There was no sign of him during the wait in the long lines at customs.
“I have to get to my connection,” Priscilla said after they had passed through.
Natasha hugged her, fighting tears. “Thank you.”
“I hope you make it okay.”
“You’ve been so kind. I can’t tell you—”
“Hey, if we can’t protect each other.”
After another quick embrace, Natasha watched her hurry on, pulling her boy along with her. In the other direction was her own gate. She went there, keeping to the wall, and took her seat. The flight for Memphis would board in an hour.
She looked around her and was abruptly aware of a bizarre, painful sense of loss, almost of yearning—a perverse wish, like something floating loose in her soul, that he would be there, that he would make another effort to speak to her. It filled her with shame. She rose and moved to where she could see the long prospect of the row of gates, going back to the exit from customs. Where could he have gone? He would have had to go through customs.
Finally, she went back to her seat. People moved by, and the sounds of the place rattled in the walls, and she sensed the eerie longing for him, the wanting—yes, that was it, that must be it—to finish things somehow. To have it answered and done with. Over. But there was something else, too, that pulled and nagged, and she looked at it inside, this cowering element of her being, while she kept still, watching the others cross and recross in their clamor and hurry, their insular worlds of will and worry, around her.
These Two
1
Late that afternoon, in a stifling swale of heat, he drove to the airport to pick her up. He wasn’t allowed to go to the gate. A security guard stopped him. He waited beside the escalator leading down to baggage claim. Watching the people come one by one into the narrow hall, he kept thinking she would be the next person and felt new disappointment each time it was someone else. When she came into view, he felt a thrill and realized again how lovely she was. He could not quite believe in this happiness, his own.
For her part, there was the shock of seeing him unchanged. She experienced as a kind of release the calming familiarity of his features, as though being able at last, after many confined hours, to spread out her arms; and, wanting the feeling to stay, she hurried into his embrace. “I’ve missed you so, so much.” She brushed the tears from her eyes and smiled, and stood back to gaze at him. “Oh, you don’t know,” she went on. “My darling.” Her whole body was trembling.
He said, “It’s over, now. It’s done. We’re home.”
They made their way down to baggage claim, holding hands. He was aware that they were both in some zone of fragility.
When they reached the baggage carousel, she came close again and put her arms around his neck. She saw herself on the beach in the early moonlight with the other, and she held tighter, eyes squeezed shut against the uneasiness that was rising like a cold chemical in her blood. She held on to the first good feeling of release at the sight of him, sensing his consternation but unable to let go.
He had to take her forearms and gently break her hold to look at her. “You okay?”
“Now, yes.”
“You made it home,” he said. “You’re home, darling. We’re home.”
She saw his hands, the bones of his wrists, the sinews of his forearms, as the flesh of a man, separate from her as that of any other man. And her shaking resumed.
He said, as tenderly as he could, “I was never in any danger,” and it was as if he were talking to a child. Gripping her arms soothingly above the elbows, he made an effort to strike a less condescending note. “You look so wonderful.”
“I feel beaten up,” she got out, but smiled back.
When they had the bags, three of them, he put them on a cart, and they started out of the building, to the parking lot. Outside it was even hotter than before. To her, the air seemed cooked. She kept her hand on his, where he held the cart handle. They got to the car, and he put the bags in the trunk while she watched, and then she walked into his arms again. “Oh, Michael,” she said. But his name on her lips was just noise to her. She repeated it: “Michael.” And felt the simple goodness of this moment. He was her love; she was home.
“We’re all right,” he kept saying. “We’re okay. It’s okay.”
They got into the car. “I want to spend the night with you,” she told him, flying in the face of the anxiety that she had beaten back. “In your apartment. Tonight. I don’t want to visit with Iris for very long.”
“I think she’s planned to make dinner for us.”
“Can’t we get out of it?”
“Babe—she’s been as worried about you as I have.”
“I wasn’t the one in danger,” she said with an edge of impatience. “I just want to get started with things. Get past all this and be together and not have to think about it or talk about it.”
The fretful rush of her speech troubled him. Something else was in her downcast eyes. “Iris already suggested that we spend some time alone. Hey, sweetie, we’re okay.”
“I’ve missed you so terribly, Michael. I want you.”
He decided to go past any more talk about what they had separately been through. “I think I found us a house to rent.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful. Take me to it.”
“It’s just two blocks from Iris’s.”
“I love it. Take me there.”
He started the car and drove out of the lot and on, down Airways Boulevard. She gazed out at the trees, still as pictures in the windless heat. As he pulled onto 240 and headed east, she caught herself trying to imagine how it would look to her in a year. The road was full of speeding traffic. Everyone seemed to be in a careless hurry to arrive somewhere. At Getwell, he pulled off and went north to Walnut Grove. He turned left there, and above the distant horizon a big thunderhead was moving across the sun. Light poured out of the complex folds of the cloud in lovely lines, and the pelagic blue spaces beyond were bordered with tender fingers of gold. As the beauty of the scene struck through her, she received the unbidden thought that she would have no more free enjoyment of sights like this, and in the next instant the dread of the darkness she felt, the fear of losing forever her very ability to love, and the pure terror of what she had been through, combined in her to form a single, breathless spasm of sickening agitation.
