Safe Passage (34 page)

    
In the living room, she put
Pictures at an Exhibition
on the stereo. She sat close to the speakers but didn't turn the volume high because she didn't want to keep Cynthia's boys from listening to their cartoons.

    
Cynthia came in. "I hope whatever happens," she said, "you and Patrick will still go to the Keys for the winter. Maybe if he relaxes…if you both relax…"

    
"I envision myself with a third-degree sunburn,"
Mag
said. She would not speak of the impossibility of going to the Keys or anywhere with Patrick any longer; she would only prepare Cynthia for what she would say later, about giving up her house.

    
"I think it might be a lot for you," she said, "having the responsibility for Simon."

    
"It would only be for a few months. You'll come back when it gets warm—you'll want to, even if you decide to move to Florida later."

Cynthia's voice was controlled, showing good breeding. At least she was well bred. "What we'll do is sublet the apartment for six months or whatever, so we can have it back at least by June. That way when I get out of school I can take the boys to the pool."

     
"The pool?"

    
"Well, yes…you know, the swimming pool at the apartment. It's our primary form of recreation in the summer. It also tires them out so they take good naps."

    
"Here they would have the yard,"
Mag
said.

    
"Yes. It's a lovely yard. But I think by summer they'll be ready for the pool."

    
Could it be that Cynthia didn't want her house? She must be misunderstanding something. There was so much on her mind; of course there were things she was probably missing. No matter, she would be gracious for now and not dwell on it. She smiled. Kindly, she thought. It was easy to be gracious when it didn't give anything away. Cynthia smiled back and left the room.
Mag
could not rid herself of the all-consuming sense of falling.

    
Joshua came in, running from Jason. Their features were angelic…but their expressions!
Mag
knew well enough when one brother intended to kill the other.

    
"Okay, guys." Alfred came running in after them. He grabbed Jason by the arm. "Hey, guys, listen to me now. If you're tired of cartoons, let me tell you about this music. Do you hear this music?"

    
The boys nodded. The record was almost over: "The Great Gate at Kiev" was playing, the last section, her favorite.

    
"Well, there's a story to it. Did you know that music can have a story?"

    
The boys shook their heads.

    
"A lot of times the composer wants to tell a story just like someone who writes a book, and so he tries to make the sounds fit it. This piece describes the gate that leads into a city in Russia. I used to imagine that it took place on Easter morning, when the people were coming into the gate going to church." He went into the family room and returned with the encyclopedia, showing them a picture of the church in Red Square.

    
"A church like this one," he said. "When you listen to music, you can imagine anything you want, but I used to think the music sounded like springtime, and the people were coming to this church on Easter."

    
This struck
Mag
as so odd that her sensation of falling left her for a minute, suspending her in
midflight
. She had not thought that Alfred could imagine things like Easter. It was one thing to joke about
Mefistofele
giving him a religious education, but really his mind didn't work like that.

    
Joshua was beginning to fidget. He was turning the pages of the encyclopedia, looking for other pictures. "Is Easter one of the times when the world is decorated?" he asked.

    
"You mean the house-like at Christmas?" Alfred said.

    
"No, the world."

    
"Well, I guess the world is decorated with plants and flowers coming up." He put one hand on Joshua's head and the other on Jason's. "And with you."

    
The boys laughed. He winked at them. "Come on, you two roughnecks. Outside." She understood that he loved them. She did not think that was possible. But clearly he did.

    
Alfred followed the boys into the other room, to get their coats.
Mag
felt numb. To imagine Kiev at Easter, Alfred would have had to let the music move him in a way she had not thought was possible.
But why not?
He had always been a thoughtful child. Perhaps he had cared for it all the time and did not say. It was a mistake to judge people by their surfaces, she knew that. But Alfred's surface had always been so smooth. She saw the music having some lasting impression on
him,
saw him loving Cynthia's boys, loving Cynthia. It seemed extremely odd.

