Bedtime Story (14 page)

“Plato.”

He waved my reply away. “Whoever. The important thing is, if you don’t have a keen awareness of your own death, you’re not really able to live your life. You’ll always be putting things off to the future, operating under the faulty assumption that the future is unlimited.”

“What does this—?”

“Chris, there’s no future. And there’s no past, not one that you can climb back into, like you’re trying to do. There’s only this, this moment, right now.” He raised his hand slowly, and snapped his fingers. “And gone. All you can do is make each moment, each day, the best that it can be.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“So, you’re Yoda now?”

He shook his head, and looked at me with such sadness I had to turn away.

“Hello?” Jacqui called as she closed the front door. “Is anybody here?”

“Back here,” I called, my face bathed in steam as I dumped the spaghetti into the colander.

I could hear her footsteps through the house.

“Something smells good,” she said from the kitchen doorway. Dark purple scrubs tonight, matching the circles under her eyes.

“You’ve been busy.” She looked pointedly at the table, set with three places, the pots and pans on the stove and on the counter.

“We thought we’d have a late dinner, once you got home.”

“David hasn’t eaten?”

I tried to ignore the tone of reproach. “He had a snack a while ago,” I said.

I added a dollop of butter to the noodles, let it start to melt.

“I opened some wine.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“No occasion,” I said as I began to cut the bread into thick slices. “I just thought we might all have dinner together for a change.”

When I looked over at her, she was staring at me.

“I thought it might be nice.”

She nodded slowly. “Okay. I’ll get changed. Should I get Davy on my way? Are we close—?”

“Sure,” I said, hoping she’d walk in on him neck-deep in his homework. “We’re almost ready to go.”

She took one last look at me, at the food, at the kitchen, before she turned away.

“Should I pour you a glass of wine?” I called after her.

“Oh, I think so,” she said from the stairs.

David came down a minute later.

“How’d the homework go, sport?”

“Fine,” he said, slipping into his place on the far side of the table. “I’m starting to really hate French, though.”

I grinned. At least he was talking again. “Why?”

He shrugged as I went to the fridge for milk. “It’s hard to remember all the words for things, and all the ways to conjugate the verbs. I don’t see why we have to learn it anyway.”

“It’s good to have a second language,” Jacqui said from behind me. She had changed into a T-shirt from a breast cancer fund-raising walk she had done a few weeks before and a pair of yoga pants. Her relaxing-at-home clothes. “And if you ever want to get a job with the government—”

“Which I don’t,” he said, with such certainty that Jacqui and I both smiled.

“Well, never say never,” Jacqui said, sitting down at the table.

“I have a hard enough time with my own language,” he said.

I brought the basket of bread to the table. “There is that,” I said.

“How’s math?” Jacqui asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know why I have to learn that either. I can do it on a calculator faster.”

“So the homework didn’t go well?” I asked.

“It’s all done.”

“I think that calls for a toast.” Jacqui lifted her wineglass.

Was she really going to get into the spirit of this?

“To getting it done,” she said, and looked at me as she sipped.

Dafyd spent most of the afternoon exploring the near reaches of the canyon. The path of the sun overhead was keeping it lit and warm. He didn’t venture too deep between the walls. He went a short way into the canyon and sat down on the path, leaning back on his hands as he watched the play of light in the misty air.

The canyon walls weren’t smooth, as they had seemed to be in the earlier dark; they were rugged and pitted, worn from the crumbling of time, the passage of the river before it had cut so deeply into the earth. The rainbow colour played across every crevice, every crack.

When the afternoon drew late, the sun remained visible through the open end of the canyon as it sank heavily onto the horizon. Dafyd heard the sound of voices approaching. Bream and the magus led a
column of the guardsmen up the narrow path toward him.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” Bream asked, looking into the canyon.

“When did you see it?” Dafyd asked.

“Years ago,” he said. “The last time we were at war. Before you were born. This canyon has always been …” He seemed to struggle for the right word. “Special. We try to camp nearby when we can.

“It’s sacred,” the magus offered.

The captain turned away.

“Stephen and Gafilair camped here during the first war,” the magus continued, “almost a thousand years ago. I suppose that’s why he decided to hide the Sunstone here.”

Dafyd stared at the old man. The Sunstone was here?

As the sun crept lower, and Bream spread his men along the length of the chasm, Dafyd grew anxious. So much was depending upon him, and he had no idea what he was doing, what he was supposed to be looking for. The rays of the sun shifted as it set, and the rainbow light gradually faded, replaced with the rich honey glow of evening. The air grew cold again, and Dafyd wrapped his arms around himself as he searched for something, anything, that might answer the questions raised by the magus’s book.

At the moment the sun slips and the doorway to the secret world is revealed
, Dafyd remembered.

The waterfall roared on. The shadows shifted and crept on the canyon walls.

