Forever (23 page)

(But deep down, don’t you think that Julie knows all about Annie?)

He did. Yes indeedy he did. And that’s why he was never going to see Annie again. That’s why his body felt like it was filled with concrete. That’s why—

The squeal of brakes followed by the inevitable sound of metal slamming against metal jerked Tom from his thoughts. Accidents happened frequently during rush hour on Rockville Road, and rainy nights like this upped the odds. A shudder rippled through him when he saw how close he’d come to being a participant in this crash. He shouldn’t have been driving anyway. When had taking stupid chances become his habit?

Sitting in the traffic jam caused by the three-car collision, he had nothing to do but continue riding his morose train of thought.

We all have our secrets, Tom
.

But would Eddie keep Tom’s secret? How exactly did Eddie fit into this picture? Where did his loyalties lie? Julie’s introduction on the night he’d met him—the night he’d met Annie too—replayed in his mind.

“Tom, this is Patricia’s
boyfriend
, Eddie” she’d said.

He hadn’t misunderstood, Julie had.
But that’s ridiculous
. Julie spent more time with Patricia than she did with him, how could she have misinterpreted Eddie and Patricia’s relationship? Yet, Eddie claimed that he and Patricia were just old friends. The pieces of this particular puzzle didn’t fit, but at this moment, Tom didn’t have the mental energy to try to work it out.

It was all he could do to keep from obsessing on Annie. He wondered if she’d searched for more records, or if she, like himself, no longer had any interest in Jacob and Maggie. The vision he’d had earlier came back to him, and he wondered what Annie would have made of it.
It doesn’t matter
. He would never tell her how Bennett stole Maggie from Jacob and then murdered him for trying to claim what was rightfully his.

The specter of political correctness prodded at him for thinking of Maggie as a possession of two rivals. But in the early 19th century, in the eyes of the law, a woman
was
considered little more than property. Back then, a man who shot another man for attempting to steal his “property” might not have been prosecuted at all. And later, when his wife and baby drowned, it would just be another tragic incident in his life. Poor man.

“Yeah, and none of that matters now,” he said, slamming his palms against the steering wheel for emphasis.

But once he’d started down that what-if road, it wasn’t easy to turn back. He wondered what it was like to be a man like Jacob, a man who stuck to his principles. A man with courage. True, his courage had cost him his life, but he’d died with dignity.

A horn blared behind Tom, disturbing his reverie, and he moved along with the traffic again, headed for home.

“I have no dignity,” he said aloud. “If you did reincarnate as me, Jacob, you picked the wrong guy.”

June 18, part two

E
ach lost in thought, Tom and Julie had eaten most of their dinner in silence. He missed Lindsay’s chatter and was about to say that when Julie spoke first.

“I’ve been thinking about going to California for vacation.”

Tom’s head jerked up. She faced him but her eyes focused slightly off to the right rather than directly at his eyes.

“But we always go down to the Gulf. Dave and I have both scheduled the time off from work. I’ve already bought the airline tickets.” Tom ticked off the list as if each item were proof there could be no possible change of plans.

“Would you mind?”

Would he
mind
? They’d visited his brother’s family every summer since Dave had moved down to the Alabama Gulf six years ago. It was tradition. Julie
loved
tradition.

“They’re expecting us,” he said. “You always look forward to this trip. You and Becky—”

“I have a chance to take a trip to California.” Her voice was unnaturally calm.

Finally, he understood. “You’re not talking about the
three
us changing our vacation plans. Who do you want to go to California with?”

“Some friends.”

“And who are these
friends
of yours?”

“Look, Tom,” she stood and picked up her plate, “I need this time alone. I’ve been studying so intently, and I’m going to be working long hours at the office soon.” She sighed and walked away from the table. “And . . . and this is an opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.” She scraped the remains of her food into the trash before continuing. “I honestly didn’t think you’d mind.”

Ignoring the implication of the last statement, he repeated his question. “Who are these friends you’ve planned a vacation with?

She set the plate on the counter and turned to him. “Patricia and . . . other friends.” She avoided his eyes as she added, “I don’t think you’ve met them.”