    
A memory came to her of Alfred's birth. She had been in labor a long time, and she was tired. The pains swept over her with increasing frequency and intensity, until they seemed to come one after the other, with no rest in between. She tried to do what she had read in the childbirth books, but the pain was in control of her and she could not breathe. She knew she would die. Then she thought: It is out of my hands. Immediately she felt calm. She said, "Please help me," and relinquished control. At that moment—
at that moment
—someone told her to push, and as soon as she did the pain stopped. It was replaced by an enormous, healing effort, and a few moments later Alfred slid howling into the world. Seeing the beauty of her son and feeling the sweetness of her own unencumbered body, she immediately remembered a scene from
The Potting Shed
, where the girl dreams she meets a lion. The man asks her, "Did it eat you?" And the girl says, "No, it only licked my hand." And it seemed to her that was what had happened the moment she relinquished control.

    
She must relinquish Alfred, she supposed. She had feared a moment when the boys would be snatched beyond her, hurt, killed, when she would not be able to call them back—but perhaps mostly they just grew up, out of control, and maybe the moment had come and gone and she had simply not known.

    
Even Simon—the way he had acted this morning with the dog, and now his admitting to being unsure about his ear. When he finally made up his mind, it would be a man's decision.
And
Izzy
with his lab animals, Gideon with his maniacal running…Even if they ran into trouble—they were out of her control.
Her freedom was not something she had wrenched from them, it was real.

   
But Patrick…

    
Oddly, Patrick was standing beside her. She hadn't heard him enter because of the music.

    
"Come into the other room, Maggie," he said. "Come help me get through the rest of this day."

    
It was a strange thing for him to say. He was not blind, for now, and his eyes were turquoise blue.

    
He sounded troubled. For three days he had not once sounded as if any of this troubled him, and now his voice was weak.

    
"Come here, I have something good to tell you about my eyes," he said.

    
"Oh, Patrick, don't. No jokes." If he joked right now, she would announce her decision to leave. She would not wait another moment.

    
"No jokes," he said softly. He touched her arm.

    
Whatever his good news was, it did not deflect his pain. She remembered then that jokes and coolness were what he always hid behind—when there were too many babies to tend, when Percival refused to run well, and now again. It was the only mask he had. And she had confused it with uncaring so she could listen to music alone. She was ashamed.

    
"What about your eyes?" she asked.

    
"Come into the family room,
Mag
. Turn this record off."

    
She knew that whatever it was about his eyes, that wasn't even the main thing. The main thing was that Percival might be dead.
Their child.
Their lives, braided inextricably. Even if she could have been as logical as Cynthia, nothing would be changed. Why did she think, then, that she could leave him to go blind alone in the Keys?

    
She was no longer falling. A sort of solidity reappeared beneath her feet—nothing absolute—and when she identified it, she saw that of course it was only sand. In the Keys, she and Patrick would walk on the beach and spend the too-hot
noons
in bed. After a time they would both grow bored, and he would begin to concoct
sunblocks
for her, even if he were blind. She would help until the house was as familiar to him as this one, and then she would find a job. There must be interesting jobs, even in Key West.

 
   
She did not think even Cynthia, with all her reserve, would escape. The web was woven of lives.

    
In the distance the doorbell was ringing, and also the phone. She could not see the door from here and thought at last it would be the Marines. Or perhaps not; perhaps it was Percival on the phone, calling to say he was all right. It could be either. The twins would get the door and Simon would answer the phone. It was the way they did things, and it was out of her control.

    
In that last second, she envisioned Percival whole, rescuing other men from beneath the rubble. Saw him in action—he had always been graceful and light. Saw him performing the sort of act that would fill him, calm him, perhaps for years. Or if not…Patrick tightened his hand on her arm, and she leaned into him. Alfred was calling them from the other room.

    
"Someone wants to talk to you," he said.
Mag
could not tell if he meant the person at the door or the person on the phone. Neither
Mag
nor Patrick moved.

    
"Hurry up, this is long distance!" Simon was yelling.
Mag
lifted the needle from the record. "Hurry!" he yelled. They began to run, she and Patrick, toward the phone room. His hand was still on her arm. In the distance they could hear Simon saying, "We knew you'd be all right, man, we knew you were too ugly to die." He spoke in a clear, light voice that was not even his imitation of a black man's voice. And they could hear, very clearly in the distance, the sound of him snapping his fingers as he spoke.

END