It was only when she saw Tom enter the park and head in her direction that Nora knew – or admitted to herself – that she had meant to come here all along. He wore jeans, a navy Shetland sweater with a gray tee shirt underneath it, showing at the collar. His hair was white, cropped close to his head; his face might have been his father’s. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. But he was fit – she could see that in the breadth of his shoulders, in the way his torso narrowed toward his waist. In the springy step.
She stood, quite suddenly breathless with longing. Awkward and young as she had felt the night they met and, at the same time, conscious of her own hair, the blond streaked with silver, absurdly apologetic for the strangeness of her own changed face.
A smile lit his face, the one she’d tried all these years to forget. His arms opened and she walked into them. The familiarity of his body against her, the rightness of it, shocked her off-balance for a moment. He caught her, placed his hands on her shoulders and stepped back slightly, so he could look at her.
“Damn.” He shook his head. “Jane.”
“I’m –” she started to say, “Nora.” But in truth she was Jane in his presence.
She couldn’t have said how they got back to the bench where she’d been sitting, but she knew she would always remember the moment when, sitting there, he touched her hand and her palm turned up instinctively, her fingers folded into his – a gesture she’d made thousands of times when they were together.
A car drove past, hip-hop pouring from its open windows. The sweet scent of marijuana trailed behind a passing boy who looked furtive, his hand curled awkwardly to cup the joint he held between his thumb and forefinger. Nora watched the leaves drift down and thought of home: how leaves there would be drifting to the green floor of the forest, how Lake Michigan would be choppy, shining in the sun. But it seemed unreal to her, dream-like, as if she had lived her entire life in this spot, her hand in Tom’s.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you happy?”
She didn’t answer.
“Remember that night we found out about the bombing in Cambodia? Walking past here and people picking up rocks and smashing windows? We were thinking about your brother and Pete and the whole fucked up mess of it, but for them it was either a big, wild party or an excuse to act out their revolutionary fantasies. We should have forgotten any idea we had about being able to end the war right then – and any idea we had an obligation to try to end it.”
Neither spoke Bridget’s name. But she was there, between them, as she had been then. And the Christmas she came back. All they’d lost because of it.
“Just tell me one thing, would you?” Tom finally asked. “Did you know what she was going to do that night? Did you decide to go with her?”
“No. No. I heard her go out and I followed her. I knew she was going to do . . . something, and I thought –”
“Fucking Bridget,” he said. “Like anybody could’ve stopped her by then. She never should have come to see you in the first place. All she really cared about by then was whatever crazy idea John Cameron put in her head.”
“I was so scared for her,” Nora said. “I thought I could –”
“Save her,” Tom said. “I know. You always did.”
“I never meant to leave you,” she said. “Cam made me –”
“I know that,” he said.
“How –”
“I know. Never mind how. I also know there was nothing keeping you from coming back here once you got away from him.”
“I couldn’t. He . . .” She took a deep breath to calm herself. “He made me believe I couldn’t – and the thing is, Tom, it was my fault what happened to Bridget that night. I didn’t stop her. I was with her . . .
“How could I drag you into that? Things weren’t all that great between us then, you may remember – and she got me so confused about everything. About us. The longer I didn’t come back, the easier –”
Anger surged up, catching her by surprise.
“I knew you’d be okay without me,” she said. “And wasn’t I right? Look at you. You just went right on and made another life.”
“What else could I do? I couldn’t look for you. Where would I look? And yeah, I have a life. But FYI, I stayed here so you’d know where to find me. Oh, fuck,” he said. “I’m sorry. The last thing I want to do is argue about that now.”
He put his hand on hers again, but this time she kept her fingers curled in a fist.
“Are you married?” she asked. “Do you have children? Tell me about your life.”
He laughed, though not with real humor. “I was married for about ten minutes,” he said. “Madeleine was her name. I couldn’t really tell you why I married her, other than that I was getting older. She was there; she was nothing like you at all. It was a fucking disaster. My mom had high hopes for us, too – grandchildren, the whole nine yards.”
“Your dad?”
“Never knew her,” Tom said. “Heart attack got him, after all. Funny – one of the last things he said to me was, ‘That Jane was a good girl. You suppose things will turn out okay for her?’ I said, yeah, I did. He got it, you know? Eventually. My mom never did. Anyway. You’re married,” he said. “I know that. One daughter, Claire. You live in Michigan –
“Friend in the admissions office,” he said. “Don’t worry. It was Pete who saw you last summer, by the way. You said your name, that’s how we –”
“Pete?”
“I know,” Tom said. “He looks like shit. Old. It was Pete, though. I guarantee it.”
“But how –”
“You look exactly like yourself,” Tom said.
“No,” Nora said. “I –”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “You do. I’ve been sitting over at Kilroy’s since this morning, thinking you might come, and I knew you the second I saw you. Anyway, Pete – he showed up a couple of years after you left, totally fucked up. I got him into rehab, he got clean. He knocked around, doing odd jobs to get by until his dad died and left him enough money to hang out on Kirkwood Avenue and play his guitar all day. Sometimes I think he’s still totally fubar, sometimes I think he’s got it totally figured out – chill out, just be. He’s been a good friend to me, in any case. The only person who knows everything about us.”
