An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  She stumbled tearfully through an account of all that had happened from Thanksgiving night, when she told Charlie about Bobby serving in Vietnam, to Claire’s exit on New Year’s Day. “Charlie will never forgive me for driving her away,” she said. “Never. He didn’t want me to tell her at all. And now I think, he was right. I was being selfish. It was for me, really. Telling. I’d convinced myself I had to tell them the truth. That I was doing it for them. But all it did was create total devastation – for everybody.”

  “Bullshit,” Tom said. “Don’t run that trip on yourself. You did the right thing, the only thing you could do. They’ll see that, eventually.”

  “Claire, maybe,” Nora said. “Charlie?”

  “I don’t know Charlie,” Tom said. “I don’t know the two of you together. But you’ve been married – what? Twenty years? Surely, that counts for a lot. He’ll come around. Won’t he?”

  “The problem is,” she said, crying again, “Our whole life together was built on the fact that neither one of us ever wanted to look back – and I can’t not look back anymore. Charlie still doesn’t want to look back. He’s scared to death of it. I don’t even know if he can.”

  “You love him,” Tom said.

  Nora nodded, covered her face with her hands.

  “Then, probably, eventually, you can work things out.”

  She looked up, looked at him – as familiar to her, as real as her own lost self. “I love Charlie, with Claire. I love the three of us together, the family we’ve been. But –”

  Tom waited.

  “I never, ever loved Charlie completely, just Charlie, the way I loved you. It was just one more thing I lied about – only that lie was the worst kind, because I was also lying to myself. What am I supposed to do with that?”

  An ore boat appeared on the horizon and they sat, quietly, watching it make its slow progress southward. The waves washed in, gray-green, depositing tiny, glittering shards of ice along the shore. It was cold, getting colder. Nora shivered, and Tom drew her close.

  “What if you went back with me?” he asked.

  She shivered again, though this time not from the cold.

  “I’ve got a studio apartment in the attic of my house. I never rent it; I don’t want the hassle. You could use it for a little while. As long you want. The new semester just started. Maybe if you’re close, if you could talk to Claire a little bit at a time –

  “I know,” he said. “There’s the problem of what she’s going to think about me. But we’re not . . . I don’t think either one of us is ready to –”

  “No,” Nora said. “No.”

  “Then if you’re going to tell Claire the truth about everything, don’t you think she could believe you were telling the truth when you said she was the reason you’d come back with me? It would be the reason.”

  She didn’t think Claire would believe it; she wasn’t sure she completely believed it herself. But the thought of seeing Claire, putting her arms around her as she had done when Claire was a little girl, being there if Claire needed to cry or to rage at her –

  “Look, if you think it’s a bad idea –”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, what would a good idea be? I can’t keep on with Charlie the way we’ve been, especially knowing we’re never going to agree about what’s best for Claire in all this. Maybe if I go, maybe if she’ll talk to me –”

  “So, okay,” he said. “Let’s give it a try.”

  He stood, pulled her up – and kept hold of her hand as they walked back to the beach parking lot, where his truck was parked. Astro hopped in first, sniffed the passenger seat thoroughly before Nora could nudge him out of the way and climb in herself.

  “He smells Maxine – my dog. She’s usually the one who sits there.”

  “Oh,” Nora said, shocked by the realization that she’d be leaving Astro, too, when she went. He sat on the seat between them, looking at her, his head cocked. She reached to scratch behind his ears, which he loved and which usually calmed him, but he ducked away to lay his head on her shoulder, as if to hold her in place, and she put her arm around him and petted him, running her hand repeatedly from the top of his head, down his back.

  “It’s okay, buddy,” she said.

  Tom glanced at her, started the engine. It was still early, the town deserted as they drove up Main Street – past the Friendly Tavern and Diane’s dark shop. Past the Hummingbird Café, its blue neon coffee cup glowing. The nursing home, where Jo slept.

  “Which way?” he asked when they got to the highway.

  Nora directed him and he turned right, onto the gray ribbon of road she’d traveled countless times toward home. Yesterday’s snow, still untouched, sparkled in the fields and on the boughs of the pines.

