Not that all this was conscious in her. It resided in her breathlessness, it was in her hands that took his and closed the bedroom door and drew him to the bed and stripped his clothes from him and allowed him to strip the clothes from her, and it was in her hands that ran over the stubble of his whitewalled hair, that grabbed him down there, grabbed the part of him that may even have known Vietnamese women like this, that hurt these women and left them, women she could forgive him for, women she could forgive.
None of this was in her conscious mind. Not then, not since. But the first time they made love it was certainly present in her hands and her breath and in the tremors of her and the grinding in her and in the rushing and release in her and in her sweat afterward and in the lull.
On that night, after she and Robert had sex, when she was led to ask him what he’d actually done in Vietnam, when she heard how his job had been like research, how he was in a safe place counting and assessing men and weapons, how it was so very unlike combat, after she heard these things and then showered and dressed and came back to him and sat beside him on the bed and hooked her arm in his, after all that, she lied to him. And to herself. She said, “I’m so glad.”
Not entirely a lie. Her rational mind was glad. If she was to be with this man forever, as she already felt she might, and if she believed in the righteous cause of her generation, it was better that he had not taken part in the fundamental act that makes war evil. Her mind was content with that. Even grateful.
But she had expected the answer to be different. In her body, something was let down, something had lessened. Her body feared—her body knew—that even though her love for him would grow, having sex with this man would never again be as good.
His wrist falls from his forehead.
He looks away, out through the French doors.
Darla says, “Is he giving up?”
“I don’t think so.” Robert turns to her.
“How’s your mother?”
“Wallowing in it.”
Darla holds her tongue. About both of Robert’s parents.
“I spoke with Jimmy,” he says.
Darla gapes. “What?”
“My mother found his number.”
“You actually talked with him?”
“I did.”
“Wow.”
“She loves her melodrama.”
“But you called him.”
“I did.”
“For her?”
“He made the break permanent. Not me.”
She grunts softly in assent. “And he actually talked with you?”
“Talked. Some. It ended as you might expect.”
“He has his father in him. I can’t see him ever forgiving.”
Robert snags on this, though not about Jimmy. He masks it from Darla by turning his face away toward the veranda. He stays silent.
“You don’t think so?” she says.
He still doesn’t speak.
“I know it’s ironic,” she says.
“But true,” he says. “He’ll never forgive me for going to Vietnam.”
“And your father will always love you for it,” Darla says, overexplaining the irony to reassure him.
Robert rises abruptly, crosses to the French doors.
“You don’t need Jimmy’s forgiveness,” Darla says, thinking she’s read his gesture.
Robert turns back to her.
She cannot see his face with the afternoon sun in the trees behind him.
He braces himself to let go of his father. It’s easier to start with his brother, so he answers her, “I know that. I don’t even miss him, is the truth of it,” thinking, Nor will I miss Pops. Pops: The word belies his assertion. I won’t, he insists. But the man won’t let him go. Maybe when he’s dead. Surely when he’s dead it’ll all be over.
And Robert has another impulse. No. Not an impulse. More considered than that. When his father is dead, what is unfinished will not die with him, it will simply stay unfinished. Robert thinks: Tell him. Whatever the outcome. Go to him. Tomorrow. Tell him about the man in the dark. And tell him the truth. Tell him you can’t get over it.
Jimmy despises napping in the daytime. It is, for him, a lying down to a small death. But after Linda has made her announcement and made her suggestion and they have fallen silent, and after she has risen and bent to him and tried to kiss him lightly on lips that he will not lift to her, and after she has, instead, pecked him on the forehead and gone out of the break room and stopped at Jimmy’s worktable and put on her quilted coat and knit cap, and after she has closed the barn door behind her and, no doubt, gotten into her car and driven away to either Paul or Becca, Jimmy finds his eyes bloated with the wish to close. He lifts his feet and turns and stretches out on the sofa. Expecting sleep, he sees before him a vast expanse of meadowed snow, the tree line etched thinly at the far horizon, the sun low behind it, setting there he realizes, and he turns and turns and it is the same in all directions: He is alone; he is utterly alone. So he turns and turns and when he is once again facing the setting sun he can see something, far off, tiny still but recognizable as three figures against the snow. At first he is lifted by the sight of them, but then he knows who they are and he cannot imagine how they have come to be here, in this landscape of snow, in his Canada, but here they are, his mother and his father and his brother, and they’re coming this way. He thrashes. He sits up.
