Lightfall: A Novel

I

IRIS AMMONS WOKE that morning groping at the air, a taste like a ball of blood in her mouth. She thought at first it must have been a dream. The cry that seemed to tear her open—hurtling through the dark like something lost in time—had strangled in her throat. She lay there bathed in sweat, her two fists raised and quivering with rage. She panted as she looked about the room.

But whatever it was she meant to curse had left her all alone. There wasn’t the slightest echo now. No shadow broke the surface of the world. Here on the sudden edge of day things were the same as ever.

The icy-bright November sun came streaming in on the window seat. The antique chest, the wing chair, the lowboy stood their ground like a clan of elders. Across the room on a three-tiered shelf, not one of her Staffordshire figurines had lost its precarious balance. The water in her bedside glass was still as a mountain lake. Though only a moment before, some terrible fury had cracked her in two, it was not out here in the world at all. It was somewhere in her head.

She let the damp nightgown drop to the floor as she stood and went to the window. Through the half-closed door beyond the bed she could hear water running. Tim always hummed a certain song in the morning when he shaved. She listened closely, as if it might remind her who she was. The world came back in patches. Down in the kitchen the children bickered. In the yard below the dog raced around from bush to bush, pissing to leave a trail. If she had screamed, she thought, somebody would have run in and held her.

All it was was nerves.

She stared out onto the wooded hills where the leaves were all but gone. Toward the horizon, stone walls pocked with lichen stitched and crossed, pulling the upland fields like a rough-work quilt. The green was all bleached out. The birds had fled. The winter silence, brown and sere, had never had the power to make her shrink or chill her to the bone with premonitions. Iris made her place in things. Instinctively, when the days grew short she went with the drift, turning in like a bear curled under a stump.

Her solid saltbox house had rooted here two hundred years, the harvest all laid in before the first snow blew. The turning seasons only seemed to deepen her resolve. For ten years now she’d had no other conscious wish but to keep just what she had. This was all she ever wanted: a proper house in an unobstructed country shot with seasons. Grief and sorrow had somehow missed her. She had a natural camouflage.

Did you ever think someone might see you?

What? she said lazily, turning to watch him tie his tie.

Out there, said Tim with a nod toward the hills. What if there’s some guy watching? Perched in a tree or something.

Who? she asked in a sudden pulse of fear.

She raked the landscape now with a cold-eyed look. Tim only meant to say the customary thing—how clear she seemed, how radiant, revealed there naked in the morning light. He praised her most in courtly ways. For a moment she almost believed it would all go away if she just reached up and pulled the shade.

It’s something else, she said quietly.

Are you okay?

I love you, Tim.

You needn’t sound so grave about it.

He took her lightly in his arms and rocked her half in a circle. He let out a sound of pure delight, a laugh that fell off in a sigh of relief. He grazed his fingers down her back as if he had just discovered her.

Iris held him one last time. For all he knew her tenderness was certain as the sun. She gave no sign—not the slightest quiver of desperation, or else he would have known. But over his shoulder she saw her eyes in the mirror, scared and lost and frantic. Run, cried a voice inside her.

Where?

Tim squeezed her tight and let her go, then bounded away with an animal laugh, as if they’d just made love. "Come on," he said impatiently.

He poised at the top of the stairs to beckon her. He grinned and tilted his head. She knew he could scarcely wait to get the day in motion. She gave him a breezy smile and nodded, taking care to let him see her happy. Her life with him was like a dream. Time didn’t rush it at all.

In a minute, she said mildly, so as to leave him free to go.

He thundered down the stairs to greet his sons, who stopped their fight the moment he walked in. Right away they were three of a kind again. While Tim put on the coffee, Michael read him a stream of box scores. Gene, not to be outdone, produced from his book bag several pages thick with algebra. He prodded his father to double-check him.

Iris crept to the top of the stairs. A puzzled frown across her eyes, she heard the familiar three-way talk at a curious remove, like a scene played out on the radio. The pit of her stomach throbbed with panic; tears coursed down her cheeks. She stood there silent and let it pass—willed herself to be unmoved. This part of her life was over.

Go, she thought fiercely, prodding the three of them out. She was sure it would be a lot easier, once she was alone. She wanted them gone while she was still numb. What time was the children’s car pool? How did Tim get to the train? She had lost these scraps and fragments so completely—all since the night before—she wasn’t sure if she could even face the three of them. What if they guessed how blank she was? They might not go at all.

She hurried across the bedroom to the closet, slid the door back and flailed in the shadows, impatient for something to wear. The clothes were all so foreign, they might have belonged to another woman. None of this frightened Iris. Let the darkness have the details—let it rob her blind. But not before she’d had a final moment with her family.