  “Beautiful country,” Tom said, and she nodded, her eyes burning with tears.

  Charlie was in the kennel run, bent over, a half-dozen dogs jumping up all around him, begging for the treats he always kept in his jacket pocket. He stood when the truck pulled into the driveway, watched as Astro bound out of it and headed toward him, his tail wagging wildly. Then Nora.

  “I know what you’re going to tell me,” he said, when she reached him. “Don’t bother. Just go. Okay? Just goddamn it, go.”

  “I’m going to Bloomington to try to talk to Claire. That’s all. Charlie –”

  But he turned and walked away from her, Astro trotting behind him.

  Inside, she was surprised to see how completely she’d cleaned the kitchen before she left to meet Tom: every surface clear, the dishwasher loaded – as if she’d known she would not have time to clean it up after her walk, as she usually did. She paused briefly at the door to the sunroom, thinking the geraniums probably needed water – but why bother? Once she was gone, Charlie would either care for them or not. So she kept on, upstairs, past Jo’s bedroom, where Charlie’s books and music CDs were in a clutter on the bedside table, to their own room at the end of the hall.

  They’d borrowed a suitcase from Diane when they took Claire to Bloomington last summer, Nora suddenly remembered, and there was nothing to pack her clothes in but a couple of beach totes and an old pink duffel bag Claire used for sleepovers when she was a little girl. She filled them quickly, with whatever was at hand. Last, she tucked in her favorite picture of Claire – seven years old, wearing overalls and a baseball cap, her two front teeth missing. A smile on her face as big as the sun.

  Nora slept most of the way back to Bloomington, waking now and then, disoriented – not by the sight of Tom at the wheel beside her, so familiar and dear, but in remembering, a heartbeat later, that it had not always been this way. They talked a little when she surfaced – Tom talked. He had a second apartment, he said, above his garage. He told her about Kate and her son, Cody, who lived there – rent-free after he realized that Kate made just enough money, waitressing, to go back to school if rent weren’t an issue.

  “I figured, a couple of years – what’s the big deal? It’s not like I need the money. She’s a good kid, a hard worker. And I get a kick out of Cody. He’s eight. He loves to hang out in the garage and hand me shit when I’m working on my cars. Or sit on my motorcycle. I get him root beer in bottles and keep it in the little fridge out there. So, you know, we can have a few beers together.”

  He drove steadily, stopping only once at a gas station, where they fueled up, took a bathroom break, and got sandwiches to eat on the road. Late in the afternoon, he turned on the radio, found an NPR station.

  “Bulking up for Baghdad,” the announcer said, and launched into a story about the troop build-up in the Persian Gulf. Attacking Iraq now was all the more crucial in light of North Korea’s recent claim to possess nuclear weapons, according to President Bush – this despite analysts’ warnings that North Korea had far greater capacity to wreak havoc than Saddam Hussein, even if the inspectors did turn up the weapons of mass destruction that so far remained elusive.

  “Fucking asshole,” Tom said.

  Entering Bloomin
gton, they saw the occasional antiwar bumper sticker. “War Is Not the Answer,” “Think! It’s Patriotic,” “Yee-haw Is Not a Foreign Policy,” “What Would Jesus Bomb?” Kids driving, mostly – stuff piled high in the back seats. Bass thumping. Pulled up to a stoplight, you could hear it – even with the windows closed. Heading back for the new semester.

  Claire and Dylan might be on the road, too, coming back from his home in Cincinnati. Never in a million years could she have imagined that a time would come when she’d have no idea about her daughter’s plans. Thank God for Dylan, she thought. At least she wasn’t alone. He was a good boy, solid – and he loved her. He’d help her through all this. She wondered how he had explained Claire’s sudden appearance to his family, this girlfriend they’d never met. Had he told them the truth about why she’d come; if he had, would it make them think Claire was somehow . . . unsuitable? Had Claire told him everything? Nora hoped she had.

