The Wide Night Sky Read online

The Wide Night Sky

  A novel by

  Matt Dean

  © 2015 Matt Dean

  Cover Image: The Wide Night Sky

  © 2013 Angela Morgane

  Used by permission of the artist

  License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

  Also by the author: The River in Winter

  Dedication

  For Sarah, Mina, and Angela, my sisters by choice.

  Table of Contents

  The Second of September

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  The Last Wednesday in October

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Thanksgiving

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  The Beginning of December

  Chapter 25

  The Friday Before Christmas

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  The Fifth of June

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  The Second of September

  Chapter 1

  He’d been born in this house, not in a hospital. Five decades within these walls, under this roof—precisely fifty years, almost to the minute—and he’d never loved the place more. The drafty rooms, the windows that rattled, the crooked drawers that jumped their tracks, the cupped floorboards: he loved every splinter, every nail, every flake of alligatored varnish.

  Sometimes, at a certain time in the afternoon, with the sun slanting through the western-facing windows at just such an angle, casting skewed rectangles of milky light on the kitchen floor, Leland found himself leaning against the island, just like this. With the chill of the granite seeping into the palms of his hands, he looked across the kitchen, looked down the hallway—gazed, really—and his heart swelled with longing, the peculiar longing of fully requited love, a possessive craving for this beloved place he already owned.

  Daydreamer. Woolgatherer. Fool. He’d stopped in the middle of tidying the island, clearing away the cutting board, the knife, the papery scraps of onion skin. He’d thought he should put on some music, but then he’d gotten stuck. He had yet to take a single step toward the corner shelf, where his iPod lay between a pair of softball-sized speakers. Sometimes, at a certain time in the afternoon, he found himself doing this, yes, but these moments of abstraction, these sentimental idylls of his—they were coming upon him more and more often, weren’t they, and stretching themselves out longer and longer?

  Going to the shelf, he picked up the iPod and slid the wheel around with his thumb. The gadget chittered, pip-pip-pip, pippip, pip. His thumb brushed back and forth on the wheel, clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise again. Album titles rolled up and down the tiny screen, but Leland wasn’t reading them. He barely saw the words at all. His mind was elsewhere, everywhere, nowhere. He gave up and laid the gadget down again and returned to the stove, where he’d left several pounds of sliced onions caramelizing in a stock pot. He rattled the pot, dug a wooden spoon into it, stirred. The onions hissed their sweetness into the air. The whitish-yellow slivers he’d dumped in by handfuls had half-melted and taken on the color of maple syrup. He breathed deeply—the smell of happiness, of home, as agreeable in its way as the scent of cinnamon and apples and pastry dough. The smell of happiness, and he was a happy man, after all.

  Wait. He’d been going to the iPod for a particular thing he’d wanted to hear. He laid the spoon aside and crossed again to the corner shelf. He’d meant to find a recording of his wife’s voice—Strauss’s Four Last Songs, in a performance she’d given five or six years ago with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. This time, Leland’s thumb had a sense of purpose, and he easily found the album, the songs, the undulating strings, Anna Grace’s clear voice.

  She was his first and second wife: That was the running joke of their long marriage. They’d met and married young, had a child, divorced, and married again. The second time, Corinne, their daughter, had been their flower girl. Surly and unforgiving—though endearing in her blue lace and white Mary Janes—the child had stomped down the aisle, doing her damnedest to smite the carpet with her handfuls of petals.

  When Leland and Anna Grace had married the first time, now almost thirty years ago, her singing had driven him insane. In the highest passages she’d unfailingly sounded as if she were chiseling the notes out of a granite wall. “Oh, if only I could scatter the clouds” from Il Pirata, Kundry’s curse from Parsifal, “No Word from Tom” and “Quietly, Night” from The Rake’s Progress—all so sharp, so shrill. For months, leading up to a concert performance of Ariadne auf Naxos, she’d filled the house with arpeggios, trills, vocalises. She’d distracted Leland from his research and his writing, and once or twice he’d taken Corinne and fled from the house.

  As she’d aged, Anna Grace had lost a bit of her top range, but with it the metallic harshness that had always raised his hackles. Leland knew what vibrato meant, of course, and timbre, and chest voice and head voice, and even if he didn’t understand how the words applied to what his wife had been training herself to do all these years, he could, and did, appreciate what her voice had become. As she nimbly climbed to the first high notes of the Strauss song—the words having something to do with the sky—he heard only clarity, solemnity, restraint, beauty.

