The Last Time They Met

by Anita Shreve

  “It’s just something for Donny T.,” Thomas says absently, concentrating on his driving.

  “What for Donny T.?” Linda asks.

  “Just some stuff he wants me to hold for him.”

  The hockey game was at Norwell, and their team lost two-zip. “Were you hurt?” Linda asks.

  “What?”

  Thomas inches slowly along Main to Spring, following a truck. On Fitzpatrick, the truck speeds up and Thomas does as well, thinking the roads must be better, though the visibility is still poor. Thomas takes the turn at Nantasket Avenue too fast, and the car makes a one-eighty. Linda puts her hands out to the dashboard to brace herself.

  “This is insane,” Thomas says.

  He tries to turn the car around, but the street is so slippery that the Skylark slides across the road, and, as if in slow motion, comes to rest against a telephone pole. Thomas guns the engine, attempting to pull away, but the tires merely spin on the ice. Above them, heavily coated wires sway in the wind.

  “We’re going to have to walk,” Thomas says. “We’ll leave the car here and come back for it when they’ve salted the roads.”

  “Walk where?” Linda asks. It’s miles still to the apartment.

  “My house is just up the hill,” he says.

  ______

  All week, the newspapers have been reporting that it has been the worst January in fifty-four years. At the beach, sleet freezes a house so thoroughly that when the sun rises the next morning, it seems a castle encased in ice. The harbor freezes as well, pushing the boats trapped there higher and higher until the ice cracks the hulls. Power goes out for days, and school is canceled four times: the buses can’t get through. There is a thaw, and the entire town thinks the worst is over. But then the storm comes and surprises everyone, even the weathermen, who have predicted mild temperatures.

  Thomas and Linda have to side-step up the hill, holding on to tree branches. Linda has worn her new knee-high leather boots that she bought with her tip money; they have slippery soles and are useless now. Thomas, who has more traction, grips her hand so that she won’t slide down the hill. Periodically, they stop for breath by a tree and kiss. Sleet runs down their necks. Snot has frozen on Thomas’s upper lip, and he looks like a bum with his watch cap pulled down low over his eyebrows and ears. His mouth and tongue are warm.

  ______

  Though it is a miserable month for school and transportation, it has been a good one for ice-skating. In his basement, Thomas has unearthed a pair of children’s ice-skates with runners, and periodically he has come by the apartment for Jack. He’s taken the boy to the marshes, where he’s taught him to skate. He holds Jack’s hand while the boy falls on his knees, and he skates with Jack between his legs, holding him up under the arms. The boy grows giddy with accomplishment. Thomas makes Jack a small hockey stick and arranges “games” between Michael and Jack on one side and himself and Rich, his seven-year-old brother, on the other. Linda sometimes puts on Eileen’s skates and hovers near Thomas and the boys, but mostly she stays on the sidelines, wrapping her arms around herself and stomping her boots to keep warm. She watches Thomas with Jack and Rich the way a wife might watch a husband with her cherished sons. Proud and happy and feeling a sort of completion that cannot be gotten elsewhere.

  ______

  The journey to Thomas’s house takes nearly forty-five minutes. In decent weather, it can be done in five. Thomas’s father meets them at the door, worry creasing his long face. Thomas’s mouth has frozen, and he can’t even make the introductions. Thomas’s mother, a tall, angular woman with navy eyes that slice through Linda, brings them towels and helps them out of their coats. When Thomas can speak, he introduces Linda, whose hands are stiff and red. She hopes the red will be taken for a reaction to the cold.

  “The storm came on fast,” the father says.

  “We worried about you in the car,” Thomas’s mother says.

