Out of Peel Tree

Dark Early: Billie

81 Dark Early Billie One November evening, Billie tasted onion soup in her kitchen and remembered her honeymoon two years ago. She and Sam had flown—her first plane ride—to Mexico and jounced on an old blue bus to Isla de las Mujeres. They drank milk from coconuts that fell with soft thuds in the sand, and strolled under clicking palms beside a sea that lapped turquoise over their toes. When Sam floated in the salt-heavy water, eyes closed above a dreamy smile, Billie thought, I don’t know him. The next day they giggled in bed and waltzed naked around their room, perched on stilts above the Caribbean. Sharp-winged terns dropped like stones into the sea and rose flapping, spraying light into light. Now they lived in Morgantown, West Virginia, where they had met at the University. The old house where they had an apartment was part of an enormous maze of old homes stubbornly dug into a steep mountainside. Billie had graduated from a little college in Ohio, and afterwards, when she was visiting Morgantown, she fell for Sam. She hadn’t planned to move here; she wanted to live somewhere out of West Virginia. “Of course you do,” her grandma Essie had laughed. “Wanting to leave is part of being a West-by-god dark early 82 Virginian. Even our state song is about leaving and pining to come back: ‘If o’er sea or land I roam, still I think of happy home, and my friends among those West Virginia hills.’ Honey, you’ll move to a city or some flat land and wind up homesick.” Still. She was twenty-four and ought to get somewhere with her life. Today she had surfed the websites of restaurants in Los Angeles , Miami, and the Bahamas. She was a waitress, she could get a job almost anywhere, right? Sam didn’t want to leave. He was mired in writing his Master’s thesis on the Battle of Waterloo. That or his day job was scrambling his brain. All day he drove a taxi through these crooked streets and up into the hills. “It’s ready,” Billie called to Sam and she carried bowls of soup into the dining room. Something was odd, was off, as if a piece of furniture had been moved. She looked down the open room that ran the length of the house. In the middle of this length was a black fireplace they couldn’t use because the landlord had said the chimney might catch fire. The fireplace gazed at her with disappointment , remembering fires it used to have, was meant to have. No, nothing was awry but something was different: the huge old windows were black instead of soft with evening light. “Look,” Billie said when Sam walked in and kissed her cheek. She pointed to the nearest window. The merged shape of the two of them glinted there, ghost-pale yet definite. “The time changed. It’s dark early now.” Sam said. They sat down, bowls of soup, plates of spaghetti, and a basket of bread between them. “We’re supposed to get a killing frost tomorrow.” He ate with the concentration of a weary man. He rhythmically ate the soup, then dug into the spaghetti, plummy with tomatoes. She twirled her fork. “I took this sauce out of the freezer today. Remember, I made it in August?” He nodded. dark early 83 She had picked up a crate of ripe tomatoes cheap from a roadside stand. The tomatoes were bruised and cracking, oozing with sweet juice, and needed to be cut and cooked right away. She’d simmered them all the next day in a big pot. That seemed far away now, a day when she knew exactly what life was asking of her. “I’ve got to find another job. I don’t want to drive a taxi in the ice and snow.” Sam’s eyes skittered into hers and away. His left forearm was still slightly tanned from being angled out the taxi window all summer and fall. He used to spend every evening in his study, a room off the kitchen. His stacks of books went straight up to the low, angled ceiling, the spines spilling letters in prim little banners. For the last few weeks, his thesis had sat in several heaps on the desk, untouched. Billie twirled and untwirled her spaghetti...