"I know," Polly said calmly. "I know. That's what this is really all about, isn't it? How you miss them both."
He began to weep. Al had wept every night for two weeks, and Alan had been there to hold him and offer what comfort he could, but Alan had not cried himself Now he did. The sobs took him and carried him just as they would; he had no power to stop or stay them. He could not moderate his grief, and at last found, with deep incoherent relief, that he had no urge to do so.
He pushed the coffee cup blindly aside, heard it hit the floor in some other world and shatter there. He laid his overheated, throbbing head on the table and wrapped his arms around it and wept.
At some point, he had felt her raise his head with her cool hands, her misshapen, kindly hands, and place it against her stomach. She held it there and he wept for a long, long time.
8
Her arm was slipping off his chest. Alan moved it gently, aware that if he bumped her hand even lightly, he would wake her. Looking at the ceiling, he wondered if Polly had deliberately provoked his grief that day. He rather thought she had, either knowing or intuiting that he needed to express his grief much more than he needed to find answers which were almost certainly not there. anyway.
That had been the beginning between them, even though he felt more like the end had not recognized it as a beginning; it had he had finally musof something. Between then and the day when tered up enough courage to ask Polly to have dinner with him, he had thought often of the look of her blue eyes and the feel of her hand lying on his wrist.
He thought of the gentle relentlessness with which she had forced him toward ideas he had either ignored or overlooked. And during that time he tried to deal with a new set of feelings about Annie's death; once the roadblock between him and his grief had been removed, these of her feelings had poured out in a flood. Chief and most distressing among them had been a terrible rage at her for concealing a disease that could have been treated and cured... and for having taken their son with her that day. He had talked about some of these feelings with Polly at The Birches on a chilly, rain-swept night last April.
"You've stopped thinking about suicide and started thinking you're angry, Alan."
about murder," she'd said. "That's why you He shook his head and started to speak, but she had leaned over the table and put one of her crooked fingers firmly against his lips for a moment. Shush, you. And the gesture so startled him that he did shush.
"Yes," she said. "I'm not going to catechize you this time, Alanit's been a long time since I've been out to dinner with a man, and I'm enjoying it too much to play Ms. Chief Prosecutor. But people don't get angry at other people-not the way you're angry, at leastfor being in accidents, unless there has been a big piece of carelessness involved. If Annie and Todd had died because the brakes in the Scout failed, you might blame yourself for not having had them checked, or you might sue Sonny jackett for having done a sloppy job the last time you took it in for maintenance, but you wouldn't blame her. Isn't that true?"
"I guess it is."
"I know it is. Maybe there was an accident of some kind, Alan.
You know she might have had a seizure while she was driving, because Dr. Van Allen told you so. But has it ever occurred to you that she might have swerved to avoid a deer@ That it might have been something as simple as that?"
It had. A deer, a bird, even an oncoming car that had wandered into her lane.
"Yes. But her seatbelt-"
"Oh, forget the goddam seatbelt! "she had said with such spirited vehemence that some of the diners close to them looked around briefly. "Maybe she had a headache, and it caused her to forget her seatbelt that one time, but that still doesn't mean she deliberately crashed the car. And a headache-one of her bad ones-would explain why Todd's belt was fastened. And it still isn't the point."
"What is, then?"
"That there are too many maybes here to support your anger.
And even if the worst things You suspect are true, you'll never know, will you? "No. "And if you did know She looked at him steadily. There was a candle on the table between them. Her eyes were a darker blue in its flame, and he could see a tiny spark of light in each one.
"Well, a brain tumor is an accident, too. There is no culprit here, I per Alan, no-what do You call them in your line of work?-no petrator.
Until you accept that, there will be no chance."
"What chance?"
"Our chance," she said calmly. "I like You very much, Alan, and I'm not too old to take a risk, but I'm old enough to have had some sad experience of where my emotions can lead me when they get Out of control. I won't let them get anywhere Close to that point until you're able to put Annie and Todd to rest."