  Linda removes her boots and stands in her stocking feet in Thomas’s living room, her arms crossed, tucking her hands into her armpits. She has never seen such a room, has lacked even the imagination to picture it. It is long and elegant, with banks of leaded-glass windows that face the sea. Two fires are burning in separate hearths, and at least a half-dozen chairs and two sofas in matching stripes and chintzes are arranged in groupings. Linda wonders how one decides, on any given night, where to sit. She thinks then of the den in the triple-decker, the TV flickering, the single sofa threadbare at the arms, Michael and Erin and Patty and Jack using the couch as a backrest while they watch The Wonderful World of Disney. She hopes none of them is out in the storm.

  Thomas leads Linda to a sofa, and they sit together with the mother opposite. It feels to Linda like an examination. The father comes in with hot chocolate and seems festive with the occasion, as a small boy might be who’s just been told that school has been canceled. Thomas’s mother, in her periwinkle cardigan and matching skirt, scrutinizes Thomas’s girlfriend, taking in the lipstick and the denim skirt and the sweater under which Linda isn’t wearing a bra.

  “You’re new to town,” the mother says, sipping her hot chocolate. Linda holds her mug with both hands, trying to warm them.

  “Sort of,” Linda says, glancing down. Not only has she worn a sweater through which her nipples, erect now from the cold that has penetrated her bones, are plainly visible (stupid Eileen), but the sweater has a low V-neck, showcasing the cross.

  “And you live in what part of town?” the mother asks, hardly bothering with pleasantries.

  “Park Street,” Linda says, putting the mug down and crossing her arms over her breasts. Beside her, Thomas is flexing his fingers, trying to get the circulation back. He hasn’t touched the hot chocolate. The denim skirt is too short and too tight on her thighs. Linda resists the urge to tug at it.

  “That would be in . . . ?” the mother asks.

  “Rockaway,” Linda says.

  “Really,” the mother says, not even bothering to hide her incredulity.

  “Great storm,” Thomas’s father says beside them.

  ______

  “I’m going to give Linda a tour,” Thomas says, standing. And Linda thinks how remarkable it is to have a house in which one can give a tour.

  They climb the stairs to Thomas’s room, step behind the door and kiss. Thomas lifts her sweater and puts his cold hands on her breasts. He raises the damp denim of her skirt to her hips. She is standing on her toes, up against the wall. She can hear one of the parents at the bottom of the stairs and is certain he or she will come up and enter the room. It’s the risk, or the thrill, or her panic that brings the image, unbidden, to her mind: a man lifting the skirt of a dress.

  “I can’t,” she whispers, pushing at Thomas.

  Reluctantly, Thomas lets her go. She jigs her skirt and sweater down. They hear footsteps on the stairs, and Thomas kicks the door shut.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  She sits on the bed and, trying to erase the image, takes in the details of the room: the wooden desk, the piles of papers, the pens scattered on its surface. A dress shirt and a pair of trousers are crumpled in a corner. White curtains make a diamond of the window and seem too pretty for a boy’s room. A bookcase is in the corner. “Oh God,” she says quietly, and she covers her face with her hands.

  “Linda, what is it?” Thomas asks, crouching in front of her, alarm in his voice.

  She shakes her head back and forth.

  “This?” he asks, clearly bewildered. “That?” he asks, pointing to the wall.

  Footsteps pass once again by the door.

  ______

  In the mirror over the dresser she can see the two of them: Thomas now sitting on the bed, his hair hastily finger-combed, his back slightly hunched. Herself, standing by the bookcase, arms crossed, her eyes pink-rimmed from the cold, her hair flattened from her hat.

  On the desk next to the bookcase are pages of writing. She looks a bit closer. “Is that a poem you’re working on?” sh
e asks.

  Thomas looks absently at the desk, and then stands, realizing that he’s left his work exposed. He moves to the desk and picks up the pages.

  “Is it something you can read to me?” she asks.

  “No,” he says.

  “Are you sure?”

  He shuffles the papers in his hand. “I’m sure.”

  “Let me see.”

  He hands her the first page. “It’s just a draft,” he says.

  She turns the page around and reads what he has written there. It’s a poem about a dive off a pier, a girl in the water in her slip. About moving lights in the background and the taunts of boys.