It seemed she wouldn’t be coming back. Perhaps she was good as dead already. In a day or two, maybe, her husband and sons would be no more than pictures in a locket. But for now, nothing could blur the still point at her center. The madness could not reach so far, no matter if it laid to waste everything else she’d ever known.

She stood at the mirror, tying the cord on her wine-dark robe. She ran a quick brush through her hair, then squinted close to be sure the tears had stopped. She was forty-two in August, small and slight and blond, and had not had occasion to test her strength in years. She’d never once been in a fight. In fact, she went in for nothing physical but sex. As to what she would brave the elements with, she had only the most suburban skills. Could shop. Could drive a car one-handed. Errands were her specialty.

Though people called her beautiful—would have said so even now, not five minutes after she woke up horror-struck and wronged—what they meant to say was that she was happy. Joy had etched her features more than time, until today.

As she made her way down the kitchen stairs, she had already adjusted herself to there being no reprieve. She bore the nightmare secretly. She knew she was lucky to get so much as this uncertain moment. At least, she thought, there would be no deathbed gloom in the good-bye scene. Hers was the one brave front required.

Mom, said Gene, will you feed Dexter? I don’t have time.

How will I find him?

I locked him in the linen closet. I think he’s getting a cold.

Okay, said Iris dryly. Feed one snake. She gave him a look that clicked like a camera. She poured out coffee in a Minton cup that Tim had already creamed and sugared, as if this place were a diner. He winked at her over the paper.

Mom, you owe me eight bucks, said Michael coyly.

How would they ever turn out, she wondered. The four years yawning between them—Gene ten and a half and Michael gone fifteen—seemed negligible to Iris. They were more like children now than they had been five years ago. Then they were positively sage.

Money’s not good for you, Michael, she said. She leaned her arms on the steel edge of the sink, looking through a row of amber bottles on the sill to the phantom hills outside. How long ago, she tried to recall, was it summer among those ruined trees? Did the whole earth turn so imperceptibly, she hadn’t even noticed? Was that why she’d been banished?

I’ll give it all to the poor, I promise, Michael said. Just so long as I get it.

What did you do, Tim wanted to know, that’s worth that kind of money?

Who do you think rakes all the leaves?

Five bucks, Tim said decidedly and flipped to another crisis in the news.

She couldn’t keep it focused. The cup shook dumbly in her hand. She tried to steady her gaze on the lay of the land outside, but now the Connecticut hills themselves would not stand firm. There was suddenly superimposed across the landscape, like some vast hallucination, a rock-strewn coast in total darkness. At last she knew where she was: on a cliff, high up above the crashing waves. A raw surf threshed on the stark pine shore. Above her head the morning sky was dead like a dome of stone. All she had to do was jump.

Honey, what is it? Tim broke in, with a light and mocking laugh.

What? said Iris tautly.

Something going on out there?

She was leaning forward across the sink, on tiptoe as if she meant to pitch right through the window. She stood up straight. She turned around with a steely smile. The dog, she said ironically, casting about the zoo for some excuse. He’s cornered another rabbit.

The call of the wild, piped up Gene quite matter-of-factly. He ate a spoonful of blackberry jam right out of the jar.

A curl of nausea played about her windpipe, so that she was forced to gulp in air and swallow hard. Her forehead beaded coldly. No one noticed. Mike stood tall at the cluttered table, having snatched up his mother’s purse from wherever she’d dropped it the day before. She could hardly remember what it was as he handed it across to her. She fished around inside for her wallet, glad to be dealing in facts. She slid out two fives and slipped them to her son. They exchanged a brief conspiratorial glance. They nodded half an inch.

Michael called over his shoulder: Hey, worm, you ready?

Don’t pick on him, Mike.

It’s okay, Dad, retorted Gene, as he gathered up his books. Mike’s gonna end up selling pencils. I’m going to be a brain surgeon.

Both now turned and ran. She raised a hand to stop them, but they burst through the back door into the yard before she had the chance. They capered away across the lawn, the dog leaping up to nip at their sleeves. They rounded the side of the house and out of sight. The last she heard, they seemed to holler the signals of some game she couldn’t grasp.

She should have kissed them first, the moment she walked in.

Didn’t you think by now they’d be less noisy? Tim asked wryly, lightly stroking the back of her arm as she gathered dirty dishes off the table.

She gave him a puzzled look he didn’t seem to see. Of course he was only kidding. He’d rather go chase his kids around the yard, shouting at the top of his voice, than go to work. But she dared not negotiate the narrow path of irony, lest he see how little she retained of all of this. Didn’t dare touch him back, for fear she would not be light enough.

