The Game of Love and Death Read online

  To Adam: Love has forged no finer heart than yours.

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  THE figure in the fine gray suit materialized in the nursery and stood over the sleeping infant, inhaling the sweet, milky night air. He could have taken any form, really: a sparrow, a snowy owl, even a common housefly. Although he often traveled the world on wings, for this work he always preferred a human guise.

  Standing beneath a leaded glass window, the visitor, who was known as Love, removed a small, pearl-headed pin from his tie and pricked his finger. A bead of blood rose and caught the reflection of the slice of moon that hung low in the late winter sky. He bent over the cradle and slid his bleeding fingertip into the child’s mouth. The baby, a boy, tried to suckle, his forehead wrinkling, his small hands curling into fists.

  “Shh,” the figure whispered. “Shh.” This player. He could not think of one he’d loved more.

  After a time, Love slipped his finger out of the boy’s mouth, satisfied that the blood had given the boy a steady heart. He replaced his pin and regarded the child. He removed a book from his pocket, scribbled a few lines, and tucked it away again. When he could stay no longer, he uttered two words, as softly as a prayer: “Have courage.”

  The next night, in a small green house across town, his opponent made her choice. In this house, there was no leaded glass in the windows. No gracious nursery, no wrought-iron crib. The child was a girl. A girl who slept in an apple crate — happily so, for she did not yet know of anything else.

  In the house’s other bedroom, the child’s grandmother slept lightly, listening from some ever-alert corner of her mind for the sounds that would indicate the child’s parents had returned home: the creak of a door, the whisper of voices, the careful pad of tiptoeing feet.

  The old woman would wait forever to hear those sounds again.

  Wearing a pair of soft leather gloves, Love’s opponent, known as Death, reached for the child, who woke and blinked sleepily at the unfamiliar face overhead. To Death’s relief, the baby did not cry. Instead, she looked at her with wonder. Death held a candle near so the child might have a better view. The baby blinked twice, smiled, and reached for the flame.

  Pleased, Death set the candle down, held the baby close to her chest, and walked to the uncovered window, which revealed a whitened world glowing beneath a silver flannel sky. She and the baby watched the snow fall together. At last, the child fell asleep in her arms.

  Death concentrated on her essential task, relieved when she at last felt the telltale pressure behind her eyes. After much effort, a single black tear gathered in her lashes. Death removed her glove with her teeth. It made hardly any noise as it hit the floor. With her index finger, Death lifted the tear.

  She held her fingertip over the baby’s clean, warm forehead. Slowly, carefully, she wrote directly on the child’s flesh a word that would be invisible. But this word would have power over the child, and later the woman she would become. It would teach her, shape her. Its letters, seven of them, gleamed in the candlelight.

  Someday.

  She whispered this into the baby’s ear:

  Someday, everyone you love will die. Everything you love will crumble to ruin. This is the price of life. This is the price of love. It is the only ending for every true story.

  The letters sank into the infant’s dusky skin and vanished as if they’d never been there at all.

  Death put the baby down, removed her other glove, and left the pair of them on the floor, where they would be discovered by the baby’s grandmother and mistaken for something else. The gloves would be the only things she would give the girl, though there was much she had taken already, and more she would take in the years to come.

  For the next seventeen years, Love and Death watched their players. Watched and waited for the Game to begin.

  BENEATH a heavy cushion of clouds, Henry Bishop stood in the soft dirt of the infield. The space beyond and between the first two bases was a fine place for thinking. It smelled like cut grass, and the Douglas firs that wrapped around the outfield sealed out the noise of the rest of the world. Henry swallowed, crouched, and socked his glove as the pitcher let loose with a fastball. The batter swung and connected — pok! The ball leapt off the bat and streaked through the infield. Henry jumped and reached, but the ball took its own surprising course past the tip of his mitt.

  When his feet touched the ground again, Henry had an epiphany about the rhythm of baseball, and why it meant a damn to him.

  It was connection. Without the answering swing of the batter, the work of the pitcher meant nothing. Likewise, the fielder’s throw found its meaning in the baseman’s glove or in the grass. The connection completed the rhythm. Two opposing forces crashed together with their individual desires, creating something unpredictable between them. Triumph. Disaster. Heartbreak. Joy. Baseball was a love story, really. Just a different love than the kind he’d always sought.

  His feet touched the grass as the team’s center fielder, Ethan Thorne, bare-handed the drive on the run, his long and loose limbs so sure of every movement. Ethan fired it at Henry in time for him to tag the runner dashing back toward second. Henry loved being part of this complicated life-form made from the hands and feet of his schoolmates.

