“You’ve only got about nine months left before college. You couldn’t wait that long?”
“No,” Lauren said, “I couldn’t.”
“What did you tell your father?” Savannah asked.
“What do you mean? I didn’t tell him anything.”
“So he’s just going to come home and find you gone?”
“Something like that.”
“So you can still go back,” Pam offered.
“He’s working the late shift. Or he’s gambling. Or he’s wasted. I stopped paying attention. He won’t be home until the morning. And by then he’ll think I’m in school. The plan was to get far away by then. Out of Iowa, at the least.”
“What about your mom?” I asked innocently. Everyone, in response, glared at me.
“Her mother’s not with us,” Pam said, speaking softly.
“It’s OK,” Lauren said. “You don’t need to whisper it. I’m right here. I remember that she died.”
“I’ll drive her,” Pam offered.
“Please,” Lauren said. She was close to crying. We all saw this. “Can’t I just stay here tonight? We can talk about it more tomorrow. Please?”
It was near two in the morning when Savannah and I were finally alone. Lauren and Pam were in the basement, setting up cots and sleeping bags. Savannah was on her third cup of coffee. Whatever had changed about her between 1952 and now, whatever gravity had done to her skin, whatever working at a midwestern library had done to her hair and her clothing, all of that disappeared after an hour in her kitchen, the present obliterating the past. As she wriggled in her seat, uncomfortable about this, about my being here in her house, about everything my face must have brought to mind for her, I tried to imagine her outside Lem’s apartment door, standing sheepishly behind his hanging laundry, and the face that came to me was this face: thirty-six, graying, tired, annoyed.
She began to shred a paper napkin lying on the table. She’d wadded it into a ball, and now, sighing, looking up at me every few moments with derision, she’d begun to make confetti out of it. “What are you doing here, Hilly?”
I opened my mouth to answer, and she cut me off.
“That’s rhetorical. Don’t answer. I have a feeling I know.”
She got up from the table and went to the cabinet to pour herself a glass of rum.
“I saw the business about your father’s diner,” I offered. “The rock.”
She hadn’t turned around. She was looking out the kitchen window, into the black night. “Like I said. I had a feeling.”
“I’m a reporter,” I said, trying to clarify. “It’s what I do. I report on race relations. Violence. That sort of thing.”
She laughed aloud. “That’s the worst job I’ve ever heard of.”
“It’s a job. It’s necessary. Don’t you think?”
“Newspapers, huh? I’d have thought you’d become a lawyer. Like your daddy.”
“No,” I said. “That was never on the table.”
“He’s on the news every day, it seems. Today, in fact.”
“Nothing changes.”
“Planes go up, planes go down.”
I made a bad attempt at imitating the chiming, ringing, cha-ching sound a cash register makes.
“That’s what I heard.”
“Nixon—” I started to say, but she put her hand up.
“I know. I read the papers. I really didn’t intend to start talking about this. Or Nixon. Let’s drop it.”
“That’s fine.”
“Good.”
“I don’t talk to him much anymore,” I said. “If it matters.”
“It doesn’t matter, Hilly.”
“I know it’s no consolation, but I feel like I should say that I’ve never stopped thinking about what happened.”
She turned around now, no trace of emotion on her face. “Let’s avoid the melodrama. You’ve already shown up at my doorstep unannounced. At midnight. With a girl I know who wants to run away. It doesn’t get any more dramatic than that. So how about we just go to sleep?”
“Whatever you want,” I said, getting up from my chair. “This is your house.” I thought again of Jenny. There was something in the tone of Savannah’s voice that matched the way Jenny’s sounded when she was disappointed with me.
“I have a husband,” Savannah said then. “This is actually his house. He’s away. Overseas. In Vietnam. I don’t know where exactly. I can’t get information. But that’s something you should know. ’Cause… ’cause I don’t know what’s got you here. But I think I can imagine. Knowing you. Knowing how you were. All right? You got that?”
