She tried to look at him, but he couldn’t bear the thought of being looked at and gently pressed her cheek against his chest. She was almost asleep again when the door opened and his mom walked in, switching on the light.

“Jesus, Frank, what you doing here? Are you drunk?”

“I’m talking to Annie.”

“What you doing in her bed?”

“What do you mean?”

“Mom,” Annie cut in, hooking her arm around Frank’s head as if he were a big dog, “we’re just talking.”

“You too old to be like this.”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Frank said.

“What?”

Annie got out of bed like a sleepwalker, took her mom’s hand and led her out into the hall. Then she came back in, closed her bedroom door, and returned to bed, laying her head back against his chest.

Frank wanted desperately to get it out of him, to try to describe to Annie what he had felt at the heart of Miss Kelly, that fibrous knot. Nothing would ever unravel it. It was death. Always there as she sang her songs, flew around town on her bicycle, that terrible, snarled, morbid knot in which every fiber of her life was wound and caught.

PISGAH 1959

PISGAH
1959

LEWIS’S HEAD BEGINS TO HURT, HIS THOUGHTS SPLINTERING like the sun in the branches of this tree, along a limb of which he now lies. He wants this place to have no voice, to speak to him as light speaks to water, as it once spoke to his brother. He watches sparrows mating, female waiting, bent, her wings winnowing, soft gills of the wind, the softest register of the voice of Wah’Kon-Tah, flutter of reeds, grasses, leaves, flutter of the sparrows. Male flutters, mounts, and remounts. Begetting time and breath. All of this, life after life, the exhale of God, growing thinner as the great lungs empty until you find yourself in the place between. Neither breathed out nor drawn in. Both breathed out and drawn in. Agony.

She.

Annie.

Always Annie to make him him again. A scar in God’s eye, projected upon the sky. No matter what God sees, Annie is always there, floating in the vitreous. She has the power to make him want his life.

She. Also he, now approaching through the trees. Raj, his brother, smiling liar, who in dreams will strip off your skin and leave you shivering, clinging to the yolk of the sun. Through Raj he becomes both the bird with the broken wing and the cat that licks the frantic beat of his own heart: this dark boy climbing the tree to him.

A mark on his face.

“Hey, Lew.”

“Annie not coming?”

“She’s with Evy and Nora. Told me to come get you. They want to make us up like girlies. I said no way.” Raj settled against a branch. “Annie tried to put lipstick on me.”