“What have you seen?” he asked slowly.
“Nothing new. Except…a kind of clarity. The struggle with Neil Mason seems to have stripped something away. It all seems so clear to me now, so inevitable. I know that what’s going to happen is going to happen soon. Very soon. And I know that you’re going to blame yourself for what happens. You’ll think it was because of some choice you made, some decision that you could have made differently. But you’ll be wrong, Tucker. There’s nothing you can do to change what’s going to happen to me. Nothing.”
“Because of destiny.” His voice was flat.
“Because a sequence of events was set in motion months ago, long before I met you. The sequence has to play itself out. You can’t stop it.”
“I can damned well try. And so can you.”
“No, I can’t. I know that now.”
“Goddammit, Sarah, don’t you give up on me. Not now. We’ve come too far for that. You said you needed my confidence, my belief that we could change the future. I still believe that.”
“I don’t think so.” She hesitated, then added quietly, “How can you even look to the future when you’ve spent your entire adult life chasing the past? How can you face one when you haven’t finished with the other?”
“Where are they?”
“Next door.”
“You don’t ask for much, do you?”
“This is as close as I could get. Can you do it, or not?”
“Yes. But it’s going to take some time.”
“Then go ahead.”
Tucker wanted to deny her accusation. He wanted to change the subject, to once more avoid the painful memories and painful admissions he would have to reveal to her. To push it away, turn away, as he had so many times since he had met Sarah. But somehow, in this quiet room in the quiet hours before midnight, with so much uncertainty and possible violence lying just ahead of them, somehow he could avoid it no longer.
“You want me to ask you about Lydia,” he said.
“I want you to tell me about her. You need to, Tucker.”
She was right. He needed to. He had never told anyone the truth, not his family, not his best friend, and it had all been dammed up inside him for nearly twenty years. Once he began, the words poured out of him in a fast, jerky stream.
“We were high school sweethearts. Went steady all during our senior year. Lydia had been raised by her mother and an aunt; her father had died when she was just a baby. Her mother had invested the insurance money wisely, so there was plenty for college; we were both planning to go to UVA. We…made a lot of plans.
“A few months before graduation, her mother became ill. Very ill. Lydia was spending a lot of time at the hospital, but her mother insisted she stay in school and graduate with the class. With finals coming up, I helped her all I could. She’d go to school, then to visit at the hospital, and every night we were together at my house or hers, studying. Or trying to. We were both under a lot of stress and we…weren’t as careful as we should have been.”
“She got pregnant.”
Tucker barely heard Sarah’s quiet voice, but nodded slowly. “She told me right after graduation. And she was…so happy about it. So full of plans. We’d get married right away. She’d put off college, use the money to get a little apartment near UVA, furnish it, bank the rest for living expenses. And medical expenses. I could go on to college, maybe change my major to something a little more practical than English lit and, anyway, maybe that book I was working on would sell. Her mother might live long enough to see her first grandchild and her aunt would surely help out…Christ, she was so happy.”
“And how did you feel about it?” Sarah asked.
He looked at her and, as vividly as if it had been yesterday, felt the shock and panic, the wild urge to run. Resentment and anger rising in him like bile, choking him…
“I felt…trapped. As rosy as she painted the picture, I knew reality would be different. Neither of us had medical insurance and babies are expensive, so the money wouldn’t last long at all. I’d have to get a job before long, and even if I managed to finish college, I’d have to take some practical courses, just like she’d said, aim for a job that would support a family right away. Everybody knew writers didn’t make much money, and a degree in literature isn’t much good for anything. I could see my life laid out all neat and tidy ahead of me, a job I hated, a wife I resented, a child I didn’t want…and all my dreams in pieces behind me.”
“And Lydia knew. Saw it in your face.”