  “Nice save,” called the coach, who wore a cap, sweater-vest, and necktie that almost cleared the distance from his belly to his waist. “But use your glove, Mr. Thorne. That hot
dogging is going to leave you with a busted knuckle.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ethan said. “I thought I’d return the ball faster that way.”

  The coach snorted and shook his head. He looked up at the sky, grimaced, and scrutinized his athletes. The practice continued a few minutes more, until something in the air shifted. Henry felt it as it happened, this sudden burst of pressure. The rain turned from a light mist to a regular shower, darkening the players’ shoulders. Puddles, sizzling with falling water, filled the low spots on the diamond.

  Holding a clipboard over his head in a fruitless attempt to keep the rain at bay, the coach blew his whistle. “Hit the showers! Everyone but Bishop.”

  Henry jogged over and looked down at his coach.

  “Usual drill. Bring in the equipment and clean the mud off the bats and balls. Make sure you get them good and dry or we’ll have to replace them, and that’s just not in the budget.” He glanced at Henry’s sagging socks.

  “Yes, sir,” Henry said, half expecting the heat on his face to turn the rain to steam.

  A sparrow lighted on the grass nearby and tugged at a worm that had been lured by the pounding drops. The bird cocked its head at Henry, appearing to study him intently. Henry pulled up his socks.

  “Once you get this cleaned up, you can go,” Coach said. “I’m heading in. It’s a mess out here.”

  Henry nodded and bent to pick up the closest ball. He winged it into a bucket and did the same with the next and the next, never missing a throw, even as he moved farther and farther away from it, creating a steady thup, thup, thup of baseballs as they piled up. Rhythm. Connection. They went where he did, like shadows, like ghosts.

  Henry whistled as he worked, the theme from a Russian ballet he’d played in the school orchestra. He lifted his cap to wipe water from his forehead and moved on to the bats, gathering them into bouquets that he swung as he walked. He rinsed them, dried them, and lowered them into a wheeled cart, which he pushed toward the storage shed with one hand as he carried the ball bucket in his other, his face angled away from the rippling curtain of falling water.

  The beauty of the all-boys preparatory academy invariably filled him with awe. It was a symphony of red brick and white paint nestled in an evergreen forest. Even on a rainy day, it was a splendid thing to behold. He was glad for the scholarship that secured his spot on its edge, and hoped for another to carry him forward through the University of Washington in the fall.

  When Henry arrived in the locker room, Ethan was still there, wrapped in a white towel, although everyone else had gone home.

  “I should’ve given you a hand,” he said, rubbing a smaller towel against his dripping hair. “I can be a real heel.”

  “My job,” Henry said. “Not yours.”

  “Well, if that doesn’t stink,” Ethan said. “You’re soaked clean through. And your shoes … I don’t know why you just don’t take my old pair. They’re in much better shape —”

  “It’s fine, Ethan. Really.” Henry set his cap on the bench, pulled his wet shirt off over his head, and let it fall with a slap to the concrete floor. “Don’t worry.”

  By the time Henry finished his shower, Ethan was dressed, looking neat and confident in his school uniform, his hair parted sharply. He turned toward the fogged-up mirror, cleared a circle with his fist, and adjusted his already smartly knotted tie.

  “Malt sound good?” He looked at Henry’s misty reflection. “Guthrie’s is always crawling with girls this time of day.”

  “Nah,” Henry said, ruffling his hair to peaks with his towel.

  “You’re certain?” But even as he asked the question, Ethan looked relieved. His expression was strange. But Ethan could be complicated, especially about how they spent their free time together. Henry had learned not to ask. He moved the fingers on his left hand, practicing the melody of a new piece he was working on. He itched to have his double bass in his arms for real. The feeling and ritual always soothed him.

  “Say, you don’t have other plans, do you?” Ethan asked, a vaguely hurt look in his eyes. Ethan always hated it when Henry made other plans, as if he didn’t want Henry to choose any other best friend. Not that he ever would.

  But Henry didn’t want to admit he intended to spend the evening in the carriage house, practicing. Ethan would give him an earful. “Oh, say, I’d meant to ask about your English thesis.”

  “Henry, that’s not due for more than two weeks and this is Friday. The weekend, for chrissakes.” Ethan slung his satchel over his shoulder.

  “Doesn’t have to be tonight,” Henry said. “I thought you might like to get started.”

  Ethan tugged the hair on the top of his head, ruining his perfect part. “No, no. I know what I want to say in it. There’s no rush. But this isn’t going to get in the way of your own schoolwork, is it? Because I can probably —”

  “It’s no trouble,” Henry said. He balled up his towel and tossed it into the bin. “I like doing it. Stop worrying.”