“He’s the man in the pictures?”
She didn’t bother to tell me I was right. “You here to save me? Give me some more stuff you’re not using?”
“No.”
“You here to beg for forgiveness?”
“Maybe.”
“Tough luck.”
“But…”
“What did you think would happen?” she asked then, turning around, repossessed with some newfound energy, her hands quivering.
“I don’t know. I just wanted to find you and see you again.”
“Reconnection?”
“Maybe.”
“Is it innocent?”
“What do you mean? Is what innocent?”
“Do you have a motive? That’s what I mean.”
“My motive was to see you.”
“And then what?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You gonna take me to the movies?
“Huh?”
“Buy me a motherfucking milk shake?”
“What?”
Now she was close to me. Both hands on her hips, both wrists covered with bangles, rings on all of her fingers, her foot tapping now. “Did you think we’d run off together? Did you think it’d be romantic?”
I pursed my lips. She had begun to shake slightly.
“Did you think we’d just go off somewhere and make up for lost time?”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “I think I hoped that.”
“But I’m married.” She flashed her ring at me. A small band, a small stone.
“I know. You said that.”
“You didn’t think that’d happen, huh?”
“I didn’t think anything about it.”
“You didn’t get to fuck me then, so you want to fuck me now. Is that it?”
“Who’s being dramatic now?”
“At least be up front about it. I see it all over you.”
“You couldn’t see that on me.”
“Don’t be a prude. That is why you’re here. I know that. I just want you to admit it.”
“It’s more than that.”
“Is it? I don’t think it’s ever more than that. With anybody. But if it is, then tell me. Tell me why you’re here.”
“This is awful,” I said. And then, because I was drowning: “I couldn’t begin…”
She blew air through her teeth. “OK.” She took a step toward me. Same position: hands on hips, her feet tapping, bracelets clattering. “Fine. You’ve clearly got some delusion you’re suffering from.”
“It’s embarrassing to even say it aloud.”
“You can’t be too embarrassed. You’re here.”
“You’re interrogating me,” I said.
“Just tell me, then. Spit it out.”
“I just wondered about you. Didn’t you—”
“Let’s not do this.”
“What?”
“Talk about all that. Ask each other these questions.”
“Why?”
“Because your feelings will get hurt. That’s why.”
“You were the one—”
“What? I was the one to do what?”
“You were the one who kissed me.”
“When?”
“Back then,” I said lamely.
“Back in 1952?” she cried. “Back twenty years ago?”
I could barely nod. “You don’t
have to be cruel,” I said.
“Would it terrible to admit that I want to forget all about you?” she asked, her voice flat.
“If it was true,” I answered.
She grimaced. “It’s true to a point.”
In the basement, Lauren was sitting on her cot, pretending to read a battered edition of Madame Bovary. She was wearing a boy’s T-shirt and a pair of flannel boxer shorts. Her legs were thin, stubble above the knees. There was pink polish on her toenails, and I could smell that she’d just applied it, that odor of the paint still hanging around in the air. She heaved the book onto the floor. As soon as I came downstairs I’d seen that she was crying. The marks on her arms were pronounced. “Emma Bovary is such a hussy,” she said, trying to divert my attention. She dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her shirt.
I sat down on my cot. “Are you OK?” I asked.
My asking this question seemed to poke a hole in the dam. Now she was crying without trying to stop.
“It’s just… not good here.”
“We’ll figure something out. OK?”
“I thought she’d be OK with it.”
“With your running away?”
“Yeah.”
“Look,” I said. I put my hand out and took hers. She was cold. “I’ll help you. OK?”
She looked upstairs. “Can we talk about something else? I’m just slobbering all over myself.” A tiny smile broke through her crying. “How about we talk about you, OK? How’d you make out? Does she remember you the way you remember her?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “My first impression is no. No, she doesn’t.”
