A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  “It’s not that,” Dorothy persevered.

  Lucybelle felt a mix of anger, compassion, and impatience. Her arms ached for an authentic embrace.

  “Of course I loved her. But we were quite happy being platonic friends. We had a happy—a very happy—agreement that way.”

  “Each to her own,” Lucybelle said.

  Ruthie scowled at Lucybelle and she shrugged back at her.

  “You’re speaking in the past tense,” Beverly observed. “She didn’t die. She’s getting married.”

  “We were not together,” Dorothy said, looking at Lucybelle. “Not in that way.”

  “Fine.”

  “But that doesn’t mean my heart isn’t broken. Again.”

  A bowl of mixed nuts, another one of Ritz crackers, and a plate of pale American cheese slices sat on the coffee table. Lucybelle made herself a cheese and cracker sandwich. The crumbs dusted the front of her blue dress as she bit into it.

  Beverly looked as though she were trying with all her might to refrain from making an inflammatory comment, and Ruthie was concentrating on keeping Beverly from doing so. Lucybelle made another American cheese and Ritz sandwich.

  “I’m sorry,” Dorothy said. “I didn’t mean to ruin your big day.”

  “Actually, I don’t feel very celebratory about the beginning of my fifth decade, so I welcome the distraction.” Callous again, she supposed, and so she added, “I don’t mean I welcome your disappointment, just—” Thankfully Dorothy interrupted her because she had no idea how to finish that sentence.

  “I’m not disappointed,” Dorothy said, her emphasis managing to convey that no words could express the depth of her devastation. “I’m delighted for her. It’s just that it leaves me rather in the lurch.”

  Ruthie patted Dorothy’s hand.

  “Get the cake,” Beverly said, hurrying things along.

  They sang “Happy Birthday” as Ruthie carried the round chocolate layer cake, adorned with four lit candles, from the kitchen. The singing triggered another crying fit by Dorothy. Lucybelle went to the window to look out as the other two tried to calm her, but then Ruthie started gasping for air. Once Beverly set her up on the leather chair with her inhaler, Lucybelle said that she was going home. She didn’t offer an explanation.

  “I ruin everything,” she heard Dorothy say as she let herself out.

  Lucybelle practically ran to her car. She was sorry to leave like that, to abandon the mess of Dorothy for Beverly and Ruthie to handle, especially with Ruthie coping with an asthma attack. But it was her fortieth birthday and she still had a horizon in her view.

  Monday, August 19, 1963

  As Lucybelle turned left onto the long driveway leading to CRREL, she noticed a cream-colored Thunderbird convertible parked along Lyme Road, a short distance away from the entrance. Looking in her rearview mirror, she saw a short-haired, brown-skinned woman sitting on the hood of the Thunderbird, hands braced on the tops of her thighs, a pair of green-lensed sunglasses on her face.

  Lucybelle braked, put the car in reverse, and backed down the driveway until she reached the highway. She parked a good twenty yards away from the Thunderbird, tried to calm her breathing, and then stepped out of the car.

  “Happy birthday.” Stella slid off the hood and walked toward Lucybelle, holding out a book.

  She glanced at the cover and said, “I’ve already read it.”

  “I figured as much. Here, though. It’s still your birthday present.”

  Lucybelle took the copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and looked at the title page, knowing there’d be an inscription. Stella had written, “Always write in books. With love, Stella.”

  Lucybelle backed up a few steps so she could lean against her Chevy. It needed a wash, and the highway grit rubbed into the cotton of her dress.

  Stella smiled. “Still all no-nonsense, aren’t you?”

  Lucybelle nodded and then felt foolish for having done so.

  “You look beautiful. The blues of your dress, car, and sky are all exactly the same.”

  “Why are you here?” Lucybelle looked over her shoulder at the buildings of CRREL, a large complex with a hundred employees and dozens of windows.

  “I’m here to say happy birthday. Forty is a big one.”

  “The Sox are playing the Yankees today. In Chicago.”

  Stella laughed. “Yep. I’m missing the game.”

