Natasha wept, touching the back of the older woman’s hand.
A few moments later, her grandmother said, “God. I should’ve seen it. I knew there was something else. I should’ve pressed you until you told me.”
“It’s all right now. I feel better telling you.”
Iris sat down again. “You don’t think Michael—he’s not heading to Orlando—”
“We didn’t get as far as the name.”
Iris appeared to deliberate for a moment. “Honey, I’ve never seen two people more in love.”
Natasha waited, watching her begin to sniffle.
“God,” Iris went on, gaining control of herself. “I’m so sorry about it.”
“Don’t, please.”
They did not speak for a few moments.
Presently, she breathed the words out. “He’ll want to do something about it. He’ll be back and he’ll want to—you know he’ll—you’ll have to tell him all of it.”
“No. I can’t—I can’t have him know some of it.”
The other’s voice was steady now. “Tell me what you think he can’t know.”
“I let—I let the—let him kiss me. Oh, I want to get past it. I wish it never was.”
Iris waited for her to subside. “But that’s such a small thing, isn’t it? A moment’s failing. And you were afraid. You thought Michael was—you were alone and he was alone and everyone was suffering this terrible thing. You didn’t know.”
Natasha sat there crying softly into her fingers. “It was hard enough telling you all that. And look what he thought. Without my saying anything. No, I can’t. I can’t.”
“You think he went to his apartment?”
Natasha looked into her eyes but did not speak.
The old woman held the handkerchief to her mouth and then wiped her eyes and her forehead. “You’ll get past this, honey. There’s people—I’m sure there’s people you can talk to. And you’re pregnant.”
“What if he can’t believe it’s his.”
She obviously had not thought of this. “But you—”
“I know.” Natasha sobbed. “But it crossed my mind.”
“You’re having Michael Faulk’s baby,” Iris told her. “That’s what’s happening.”
“I feel so sick of everything, Iris.”
A little later, they went into the living room and sat on the sofa facing the window out onto the street. They were quiet. The younger woman kept sniffling. The sky was darkening outside.
Iris said, “You have to talk to him, honey.”
“I wish I felt different. I don’t even like to think about him right now. I don’t.”
“No, now. Honey—there’s a child. You have to try, anyway … you’ve just got to try.”
“He thought I was with someone else, Iris.”
“Well, he can’t be expected to know what he wasn’t told.”
Natasha looked at her. “But he assumed—”
A moment passed.
“The assumption came from what he’s afraid of,” Iris said. “And he might’ve been right in assuming, with the rest of us, that if it was something like—if it was—that you’d have told him.”
Natasha remained silent.
“Right?”
“So many never—you know?” She sniffled. “Nobody knows it happened. I read up—I—”
Iris did not respond.
“Could be—anyone. Anyone you meet.”
“Do you love Michael?”
“You should’ve seen him. I thought he was going to hurt me.”
Iris said, “Jesus.” She stood and started out of the room. She wasn’t limping at all, and she’d left her cane leaning against the umbrella stand.
Natasha followed her into the kitchen. “I thought the whole world was over when New York happened,” she sobbed. “Oh, what happened to us. We didn’t have anything to do with it. We didn’t do anything wrong.”
Her grandmother moved to hold her. “Baby,” she said.
“Nothing makes any sense.”
They were quiet, standing close, looking like two people undecided about whether to leave a room or remain in it.
“I would like to have known her,” Natasha said, suddenly.
Iris blinked, and stared. Then: “Your mother.”
“Yes.”
There was another pause.
“I used to think about what it would’ve been to—to get to know her as something other than a soft blur.”
“A soft blur is a pretty good thing to have when nothing is the only other choice.”
Natasha wiped her eyes with a napkin from the table. “I don’t mean anything about you—but I feel like I don’t have anything to lean on, nothing to brace myself.”
Iris said. “I’m here.”
They were still facing each other.
“You’ll stay here for a while?” Iris asked.
“I don’t know.”
4
He drove out to the interstate and along Highway 40 toward Nashville. He went fast, pressing the pedal to the floor, taking the car up to ninety-five miles an hour. He had no destination in mind. It was just going on. Speeding away. The road made its gradual curves before him and then was straight for miles. Away. That was what was needed. He was taking himself away. He imagined simply driving off the side, into a tree, or over one of the bridges skirting a riverbed. The only sound was the wind-rush of the car as he sped on.
He drove to Jackson and pulled into a rest area and stopped, and put his forehead down on the steering wheel. He had been struggling with his faith, the whole edifice threatening to collapse, and now his marriage and this marvelous love he had been given so freely were casualties of all that. Abruptly, it came to him, with a terrible, leveling force, that she was a victim not only of the assault but of his, Faulk’s, failure of trust: how wrong he had been, and he understood utterly now what that meant. Some element of his makeup had fallen into this pit of mistrust, this obsession. Last night’s fit had arisen out of the crazy, synthetic, self-righteous anger of intoxication, and he was painfully aware of that. He had imagined everything from the beginning, had been wrong the whole time, and it was his suspicions about her that had magnified her unease and anxiety.
The truth of this flamed forth, here, in the closed car, in the troubled light of morning. She was innocent. She was innocent and she was beautiful and true and herself, and all of her breathing life was her own, and he had not been worthy of her.
He drove back toward Memphis. There was almost no traffic. He kept exactly to the speed limit. His eyes stung. He was out of breath. The sky before him changed to towering dark folds of cloud, and lightning flashed at the very tops of them, not going to the ground but forking, extending across.
At Iris’s house he parked the car and sat for a while behind the wheel. Perhaps they were watching from the windows. The rain started, big drops splashing, then a downpour. He waited, and gradually the rain subsided and became a steady fall.
