by Sue Miller
As he drove up the worn-out dirt road, steering carefully around the exposed boulders in the roadbed, he wondered about how many other corners of this town he’d never cast his eyes on. Early in his life here, he’d tried to drive or walk everywhere. He’d explored the five cemeteries, one of them so overgrown that he wasn’t sure at first he was in the right place. He’d swum in all the ponds in town—Hurd’s and Green Pond, and the man-made one by the inn that had been torn down years before, and the one up here, Silsby. But sometimes, as now, driving somewhere, he’d realize he was seeing a road or a house or a vista that he’d never encountered before.
It made him think about how impossible it was for the fire-watch guys to keep an eye on everything, as Loren had said.
The road kept rising, and then suddenly it opened out to a clearing. To a hilly meadow, he saw, with a dirt track running up it. He stopped where he was, still partly in the woods at the field’s lower edge. At the top of the meadow, he could see a trailer perched on cinder blocks, a car parked next to it.
And a man—Tink—moving from the trailer to the car, loading something into the trunk, then bending over, rearranging things. He was wearing only jeans and work boots. Bud watched him until he stood straight, slammed the trunk closed, and went back inside the trailer.
He sat there, waiting, but Tink didn’t reappear. After a minute or two, he eased the car into neutral and let it roll silently back down the hill. Within a hundred yards or so, he spotted an area big enough to turn around in, and backed into it.
At home again, while he made coffee, while he sliced a piece of bread to put in the toaster, he decided he’d stop by to see Frankie today. Yes. He’d ask her out for dinner. He hadn’t really taken her out yet. He’d gone with her to the dance, yes, but that was different. Civic. Work related—he’d had to take the pictures, after all. Even if they had ended up later lying next to each other in a field, talking, kissing.
He stood at the sink drinking his coffee and looking out the window at the mountains beyond the river, at the road that cut horizontally between them. A lumber truck went by on it, a miniature from here, the logs so many twigs stacked up on its trailer. The mountain peaks were still in shadow. The only radio station you could get here was from Vermont, and the long-winded guy there was discussing the subtleties of weather in his self-satisfied way.
What were his intentions with Frankie? Sex. Well, yes. He’d thought about it, her, numerous times in ways that were at once all too generic—legs opening, et cetera—and very specific. Her face, her smile, the paper white of her skin, her tumbling hair. He liked her physically. He liked looking at her, he liked the way she smelled. He’d liked touching her the other night in the field. He could have made love to her there, then, if she’d responded to him with any answering passion. But she’d seemed hesitant. Not in a way that made him think it couldn’t or wouldn’t happen. In a way, instead, that seemed to him to spring from all that was unclear and unresolved and troubling to her in her life—and that seemed to be just about everything.
On the other hand, they were both freezing their asses off at that point.
The toast popped up noisily. Sometimes it flung itself out so enthusiastically that it landed on the counter, and he always felt cheered when this happened. Not today. “Wuss,” he said to this slice, nicely browned. He buttered it and sat down at the table, chewing contemplatively. He regarded this bread, from a bakery in Whitehall, flecked with seeds and grains and oats and flavored slightly with molasses, as one of the reasons for living where he did—though he would have been embarrassed to offer it as an argument to any of the friends he’d left behind in Washington.
The toast, and also the view from his house. When he was living in Washington, he’d watched television in the morning, the chatty news shows. Here he listened to the radio and looked up at the hills.
The angle out onto the hills was part of why he’d chosen the house. In itself, it wasn’t much. A small former summer cottage, awkwardly winterized. Its first-floor windows, which he imagined as charmingly multipaned in their previous life, were now huge, fixed, double-glazed picture windows. The ones upstairs had simply been replaced with cheap versions of themselves, but the double glazing up there had leaked at some point long before he had moved in, and the views upstairs were therefore all befogged—when you woke and looked out, the day always seemed grayish and unpromising.
He was watching the light shift in the room and half listening to the news while he ate. And then suddenly he was paying attention—they were talking about Kenya. Kenya and also Tanzania: bombings. He stopped chewing, hurriedly set his toast and coffee down, and crossed the room to the radio. He knocked his chair over in his haste, and it went scudding backward over the uneven floor. He turned the volume up.
The NPR correspondent in Kenya was talking about numbers killed. Large numbers. Thousands wounded. It was at the U.S. embassy. Not inside the embassy, they hadn’t gotten inside, but right in front. The other bombing, the one in Tanzania, was clearly coordinated with it—they had happened within minutes of each other.
He was thinking of Frankie. She might not know this yet, and it would be important to her. She might know people who worked at the embassy or someplace close to it. They said many nearby were wounded or dead. People just walking past, people in the building opposite.
He’d go to her place now, he thought. He’d let her know, if she didn’t already. He could stop by again later, he could ask her out then. He was already upstairs, getting a sweater, brushing his teeth. He didn’t bother to shave.
The sun was just entering the valley as he drove across it. He had the car radio on, in case there was more detail, but the hosts had moved on now—they were discussing the Lewinsky stuff again. He turned it off and drove in the relative silence of his car’s engine noise, wondering what this would mean to Frankie, how she’d receive it.
