That realization was underlined by Kalso’s next sentence. “I took those pictures this summer. Out at the commune.”
“Anna’s alive?”
Kalso nodded, smiled broadly. “Now there’s a surprise, right? Bowl you over or what?”
“That’s impossible,” I said.
“I think so, too,” Kalso said. “On general principles, I refused to credit my senses when I first saw her. But it is her. I talked to her. She recognized me too, said, ‘Hey Robert, how you doing?’ You know Anna, she never paid much attention to time. What’s ten or fifteen years to someone like Anna?”
As Kalso talked, I felt an odd babble of voices blowing in my mind. Anna was dead. I had thirteen years of knowing that, waking up at three in the morning to have it reaffirmed. They never found the body. But two kids watched her being stabbed, watched her drown, and they did recover the body of her murderer. She was dead. Thirteen years of being dead.
Kalso told me about his decision to photograph the commune. “It was an inspired idea, really,” Kalso said. “I wanted to show a utopia-gone-to-seed, an over-the-hill commune.”
But Father Walker and his followers weren’t welcoming visitors, and Kalso had been turned away at the gates. It hadn’t been difficult to sneak in, however. All he had had to do was walk across a couple of fields and there he was. He had walked up on the porch of the big white farmhouse and knocked on the door, and the door had been answered by his holiness himself, Father Walker.
And Anna Shockley had been hanging on Father Walker’s arm, smiling. That’s when she asked Kalso how he was doing.
“Okay,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”
Anna had giggled.
Father Walker invited Kalso in. Now that Kalso was actually there, they didn’t seem upset by his presence. Walker told how one of his people had found Anna, bleeding, almost dead, and this person had fetched others and they had taken her back to Father Walker.
“Death didn’t want her,” Walker told Kalso. “So we kept her. As you can see, the years have been kind to her. She has nothing to complain of.”
I was puzzled and interrupted. “Why the secrecy? Why didn’t Walker take her to a hospital?”
Kalso shrugged. “Father Walker doesn’t function along entirely rational lines. He strikes me as an authentic guru, very spiritual, very crazy. Like he says, he kept her. Maybe I asked him the same question because I do remember him saying he couldn’t, morally, return her to the river since it had given her up. He couldn’t throw her back.”
I couldn’t sort all this in my mind. I kept thinking I had it and then I didn’t. I was hyperventilating on some credibility level, and I made Kalso keep repeating the story while the party rushed around us, laughing, hooting, cranking up the stereo. What I really didn’t understand was how Anna could stay out there all those years without anyone knowing.
Kalso, speaking with uncharacteristic gentleness, said, “Anna didn’t loom so large in most folks’ universe. Most of the world did not know Anna Shockley. She was no social butterfly.”
“What about the police?” I asked. “Shouldn’t the police know about this?”
“Why?” Kalso asked. “What purpose will that serve at this late date? Her attacker died at the same time she did—poisoned himself, according to the coroner—so there isn’t any wrong to be righted by her coming forward. The press might be interested, but I don’t think Anna would appreciate the publicity.” Kalso paused, frowned. “I’m not sure she could hold up under the publicity. I was amazed at how unchanged, how young Anna still looked when I saw her, all these years later. But damage occurred, you understand. I don’t know how much, and Anna never thought, never lived in the world on quite the same wavelength as the rest of us so it is hard to say the extent to which she was harmed by that experience. But she was harmed.”
I knew that. She couldn’t go through the sort of experience she had been through without suffering some emotional and mental trauma. A new thought occurred to me.
“Does Diane know that Anna is alive?”
Kalso sighed. “Diane told me you would ask that one. She does. I told her this summer.”
“She never said anything to me.” Diane was the only one I still kept in touch with in Newburg.
“No. She went out to the commune with me once and talked to Anna. She said Anna was where she should be. She didn’t want me to tell you about it either, but I’m stubborn in my own way.”