Natasha saw him from the window, and her grandmother spoke about immediately going out and meeting him, even with the rain pouring down. “Don’t let him sit there.” Natasha felt like hiding, going to the back of the house and letting him knock and waiting for him to leave. But she had been hiding, she told herself. When the rain slackened and he got out and walked up to knock on the door, Iris opened it and let him in. He stood in the light of the entrance, eyes cast down. Rain dripped from his hair onto his face, so that it looked like he was crying.
“I guess you know what I—what happened,” he said to Iris, looking at Natasha and looking down again.
“I know,” Iris said to him. “Yes, I know what this girl has had to deal with.”
“I came to say—I don’t—I’m—I can’t believe I could’ve—”He halted and looked at Natasha again. “Everything. It’s my fault.”
“Come in and close the door,” Iris said. There were tears in her voice.
He took the step toward them, turned, and pushed the door
shut, then faced them again, glancing at Iris and then back at Natasha and then casting his gaze back downward. His demeanor was absurd, nearly comical, that of a boy in trouble for getting wet.
“I always thought you had such a way with words,” Iris said.
He left a long silence. Then: “No.”
“Not much to say, is there.”
“Iris,” Natasha said quietly.
“I’m going to make us some breakfast,” the old woman murmured.
When she was gone, neither of them moved. Natasha still felt frightened, and he had seen it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I—I’m so sorry.”
She waited.
“I can’t lose you. I don’t know what to do now. Can’t—can’t I do anything?”
“I don’t know.”
“I love you.”
“Right now,” she told him, “that’s hard to believe.”
“I do, I swear it. Please.” He saw the tears in her dark eyes and looked away. “Why didn’t you—why couldn’t you tell me, baby?”
His voice was so sad that for a few seconds she could not answer him.
“You were afraid?”
“No,” she breathed out. Then: “Yes.”
“If you’d told me—you know—”
“I should’ve told you,” she said.
Iris came to the opening from the kitchen. “Where did I put my cane?”
Natasha walked over and got it, and when she approached with it, Iris grabbed the frame of the door, and Natasha took hold of her. “Damn thing’s hurting again. Come in here and help me, will you? Both of you.”
Natasha walked with her, and when they were in there, they both turned. There was the empty doorway, the living room, the rainy windows. Iris nudged her toward the sink, handing the glass kettle to her.
He went to the opening and looked in at them and saw that they were working together, Iris leaning on the cane and taking things out of the refrigerator, Natasha at the sink, pouring water into the kettle.
He walked in, hesitated, and then opened the cabinet over the stove and brought out three plates and three saucers. Iris broke eggs into a bowl and whisked them and sprinkled thyme in them, and salt and broken bits of feta cheese. Faulk laid strips of bacon in the big iron skillet, and Natasha, with trembling hands, spooned coffee into the French press.
Watching him tend to the bacon, she thought, I don’t know how we’ll manage it, now, my love. She started to speak the words and then felt the tears come, turning herself away, going on with the tasks, setting the table, pouring orange juice, laying out silverware.
He wiped his wrist across his mouth, watching the bacon sizzle. To his left, Iris, pouring the eggs into another skillet, began suddenly to cry. “I’ll be better,” she said quickly, standing there with the bowl in one hand, her hip against the counter. “It’s not so strange, I guess. I’m thinking about my poor girl, my daughter. After all these years, it’s—it’s still the same pressure here.” She touched her chest.
Natasha came and put her arms around her.
He looked at them, and the whole of what they had been through moved in him under his skull, a terrible pressure.
“Please,” he said. “It’ll never come up again. Ever.”
“What will never come up again,” his wife said. It was a challenge. And as the words came from her, she felt her own strength, her own separate being, not his, not anyone’s. Hers.
He said nothing. The helplessness in his gaze was hard to look at.
They went on with the preparation of the meal, and when it was all done they sat at the table, and Iris spooned eggs onto each plate and parceled the bacon. Natasha poured the coffee and set down the small plate of buttered toast. There was a long silence. And then Iris bowed her head and extended her hands to them.
Faulk took his wife’s hand, because this was grace; it was nearly habit.
“For what we are about to receive,” Iris said in a trembling voice. “We pray that you will make us truly thankful.”
Natasha saw the worry in his expression, the frowning anticipation. Without words, she had the rush of knowing: they were living in the new, terrible reality—war and broken expectations and suspicion and rape and masses of people dying for nothing they had done, even from a thing as harmless as the mail—and she had been frightened that she had lost him forever, and here he was, at her grandmother’s table, the family table, not lost: an essentially good man carrying the weight of his blunders and failures of faith or understanding, a man full of inconsistencies and anxiety, subject to the terrors of the time, and, withal, someone who desired to be better than that and who might even find a way to make up for the things he had done and felt out of his anguish. And perhaps, through the long and difficult and—she understood this, too—doubtful journey back, she might find again the man she had fallen in love with, the one with whom she had been so happily at ease, so much at home. The one whose child she was carrying.
“There’s something else I have to tell you,” she said.
September 7, 2007—October 6, 2012
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was begun in Memphis; worked on and titled in Knoxville; continued in Galway, Ireland, while in the hospital with a head injury; then again in Memphis; in Ireland again; in France; and finally finished in Orange, California. Allen and Donnie Wier provided hospitality and good company throughout the composition, and my grown daughters, Emily, Maggie, and Amanda, gave nurturing and support. Lisa Cupolo was beautifully helpful through it all.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Bausch is the author of twelve novels and eight volumes of short stories. He is a recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and, in 2013, the Rea Award for the Short Story. He is currently professor of English at Chapman University in Orange, California.
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