Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus Read Free Book Online Page B

times she heard the children drop heavily into their beds and the sleep their bladders had barely disturbed; and each time she quietlyand briefly wept, for their sounds recalled to her the nights of Gina’s and Ryan’s growing up when she woke hearing them walking down the hall to their rooms, their light footsteps only audible when the flushing that woke her had ceased and she could hear the moving weight of their small warm bodies above the faint sound of water filling the tank. Her weeping that night in the hotel at St. Croix was soundless, her tears so few they did not even leave her eyes which she wiped dry with the sheet, and it was neither joyful nor frightened nor relieved: it simply came, as milk had once come from her breasts.
    Sometime after three-twenty she slept. They stayed one more week on the island, to answer questions and sign statements, to attend the captain’s funeral, a young blond man from California whose young blond, tanned woman wore a white dress and sat with his family in the front pew—a father and mother and two older brothers, who arrived in three different planes from the United States and wore black—and all through the service she stared at the casket, her face still lax with the disbelief that for others becomes in moments a truth they must bear all their lives. Then at the grave, as the brothers at her sides turned her tall, strong body away from the open hole where the captain lay under flowers, the young woman having plucked the first from a wreath and dropped it onto the casket, she collapsed: her knees bent, her body fell, and the two brothers strained to hold her as, doubled over, her lowered face covered by the long blond hair fallen forward and down, she keened.
    Rusty and Cal and Gina and Ryan attended the memorial service for the mate, who was from RhodeIsland, whose family arrived on five planes: two sisters, a brother, the mother and her husband, the father and his wife. Rusty sensed that the mate had not had a lover on the day of his death, but there were two young women, one in blue, one in gray, in the pew behind the family, and something about the way they entered together, and sat close, and glanced from time to time at each other, and lowered their faces to cry, either simultaneously or the tears of one starting the tears of the other, made Rusty believe they had at one time, separately but probably in quick succession, been the mate’s lovers; and whether the one in blue had taken the place of the one in gray in the mate’s heart, or the other way around, they were joined for at least this bodiless service, perhaps even because it was bodiless, and for these minutes in the church were somehow united as sisters are, even sisters who dislike each other but despite that are bound anyway because they will never again see or hear or touch someone they both loved. The memorial service was the day after the captain’s funeral, and the questions and answers and signing of statements for the Coast Guard lieutenant from Puerto Rico were done, but the family stayed for the remainder of the week, because they had planned to.
    They had planned those fourteen days while eating dinner in Massachusetts, when the thermometer outside Rusty’s kitchen window was at twelve degrees and there was a wind from the north and Cal had said: “If we wait till the off-season I can pay for the whole thing. For everybody.” Gina and Ryan, both working, renting apartments, buying cars, had happily, gratefully, protested; and agreed when Cal said: “Or we can all go Dutch this week.” During those final days at St. Croixthey swam in the small pool at the hotel, but none of them went into the sea, whose breakers struck a reef a short distance from the beach, a natural shield against both depth and sharks, so that only a tepid, shallow pool with the motion of a lake reached the sand at the hotel. One evening, from the outdoor bar, Rusty watched Gina standing with a tall sunset-colored rum drink