The Last Time They Met

by Anita Shreve

  “Well,” she says. “I’ve been talking to Mr. K., and I think I’m going to apply to college.”

  “Yes?” Thomas asks, smiling. “Yes?” He backs her into the wall. “Where?”

  “Middlebury, for one.”

  “Fucking Mr. K.,” Thomas says.

  “And Tufts and B.C., maybe.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I’ve passed the deadline, but he’s made some calls and explained what he calls ‘my situation’ and they say they’re willing to consider my application. Well, Middlebury has so far.”

  “He’s a miracle,” Thomas says and kisses her.

  A voice calls to them from down the hall. “No fraternization between the sexes during school hours.” Thomas, with his back to the vice principal, raises an eyebrow. The man stands with his hands on his hips. Any minute, Linda thinks, he will stamp his foot.

  “Something funny going on down there?” he asks.

  ______

  The parking lot is a sea of slush. The soles of Linda’s boots are soaked.

  “Now I’ve got the chains on,” Thomas says, “we’ll probably never have another day below freezing.” He unlocks the door of the Skylark. The temperature is so freakishly warm that Linda takes off her coat at once. Thomas turns on the radio.

  “It’s the same with an umbrella,” she says.

  “What is?”

  “If you remember it, it won’t rain.”

  “Let’s celebrate,” he says.

  “OK,” she says. “Where?”

  He drums his fingers on the steering wheel and thinks. “There’s a nice seafood restaurant called the Lobster Pot not too far from here,” he says. “We could go have dinner.”

  “Really? It’s a Wednesday.”

  “So?”

  “I have a test tomorrow.”

  “You can study later.”

  “I have to work.”

  “Not now you don’t,” he says, putting the car in reverse.

  ______

  They drive along a twisting, narrow coastal route. Linda sits so close to Thomas that he has to borrow his arm back occasionally to steer. When he can, he puts his hand on her knee. Once, he hitches up her skirt so that he can see her thigh. Then he snakes his hand under the skirt. She doesn’t push him away.

  Thomas stops at a gas station so that she can call the diner. She holds her nose and pretends to have a cold, while Thomas stands outside the booth, banging on the glass and singing. Help me, Rhonda. Help, help me, Rhonda. When they get back in the car, Linda kisses him so hard and for so long, she leaves him gasping for breath.

  As they drive, the setting sun lights up the trees and the old houses beside the road so that, for a time, the world seems happily on fire.

  “This is the best day of my life,” she says.

  “Really?”

  The water in the marshes turns a brilliant pink. Thomas reaches below his seat and pulls out a bottle of what looks to be scotch or whiskey. A shadow passes across the road.

  “What’s this about?” she asks.

  “You want a drink? We’re celebrating.”

  The bottle is only half full. Perhaps there are things about Thomas she doesn’t know.

  “You’ve never had a drink,” he says.

  “Thomas, can we stop somewhere? There’s something I want to tell you.”

  ______

  “He used to have sex with me,” she says, letting her breath out in a rush.

  She waits for the car to buckle in, for the air to billow out. Thomas has parked the Skylark on a dirt lane in the marshes. They are partially hidden from the road by a grove of trees, glittering and melting in the setting sun.

  “He raped you,” Thomas says.

  “It wasn’t rape,” she says.

  This will be the moment, Linda thinks, when Thomas will have to open the door of the car and get out, letting in a cool gust of air. He will have to take a walk, get his bearings, and when he gets back in, she knows, everything will be different between them.

  “Often?” Thomas asks.

  “Five times,” she says.

  He lays his head back against the seat. Linda feels light-headed. She needs to eat.

  “I knew it was something like that,” Thomas says quietly.

  “You did?” She is only a little surprised. And perhaps a bit deflated. One’s terrible secret guessed after all.

  “I didn’t know for sure,” Thomas says. “Actually, for a while, I thought it might have been your father.”

  “My father left when I was five,” she says. “I told you that.”

  “I thought you might be lying about when he left,” Thomas says. No judgment implied about the lying. It is understood she’d have had to do that.

  “Was it awful?” he asks.

  “It wasn’t awful or not awful,” she says carefully. And after a minute adds, “I don’t think we should talk about this particular thing anymore.”

  He nods. What good can come of details? Of pictures that can never be erased?

  “I love you,” Thomas says.

  She shakes her head. The words should not have been offered now. She might always have to think they had been said partly out of pity.

  “I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you walk into that class,” he says.

  Yet words are momentous, she knows, and her heart lifts all the same.

  “I sometimes think,” he says, “that we were meant to be together.”

  “I agree,” she says quickly. And it is true. She does very much agree.

  Elation makes him turn to her.

  ______

  “Are you sure?” he asks.

  “I’m sure,” she says.

  He draws back and studies her. “This isn’t something he made you do, is it?” he asks. “Take all your clothes off?”

  She shakes her head and realizes that Thomas has images too — his worse for being the worst he can imagine. What’s imagined always worse than what is.

  She crosses her arms and removes her sweater, feeling more naked than she ever has before. She hitches her hips up so that she can take off her skirt. She hears Thomas’s breath catch.

  “Linda,” he says.

  Lightly, as you might touch a sculpture in a gallery, Thomas runs the tips of his fingers from her neck to her thighs. She sucks in her own breath as well.

  “This is better,” she says.

  ______

  They move into the backseat to avoid the steering wheel. Outside, it is winter still, but inside it is all steam and hot breath. A kind of cocoon, the world opaque.

