Sarah Lucas imagined the rest of her days would be spent living peacefully in her rural Vermont home in the steadfast company of her husband. But now, with Charles's sudden passing, seventy-five-year-old Sarah is left inconsolably alone.
As grief settles in, Sarah's mind lingers on her past: her imperfect but devoted fifty-year marriage to Charles; the years they spent raising their three very different children; and her childhood during the Great Depression, when her parents opened their home to countless relatives and neighbors. So, when a variety of wayward souls come seeking shelter in Sarah's own big, empty home, her past comes full circle. As this unruly flock forms a family of sorts, they—with Sarah—nurture and protect one another, all the while discovering their unsuspected strengths and courage.
In the tradition of Jane Smiley and Sue Miller, Kate Maloy has crafted a wise and gratifying novel about a woman who gracefully accepts a surprising new role just when she though her best years were behind her.
Release date:
May 12, 2009
Publisher:
Algonquin Books
Print pages:
304
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“A story about the profound gifts of time, love, and loss . . . Maloy’s message is about affirming the profundity of grief by expressing that energy in positive ways. This story is her generous vision of how things could be.”
—The Olympian
“The appeal of Maloy’s debut—which has the fast-forward quality of a fairy tale—is not in its subtlety but in its conviction.”
—People
“Maloy does a marvelous job depicting the kind of tender, steady domestic partnership that is the reward of a lifetime of shared experiences, both good and bad . . . Its tenderly wrought portrayal of elderly life has an unexpectedly powerful effect, revealing fictional possibilities we’d either forgotten about or never considered at all.”
—The Oregonian
“Maloy nicely portrays the long, imperfect, but still lusty marriage of Sarah and husband Charles, moves gracefully through the shock of loss, and charts the steps back into community. But what feels most original and moving is Maloy’s sense of how Sarah sees herself connected to other generations.”
—The Boston Sunday Globe
“This lovely tale depicts the surprises and changes that come about with aging . . . Maloy has created a truly engrossing novel, with situations at times both joyful and horribly sad and an entirely likable protagonist surrounded by an eclectic cast of friends and family. An excellent book club selection; highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“A luminously textured novel that insists that grief need not diminish a life but instead can offer up a bounty of surprises, that choices don’t have to narrow as we age but, in fact, can grow more plentiful, and, finally and most important, that love can be as open and expansive as the sky itself. I loved this rich and haunting novel.”
—Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls in Trouble and Coming Back to Me
“A beautiful, graceful story about a vibrant, beautiful woman.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“A wonderful story of human potential and what is possible when strangers become family . . . This heartwarming tale is an excellent read.”
—The Roanoke Times
“[A] moving debut.”
—More
“A tender and wise story of what happens when love lasts. This vivid and original novel seizes and surprises the reader, who is rewarded by an extraordinarily appealing range of the best sort of fully engaging novel elements, from the moving issues of multi-generational family dynamics and aging and solitude to the necessity of confronting our own sometimes violent instincts as creatures living in the natural world. It’s a stunning, elegant debut.”
—Katharine Weber, author of Triangle and The Little Women
“Every Last Cuckoo is an impressive step in a new literary direction.”
—MSNBC.com
“Kate Maloy’s sweetly inspiring first novel, Every Last Cuckoo, is a lovely meditation on what miracles can happen when we simply open our hearts . . . Maloy’s novel grabs the reader by the heart—it is rare indeed to find such assured fiction about love that endures over time . . . In this portrait of a long and loving marriage, Maloy gives us a real human family, with all its love and conflict and change, as well as a look at the richness that can come with age.”
—The New Orleans Times-Picayune
“A striking portrait of a marriage that is as imperfect and amiable as its participants.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This charming novel is an examination of friendship, tragedy, romance, generosity, moral indignation, aging, solitude, and what happens when love lasts and we confront our own inner weathers.”
—Rocky Mount Telegram
“This is a splendid book, written in spare, clean prose, in which the knots of grief and complication are eased to resolution by wisdom and love.”
—Peter Pouncey, author of Rules for Old Men Waiting
“Almost every page rewards the reader in some unexpected way: by a glimpse of the Vermont landscape, a moment of intimacy between the characters, a beautifully turned sentence. And every page brings us closer to Sarah, Kate Maloy’s remarkable heroine, a woman so passionate, so intelligent and so full of life that most readers will quickly forget that she happens to be in her seventies. This is a wonderful debut.”
—Margot Livesey, author of Banishing Verona and Eva Moves the Furniture
“What great pleasure Kate Maloy gives us with this lovely, lucid novel of family, landscape, and complications.”
