epitaphs written by the family left behind, which seem a humble and endearing attempt to sum up a life like the log line of an epic novel: The heart of man is restless until it finds its rest in Thee... Now twilight lets her curtain down and pins it with a star... Little Boy Blue has gone away.
One of the first things I bought when I received the advance on Zebra Crossing was a matched pair of gravestones for my mother and grandmother, to replace the cheap brass plaques that had been set in the ground to mark the places where their ashes had been interred. My mothers deserved proper headstones; they deserved to stand upright, not laid like pavement in the grass.
I have brought my scrub brush and thermos of soapy water. I kneel before my grandmother’s grave and scrub away the dirt and bits of moss that have accumulated in the crevices since last month. I pour water over the granite surface, watch it gather into tiny pools at the bottom of her name, then trickle away and disappear into the grass.
At the edge of my mother’s grave is a spider on a half-formed web. It’s a beautiful thing, pale gold, with long delicate legs and a slender body covered with fine hairs. I put my face down close, peer into its many glassy eyes. Its front legs pluck gently at the dew-jeweled threads. A single drop of water falls to the rung below and hangs there, clinging to the corner, where the cells of the web are joined by a tiny silken knot.
With the back of my scrub brush, I destroy the web and smash the spider into the grass. I pour water over the brush to clean away the bug’s remains, then more water over the headstone. When I am finished, I run my fingers through the carved letters, over the cold arc of granite and the carved stone rose at the center.
* * *
Later that night, Jack comes back for me. We head north, straight up the boulevard, past the tiny Vashon Theater crouching beige and humble on the left, and the much larger vine-covered brick yoga studio on the right, past the auto shop and the Episcopal church, until the town peters to an uncertain end and we leave it behind. After a few minutes, Jack turns onto a narrow dirt road fringed with pines, through which the Puget Sound shines in the twilight. He doesn’t stop until we’ve reached the empty mouth of a trailhead, where the moon sits like a pearl on a sheet of hammered pewter.
Below us is the beach my mother took me to about a month after Nana died. The weather was chaotic that day, blustering and weeping from a swollen sky. Holding hands, my mother and I wobbled through the high loose sand, then turned our shoulders to the sea.
For a while, we walked in silence, bundled into our hoods, hands buried deep inside our pockets.
“Things are going to be a lot different now,” my mother said.
I nodded. Things were already different. We came up against the bewildering absence of Nana every day. Breakfast was cold now, and late. My braid had unraveled to a ponytail, and the week before the batteries for my favorite doll had died, leaving her with an open, frozen mouth where she used to chew from a little plastic spoon. Now the doll’s mouth seemed to be screaming mutely, endlessly. I had put the doll under my bed, then in my toy box, before finally wrapping her in a rag and burying her in the garbage can on the curb outside.
“Nana was good at this,” my mother was saying. “For me it’s harder. We’re—I’m going to have to figure out what to do about money. Maybe get a second job. I don’t know.”
“I can get a job,” I piped, aware this was childish. But Nana would have expected me to find a way to help.
My mom took her hand from her pocket and laid it on top of my head. “You’re a little young for that, squirt.”
She took my hand. Hers was cold and thin as a bird’s wing. She smiled down at me, her face dewed with raindrops, melted somehow, as if all the bones under her skin had dissolved. It was the expression of the smallest on the playground, the soft, malleable face of directionless fear.
Jack and I get out of the truck and stand together, blinking at the moon’s smug roundness, listening to the clicks of the cooling engine.
“Makes you feel small, doesn’t it?” he says.
“And alone.”
“You’re not alone, you’re with me.”
I look up at him. His face is all planes and lines, and skin like a tarp stretched over the bones. He lights a cigarette, holds it between two fingers while he plucks a strand of hair from my cheek with his thumb and ring finger.
“First star,” I say. “Let’s make a wish.”
He smiles from inside the cage of his glasses.
“Careful what you wish for, little box thief. You might get it.”
“What do you imagine I’m wishing for?”
“Comfort. Same as the rest of us.” He peers at me through the smoke. “Or maybe not. Maybe it’s something else for you.”
He produces a stack of blankets from the backseat, lets down the tailgate and makes a nest in the truck bed, between the wheels of his pickup. I wait, smoking his cigarette, tracking a satellite across the sky. Nana used to worry that satellites and meteors could come down and crash on our heads. You’d never see it coming, she would say with a shudder and a sidelong glance at the sky.
Nana was pretty superstitious all around. Not only didn’t she step on the lines and cracks in the sidewalk herself, she kept me from doing so. No black cats, no number thirteen. As if she always knew the end would come at her fast.
When he’s finished, Jack helps me up and we settle together against the wall of the cab, our legs tangled on the blankets, my head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. The moon rises and retreats as though pulled by an invisible string into the starry sky.
“I like your house,” he says unexpectedly.
“Yeah? You’re the first person to see it inside.”
“It looks like you.”
“A hot mess.”
“Emphasis on hot.”
“I’m surprised you’d like it. Being an architect and all. It’s not exactly an original.”
“Not outside, no.”
“Have you ever lived in a house you designed?”
“No. I’ll build one for myself one day. I’m making payments on a plot of land south of Portland, near the coast. Waiting for zoning to approve the plans.”
“I’d like to see them.”
“Yeah? They’re in the truck.”
“Well, break them out.”
Prompted by my interest, he lays out the blueprints and describes the design—a modern Craftsman, with a wall of windows overlooking the sea, which will extend all the way through the bedroom, to open that side of the house to the ocean breeze and the patio. Lots of golden wood, he says, lots of glass. But for all the house’s delights, it’s the kitchen that enchants me most. A long soapstone counter faces the open window without obstruction, inset with a deep, wide sink and built-in cutting board.
I run my fingers over the delicate lines of the blueprint.