I wasn’t angry with Diane. I realized that she was doing what she thought was right. And when it came to Anna, she didn’t trust my judgment. History was on her side.
Another question occurred to me. “Why are you telling me? Diane didn’t want you to say anything.”
Kalso looked surprisingly serious. “I think you are entitled to know, David. I was around when you and Anna were together, and I was touched by those times, the two of you. I was saddened by the tragedy. I think you deserve to know the rest of the story. I believe in free will. I also believe in advice, and I will give you some: Don’t go near her. Rejoice that she is alive and well, and stay as far away from her as possible.”
2
I spent the next couple of days thinking, or what passed for thinking. I let fevered thoughts loose, and they raced in frenzied circles until they gasped for breath.
I am not usually very good with advice, accepting advice, but I agreed with Kalso. If Anna had wanted to get in touch with me, she would have. And why, in any event, would I want to go back and revive the most destructive relationship of my whole life? Let sleeping obsessions lie.
One thing I had learned (thanks to my drinking career) was that an addiction always looks good to the addict. Anna had been an addiction. But now, with the perspective of years, I realized how doomed that relationship had been.
And my life was full now, busy. I was working on several different projects, including another book, and I had acquired a number of good friends, people I could actually talk to, and I didn’t feel compelled to run away, fly screaming toward some chimera of child-love that my imagination had enshrined.
I was a grown-up guy now.
Sharon came over on Tuesday, and we went out to a restaurant, and I told her about Anna while she ate vast quantities of lobster. Sharon Kane is a small, pretty woman of twenty-eight with a voracious appetite. She nodded, said, “Oh boy” a lot and dug right into the lobster.
“This is the crazy girl you told me about, right? The one who shot you?” Her eyes were wide, hungry for sensationalism. I found myself growing defensive. This wasn’t a story for the National Enquirer.
We had planned to go to a movie after the restaurant, but the only thing we could agree on was way the hell down Connecticut Avenue in the district and neither of us felt up to the effort. We went back to my apartment and made love.
Sharon is a fierce lovemaker, too. Indeed, there is something voracious about everything she does. Maybe this has something to do with her exquisite smallness. I learned in biology that the smaller a mammal is, the greater its body surface/volume ratio, the more heat it loses to its environment, and, consequently, the faster its metabolism.
Anyway, Sharon does have a zest for life.
It was about one in the morning, and Sharon was propped up in bed eating an apple. “You are going to see her,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. She’s got her own life now.”
Sharon laughed, a sharp bark of a laugh, the sort of laugh used to underline disbelief. “Come on. I know about that Anna. She’s the fatal, heartbreak one. You even do this funny thing with your voice when you speak her name, like it’s carrying more freight than your average two syllables.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is. You say her name the way Baptists say ‘Jesus.’”
“A lie,” I said, and I crawled under the sheets and dragged her with me.
Still later, she said, “It’s okay if you go. I would prefer you got a look at the reality: Anna in the l
and of the living. That Jesus analogy I said earlier.… Well, it’s a damned good analogy now that I think about it. Risen from the dead, hasn’t she? Anyway, whatever is in your head is gonna be tougher competition than any flesh-and-blood woman. So, me, I’d just as soon you went. Okay?”
“What is all this?” I asked. “Are you trying to get me out of town? What’s the matter, anyway?”
Sharon began to cry. She does that sometimes, and it always throws me off, because it isn’t in character. She’s generally frugal in her displays of emotion. She blinked at me, owl-like, angry. It was a look I have identified as saying, “How can you be so dense?” I reached out to hold her and she sprang up and huffed off into the other room. When I walked out she was watching a science fiction movie, an old black-and-white flick about a sinister island where a mad doctor and his daughter create giant insects by injecting regular insects with a special yeast.
I had intended to talk to Sharon, to discover the heart of the problem with some gentle probing, but I am a sucker for science fiction movies, no matter how bad, and I had never seen this one before. Sharon went back into the bedroom, dressed, and left before the picture was over.