Lauren frowned at me. There were two small windows above us, dim light leaking through from the kitchen, upstairs. Shelves on three sides of the room were stacked with jugs of water, bags of rice, and canned vegetables. This, I realized, was a tornado shelter.
“She had that picture in her office,” she said. “Remember that.”
“I do,” I said. “Believe me.”
“Did you tell her?”
“I forgot,” I said. “She, uh… she got kind of mad at me.”
“She acts tough,” she said. “But I think it’s an act sometimes. She’s a softy.”
“To you, maybe. But for me, I think it was a mistake, coming here.”
She was quiet for a second. She seemed alternately like a woman my age, a woman I might meet in a bar somewhere in Cambridge or Berkeley or Charlottesville, and then, with her pink toenails and her tiny legs, like a thirteen-year-old.
“Have you really been in love with her forever?”
“Sometimes yes. Other times no.”
“You only get one of those in your life, I heard.”
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t know. Some magazine article, probably.”
I thought of Jenny. “I think it’s possible to fall in love as many times as you want.”
She smirked at this. “Really? Is that why you’re here right now, in this basement?”
There was a phone by the cot I was sitting on. I should call Jenny, I thought. Tell her I won’t make it home tomorrow, tell her to wire some of the money to me.
“So, your father is Arthur Wise,” she said. “What’s that like?”
“Problematic,” I managed.
“Problematic? Aren’t you guys insanely rich?”
“I’m not rich,” I said. “My father’s rich.”
“How rich is he?”
“Rich.”
“Like, how?”
“Rich. Really rich.”
“I’ve never really understood how you can get rich off plane crashes.”
“Class-action suits. You find some reason why a plane crashes, why it shouldn’t have crashed; you uncover some memo somewhere saying that the airline knew about it, that they were covering it up, trying to stretch their profit margin.”
“That sounds kind of grim,” she said.
“Then there’s the consulting work. Companies are so afraid to get sued by him that they hire him now to write up these indemnification clauses on the back of the tickets you buy. I don’t know if that’s the actual term. The fine print. Like: If you happen to die, it’s not our fault, your brother-in-law can’t sue us. That sort of thing.”
“I see.”
“To be honest, I don’t really know how it all works. But he owns a lot of real estate, too. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Lauren said, grinning.
“And commodities, I think. Oil futures. Various small companies. And insurance, probably. I think there’s a part of his company that sells insurance. And whatever else I don’t know about. He has his own law firm. Second largest in New York. Everything they bill, everything every lawyer in the firm makes, he gets a cut. He’s just a waterfall of money.”
“A waterfall.”
“He wakes up and money just comes out of the faucet.”
“Wow. Money running out of the faucet.”
And then, nervously flicking at a loose thread on the cot, I cleared my throat. I’d never discussed this with anyone before, certainly never confessed to a stranger the level of my wealth, however untouched the money was, however guilty and conflicted it all made me feel. Lauren was the first.
“There’s this account for me that I never touch. And because of that, I guess you could say that I’m rich. Very rich, even.”
“How much is in it?”
I shook my head. “Seventy million dollars,” I said. “Or something close to that. I don’t look at every statement. But last time I looked, it was seventy.”
Lauren rocked back from her butt to her shoulders, laughing silently. She’d stopped crying now. “What?” she whispered. “Are you kidding me? Seventy million? What! I thought you were going to say, like, two million or something.”
“I don’t touch it,” I repeated, and then I told this girl, this future runaway, this future millionaire herself, everything. About Boston Airways, Wren’s Bridge, Bluepoint, Lem Dawson, Charles Ewing, and then about Savannah, her shack at Emerson Oaks, those buckets, the carful of things I’d brought her way. And then: my father and mother and Robert Ashley, my house in Massachusetts, my job, covering race riots at the buckle of the Bible Belt. And Jenny. I said all of this without making any eye contact with Lauren.
When I was finished, all she said in response was this:
“Will you marry me?”
I smiled. “That’s all you gotta say?” I asked. “My whole life story, and all I get is a marriage proposal?”