“I don’t see anything,” the captain grumbled to the magus.

“Patience,” the magus said, his voice less than sure.

“If your book is to be believed …”

Dafyd tried to ignore their voices. The sun was mostly sunk into the earth now, only the barest curve of light remaining over the river past the canyon’s mouth.

There was nothing here. No secrets. No Sunstone. He thought of the handmaiden, the man who had died on the road; their sacrifices for him had been for nothing.

The last edge of the sun slipped below the horizon. And with the final ray of light, Dafyd saw it.

It happened so suddenly he thought he had imagined seeing anything. But the magus was pointing across the river, and a shout came from a guardsman up the line.

The shadows on the rocks across the canyon had seemed to straighten and solidify, forming, for one passing moment, the perfect, symmetrical, unmistakable outline of a door in the canyon wall.

As quickly as it had come, though, the image disappeared, and the canyon was dark.

I left the dishes to soak while Jacqui took a bath. David was in bed, so while dishes and wife were immersed, I read a few pages of the novel I was reviewing for my next column, absorbing next to nothing, letting the words wash over me.

Once we had all gotten past the initial weirdness, dinner had been quite pleasant: a reminder of better times. The three of us together, eating, drinking, talking: anyone looking through the window would have thought we were a normal family.

After David was finished he put his plate and glass on the counter beside the sink and headed back up to his room, Jacqui and I sat for a while longer, working the wine down in our glasses. We hadn’t talked about anything important, and avoided any topics that might provoke a fight. We talked about the Emergency Room, about David’s fight with the French language, about the book I was reviewing. When I offered her more wine, she waved it away, mentioning how much she would like to take a bath. She offered to do the dishes—“Doing my fair share, with you making dinner”—but I shook my head and poured her more wine to take with her.

The dishes were just about finished when I heard her coming down the stairs. Taking one last swipe across the rim of the last pot, I held off looking at her as long as I could, wanting to delay the pleasure.

“I think I needed that,” she said as I hung the dishcloth on the faucet.

“Glad to be of service.” I turned to face her.

That first moment was worth the wait. She had on one of my old T-shirts, which clung to her, hanging just to her upper thighs. Her legs
were bare, shiny. Her skin was flushed, glowing from her soak, her hair glistening. Her eyes were relaxed, soft.

“I’m probably a little late with this,” she said, handing me the empty wineglass.

“There’re always more dishes to be done.”

“Thank you,” she said. “For all this.” She gestured around the room. “It’s been a rough few days at work.”

I took a step toward her, shaking my head as if it were nothing. “No big deal,” I said.

“No, it was. I really appreciate it.”

I was close enough to feel the heat radiating off her, smell the sweetness of whatever she had put in her bathwater. I gently put my hands on her hips, barely touching her, the softness of the T-shirt over the warmth of her skin. I leaned forward.

She took a step back, shaking her head as if to clear it. “Chris, what are you—?”

“It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, would it?”

Thankfully, she ignored the question. “Chris. It’s a bad idea.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t you remember our anniversary?”

I’d been thinking about that night since Dale had mentioned it. Dinner and a few drinks, talking the way we used to, then falling together, our bodies fitting like two pieces of a whole.

“I remember,” I said.

“It made everything crazy for weeks. We were fighting all the time.”

“We fight all the time anyway.”

“Things are pretty good right now. I don’t want to mess that up by jumping into something that we’ll both regret.”

“Sleeping with my wife isn’t something I’m going to regret.”

“It’s not the sex, Chris.” She took a step forward and touched the back of my forearm, just below the elbow. “I do love you. I really do. And the idea of messing up the sheets with you”—she allowed herself a naughty, knowing smile—“definitely has a certain appeal. It’s what comes after … It’s your thinking that this would somehow make everything else better, too. That you could start moving your things back in.”

I shook my head, but she wasn’t wrong.

She squeezed my arm. “I don’t have the strength for it.”

We said good night. I stopped on the back stoop in the light from the window, my chest tight, my eyes burning, not even really sure of what had just happened.

Closing the door lightly behind myself, I lit a cigarette, and tried not to hear Dale’s voice in my head, tried not to reach into my pocket to touch the key to his apartment.

David had woken to the sound of voices in the kitchen, right underneath his bedroom. His mother and father. Again. Not fighting this time. “Having a discussion,” they would call this.

He waited for a few moments, the covers pulled tight to his chin, his head pressed into the pillow, hoping that it would stop, that the voices would fade again, that the bad feeling would disappear.

When it didn’t, he reached out for the lamp on his bedside table and turned it on. He climbed out of bed and walked across to the door, not really taking care to be quiet.

As he closed the door, he took
To the Four Directions
off the shelf.

Lying back down on his stomach, he opened the book and tucked the leather bookmark inside the back cover.

As he started to read, his parents’ voices disappeared.