When they pulled onto Mimosa, he said, “It’s the fourth one on the right.”
She looked at the house fronts, the lawns. Each of the entrances had an iron screened door. She had known them all her life, and now they made her think of jails. He saw her pale hand fly up to her face and then drop into her lap.
He parked in front, and for a moment they sat there looking at it. “Here we are,” he said.
The house was the color of coffee with cream. The light changed on it as the lowering sun came through another opening in the clouds, and she saw the small square windows across the top of the front door. “I used to walk by here,” she said, low. “Going for walks in good weather.”
“Does it feel strange to think you’ll be living here?”
“I guess it does. I never even really looked at it. It’s nice.”
A thin sidewalk led up to the front stoop. She got out and stood waiting while he came around the car and took her hand.
“I always thought it was a pretty neighborhood,” she said.
In the front yard, to the right of the walkway, a small tulip poplar stood. Crepe myrtles lined the street, making oblong ponds of shade on the grass going up to the crossing road. There was a tall, leaning river oak behind the house. It looked as though it had been arrested in the process of falling.
They went up the walk to the stoop, climbed the seven steps, and he opened the iron-framed screen door and put the key in the lock. It didn’t want to turn. Remembering Mr. Rainey’s trouble with the wrong keys in the lockbox, he wondered if somehow he’d got the bad set. He felt the need for things to go smoothly, pressing
a little, aware of her standing there watching him. Finally he got the key to work and, pushing the door open, stepped back for her to enter. She went slowly, as if in wonder or disbelief, looking around. Her manner was that of someone still in a far place, alone. “We’ll paint this room, of course,” he said about the living room, which was a deep brown, with a large picture window at the back, looking into the yard. “Something bright. The real-estate agent said we could treat it like we own it where that’s concerned.”
“I like the window,” she said.
Their voices echoed slightly. She couldn’t shake her unease, moving through the rooms, the tight spaces inside the walls of the house. He was obviously proud of his choice, though now he murmured, as though the two of them were in church, that she did not have to like it at all; they could look for something else. It was quite small. She walked out the back door, to the patchy green yard with its shed and koi pond. Beyond the pond was a separated area, like a dog run, but whoever had lived here before had not used it for that purpose; it showed signs of a garden gone to seed. To the right of this was a rose arbor in the shape of a domed gazebo, with a wooden swing in the middle of it. The rosebushes were all overgrown, and some of the longer branches lay across the entrance. The petals were scattered everywhere on the ground.
“Needs work back here, too,” he said. “I can do some things. I should’ve looked closer at everything, I guess.”
She broke forth suddenly with a sob. “I shouldn’t have gone to Jamaica!”
It startled him. “Hey—we’re fine, honey. We don’t have to take this.”
So much stood in her mind: what she was going to have to do, the distance she would have to travel, and—she could not shake the feeling—everything for which she would have to atone. It seemed wholly out of her reach, past her strength.
Standing there, hearing the rasping breath of her distress, he was filled with a queasy kind of wonder. He stood back. “Baby,” he said, low. “It’s all right now. We’re all right now. Come on. We can look for somewhere else.”
“I should’ve come here with you,” she said through her tears. “I should’ve been here. I should’ve been here.”
“It’s okay if you want something else,” he said. “We don’t have to take this one.”
“No.” She turned to him. “No, I want it. I do. I want us in it. We could be moving into it by now.” Wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands, she started toward the rose arbor, feeling his proximity as oppression: if she could just walk out into the open space of the yard, where there was still a pocket of sunlight, to breathe a little and get command of herself. By herself.
“I’m okay with whatever you want to do,” he said, following her. “Really, honey.”
“I know. I love it. I wish we lived in it right now.”
“We’ll fix it up together.”
“Yes.”
“There’s a lot we can do.” He longed to take her arm and pull her back to him, but, sensing that it wouldn’t be what she needed or wanted, he refrained. There was something inaccessible about her now. “The two of us,” he went on helplessly. “It’ll be fun.”
She was still sniffling, still shying away from him.
“We can be like a couple of graduate students. Like we talked about.” It was as if he were pleading with her. “Remember? Going to antiques stores and shopping together for our house in Memphis. Here it is, if you want it. Our house in Memphis.” Now he felt garrulous.
“Yes, our house in Memphis,” she said.
They said nothing for a space, walking to one side of the house, and then around to the other, trying the gate there and looking briefly out at the street. Without expressing it to himself, he determined that the distance between them could for some obscure reason be a thing she required in order to come fully to him. He reassured himself with this notion, watching her walk back out past the river oak and then on to the center of the yard. Undeniably, something else was weighing on her mind. He decided it was the house and the fact that he had chosen it without her.
“I should’ve waited until we could look together,” he said.
She faced him. “No, I’m glad. I didn’t want to have to do that. You did it for us. I’m glad. I am. Really. I love it.” Seeing the concern in his features, she believed she knew what he was thinking. She stepped toward him, indicating the house. Through tears, she said, “Home.”
