An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  There’s so much I’ve forgotten. But this part I remember perfectly. I’ve dreamed it over and over these past months. The vast emptiness of early, early morning. Crisp, cold. The sky black, dotted with stars. Bridget ahead of me, walking at a quick pace, appearing, disappearing under the streetlights. When I realized she was heading for the ROTC building, I took off running after her.

  Here’s where the dream I have differs from what actually happened: I go into the building with her. I’m there when the bomb goes off prematurely. I hear glass shattering and see the windows blow out. I see the Bridget I first knew wheeling backward, on fire, her beautiful, long red hair streaming.

  The thing is, Tom, I’ve dreamed that dream so many times now, I half-believe I actually was in the building with her. But if I had been there, I’d be dead, too. In fact, we stood outside the building, arguing, until she took a package from the duffel then thrust the bag into my hands just before climbing into the window that had been left open for her.

  As for what happened after that, there was a terrible blast. Fire. Cam appeared, as if out of nowhere. I remember that – and that he was rough with me. Maybe I was screaming. I probably was. Like I said before, I remember being in a car with him, but not how I got there. I remember begging him to let me out, let me go. He was furious, raging about Bridget. He’d told her not to contact me – and hadn’t that been what killed her, after all? Letting me distract her from her purpose?

  I think I would have come back if he’d let me go that first night. But by the time I did get away, it seemed too late. But to be totally honest, there was this, too: I was so tired. There was something easy about accepting, finally, what that little voice inside me had been saying all along. You don’t deserve Tom, you never did. You’re not capable of being the person you wanted to be. Look at what I’d demanded of my parents, I told myself – then willfully, selfishly broken their hearts. I’d failed Bridget, I’d failed my students, who loved and depended on me. Worst of all I’d failed you and ruined all we might have had together.

  I wonder now where such shame comes from, the instinct to turn to shame first in trying to make any sense at all of what has happened to you. All I know is that my whole early life was shaped by it. “Is there anything that satisfies you, Jane?” my mother would ask, when I behaved badly or was moody and sullen. “Is there anything that makes you happy?”

  There wasn’t, really. I wanted. She didn’t understand that. She couldn’t see that I just wasn’t a happy person by nature. Her deep desire for my happiness, her belief that I could be happy if only I tried, oppressed me. It enraged me, which I knew was ridiculous, even then. What mother wouldn’t want her daughter to be happy? What kind of daughter hoarded any happiness that did come her way?

  But then.

  That first day with Cam, I found a set of documents in Bridget’s duffel. Birth certificate, social security card, driver’s license. I was smart enough to put them in a secret place, for when I mustered up the courage to get away from Cam. Nora White. I used to think about her: born the same year I was born, in St. Louis. Who was she? Most fake identity papers used names of dead people. I knew that and wondered, how did she die? But eventually she became me: a woman who’d lost everything through her own stupidity, a woman with no life, nowhere to go.

  It surprised me, in a way: it’s not as difficult to change your identity as you might think. Women do it all the time, even now – changing their last names when they marry. Really, it would be almost as hard to track down a high school classmate who’d moved away and married – maybe several times – as it would have been to find me. By the time I married Charlie and changed my name a second time, it seemed to me that Jane really had died on that Christmas morning.

  So much of what happened between then and the summer I landed in Monarch is a blank. Nobody ever questioned the story I told about my parents, dead in a car accident. How I struck out on my own afterwards. Even I didn’t question it after a while. I never thought about the past, lived only in the now.

  But, really, doesn’t that happen to everyone to some degree?

  I mean, life happens. Not that so much of it isn’t lovely: waves sparkling on the lake in the early morning, the smell of pies baking in your own kitchen, moths batting against the screens on summer nights. A child growing right before your eyes. Sometimes I think I could stack all of Claire’s school pictures top to bottom, kindergarten to twelfth grade, flip them like an animator to watch her grow, and the second it would take to do it would seem as long – or as short – as the years themselves took. Where do they go? Old people always say that. But it’s true.