  She wasn’t here to say happy birthday. “How’s Wanda?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Rusty?”

  “Rusty is Rusty. Can’t do anything with her. Takes herself right up to the edge of trouble, time and again. Sometimes I wish she’d just mess up big time and let them put her away.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Of course I don’t mean that. But she’s not a kid anymore. I expected more of a learning curve than I’ve seen. I’m tired of bailing her out of tight spots.”

  “She depends on you and Wanda.”

  “She needs to learn to depend on herself.”

  “Acme Transport?”

  “We’re doing great. I have six cars now and good drivers. Solid protection from a few well-placed friends, which these days is even more necessary than it was back when you and I were stopped. Remember that Halloween?”

  “I need you to tell me why you’re here.”

  She nodded. “I forgot how you like to get right to the point.”

  “I haven’t seen you in five years. So if this is getting right to the point, I’d hate to see your idea of a delay.”

  “I miss you.”

  “Stella.”

  “We were raided a month ago. They searched every room in the house, including my darkroom. They took the company books. They even tore through our clothes. Lots of us in the movement are getting this. It’s intimidation, plain and simple. They hope to find drugs, anything they can stick you with, but all they found at our house was a lot of dirty dishes and more photographs than they’ll ever want to look through.”

  The jolt of fear was so intensely visceral, Lucybelle thought she might vomit.

  “They didn’t find the ones of you. I had them well hidden.”

  It was as if she herself, not just photos of herself, had lain naked, well hidden, perhaps in an attic, while the men searched. She croaked, “You still have them?”

  “Of course I still have them. I can’t bear to destroy them.”

  Lucybelle struggled to reassemble herself. “I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused you and Wanda.”

  Stella grinned, her dimples caving. “I’m not sorry. Don’t give me that strict-girl look. I’m just telling you the truth. That’s what you asked for, isn’t it?”

  “You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

  “I came to bring you the negatives and the pictures. I didn’t want to put you at risk by mailing them. And they’re not safe at my house anymore. We’ll be raided again.”

  “You drove all this way to give them to me?”

  Stella nodded.

  “You could have just burned them.”

  “Yes. I could have.” Stella opened the door to her Thunderbird, reached under the driver’s seat, and withdrew a manila envelope. She handed it to Lucybelle. “But I didn’t and I won’t. Go ahead, if you see fit.”

  “What about the two that Wanda has?” Lucybelle still had the baseball bat. She kept it under her bed, alongside the novel manuscript.

  Stella shrugged, looked off across the field on the other side of the highway.

  “Where does she think you are now?”

  “She knows where I am.”

  “Visiting me in New Hampshire?”

  “Nah. I’m on my way back to Alabama to shoot another action.”

  “Yeah, and Hanover is right on the way.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Lucybelle glanced over at the complex of buildings again. The sun glinted off the upper-story windows. “I should get in to work.”

&nbs
p; “Okay. I’d ask you to lunch, but . . .”

  “Be careful in Alabama, will you?”

  Stella chuffed and tapped the book in Lucybelle’s hands. “Rachel Carson doesn’t back down. She doesn’t stop telling the truth. Despite Monsanto and the American Cyanamid Company attacking her every chance they get.”

  “Please be careful.” They shot Medgar Evers in his own driveway. In the back.

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “I know you do.”

  “‘If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word freedom out of your vocabulary.’ That’s Malcolm X.”

  A long silence opened up between them. Lucybelle spoke the only words that would bridge it. “I love you.”

  Stella nodded.

  “Please be safe.”

  “Look. Lucybelle. Honestly, I’m the one who should be cautioning you. Promising to not have girlfriends. Keeping classified secrets. Bound and gagged. It’s going to corrupt your soul, sooner or later.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “They’ll sell you down river the second it suits them.”

  “I’m getting out. Soon.”

  Stella studied her for a second, swallowing as if to rid her mouth of something distasteful. “There’s something else.”

  Lucybelle waited.

