He seemed to know what to do, and without any questions he wrapped his arms around me tight, and leaned against the wall.
“I can’t breathe,” I rasped. I could feel his bare, scarred chest against my cheek, feel the way his skin matted up in thick wrinkles and lines. “I miss him so much it’s impossible to go on being a person.”
“I know, Allstock.”
And then I just cried on him for what seemed forever, and he patted my back saying, “Shh,” which is all I really wanted to hear, even though it’s meaningless.
I can’t stand it when people try to tell me there’s some meaning to Teddy dying: that God wanted him in heaven or that he died for the greater good or whatever else. I think maybe “shh” is the only thing you can say for sure without lying.
“Lenore, I don’t know anything about anything,” James whispered. “But the important things don’t leave us.” That I was less sure of. But I didn’t protest.
Before dawn I was wiping my face and getting myself together and walking home. James came with me to the edge of the pasture, out of the woods, and then I waded home through the tall grass on my own.
Beth, I’ve made a discovery, and it’s that grief isn’t like sadness at all. Sadness is only something that’s a part of you. Grief becomes you; it wraps you up and changes you and makes everything—every little thing—different than it was before. I remember the me before we got the telegram saying he was gone, but it’s like I’m remembering someone else. It feels like an earthquake has gone through me, and the earthquake is that Teddy is gone. And I’m only just beginning to realize it.
And it makes me think about you and me. And how I’ve wanted so badly to be the person you remember. And how I’ve hated everyone for their sadness because mine is so big and ugly and hungry inside me that I can’t let it catch me.
I’ve been up all night. I’m lost but I also want to tell you, I’m not hopeless. I can hear the birds waking up, and a line of pretty yellow light is falling into the room, and I feel alive like I haven’t in a long time, but also aching. It feels a little like waking up from a fever. Like I’ve been asleep for months, or a year.
But I can’t promise you that I’m unaltered. And I’m not sure anymore that I want to be.
Love, Lenore
JUNE 14, 1919
Beth,
I have so much to tell you that I don’t know where to start. Everything has changed. Or more specifically, everything has disappeared.
I keep thinking, should I tell you about the fair? About everything that was wonderful about the night? Or should I skip right to the end, to the parts that really matter?
I suppose it’s always best to start things at the beginning, isn’t it?
The night of the fair, James showed up at the door at a quarter to seven.
I wore a new turquoise silk dress from Mother, and I knew I looked quite nice (you know I’m not humble). I opened the door and sucked in my breath, because James was in a gray suit and tie, and looked actually nice himself, though I wouldn’t have been able to see it before, even if he’d been dressed like that when I first met him.
Mother certainly couldn’t. She came up behind me asking about our plans when she brought herself up short at the sight of him, then recovered herself.
“Nice to meet you, James,” she boomed with an artificial smile, heartbreaking pity in her eyes, then led us into the drawing room. Father’s eyes widened but otherwise he stayed composed, stood from his chair, and shook James’s hand.
“Well usually I’d say we’ve heard nice things about you, but we’ve heard nothing about you, nice, bad, or otherwise,” he said, then cast me a look. “Where did you two meet?”
“We met each other in town,” I lied quickly, having rehearsed. “James was looking for fossils. I helped him a little.”
Father looked at me suspiciously. “Lenore helps you find rocks?”
“I talked her into it,” James said confidently. If he was self-conscious at all, he didn’t show it.
We all sat down to chat for a few minutes, and it was strangely like a breath of air in the house, because James was making jokes and giving little compliments about the house, and Father was talking about jobs. And everyone looked happy and relieved—as if I’d finally come to my senses.
“It’s nice to have a soldier in the house,” Father said. “The others were too young to serve, but you know we lost our own son to the cause.”
“I do know, sir.”
By the time we set off, Father was patting James on the back as if he were his newfound son-in-law. It was a harmless hope, and I didn’t try to signal him otherwise.
We reached the train station with our hearts in our throats—in the crowd, even James seemed to have caught the excitement of where we were headed. The train rocked toward London agonizingly slowly, and the closer we got, the more crowded it became, until it was jammed full of people: laughing teenagers like us, parents and children, old ladies who weren’t going to miss their chance to see the sights.
Whenever the train lurched forward, James and I reached to steady each other and laughed.
Getting off at the station, the fair gleamed up ahead of us like a beacon. Even with the throngs of people streaming in around us and through the gates, people were too wrapped up to barely glance at James, and he seemed so at ease it was easy to forget it was crowds that, for months, he’d been wanting to avoid.
He chatted to me as we walked, pointing things out (he has excellent manners when he decides to use them). He even seemed to forget about his face—no touching his lips and his ears or scratching at his cheeks. And I was proud of him, proud to have a hero by my side.
We’d stopped at a booth to gaze at the rows of candy apples, and James had just dug in his pockets to buy us one, when a woman pushed in behind us and said, breathlessly, that they were about to turn on the Hall of Lights. Everyone broke apart as we hurried toward the main plaza, hoping we wouldn’t be too late. We weren’t. We got there in time to see the lights go on—what they call the great illumination.
I don’t care what James says about the industrial age and how it’s hurt us just as much as it’s helped us. At that moment, when the plaza went up like a flame all around us (so bright that I kept thinking the moon could probably see us just as well as we could see it), I felt sure that everything that’s been invented is all completely perfect, and that human beings are incredible to dream up such things and bring them into being. Aren’t we a little like tiny gods? To reach up from the ground for the sun, and then when we can’t reach it, to make it ourselves?