Sharon called me up the next day and said, “You know what’s wrong with us?”
I recognized this as a rhetorical question and waited.
“I’m not mad at you,” she said.
“That’s what’s wrong?”
“Figure it out,” she said and hung up. I couldn’t figure it out.
But I thought about it. Maybe we need a break from each other, I thought. So I decided to drive down to Newburg, see Diane. Yeah, see Anna too.
She was alive. That was great. I would give her a big hug, wish her well in her new life—except, of course, it wasn’t new to her, was it? I mean, she had been doing whatever she was doing for a long time now. I felt a twinge of fear, one snaky, cold tendril reaching out from the pit, tweaking my heart. Did I know what I was doing?
As soon as I got in the car and began to drive south through a cold, glittery morning, I knew I was doing the right thing. Speed equals purpose. When I was drinking, I would often put a couple of six-packs in the car and go somewhere. I always felt closest to being a free human person when I was fleeing one shore and not yet run aground on a new one.
I listened to the radio and smiled as the highway hissed under the wheels. Kalso had warned me against going, but he wouldn’t have told me about Anna if he hadn’t wanted me to see her. I realized that now. He wanted me to go down there. Because he knew I would.
And it wasn’t just an addiction, a selfish hunger on my part. I had loved Anna—more intensely than I had ever loved anyone, maybe ever would. That, no doubt, is what Sharon had meant. Sharon and I liked each other, but we didn’t possess the passion for authentic lovers’ quarrels. Anna and I had had something. I owed it to Anna to see her, to say I had missed her, that I was glad she was alive.
3
So I drove down to Newburg, assaulted by memories. Once, in a bad period during my marriage (perhaps a redundant phrase), I had gone to a shrink named Dedmon. I had talked about my mother’s mental collapse and how I had tried to protect her from my older brother and my father, both of whom seem, in my memory, brutal and insensitive. My mother was brilliant, a gifted painter of watercolors, a beautiful but fragile human. I had also told Dedmon about Anna, and he jumped at the obvious: I was in love with vulnerability, with helplessness. I wanted to be the daddy, the one in charge.
I told Dedmon he had never met Anna. Certainly, he didn’t do Anna justice. She was a force in her own right. And she had steel in her, a courage and resourcefulness I have never encountered since.
Dedmon told me I talked about Anna more than I talked about my wife. I told him that that’s what I thought I was supposed to do, talk about the past. I told him I was no longer in need of his services.
“Good,” he said.
Maybe there was some truth in what he said. I found myself remembering a time I had taken Anna to a party at Ray and Holly’s place. The party was composed of professors and grad students, very drunk, very erudite. Nobody completed sentences. It would have been bad manners to complete a sentence. To complete a sentence would suggest that your audience was ignorant of its direction. Nothing was uttered that wasn’t swathed in disclaimers. There was much eye rolling and eyebrow lifting on the part of both sexes.
I went to the kitchen and talked to Holly for awhile, and when I got back a lot of people were clustered around Anna, and a thin, effete-looking professor of English literature was looking mock serious, leaning forward, nodding his head.
Anna was talking about her favorite romance writers. Aside from Walker’s religious diatribes, Anna read nothing but romance novels, read them with the kind of rapt attention that authors of serious novels would kill for. Anna was telling the entire plot of Love’s Long Summer or some similar title. Anna had got up some steam, I could see. She was saying something like, “And then Darrell, who is acting real weird, disappears, and Lady Berkley is arrested for treason because Thomas has lied to the king …”
I looked at Anna and I looked at the circle of smirking faces exchanging arch, superior glances, and I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her away from that bloodless, thin-lipped lot. Anna didn’t know what was going on, but she was used to erratic, violent behavior, having lived the last years with drug-crazed Larry, and, although she could be infuriatingly stubborn when the mood hit her, she would shrug off really bad behavior with stoical indifference. (As time went by, I realized that Anna wasn’t oblivious to these wrongs. She totted them up and saved them, kept an account that she balanced against her own outbursts and inevitable guilt.)