  “It was over a year ago. A woman came to the door. Asked a bunch of questions, including had I heard of a place called Camp Century.”

  Dread weighted Lucybelle’s legs.

  “No,” Stella said. “Don’t worry. She got nothing. I said I’d never been to camp. So she goes, ‘Oh, I think you know what I’m talking about.’ I said, ‘I hate camping’ and gave her my best dumb Negro look.”

  “Did she have a badge or anything?”

  “Of course not. Just some low-level agent hoping for a find that would lead to a promotion. But what I’m trying to tell you . . . remember when you told me you couldn’t abide lies?” She waited for Lucybelle to nod. “That’s the safest place to be. Right there. They can’t touch you if you’re living the truth.”

  “I know.” She hadn’t meant it to come out in a whisper.

  “I love you too.” Stella touched her cheek.

  “Do you have your camera?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let me take your picture.”

  Stella got the camera out of her car and handed it to Lucybelle. She looked into the viewfinder, seeing only black, until Stella said, “You have to take off the lens cap.” Stella guided her fingers to the focus ring, and as Lucybelle turned it, eyelashes came into focus. She took a few steps back and framed Stella, who looked right into the center of the lens, unsmiling, her eyes seductively perceptive. “Take your time,” she said.

  When Lucybelle lowered the camera, Stella took it from her hands. She advanced the rest of the film, opened the back, and dropped out the roll. She put the film—light and shape, even emotion, fixed in a translucent spool of tape—in Lucybelle’s hand and closed her fingers around it. Stella climbed back in the Thunderbird and drove down Lyme Road toward Hanover.

  That night Lucybelle lay in bed with her new copy of Silent Spring. The lovely writing, the woman’s lyrical view of the planet and its life forms, and her tender defense of her positions sustained Lucybelle through the long, sleepless night.

  Sunday, September 15, 1963

  Early on a Sunday morning in the middle of September, four men planted a box of dynamite, fitted out with a time-delay mechanism for its detonation, under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. A little after ten o’clock that morning, a group of twenty-six children walked into the church basement to prepare to hear a sermon titled “The Love That Forgives.” The bomb went off, killing four little girls: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley.

  In her anger and grief, Lucybelle pulled her novel out from under her bed and began a rewrite, a search for deeper truth, for greater revelation. Stella once had called her photography bearing witness. It was throwing light onto lives, or more accurately, capturing the light already existing in lives. She hoped that words and stories could do that too.

  Friday, November 22, 1963

  The festivities to celebrate the opening of the new lab had been postponed so many times that the colonel considered forgoing the whole formality. A few folks, including Lucybelle, already had been working there for two years. The date kept sliding for various reasons, including the tar-pot fire, followed by half the staff disappearing for their annual research trips to Greenland, Alaska, and Antarctica. The community in Hanover was slowly getting used to having the lab in its midst. Why remind them of their fears with fanfare?

  However, the funders in Washington, who didn’t have to live with the people in Hanover, insisted on a three-day gala event, and so on Thursday, November 21, when all the field researchers had returned to New England, General Britton cut the ceremonial ribbon and said, “This will open the door to the many friends of CRREL visiting today and throughout the open-house period. But more than that—it will signal, symbolically, the opening of the doors to new horizons in scientific and engineering achievements.” On Friday the lab would be open for public tours. The grand finale, a big party, was planned for Saturday.

  Lucybelle arrived in the late morning on Friday, as did Amanda Woo and Emily Hauser, to help set up. Beverly and Ruthie were already there, moving chairs about the cafeteria, flapping tablecloths onto tables, scrubbing stains off the walls.

  “Music!” Emily cried and went off in search of a radio. She returned carrying the big one from the colonel’s office and plugged it in. The voice of Elvis crooning “Love Me Tender” filled the cafeteria and Emily feigned a swoon.

  “I’ll find the classical station.” Ruthie reached for the dials.

  “I just tuned it,” Emily said. “We need rock and roll for party prep.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “As a heart attack.”

  “Elvis?”

  “Heartthrob. Don’t tell Peter.”