By the way, he went on cheerfully, it’s about time they started turning on us, isn’t it?

What do you mean?

You know—king of the mountain. Knife the old man in the back. Climb into bed with their mama.

Oh, that, she said wistfully, all at a loss.

For a second she almost caught a glimpse of who she used to be. This was the clue she’d been waiting for. Something to do with a roomful of books and people telling stories. The surface refused to clear. Though Tim seemed ready to defer to her, she couldn’t imagine a thing she knew about teenage boys. The mind was a foreign tongue she couldn’t speak at all. Some door was shut inside her.

"How old were you, she asked tentatively, when all of that began?"

Me? Tim scoffed, returning to his paper. I never had the time myself. Too poor.

And something fell into place: they’d come to the ground where they always fought. She eased the stack of dishes into the sink. She let the water run a bit, then turned and took the chair beside him. Pretending to read the news, which made no sense at all, she struggled to put the shards of him together.

He had no truck with the psyche whatsoever, perhaps because he suffered no extremes. He seemed to steer an equal course to the world at large. He never second-guessed himself. He slept from eleven to seven without a moment’s stir. He was given to saying a man was marked by how he acted, not by how he behaved.

What are you thinking? he threw out suddenly, almost as if he knew she hadn’t read a word.

Nothing, she said, for the thousandth time. It’s just … I don’t suppose I could ever survive alone. On my own, I mean.

You don’t have to, Tim said firmly.

Really? What if you died?

I won’t.

"But what if I got lost? insisted Iris, looking away at her rack of spices, eighty bottles strong. Say there’s a war, and we end up separated."

Well, Tim said, not a moment’s pause, I guess I’d have to come find you, wouldn’t I?

She didn’t press it further. Tim was grinning playfully, as if he’d aced a set of tennis. He folded the paper neatly, tucked the sections together, and laid it down as good as new. Clearly, this was the usual way they went about it. He laughed off all her fears with fast talk, freeing the road ahead of all the masques of death she might imagine. Iris didn’t doubt it used to give her comfort just to hear him.

He didn’t seem to see that they were past laughing now. The nightmare bided its time, indifferent alike to terror and defiance. It had no other purpose but to make its kingdom ready. How could a man like Tim be blind to such immensity? She felt a surge of helpless anger, to think what a circle he wandered in. He had led them ever deeper into dreams. In the end, perhaps, the danger was greater here.

He pitched back now on the legs of his chair and reached around to the high buffet. He rooted among the papers strewn inch-deep along the top. The thin-ribbed chair creaked horribly. It rode so close to the breaking point that Iris clutched the table leg to keep from crying out. When she heard the dog start scratching at the door, it was too much. She made as if to plump her hair, meaning to stop her ears, when something made her listen close.

Surely that was the strangest note the dog had ever sounded: half like a whimper and half a howl. Iris could have sworn it was a warning.

Just then Tim found what he was looking for. He snatched it up and brought it forth with a thump on the table before him. Iris stared, and her heart went cold. Whatever was he doing with a Bible? She cast back over everything she’d said. She twined her feet on the crossbar under the chair. The bones along her spine went taut, as if she had to undergo an inquisition.

I won’t be home till nine, he said heartily, standing up and lifting down his trenchcoat off a peg. I’ve got a vestry meeting starts at six.

He was some sort of priest, was he?

She doubled her guard as she watched him button his coat. It was obvious she’d been tricked. For all she knew he’d watched her since the moment she woke up. Had she answered something wrong? Did he mean to turn her in? She could no longer state with certainty the customs of the churches hereabouts. Could they put her to death for drawing a blank?

Out of nowhere a searing pain she could not fathom stropped across her shoulders, leaving welts like strips of fire. She gritted her teeth and would not wince. It was some kind of test. If he saw her flinch, he would doubtless call her godless. This was the law. She remembered now: there were wives discovered every day who had one foot in hell.

You know what I’d really like to do?

What’s that? she said abstractedly as she picked the broken blossoms out of a pot of winter flowers.

We’ll go skiing, Tim said with maddening cheer. Say the week after Christmas—okay?

Christmas, thought Iris suddenly, apropos of nothing at all. Just four days after the solstice. Four days after— Fine, she said, standing up to face him. Smiling, though the whip marks stung like salt.

She meant to fly upstairs and pack, without another word; she’d risked enough. She watched him gather up his book of dreams—black leather, tattooed with a thin gold cross—and tuck it in his pocket. She watched his shallow, laughing eyes and knew she had not betrayed a thing. By the time he got home, in the moonless dark, she would have cut loose. Some devil had sent this pain to keep her free.