Mavis’s face is before him, her brow furrowed, her gray gaze gone sad.
She waits in silence as he squeezes his eyes shut briefly, clamps his two temples between thumb and fingers, waits for the wooziness of daytime sleep to fade. Finally he lifts his face again, looks at her.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Just the effects of the nap.”
“I mean otherwise,” she says.
Her manner with him over the past weeks, particularly when Linda was the seemingly routine subject between them, finally clarifies itself. “You knew,” he says.
She looks at him for a few beats, filling in the unspoken words between them. “Only guessed,” she says.
“This won’t affect any of you,” he says.
“I’m not worried about that.”
“I’m all right,” he says.
She nods, minutely, as if she’s doubtful.
“It’s an understanding,” he says.
“I don’t mean to intrude,” she says.
“Thanks.”
They stare quietly at each other for a moment.
Then he asks, “How was the stew?”
She flickers a smile. “I brought you some.”
“Good,” he says. “I’ll have enough for two nights.”
She puts her hand on his shoulder, squeezes it gently, and she goes.
He rises.
He crosses to the coffeepot, pours a cup, drinks. It’s no longer fresh. At the pay phone in Buffalo in July of 1968, after the click of disconnection from his father, Jimmy hung up the receiver, turned his back on the phone, and he looked at his watch. He didn’t need to know the time to know it was time to go. In the break room Jimmy does not consciously remember that gesture, but it and the reflex that animated it, that propelled him to the life he’s lived all the years since, is the same now: He looks at his watch. It is five minutes to one. He can be on Baldwin Street in three hours. Before the shop closes and Heather goes home. It is time to go.
Less than three hours later, Jimmy steps into his shop, the entry door’s retro brass bells jangling above him, the smell of mellowed-down leather filling him, two things that always give him a surge of pleasure, this space he has created, these things he has made. And the long drive has done him good. He quickly ceased thinking about Linda and instead revisited all of Heather’s knowing looks and admiring words, compressing them into an underlying narrative that reassures him he’s not about to make a fool of himself.
The shop is empty, including the checkout counter. He moves along the center aisle with a sudden and acute sense o
f Heather: In a place empty where he expected her to be, he misses her.
Then she appears in the doorway to the back room.
She’s wearing her sales-floor outfit, a jacket off the rack—today a lambskin bomber—over a black crewneck T-shirt. Black on black makes her dark eyes even darker, her skin even whiter. She brightens. His narrative falls apart. He will make a fool of himself.
She comes to him.
She stops just beyond reach. A bad sign.
“I didn’t expect you,” she says.
All he has is small talk. “Things seem slow, eh?” he says.
“Winter Wednesdays. I let Greta go home. She’s working up a cold.”
“Good,” he says. He hears the ambiguity. He quickly adds, “That you let her go.”
She smiles at the correction. Then she softens the smile at the edges and lifts her chin. An inquiry. A prompt.
Such things were part of the Highway 400 narrative.
She is saying but she is not saying.
An insistent part of him wants simply to thank her vaguely and claim that he only dropped in to see how things are and he’s meeting somebody down the street and has to leave.
So he tries to drag himself in the other direction by the improbable strategy of nodding at her chest. He means to indicate the bomber jacket. He says, “You’re modeling today.”
“I sold its mate this morning. The lady took one look and said, ‘I want what you’re wearing.’”
“On a Winter Wednesday to boot.” He knows he sounds lame.
But, generously, she laughs.
Overloaded with prompts, Jimmy is mystified why this should be so difficult for him. He’s never been awkward approaching a woman. And he offers himself an explanation: It’s too important, is why. This is different.
