“Help me up,” she said, and only then did I realize that her back was bad again. I helped her up, though my hands were trembling. And then we went to check on the patients, who were fine, or as fine as they could be, just white with plaster dust. A corpsman had died, but I didn’t know him, and his death isn’t why I tell this story.
I tell it because of this.
For a moment, before we went to check for damage, we stood there looking at each other, my hands on her arms as if to steady her. Her eyes were full of tears that I thought at first were from the pain and the fright. But that wasn’t why she was sad. She looked at me hard, like she was never going to see me again, like she was trying to memorize my face. And then she stepped back so that my hands fell away. That was the moment I really knew I’d lost her. I don’t know what I’d been hoping for, but that was when I knew I’d never have it, or if I’d had it, it was gone.
The next night was when she went out with him. I remember she didn’t seem to want to go. I remember she said before she went, “I don’t know about him. He’s . . . pushy.”
“So don’t go,” I said. “Stay here with me.”
A strange look crossed her face then. Maybe it was the way I’d said the words. Or maybe it was just the way she heard them, that kiss, that goddamn kiss, changing everything. “I think I’ll go,” she said.
And I put my face back in my book, without another word. That’s what I did, Jennifer.
In the morning, when I asked how the date had been, she said it was fine, but she wouldn’t look at me. There was an angry scratch on her neck, a strange flatness in her voice. Do you understand, Jennifer? I didn’t myself, until later. I was there and I failed to see, and maybe that’s one reason why I did what I did, because in my own grief and resentment I’d failed to see. There are so many ways in which the world is terrible, sometimes you fail to spot them all.
The Ones We Love
This morning Jennifer yelled at Milo. She lost her temper—over a little thing, an everyday thing, his snatching the Cheerios box from her hand after she said no more cereal, spilling Cheerios all over the floor, then stepping on them, crunching them into a spreading dust. All of it, except the snatching, an accident. In return she grabbed his arm, pulled him close, smacked him, twice, on his behind. For a moment he looked mulish but then he burst into tears. “You spanked me,” he said, in tones of grief and wonderment.
She knows it’s not rational to blame Margaret for this. But she is tense, she is so tense, and that is undeniably Margaret’s fault. Just tell me, she wants to demand. About Kay, yes, and the terrible world, and why you did what you did, and what you know about me. Unwrap the bandage. Hand me a mirror. “Do you understand?” Margaret asked, and Jennifer said, “I think—” but Margaret interrupted.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say it.”
“You asked me,” Jennifer said.
“So I did,” Margaret said. And then she abruptly changed the subject. “Are you still spending time with that professor friend?” Why would Jennifer have told her about Megan? But she must have, because then Margaret said Megan’s name. “Her husband’s a photographer, you said?”
“Yes,” Jennifer said.
“Maybe I should have one last portrait made. To go with this”—Margaret waved her hand at Jennifer’s notebook, on her face that look of disdain—“this thing you’re writing. Have you had your portrait made?”
“No,” Jennifer said. “Why would I do that?”
Margaret looked at her appraisingly. “You wouldn’t,” she said with certainty, and then to Jennifer’s surprise she smiled. “I wouldn’t either, to tell you the truth.”
Jennifer is reviewing this scene, thinking about Margaret, even though she’s out walking in an effort to shake her off. She’s on the Perimeter Trail, which encircles Sewanee—or the Domain, that humorously fantastic and yet appropriate name. She’s discovered, since Megan introduced her to this trail and the access point at the Cross, that she likes a solitary walk in the woods, likes clambering up a rock where the trees open out on a view of valleys and mountains and trees and trees and trees. She likes surveying an uninhabited world. When someone approaches on the trail—you can always hear them coming, their voices and their footsteps in the crackling leaves so wrongfully loud—she has to fight an urge to dart behind rock or tree and hide until they’ve passed. She forces herself to stay on the path, make eye contact, smile, say hi.
“You and I,” Margaret said yesterday, “we’d both like to be invisible.”
“What makes you say that?”
“But then,” Margaret said, “sometimes we wish we weren’t.”