I remember getting in the car, smiling at Anna, who hadn’t said anything since my peremptory “We gotta go.” The night was warm and humid, and I felt prickly, disgusted with Ray’s friends, a disgust that reached out to embrace the vast, impenetrable stupidity of the universe. Anna was looking straight ahead, mouth slightly open, street lamps fluttering by, lightly brushing the pure planes of her face, and I was overwhelmed by her innocence, and I pulled the car over to the side of the road and reached for her desperately and kissed her, and told her I loved her.
Maybe that shrink was right. Anna seemed defenseless that night, and I wanted to shield her from the brutal press of the world. I was angry, I remember, more angry than the situation warranted. And I was head-down, heart-howling in love. Maybe that was part of it, this love: hating the opposition, the cold, steam-rolling universe. Only Anna, an oasis from my anger, burned brightly, warm and vulnerable.
I got to Newburg at about two o’clock in the afternoon. I had toyed with the notion of just finding Diane’s house and knocking on the door, but I remembered my last shot at surprise entrances. So I called her from a gas station. She was delighted to hear my voice, and she gave me directions to her house, which turned out to be a pretty, freshly-painted wooden house amid maples. There was a child’s big-wheels bike in the yard, and a young beagle came banging out from behind the screen door to howl at me. Diane shouted, “Wimpy, behave!” and then ran to me and gave me a hug.
Back in the house, I met her daughter, Becky, who was a shy, skinny girl of seven with her mother’s wonderful eyes and something of her mother’s unnerving acuteness. I felt myself being inspected by the both of them.
Becky said, “You wrote The Summer Troll?” She seemed a little skeptical. Adults have the same problem with me. I don’t look in any way exceptional. I like to think that people would describe me as good-looking, but they would have to remember me first, and I am aware that I don’t have a memorable face.
I told her that I had written The Summer Troll, and she told me that she admired it greatly. It was a formal but heartfelt compliment.
Becky left, and Diane, who had apparently had time to think about my appearance in Newburg, studied me closely.
“Robert told you,” she said.
“It’s great to see you,” I said. “How
are you doing? How is Charles? I’m looking forward to meeting him.” Diane Larson was now Mrs. Charles Nichols. I assumed that Charles Nichols was an improvement over Saul. A wolverine would have been an improvement over Saul.
“You’ll like Charles,” Diane said. “You guys are a lot alike. I fall for a certain type—self-involved, immature, but charming and witty.”
“I wasn’t aware that you ever fell for me,” I said.
“Self-involved,” Diane said, nodding. “Self-involved.”
We chatted along smoothly. Diane was still working three days a week out at Romner and once I got her going on that she was good for awhile. Then I had to tell her how I had been doing, and about the new book. We talked, inevitably, about old times, and so we came back to Anna.
“Yes, Kalso told me,” I said. “And he told me that you already knew, but didn’t want to tell me. I understand that. I think you are wrong, but I understand. I don’t hold it against you.”
“That’s big of you.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. “Are we going to have an argument?”
Diane sighed. We had moved out on the porch to drink coffee. Mottled sunlight decorated the grey floorboards. “You would always do anything to avoid an argument,” she said. “You have this dread of arguments, David. Why is that?”
I shrugged. “Beats me.”
“Anna never shared that dread. She liked a good fight.”
“Yeah. Anna was born to fight. A stormy girl.”
Diane smiled. She was a good-looking woman, and now she had a self-assurance, an easy elegance that the younger woman had lacked. She was wearing a frayed grey sweatshirt and her hair was tied back in a pony-tail.
“Why should I fight with you? You are here. You are going to do what you came here to do. You are going to see Anna. I hope it works out. I don’t want you to get hurt. And I particularly don’t want her to get hurt.”
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