Crows by Charles Dickinson Page A

Robert declined. It was after midnight and he wanted to get home.
    â€œWill you go back to your office tonight?”
    Ben was eating, looking up at the house. The house was so tall it seemed to infringe unnaturally on the starlight.
    â€œI feel there’s a chance for my return tonight,” he said. “A crow is allowed back not all at once, but a little at a time. But it is always more sudden than one expects. I have hope.”
    They said good night. Ben invited Robert to come to his office the next day, where he would tell him how the night concluded. Robert walked a block away and then returned. He was worried about the man sitting in the damp coolness, occasionally circling the house in search of a point of entry.
    Ben was not in the backyard and Robert did not see him when he walked all around the house. Maybe Ben had been correct in his assessment of the situation and had been allowed to return.
    But a low voice called down to Robert from a thick branch high in the birch tree beside the house.
    â€œWhy are you back?”
    Robert could barely see Ben; he was crouching on a branch outside a third-­floor window. Robert could not see his eyes, his mouth, his hands; he was just a shape.
    â€œI was worried about you,” Robert said.
    â€œThank you, Robert,” Ben said. “But you needn’t worry about me. I’ve done this countless times before. Go home. You need your rest.”
    Robert left him there, tapping at his wife’s locked window.

 
Chapter Three
    Night Dive
    R OBERT DID NOT fill his day sufficiently to tire himself, and after the brief sapped exhaustion from making love to Olive he lay awake and edgy. He could feel the summer rising away like a turned blanket, feel the comforter of frost beneath it. It was the end of August, the downside of summer’s peak, and the lake was cold. ­People who had lived in Mozart for decades swore to the passing of distant summers when balls of blue ice never left the lake, but regrouped in late September, and there was skating by Halloween.
    He shook the sleeping Olive’s shoulder; bunches of muscle everywhere he touched, this long a time after she had stopped training: shoulders, legs, arms, the strong slatting on her ribs, which were ticklish, the pulling grip she exerted when he was inside her.
    She had not been asleep.
    â€œWhat?” she asked.
    â€œThe rain’s stopped, O. Let’s go look for Ben.”
    She rolled toward him. “Could we?”
    He crawled across her, already moving toward the lake, as if her participation was guaranteed. She clasped his arm. “What if we find him?” Her words came out of the shadows her head and body cut against the darkness, and they were words filled with a distant, buried grief and a fear of final knowledge.
    â€œI look for him all the time,” Robert said. “He’s not there. But he’s somewhere. We’ll never find him, but the important thing is to look.”
    â€œTalk sense,” she said peevishly.
    â€œI am. You want to go or not? A little night dive?”
    â€œI’m afraid.”
    â€œSo am I,” Robert said.
    They left Ben’s house and walked to the lake. The Ladysmiths’ rowboat was tied to a pier that poked a silver finger out into the dark water. The lake was the sky and the lights around it stars that had fallen in. For both of them these lights had the familiarity of constellations. Olive would not have come to the lake without Robert; to walk along it on her way to work or school was enough to break her heart, if allowed. She saw her father everywhere. Every distant floating board was his arched spine, every scrap of Styrofoam his bobbing head. On occasion she ended a shift certain she had waited on him sometime during the night.
    She half resented her missing father for taking the lake from her. In growing up in Mozart it had been the one constant through the shifting and turning of friends, boy and girl.