The Golden Hour

The driver this time was a woman. Amy put down her sign and got into the car.

“How do you do, Amy?” She offered her hand. “I’m Rachel Wood.”

They shook. For a moment Amy was rendered speechless, arrested by the woman’s beauty: a face of delicate, well-made bones, as if honed with the finest tools; skin that glowed with youthful health; a trim, strong body, her arms articulated with lean muscle. Her hair, pulled away from her face in a taut ponytail, was blond with golden streaks. She was wearing what Amy knew to be tennis clothes, although this knowledge seemed to come from elsewhere, the idea of tennis itself lacking any meaningful reference. Sunglasses with tiny jewels embedded in the arms were perched on top of her head.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here to get you before,” Rachel continued. “Anthony thought you’d like a familiar face the first time.”

“I’m very glad to meet you,” Amy said.

“That’s sweet of you to say.” She smiled, showing her teeth, which were small and straight and very white. “Buckle up now.”

They glided away from the overpass. All was the same as the last time—the same houses and stores and parking lots, the same glowing summer light, the same busy world flowing past. In the deep leather of her seat, Amy felt as if she were floating in a bath. Rachel seemed thoroughly at home at the wheel of the immense vehicle, humming a shapeless tune under her breath as she guided them confidently through traffic. As a large pickup braked ahead of them, blocking the lane, Rachel flicked on her blinker and deftly swerved to pass.

“For goodness sake,” she sighed, “some people. Where do they learn to drive?” She looked at Amy hastily and returned her eyes to the road. “You know, you’re not quite what I imagined, I have to say.”

“No?”

“Oh, not in a bad way,” Rachel assured her. “That’s not what I meant at all. Honestly, you’re just pretty as a picture. I wish I had skin like that.”

“So how am I different?”

She hesitated, choosing her words. “I just thought you’d be, you know. Younger.”

They continued on. Amy’s abrupt arrival in this place had brought about a mild disorientation and, with it, a muting of emotion. But as the minutes passed, she felt her mind opening to her circumstances, the images and her responses to them growing more defined. How remarkable everything was, Amy thought. How very, very remarkable. They were inside the ship, the Chevron Mariner, yet she had no physical awareness of this; as before, with Wolgast, every detail of the scene possessed an absolutely firm appearance of reality. Perhaps it was real, in some alternate sense of the word. What, after all, was “real”?

“Right there is where I stopped with him, that first time.” Rachel gestured out the window to a block of stores. “Somehow I had it in my head he might like doughnuts. Doughnuts, can you imagine?” Before Amy could assemble a response, she went on: “But listen to me, giving you the grand tour. I’m sure you know all about it. And you must be tired, after such a long trip.”

“It’s all right,” Amy said. “I don’t mind.”

“Oh, he was such a sight.” Rachel shook her head sadly. “That poor man. My heart just went out. I said to myself, Rachel, you have to do something. For once in your little life, get your head out of the sand. But of course I was really thinking about myself, as usual. Which is the thing. I’ve got enough regrets on that score to last a hundred lifetimes. I didn’t deserve him, not one iota.”

“I don’t think he believes that.”

She slowed the car to turn onto a residential street. “It’s really marvelous, you know. What you’re doing. He’s been alone so long.”

Soon, they pulled up to the house. “Well, here we are,” Rachel announced in a chipper voice. She had put the vehicle in park though she’d left the engine running, just as Wolgast had done. “It was a pleasure to finally meet you, Amy. You’ll want to watch your step getting out.”

“Why don’t you come with me? I know he’d like to see you.”

“Oh, no,” said Rachel. “It’s nice of you to ask, but that’s not how this works, I’m afraid. That’s against the rules.”

“What rules?”

“Just… the rules.”

Amy waited for more, but there was none; there was nothing to do but climb out of the car. By the open door she turned to look at Rachel, who was waiting with her hands on the wheel. The air was thick and warm beneath the green canopy of the trees; insects were buzzing everywhere with their bright, chaotic music, like the notes of an orchestra tuning up.

“Tell him I’m thinking about him, won’t you? Tell him Rachel sends her love.”

“I don’t understand why you can’t come with me.”

Rachel directed her gaze over the dashboard, toward the house. It seemed to Amy she was searching for something, her eyes, which had clouded with a sudden grief, pausing at each of its many windows. Tears appeared at the corners of her eyes.

“I can’t, you see, because it wouldn’t make any sense.”

“Why wouldn’t it make sense?”

“Because, Amy,” she said, “I’m already there.”