You better hurry, Tim said as he turned to go. You’re late.

For what? she wondered coolly, grabbing up the bread knife from the counter. She lifted it like a dagger above her head. She danced up close as he pulled the door wide, ready to face the morning. All her fears were gone. She hovered there like an angel and gashed at the glittering air—half a second late. The dog bowled by and threw Tim back, so he lost his footing and fell against her. The knife flew out of her hand and clattered against the counter. She watched it land by the loaf of bread.

Tim saw nothing.

He turned around as if to chase the dog, as if for him the ordinary ring of life sounded on the hour. All he had to do was catch one sight of Iris—dreamy-eyed and vivid, all his own, the country wife with her countless weathers. He breathed her in like morning air. He swept her up in his arms and carried her half across the kitchen, master of all the luck he lived by. Feet off the ground, her breath knocked out, Iris was near delirious to think that he was safe. She did not question the freaks of fate, or thank them. She merely twined her arms about his neck and mimicked his every laugh, as if the world were dumb and simple after all.

The dog barked brightly, prancing about their feet. The bowl of oranges gleamed like money. In the cupboard above the sink she saw a dozen jars of pickles, mincement, honey, plums, the weight of which stood ready to see them through to spring. Though everything in her shrank from him, though voices scored and choked her, Iris knew the truth now. All these forces, whatever they were, had thought to make her give him up beforehand, so she’d run from here unburdened by regret. They didn’t want her sorrowing for Tim.

But she had won this one concession from the darkness: now they knew she would not kill for the sake of kingdoms. Heaven and hell did not engage her, either one. She would not go at all unless they let her believe in nothing whatsoever.

Why not just stay home? she murmured in his ear. We could spend the day in bed.

The pain tore up and down her like a madman in a cage.

Don’t tempt me, Tim said happily, as he set her lightly back on earth.

Please help me, she thought. Don’t go.

But when she moved to speak it, silence shivered through her. He was gone before she could make a sign—some gesture of withdrawal, so he would always know she’d stayed to say good-bye. If only she had some moment of the past to give him back. Yet the years, it seemed, had fallen off a tree. The snow had bedded them deep, like sheets on summer furniture. She stood at the back door watching Tim go off. The air was smoked with his breathing, all the way to the barn. He backed his black car out and drove away. He receded like the far horizon, sweeping her out to sea.

She must not linger. She must not care. She had to be on a plane at four o’clock. Except for this—her one tenacious deadline—the amnesia lay like cotton on her brain. As she reached a canvas suitcase down off the closet shelf, she understood she was not allowed to search out any memories. The details were all off limits, as well as the taking of souvenirs.

When she passed her desk in the dining room she felt as if a wall of fire had sprung up out of the carpet, holding her at bay. In the hall behind the stairs, where the books rose floor to ceiling, she found she couldn’t recollect a single title. She picked up papers here and there—letters and lists and homework, strewn across the parlor. A blur had flared like a virus in her head till her finer vision was slightly off. The words wouldn’t hold together. The simplest phrases didn’t work anymore.

She realized she was meant to pack for rainy weather. The outer gear—knee-high boots and a yellow slicker—took up all the room. There was hardly space left over for a heavy sweater and sheepskin vest. No fancy clothes required. No personal effects. Yet even here she would not give up the past without a fight. She found that when she happened on the odds and ends of this life—came on them incidentally, without the will to know—there occurred a moment’s break in the fog. As she went to get her checkbook out of a drawer beside the bed she uncovered a wrinkled calling card. She caught a quick glimpse as she turned away: Timothy Ammons, Rector, St. Andrew’s, Killingworth Common. Episcopal, it looked like.

A few minutes later she stood in the bathroom, stocking a quilted bag with necessaries. Toothbrush, aspirin, soap, and a fistful of pills for any number of overnight conditions. She might have been planning a weekend jaunt. Turning to go, she noticed a pile of magazines on the ledge behind the toilet, Vogue on top. The mailing label on the cover was printed with her name: Dr. Iris Ammons.

Doctor of what, she wondered. As she went to the bed to zip her suitcase, she cast about in her mind to figure what she had the power to heal. Her hands were numb; her aim was squeamish. She shied from sickness generally, as being too like death for comfort. Who’d ever pay good money to a doctor who was scared?

The dog stuck close to her heels when she left the house. He seemed to think she’d let him come along. She found his air of expectation vaguely threatening. The wagging tail, the panting tongue—what was he anyway, some kind of spaniel? He scratched at the door of the station wagon as she slipped inside and started it. He appeared to have some notion she would need him.