She came to the door in a bathrobe, her hair in a single braid draped over her shoulder. No makeup. White. Very white.
“This is early,” she said, with the gap-tooth smile that made Bud happy every time he saw it, no matter what else was going on.
“Yeah. For a reason,” he said.
“Come in, then. Tell me.” She had stepped back, and he came in. A low morning light streamed into the room through the windows over the sink. There was a book open, facedown, on the kitchen table, a paperback. A coffee mug sat next to it. Her robe was a pale blue, draped, clingy. He watched her hips under it as she walked back to the table and sat down.
He went to stand closer to her, by the table. “I just wondered, did you hear about the African bombings?”
“Oh, no!” she cried. She was looking up at him. He could see most of one breast, a minimal, graceful weight to its curve, very white, too. But now, as if in response to his news, her hand rose, and she pulled her robe together at her neck. “What happened?”
He explained what he knew, what he’d heard. He sat down next to her as he talked, watching her face, the anguish he could read there in response to what he was reporting to her.
When he was done, she was silent for a moment. “And they think it was terrorists?” she asked finally.
“Yes. They said some Islamic sect, I think.”
She shook her head. “Ah,” she whispered, frowning. Then, after a few seconds, her light eyes on him: “So, it was just the embassy?”
“I don’t know, Frankie.” He shook his head. “Damage to more than one building, I think they said. But I think it was just collateral damage. The embassy was the target, they seemed pretty sure. And then there’s the other bomb in Tanzania. But I don’t know, actually.”
“There are people I should call,” she said. She stood up abruptly, then stopped. “Ahm.” She was still frowning. “It’s what? Early afternoon there.” She bit her lip. She wasn’t really talking to him. “Maybe I should go up to my parents’.” She turned away from him. “Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.” She went toward the bedroom doorway.
“You could use my phone,” he said, watching her. “I’ll be out for a while. I’ve got an appointment.” He didn’t, but he could invent something to give her some privacy.
She looked back at him. “You know, that would be great. Just … so much less complicated.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
She went into the bedroom. He could hear her moving around, drawers being opened and closed, the rustle of clothing. He tried not to think of her taking her robe off, dressing, but was unsuccessful and, in spite of himself, turned on. When she emerged, she was wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved white T-shirt. She carried a green sweater. “I’ll just wash my face,” she said.
“Fine. I can wait.”
She was in the bathroom for several minutes. When she came out, she’d loosed her hair from her braid—it fanned out over her shoulders. She’d put on eye makeup, and lipstick, too. He felt pleased, imagining this was for his benefit.
She took her cup to the sink and rinsed it. She picked up her book from the table. “I better take this,” she said. She tucked it into the big straw bag she used for a purse. “Sometimes you wait a long time for a connection. And then it disconnects, and you have to start all over.”
On the way back to town in Bud’s car, he turned the radio on. At seven, the top of the hour, the bombings were discussed again, but again, the hosts moved on quickly to the domestic news. He turned it off.
“I think I’m going to take you to my house,” he said. “Not the office.”
“Okay.” There was a question in the word.
“Yeah, it’s just that the office line will ring off and on, and people will be leaving messages. My line at home is more private, less of a hassle.”
“Okay,” she said again.
“You think you might know someone …?”
“I don’t know. But the wife of a friend—a colleague, really—works at the embassy, or she did. And who knows? Any one of a lot of my friends might have been there for something or other. I’d just like to check.” There was a silence. “I might call New York first, to see what they know.”
“Okay.” They came to the paved road, and Bud turned left.
“I’ll keep track of the charges,” Frankie said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“And Bud?”
He looked over at her. What?
“Once I’ve done all that stuff, do you mind if I call around locally a bit?”
“No.”
“I told my mother I’d research care options for my father. She … was having a hard time the other night, after the fire.”
“I’m sorry.”
There was a long silence. “Clearly, I should get a phone.”
“If you’re going to stay,” he said.
“Even if not. Too much going on.” She had turned away and was looking out the window. They were passing the town green. There were two large dogs, one white, one yellowish, wrestling. She turned back to him. “Who’d have thought it?” she said. “I come home—back to the States—for downtime. A sabbatical. A retreat in the country, to think things over. And all hell breaks loose here, and now all hell breaks loose there. What does it mean, you think?”
“That there’s no such thing in life as a sabbatical?”
She smiled, a quick sad smile.
At his office, after he’d dropped Frankie off, after he’d shown her how the coffee machine worked, he started his workday. He had a message on his voice mail from Georgie Morrell saying that Paul Ardery had been taken to the hospital with what they thought was a heart attack. He’d have to follow up on that. And Matt Reinhart had called, the guy from the Boston Globe who’d started to follow the fires after the piece of Bud’s that AP had printed. He was just checking in, wanting to know about any new developments. Bud called him back and left a message about Frankie’s parents’ fire. Then he wrote up his own account of that one for the paper, mentioning that Tink Snell had phoned it in.
When he was done, he made himself a fresh pot of coffee. As it was dripping through, he heard Barb come in downstairs, and he called down and offered her a cup.