She found him kneeling in the flowerbeds, working in the dirt. A wheelbarrow was positioned nearby; piles of dark mulch, exuding a heavy earthen smell, were dispersed among the beds. At her approach he rose to his feet, removing his broad-brimmed straw hat and drawing off his gloves.

“Miss Amy, you’re right on time now. I was just setting to work on the lawn, but I reckon that’ll keep.” He waved his hat toward the patio, where glasses of tea awaited. “Come and sit a spell.”

They took their places at the table. Amy tipped her face to the crowns of the trees, letting the sunlight warm her. The aromas of grass and flowers filled her senses.

“Thought you’d be more comfortable this way,” Carter said. “The two of us can have a time, talking and such. Make the days pass.”

“You knew he’d be there, didn’t you?”

Carter mopped his brow with a rag. “Didn’t send him, if that’s what you mean. Wolgast just had his way. No talking him out of it when he set his mind on it.”

“But how come the others didn’t know who he was? They couldn’t have. They would have killed him.”

Carter shook his head. “Their kind never could read me, one way or the other. You could say we been out of touch awhile. It’s a two-way street, and I ain’t sent nothing back their way since the beginning. Shut my mind to all of them.” Carter hitched up in his chair and returned the cloth to his back pocket. “You done right, Miss Amy. Wolgast, too. Was a hard and terrible thing, I know that.”

She was suddenly thirsty; the tea felt cool and sweet going down and left a bright, lemony taste on her tongue. Carter watched her, waving his hat in a gentle motion to push a breeze over his face.

“And Zero?”

“I expect there’s time yet. But he’ll be coming for us. This here’s personal now. He’s surely the worst of ’em. Put ’em all together and you still ain’t got one Zero. Bridge we cross when we come to it.”

“And until then, here we stay.”

Carter nodded in his patient way. “Yes’m. Here we stay.”

They sat together in silence, thinking of what would come.

“I’ve never tended a garden before,” Amy said. “Would you teach me?”

“Always lots to be done. Reckon I could use the help. Mower’s fussy, though.”

“I’m sure I could learn.”

“I’m supposing you could, now,” he said with a smile. “I reckon that’s the case.”

Amy remembered her promise. “Rachel told me to send her love.”

“Did she, now. I was just thinkin’ on her. How she look to you?”

“Beautiful, really. I’d never really had a chance to see her clearly before. But sad, too. She was looking at the house, like there was something she wanted.”

Carter seemed surprised. “Why, it’s her babies, Miss Amy. I thought you knew.”

Amy shook her head.

“Haley and the little one. Woman can’t see or touch ’em, where she is. It’s her babies she’s always dreamin’ on. It’s the most awful ache to her.”

Amy finally understood. Rachel had drowned herself, leaving her children behind. “Will she ever see them again?”

“I expect she will when she ready. It’s her own self she has to forgive, for leaving them like she did.”

His words seemed to hover in the air, not sounds alone but things of form and substance. The temperature was dropping; the leaves had begun to fall.

“She not the only one, Miss Amy. Some folks can’t find a way on they own. For some it’s a bad feeling in the mind. Others just can’t let go. Them’s the ones that love too hard.”

In the pool, the body of Rachel Wood had completed its slow ascent to float upon the surface. Amy looked down at the table; she knew what Carter was saying to her. Every day I cut the lawn, she thought. Every day she rise.

“You got to go to him,” said Carter. “Show him the way.”

“I just …” She felt his eyes on her face. “I don’t know how.”

He reached over the table and cupped her chin, lifting it upward. “I know you, Miss Amy. It’s like you been inside me all my life. You the one was made to set this whole world right. But Wolgast’s just a man. It’s his time now. You got to give him back.”

Tears trembled in her throat. “But what will I do without him?”

“Just like you always done,” said Anthony Carter, and smiled into her eyes. “Just like you do now. You Amy. ”

He came to her a final time. Or it was she who came to him. They came to each other, to say a last goodbye.

For Wolgast it began with a sensation of abstract motion. He was in a kind of nowhere, floating through an infinite space, though bit by bit the scene resolved, its spatial and temporal parameters firming, and he became aware that he was, of all things, riding a bicycle. A bicycle! Now, that was strange. Why was he on a bicycle? He hadn’t ridden one in years, but he’d loved it as a boy: the feeling of pure freedom and gyroscopic lift, his body’s energy flowing through this marvelous mechanism that joined him to the wind. Wolgast was on a bicycle, riding down a dusty country lane, and Amy was beside him, perched on a bicycle of her own. This fact surprised him neither more nor less than anything else about the scene, it all simply was, just as Amy was both a little girl and a grown woman, and for a time they rode together without speaking, though the idea of time itself felt strange. What was time? How long had they been riding like this? Some period of hours, perhaps, or even days, and yet the light was always the same—a permanent penumbral twilight that enriched the colors of everything around him with a golden glow: the fields and trees, the dust that rose under his wheels, the small white shapes of houses in the distance. Everything felt very close; everything was far away.