He understood it as a gift she was offering him.
“Perfect.” She went on, “I’m so happy.”
“You’re sure.” He felt wrong. He rested his hands on her shoulders and gathered her to him. In that moment something shrieked high in the branches of the river oak, a crow or a blackbird. She jumped and looked up. “Honey, we’re fine now,” he said.
“Has Iris seen it?”
He sighed. “Not yet.”
She took his arm at the elbow. “I just need a little time. Everything was so awful when I couldn’t reach you.”
“I know.”
“I think Iris’ll like this house.”
“You can do physical therapy with her every morning for her knee, or just visit with her in the rose arbor and have coffee, and then spend the mornings painting.”
“That sounds lovely.” She reached out and touched the soft petals of one of the roses. “I’ve been hoping to get started again.”
“There you go. And, you know, I could keep my little apartment and you could use it as a studio, so you won’t be interrupted. I hadn’t thought of that until just now. Whatever you want to do, babe.”
“I like it when you call me that.” She thought horribly of his innocence. “You’re so sweet.”
“Babe,” he said.
Any moment, he would be able to read what was rushing through her mind. The tips of her fingers came to her lips, touched softly there. Then she dropped her hands to her sides and offered herself for another kiss.
He put his arms tight around her.
She made herself smile, looking up into his eyes, and she forced the light tone. “And what will you be doing while I’m painting?”
“A friend of mine named Lawrence Watson runs a service for the parole board. I start Wednesday. Job counseling.”
“That’ll be helping people in trouble. Working with people.”
“Exactly. One at a time, you know.”
“But what about France?” She could not help bringing it up.
“It’s not permanent. Just helping out.”
“Isn’t that really what you were doing anyway? Helping people one at a time?”
He noted the tone of feigned interest in her voice and once more received the urge to soothe her. “I’ve been thinking. I don’t know how to put it. I can’t seem to get my bearings after what’s happened.”
All the color went out of her face. “Me, too.” She reached for him. “Oh, baby. I feel so sad for everything and everyone.” It seemed to her that this was the first completely honest thing she had said to him since her arrival.
“You should’ve seen the cabbie that drove me to Clara’s in D.C. A Palestinian Christian. He had quite a story to tell about his day.”
“It’s all so hideous.”
He began telling her about the poor cabbie and the near violence that had come at him solely for his appearance.
She interrupted him. “Let’s not talk about it now. Please?”
“Well, but you know we’re all supposed to go on with our lives and shop up a storm. You’ve been hearing that, right?”
“No.”
“It’s true. If we change anything they win.” He took her hand, felt the thin bones there. “You think the truck will arrive on time at Iris’s?”
“How are we supposed to just ‘go on’ with our lives?” she said. “It’s all changed, hasn’t it?”
“They’re playing football games this weekend. And the baseball teams are going on with things. We’re supposed to not become paranoid. Not show any fear.”
“And what about rag
e?” Her eyes shone.
“I know.”
“Let’s go,” she murmured. She put her arms around him again.
He stood there hugging her while she cried a little more, and some part of him stirred with annoyance, like a breath of air at a window. It passed through him and was gone.
As they went back out to the car, she asked what he had to do to secure the house and close the deal, and as he explained it his gladness in seeing her returned. He marveled at the little creases in the corner of her mouth, the perfect dark shine of her hair in the sunlight. They were together, and the fact of her physical presence lifted him. He felt suddenly quite strong and resilient and free of doubt. The disquiet he had felt earlier, the apathy—that had been caused by having to be away from her. He was almost proud of it. “I’m so happy,” he said.
She smiled, and her eyes welled up again. “Yes—happy.”
She wanted to drive to Iris’s. So much time had gone by since she had driven a car. It felt good to get in behind the wheel, with him at her side. On the little two-block jaunt over to Bilders Street, they talked about Iris’s most recent fall, and he remembered the first time he had ever seen the old lady coming into his church, asking to talk to him. He described how it was to see Iris yesterday, none the worse for wear, constant as ocean waves.
Iris was in front of her small house, watering the flowers in the wooden box that ran along the window. She had her cane with her, and when she saw the car pull up, she put the watering can down and started toward them across the lawn.
Natasha got out and said, “Stay there,” but lost her voice on the second word. She ran to her, and there was Iris, arms spread wide to greet her.
2
The truck with her belongings had been delayed by traffic on Interstate 70 and by bad storms in the mountains near Knoxville. It would not arrive until tomorrow morning. Most of what was on it would be moved into storage for the time being anyway, since they could not occupy the house until the end of the month. Late that evening, they drove back over there with Iris, to show it to her. Once again, Faulk saw the beset look in his future wife’s face and heard notes of a kind of hectic, feigned cheer in her speech—something dark coursing under the timbre of her voice, the slightest tremor there, giving her away. He wondered if Iris heard it as the two women went through the rooms and out to the back, Iris moving quite well with her cane, actually going in under the drooping branches of the rose arbor to sit in the little wooden swing there. Natasha joined her, and Faulk watched as they swung back and forth, Iris talking about how nice this would be when the first real fall weather arrived.
Before, During, After Page 19
