Nothing to Declare Page 18

  He found her doing yoga in the courtyard between house and shop, moving briskly through the asanas. Her body was as sturdy as he remembered, her features sun-bright and stripped of feeling. Overhead, wild parrots roosted in the bougainvillea. The beating of their wings blended with the stroke of Isabel’s breath.

  She adopted a lying-down posture he recalled as Lord Vishnu’s Couch, and Jesse set himself atop the cobblestones to follow along, forcing the leg extension with painful effort. Isabel sighed as he struggled to achieve the pose. “You can’t hop in like that, you’ll hurt yourself.” Annoyance colored her voice, yet Jesse imagined there was tenderness, too.

  “I’m not hoping for nirvana, just a little wake-me-up,” he said. Isabel carried on without waiting to see how he managed.

  After they were done, she showered and brought out breakfast and asked him how he was feeling. “You put the fear of God in me last night. The mushrooms had you babbling about the soles of your feet and setting the forest on fire with your tail.”

  Jesse extended an almost-steady arm to show his level of repair. “I’m on the mend, thanks to your good graces and the contents of your medicine chest. You always had that nurse’s touch.” An impatient smile forced itself onto Isabel’s face. “Liar.”

  While they ate, Jesse told a little of his years in Santa Monica, describing Copain’s success and his catastrophe of a marriage. “I can handle Helena as a business partner, but as a wife, call out the National Guard. Nowadays, I point her toward the competition and say, ‘Kill.’ Better them than me.” Isabel drank her tea in silence.

  He went on with what he knew of Marty’s recent life. There was no way to shape the story or blunt the blow of his death on Route 11. The telling poured out of him as Jesse pictured for her the Somerville apartment, its books and mildewed quilt and $40 bourbon, then Lieb and his paintings and cigars, the InfoCon bequest. The ironies were merciless and plentiful, but none of them brought Isabel to tears.

  “It sounds like Marty’s bad habits finally caught up with him,” she said when Jesse’s stories had run out.

  “Maybe he just lost his way. If I hadn’t turned him in...”

  “If. You did what you saw necessary. Same as everybody does, Marty certainly, every chance he got.”

  She seemed so sure of her ground, it put her at a remove that Jesse didn’t know how to close. “I wanted better of myself,” he said.

  Isabel stood. Sunlight washed over her, bright flecks shining in her hair as though she were lit from within. “We all do. Thank heaven nobody’s keeping score.”

  Jesse felt a wave of sadness wash through his chest. “I am. I always have.”

  “But you can stop. Just stop. It took me years to figure that out for myself. Give yourself a break and see how it feels.”

  With a nod of adjournment, she piled up the breakfast dishes and straightened the table.

  “I’d like to think I made a hit with Aster this morning.” Jesse fought to shade a note of lightness to his tone. “Would you mind if I stayed for dinner and had a real goodbye?”

  Isabel measured him with a stare. “As long as that’s all it is and you leave afterward.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve been making exits all month. I’ve got it down.” He watched her go off to open her shop for customers. The rattle of the loom filled the still, hot courtyard.

  After dinner there was algebra, and Aster demanded Jesse’s attendance. He sat on her bed as she pondered word problems at her desk, talking herself through the steps, finding the equations buried within stories about bus trips, cookie sales, and party invitations. Aster clapped her hands and cheered herself on with every happy success. She was Marty’s kid—it was broadcast in everything she did. The world was made for girls like her.

  At one point Aster looked up from her notebook. “Did you know my dad?” She spoke casually, and at first Jesse thought the girl was repeating something from her text. Various answers dried in his mouth. “No,” he said carefully. “What was his name?”

  Aster was doodling on her page, curlicues and flowers and a pretty cabin on a hill. “Carlo, Mom said. He was Italian, a tourist, I guess. But he died before I was born. He drowned body-surfing in Nusa Penida—she won’t show me where.”

  “Do you think it would make a difference if you knew?”

  Aster put down her pencil. “I think she’s mean. I don’t know anything real.” Her yearning touched him, the wounded dampness in her young eyes.

  “Only in math books does the world line itself up in columns.”

  “I don’t like it. It’s unfair.”

  “So it is,” Jesse said.

  They said their goodbyes when her homework was finished, Aster kissing his cheek shyly. He closed her door and heard her talking to herself. Double-checking her math results before she went to bed.

  Her mother sat at a courtyard table beneath a string of paper lanterns. The place before her was scattered with loose snapshots and an open photo album, and she was drinking Johnny Walker from a water glass, small, ladylike sips as she pasted pictures in her book. “Hear those frogs? When I moved here, the night sounds made me crazy, I barely slept. Frogs and dogs. Dogs and frogs.”

  Jesse took the chair next to her. “You got used to it, though.”

  “I got used to it. I learned to be light on my toes. My tippy-toes. Of course after a bit I had my baby. With a child you switch to hunker down.”

  “You’ve done an amazing job. She’s quite the girl. Dancing forward and the universe be damned. Just like Marty.”