  Linda has thought the ache of pleasure was all there was. It seemed to be enough: the kissing and the touching and the mysterious wetness she would take back with her to the triple-decker. But that afternoon, in the car, she understands finally what the ache is all about: how the body strains and bursts, showering itself.

  They lie on the backseat, their legs twisted and bent to accommodate their length. She, with him on top of her, is warm, but he now feels the chill and reaches into the front seat and slips his overcoat over his back.

  He smooths her hair from her face. “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “Everything is new,” she says. “Everything.”

  ______

  “We’ll always be together,” Thomas says.

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing can separate us.”

  “No.”

  “Did you like that? Making love?”

  “I loved it.”

  “You weren’t afraid?”

  “A little.”

  ______

  Thomas retrieves the bottle of scotch from the front seat and lifts his torso so that he can take a sip. “Do you want some now?” he asks.

  If she hesitates, it is only for a second, two at best. “What is it?”

  “Scotch.”

  The drink burns as it is going down, and she can feel almost immediately the heat in her stomach. She takes another drink and passes the bottle back to
Thomas. After a time, she leans her head back down. The drink hits her, spins her out of the Skylark, and sets her afloat.

  “Did it upset you?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “My not being . . . you know.” She can’t say the word.

  “A virgin?”

  “Yes,” she says, relieved.

  “No,” he says.

  ______

  “Something happens to you, it doesn’t have to change your life for good,” he says.

  “This has changed my life for good,” she says.

  ______

  They dress awkwardly in the backseat. When they are done, they each leave the car to get into the front seat — another comedy routine. “We’ll have children,” he says, startling her.

  “You think so?”

  “I really like Jack,” he says.

  “OK,” she agrees.

  “How many do you think?” Thomas asks.

  “I don’t know. Three or four?”

  “I was thinking seven or eight.”

  “Thomas.”

  He hunches over the steering wheel. “Run your nails down my back?” he asks.

  “Like this?”

  “All over.”

  “Like this?”

  “Yeah,” he says, sighing. “That’s great.”

  ______

  “I feel so lucky,” she says. “So fantastically lucky.”

  “To have met, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a goddamn miracle,” he says.

  ______

  “I have to ask you this,” he says as they are once again driving on the coastal route. And perhaps he is driving a bit faster than before — a bit too fast, maybe.

  “OK,” she says.

  “Why did you let it happen?”

  She closes her eyes briefly and thinks. She knows that she must try to answer this. “I don’t know,” she begins. “I was always the odd one out . . .” She interrupts herself. “This isn’t an excuse, you understand. It’s just an explanation.”

  “I understand.”

  “With my aunt and cousins, even the ones who treated me well, I was always an outsider. I suppose you could say it was like being nice to a servant. But he was different. It’s pathetic to admit to this, but he made me feel special. He always had treats for me.”

  She stopped, hearing herself. It was absolutely pathetic. “I think in the beginning he felt sorry for me and was trying to compensate in his way. He’d take me to a movie or let me go with him when he did errands in town.”

  “Did he do it to Eileen?”

  “I used to think not. But now I’m not so sure.” She considers his original question. “The truest answer I can give you is that I did it for the attention. I craved attention then. I suppose I still do.”

  “Everybody does,” he says.

  ______

  Thomas turns the radio up, something he rarely does. He sings, badly and loudly, and she can’t help but smile. She sits back against the seat. She can’t believe her luck. She has Thomas and a future now — years of possibilities. The sun sets abruptly, rolling shadows up the sides of houses. The temperature drops, and she reaches for her coat.

  “I love you,” she says as they round a sharp corner.

  And this is true. She knows that she will love him all her life.

  A small child, a girl, perhaps five or six years old, sits on a tricycle in the middle of the road. She takes in the approaching Skylark, lifts the tricycle to her waist, and runs with its weight to the side of the road.

  It is a fleeting scene, a tableau, and slightly comical. The O of surprise on the girl’s face, the commonsensical decision to carry the tricycle, the run-waddle to safety. And if Linda and Thomas had continued on, they’d have been at first horrified and then tickled by the scene, the scotch turning laughter into giggles.

  But they do not continue on.

  Thomas brakes and swerves to avoid the girl. Linda screams as a telephone pole and a tree fill the windshield. Thomas jerks the wheel, the car skids across the narrow road, and a rear tire catches in a ditch.

  It happens that fast.

  In the seconds they are airborne — in these, the last seconds of Linda’s life — she sees not the past, the life that supposedly flashes before one’s eyes, but the future: not the life she has lived, but the life she might have had.

  A cottage in a field of chrysanthemums in a country far away.

  A small boy she holds on her lap whose scalp is patchy with disease.

  A white room with lovely windows, a drafting table at its center.

  A child named Marcus who is more fragile than his sister.

  A spray of oranges on a kitchen floor.

  A hotel room with a mirror, her aging face.

  A plane rising from the clouds.

  A party to celebrate a book.

  A beach house with a man — long and elegant and beautiful — sitting on the porch.

  The Skylark somersaults into the January afternoon and tumbles down an embankment. The windows shatter inward. Linda reaches a hand to Thomas and says his name.

  Thomas. Her beloved Thomas. Who will go on to write a series of poems called Magdalene about a girl who died in a car crash when she was only seventeen. And who will one day win a prize, and then will lose his daughter and, shortly before four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in Toronto, will take his own life — the weight of his losses finally too much to bear.

  But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.