  Ethan grinned. He drummed his fingernails against the doorframe, a quick rattle of sound, and then pushed on the door. Outside, the rain had stopped, but the world around Henry still felt as though it was about to crack open. He hurried after his friend. The world could fall into pieces if it wanted. Ethan — and everyone else — could count on Henry to hold up his part.

  FLORA Saudade stood on the lower wing of the butter-yellow Beechcraft Staggerwing C17B, ready to refuel the plane. She ran her hands over the upper wing, loving the way it was set behind the lower one. This little detail was everything. No other biplane was crafted this way. It made the Staggerwing an oddity. Flora, an oddity herself, loved that about it.

  It made the plane look fast. Even better, the plane was fast: blisteringly so. The previous year, a pair of aviatrixes had flown a similar model across the country and won the Bendix Trophy, along with a seven-thousand-dollar prize. The thought of speed like that set off fireworks in her chest. If only.

  But this particular plane wasn’t hers. It belonged to Captain Girard, who’d known her father in the Great War and who’d been something like a father to her since she was a baby herself, teaching her everything he knew about airplanes since the day she told him her dream of flight. He’d hired her on as one of his mechanics. He had an official pilot, though, a man who used the plane to ferry executives to their meetings around the country because this was faster and more impressive than travel by rail.

  There wasn’t a businessman around who’d trust Flora to do the actual work of flying him, although plenty had unknowingly trusted her to make sure the plane was safe, which was every bit as important. People were funny about things they couldn’t see. If they couldn’t see it, it wasn’t there. Or at the least, it didn’t affect them. But the world didn’t work that way, did it? There were things all around that you couldn’t see, and these things had power.

  And so, even though the captain had been nothing but generous, it would take years of what she made at the airfield and at her other job, singing at the Domino, to afford a plane of her own. A Staggerwing could cost seventeen thousand dollars. She’d have to win something like the Bendix to afford the down payment. Which she couldn’t do without a plane of her own.

  Frustrated, as always, Flora reached up to fill the gas tank on the upper wing, inhaling the blue-smelling fumes of ninety-octane fuel. She caught a glimpse of the sky and frowned. The clouds overhead didn’t look good. She hoped they’d hold off for an hour or two so she could get in a flight. But you never could trust a spring sky in Seattle.

  She hopped down, her boots crunching on the gravel runway. She climbed on the other wing to fill the tank on the opposite side. Fueling the plane always took a while: one hundred ten gallons of gas was a fair amount, and the men at the airfield were about as keen to help her as they were to see her in the cockpit.

  She checked the snaps on her blue canvas coveralls. Securely
fastened. She had a superstition that if she wasn’t buttoned up, nothing else could be. And while she was under no illusions about her own mortality — everybody and everything died someday — she aimed to keep that someday far in the distant future. Just thinking of it gave her a headache.

  The plane looked good, so she turned the props over by hand to make sure no engine-damaging oil had accumulated in the pair of bottom cylinders. Satisfied, she opened the door on the port side and climbed in past the pair of seats in the back. Feeling her usual preflight giddiness, she walked forward to the front, where the polished wood on the instrument panel beckoned.

  She strapped herself in and looked out the windshield. It wasn’t raining yet, but it would be soon. She could feel it, the sense of change and trouble in the air. Because the plane had a tail wheel, she couldn’t see the ground around her. But she’d checked and trusted it was clear. One of Captain Girard’s men waved a flag and Flora accelerated. When she reached forty miles per hour, the tail wheel lifted, giving her better visibility. She pushed the engine more, and at sixty miles per hour, the plane rose. Faster still, and she was fully airborne.

  Flora smiled. Every time, this separation of herself from the earth below was a miracle. She rose, and gravity tugged downward on her belly as she ascended and nosed south. If not for the clouds, she’d be able to see Mt. Rainier, a snow-capped volcano that overlooked the city like a pointy-headed god. Below her, Lake Washington extended its own limbs, a long green-gray body of water that reminded her of someone dancing. The lake’s south end looked just like an arm flung skyward, where the north was a pair of bent knees. Pointed Douglas firs and brushy cedars surrounded it. And then, clustered around twisty roads, tiny houses and all the lives and chaos within.

  She exhaled. The sky was hers. Hers alone. And it was forever, and when she was in it, she was part of something infinite and immortal. As long as she took care of the plane, it would take care of her. It was nothing like the jazz music she performed at night, which was never the same thing twice: sometimes wonderful, sometimes agonizing, always dependent on the moods and whims of others, influenced by the appetites of the audience.