She came up, and they talked, as they sometimes did. She had heard about Loren driving Tink and Gavin down to the state police barracks the day of the Rowleys’ fire. “But just to talk, they say. And you know what I say to that? Enough already. Just arrest someone.”
“Yeah,” he said. “The hell with evidence and witnesses. Let’s get this over with.”
“I’m at that point, man.”
“What, you’re scared?”
“Scared shitless. But I’ve got, like, three suitcases right by the door,” she said. “If he lights my house up, I already know what I’m taking out.”
“What?”
“Oh, mostly sentimental crap. Photos of my kid when she was little, and letters, and some of my favorite clothes.” She smiled. “That’s a problem. I have to keep opening up the damn suitcases to find something I want to wear.”
After a moment, Bud said, “I’m going to use this.”
“For what?”
“As an example of how people are dealing with the arson, natch.”
She snorted. “Or not,” she said.
When he opened the door, he could hear Frankie in the living room, still talking on the phone. He stood there for a few seconds in the doorway. She was saying, yes, she would be interested to look around. It sounded as if she’d moved on from the events in Africa to whatever the local stuff was that she’d wanted to explore.
He shut the door, deliberately making enough noise in the kitchen to announce himself. He went around the corner to the living room. She was on the couch, her long legs curled beneath her, the phone propped on her shoulder. Her paperback was open on her lap. She was writing on the endpapers, notes in ink. He took her in, the wide swell of her buttock and thigh in her jeans, the long white foot tucked beneath that swell, the messy hair, the glasses, the freckles—there was nothing he didn’t like. She raised her hand in response to his appearance in the doorway, and he went back into the kitchen.
Just as he’d finished making himself a sandwich—leftover chicken, chutney, cucumber slices, and the bread he was so fond of—she came into the kitchen in her bare feet.
“Want some of this?” he asked.
“Sure,” she answered. She seemed subdued.
He got out a serrated knife and sliced the sandwich in half, holding it flat with his hand. He put each half on a plate and carried the plates into the dining area. He came back to the kitchen for glasses and paper napkins. She was standing, looking out the window. “What do you want to drink?” he asked her.
She looked over at him. “I’ll get it,” she said, taking the glasses from him. “Water’s fine for me. What do you want?”
Bud said water, too. She put ice in the glasses and filled them. In the dining room, they sat down opposite each other. She picked up the sandwich and took a bite, and Bud felt a pang, a yearning, for exactly this unremarkable domesticity.
“What’s the news?” he asked.
Her mouth was full, her jaw working. She raised a finger: Wait. Finally she swallowed and said, “Everyone I know is okay. The person I most worried about, the one who actually worked there, is fine. But it’s just awful, they say. So many people hurt, and people just flooding the hospitals. Thousands. It’s … they can’t take care of them all. All these windows blew out, so there was glass everywhere. Horrible injuries just from that. And it was mostly, of course, Africans who got killed and hurt.”
“I heard a couple of Americans died, too.” He’d had the radio on again, driving back from the office.
“Oh, I know. And I don’t mean I wish they all had been Americans. But just, it all seems so misplaced. Poor Africa.”
They sat silently for a moment, and then lifted their sandwiches again. After another minute, she said, “Everyone’s really worried now, too. The aid agencies, I mean. Especially the American ones and the church ones. They’re worried about who wi
ll be next. But for now …” She lifted her shoulders.
They were quiet. Then he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, I am, too.” She rubbed her face. “But thanks.”
“Do you wish you were there?”
“Part of me does, I suppose. But I wouldn’t be any more helpful than the average bystander.”
“Because it’s medical?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She gave a light, quick, mirthless laugh. “I’m not sure I was ever any use in Africa.”
“Hey.” He reached over and touched her hand lightly. “That’s not true. You’re just … this is just, overwhelming, I suppose.”
“Probably,” she said. And then, in a minute, “You know, once, this past spring, I was working in Sudan, in a village—I was going from village to village, actually, working with local people, with the Ministry of Health. We were trying to help them set up programs in health facilities to deal with malnutrition. You know, training people, supervising systems. I was doing a lot of the care myself. Feeding tubes, that kind of thing.” She paused and looked over at him. She said, “But these weren’t health facilities as you and I know them. Really, they were huts. What you should imagine is people lined up outside huts.”
“Okay,” Bud said.
“Quietly lined up. That was something that always saddened me. How quiet they were. Their acceptance of … life, I suppose. And of our rules for them. It was … I found it almost unbearable sometimes.”
Bud nodded.
“Anyway, this was in an area that was safe,” she went on. “Or it was supposed to be safe. We wouldn’t have been there otherwise. And if we hadn’t been there, they wouldn’t have come. But we were there, and so they did come. They came from miles and miles around. They walked, mostly. Women and children and babies. Some fathers.”
She had been looking down, remembering this. Now her eyes snapped to Bud. “But it wasn’t safe. We were in the midst of things when an elder from the village came to tell us that an armed group was maybe a few hours away, approaching. That we had to go, we had to get out, right away. He told everyone, the people waiting, too.