—Roxana Robinson, author of Sweetwater and This Is My Daughter
RUNNING ON FEAR ALONE, Sarah Lucas follows her dog Sylvie down a long meadow and onto a disintegrating ski trail in the woods. Sylvie, a black Lab, holds her tail out stiffly from the base of her spine; she is all business. Sarah carries a heavy down parka for Charles, just in case. A sleeve falls loose and tangles between her legs; she nearly goes down. Panic fills her lungs and throat, displacing her breath as she tries to keep up with the dog. Her heart strains, an overtaxed engine. Sarah curses herself for not having said to Charles, “Be careful,” as always. She had rushed off with a friend; she had failed to voice the necessary charm. In her last glimpse of her husband, he had his walking stick in hand, his daypack over his shoulder. He was pleased to be setting out—and then he did not come back. Sarah had returned home to find the house empty and Sylvie waiting, frenzied.
Sarah feels both young and old, amazed that she can move so fast but aware that it might kill her. When she reaches the topmost point of the trail, she can see where Charles struck off through recently melted and refrozen snow. It has a thick crust, which he broke with each step. He wasn’t wearing his snowshoes.
Sarah wads the parka more securely under her arm and moves carefully off the ski trail. She places her feet in the depressions Charles left, thinking wildly, Whither thou goest. Her pace now is unbearably slow. Her pulse thuds in her throat and behind her eyes. She squints to see ahead, but Charles’s trail, which descends into a deep ravine, goes out of sight behind a house-size boulder.
Finally, Sarah sees him down. The broken snow reveals that he fell steeply and rolled. His mongrel terrier, Ruckus, is close beside him, a furry appendage. The little dog looks up and whimpers as Sarah approaches, but he stays put. Charles lies sprawled on his back, his head lower than his feet, one leg bent wrong. Sarah reaches his side and falls to her knees. A sudden soft keening escapes her. He is icy to her touch, his lips are blue, he does not stir. Frantically she feels for a pulse. It is there, but faint. She quickly wraps her husband in the parka, tucking it as far beneath his motionless body as she can. He murmurs something, and his eyelids flutter, but he doesn’t awaken. She fumbles in the pocket of her coat for her cell phone, her hands shaking violently. She enters a number, hears a crackling emptiness. She wails in frustration, breaks the failed connection, and tries again to punch in 911. When a woman answers, Sarah stammers with cold and fear as she tries to explain where Charles is. She has to give their address, then directions to the entrance of the trail, then an estimated distance to the point at which Charles left the easy route and began breaking through the old snow. She is weeping by the time the operator understands where to send the EMTs on their snowmobiles.
Sarah lies down as close to Charles as she can, trying to warm him with her body and her breath, feeling for his heartbeat. The dogs curl up close as well. Charles does not move.
THAT FALL AND WINTER Sarah felt events conspiring toward some menacing end. She told herself this was baseless, nothing more than a symptom of the seasonal plunge into cold and lengthening dark, but her anxiety persisted.
Her dread first began to surge during an illness that came over her on a midnight in November. She left her bed at the first roiling and moved to the window seat across the room, not wanting to wake Charles. Cold air flowed down from the stars, up from the river, and through the open casement beside her. She gulped it like an antidote, though it turned the fever sweat to icy pinheads in her pores. She was alarmed by her racing heart, too aware of her skin—how touchy it was with the onset of illness, how furnace-dry beneath the moist sheen.
Sarah held herself perfectly still, trying to quell the swelling nausea by force of will, as she had done since childhood, hating the stink and sound of the body’s gross defenses. She preferred drawn-out suffering to the quick but horrible relief. Hot and cold, she set herself adrift, hoping to sleep again and fool whatever virus or toxin had invaded her. Soon she entered a suspended awareness in which she was conscious yet assailed by images her conscious mind did not produce. Where had she seen that piece of road, that sweet rise and bend that now un-spooled behind her eyes? The ocean, or perhaps a lake, lay to the right of it, a fringe of trees and a tucked cottage to the left. Up ahead, around a curve, a causeway crossed the wide water, but from where to where? Sarah tried to remember, but it was like snatching at milkweed fluff in the air. The very attempt sent it out of reach.
This kind of thing happened more with age. Sarah was seventy-five. She had lived many thousands of days, so it was not surprising that scenes from an hour here or a moment there should surface at random. Her memories were beads jumbled loose in a box, unstrung. Everything—people, events, conversations—came and went so fast that only a fraction of the beads were ever stored at all. Few were whole, many cracked; most rolled away beneath pressing, present moments and were gone forever. What was the point?
Still, Sarah felt she should remember that road. Something about it.
Fully awake now, she slipped from the window seat and stumbled urgently across the hallway to the bathroom. On her way she heard Charles utter an inflected snort that meant, What’s happening? Where are you?
She closed the bathroom door and fell to her knees, thankful that she had scrubbed the toilet just that day. The porcelain was clean enough that she cooled her cheek on it between eviscerating heaves.
