warmth. How could he have done this? Broken something so lovely and intact.
“There's one,” said Steven. “I saw it with my wizening eyes.”
“I saw it, too,” Julia said: a bright streak of falling light, a flare of hope. She thought of Simon.
“I did, too,” Katharine said.
“So did I,” said Edward, pleased.
There, thought Julia, as though something had been exquisitely proven. She felt a wave of pleasure. Her parents were fine. They were frail, but they were wholly present. Risks lay in the future, but they always did. Just now, Julia, wrapped in the striped blanket, sat between her mother and her son. They were all sitting on the vast, sloping, darkened side of the earth, looking into the limitless reaches of the sky and watching miracles of light and motion. Right now they were safe.
When Julia woke, the house was silent. Her room was flooded with the thin light of early morning, and the plaster walls were bright with sun. The big dormer windows stood open wide onto the front meadow, and the air was cool and sweet.
As she woke she found herself thinking of Jack, and wondered if she had been dreaming about him. The glint of his red-brown hair that grew straight downward, resisting the part; the way he raised his chin when he laughed. He was so handsome: really, with his straight brows and brilliant blue eyes. It made more difference than it should.
Julia was smiling, remembering the time they'd been at a diner somewhere—where? Outside, it had been winter. Sitting at the counter, drinking coffee. Wendell was there, so it was before the divorce, and Steven. They'd been talking, with Jackie at the end of their row, listening intently.
Too intently: there was something odd about his look. He was staring at them, and they turned, one by one, to look at him. He was humming quietly, stirring his coffee. As they turned he began to sing, that corny ballad about the logger who stirs his coffee with his thumb. It took them a moment—Jack's expression was so earnest—to see that he was doing it, stirring his coffee with his thumb, his finger buried deep in the inky liquid. It was his face, that manic, deadpan stare: it still made Julia laugh.
Jackie was always the star, the center of things. There was a glitter about him, the hypnotic gaze, the slow wide smile. The sense of wild possibility. He might do anything, and you wanted to be there when he did. He didn't care what happened. Risk appealed, you could sense it.
It had caused trouble for years. All those times Julia had been called in to meet with his teachers, his principals. But Jack was a sweetheart, not one of those sullen, hostile kids who hated their parents. (Julia knew kids like that: what would you do? Shoot yourself?) No, she was grateful for Jack, good-natured, warm, smart, creative. He'd always gone his own way, and why not? He was electrifying. You couldn't take your eyes off him.
She remembered the time they'd all been down at the dock, loading the boat for a picnic. Jack was carrying the hamper with all the food, sandwiches, fruit, potato chips, cookies, napkins, the works. Wendell stood in the Whaler, receiving things from the others, setting them in the bottom. Julia was walking down the ramp, carrying her own bundles, when it happened.
Wendell took a bag from Steven and set it down at his feet.
“Hold on,” he said to Jack. “Let me move some of this. Everything's over on this side, let me balance it.”
“That's okay I'll take it around to the other side,” Jack said. He walked along the dock beside the boat, up to the bow, then started to walk around it, stepping casually off the dock and into the air. Dropping, with the loaded basket in his hands, into ten feet of ocean at fifty degrees. His expression, as he went down, was mild and unconcerned, his body frozen in mid-step, hands locked on the hamper.
It was so absurd, and electrifying: they couldn't believe they'd seen it. She'd been furious, all those soaked sandwiches, the ruined food. He was outrageous, he dismissed everything the rest of them took seriously: warmth, dryness, order. He liked chaos, reveled in it. But it was impossible to stay mad at Jackie, he was so funny. So original, so bright and charming, so good-natured.
Though it was hard not to worry about him. His life was late in starting, or something. Was that it? He'd finally, barely, managed to graduate from college (an obliging one that no one had ever heard of, in northern New Hampshire), but at least he had a degree. Which had led him exactly nowhere, so far. He lived a Gypsyish downtown life of start-up bands, part-time jobs, optimistic schemes, and the very occasional unpaid musical gig. He was in a band, though not a rock band. It's not rock music, he'd told Julia, shaking his head and grinning with that generic rolling-eyed amazement at parental ignorance. As though she'd called it Latvian chanting. What it was, instead of rock, was a mystery to her. Mostly rhythm and electronic feedback, as far as she could tell.
But Jack loved it, and she loved watching him play, seeing him onstage in his skinny black jeans and black T-shirt, his head nodding in charmed obedience to the monstrous beat. That slow grin, the magnetic sideways glance. Who knew how he'd end up?
The bands he was in never actually seemed to progress. They seemed continually to be part of some emerging and dissolving process, like early life forms, and Julia wondered how long this ought to go on. At some point, didn't you accept the fact that the music wasn't succeeding? Move on? Though your child should decide this for himself; the parent's task was to be supportive. What Julia was determined never to be was like her father: judgmental. The world would always be the critic, her job was to be the fan.
Despite what seemed very ill-considered choices. There were things it was hard not to worry about. Drugs, of course, had always been a part of Jack's life. Certainly part of the downtown music scene, they were all around, she knew it. Julia rolled onto her stomach and burrowed her head into her flattened pillow.
During his adolescence, drugs had seeped into Jack's landscape like a toxic plume. All those things she kept finding in his bedroom, under the bed, among dirty clothes in his duffel—the grubby bags of pot, the bongs. And nothing seemed to stop Jack, not her and Wendell's serious talks, not their later anger and shouts and threats, not Jacks suspension from school, not even, once, his expulsion. They might as well have been ordering him to breathe a different kind of air.
She picked up the pillow, punched it, and laid her head down again.
That time they'd gone together—though by then they'd been separated—to visit him at college, when he was so weird all weekend, grinning, unfocused, completely stoned. Wendell was angry, but Julia was hurt to see he wouldn't face them without chemical protection. But it had been just after the divorce, maybe Jack had been angry at them for that. Acting out his rage.
For a moment Julia allowed herself the luxury of blaming all Jack's problems on Wendell's despicable behavior—why not? Wendell actually had been despicable—though this lasted for only a moment. It was a dangerous luxury. Considering Wendell's despicable behavior would lead to considering her own behavior, and to the (morally indefensible) fact that she did not know, absolutely, who Jack's father was. It had been Julia's only affair, and brief.
For five months she'd been caught up in its runaway current. She'd been in thrall, powerless, it seemed. Each time she came home from seeing Eric, each time she stepped into her own apartment, into the safe domestic haven she'd created,
