The Legend of Bush Man — Chapters 42 and 43: The Second Bite

Chapter 42: The Grip Holds

Chloe held.

That is the whole sentence, and it took everything she had. Marcus’s knees had bent an inch on their own — courteous, the way a guest’s knees bend when a host is standing behind the chair — and her hands were fisted in the back of his jacket so hard her knuckles had gone the color of the porch lights. Pale. Green-white. She did not pull him. Pulling would have been a going. She just made herself into furniture: a coat rack with opinions.

“Seconds, Marcus?” said his mother’s finished voice from behind him, the voice that still knew his name.

“Nobody is sitting,” Chloe said, to the room in general, to the fifth chair, to the warm dark at the head of the table. “Nobody is hungry. It is a very nice dinner and nobody is hungry. Put that in your recipe book.”

The slow wet creak under the floorboards stopped. Not faded — stopped, the way a held breath stops being polite about it. Marcus felt the pressure behind his knees hesitate, and in the hesitation he understood the manner of the thing all over again, page seventy-two, the rule they had survived the car by: it will not begin until a guest begins. Sitting would have been a beginning. Being seated was not quite the same as sitting, and the inch of difference was standing in Chloe’s fists, shaking.

His mother — the real one, at the counter, holding a dish towel like a flag of a country she no longer recognized — said, “Baby,” and stopped, because the name after it had been served to her an hour ago by something else, and she was afraid of whose mouth it would come out of this time.

“Don’t say it,” Marcus whispered. “Don’t feed it grace.”

So nobody sat. Nobody spoke a name. Nobody began. And the host, who is patient above all things, who has never once hurried in all the years the Miller hedge has stood, did what any host does when the guests will not come to the table.

It cleared a plate anyway.

From the AOP3D Forum Archive — Page 74: “The Clearing”

Posted by rootcellar, Hollow Creek. Timestamped eleven minutes ago.

“You all keep asking what the second bite is. Wrong question. Ask who it is served to. A host that cannot seat the guest will seat the house instead. The first bite is a name, because names are carried in mouths. The second bite is a place, because places are carried in feet. It does not take the room. It takes the way you find the room. After the clearing, the house still stands. You just cannot remember how you ever got into it — only that you are, somehow, already inside.”

“P.S. If someone is holding you up, let them. Being held is not a going. It is the opposite of a going. Do not thank them out loud. Gratitude is a kind of beginning.”

Chapter 42 (continued): What the Kitchen Lost

The sound was small. That was the obscenity of it — after the car, after the hallway in the hedge, after eight feet of thorns folding themselves into a middle seat, the second bite arrived as a small domestic sound: a plate being lifted off wood. One of the five settings at Marcus’s place — his mother’s good plates, the ones with the blue rim — rose an inch, tilted, and was simply no longer there. Not broken. Not taken through any door. The table kept its polish where the plate had been, and the polish was wrong, the way a smile is wrong when a tooth is missing.

“Okay,” Chloe said. “Okay, that’s fine, it can have a plate, plates are cheap, we are a plate-rich household—”

“Chloe,” her mother said quietly. She was looking at the kitchen doorway. “Where is the hall?”

The doorway was there. The hall was there — Marcus could see the runner rug, the crooked photograph of the lake house, the stairs going up into the dark. But when he tried to remember walking through it, twenty minutes ago, with the ordinary relief of a boy coming home, there was nothing to remember. Not a blank. A served plate. He knew they had driven six streets. He knew the engine had started like an engine. But the part of the evening where the house received them — the keys, the door, the step over the threshold they had sworn never to be fooled by again — was gone, eaten neatly, without crumbs.

They had not arrived at Marcus’s house. As far as any of their memories could prove, they had always been in the kitchen.

“It took the coming-home,” Marcus said. His knees had straightened while he wasn’t attending to them, which frightened him more than the bending had. “That’s the bite. It took the coming-home.”