Charles knocked softly after a decent interval. He would never just come in, not while she was on the floor, clammy and trembling. “Just a minute,” she called, flushing the toilet. She rose and glimpsed her face, gone ashy, in the mirror. She rinsed her mouth, brushed her teeth, rinsed again, and went out of the bathroom into Charles’s embrace.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” he asked, looking down at her, his white hair standing in tufts, his eyes naked without glasses.
“So you could do what?” Sarah answered, filled with relief, welcoming the pale euphoria that always rose in her when illness faded.
“Well, how about now? Want tea?”
“No, thanks. Just put me back to bed.”
Charles, still lanky and straight at eighty, still courtly at moments like this one, held Sarah’s arm and steered her to their room and her side of their bed. He lifted her legs and feet onto the mattress, smoothed the covers over her, and felt her forehead. “Hot,” he said. “I’ll get the thermometer.”
“No need,” Sarah replied, exhausted. “Fever’s going down.”
Charles touched her cheek. He might be the doctor in the family, but the palm of Sarah’s own hand was accurate within a degree of fever. All those years of mothering.
“What brought this on?” he asked. “You feeling better?”
“Mmm. Just a bug.” Talking was an effort, but Sarah added, “Don’t you catch it.”
“Not this iron man,” said Charles, bending to kiss her cheek.
SARAH SLEPT UNTIL NINE the next morning, three hours later than usual. When Vermont’s dilute autumn sun finally woke her, she could tell the hour from the position of its diffuse glow through the honeycomb shades. Her body luxuriated in surcease from illness, but her mind dwelt on mortality. This time a fly-by-night virus. Next time—what?
Sarah was rarely ill. Even as a child she had weathered the odd bout of sickness with a calm born of utter trust in her body. She had submitted patiently to everything from colds to menstrual cramps, believing that to be in the best of health she had to be ill sometimes. She had to let her body use its defenses the way an army practices maneuvers during peacetime. Colds kept her immune system fit. Cramps confirmed her clocklike fertility, announced the readiness of her body for babies, familiarized her with the tugging sensation that would so wildly intensify during labor. No matter what the ailment, her health always returned.
Last night, though, Sarah had feared the body-shaking thud of her heart, the weakness in her joints. Her half-awake dreaming had brought unusual images, scenes in which her molecules came unbound and drifted like motes in a beam of light, or her limbs turned to rivers that ran away into sand. She tried to fight panic along with the nausea, but neither had receded until victorious. Vomiting drained away the poisons, but the fear crept back, peripherally.
The telephone rang downstairs. Charles answered. He must have turned off the bedside phone. Sarah heard the rumble and inflections of his voice but couldn’t distinguish his words, only that he was friendly, not grumpy. The grumpy Charles emerged more often than he used to, but, then, so did the grumpy Sarah. So, for that matter, did a broader spirit in each of them, a ferocious joy. There was more to being old than she had ever expected.
With that, Sarah dressed and headed downstairs, stepping through early November sunshine on the landing, pale light made watery by the wavy, century-old glass in the southeast window. As she turned to finish her descent, she felt briefly unsteady and grasped the banister. Sylvie and Ruckus surged up to meet her, a canine tide. She extended her free hand, received their kisses, and fondled their ears. Content, they preceded her down the last stairs and flanked her on her way to the kitchen, tails moving like metronomes, toenails rattling time on hardwood and tile.
Charles was still on the phone, holding the receiver to his ear with his shoulder while pouring coffee. He saw Sarah and held the pot up inquiringly.
No, thought Sarah, her stomach contracting. She grimaced at Charles and went to the pantry for tea.
Charles said into the phone, “She’s up. Let me see if she’s up to talking.” He covered the receiver. “It’s Lottie.”
“Ask if I can call her back,” said Sarah, filling the kettle.
Charles did so, laughed, and hung up. “No, she’s never speaking to you again.” He surveyed her face and looked her tall self up and down. “You don’t look sick,” he said. “In fact you look better than you ought to and too young for an old fart like me.”
“Eye of the beholder,” said Sarah. “What did Lottie want?”
“You, of course.”
“She say why?”
“No, but I’d guess the usual,” Charles said. “Her parents.”
“You mean her mother,” said Sarah wryly. “Don’t be so judicious. It’s only me.”
Lottie, their granddaughter, belonged to their firstborn, Charlotte, and was named for her. She’d been given her nickname to avoid confusion, but it suited the girl’s light, free-spirited nature. Lately her rising hormones had brought stronger moods, many of them dark. At fifteen Lottie was volatile and given to melodrama. Charlotte, high-strung herself, had no idea what to do with the adolescent changeling in her house, so Sarah was a drawbridge, separating mother and daughter until the traffic on their troubled waters could pass.