  They were quiet driving the last few miles; darkness had fallen by the time they turned onto Kirkwood Avenue. Students roamed up and down the street, some hand-in-hand, some in groups, laughing, probably catching up with each other after break. A boy whizzed by on a bicycle, his head bent into the cold. Tom turned onto North Grant Street, drove a few blocks, and pulled into the driveway of a wood-frame house. There was a light on in the upstairs apartment, one illuminating the narrow iron stairway that hugged the side of the house.

  “I turned the heat on before I left,” he said. “In case –”

  “Thanks,” Nora said.

  He opened his door. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving again. Let’s go to my place first; I’ll fix us something. Then I’ll take you upstairs.”

  Maxine bounded to the door when they entered, wagging her tail wildly. She barked half-heartedly at the sight of Nora, but leaned into her hand when Nora bent to scratch her ears. Then sniffed up and down her jeans. Astro, Nora thought, missing him.

  “We’re not talking gourmet here,” Tom said, retrieving deli packages, a loaf of bread and two Miller Lites from the refrigerator.

  “Good.” She laughed. “You being a gourmet cook could’ve tipped me right over the edge.”

  He fixed them turkey sandwiches, spooned coleslaw from a plastic container, set out a bag of chips. He held up one of the beers and cocked his head slightly toward her. She nodded, took it from him, popped the tab. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a beer – she and Charlie always drank wine – but it tasted good, familiar. The smell of it brought back Saturday night parties at the Sigma Chi house, Tom’s room there, the old farmhouse Pete rented out in the country, picnics in Brown County – everything.

  There was a school picture of a little boy on the refrigerator, some drawings of cars and motorcycles, one of a man and a boy – stick figures with big smiling faces, under a yellow sun.

  “Cody,” Tom said, when he noticed her looking at them. “The kid I told you about. I have a whole drawer full of pictures he’s made for me.”

  “He loves you,” she said.

  “Yeah. He does.”

  “There was a whole unit in my child psych class on kids’ pictures, how you could know so much about them by looking at what they drew. The size of people, where they’re placed. You can see what they’re noticing, too.” She smiled. “When Claire was maybe five, she started drawing all of her people with these gargantuan eyelashes. She went through this hilarious phase of drawing dogs with little circles on their butts with poop falling out of them.”

  Tom laughed. “What’s she like? Claire?”

  Nora showed him Claire’s senior picture, which she kept in her wallet.

  “She looks like you,” he said.

  “Her face,” Nora said. “But she’s got long limbs, like Charlie’s. She’s got his hands, too – beautiful, beautiful hands, with long fingers and perfect oval nails she keeps cut short because she plays the cello. Freckles, which you can’t see in the picture. She blushes when she gets excited or upset, which she hates, even though it actually makes her look prettier. She cries at the sight of a hurt animal, but never, ever when she’s hurt herself. Then she withdraws, broods.”

  “Like you used to,” Tom said.

  It startled her to realize that this was true. “I hated to cry,” she said. “I still do. I feel – stripped away.”

  Silence fell between them; Maxine watched Tom attentively.

  He smiled. “Think she wants me to tell her what she’s supposed to do with you?”

  “There’s a sixty-four thousand dollar question,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, my guess is it won’t be the last. What am I supposed to do with you, Jane?”

  “Nora,” she said. “Tom, I need to be Nora. For Claire –”

  “Right,” he said. “Of course –”

  “She’ll need that, I think. No matter what happens.”

  He nodded. “It’s pretty. Nora. I’ll get used to it. Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you up to the apartment.”

  She held the rail following him upstairs because she felt light-headed, faint. He opened the door, told her what she needed to know, then handed her the key ring, which also had a key to his house on it. “It’s pretty spare in here,” he said. “Feel free to come down to the house whenever you want.” He hesitated a long moment, his hand on the doorknob. Then he was gone.