“Where are we going?” Wolgast asked.

Amy smiled. “Oh, it’s not much farther.”

“What… is this place?”

She said nothing more. On they rode. Wolgast’s heart was full of warm contentment, as if he were a boy again: a boy riding his bicycle at sunset, waiting for the call that would summon him home.

“Are you tired?” Amy asked.

“Not at all. It feels wonderful.”

“Why don’t we stop at the crest of the next hill?”

They coasted to a halt. A grassy valley opened below them. In the distance, nestled by trees, was a house: small, white, like the others, with a porch and black shutters. Amy and Wolgast lowered their bicycles to the ground and stood together quietly. There was no wind at all.

“It’s quite a view,” Wolgast said. Then: “I think I know where I am.”

Amy nodded.

“It’s strange.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t really remember how it happened, but I suppose that’s for the best. Is it always like this?”

“I’m not sure. I think sometimes it is.”

“I remember thinking I had to be brave.”

“You were. The bravest man I ever saw.”

He mulled this over. “Well, that’s good. I’m glad to hear it. In the end, I guess that’s all a person can ask.” He sent his gaze over the valley again. “That house. I’m supposed to go there, aren’t I?”

“I believe that you are.”

He turned to look at her. A second passed; then he broke into a smile of discovery.

“Wait a minute. You’re in love. I can see it in your face.”

“I think I am, yes.”

Wolgast shook his head with wonder. “I’ll be damned. How about that. My little Amy, all grown up, in love. And does he love you back, this person?”

“I think he does,” she said. “I hope he does.”

“Well, he’d be a fool not to. You can tell him I said so.”

For a moment neither spoke. Amy waited.

“So,” he began again. His voice was thick with emotion. “I suppose that means my work here is done. I guess I always knew this day would come. I’m going to miss you, Amy.”

“I’ll miss you, too.”

“That was always the hardest part, missing you. I think that’s why I could never bring myself to leave. I always thought, What will Amy do without me? Funny how in the end it was the other way around. I suppose all parents feel that way. But it’s different when it’s you.” The words caught in his throat. “Let’s do this quickly, okay?”

She put her arms around him. She was crying too, but not with sadness. Though perhaps a little bit of sadness. “It will be all right, I promise.”

“How do you know?”

At the far end of the valley, at the edge of the fields, the door to the house had opened.

“Because that’s what heaven is,” said Amy. “It’s opening the door of a house in twilight and everyone you love is there.” She hugged him tightly to her. “It’s time for you to go home, Daddy. I’ve kept you as long as I could, but you have to go now. They’re waiting for you.”

“Who’s waiting, Amy?”

On the porch a woman had appeared, holding a baby in her arms. Amy backed away and touched his tearstained cheek.

She said, “Go see.”

She awoke to the cold and a vision of stars. Stars by the hundreds, the thousands, the millions. Stars in their slow turning, pinwheeling over her face, and some of them were falling. Alicia watched them fall, counting off the seconds. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. She tallied the durations of their descents as they plunged across the heavens, and in so doing she came upon the understanding that the world was where she’d left it and she was still alive.

How could she be alive?

She sat upright. Who knew what time it was. The moon had set, dipping the sky in blackness. Nothing had changed; she was just the same.

And yet:

Alicia, come to me.

The sound of her name, whispered on the wind.

Come to me, Alicia. The others are gone, you will be my one. Come to me come to me come to me …

She knew whose voice this was.

Alicia climbed from the culvert. Fifty feet away, Soldier was grazing on a frosted stand of weeds. At the sound of her emergence, he lifted his head: Ah, there you are; I was beginning to wonder. His great hooves tossed clumps of white as he ambled toward her with his powerful gait.

—You good boy, she said. She caressed his muzzle, his breath filling her palms with a scent of earth. You splendid, noble boy. How well you know me. I guess we’re not done, after all.

Her pack was lying in the culvert. She had no gun, but the bandoliers were there, blades tucked into their sheaths. She pulled the leather straps over her chest and cinched them tight to her frame. She climbed on Soldier’s naked back and clicked her tongue, turning him east.

Come to me, Alicia. Come to me come to me come to me…

You’re damn right I will, she thought. Leaning forward, his great mane filling her hands, she heeled Soldier to a trot, then a canter, and finally a gallop, wild through the snow.

You bastard. Here I come.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14