He’d known before he asked that Patricia was involved in this. But how was it that a trip to California was something Julie had wanted for a “long time” and yet never—not once—mentioned to him? Suddenly, Tom saw himself standing in the foyer praying for a heart attack and knew
this
is what Lindsay and Julie had argued about last night.

“What does Lindsay think about it?” he asked.

“She couldn’t care less.”

This time she looked him straight in the eye. She believed that. Apparently, she also believed
he
couldn’t care less. Julie was not asking for his permission to leave; she was going to California whether or not he liked it. And though her announcement had blindsided him, he wasn’t as angry as he expected a man should be when his wife proposed separate vacations. Instead, he was disturbed that part of him—the part that had gone rogue this month—felt relieved.

“When are you leaving?”

From the look on her face, he understood she’d been prepared for him to hit the roof. His calm had taken her by surprise.

“We’re leaving on Saturday evening.
This
Saturday.”

That last bit of news
did
cause him to lose his cool. “You’re leaving
tomorrow
?”

“I . . . I wasn’t sure I was going to go until today . . . until this morning.” She turned her back to him and placed her plate in the dishwasher. “That’s why I didn’t say anything until now.”

One of those words set off an alarm in his head. Julie hadn’t been sure she was going until
today
. And
today
, Eddie had told him he knew about him and Annie.
Today
, evidently, Dear Old Eddie had lied about keeping that a secret.

Julie stood immobile at the sink. He sat frozen in his chair, silently trying to make some sense of this situation. Although Julie taking a vacation without him was certainly not the norm, it wasn’t something he imagined Lindsay would label “disgusting,” something that would make her “sick to even think about.” So now, even though Julie didn’t seem angry with him, and he couldn’t really imagine she’d told Lindsay that her father was having an affair, Tom returned to his original suspicion—Julie and Lindsay
had
argued about his relationship with Annie.

There were questions he should be asking Julie, but he couldn’t face hearing the answers. Tom stood pushed his chair back from the table and stood. He whistled for Max. A minute later, the two of them drove away from the house in his truck.

* * *

Max sat happily in the front passenger seat, head out the window, ears flapping in the wind as Tom drove aimlessly for a while. Finally, he headed to the park where he’d walked with Annie the week before. In the glow of sunset, he unleashed Max and then slumped on a rain-soaked bench. With a cigarette clamped between his lips, he peered through the smoke and wondered at the calm he’d felt after Julie’s announcement.

Fourteen days ago, he’d been a man living a comfortable, if routine, life and the next day he’d become obsessed with a woman he’d first seen less than five minutes before. And because of that meeting, he was now trapped in a revolving time warp. Last night, he’d put that woman totally out of his life to save his marriage. But now—
yes folks, this is the whipped cream with a cherry on top
—tonight he’d seen the first goddam irrefutable evidence his marriage was over anyway.

“How did that happen, Max?” The dog merely looked at him. “I feel like I missed the road sign and entered the Twilight Zone unaware.” Max trotted toward the woods.

Tom leaned forward, took one last puff on his cigarette and ground the butt under his shoe. Resting his forearms on his knees, he watched as his dog ran back and forth along the edge of the woods, barking at some creature’s scent he’d picked up. Often he envied that freedom to be true to your nature. Max was pure Max. Somewhere in the last twenty-three years, Tom had lost sight of his own true nature.

He lit another cigarette and began strolling down memory lane. The Saturday morning in mid-June when he met Julie had been the kind of day that almost forced you to fall in love. And he did. He was twenty-three then, but because he’d been on his own since he was sixteen, Julie considered him far more mature than most of the guys she dated and she jokingly called him “Old Man.” They dated all that summer, and sometime in August, she began hinting they should get married. He hadn’t planned on getting married just yet, but the more they talked about it, the more it seemed a good idea. He gave up the fleeting thrills of his wild-oats life and proposed. They married five months to the day after they met.