“You look beautiful,” he says.
Heather soughs, as if she’s been holding her breath. She gathers herself and says softly, “Thank you.”
And he finds himself needing to explain. To her. To himself. “You’ve admired how my spirit seems free,” he says.
He has more words but the effort of just these makes him pause.
She fills the pause, again softly: “Yes.”
“Free by ideology,” he says. “Free by protocol. Free by …” He searches for a word now. “… devaluing it,” he says. “Thus. Thus it’s devalued, the freedom.”
He stops. Tries to clear his head.
“I’m having trouble,” he says. “Putting it into words.”
“Do you have to?” she says.
Another invitation. He won’t ignore it, but he trusts it will stay valid for a few more moments. “I have to,” he says. “I think I understand. I was free because what my wife and I decided we were free to have wasn’t worth all that much.”
He finds that Heather has moved closer to him.
They are in each other’s arms.
And in the room above his shop Jimmy lies on his side, the fern frost on the window jaundiced by street-light, Heather spooned into him, her arm draped around his chest. He closes his eyes, discerns the soft touch of her nipples just beneath his shoulder blades.
He and Heather are quilted over, the room still cold. He’ll have her call someone to look at the furnace.
It seems to have been such a long long while since he had that thought yesterday. The flex of time.
And he thinks of dark matter, dark energy. How astrophysicists now understand that all visible matter—from the galaxies to our bodies to the strands of our DNA—makes up only a tiny percentage of the mass of the universe. How all of the rest of the matter and energy—unobservable, unrecordable, the dark 95 percent—somehow resides in the spaces formerly thought to be empty. How quantum physicists are beginning to theorize the existence of parallel worlds to explain the bizarre mechanics of matter in its smallest particles. How, as well, it’s known that our bodies are made up of atoms, electrons orbiting nuclei, with empty space in between, that our bodies themselves are mostly empty space. And so if dark matter and dark energy exist in the empty space between the stars, why should they not exist inside our very bodies? Are we not ourselves mostly dark matter and dark energy? And what if that’s where those parallel worlds reside?
Linda was wrong. Being with Heather won’t stop me thinking about what’s next. Linda was stupidly wrong: It’s not worry. For millennia we’ve all been thinking there’s a place for us other than the one we’re in, this savage place where we fight each other, consume each other. This place we must escape. From the sun to the moon to the earth, from Heather’s nipples to my shoulder blades, from her atoms to mine. In all the empty space within and between, there is consciousness, there is existence. Impervious to war and betrayal and hardness of heart. It’s the place we all will run to.
“Are you awake?” Heather whispers.
“I am,” Jimmy says.
“What are you thinking?”
Only in his wish to answer her does he realize: “How it was I came to Canada.”
Heather tightens her arm around his chest. “I can’t hold you close enough,” she says.
The next morning Heather and Jimmy rise late, her daughter having spent the night with the grandmother, who is accustomed to sending the girl off to school. They have to rush to get ready to open the shop on time, tussling for first use of the bathroom basin, pausing to laugh at feeling like a couple already. Robert and Darla rise in their usual manner, having gone to sleep in their usual manner, Robert distracted, this time by his intention to speak to his father, and Darla sublimating with Bach. She is to go for her run and drive to the hospital on her own in the late morning. Robert will head up earlier, though after Darla has left the house he lingers for another bean-grinding and brewing and a second slow sipping of Ethiopian coffee, in his reading chair facing his oak. Peggy sleeps late in her one-bedroom assisted-living apartment at Longleaf Village, exhausted by her husband’s pain, sorry the twin bed next to her is empty, dreading when it will not be. Bob is up early from his bunk bed at the Mercy Mild Shelter. He’s happy that North Florida is behaving in the way it often suddenly can, throwing off the cold, warming the morning. He makes his way to the woods near Munson Slough, where he will spend a couple of hours dry-firing his Glock, getting back his trigger control.
