He got strangely buoyant then and told a story about how when he was four he walked a mile to the penny candy store naked. The police brought him back home. I could tell Matt and Jen had heard the story before but laughed as if they hadn’t.
After another long hour around a fire pit, Luke and I walked in the dark to the treehouse. I wanted to talk about the weirdness of dinner, but once we were alone in the meadow I didn’t care about words. I needed to touch him, press against him and relieve my heaviness, my swollen ache for him. Lightning bugs flashed everywhere, for hundreds of feet in every direction. We kissed hungrily and pulled apart our clothes and pushed hard against each other in the thick spring grass. Everything else vanished into my desire for him.
We lay there a long time afterward, and the lightning bugs came closer and closer and flashed so near we could have touched them.
‘I think for the rest of my life lightning bugs will make me horny,’ I said.
He gave a half laugh, but he was gone somewhere else by then.
There was only one thin mattress and one pillow in the treehouse. He moved the flashlight around the room, and it lit up a box of Legos and a couple of board games and two dolls in chairs having a tea party. Luke got under the blankets and I curled up close, but even his skin felt plastic and closed off.
He reached up to touch the corner of a drawing stuck on the wall with a thumbtack. It was hard to tell what it was, a house or a dog. ‘Our daughters were nearly the same age,’ he said. ‘Caliope is seven weeks older than Charlotte.’
Charlotte.
‘How old was she when she—’ I didn’t know if he was a person who said died or passed or was taken. ‘When you lost her.’
‘Four months and twelve days.’
He let me hold him, but he was rigid in my arms all night.
He was gone when I woke up. In the house Jen told me he’d helped Matt move a few of the hives, then gone to the hardware store. Jen left her boy with me while she took a shower. Luke and Matt came back and ate egg sandwiches outside. By the time we got in the car to leave I was shaking with hunger and confusion.
I made him stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts before the highway. We drove an hour after that, barely speaking. Then he said, ‘What if,’ and stopped.
‘What if what?’ I forced myself to ask. I knew it wasn’t a good ‘what if.’
‘It’s not reliable.’
‘What?’
‘All this.’ He waved his hand back and forth over the gearshift. ‘Between us.’
‘All what?’
‘This attraction.’
‘Not reliable?’
‘Not meaningful. Not good.’
‘I think it’s pretty good,’ I said, playing dumb.
‘What if it’s the Devil?’
‘The Devil?’
‘Bad. Evil.’
It was like something very loud had started blaring in my ears.
By the time we got back to the Barn he had decided we shouldn’t touch each other. It was too confusing, he said. It was too much. It was too unbalanced. There was a disconnect between our souls and our bodies, he said.
I skipped dinner and stayed in my cabin. I lit a fire and stared at it. He found me there. He was inside me before the screen door had stopped shaking.
We lay on the old rug sweating, all the tension and misery of the day washed away. I felt loose and weightless. We looked at the signatures on the wall of all the writers and artists who had stayed in my cabin.
‘They all definitely wrote more in here than I have,’ I said. ‘But I think I’m in the running for the most orgasms.’
Caleb called me on one of the phone cabinets outside the dining room. He said his friend Adam had a place I could rent cheap in Brookline. I said I might move to New York, and I told him everything, even the part about the Devil, which I’d planned to leave out.
‘Stay away from him, Casey. Write your book.’ He sounded like my mother. He never had before.
I wondered if I did, too. ‘Do I sound like Mom to you?’
‘No, you do not sound like Mom. You sound like a fool who is sabotaging an amazing opportunity. Get ahold of yourself.’
I worked on the same chapter the whole time I was there. Two months. Twelve pages. While poetry poured out of Luke. Poems about lightning bugs, bullfrogs, and, finally, a dead child. The one about the bullfrogs he taped to the seat of my banana bike. The one about the dead child he read to me early one morning, then shook in my arms for an hour afterward. I never showed him any of my novel.
His last week there he gave a reading in the library. He was nervous walking over. He gripped the pages and told me they were all for me, about me, because of me. But when he was at the podium and I was in the first row, he never looked at me. When he read a poem about eating a peach on an overturned rowboat, the peach I’d brought, the rowboat where we’d sat together, he said it was for his mother, who loved peaches. He read the poem about the dead child, and everyone wept.
He got a standing ovation, the only one I’d seen there. People leapt to their feet without thinking about it. Women flocked around him afterward, women who’d arrived in my month and women just arriving and discovering him.
On his last night, we took a walk down a road lit blue by the moon. A cow in a field lumbered beside us, the wire fence invisible. We turned down the dirt road to the lake and dropped our clothes in the grass and swam in silence toward the middle. The frogs, which had stopped their singing, resumed full throttle. We came together, cool and rubbery, and we sank as we kissed. We lay on our backs and the moon had a thick milky caul around it. It blotted out all the stars nearby. The water dripped from our raised arms back into the lake. He said we’d have to find a way into each other’s lives. He did not say how.
The next day he got in his truck and rolled down the window. He put his palm flat to his chest. ‘You’re deep in here,’ he said, and drove away.
The number he gave me rang and rang. No person. No machine. I had a week left at Red Barn, and I tried that number from the wooden phone cabinet before every meal. On my last night there I sat next to a painter. She’d arrived a few days before Luke left, and he’d introduced me. He knew her in New York. Her eyes were kind. She passed me the mashed potatoes. She said, ‘You know he’s still married, right?’
On my machine he breathes another long breath into the phone. ‘I need to see you,’ he says.
I wait at the Sunoco station. He’s late, and I sit on the cement border of a bed of garish marigolds. My legs begin to shake.
His truck slides up beside me, and he gets out, scrawnier than I remember. His hair is longer. It looks dirty. We hug. I can’t feel him. There’s churning under my skin, and my heart is going so fast that I’m not sure I’ll be able to remain conscious. He swings my banana bike into the back of the truck without comment, without recognition.
We get into the cab, our old positions.
‘This is hard, isn’t it?’
I nod.
‘I’ve just been moving very slowly,’ he says, pulling out onto Memorial Drive.
We head west to Route 2. He wants to go swimming at Walden Pond.
‘Loraine told me she told you.’ Loraine was the painter. ‘It’s only on paper, Casey. It’s not like . . . I’ve had other girlfriends and she’s had . . . other men. For all intents and purposes—’