Julie felt they should get “established” before starting a family, so Lindsay was born five years later. He’d always pictured himself with a big family, but after Lindsay’s birth, Julie announced she needed time before they had another. She stayed on the pill for three more years before they went into procreation mode again. As they waited for the next merging of egg and sperm, they watched Lindsay grow healthy and beautiful. The three of them were a happy family.

At first, he waited every month for Julie to announce her period was late. After a while, he tried not to think about it—sort of the watched-pot approach. Eventually he honed his disappointment into regret and finally into resentment. Once, when she was visiting her parents, he’d searched the house in a state of drunken paranoia, sure that Julie had never gone off the pill at all. He found nothing. Sometime during their fourth barren year, they’d discussed seeing a doctor, running tests, finding out who was at fault, but they never did. They didn’t really want to know. It was hard enough to accept there would be no more additions to the Cogan family without placing blame.

Since then, he’d often counted the blessings of being a family man with a beautiful wife and a perfect child. They had a good life.

But now, Julie was flying off to California—in two days. Would she come back? Wait. That wasn’t the real question, was it? Surely, she’d come back to Lindsay, to the house, to her life here. But would she come back to their marriage? No. He didn’t see that happening. She was leaving him.

Yes, he’d hurried it along these last two weeks, but the end had been in the cards for some time. There was no grand crisis in their marriage on which to place the blame. They’d just steadily drifted apart the last few years. Their mutual friends, from early in their marriage, had either moved away or divorced, either of which effectively ended the friendships. Their mutual interests had been few to begin with. He worked long hours; she joined social clubs. Then he worked longer hours, and she took craft classes.

The only thing they’d really shared was Lindsay, and neither of them could be faulted for the love and care they’d given her. But Lindsay was leaving the nest, and Julie had finally faced that the empty nest would be empty in more ways than one. But did that mean they couldn’t change things? Couldn’t they find a way to grow closer again instead of ditching the marriage?

“I don’t want a divorce,” he called out to Max.

The dog barked. Night had fallen; Max was a vague shape bounding across the park toward him. Tom felt tired. Exhausted. He ground out his cigarette and leaned back against the bench. Insects swirling around the sodium light above him caught his eye, and then the dog bumped his knee. He reached down to pat Max. Tom’s eyes flew open and his breath rushed out. The dog looking up at him wasn’t Max at all. It was some kind of hound. It was a hunting hound. And—
oh jeezus
—the hand stretched out to this dog was at the end of a buckskin sleeve. With another jolt, Tom saw that his other hand rested on the curly-maple stock of a longrifle balanced across his buckskin-covered knees. In a split-second, without any warning at all, he’d slipped into Jacob’s life again.

But this was no scene played out only in his mind.

While Jacob settled over him, Tom sat like stone, hardly daring to breathe. For a minute, he wore Jacob like a costume, and then they merged. The dog that was no longer Max trotted off toward the woods, and the body that was both Tom and Jacob stood up to follow. He felt the weight of the rifle in his hand, and the ground beneath his feet felt odd until he realized it was because he
could
feel the ground. Tom thought to look down at his feet, but his eyes would not follow his command. The best he could do was sense that he wore some sort of moccasins, thin-soled and flexible. What he
could
see was the woods before him, and he was astonished that he saw it so clearly. It was no longer night. With one more step, he walked out of the hot summer sun and into the midday twilight under the canopy of trees.

He was tired of swatting at mosquitoes in the sticky heat of this place. He was tired of following every trail in this Godforsaken state only to find that his Maggie was not at the end. He was bone weary and heartsick. The last person who kenned the name Elihu Bennett had lived back near Cincinnati. In the three days hard walking since then, he’d neither heard nor seen another trace of Bennett. The storekeeper in Ohio said Bennett was headed for new surveyed land along the White Lick in Indiana.

“What if they kept moving west, past Indiana?” he asked the dog at his heel. “Or turned south to Kentucky?” No, Eastern Kentucky was already too populated for Bennett. Jacob had crossed long stretches of the trail in this Indiana wilderness with no sign of white settlement, only an abundance of game that thrilled him. Although he’d never wavered from tracking Maggie, he packed a good sized bundle of pelts for the next trading post he came to.