“Nobody in my life knows,” she said.
Tom was quiet a moment. Then said, “That must be hard.”
“For a long time it wasn’t,” she said. “For a long time it felt like a blessing.”
“But it’s hard now, because of your daughter.”
She nodded. “I tried to talk her out of coming here, but of course I couldn’t say why, so all that did was get me sideways with everyone I loved. It’s the perfect place for her, everyone could see that. I could see it. But I knew if she came here, I’d have to come back, and that scared me to death –
“Not because I thought someone would recognize me,” she said. “It seems stupid now, but I didn’t really think about that happening. I was scared to be here. To be –” Her throat ached with tears. “I was scared to be myself,” she said. “I was scared I’d be Jane again. I can’t be Jane. Not anymore.”
“You don’t have to be Jane for me,” Tom said. “You can be anyone you want.”
She stood abruptly. “I have to go. Really. I can’t stay.”
He stood, too, caught her hand. “Wait. You need to know some things.”
“What?” she said. “I can’t –”
But she didn’t pull her hand away, and without quite deciding to she found herself walking up Kirkwood Avenue with Tom, through the university gates to a bench in the woods where they used to sit sometimes between classes. It amazed her that it was still there, that the place looked exactly the same. Dusty shafts of light falling down through the thick trees, drenching the carpet of yellow ginkgo leaves with even deeper color; the sky above like a blue ceiling. Thirty-five years had been nothing to the little patch of forest, she thought. She’d live through this time, live her
life. In another thirty-five years, it would be all over. None of this would matter.
“Listen,” Tom said. “I don’t know what you want. Or need. But you came back to the park, so I figure you need something – and this is what I know for sure I can give you.” He touched her face and turned it so she had to look at him. “You’re not responsible for what happened to Bridget that night.”
“I am.” She closed her eyes, willing away the sudden rush of memory that came with his words. The blast, the whoosh of flame, the sound of her own voice screaming and then nothing, blackness.
“Feeling responsible, that’s something you have to work out in your own mind. And you need to do that. What I mean is, you won’t be held responsible – from a legal point of view.”
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“Hey, I’m a lawyer,” he said. “Remember? I know how this shit works. I knew right from the get-go it was Cameron they really wanted. He was in deep way before he ever came to Bloomington that first time. The ROTC building wasn’t the first action he was involved in.”
“Or the last,” Nora said. “Tom, I was with him –”
“I know about all that,” he said. “I found out from the FBI. They caught him not all that long after you left, you know. I also knew they had virtually nothing on you. They couldn’t even prove you were there when the bomb went off – and it was arguable that Cameron had forced you to go with him, meaning whatever you did when you were with him was done under duress.
“The other thing I knew was that the FBI had fucked up so badly trying to nail most of the other Weather people they arrested that they really needed this one to stick. I never trusted Cameron. You know that. I’d been keeping track of him all along – and Bridget, too. I was in touch with people I still knew from the Movement; there were people in the law school who had contacts, too. So I knew things, useful things – which I traded for the promise that they’d stop looking for you.”
“You never told me you were checking up on them,” Nora said.
“I know. I should have,” he said. “But I knew you’d be pissed. Plus, I figured you wouldn’t want to know, you wouldn’t have wanted to believe it. I guess I was trying to protect you. Meanwhile, you were bound and determined to save Bridget. Fuck. Look where it got us.”
“Oh, God,” Nora said. “I’m just so sorry about – everything.”
“I know,” he said. “I know.” He bent and picked up one of the ginkgo leaves and handed it to her, a little yellow fan.
“I’d never seen a ginkgo tree before I met you,” she said. “I’d never seen anything.”
“You were –”
Nora raised a hand to stop him. They sat quietly for a long moment, the sound of traffic on University Avenue filtering in through the trees. Nora twirled the stem of the ginkgo leaf back and forth between her fingers, concentrated on the crazy little dance it made.
“Jane,” Tom said, finally. “Nora –”
She let the leaf float to the ground. “Really. I should go now,” she said.
But he put his hand on her arm, to keep her there. “Look,” he said. “I loved you the first time I saw you, I never stopped loving you. Or missing you. I never will. I’m not saying I’ve been sitting around all this time waiting for you to come back. I’m fine. I’ve got a life. It’s good. You’ve got a life, too – and the smart thing to do would be to leave here and walk right back into it. But –” He took a business card from his shirt pocket and tucked it into her bag. “If you ever want to talk, if you ever want or need anything, call or e-mail. Promise?”
“It’s not a good idea,” she said.
“I said, if you need to.”
She nodded. “Okay, then. If I need to I will.”