  But here’s what I’m writing to you about, really: remember, I said in the first e-mail I sent you that I told Charlie about Bobby, that it didn’t go well? What started it was, he’s been upset with me because he thinks I’ve become obsessed with Iraq. What does it have to do with us? We had a nasty little exchange about it Thanksgiving night, which surprised and upset Claire. I was nasty – after Charlie asked, didn’t I think it was a good thing that the inspectors were there?

  Well, it doesn’t matter what the argument was about. Just that afterwards I felt ashamed of myself for hurting Charlie – and not for the first time in the past months. We’ve been – not okay, really, ever since Claire decided to go to IU. Worse since she left. And it’s been mostly my fault. So after Claire had gone to bed, I went downstairs and apologized – and told him about Bobby. That was three days ago, and he’s barely said a word to me since. I’m scared, Tom – I don’t know how long I can keep on this way.

  FROM JBMI65@aol.com

  TO TGilbert@gilbertlaw.com

  SUBJECT PS

  DATE SENT Tues, Dec 4, 2002 7:33 AM

  That day in Bloomington, you said you had a life. That it was good. I’m glad for that. What is it like? Tell me your greatest pleasures.

  FROM TGilbert@gilbertlaw.com

  TO JBMI65@aol.com

  SUBJECT Re: PS

  DATE SENT Tues, Dec 4, 2002 7:33 AM

  It’s pretty simple, really. The law practice – mostly civil rights and kids who get themselves in trouble somehow. I like it: license to fight. Though it’s depressing sometimes, how fucked up things are.

  Anyway. Work. The gym right after that, then I usually eat out somewhere. Evenings, I read – or watch a movie or sports on TV, depending the season. Tuesday is pool night. Weekends I’m outside whenever I can be. I ski in the winter; summers I go fishing way up in Canada. I’ve got a house on Grant Street, just off Kirkwood Avenue, a great mutt, Maxine.

  Pleasures (shallow): ’99 Corvette (red), ’97 Ford truck (black), ’67 GTO (maroon, mint condition), ’91 Harley Sturgis (black). Dad’s old aluminum fishing boat. Huge garage, mother of all garages. Probably, this won’t surprise you.

  Like you said, life happens. Mostly, I’m happy.

  Those first couple of years without you were tough ones, though. I’d go over to the Sig house on football Saturdays – you know, the old-fart lunch they always have. A lot of old guys with comb-overs, drunk at noon, talking about how great things were when they were in college. I’d go to remind myself of what I didn’t want to be.

  Sunday evenings, I’d decide what I was going to do every night after work. I’d make a list, stick it on the refrigerator and fucking do every single thing on it – even when what I really wanted to do was hole up and feel sorry for myself. I said I was going to do that stuff, so I did. I learned how to keep you in a certain place in my mind. I was pretty good at it, too, until Pete saw you that day.

  I went over to the house the Saturday after I saw you in October. Same scene, only now the old guys with comb-overs running the wasn’t-it-great-then trip are our age. There was nobody there I knew, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to see anyone. Just hang out, see what it felt like to be there. I wandered around. Checked out our composite pictures – down in the basement with the rest of the dinosaurs. Pete and I used to think that was hilarious. Like we’d never end
up there ourselves. But there we were, so clean-cut, faking it in our suits and ties.

  Really, the place hasn’t changed much at all. The dining room still smells like bad cooking mixed with sweat and beer. It’s still a pit upstairs. Remember the big clothes cupboard you hid in, holding the Bloody Marys, that night the fraternity police came through? It’s still in my old room on the third floor. I got a kick out of remembering how we used to sneak around upstairs. You’d have thought it was a federal offense. Shit. Now kids can do anything they want. Where’s the fun in that?

  Yeah, I know. I sound like those old guys, after all.

  Remember Pete when he came back that last time, how he was such a sanctimonious shit about the fact that I was in law school, you were teaching – we had plans for our lives. He was all about “Be Here Now.”

  Who’d have thought he’d turn out to be right? Trouble is, though, since I saw you, Now and Then feel like exactly the same thing to me.

