The Patron Saint of Liars (27 page)

I kept thinking the knee would take a turn and I would get back in. It was going to be a long war, everybody saw that now, and I thought there may still be time for me, but the knee wouldn't go along. Even when I finally got to moving around pretty well on my own, I could tell I was a long way from running off a landing craft onto a beach. Years off.

My school agreed to let me work at home, and every day Cecilia would bring me my lessons and the notes she'd taken in class. In truth, I was glad to have the work to do. It kept me busy. I was really a much better student those last months than I ever had been before. I sat at the kitchen table all day now, my leg stretched over several chairs, and I read books and worked long math problems in a notebook. My mother never bothered me. Until three o'clock every afternoon she treated me like I was in school.

Then at three Cecilia came. All day long I would watch the clock and think about where she was, in science class, in history, at lunch, walking over the school lawn, stopping to talk to a friend, winding her way slowly toward my house. At first she would get to the house quickly, half out of breath. She would tell me what everyone had said and done that day, acting out both sides of every conversation. She would hold my hand as she talked and sometimes her engagement ring would slip to one side and bite into my fingers.

But there was a war going on, and it didn't take her long to see men who had been hurt while fighting. I imagine she met men, too, ones who were just getting ready to go off. Me and my leg, stretched out in my parents' kitchen, didn't look quite as interesting, and Cecilia started to come late. Some days she didn't come, but sent somebody else instead.

Time went by slowly and winter seemed longer than I had ever remembered it being, but by the spring I was just wearing a light brace and could get around pretty well with a cane. I'd go for short walks through the neighborhood at night, waiting until it was late enough that I wouldn't have to stop and explain myself to everyone I passed. Sometimes I would stand stock-still in the driveway and shoot free throws into the hoop my father had put up on the garage when I was ten. Every time the ball went through, one of my sisters would run and catch it and bring it back to me.

Sometimes I would ask Cecilia about the wedding, but she would always say, when your cast is off or after graduation or not until you find a good job. We were breaking up, but the thing was, it wasn't like all the other times before. We were breaking up but she wasn't leaving. Cecilia sat the closest to me when my parents were in the room, and when I went for walks she wanted to come with me. And since I wanted her, needed her more than I ever had before, I took every act of kindness as a chance that things would work out after all.

But when we were alone she'd nearly pull her hair out in frustration. By the last month of school it was all she could do to drop my books on the table and go.

"I don't know why you can't pick up your things yourself," she said one day when she was giving me a math assignment. "Everyone knows your leg is fine."

"It is?"

"You're going to sit right there for the rest of your life, let everybody else take care of you. Well, not me. I'm not going to do it."

"You think this is all a joke? You think I should go down and reenlist?"

Cecilia looked so angry. She was hugging her notebook to her chest. I watched the ring on her hand. It was always there. I hadn't seen her take it off once, not since I put it on her. "Yes," she said slowly. "That's exactly what I think."

I tensed the muscles in my leg. Tense, release, tense, release, just like the doctor told me. "I want to," I said. "There's nothing in the world I want more. It's the only thing that could make half a difference to you, so you've got to know by now that I'd do it if I could."

She wouldn't say a word. Her face was as cold as anything I'd ever seen in my life.

"What I want to know," I said quietly, because in truth a big part of me didn't want to know, "is why you keep coming around. If this whole thing is making you so crazy then why do you bother?"

"What am I going to do? Have everyone in town say I broke off my engagement because you got shot?" She pulled out a chair and sat down at the table across from me. "It's all I ever think about. People at school, my parents, they keep saying how they all know this must be so hard for you and how great I am, helping you along. I hate it, you know? I really hate it. I feel sometimes like I'm already stuck in a marriage and I'm not even married yet." Then all of a sudden she looked up and stopped talking. It was like she realized that she was saying these things to the enemy, the person she was trying to get away from. She picked up her books and left without so much as a good-bye.