His dead phone lit on the counter, face up, in nobody’s hand. A photograph, from his own number: the four of them at the table, eating, mid-laugh, heads tipped back, an ordinary family at an ordinary dinner. None of them were sitting. All of them were standing exactly where they stood now, staring at a phone.

Under the photograph, in his finished voice, one word: “delicious.”

Chapter 43: Already Inside

“New rule,” Chloe said, without letting go of Marcus’s jacket. She had been holding it for nine minutes. Her hands had stopped shaking, which she reported, in a bright voice, was either courage or circulation failure. “We do not discuss the photograph. Discussing is a kind of answering. We do not sit. We do not say names. We do not say thank you. We are the world’s rudest houseguests and we are proud of it.”

“And then what?” her mother asked. “We stand in the kitchen until morning?”

Nobody answered her, because the forum had answered that one weeks ago, on page forty-four, and the answer was the shape of the whole night: it is patient. It can wait out a kitchen. It can wait out a street. It has waited out a town. Standing still had starved an invitation once, at a patio door, in another life that felt about eleven minutes and a hundred years old. But that door had been an invitation. This was a meal already in progress, and you do not starve a meal by standing next to it. You just get colder, and tireder, and eventually — the way a standing person eventually does — you lean.

Marcus’s mother leaned first. Only an inch. Only toward the counter, a tired woman resting her hip against her own kitchen in her own house, the most ordinary gesture on earth. The fifth chair, at the head of the table, dark as wet bark and faintly warm, slid out one more courteous inch on the hardwood.

“Nobody lean,” Chloe said. “New rule. Nobody lean, nobody sway, nobody shift their weight like a person. Statues. We are statues at a dinner party. Rich people pay money to look at us.”

It might have worked until dawn. It might have. The thing in the garden has never once taken anything a guest did not, in some small way, offer — a step, a look, a name, a lean. Four statues can outwait a great many things.

What four statues cannot outwait is a doorbell.

Chapter 43 (continued): The Nightcap

It rang at the front of the house — the house none of them could remember entering — a clean, cheerful, two-tone chime, and every one of them flinched, and flinching, Marcus understood later, is also a kind of beginning. Something in the walls settled, satisfied, the way a table settles when the last guest finally arrives.

Through the kitchen speakers — the little countertop radio that had not worked since July — five finished voices braided together, almost gentle, the way they had braided in the car: “A nightcap for the road?”

“Nobody is on any road,” Chloe said. “We live here now. Standing up. Forever. It’s a lifestyle.”

The doorbell rang again. And under it, faint, from the front hall none of them could remember crossing, came a sound Marcus knew better than his own heartbeat by now: crunch… swoosh… crunch. Enormous steps through dry leaves. Inside the house. On the hardwood. Coming, with terrible patience, in no hurry at all — because it did not need to come to them.

It only needed to be announced.

His mother — the real one, the tired one, the one who had already lost her son’s name once tonight and gotten it back from the wrong mouth — looked at the kitchen doorway with the expression of a woman who has hosted a thousand dinners and whose body knows the choreography better than her fear does. Her hand rose, slowly, toward the hall. The way you rise to greet someone at the door. The way you have risen ten thousand times.

“Mom,” Marcus said. He did not know which mother he meant. Both of them turned toward his voice — his real mother in the kitchen, hand half-raised to welcome the guest in — and, from the dark of the hall behind her, in perfect unison, a second voice wearing her face and knowing his name said it with her:

“Come in.”

Tonight, in the Garden

• The grip held: Chloe never pulled and never let go — being held is the opposite of a going, and Marcus never sat.
• The second bite: denied a guest, the host cleared a place instead — it ate their memory of coming home, so the house has no outside they can prove.
• The rules still hold: it never chases, it never crosses a threshold uninvited, and a flinch, a lean, and a raised hand are all beginnings it can use.
• Tomorrow: two voices have said “Come in” in the same mouth. One of them belongs to his mother. The garden is deciding which one.