Where or When (27 page)

Charles picks up the note, walks to his study, at the front of the house. Of course he understands why she has left with the children: she cannot bear the house now, a house so full of memories, a house she cannot have. He wonders if he should call, decides he should not, not today anyway. He hasn't planned on coming here, hasn't planned on working, but as long as he is here, he wonders if he oughtn't to try to get something done—something to while away the hours until Harry Noonan opens the post office tomorrow. He could fill some cartons with his papers so that he could sort through them back at the motel Or perhaps, with Harriet and the children gone, he could work here for a couple of hours, listen to his messages, return the most important calls, get out some mail.

He enters his study, sees immediately another note on his desk. In his coat, he sits in his office chair, picks it up. It is written in purple crayon, on the back of a piece of his business stationery. The handwriting is Jack's.

He crumples the note in his fist, looks out his study window to the yard, where he can see the long rope swing he threw over the walnut for Hadley and the others. In the silence of his study, he opens the note, reads again the childlike scrawl.

The note contains only one word, a question.

Why?

 

 

 

 

The house was full of people, Stephen's brother and his wife, their children. They were solicitous and guarded. They wanted to ask, but did not, what exactly it was that had caused Stephen to be in the barn with a gun on Christmas Day. Stephen, in the hospital, would not say. Lily was told only that there'd been an accident.

I wrote the letter to you, as you had asked, and put it in the mail. I knew when I wrote it that it was irrevocable, and, when I mailed it, that it was irretrievable. I knew, too, that if a heart can be said to be broken, this letter would break your heart, because it had broken mine. And yet love—the love that we shared so briefly—lodges not in the heart but in the brain, and with the brain there are always thoughts, always memories.

The afternoon I handed the Express Mail package to the woman behind the counter at the post office, it seemed to me that I was giving over to her a great secret, forfeiting a mystery.

The next morning, the house still full of people, I dressed my daughter and put her in the car. We needed milk, cereal, eggs, bread for toast, and coffee. I did not want to think about when your post office would open, about how you would find the red-white-and-blue package, about how you would rip it apart, take it to your car. I did not want to think about your face when you had read the letter.

The A&P was not crowded; some early morning shoppers like myself, looking for their breakfast or thinking to get this chore done early. I put Lily in the basket in the cart, started down the aisles. Overhead was the piped-in music, a lazy drone I barely heard. I put bananas and oranges into the cart, potatoes for dinner. In another aisle, the next, I found cereal and coffee, put them idly in. I opened Lily's coat, I remember, shook open my own. It was hot inside the store; we were overdressed.

In the third aisle, the refrigerator aisle, I saw at its end a worker, a tall boy with pimples, in a white coat, whose task it was that morning to put prices on the orange juice, restack the eggs. I headed down the aisle, picked up a hefty gallon of milk, some yogurt, a container of cottage cheese. I was thinking about whether it would be more economical in the long run, since there were so many people in the house, to purchase cans of frozen orange juice rather than the brand in the carton that I preferred, when I heard the song.

Perhaps a bar or two had passed before it registered, before it stopped me, there in the middle of the aisle. I listened to its melody, its words, a simple pop song of no consequence to anyone else in the store, yet to me, at that moment, it was a call across the years, a cry across three states.

I began soundlessly to mouth the words. Lily looked up at me and smiled, then stopped smiling when she saw that I was crying. I put sound to the words, a hesitant, cracked sound that was something like singing. The boy, the teenage boy with pimples at the end of the aisle, heard my unfelicitous voice, saw me standing paralyzed with my shopping cart in the aisle. Another woman, an older woman with tight gray curls and wearing what we used to call a loden coat, turned the corner into the aisle, looked first at the boy, then at me, to see what was the matter. My voice is terrible; I am not a singer. But I didn't care. What was there to be ashamed of, what was there to lose? I opened my mouth wider. I sang as if were not normally chagrined by my voice, I sang as if I had wanted to belong to a band all my life, I sang as though the song were a prayer and I a priest, begging for its meaning.

The song—a simple song with enigmatic words and lovely flourishes—finished abruptly, leaving me stranded in the aisle to no applause.

I picked up Lily, abandoned the cart with all that I had put into it. I carried Lily to the front of the store, looked frantically for a phone booth. It was twenty past eight. I had to reach you before you went to the post office. I was crazed, intent. I was crying too—I didn't care. I yelled up to the manager, in his booth above the shoppers, to let me use the phone. He said there was a pay phone just outside the store, around the corner. I ran with Lily past the startled woman at the register, ran past the long line of carts, found the phone booth against the wall. I put Lily down, reached for quarters in the bottom of my pocketbook. Lily started to wander away; I put my leg around her, held her to me I found the piece of paper in my wallet, punched in numbers, fed the box with quarters as if it were a child you wanted to keep quiet with cookies.

The phone rang. A man answered. I asked for you. He said that there were no phones in the rooms, but he would be glad to give you the message. I told him very carefully what the message was: Don't open the letter. Go directly to The Ridge. I would meet you there.