  The space was spare, as he had said: just one room, a kitchenette, and a tiny bathroom. There was a foldout couch, which he’d had made up for her, an armchair and end table, a dresser. A Formica dinette table and two mismatched chairs. The walls were white, the ceiling was sloped low on two sides with dormers built into it, long window seats below, which Tom had shown her could be used for extra storage. It was exactly the kind of attic refuge she’d read about in books, coveted, when she was a girl, Nora thought – a room to dream in, to while away lazy afternoons imagining what your grown-up life would turn out to be.

  26

  “Hazy Shade of Winter”

  She slept poorly and missed the lake when she woke – knowing it was there, knowing she could step outside and walk across the meadow to the path through the forest that would take her to the shoreline in moments. She missed the sight of Astro, all coiled energy, bursting into the morning.

  It was still dark outside. The clock on the bedside table said six o’clock: the time she always woke up. Tom left for work around eight-thirty, he’d told her. He’d always hated getting up in the morning, she remembered. Always slept till the last possible moment, then dragged himself from bed like a gut-shot bear, grumbling, till he’d had his coffee. Had he ever gotten used to it?

  She got up, dressed. She put her few things away, sat down in the armchair, stood up again and paced the little apartment. Move, her body told her. So she slipped out, tiptoed down the stairs, and set out walking. She might have been Jane, she thought, hurrying down the street after Bridget on that long-ago night, a girl huddled against the cold, hurrying toward what would turn out to be her life. She let her feet carry her to the place at the edge of campus where she had stood, watching Bridget disappear into the trees. Then across University Avenue, up a brick path through the woods toward where she remembered the ROTC building had stood.

  Nora didn’t expect to see it, of course. But she was surprised not to find some evidence that it had been there once – a flat place, perhaps, a cluster of trees obviously younger than those around them, or even a new building replacing it. She picked a spot near where it must have been, stood, waited to feel – what? But she felt nothing, just cold. And a little foolish, though she told herself this wasn’t something she had planned to do. She continued on the path, which eventually wound its way to Third Street, where the big fraternity houses loomed like castles in the gauzy light of the streetlamps.

  There was a Starbucks open on University Avenue, and she bought a latte to take back to the apartment. Once there, she crept back up the stairs and closed the door behind her. She didn’t turn on a light. She sat down
in the armchair and sipped her coffee, watching the sky slowly lighten. At eight-twenty, she heard the engine of a car start and looked out the window to see the little boy, Cody, run across the yard, his backpack bumping, his arms waving – heading for Tom like a ball for a glove. Kate was out of the car, scraping the ice from the windshield.

  Not exactly a kid, Nora thought. She looked to be in her early thirties, dark and slim, with a smile so dazzling that Nora could see it from where she sat. Tom walked toward her, his hand on Cody’s shoulder, Maxine zooming back and forth between them until Tom reached the car and settled Cody into the backseat. He and Kate stood talking for a moment. She glanced upward, toward the apartment. Tom nodded.

  Was there something more than friendship between them, Nora suddenly wondered? Tom hadn’t said there was, but he hadn’t said there wasn’t, either. Or, if not Kate, someone else? Someone who might also know he’d gone up to Michigan and was waiting right now to hear whether or not she had come back with him? A woman he’d expect her to get to know, to be with? How would she be able to do that?

  Maxine barked once when she heard Nora turn the key in the lock, but greeted her, tail wagging, as if it were perfectly normal for her to be here. Tom had left a note on the kitchen table. “Made coffee. Not much in the refrigerator, but help yourself to whatever you can find. How about lunch? If I don’t hear from you, I’ll meet you at noon at the Uptown Cafe. It’s on Kirkwood, near the old Indiana Theater. Take care.”

  Nora poured a cup of coffee. No half-and-half in the refrigerator and the coffee was strong; Tom always made coffee too strong. But she drank it anyway, wandering through the empty house. The living room, with its big flat-screen TV, wall-to-ceiling bookshelves flanking the fireplace, black leather couches, and a deep, comfortable black leather reading chair. A guest room doubled as a study, with more bookshelves and the old oak desk they’d bought together when Tom started law school. A clinically neat bathroom – and in the medicine cabinet, no evidence of anyone but Tom. His bedroom, spare – and, in the closet, no evidence of anyone but him, either.