“No, it’s not. I never came to see you at the hospital either. After your accident. I’m sorry for that too. That was hideous of me.”
“It was hard for people . . .”
“You were friends with my daughter. I was friends with your mother. I should’ve come.”
Lindsay looked down, and for a moment Angela saw her in flight, one long leg thrown out before her and the other folded under like a wing as she took the hurdle. Effortless, magnificent.
“Caitlin came,” Lindsay said. “Every day after school. Or after practice. I’ll never forget that, Mrs. Courtland.”
Angela smiled. Lindsay smiled. Without thinking, Angela reached and thumbed the tears from the girl’s face, one side, then the other.
“I’m sorry I ambushed you like this. I’m sorry to upset you. I just wanted to talk to you.”
“I’m not upset. I’m glad to see you.”
Angela stood to go.
“Mrs. Courtland?” said Lindsay.
“Yes?”
“I know about what happened.”
Angela stood looking at her.
“Between my mom and your—with Mr. Courtland. Years ago. I know about it. I know that’s why you and my mom stopped being friends. I know that’s why you didn’t come to the hospital.”
Angela stared at her. Then she remembered—but it was like something she’d lost, or buried. She had no idea what it once felt like to know that her husband had slept with—was sleeping with—Jeanne Suskind. She thought of her own mother in the nursing home, who sometimes called her Faith, who asked, Where’s Angela? Did the mind break down or did it simply correct? Vectoring away from pain? They’d never told her mother about Caitlin and they never would. The old woman would die without ever having lost her granddaughter.
“That was so long ago, sweetheart,” Angela said at last. “None of that matters anymore.”
“I know. But Caitlin and I talked about it sometimes. I think it made us closer. Almost like sisters. Weird as that sounds.”
Angela nodded. She smiled. “I’m glad I got to see you, Lindsay. Will you please tell your mother I said hello?”
“I will. And please—” The girl’s eyes filled again. “Please come back.”
Lindsay watched her walk away. From where she sat she saw Angela pass through the library’s automated glass doors and stop to open the small brushed-nickel door of the deposit chute, lift her book, and drop it in. She seemed to listen for the dull bang, then she let go the little door and walked on.
15
A whistle shrilled and three girls burst bare-legged down the black lanes, ponytails whipping, but then pulled up laughing and loped onto the field where other girls lay strewn and twisting on the grass. Cross-country girls, not sprinters, they’d mostly been freshmen when Caitlin was a senior, yet they all knew her and they all knew him, and when one girl contorting in the grass looked up the hill and saw him, and tapped the hip of the girl nearest to her, he turned and limped away.
Deep painful blue of sky, the first stains of autumn in the elms and oaks.
The buses were long gone and there was nothing to see or hear at the front of the building but the snap hooks lashing at the high barren flagpole with that silvery hollow sound, and when he reached the street he turned south toward the railroad tracks. VFW stood for Veterans of Foreign Wars and the old vets would hail him and arm him with a pool stick and tell him stories of shitstorms in the jungle where men, boys really, not much older than he, best buddies, brothers, were there one second and gone the next. Headless. Cut in two. They wouldn’t let him smoke or drink. They called him the Young American. They swore they would find the piece of shit who did that to his leg and make the cocksucker beg them to put a bullet in his cocksucking eye. The old vets knew nothing about Caitlin—there one second and gone the next.
Before he reached the tracks a truck pulled alongside him in the street, and the passenger’s window descended and behind the wheel was his father. The boy stopped, and the blue Chevy stopped too.
I was up at the school, his father said. Up and down those halls. Where were you?
Just walking. The boy felt dizzy. The sun appeared to yo-yo in the sky. What are you doing here?
Came to talk to you.
The boy waited.
It’s not about Caitlin, he said. Hop in, he said, and the boy breathed. He slipped the backpack from his shoulder and hauled himself up into the cab.
Where were you going?
Nowhere. Just walking.
Just walking, his father said. That knee must be feeling pretty good.
The boy shrugged. Though the windows were down, the cab held a humid personal odor like a bed just vacated. It was the smell of a man’s long drive alone. His uncounted cigarettes and coffees. His souring skin and all his human emanations, including his thoughts, all the miles and miles of them collected within the cab like a dew that would lift from the glass on the tip of a finger.
The Chevy joggled over the tracks and Grant turned left and drove past the old VFW lounge with its antiaircraft gun aimed at the sky. The faded flag lifting feebly from the pole and falling again.
You’ve got your aunt Grace pretty concerned with all this just walking.
Is that why you’re here?
No, I was coming anyway.
Why?
To talk to you, like I said.
You could’ve called.
That only works when the other party answers his phone. Did you lose your phone again?
The battery died. So you drove all the way here to talk?
Do I need a better reason?
They drove south, out of town, on Old Airport Road. Grant had just come from seeing Angela, from sitting across from her at Grace’s kitchen table, a mug captured in her thin hands, her eyes dark and strange. As if watching a scene that had nothing to do with that kitchen, with him. There was one morning she couldn’t forget, she said.
A twin-engine Piper raced the Chevy on a parallel course and rose from the runway and immediately banked and headed for them as if in attack. It droned overhead, darkened them in a blink of shadow and went wobbling off into the west. When Sean was small they would come here to watch the small planes take off and land, and Grant had told him the story of Sean’s great-grandfather who had been a navigator on raids over Germany and whose plane had been shot down. How one of the crewmen came home two years later to tell that he’d seen the boy’s great-grandfather parachute out just ahead of him but had lost him in the night sky, and when the crewman was captured he expected to see the navigator in the camp, and when the war was over he expected to see him at the army hospital, and then he expected to see him back in the States, but he never did. No one ever did.
The story had put into the boy’s mind the story of a man who dropped into a forest far from the war and the cities, a black forgotten forest where a man could walk for years and never come across another man nor the end of the forest. Back home his young wife and his son wept over his gravestone but the man was alive in the forest and he lived there for so long that he forgot that there were such things as wars and cities and families. He simply became, like the deer, the owl, the fox, a thing of the woods. And like them he one day died, not from war, or the violence of another man, but because he’d grown old and could no longer hunt and could no longer protect himself from the other things in the forest.