  FROM JBMI65@aol.com

  TO TGilbert@gilbertlaw.com

  SUBJECT Re: PS

  DATE SENT Tues, Dec 4, 2002 8:37 AM

  I know. Me, too.

  23

  “She’s Not There”

  “I was thinking we should decorate Jo’s room for Christmas,” Nora said to Charlie. “It might ground her a bit. Or just be something pretty for her to look at.”

  He shrugged but agreed to drive into Traverse City to the Walmart with her, where they bought a table-top tree with tiny, twinkling lights. They picked up, then put down, a box of miniature glass balls – too dangerous – and bought a bag of candy canes to use as decorations instead. At home, Nora made a batch of the Mexican wedding-cake cookies Jo loved. She packed up the ceramic nativity figures Charlie had made in Sunday School when he was a little boy, the paint chipped from years of use, along with a few other things she thought might feel familiar to her: a nutcracker, a Santa wearing skis, a paper snowflake – brown at the edges now – that Claire had made in grade school.

  Charlie carried the box with the tree in it into the nursing home; Nora followed with the decorations and the cookies she’d arranged on a snowman plate. They passed through the lounge, where some of the residents had gathered to listen to a group of kids from the high school, decked out in Santa hats, singing Christmas carols.

  “Jo’s feeling a little under the weather today,” one of the nurses said. “Catching a cold, I think. She’ll be glad to see you.”

  But she greeted them with a blank stare. Her eyes were redrimmed, her nose rubbed raw. She sat in her recliner, facing the dark window – as if waiting for the birds to come back into her view. The TV was on – the 6:30 news. “Despite Iraq’s claim that there are no banned weapons in the country, despite UN inspectors’ failure to turn up any evidence of such weapons, 89 percent of Americans believe that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction,” Dan Rather said.

  But Jo wasn’t listening.

  Nora switched it off, bent and kissed Jo’s cheek. “We brought you Christmas,” she said. “Look. Charlie’s brought you a pretty little tree. And I made some Mexican wedding cakes. You’ve always loved those.” She took the plastic wrap from the cookie plate, but Jo looked past it to her bed, a weary expression on her face that spoke volumes: please.

  “You set up the tree,” Nora said to Charlie. “I’ll get her ready for bed.”

  Gently, she helped Jo to the bathroom and closed the door, knowing that it distressed Charlie to see his mother in such a private way. She pulled down Jo’s sweatpants, took off the Depends she wore now, and guided her to the toilet. When she’d finished, Nora wiped her clean with a warm cloth. She took off Jo’s top and pulled a fresh, clean nightgown over her head, talking quietly to her all the while – about Christmas and snow in the forecast and how good the cookies had smelled baking in the house.

  “Tomorrow you’ll have some,” she said. “You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

  When they came out of the bathroom, Charlie was sitting in exactly the same place.

  “Charlie,” Nora said. “I thought you were going to –”

  “Oh.” He looked at the unopened box beside him.

  “Never mind,” Nora said. She settled Jo into her bed, then took the tree from the box, set it on the little dining table and plugged in the lights. She arranged the nativity figures beneath it, set the nutcracker and the Santa on the windowsill, and looped the thread on Claire’s paper snowflake around the window latch – taking care not to block the view of the birdfeeder, working quietly so as not to disturb Jo, who had fallen fast asleep the moment her head hit the pillow.

  “Leave the candy canes till later?” she whispered to Charlie. “I’m afraid crackling the wrappers to open them will wake her.”

  He didn’t answer. He looked at his mother, and for an instant his expression was completely unguarded, bereft. Then he put his head in his hands and began to sob quietly, his bony shoulders heaving.

  “Charlie!” Nora said.

  He waved her away, and when she went to him anyway, threw off her touch, knocking her off balance, so that she was still reeling when he stood, suddenly, and bolted from the room. All this time, he’d refused to see what was happening to his mother, Nora thought – and how was she any better, dragging him over here with some convoluted idea that making Christmas for Jo would be a comfort for any of them? All she’d done was force Charlie to come face-to-face with one more thing he knew but couldn’t bear to know and hasten the speed with which their whole world was falling to pieces all around them. She grabbed her coat and hurried after him, past old ladies making their way back to their rooms after the Christmas program. Outside, sprung from the depressing atmosphere, the students were climbing boisterously into a van that had pulled up at the entrance, their shouts and laughter bright puffs in the cold, crisp air.