This is how crazy I was: I thought, if that's the reason she's staying, at least she's staying.

The principal of our school, Mr. Franklin, came to the house to give me my exams. He seemed to understand my not wanting to come back, and so he never suggested it, even though by that point everyone knew I could have returned to classes. "I've been going over your work, Son," he said, bringing out a file of papers I'd written. My mother put a cup of coffee down on the table for him and then left the room, even though it was clear she wanted to stay. Mr. Franklin spooned two sugars into his coffee. "I think you should consider college. You've done very well, now that you've stopped concentrating on athletics."

It's nothing but sheer vanity that makes me say this. Rose, I bet, would laugh if I told her that someone once said that I should go to college. But Mr. Franklin did.

The weekend before graduation it turned fiercely hot out of nowhere. Late May, nobody could figure it out. My mother was up in the attic getting down the last of the summer clothes, packing the sweaters away in mothballs. My father was working a lot, because that's the busy time of year for contracting. Cecilia came by when she knew my family was going to be around, because she'd come to a point where the idea of being alone with me was more than she could stand. As much as I tried to figure out what to do about it all, I couldn't. The truth is, I had started to hate her a little. I looked forward to her visits less and less. I was feeling half as trapped by the whole thing as she was. But it never occurred to me that I could have come not to want her. That wasn't the way it worked between us. I wanted her and she decided. That was the way things went.

So on that hot Saturday when she showed up at the house and found me on the couch reading, I'd just as soon she hadn't come at all. I wanted to find out what was going to happen in the next chapter, and she was working so hard to make it clear to me that she was sorry she was with me that I was half ready to throw the book at her. Then my father came in and said to her, "Cecilia, will you please get this boy out of the house? Take him down to the quarry, get some sun on him. He looks like the underside of a rock."

"I can't swim yet," I said. "It doesn't sound like much fun."

"You don't have to swim," my father said. "Just get some air, get out. Take the station wagon. Cecilia can drive you."

Cecilia looked at me, told me in her way, get me out of this. "That sounds like a good idea," she said.

"Cecilia doesn't have her suit," I said.

"So she'll borrow one from Martha. You're sounding like an old man, Son. You can't spend your whole life indoors."

So Cecilia went up to my sister's room and put her swimsuit on and then put her clothes back on top. I had to ride in the backseat with my leg up because my knee still didn't take to being bent. I waited for her in the car and when she got in she didn't say anything and I didn't say anything, she just drove to the quarry.

What I remember best was the heat. It felt good, the way the first few hot days will after a long, wet spring. The sun seemed to go right into your bones and work the winter out of you. I spread a blanket out on the ground and tossed my book down. Everything took me twice as long then, and Cecilia only stood there and watched. "I can't believe nobody's here," she said. "A day like this."

"It's early," I said. I pulled my shirt off over my head and stretched out on the ground. Cecilia took off her dress and stood there for a minute in my sister's bathing suit, which was too big for her. "What's that on your arm?" she said, leaning closer.

It was her name. I had never told her about the tattoo. I figured I would show it to her on our wedding night.

"Jesus," she said, reading it over and over again. "How could you have done that?"

"It was when I was in boot camp. I was drunk."

"Jesus." She walked away, toward the water. "Does anybody know about it?"

"My father's seen it, the guys in boot camp, a couple of nurses. That's about it."

"Your father's seen this? I can't believe you. Who would do a stupid thing like that?"

"It wasn't a stupid thing. We were getting married, I was in love. I got a tattoo." I started to stand up, but I don't know why.

"Stay there," she said, her voice full of anger. "Don't talk to me. Don't look at me." She walked into the water and then turned around again. "That's my name," she said. "You can't just go putting it wherever you want." And then she was gone, underwater, swimming out toward the center of the quarry.