“Do you know that you could buy the Empire State Building for that much money?”
“Let’s go to sleep. You’ve got a big day tomorrow. You have to finish running away, don’t you?”
“No,” she said, laughing. She stood up and got on the floor at my feet. “You’re marrying me. That’s what we’re doing tomorrow. Marriage. Chapel. Priest. Gift registry at Dillard’s.”
“I’m Jewish,” I said, “so we can’t have a priest.”
“Rabbi. Fine. I don’t care. I can be Jewish.”
“You’ll have to convert.”
“I love Barbra Streisand.”
“Good night,” I said.
“I can learn to cook.”
“Good night, Lauren.”
“Oh, right. You probably have a private chef.”
“Good night.”
“New plan. You adopt me. I become your daughter.”
“Seriously,” I said.
For a minute we were silent. On the other side of the thin wall beside my cot, the furnace churned. Finally Lauren turned to me, her face edging into a faint slant of moonlight.
“Will you help me get out of here?” she asked. She’d started to cry again. Just a little. A drizzle. “No joke. Will you? I need to get out of this place.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“Thank you, Hilly,” she said. “Thank you for helping me.”
“No problem, kid. Thank you for helping me.”
“Seriously. I’ll never forget it. Friends for life. Promise?”
Six
By morning Savannah had decided that Lauren was going home. There wasn’t much discussion about it. I’d come up the stairs with Lauren to find Savannah in the kitchen, looking like she hadn’t slept much, her arms crossed against her chest, her gaze unwavering. Savannah pointed at us. “You get ready,” she said to Lauren. “And you,” she said pointing at me, shaking her head. “I don’t even know what to do with you.”
Lauren started to cry and shot me a helpless, silent look.
“Don’t worry,” I said to her. “We’ll figure it out.”
“You promised, though,” she cried, before running back down to the basement.
Now I was alone again with Savannah.
“It’s not much of a surprise, now that I think of it,” Savannah said. “You find yourself some helpless young girl with a bad daddy. Try to save her.”
“She found me,” I said.
“You’re always trying to save people. That’s why you’re here, right? Save my father’s window?”
“What’s so terrible about that?”
“It’s insulting,” she said. “That’s what’s terrible. Let him save himself. Let me save myself. And let that girl down there—let her figure her life out. She’s a kid.”
Savannah kept herself as far from me as possible. When I moved into the kitchen, she switched places with me and went out toward the far living room window. She was in a lilac sweater, a turtleneck, a gold crucifix up over the lip of the fold. Her feet were bare, and I noticed that she had matching silver bands on the fourth toe, the ring toe, of each foot.
“It seems like it’s a pretty bad scene over there. And I think there’s enough evidence—”
“Listen, Hilly. It’s my house. I’m not getting involved. I’m taking her back. She’s leaving for college in nine months. She can wait that long.”
Implicit in the way she was talking—without eye contact, without any trace of softness in her voice—was the simple fact that she wanted to get rid of me after she got rid of Lauren. Behind her, out on the soy plantation, a tractor painted in Hawkeye gold motored past the window. I feel obliged to note here that the man on the tractor was black, as was a young woman standing in the field, watching him, a floppy straw hat shielding her face. As were two teenagers with burgeoning miniature Afros gossiping nearby, both of them in flared bell-bottoms. As were some farmhands who emerged as I watched, coveralls on, shit-splattered Wellies up to their knees. Later that day, I’d realize that all of Hove was as black as Ebbington was white: the men at the Esso station, the men flipping pancakes at the Liberty Café, the women selling wedding dresses on Frederick Douglass, the letter carriers, the butchers, the dentists, the judges, bailiffs, defendants, prison guards, hardware clerks, electricians, general contractors, ball coaches, chemistry teachers, portrait photographers, confectioners, even the elderly fellow who built caskets, the name of his establishment slightly too cheery for me: Bleavin’s Heaven Boxes.
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