And a physical therapist at Archbold Memorial named Tammy, a former softball star at the University of Georgia, uncovers William with encouraging chatter about how tough he looks and how he’s going to muscle through this little episode. She unwraps his compression leggings and she straps a thick cloth belt around him, and she starts to get him up, get him vertical, get him on his feet with her help, just for a little bit, to prime his body to heal, to engage him in staying alive, to get him used to the cost. This is her specialty. She is a champ at this.
William is grumpy but compliant. He might think this is a good time in history to die, given what the world has come to, but he’s too pissed about it to succumb. So he is vertical now. And he feels something begin in the middle of the calf of his right leg. A pulling loose. Like an adhesive bandage that’s been on for too long being stripped off, beginning there in his calf and running now upward, behind his knee, and then curving to the inside of his thigh. It’s a good feeling. A letting go. But the rushing changes, as if the bandage finishes breaking away and something emerges from beneath it, a goddamn night crawler burrowing its way past his broken hip and up his spine, and William thinks, What the hell is that doing inside me? but it moves too fast for a worm way too fast and the blood clot hits his heart and the engine seizes in Papa’s Ford Runabout pickup, which is as old as me, and maybe this is when it finally dies, on this dirt road along Bayou Bernard and Papa has stripped off his shirt and has the hood up and he’s cussing like Mama won’t stand for, and now we’re sitting beside the bayou letting the Ford cool off and Papa cool off, and I’m a little behind him and sneaking peeks as usual at the slash of a scar below his left shoulder blade, and I been warned by Mama since I was toddling not to ask
him, since the scar was from the Big War and full of bad memories, but today I do ask and he turns on me and his hands come up but he doesn’t hit me, he just gets quiet and he gets sad and he takes me by the shirt and pushes me over backward, but not hard not to hurt me just to tell me to shut up, and he’s weeping like a baby with me at the train station and I’m in my uniform and there’s another Big War, and as I put my duffel over my shoulder it hits me like a rifle shot in the brain what it is that he’s been carrying around all this time, the fact that his battle scar is in his back, it’s in his goddamn back, he turned his back, and so I turn my back on him, I turn my own goddamn back and I run away from this man and I’m going up the stairs in a house in Mainz, and it’s just mop-up, we haven’t yet found a living soul on this whole block, it’s only us Patton boys tidying up with the Third Army that’s about to cross the Rhine, and I’m checking the second floor, just for procedure’s sake, and I’m at the top of the stairs and there’s a doorway to my left and I step into it and across the room the window is bright behind him and he’s sitting tall there and I can’t see his face, I can’t read his face for the shadow but his Schmeisser is crosswise in his lap and his hands are down but I don’t check where they are I just know they’re down but I don’t check if his shooting hand is near the grip and it’s all fast and my M1 is up and I’m squeezing and squeezing and the Kraut’s chest blows open and he flies back and he’s dead, and then I notice some little thing, no I don’t, not then, I just see it but I don’t really notice it, not then while I’m rushing inside over killing the enemy, rushing sweetly at that moment, sweetly like happens in a war, and it’s only years later, when my sons are about ten, about the age I was myself in the dying Ford, and it’s hot summer in the Ninth Ward and the afternoon thunderstorm has just passed and my boys take off their shoes to run barefoot in the wet grass, it’s then that I really notice the German soldier’s boots, which are sitting there beside him, the two boots straightened up side by side and his socks draped over them, his feet hurt, this guy, his feet hurt and he took off his shoes and socks so whatever is going to happen to him on this day at least his feet won’t hurt him so bad, and I turn away from my sons so there’s no chance they’ll glance back at me and see my eyes filling with tears, and not a week goes by for the rest of my years that I don’t think about that man and I squeeze the trigger and I squeeze and there is no rushing in me, no fucking sweet thing, my own chest cracks open and my heart seizes, and I come up the stairs and I step into the doorway and I see him sitting there and I notice his boots, and I take my hand off the trigger, I don’t squeeze the trigger, and the light behind him gets brighter but the shadow on his face fades away, and we look each other in the eyes, and it’s just two fellas in a sunny room
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