning, there will be tiny red scratches above his anklebones. Andre lets go of Jody, and as she follows him across the street, Jody knows that on the ride home she will sit in the back of the truck, and by then the stars will be as white and sharp as dragon’s teeth.

  Chapter Two

  OUT ALL NIGHT

  IN October a cold snap freezes pumpkins on the vine, and horses left out to pasture return to their barns with ice on their hooves. There are yellow leaves lining the ditches and the roadsides, frozen in place. Jody hates the change in the weather. The cold raises welts on her skin. The stars seem much too bright. Ever since August, Jody has put her desire on hold, which is not to say she has given up hope. Instead of leaving after Labor Day she had registered for the school term, and is now a junior at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. She is convinced that if her feelings for Andre were as one-sided as they seemed, he would be able to look at her, no problem. Twice this week Andre has passed her on the road. Both times he was driving the pickup alone and she was walking home from the school-bus stop. He didn’t look at her as he went by, but she imagines that he looked at her pretty damn hard in his rearview mirror.

  She wants to know the smallest details of his life. Does he sleep with his arms around Vonny? Does he shave in the morning or at night? Does he ever think of her, the way she thinks of him when she can’t fall asleep? She grows more and more impatient. She weaves a thousand plans. She will hide in the pickup truck, dressed in nothing but a long black sweater. She will call him at midnight, after first making certain that her grandmother is asleep, and beg him to come and trap a bat lodged in the rafters of her bedroom. She will kidnap the little boy, Simon, and hold him hostage for the price of a kiss. Instead of taking notes during class she writes tactical possibilities in careful script until her looseleaf notebook is filled. But when she does finally seek him out she does so before she realizes what she’s doing. There is no design, it’s just something that happens. That’s how she knows it was meant to be. Her grandmother has been asleep for hours and Jody is already in bed when she realizes she’s forgotten to let the cats in. They don’t come when she calls so she puts a raincoat on over her flannel nightgown and pulls on a pair of leather boots she doesn’t bother to tie. Out on the porch Jody hisses the way her grandmother has taught her. When she makes this urgent sound, Jody is calling not to the cats but to Andre. She thinks he may hear her because in his house the kitchen light is switched on. Sinbad comes running for the house. Jody opens the door for him and he slips inside. Then she walks across the yard.

  She has to find out who it is in the kitchen. She goes to the window and peers in, past a sink filled with dirty dishes. He is at the table drinking something—coffee, maybe—flipping through a stack of papers. Bills. He wears a green flannel shirt and blue jeans. With one hand he moves his coffee cup back and forth in its saucer. Jody feels some of the excitement robbers must feel. There is enormous power in watching someone act completely natural and unawares. Before she can stop herself, Jody taps on the window. The cold glass against her knuckles feels sharp. When Andre turns to the window Jody holds her breath. If nothing more she will always have this moment when he sees her and nothing else. She knows she will be crushed if he simply looks away, so she breaks their locked gaze and backs off. She stands beside the rose of Sharon that grows by the side of the house. She reaches into her pocket, and when Andre comes outside, without having bothered to put on a sweater, Jody is smoking a cigarette. Andre lets the door slam behind him and follows the orange light of h
er cigarette. He thinks his heart is beating so fast because he’s angry.

  “What do you think you’re doing here?” he says.

  The white cat Jody originally came out to look for is on the porch next door, mewing and scratching at the door.

  Jody can no longer measure her own behavior. She has always been well practiced at manipulation. It isn’t difficult for her to get what she wants from her parents and friends when she plays her cards right. She’s sure the way to get to Andre is to tell him a sad story that will make him feel responsible not only for her but for the way she feels about him. But she’s so close to him she can’t think straight, and so she tells him the truth.

  “I just wanted to see you,” Jody says.

  Her honesty catches Andre off guard. He realizes just how cold it is. Inside, everyone is sleeping. Even the dog on the kitchen floor seems miles away, distanced by sleep. Lately Andre and Vonny have been careful with each other. Until tonight Andre has made certain to avoid the yard when Jody is out there, waiting, he knows, for him, and Vonny has not complained when Andre brought home a second, then a third, old motorcycle: But careful isn’t enough. Something between them is cracking.

  “You should be going out with boys your own age,” Andre tells Jody.

  “Thanks a lot,” Jody says in a tone that reminds Andre exactly how young she is.

  “Jody, go home,” Andre says. They both know he means all the way, Connecticut, not next door.

  “I wouldn’t even ask you for anything,” Jody says.

  “Look, I don’t want to see you,” Andre says cruelly. “I don’t know how to make that clear to you.”

  Jody feels her face grow hot. It would be easy to hate him.

  “You’re just lonely,” Andre says.

  It is the worst possible thing he could have said.

  “All right,” Jody says. “If that’s the way you want it. I’ll never come back here again.”

  “Good,” Andre says.

  “I really mean it,” Jody says.

  Andre watches as she runs between their yards and disappears in the dark. When he hears the door slam behind her, he walks back to his house. He turns off the downstairs lights, then goes upstairs. In the bathroom, he avoids looking at himself. He washes his face, then goes to Simon’s door and opens it. There is a night-light, a wedge of white plastic, plugged into the wall. The rice-paper shades have been pulled down. Simon lies sideways across the bed. He’s kicked off the blankets and his feet dangle over the mattress. Andre leans down and shifts his son so that his head is once more on the pillow, then covers him. It amazes Andre that Simon can sleep so deeply, that he can even be carried from room to room without waking. If Andre ever slept as peacefully he no longer remembers. Can it be that every night in his childhood was broken in two by the sound of sleet against the roof, by the hum of the TV his father watched in the living room? Can it be that even in August there were always cold sheets? He wants to be everything to Simon his own father was not, but already Simon runs to Vonny for comfort. When Simon is with Andre it’s as though he doesn’t think his father can recognize pain. If Simon falls when they’re together, he picks himself up and keeps running and Andre never finds out until later, when Simon sits on Vonny’s lap and shows her the scrape, that his son has been hurt. Andre doesn’t want to believe that his own father’s indifference was anything other than what it seemed. And yet, when he thinks of his father getting up long before dawn, maneuvering his Ford down snow-blocked roads he would later plow, Andre wishes that just once, instead of lying in bed until he heard the car start, he had gotten up and made a Thermos full of black coffee.