I made the motel manager repeat the message. I told him it was essential that he give it to you. Essential. He said that he would walk straight over to your room, give it to you now, and that if you weren't there, he would watch for you, give it to you himself, in person, when you returned.

I thanked him, hung up the phone. I put Lily in the car, drove back to the house.

They were all in the kitchen, waiting for their breakfast, astonished I had returned without the milk and coffee. I said Hello and then Excuse me, and I ran upstairs to the attic.

In the attic, in addition to the trunk that had traveled from Springfield to Dakar and back to the farm, there were cardboard cartons of belongings from my father's attic that he had given to me several years before. The cartons had been placed along a far wall, behind other trunks, other boxes, in a position that had all but guaranteed their never being opened again. But I was on a mission, determined. No trunk was too large, no object insurmountable. I shifted heavy boxes, wedged myself in. I thought for a moment I might not get out. I made my way to the far wall where the cartons were.

When I reached them, I tore open their tops, upended the boxes onto the attic floor. There were showers of school papers and mementos. In one carton, I heard a promising clink. At the carton's bottom was a box of childhood jewelry—ropes of beads, a pin from the National Honor Society, a handful of gaudy rings. And there, tangled with a necklace, green and sticky with a substance that might thirty years ago have been Kool-Aid, I found the bracelet.

I held it in my hand, as if it were an ancient amulet I had excavated, its worth beyond understanding.

I put it on my wrist.

I went quickly downstairs to where the others were gathered. I hugged Lily, told her to stay with Stephen's brother's family. I told Stephen's brother I might be gone most of the day; it was important. Before he could think to protest, I ran out the door to the car.

I drove seventy, eighty miles an hour, hoping you wouldn't get there before me.

The lawns around The Ridge that day were covered in snow, a pristine snow with a crust that had not yet been trampled upon. I was sure that you would come. I remember feeling exhilarated with the knowledge that you would come, that within an hour or two you would be there with me. I did not precisely know how it would work, but I felt somehow that it would. We would talk, we would hold each other, and we would invent a life.

I thought that I would go for a walk around the inn, perhaps down to the lake. Then I went inside, asked the man at the desk, who knew me, if there was still the badminton court I remembered from childhood. He looked surprised, said yes, the court was still there, though not set up now, of course. But I could walk there if I wanted to. I told him I would like that. He gave me directions. It was across the lawn, down to the left. Behind a hedge. A flat grassy field in the summer, with a bench. I'd know it by the stone bench with the carvings, he said.

I walked across the lawn, making virgin footprints in the snow.

I found the hedge, covered with a thick frosting. I found the bench by the field, brushed off the snow with my gloved hands. I sat on the bench.

I looked across the grassy court, now covered with snow. The sun made a billion brilliant specks on the crust.

I looked across the grassy court. It was summer, and we were children.

And it was then, finally, that I could see it all.

 

 

 

 

A
GUST CATCHES
the metal motel door, slams it hard on his fingers. Charles winces, retrieves the door, pushes it against the wind, closes it. His topcoat billows out behind him. He bends into the gale, walking quickly to his car. In the parking lot, bits of debris and dust swirl and eddy, sending grit into the air, into his eyes. The ferocity of the wind surprises him, considering the clarity of the day. Overhead, evergreens sway and bend. A freak storm—a blow without the clouds.

He shuts the door, feels the sanctuary of the car, the quiet as well as the calm. He looks at his fingers, the bruised knuckles, the middle finger swelling already. Checking in the rearview mirror, he sees that his hair is wild about his head. He tries to comb it with his fingers. He notices, too, that his eyes are bloodshot—from too much beer, no doubt, but also from an almost superhuman lack of sleep. He cannot remember the last time he slept a whole night through, cannot really remember the last time he slept more than two hours straight. His face feels grainy, stretched, even though he has just shaved.

He puts the car in gear, heads toward the post office. If he has any luck left at all, Noonan will be there already, and more important, the Express Mail letter will have come in. As has happened to him before, he both dreads and hungers for the letter—hunger winning out. The open line of communication between them seems so fragile, particularly now, when he cannot talk to her on the telephone, when she has been so guarded, that he is eager to restore it, no matter what the cost. If he can talk to her, if she can talk to him, if they can be in each other's physical presence, then he truly believes that they will be all right.

He drives through town, the odd storm creating havoc in the streets. Townspeople, bent double, seem blown from open door to open door. Hats, newspapers, paper bags, trash, and Christmas decorations skim along the streets and lodge momentarily in doorways. He comes to a stop at the traffic light, doesn't like the perilous way it is swinging in the stiff blow. Harborside, he can see the water hit the seawall like a firecracker, explode in a spray that drenches everything within twenty feet of the wall—parked cars, hapless pedestrians, phone lines, the backs of shops. The tide is up. Any higher and there'll be serious flooding in a couple of hours. He thinks of the houses smack up against the water along High Street; there'll be anxious home owners there. He wonders if the spit will breach.

Noonan's Trooper is at the post office.
Yes.
If only his luck will hold, Charles is thinking, the letter will be there.