I looked at her name for a while, tried to remember what I had been thinking that night. I loved her. I loved her even as she was swimming away from me, even as I was hating her. That's the way it is, when you've loved somebody your whole life. It's like a direction you go in, even when you don't want to go anymore. I lay back on the blanket and closed my eyes and felt the sun on my face. I listened to the sound of Cecilia's even strokes through the water and occasionally the sound of her diving from one of the rocks and thought, she'll stay out there her whole life rather than come onto dry land with me.

I read for a while and then lay on my stomach to watch Cecilia swim. She had been out there a long time. I don't know if an hour had passed, or two, but my skin was tight and red and I shaded my eyes with my hand to watch her dive. I thought that she must have gone down deep because she didn't come up. Then she did, came up and flipped her wet yellow hair aside and waved her hand and I started to wave to her. I couldn't remember if I was angry at her at that moment or not, and then she was gone again, back under the water. I found my cane and stood up. My leg was stiffer for lying still. Again she came up and her head was thrown back and her neck was long and wet in the midday light and smeared with a bright streak of red coming down from her forehead. Her mouth made one terrible round O. She was pulling air in, as much as she could get before going down again, which she did. The water set itself right almost immediately, smoothing over the place she had been so quick it was like nothing was going on at all. Nothing was wrong. It was like watching something very far away, something that had happened years before, even while it was happening right in front of me. She broke the surface again. She didn't make a sound, other than the splashing, because she wanted to save her lungs for taking air in, not forcing it out. Her wild eyes passed over me and suddenly I understood. That was still Cecilia and I was still here. It wasn't yet something that had happened, but something that was happening, and even as I understood this I stood there. I took a full minute to watch her suffer and watch her want me as I had wanted her all my life. Then I went into the water with my shoes and pants and brace.

The leg pulled down, but I was swimming. I did not see Cecilia. She had said as much with her eyes, that that had been her last time up. I dove down, let the weight of the leg carry me, and felt along the bottom in darkness. Huge rocks jutted up and I traced around them with my hands. The water made its own world, and I remember thinking this is where I'm going to die. I pushed myself up again and breathed like Cecilia. I made sure it was the right spot and then went down to feel the silt and rocks, some branches blown in by storms. I felt the pressure of the water, the way my leg pinned me there to the bottom. I came up again and gulped the air and thought how much bigger I was than Cecilia, how much more these lungs could take in. The third time down her hand brushed my face, not at the bottom but resting on the top of some branches, and I took it and pulled it up with me, forced her head above the water as if it would make a difference and I screamed, "Somebody help me." I was pulling two weights back, Cecilia and the leg and they both wanted me under. I put one arm beneath her arms and pulled myself backward, calling again and again until someone called back. A family I could barely see crested the hill when we were still twenty feet out and by the time the man had made it to the edge of the water, we were pretty much there. He only had to get wet up to his knees pulling us in.

I knew those people, they went to church with us. There was a basket of food on the ground that they had dropped and the mother was pressing her two children into her skirt so they couldn't see Cecilia's face, which was cut along her left temple. Her mouth was still in that same O. I lay back on the bank with her on top of me. Martha's swimsuit was half falling off of her it was so big, as if the water had made Cecilia even smaller. The man, Mr. Thompson, I can't remember now what he did for a living, he was trying to pull my arm off of her but I couldn't seem to help him. He was pushing on her chest, pushing her back into my chest, trying to work the water out of her lungs. Her hair spread out against my chest, so much longer and darker than it was when it was dry. The wife asked should she go and call for somebody but the husband said no, we should take her in ourselves.

"Come on, Son," he said. "Get up now." He helped me up and Cecilia just came with me and I knew the day was hot but I couldn't feel it anymore. I took her legs in my other arm and we walked back toward their car. The mother stayed behind. She wouldn't let the children in the car with us and they were crying. My knee was starting to swell and I was ashamed that I even knew how much it hurt.

Mr. Thompson opened the door of his car for me. "Come on," he said. He was a young man but he looked so old to me. He was sweating and his hair was slicked down against his head. "Get in the car," he said.