The Gravity of Birds. Tracy Guzeman
wishing for even a small measure of Natalie’s unapologetic impulsiveness. There was power associated with her sister’s prettiness. Even now, listless and drawn from some bug she’d caught after weeks spent away looking at colleges, Natalie was still the bright sun, the star around which the rest of them orbited. Her failure to attempt to charm, or even acknowledge Thomas Bayber was surprising. Even more surprising was the fact that neither of her parents admonished Natalie for her rude behavior or insisted she say hello. And Thomas Bayber, for his part, seemed equally unaware of Natalie.
‘Hello. Thomas, are you there? It’s Alice.’ She knocked louder; the slick doorknob turned in her hand and the door creaked open.
‘Thomas?’
Her father was on the skiff, halfway across the lake; Natalie had shunned her invitation to skip rocks, and instead put on her swimsuit, packed a lunch, and said she was going to the beach near town and didn’t want company. Her mother was meeting summer friends for a game of bridge.
‘Thomas?’
There was a scrambling sort of noise, and there he was, looming in front of her, blocking out the light. He looked as though he’d been sleeping—sloe-eyed, one side of his cheek creased with little half-moon impressions, his dark hair knotted—though she’d watched him carry the paper bags into the house not quite half an hour ago.
‘You look a fright,’ she said.
He smiled at her and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Alice. What an unexpected surprise.’
‘Is it all right?’
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘Where’s Neela?’ She’d grown attached to the little dog, carrying table scraps with her in case of a chance encounter. Natalie, on the other hand, referred to Neela as the vicious little cur.
‘She’ll bite you if you’re not careful,’ she’d told Alice.
‘She will not. You’re jealous because she likes me.’
‘That didn’t stop her from taking a bite out of Thomas, and he’s her owner.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘You should.’ Natalie had smirked. ‘I’ve seen the scar.’
Thomas turned and walked into the main room of the cabin. ‘Neela’s out visiting friends, I imagine.’ His bare feet left marks in a fine dust on the floor, and Alice trailed in after him.
‘Damn chalk dust,’ he said. ‘It gets over everything.’
‘What are you working on? Can I see?’
‘I’m not sure it’s ready for public consumption, but if you insist, I suppose you can have a preview. Stay there.’ He sorted through canvases stacked on an easel facing the bank of windows overlooking the lake. Settling on one, he picked it up by the edges and walked back across the room, sitting on an old velvet sofa, patting the cushion next to him.
The sofa was the color of dark chocolate, the fabric stained and threadbare in places, with big tapestry pillows stuffed into the corners. In spite of its condition, a shadow of elegance clung to it. That same shadow cloaked everything in the room. Beautiful books with tattered covers and pages plumped by mildew, a grandfather clock with a cracked cabinet door and a sonorous chime that sounded on the quarter hour, expensive-looking Oriental carpets with patchy fringe—all of it near to ruin, yet perfect in the way that something is exactly as you imagine it should be. The Restons’ cabin, by comparison, was a third the size and designed to look as though its owners were sportsmen, though nothing could be further from the truth. This place was like Thomas, Alice decided: flawed and sad, yet perfectly true.
She settled on the sofa next to him, folding her legs underneath her. He turned the canvas so she could see. It was a chalk sketch of the beach near town, sadly without birds. She recognized the silhouette of hemlock trees against the sky and the lip of shoreline that curled back toward itself after the point. But even though she knew the location, the way Thomas had depicted it made it unfamiliar. The pier was drawn in dark, violent slashes; the trees were leafless, charred spires; and the water looked angry, foaming against rocks and railing against the beach.
‘Why did you draw it that way? It scares me to look at it.’
‘I should thank you for preparing me for the critics. It’s supposed to do that, Alice.’
‘That stretch of beach is beautiful. It doesn’t look anything like this.’
‘But you recognized it.’
‘Yes.’
‘You recognized it even though it frightens you, even though you find it dark and ugly. So maybe those qualities are inherent, but you choose to overlook them. You don’t see the ugliness because you don’t want to. That’s the job of an artist: to make people look at things—not just at things, but at people and at places—in a way other than they normally would. To expose what’s hidden below the surface.’
Alice followed the line of a tree trunk, the tip of her finger hovering just above the paper. When she realized he was looking at her hands, she tucked them under her legs.
‘Why are you hiding them?’ His voice was patient, but firm. ‘Let me see.’
She wavered before offering them up for inspection. He took both of them in his own, his palms warm and smooth as a stone. He examined them carefully, turning over first the right, then the left. He ran his own fingers slowly down each of hers, circling her knuckles and rubbing the skin there as if trying to erase something, watching her face the whole time. Alice bit the inside of her cheek and tried not to wince, but the pain was sharp and she pulled away.
‘Be still. Why are you fidgeting?’
‘It hurts.’
‘I can see that.’ He let go of her hands, got up from the sofa, and walked to the window, resting his sketch again on the easel. ‘Have you told anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Not your parents?’
She shook her head.
He shrugged. ‘I’m not a doctor. I’m barely an artist to some people’s way of thinking. But if something hurts you, you should tell someone.’
‘I’ve told you, haven’t I?’
Thomas laughed. ‘I hardly qualify as a responsible party.’
She knew something was wrong; she’d known for a while now. She limped when she got out of bed in the morning, not every morning, but often enough that she wouldn’t be able to blame it on something random much longer: a twisted ankle, a stone bruise, a blister. Fevers came on like sudden storms at night, leaving her flushed and dizzy, then vanished by the time she got up and went to the medicine cabinet for an aspirin. Rashes dotted her trunk and disappeared along with the fevers. Her joints warred with the rest of her body, using tactics that were simple but effective: flaming the skin around her knees to an unappealing red, conjuring a steady, unpleasant warming that annoyed like an itch. She’d never been blessed with Natalie’s natural grace, but lately she was wooden and clumsy. Balls, pencils, the handles of bags—all fell from her fingers as if trying to escape. She stumbled over her own feet, even when staring at them. At night, time slowed to the point of stopping, each tick of the clock’s minute hand stretching longer as she tried to distract herself from the pain in her joints.
She’d said something to her mother, but only in the vaguest of terms, making every effort to sound unconcerned. Her mother’s reactions tended toward the extreme and Alice had no interest in finding herself confined for the entire summer. But her mother, who’d been getting ready for a dinner party at the time, had answered absently, ‘Growing pains. They’ll pass. You’ll see.’
‘Sometimes my hands shake,’ she told Thomas.
‘Sometimes