Two past-due notices and a wedding invitation have been slipped under my door. A message is flashing on my machine. My blood leaps. Old reflex. It’s not him. It’s not him, I tell myself, but my heart slams anyway. I hit Play.
‘Hey.’ Pause. Long breath like a roll of thunder into the receiver.
It’s him.
My mother died six weeks before I went to Red Barn. I called to ask if I could change the dates, if I could come in the fall or next winter. The man who answered gave me his deepest sympathies but told me I’d been offered the longest artist’s residency they had. Eight weeks. April 23 to June 17. The Red Barn calendar, he said, was inalterable.
A long silence spread between us.
‘Are you calling to forfeit your spot?’ he asked.
The last time I’d used the word ‘forfeit’ must have been at recess in fourth grade. If you show your teeth or tongue, you must pay a forfeit.
‘No, I don’t want to forfeit.’
I flew from Bend to Boston and took a bus to Burrillville, Rhode Island. Early spring. New England. I stepped off the bus and smelled my childhood, smelled the thawing earth in our yard and the daffodils at the end of the driveway. I was given a dorm room to sleep in and a cabin to work in, and when I stood on the porch of my cabin the first morning I remembered my mother’s fawn-colored jacket with the white wool cuffs and collar and the smell of her wintergreen Life Savers in the left zip pocket. I heard her say my name, my old name, Camila, that only she called me. I felt the slippery seat in her blue Mustang, cold through my tights.
At Red Barn, my mother was both dead and resurrected.
In the dining room hung a framed letter from Somerset Maugham, who’d been one of the early fellows there.
‘Red Barn is a place out of time,’ he’d written in the letter.
Luke was tall and scrawny, like one of my brother’s goofy friends from middle school. Before he was anything else, he was familiar.
It started the fourth night I was there. One of the fellows was showing her film in the art shed. I’d gotten there too late for a seat and stood in back. Luke came in a few minutes later. Onscreen, a power tool was drilling a screw into a raw egg. In very slow motion.
‘What’d I miss?’ he said in a fake whisper. ‘What’d I miss?’
He slipped in behind me. I’d been seated at his table once for dinner—there was a new seating chart for dinner every night—and passed him in the hallways of the farmhouse a few times. I hadn’t thought much. I wasn’t registering other people well at that point. Nor was I writing. I had eight weeks to devote to my novel, but I couldn’t focus. The cabin I’d been given had a funny smell. My heart beat too fast and under my skin it felt mealy, like an old apple. I wanted to sleep, but I was scared of dreaming. In my dreams my mother was never herself. Something was always off. She was too pale or too bloated or wearing heavy velvet clothing. She was weak, she was failing, she was fading from view. I was often trying to persuade her to stay alive, long soliloquies about what she needed to do differently. I woke up exhausted. Animals rustled outside my window.
When Luke stood behind me, I became animal myself: alert, cautious, curious. More people came in and he was pushed in closer and there were long moments when my shoulder blades rested against his chest. I felt him breathing in and out, felt his breath in my hair. I’m not sure what happened in the movie after the nail went through the egg.
When it was over, I staggered out of the room and onto the porch. It was still light out. The sky was violet, the trees dark blue. The frogs had started up in the pond across the road, louder and louder the closer you listened. I stood against the railing while behind me people creaked into the old rocking chairs and passed out beers and raised their bottles to the filmmaker, who was giggling psychopathically, the way you do when you’ve exposed yourself through art.
Luke came up beside me. We looked out at the fields. The back of his hand brushed up against the back of mine and stayed there.
‘Wanna go somewhere?’ His eyes were washed out, pale as dawn.
We got in his truck and headed for Pawtucket because we saw a sign and liked saying the name, dragging out the ‘Paw’ and clipping off the ‘tucket,’ over and over. Pawwwww-tckt. It was on the border of Massachusetts, where we’d both grown up, an hour apart. He lived in New York now. In Harlem. He asked where I lived.
‘Oh, I have this little cabin in Burrillville, Rhode Island.’
He laughed.
‘I’ve still got seven weeks to come up with a plan.’
‘You could always move in with Duffy,’ he said.
Duffy was six foot six, the director’s grown son, who dropped our sandwiches off on our porches at noontime. He tied love notes around heart-shape rocks and left them in women’s lunch baskets.
There was a gazebo on the town green in Pawtucket. I had a deck of cards in my backpack, and we sat up there cross-legged and played Spit in the dark. It got heated and we shouted at each other and a cop came up the stairs. His flashlight lit up the piles of cards spread out between us, and he chuckled.
He’d never heard of Spit so we showed him how to play, and he said he’d have to teach his grandson. He took care of his grandson on Thursday nights, he told us.
He had a bad hip and moved slowly back to his cruiser.
‘Not much happening in Pawwwwww-tckt,’ I said.
‘Just a small dustup down at the gazebo.’
On the way back to Red Barn we called out all the funny names of Massachusetts towns we could remember.
‘Billerica.’
‘Belchertown.’
‘Leominster.’
We spoke in the accent we’d both lost long ago.
He drove with his left hand on the wheel and his right tucked under my arm, his fingers curving slowly around the outline of my breast.
It was strong, whatever was between us, thick, like the wet air and the smell of every green thing ready to bloom. Maybe it was just spring. Maybe that’s all it was. We took our lunch baskets and ate ham sandwiches by the pond near our cabins. We walked into a cluster of cattails, some of their pods new and green and some, maybe left over from fall, long and brown and tall as us. Luke called them bulrushes and yanked me close. We both tasted of mayonnaise. Our heads knocked against the brown pods. The sun felt warm for the first time.
‘You kissed me in the bulrushes,’ I said.
He pointed to a pair of swollen eyes floating just above the water’s surface. ‘While the bullfrogs looked on, misunderstanding everything,’ he said and pulled me down to the ground.
I told him the things that were coming back to me about my mother when I was little: her lemon smell and her gardening gloves with the rubber bumps and her small square toes that cracked when she walked barefoot. Her tortoiseshell headbands that were salty at the tips if you sucked on them.
‘I can feel her. I can feel her right here.’
He kissed where I was touching, just below my collarbone, in that place where all my feelings got caught.
I believed she’d sent him to me, a gift to help me through.
We ran to the lake, swam across it, ran back to the dorm and took a bath together in the tub with the clawed feet and two taps and a rubber plug on a chain. Water sloshed all over the wood floor. We lay damp on his bed laughing, our chests pumping at the same time, knocking together, making us laugh even harder. When I looked at him I hid nothing.