A wolf perhaps, or a red-eyed owl, but not this eunuch sentimental mutt. He clearly didn’t have it in him to go for the vitals. As she wheeled around the drive and picked up speed, he trotted close to the car. He gave a playful yap, still sure she was only kidding. Just at the last, she gunned the engine and swerved—so he had to scramble squealing out of the path of the racing wheel.

She drove to town over roads she could have sworn she’d seen in photographs. She didn’t know how she knew the way, but this was sure: she would never be able to retrace it. She skirted a grove of birches, crested a hill, and saw the village square spread out below. That’s not it at all, she thought. Not what? She couldn’t say. As she drove downhill, she passed beneath an arch of leafless elms, most of which were cut to the bone to halt the spread of blight. They stood like broken sentries, handing in their arms.

She turned in at a red-brick bank designed to look like a sweetshop. The young teller didn’t bat an eye when she wrote out a check for fifteen hundred, cash. All he said was: Getting an early start on Christmas, are you, Dr. Ammons?

To which she replied she would have it in hundreds. She would not stop to small talk. The kid got very apologetic, counting out her bills. As if he’d gone too far, somehow, and feared she’d turn him in.

Across the square, outside the drugstore, Iris slipped into a phone booth to call in her reservation. Where to? the airline clerk asked patiently. San Francisco, said Iris like a dutiful child. Till she spoke the name, she had no clue where she was meant to go. She mulled it over as the airline man rang off to consult his computer. She’d been there once before, of course, when she was … twenty, twenty-five. One of her summers in college, perhaps. A flattish sort of travelogue ran dully in her mind. Did she have some friend there? Some connection?

She looked across the street to the village grocery. A portly man in a spotless apron pyramided his bins of fruit. Two old women picked through a burlap sack of onions. A small child, too young to go to school, toddled in the doorway. It wasn’t clear who he belonged to, but he seemed to sense that nobody here was watching. He reached inside the grocer’s open toolbox. He brought out a pair of steel-gray shears that would have cut a chicken up like paper. Iris stared with growing fury, but made no move to stop him. He pulled the scissors open. The blades were as long as his arms.

The four o’clock is filled, announced the tight-lipped clerk. I have a space on the five-fifteen.

The five-fifteen is perfect, Iris said. She felt a thrill of power to think there were systems out of their control. The forces still had limits. Remember that, she thought.

The little boy stood at the grocer’s knee, holding up the slack-jawed shears. He only wished to be helpful. He did a sort of jig, to get the other’s attention. The blade points grazed the belly of his parka.

Just one way, she told the clerk.

As she hung up the phone, the grocer turned and nearly stumbled. The child fell back, the shears beneath him. Iris cocked an ear for the cry and watched for the gout of blood. But it seemed the deadly drift of things had not caught on in the country towns, or not around these parts, at least. The blades fell flat, so he fell without harm. The grocer stooped and heaved the child up, laughing. No one took note of the shears at all. Now the two went barreling through the door to fetch the boy a chocolate bar. The elderly ladies clucked at the price of tangerines. In the grocery window, the hands on the clock met tight at noon, and all the shadows vanished.

Why was it, then, that Iris shook with horror, if all the danger was safely passed? Couldn’t she see how solidly the bricks were mortared here? The circle of shops that bordered the square took care of the people’s every need. The village streets connected each to each, so no one even had to turn around. In the center of the square, a polished granite obelisk rose out of a boxwood hedge. It bore the names of the town’s war dead—four wars, one to a side—and showed they were ever mindful of the sacrifice that kept them safe. The wells were deep with water sweet as honey. The school won all the tournaments. The taxes were a song.

How could she blame them for feeling secure? They’d made a collective stand against eventuality, just being here. They had the deeds to prove it.

Yet the feeling was so strong she could not keep it checked. A tightness gripped her skin till she thought it would rip like fabric. Palms flat out on the booth’s glass door, her lips pulled back against her teeth, she looked for a moment like someone about to be buried alive. Though her heart was all stripped bare from leaving home, she seethed with dread and pity for these people, living out the rag end of their lives in a place where time was running out.

For none of these ordered ways would last. If the instruments of pain were limp and harmless now, tomorrow all the penalties would double. Iris felt a throb of joy to think that she could flee. This town was a burning house. The death that hadn’t come to pass fed beneath the surface like the yellow in a sore. And no one dared to look it in the face. No one had a plan.

The more she took it in, the more her pity faded. A murderous logic beat against her temples. Clearly, they had brought it on themselves, these dim and buttoned people. Their gods and devils were