  A long silence fell between them. Beyond the courtyard, fireflies darted above the garden: motion upon motion and a pale green glow, and all for love. Isabel, however, was watching Jesse with a sadness familiar to him—a plea for ending things without more words.

  Jesse picked up her glass and drank the whiskey down. “I’m guessing Marty never knew about Aster. And she has Carlo. More tragic than the real story, but now only a few millimeters shy of what really happened. Maybe one day you’ll be able to tell her the truth.”

  Isabel’s jaw quivered, but Jesse pressed on. “OK, the past stays where it is—you have your reasons. But the future, Bel, let me help you with the future. Marty left a large estate. You and Aster could return home, buy a house in Felton or anywhere. Money for college and beyond. The man would be doing cartwheels. He never had the chance to make amends.”

  Isabel poured herself another whiskey. “There are no amends.”

  “Sure there are. Marty left a trail of disaster a mile wide and a decade long.”

  Isabel leaned forward and fluffed her fingertips through the curls at Jesse’s temples and touched his cheek. “Look at you, gray as a grandpa. And me, I’m nothing but spots and wrinkles, a million marks of age and failure. I’ve given up looking into mirrors, I leave that for Aster. But you, you’re desperate to pick over everything we are and were, and there’ll be no blinking and nothing left out. You want the mirror head on. OK. I’m tired of fighting you off.”

  A breeze jostled the overhead fixtures, and in the dancing light, Isabel seemed to have lost her substance, as though she was floating above her chair. The imprint of her fingers still warmed Jesse’s skin. She leaned forward so that the wind wouldn’t chop into her words. “There are no amends because Marty did nothing, was responsible for nothing, was let in on nothing. The blue jeans deal was mine not his. My own secret arrangement through people I knew from my Hollywood days. I was planning to bring everybody into it, you included, but only after the fact, for safety’s sake. But then you got arrested and everything exploded.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Jesse said. “Why would Marty go through eighteen months in jail for something he didn’t do?”

  “For me,” Isabel said with little enthusiasm. “To play the gentleman for once. To be the big man. Of course, I skipped off quickly enough, anyway. Finding my lifeline, first and always.”

  “While Marty and I were free-falling?”

  Isabel sat with her
hands in her lap. “Yes. I had to. I’m sorry.”

  It took Jesse a moment to find his voice. “I once imagined you were the answer to all my problems. It’s a hard habit to break and I’m sure it got in your way, how I tried to love you. But I never lied to you, not that I remember. Not once.”

  Isabel looked at him. Her dark eyes were damp. “No. The only one you lied to was yourself.”

  Jesse rose to his feet. “Marty’s lawyer will be calling. The name is Lieb. Don’t let him hand you the runaround.”

  Isabel tilted her face toward Jesse. “Please, I don’t want anything.”

  “It’s not for you.” He thought he could kiss her goodbye, but Isabel had picked up a snapshot of herself and Aster—the two of them in bathing suits, the girl clinging to her mother’s back as they jumped into a river. There was a looseness in Isabel’s photo smile that rendered her unfamiliar, caught as she was between what she knew and what she didn’t. Water spray misted mother and daughter from head to toe. You couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  CONFESSION LANCES THE SPIRIT, so the padres tell us, and the shrinks, and I can think of more than once I tried to phone you up to own my history as Isabel’s champion and patsy. Something always held me back, Jesse. Worry for the lady’s well-being, not that she deserved it, not that I knew where she was, and a need for peace and quiet. Middle age had cured me of my craving for commotion. Vanity, of course, was still my number one—the swollen image of myself I’d lugged around since I was out of diapers. No way I wanted you to know me as I was: a faithful lapdog sold out by somebody I trusted.

  And so I gave you the role as the aggrieved, and I played mine as your betrayer. I missed your wedding, your restaurant success, and your divorce. You missed my slow approach on wealth, my simultaneous decline. Funny how that works. The shinier my balance sheet, the more I had to spend my time alone—stung once, I guess, forever shy. The “yo” I grunted at the toll-booth gal the night I drove to Lincoln was the first I’d said to anyone in days.

  Did we ever make that trip together, I can’t remember. Country roads in midwinter, the Milky Way above the ridge near Lafayette, so much twirling energy and stellar dust and light, the whole cosmic do-si-do. Once or twice a season I hit the White Mountains in my junker hunting for vistas. Christ, the overflow of space in three dimensions made me happy, slammed my point of view into proportion, shrank me down to size. How could I resist, I floored the gas until it felt like I was zooming through those stars myself—the farthest thing from suicide there is.

  I never saw the deer who jumped into my headlights, a twelve-point buck, according to the local news, plenty big to dent my belly and throw my car into the rail. We built ourselves a handsome pile of litter, didn’t we, skid marks and crushed iron, animal blood spoiling that double white line. I always could be counted on to leave my mess for someone else to tidy up. That’s you, Jesse. Now and always.