The teakettle whistled, and Sarah poured boiling water into a heavy mug, over a pouch of ginger tea. She sat down opposite Charles at the table inside the kitchen’s broad bay window. “Thanksgiving’s less than two weeks off,” she said. “I need to plan, though the thought of all that food’s a bit much this morning.”
“You going to call Lottie first? She was heading out soon.”
Sarah tried, but Lottie had already left on some Saturday jaunt. Charlotte, after a brief and stiffly cheerful conversation, said she would tell Lottie that Sarah had called.
Sarah hung up, disheartened. She gathered cookbooks but then sank into her chair and stared out at the late fall garden, trying, as she had countless times, to remember when she and Charlotte had first lost track of each other. As she often did amid thoughts of her oldest child, she wished her other two, Stephie and David, lived nearby. She felt no tension with them.
Sarah shifted her gaze to Charles, engrossed in a book. “Remember the first time it was just the two of us?” she asked wistfully. “Before the kids?”
He glanced up, preoccupied. “Anything in particular?”
“All that sweaty sex.” She smiled and got up to fix some toast.
“Who, us?”
“Us. Don’t you ever think about those days? They come back to me all the time lately. Sometimes I think I remember every minute; other times I think I made it all up. Or I can’t tell the difference.”
Charles looked up at her, considering. “I prefer the present.” With that he closed his book, planted a kiss on the crown of Sarah’s head, and started back to his office over the barn. As a young man he had meant to study history, before medicine proved a stronger calling. Now he was writing a Lucas genealogy, conducting his research on the Internet. Since his retirement a dozen years earlier, he had written a social history of their village, Rockhill, and had self-published the diary his mother had kept as a World War I nurse. Charles was disciplined and happy. Sarah often envied his routines—mornings at his desk, errands in town, lunch with friends or meetings with environmentalists, then afternoon chores or rambles with the dogs in good weather. She joined him on those long walks when she could, but her days refused to conform to anything like a schedule. She had her own kind of discipline, which kept their lives and house in order, but she didn’t have Charles’s long attention span, and she wasn’t creative.
Sarah made more tea and began riffling through the cookbooks. She sat planning the holidays until almost noon. The sun circled past her right shoulder. Now and then some high, fast-moving clouds cast brief shadows on her lengthening list of tasks. Before Thanksgiving was over, she would feel Christmas bearing down—the last one of the century and the old millennium.
CHARLES AND SARAH’S YOUNGEST, David, arrived early from Massachusetts on the day before the holiday. Sylvie and Ruckus reached the door first, barking excitedly. David bent to greet them as Sarah rounded the corner from the hall to the foyer. She meant to embrace her son but stopped suddenly, surprised to see a small child—bright-haired, wearing red—back up a step at the sight of the dogs, her eyes frozen wide, chubby hands in the air. Then she flung herself at Sylvie’s neck, accepting wet kisses with glee.
“David!” Sarah cried, delighted. “I didn’t expect you for hours. Who’s this?” She went down on one knee to meet her unexpected guest. “Hello, sweetheart. I’m Sarah. What’s your name?” The little girl backed away, as she’d done before the dogs. Her dark blue eyes turned solemn.
David hugged his mother as she rose in some embarrassment. His leather jacket was stiff from the cold, his neat beard coarse and springy against her cheek. Sarah looked up at him and saw the young Charles, tall and handsome. David said, “This is Hannah, Mom. Hannah’s three and a half. And this,” he added, drawing a slender young woman indoors, “is Hannah’s mother, Theresa McDermott. Better known as Tess.”
Sarah smiled and held out her hand. “Forgive me! I was so taken with your daughter.”
Tess’s hand was warm, her grip firm but not hard on Sarah’s joints. “It’s good to meet you in person, Mrs. Lucas. I’ve seen photos of everyone in the family—David has prepped me well.” She threw him a teasing glance. She was tall, with the same pale blond hair as her daughter, the same clear eyes and skin. A certain asymmetry in her face saved it from being just another pretty one. Overall, she had an inquisitive, intelligent look.
Hannah tugged shyly at Sarah’s sleeve. “What’s his name?” she asked, patting Sylvie’s broad, glossy head.
“He’s a she, honey. Her name is Sylvie. And this curly guy is Ruckus.”
“Hi, Sylvie,” Hannah crooned. “Hi, Ruckus,” she added, extending her hand to the smaller dog, who obligingly licked it and wagged his stumpy tail. “Ruckus is a funny name,” she announced, and giggled.
“Well, he’s a funny dog,” said Sarah. “Go on into the kitchen, all of you. I have a feeling someone there will be very happy to see you.” She’d heard Charles come in through the mudroom, returning from errands. Driving into the barn from the village road, a rutted dirt byway through the woods, he wouldn’t have seen David’s car in front. Sarah suddenly wondered why David had come in that way, through the door on the wide porch. Family usuall. . .
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