  When Andre gets into bed beside her, Vonny opens her eyes.

  “Simon?” she says, thinking Andre has just been roused.

  “Asleep,” Andre says.

  Vonny smiles and moves closer. Andre knows this girl next door is just bad timing. If she had come along a few months ago, he and Vonny would have laughed over it. Now, he will not mention her visit to Vonny. And, because of this, he will not be able to fall asleep until dawn.

  When he dreams he dreams about the Flying Horses, the old carousel in Oak Bluffs. He is in a terrible hurry. He knows it is winter because the streets are deserted. The carousel should be shut down, yet he can hear music. Who is he meeting here? Why is he frightened? He thinks perhaps Simon has been locked inside the wooden building that houses the carousel, and he breaks into a run.

  The clouds are much too low. He cannot tell if the sky is above him or directly in front of him. As Andre runs he knows he is too late, but in spite of that he runs faster. Luckily, an ax has been left for him. He must chop through the building. He knows that. As he swings the ax, snow begins to fall. Finally the wood splinters, and he sees that the carousel is motionless. How strange, then, that mirrors set in a circle sway back and forth, distorting what he sees, making it impossible to tell what is real and what is a reflection. When he hears a hissing noise, Andre breaks into a sweat. He studies the carved horses—they are wood, their mouths forever open, frozen in place. Along one of the carousel coaches is a painted dragon. It flexes its talons once. When it opens its mouth Andre can see two sharp white fangs. A stream of mosquitoes and hot air pours out of its mouth, and the hiss, which moves mirrors, which alters reflections, winds itself around Andre’s throat.

  Andre tries to tear away what is choking him. When he leans his head back he sees a painted sign but cannot read if it says This is the beginning or This is the end.

  In the morning, Andre finds that he has lost his voice. He can communicate only by writing notes. He drinks hot tea with honey and gulps cough medicine straight from the bottle. When this has no effect, he drinks three cups of scalding black coffee in a row, and by noon he’s able to speak.

  JODY can feel spite curling beneath her tongue as she checks out the cafeteria. Usually she brings a book and ignores everyone. Today nothing escapes her attention. She wears tight black jeans and a gray sweater that makes her eyes look like smooth, flat stones. She has chosen her black boots and red bangle bracelets carefully. For nearly two months she has paid no attention to her fellow students, so she has to make up for lost time. The entire student body of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School is smaller than the senior class back home. No one approaches her anymore, and she can’t blame them. During her first week of school Jody let the girls who tried to be friendly know right away—she wasn’t interested. Now they don’t speak to her unless they have to. Jody has no confidante to fill her in on the social hierarchies, so she has to figure them out herself and it isn’t easy. People blend together here, there’s no clear-cut caste system as there is at her old school. The most awful-looking boys sit with the prettiest girls. Jody figures that people can’t afford to be as nasty to each other when they live on an island. No matter where they go, they’re bound to run into each other.

  She sees two distinct possibilities at tables up front. One is blond and tall, wearing a flannel shirt and jeans. The other has reddish hair and a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses in his shirt pocket. They’re both, Jody supposes, acceptable, although even the handsomest boys at school are pitiful compared to Andre. She has never been more calculating. She doesn’t care what they think of her and she has nothing to lose. Andre has told her to go out with boys her own age, and that’s exactly what she plans to do.

  She brings her tray up front and watches carefully. The boy with the red hair has his back to her, but the blond boy looks. At his table are two other boys and a girl with short hair who clearly is desperate for his attention. Jody stops a few feet away and meets his gaze. All she has to do is wait and he will walk over to her. When he does she’ll have only two questions: does he have his own car and what time can he meet her after school?

  SIMON has already decided he does not want a birthday party. He refuses to be any older until he is taller. He does not tell his mother about his decision as she puts a peanut-butter sandwich on the table for him, or when she quickly h
ugs him. The pressure he feels in his chest comes from keeping his secret, but he cannot be moved or intimidated. Vonny senses something and when she brings him some juice she touches her lips to his forehead. In fact he’s hot, not with fever, but with shame.

  He knows he is wicked. He must be. He is under a spell. Something pulls at his clothes, stretching them out so that cuffs have to be rolled up, new boots have to be packed with newspaper before they’ll fit. Something sits on him, pressing down hard so he cannot grow. His parents think he is stupid. They think he doesn’t know that his mother is measuring him against the kitchen counter, or that his father never throws a ball to him, but bounces it instead, the way he would to a baby. Simon sees the way they look at him, and now, even when they are not measuring him, he’s measuring himself.

  As Simon eats his lunch, Vonny kneels by a cupboard and searches for her cake pans. Simon’s stomach hurts. She is already planning his birthday party. If he can put off being four he can use the time to try to grow.

  “Maybe I’ll be sick next Saturday,” he says casually.

  “Oh?” Vonny says. She pulls out two round pans and puts them on the counter.

  “I might get chicken pox,” Simon says.

  While his mother’s back is to him, Simon pinches himself. A red welt rises on his forearm.

  “Look,” he calls. “A red spot.”

  Vonny comes over and examines his arm. Simon watches her carefully. He can always tell when she believes him.