He let loose of her then, freeing her to go, but she felt as if all the air had gone out of her and she sat back down on the bench – Jane. At that moment, she could not imagine being anyone else. Afterward, she thought that if Tom had taken her hand again and led her . . . anywhere, she would have gone. He didn’t, though. Just looked at her a long moment, kind of shook his head as if to bring himself back to his own reality, then turned and made his way down the wooded path, alone.
She walked. Threading in and out of buildings, wandering along paths once so familiar to her, she kept moving in constant retreat from herself. She walked to the top of Ballantine Hall, then down again. She peered into the library at Jordan Hall, with its long battered wooden tables where she and Bridget had sat studying before their botany class; walked through the cool, damp greenhouse with its gargantuan tropical plants. So much was exactly the same as it had been then, the tattered notices on the bulletin boards with advertisements for computer discounts and cell phones the only evidence of another era.
Even the voices wafting through the open windows in the Music Building, running up and down the register of scales, were the same. She stood on the path and listened for a long time, transported to a classroom on the second floor of the Education Building on the first day of “Introduction to Teaching,” her freshman year. An Indian summer day: sticky, no breeze. She sat at a desk, a brand new notebook open before her, as drowsy as the honey-drunk bee buzzing at the corner of the open window – and then, suddenly, a single ghostly voice singing scales came drifting over from the Music Building next door. She sat straight up in her seat, her scalp prickled, and she was shot through with the visceral confirmation of her own escape.
How could she have forgotten this? Years of listening to Claire practice scales on her cello, and so completely had she buried the person she once was that she never remembered that moment and what it had meant to her. She ached to think of it now and of the sounds from the life she’d escaped that had been its counterpoint: the constant roar of traffic on the interstate highway behind her parents’ home, the hiss of her mother’s steam iron late at night, the television laugh track.
If she could find that classroom, she could think. It had become a secret place for her all through college, someplace she went in the late afternoons when she was feeling guilty or low. Outside, the Education Building looked the same: limestone, with leaded casement windows and iron grillwork above the high doors. Caleb Mills’ words were still there, etched deep into the portals: “A teacher must inspire as well as instruct,” and she remembered how it had always made her feel proud to read them and to imagine herself in her own classroom someday, her students lined in neat rows, their faces expectant. But the building was a recital center now, completely renovated to accommodate the overflow of music students. The second floor classrooms had been transformed into a web of practice rooms, recital halls, and recording studios, their doors locked so that there was no hope of finding the window she remembered.
Maybe Claire would be assigned the practice room with her window in it, Nora thought. But that only made her feel more lost and confused, more disconnected from her daughter, her life. What would it be like to be able to tell Claire how it had felt to hear that voice singing scales when she was young, she wondered. To say how glad she was that such a sound was not in the least exotic to Claire herself because every kind of beauty had been a part of her life since she was a little girl. This was something she had done right, Nora thought. She and Charlie, together. They’d made a beautiful life for their child.
But all she could think about was how she had lied to her daughter and kept herself apart, how leaving Tom so long ago, determined to punish herself for what happened that night, had set her on the path toward this moment when, finally, she must come face-to-face with all she had lost.
To wish that she had not succumbed to loneliness, to wish that she had held fast and lived her life alone – or, in time, returned to Tom and made a life with him, after all – would be to wish that Claire had never been born. She did not wish that. She could not even imagine it. She just wished that, on the day of Claire’s birth, when she and Charlie were so happy, closer than they had ever been or ever would be again, she had gathered up her courage and to
ld him the truth about her life.
20
“Mercy Mercy Me”
Nora felt strange in her own house after the weekend in Bloomington – not unlike she’d felt on acid all those years ago. Scared, clinging to rational thought in exactly the same way. But the world she’d seen on acid was chemically induced, not real, and in time the images had faded. Now both worlds were real – the world she’d made with Charlie and the one, before and beyond, with Tom in it. As for Charlie, he seemed shocked by the fact that Claire really did have a life away from him, that it was her real life now. They’d had breakfast with Claire and Dylan on Sunday morning, before setting out for home, and she’d been embarrassed by his uncharacteristic volubility, the way he’d delayed their departure with anecdotes and bits of advice, even after Claire said, finally, that they had plans to go to Brown County with friends who were waiting for them back at Dylan’s apartment.
What? Nora wanted to say to him. You didn’t know this would happen?
She missed Claire, too. But there was no surprise in it. She’d known all along that something would be over once Claire was gone – and more over for the fact that she’d gone to IU, something she realized she was still angry with Charlie about.
She told herself that, regardless of where Claire had chosen to go to college, the foreboding images of war these past few months, the dissembling of politicians, the inevitable comparisons to Vietnam would have dredged up memories of Bridget and made her wonder, after all these years, what had become of Tom. It was the time of life, too. Wasn’t remembering the people you loved when you were young a natural part of the process of looking back at your life, coming to terms with what it had turned out to be? It might have been only mildly disconcerting if she hadn’t seen Tom. If she didn’t have the image of him now in her mind’s eye or hear the echo of his voice speaking her true name.
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