  “Hey! Mrs. Quillen!” a voice called.

  One of Claire’s friends, probably. But Nora didn’t look back.

  Charlie stood, jacketless, his fists clenched, in the parking lot nowhere near where his truck was parked. Nora stopped short of him, and he turned and walked away from her again – this time up Main Street. It was not seven yet, but pitch dark, nearing the longest night of the year. Cars moved slowly in the snow that was just beginning to fall, the beams of their headlights haloed in it. The streetlamps were haloed, too. They looked like a long row of angels.

  He was going to the Hummingbird Café, she knew – and he didn’t want her to follow him. She went back for his jacket, then walked to the café anyway and stood in front of the steamy window until he looked up from his favorite booth, where he used to sit on summer days at lunchtime when he was a little boy. She raised the jacket, he shrugged. She stepped inside and hung it on a peg in the entry, then walked the few blocks over to Mo and Diane’s.

  Shivering, not only from the cold, she stood on the sidewalk looking at the two of them framed in the dining room window – like any happy married couple, Nora thought – the remains of their evening meal, a bottle of wine, half-drunk, between them. Talking over the day’s events. She had thought . . . she had no idea what she’d thought, really – that they could help her? That they would know what to do? She knew what to do. She just didn’t want to do it.

  She walked back through the dark streets, into the café, and slid into the booth across from Charlie. His hands were on the table, cupping a full mug of coffee as if for its warmth. He wouldn’t look at her.

  “Hey, Nora!” said Renee, the waitress. “I never see you guys in the evening. What’s up? Coffee?”

  “Sure,” Nora said, ignoring the first question.

  “You’ve eaten,” Renee asked, pouring. “Charlie said he had.”

  Nora nodded.

  “I’m so sorry about Jo,” she said to Charlie in a low voice, when she’d gone. “I’m sorry for the way I’ve been since Claire left –”

  “Don’t say you’re sorry,” he said, bitterly.

  “But I am sorry,” she said. “About Jo,
of course. I’m heartsick about Jo. But it’s not only that. Charlie, there’s something we need to talk about if we’re ever –”

  “It’s about Bloomington, isn’t it?” he interrupted. “Why you didn’t want Claire to go there.”

  “I went to school at IU,” Nora said. “In the sixties. I didn’t want to go back. I just didn’t see how I could –”

  “Great,” he said. “First I find out you had a brother who died in Vietnam. So much for being an only child whose parents were killed in a car crash. Now –” He shook his head. “All those times my mom tried to get you to let her pay for you to go to college. You were too smart not to go, she’d tell me. She felt bad because she thought you were too insecure to give it a try. We both did. And you’d already been.”

  Nora’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Don’t cry,” he said.

  The words, spoken low and mean, felt like physical blows to her.

  “Charlie, can we go home?” she asked quietly. “Please? Can we talk there?”

  “Here’s as good as anywhere,” he said.

  The café was mostly deserted, she was thankful for that – and for the fact that Renee’s boyfriend had come in and she was fussing over him.

  “Need anything?” she asked, on her way to the kitchen.

  Nora shook her head, no.

  How many times they had sat here in this same booth over the years, drinking coffee, eating one of Jo’s good meals, maybe a piece of apple or cherry pie. If things were slow, Jo would slide in next to Charlie and give him a hug and a kiss, reach across the table to cup her hand over Nora’s and give it a squeeze, then fill them in on whatever news of the town had come her way that day. When Claire was a baby, Jo loved to carry her around the restaurant – the coffee pot in one hand, Claire balanced on the opposite hip. Later, Claire spent whole days at the café with Jo, who folded down a waitress apron for her, gave her a notepad, and let her wait on customers when it wasn’t too busy.