  She reads the poem through and then reads it again.

  “Water’s silk,” she says. “It felt like silk.”

  ______

  There is hell to pay when they go downstairs: a mother who is frosty; a father who’s had an earful from his wife. The father drifts into a room from which Linda can hear a television; the mother, a woman with a mission, calls a cab with chains. Linda puts her boots back on and stands, dismissed, with Thomas in the vestibule, waiting for the cab.

  “In the duffel bag?” he says. “It’s drugs.”

  ______

  The next day, in the car in back of the cottage, Thomas slides Linda’s blouse and jacket off her shoulder and kisses the bony knob there.

  “I love this part of you best of all,” he says.

  “Really? Why?” It seems, in light of all the parts he has recently got to know, sort of beside the point.

  “It’s you,” he says. “It’s all you.”

  “Isn’t that a song title?” she asks.

  They have on sunglasses. Beyond them, the world is all aglitter. On their way to the beach cottage, they passed the Giant Coaster, St. Ann’s Church, and the diner, all of which were encased in ice. The sun made a sheen against walls that were too bright for the naked eye; it made the branches of the trees seem to have come from Paradise.

  “A different kind of Heaven than we imagined,” she says.

  “What?”

  “It’s a wonderland,” she says, admiring.

  Thomas has retrieved his car. He has, along with most of the rest of the other holdouts in town, finally had chains put on his tires. There is still February to go, and March, and who knows what freak storms April might bring?

  “They cost me twenty bucks,” he said earlier. “Worth it, though. Otherwise, I couldn’t have picked you up.”

  He kisses her. Though they are parked — daringly — in their usual spot, Thomas argues that the cop isn’t likely to start his rounds so early in the afternoon.

  “Why are you doing it?” Linda asks.

  He knows precisely what she is referring to. “Donny T. asked me to,” he says.

  “That’s not a very good reason,” she says, leaning forward and turning on the radio. There has been no school this day, but it’s taken Thomas all morning to get the car towed. She inhales deeply. She can’t get enough of his smell, that scent of toast. It seems to her the essence of human warmth.

  “Last night at your house?” she says. “That was a disaster.”

  “It was OK,” he says.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Linda says. “She hated me.”

  “She’s overprotective.”

  She puts her face in her hands. “I can’t believe I wore that sweater without a bra,” she says.

  “I loved it,” Thomas says. He touches her breast and stops, an animal waiting for the signal to approach.

  “It’s OK,” she says.

  “Whatever it is, you should tell someone.”

  “I would tell you if I could,” she says. She thinks a moment. “I would tell God if I could.”

  “Isn’t He supposed to be able to see and know everything anyway?”

  “It’s part of the contract. You have to be able to tell Him what you’ve done.”

  “It’s illogical.”

  “Well, of course,” she says.

  ______

  “I don’t want to be rude,” Thomas says a few minutes later, “but do you really think God cares?”

  The question doesn’t shock or even surprise Linda. It’s a query, phrased differently, that has gnawed at her for some time: the illogic of caring whether Darren sleeps with Donna before marriage when the Holocaust has happened. Logic demands common sense: God can’t possibly care about premarital sex in the face of all that horror. Yet the thought that He might not care fills her with despair.

  Thomas removes Linda’s sunglasses, and she squints.

  “Take yours off, too,” she says, and he does. They sit face to face.

  “I have to ask you this,” he says.

  “OK,” she says, ready for anything. Curiously buoyed up in fact.

  “Please tell me what happened.”

  But her confidence is false. She opens her mouth to speak and can’t.

  Thomas puts his head back against the seat and shuts his eyes. She runs a finger down his chest. Beyond them the sun sets. The sparkle in the dunes goes out, and the temperature drops.

  “Where did you live before here? Before the Home, I mean?” he asks.

  “Marshfield,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I guess there are quite a few things I don’t know about you.”