  Emily Hauser wore her ironic smile throughout the exchange and Beverly shot leave-it-be looks at Ruthie. It was a tough call, who in this situation had higher rank: the wife of a scientist or an actual employee of CRREL, even if she was a just a secretary.

  “I’m surprised the new geologist isn’t here.” Ruthie retreated by impugning another. Vera Prescott was the first-ever woman scientist hired at SIPRE or CRREL, but apparently in Ruthie’s opinion, femaleness trumped job title.

  “She’s just a geographer,” Beverly said.

  “She’s got a PhD in both,” Lucybelle said.

  “Well, la-dee-da.”

  Ruthie did her nervous titter, quietly tumbling it into a cough.

  “I don’t care if she’s the Countess of Hanover,” Beverly said. “Helping out today would be a good way for her to get to know the other ladies.”

  “She’s a scientist,” Emily said. “She doesn’t need to help with party setup.”

  “Well, la-dee-da.”

  “She keeps herself separate,” Ruthie rallied. “Lucy is head of publications. She’s here.”

  “She shouldn’t be,” Emily said. “For that matter, neither should either of you two.”

  “It’s my job. I’m office manager.” Beverly spoke with icy precision, claiming both resentment and authority.

  “She’s only been here a month,” Lucybelle said. “She’s probably shy.”

  “I invited her to help out today.”

  “Asking her if she’d like to help set up for a party is hardly a welcoming gesture.”

  Lucybelle was willing to cut Vera Prescott a lot of slack. She remembered how difficult it had been to break in socially with these women and nearly impossible to win the respect of the men. As a scientist, Vera was supposed to be their equal. It might take her years to be accepted, especially since, true enough, she didn’t have an accommodating personality.

  Twice Lucybelle had invited Vera to Friday ni
ght drinks with the scientists, both times writing down the address for Lander’s Restaurant. When on the following Monday mornings Lucybelle asked why she hadn’t come, meaning to make it very clear how welcome she would be, Vera said that she was looking for a place to live and that the search took all of her time. Meanwhile, she’d had to make a long trip to Washington soon after starting the job. But even when she was in town, Lucybelle rarely saw her in the lab. She stayed holed up in the scientists’ wing, not even emerging for lunch.

  That too was understandable. What’s worse than standing with a tray of food in a cafeteria full of people who all know one another, looking for a place to alight? On Vera’s second day at CRREL, Lucybelle stopped by her office, introduced herself, and asked if she’d like to go to lunch together. The telephone rang as Lucybelle was making her invitation and Vera had lifted a finger, the wait-a-second gesture, and Lucybelle had done just that, waited there in the doorway while Vera entered into a lengthy conversation as if she weren’t standing there at all. She finally left and Vera didn’t mention the lunch invitation, or even smile, when they passed in a hallway later that afternoon.

  The rebuff was so complete that Lucybelle didn’t know why she tried another time. The woman was no-nonsense with her mink-brown hair and steely gray eyes. She wore her intelligence like armor, putting her brains on the outside, to ward off anyone who didn’t want to engage on that level. It was almost fun to see what it would take to get her attention. She’d heard that Vera had been the only woman in her PhD program at MIT, and she wanted to hear the stories. They’d be doozies, she knew that. Vera undoubtedly survived by being perfect. Peter Hauser had said “her work couldn’t be faulted,” which meant that she was flawless. Keeping that up for a lifetime would take a toll. It also made Lucybelle curious.

  The second time she asked Vera to lunch, she didn’t even look up from the work on her desk. She continued making notes as she said, “Too busy, but thanks.”

  Lucybelle couldn’t imagine her baking cookies or arranging flowers for a lab party, nor did she blame her.

  And yet, a little after noon, just as the radio station began broadcasting the Kingsmen doing “Louie Louie” and Emily demonstrated the twist, who should come into the cafeteria carrying an uncovered plate but Vera Prescott. She smiled staunchly, looking as though she were making her best effort, and barked out, “I made Toll House cookies.”