Surrender, New York by Caleb Carr

Author:Caleb Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

{ii.}

Once down in the Kurtzes’ backyard again, I found Mike very concerned that we get back to Shiloh so that he could change into appropriately clean clothes for dinner with my great-aunt Clarissa: as usual, his fear of offending her in any way was very real. And, as cocktail hour was in fact fast approaching (and you did not mess with Clarissa’s cocktail hour), I asked Ambyr to pull the boys into shape so that we could get under way. This she did, quickly morphing from the secretive, wise, and flirtatious young woman I had just observed to the full-on matron of the house, barking at Lucas and Derek, using her cane at once to navigate, herd, and threaten, and telling them she didn’t want to hear about their coming back out of the house in clean T-shirts and jeans. The two youths apparently knew that this was Ambyr’s no-bullshit voice, and moved quickly to wash up and change. Eventually they reemerged, scrubbed, combed, and wearing collared shirts and khaki pants that, during their first few minutes in them, might just as well have been medieval plate armor. Ambyr herself came out a few minutes later, having changed into a more elegantly styled summer dress than the one in which she’d greeted us; and apparently my reaction was a little too obvious, because Mike began laughing quietly again, passing me by on the way to the garage, twirling his keys and muttering those same words: “So fucking dead…so fucking dead…”

But, whatever our respective conditions, we all piled into the car, Marcianna in the front seat, now, by the window, and me sitting between her and Mike. I told Lucas and Derek to let Ambyr have the rear window behind Mike, an order they didn’t question, I can only think because they immediately recognized its purpose: if she could not actually see Death’s Head Hollow and Shiloh, she could at least enjoy its scents and sounds.

This she did, and quite a bit. Lucas played guide, sitting in the middle of the seat and pointing out the sources of the various sensations that Ambyr experienced. I confess that I had long since taken many of these for granted: not just the obvious ones, the songs of birds whose young were just fledging, the ancient fruit trees that grew in discrete clusters at various spots, even the smell of the cow dung that filled the pastures with the arrival of the rich, midsummer grass that the animals mowed down as if they were precision machinery. I was a bit ashamed for not having more often appreciated all these and more of the riches that the hollow offered up without fee; and at one point, when I turned to Mike as Lucas kept up his commentary, I saw in my partner’s face a very deep sort of contentment and even happiness, one that matched the statement he had made to me before we departed for the Kurtzes’ house: that our life in this place,

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