  She is silent.

  “Where did you go in the summers?”

  “Thomas.”

  “Can’t you just answer one lousy question?” A testy note in his voice she has never heard before stiffens her shoulders.

  “What is this?” she asks.

  “When you go to Confession,” he asks, “do you confess letting me touch your breast?”

  She pulls her blouse closed.

  “Will you tell the priest about last night? About when I lifted your skirt?”

  She is tight-lipped, staring straight ahead.

  “Will you?” he asks.

  She puts her sunglasses back on.

  “How detailed do you have to get?”

  “Thomas, stop.”

  The diamonds on the windshield are gone. She pulls her coat tightly around herself. “Take me home,” she says.

  “I just want to understand what you’re all about,” he says.

  The wind from the ocean rattles the loose bits of the Skylark and waffles against the windows. There is frost inside the car as well, she realizes. She can see their angry puffs of breath.

  “I guess I’m angry,” he says.

  “With who? With me?” she asks.

  “I guess I’m angry at you.”

  “Good,” she says, hugging the door now. She begins to button her blouse.

  “I’m not angry at you,” he says.

  “You should be,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve spoiled something for you, haven’t I?”

  “That’s a myth.”

  “It’s in your bones. It’s not a myth.”

  “Linda. Look at me.”

  She refuses. “Speaking of not knowing everything about a person, why don’t you tell me why you’re carrying drugs for Donny T.?”

  “So what if I do?”

  “So what? So fucking what if you do? You could go to jail, that’s what.”

  “Linda, look at me. Please.”

  She relents and turns.

  “This is it,” he says. “You’re it. If I know anything in my bones, I know that.”

  She is silent.

  “You’re my family, for Christ’s sake. You’re my lover and my friend and my family.” He pauses. “I assume I’m yours.”

  It might be true, she thinks. It might be possible. And what a relief that would be, she thinks. A different way to see the world: Thomas as her family. She crosses the ocean between them and touches his hand.

  “You sound ridiculous when you say fuck,” he says.

  ______

  Thomas opens the door of the Skylark. He reaches into the backse
at and takes out the duffel bag. Linda watches as he makes his way to the beach in front of the dune grass, slipping and sliding as he goes. She sits on her hands to get a better look. The tide is high, lapping at his feet. With the strength of an athlete, he flings the bag high and wide into the sea. He watches it float for a minute until it sinks.

  Her eye flickers between the vertical upright stalks of the dune grass, the horizontal clapboards of the cottage, the squares of the windowpanes. She hasn’t noticed this before, but everything is a pattern. She has thought that her life until now was a random series of events. This thing happened and then that thing happened, and then that thing happened. When all along, there has been a pattern, a plan. A beautifully intricate plan.

  Thomas slips into the car, shivering as he does so. Though his jacket is on, his shirt is still unbuttoned. He rubs his hands together.

  “What will happen now?” she asks. “Won’t Donny T. be mad? How much was in there?”

  “A few kilos. He’ll probably put a contract out on me.”

  “Thomas.”

  “I’m only kidding. I’ll pay him. I’ll think of something.”

  ______

  In the cafeteria the next day, Donny T. is making book on how many more days of school will be canceled before the winter ends. The high bet is six. The low is none. Linda thinks the low bet is closer to the truth. The minute changes in the light — the strength of it, the way it slants through the windows — suggests that spring is tantalizingly near.

  There are pockets of slush on the tile floor beneath her table. She sits alone, with only five minutes left before class. She contemplates the iridescent sheen on the mystery meat in front of her, the congealed gravy that lies in lumps on the plate. She wishes she’d thought to bring an apple.

  She watches Donny T. at his table: the deft way he takes the money from outstretched fingers; the sleight of hand as he slips it into a jacket pocket, the casual way he jots notations on a napkin, ready to ball it in his fist should an overcurious teacher wander his way. He is entrepreneurial and gifted.