  What made you go those miles from Somerville to Bali, spreading my little tale to anyone who’d care? Guilt, was it, or loyalty to what our time in Santa Cruz had been, or love? Nothing to be ashamed of, love, it starts wars and builds cathedrals, why can’t it spur you to a little trip? Wasn’t it love that got you to lay the money on the kid, even if it makes her mommy squirm? I say send them every dime and let the future roll.

  She’s got moves already, Aster, hasn’t she, soul as wide as the world and a mind that skips around corners, Isabel’s gypsy looks. We’ll have to pray she makes it through without her daddy’s touch but all his nature. Maybe you’ll check in on her from time to time. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you can’t.

  Enjoy your peace and quiet, you’ve earned it ten times over—that long hike from Isabel’s gave you too much time to think. So go ahead and hole up on that beach till you turn baby pink, watch the local women scrounge for shells—they step so neatly, look, they never get their clothing wet. They don’t like the sea, the Balinese, it scares them, evil spirits, and they keep their distance. But we can’t get enough, the air the flavor of the womb, the light dimpling off the water, so many kinds of blue you lose count. It thumps the heart to see the breakers crash on shore without even a tiny intermission, some of them higher than your waist, some small and feather-light. It’s the teeny ones that make the sand, Jesse, crumbling rock until it shines like diamonds. All it takes is patience.

  The airport taxi was due, but Jesse didn’t mind making it wait. Every so often he could swivel under his beach umbrella and spy his landlord standing where the hotel path reached the sand, the fellow poised with one hand on the knot of his sarong while the foolish American in his black bikini underwear refused to come out to meet his obligation. In the Balinese way, the man was too polite to step forward and raise a fuss.

  Jesse had worn away the early hours at a travel office arranging his afternoon flight to Los Angeles. Humble pie and bluster had been the order of the morning, and it had pleased him to roll out the full battery of his persuasive skills to pry loose a ticket on a sold-out plane. But as time passed and the metallic sunlight bore down and the sea breeze tickled his hair, the thought of hurrying home seemed a mistake like everything else he’d done since leaving Somerville the month before. Pick your lifeline and let everyone else fall in behind—so had gone Isabel’s instruction. How on earth was it applied?

  Noon was approaching, and the beach glowed white, yet all around him, sunbathers soaked up the ultraviolet. Jesse was convinced he spotted Rama and Niki sleeping on a nearby blanket, their limbs carelessly entwined. Love endured in its fashion. There was a lesson there, too.

  He picked up the cardboard box that sat beside him and carried it to the shoreline. Marty’s ashes. It was heavier than ever and bruised from travel, the green color faded; it looked like it had been to the moon. The waves lined up for their next set. Jesse fixed on his goggles and dove beneath the first breaker.

  He was pounded five feet down where the water was cool and glassy and graced by filtered light and darting fish. With a sharp tug to the lid, the box exploded in a cloud of silvery ash and bone. Glitter streamed in the current. Jesse watched it eddy and fall. And then the pressure in his chest pushed him gasping to the surface.

  Amazing, he was gritty with the stuff, streaks on his shoulders and face and coating his goggles, the flint of it on his lips. Marty, true to form down to the very end, demanding the final word.

  A wave shaped up behind him. Jesse swam to meet it and put himself in its care. He rode to shore laughing with all the strength in his body. He was naked but he didn’t know it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to the many hands whose fingerprints are all over this manuscript. First to Andre Dubus II. You showed me the way. To my current and former workshop members. Your patience, careful reading, and good humor kept me on track during this book’s long development. Lori Ambacher, Cindy Anderson, Louie Cronin, Claudia Franklin, Judy McAmis, Peter Orner, Adair Rowland, Bob Steinberg, Jep Streit, and Frankie Wright—I love you guys.

  Thanks to David Talbot. Your enthusiasm and brilliant advice gave me a much-needed late boost.

  Special thanks to Ruth Henrich and Bonnie Mettler for editing and design. Your work makes mine look like the real thing. And thank you, Alex Deidda of https://www.aledesign.co.uk/for my beautiful website.

  Thanks to the members of the ALLi Facebook group. You answered my ongoing questions with more forbearance than I deserved.

  Thanks to my parents, Iver and Bernice, who started me as a reader. You were there in bed, books in hand, night after night. And especially to my mom, who passed onto me her love of writing.

  To my brother, Dan, who left behind lists of books he’d finished and ones he wanted to get to next. To my Canton family, Bidu, Rac, Zander, and Zella—none of this would be fun without you.

  And last and most of all, to Carol, whose energy, determination, and love prove daily what an artist’s life can be. We said “forever,” and I guess we meant it.

&nbs
p; Richard Ravin has written for the San Francisco Examiner, Salon.com, The Daily News of Newburyport, and was anthologized in Andre Dubus: Tributes, Xavier Review Press. Before turning to writing fiction, he worked as a production executive in Hollywood, overseeing the creation of more than forty television movies and miniseries. He lives in Massachusetts.

  You can find him at www.richardmravin.com

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