  Although the song was called “Frühling”—“Spring”—to Leland it sounded strikingly autumnal, valedictory, even slightly morose. Even so, the lovely tone of his wife’s voice—austere, but somehow lavish, too—lifted his mood. A feeling of tenderness, of joy, bubbled up in him. For half a second he teetered between laughter and tears. He cleared his throat.

  Humming tunelessly along with the music, he returned to the stove. The onions were darker now, but also duller, more gray than golden. They weren’t ruined, but they were past the point of perfection. He cut the heat and dragged the pot off the burner. Stupid, wasn’t it, to make onion soup for a party? Hardly the ideal finger food. But at lunchtime he’d had a culinary vision of sorts—a mental image, clear as a snapshot, of some otherwise unremembered party his mother had thrown some thirty-five years ago, and of a tray of ramekins bubbling over with melted Gruyère. His tongue had bristled ahead of time with the salty tang of the cheese and the meaty savor of the broth, and he’d set to work with his best chef’s knife and a big mesh bag of onions.

  Behind him Anna Grace sang a downward-leaning melody. The orchestra played a stuttering rhythm. Anna Grace had somehow managed to match the clarinets’ tone—a smoky plumpness, Leland might call it—and by some acoustical miracle the instruments seemed to be singing close harmony with her, not just in pitch but in words too.

  This was the second song of the four. “September,” it was called, and it was the reason he’d wanted to hear the Four Last Songs. It was his birthday, and he’d wanted music that celebrated the day, or at least the month—September, the best month of his year. But Strauss’s song was a lament
for the death of summer. Leland tried to remember the exact translation, tried to recall the words from the program, all those years ago. “The garden is in mourning”—wasn’t that the first line? Here in the American South, in Charleston, the garden was in full flower. Outside, a battalion of snapdragons, the color of sangria, bobbed their heads. In Germany, though: “Summer awaits his peaceful end.”

  On the recording there was a cough somewhere in the audience, in a far corner of the auditorium. It was the dry clap of wood against wood, the sound of that cough. And now, because of it, Leland could place himself in the audience again, looking up from the gray half-dark to the stage, where Anna Grace had stood poised and calm, confident, cool and gleaming as a jewel. He pictured the fulvous wood of the acoustical shell, the familiar backdrop of Gaillard Auditorium curving around behind her, arching above her. She’d worn a blue-black gown, the color of night itself, and when she’d turned for a moment toward the conductor and the silk had glinted under the lights, Leland had thought, How sweetly flows the liquefaction of her clothes.

  How sweetly. How sweetly flowed the music, the voice, the clarinets, the smoky plumpness of Anna Grace’s voice, the surprising softness of the German syllables. How sweetly flows—

  His father, all those years ago, had made the onion soup, not his mother. In the seventies, his father had taken up cooking. Starting from nothing—from “how to boil water”—he’d learned to make French onion soup, chocolate mousse, cheese soufflé, beef Wellington, and all sorts of odd meats in strange sauces. He’d baked endless quiches and pies and tortes. Once he’d roasted a goose for Christmas. Where would he have gotten a goose?

  Leland kneaded the tight skin at his temples. His head was in such a muddle. His thoughts kept wriggling away from him. This morning, as she’d left, after wishing him a happy birthday, Anna Grace had said, “They say fifty is nifty. I say there’s a sucker born every minute.” She was fifty-one.

  Corinne had gotten married in June. She wanted to have a baby as soon as she could. In December, Ben would come home from Afghanistan with a record of honorable service and, presumably, all his limbs. John Carter had just begun his freshman year of college. Someday he’d be a serious musician, perhaps the Glenn Gould of his generation. How could Leland fail to be happy with such a year—with such a life—ahead of him? Why shouldn’t fifty be nifty?

  He stared into the pot of onions. Stringy, lifeless, unappetizing. Ruined after all. He lifted the pot and took a step back from the stove. His knees buckled. His eyes rolled in their sockets. Helpless suddenly, limp as a drooping leaf, he tripped backward and crumpled to the floor. His hipbone, and then his shoulder blade and the back of his head, cracked hard against the tile. The last thing he saw, before he passed out, was the big aluminum pot spinning through the air above him, and the slivers of caramelized onion pouring out of it.