The show was being put on at a Minor League baseball stadium about twenty minutes from my parents’ that’s always been the perfect place for pyrotechnics; we used to go there for the Fourth when I was a kid. Until I went to college I came here every Independence Day, first with my parents and Solly, then with a swarm of classmates, and by my last years in high school with guys in their hand-me-down family cars—not watching the show, just using the dark and crowds and noise as camouflage. That was when the stadium was small and dilapidated, with wooden seats, before it was renovated into the slick behemoth it is now.
I led the others into the elevator and we went all the way to the last row, where the view was worst for sports but best for fireworks. It had been a hot day but now a breeze swept up and chilled me; I’d remembered to bring a jacket for Lena, but not one for myself. As we filed along into our seats my arms came up in goosebumps.
Ned would have to work hard to find us, I figured, and of course there was no good reason he should try: no photo op, no obvious prospect of gain. Then again, hounding me seemed to be its own reward. He was always able to trace my movements. And he’d said he was coming.
Tumbling acrobats erupted onto the field, frolicked and ran off again; lumpy costumed creatures ran out next, waggling their top-heavy bodies, possibly cartoon animals connected to a TV show. Tinny pop music blared loudly from a bad sound system to accompany their antics, then mercifully cut off. Vendors of popcorn and glow-in-the-dark novelties moved among the seats; I bought Lena a whistle in the colors of the rainbow. Finally the main show started, a local orchestra that tuned up and launched into a jumbled rendition of the 1812 Overture.
Maybe it wasn’t jumbled, I thought, maybe the flaw was in my ear, maybe Ned’s long fingers had twisted even the music that I heard.
Lena bounced off my lap in delight when the first firecrackers shot into the sky. She’d moved along to sit with Main Linda by the time, a few minutes later, her father appeared at the end of our row.
He wasn’t wearing a suit and tie for once; in a jacket and a polo shirt he was strictly business casual. Where was his bodyguard, I thought, his driver, the fake Secret Service guy? There was always one of them at least, but I saw no one near. Maybe they were seated somewhere, hidden in the crowd.
I moved out toward him instantly, exactly as though I wanted to be in his company and sought it out—and I did want to, I wanted nothing more than to reach him at that moment. Instead of a rush of adrenaline or heavy dread it was a stolid calm that guided my progress; I barely noticed the guests as I inched myself along between their jutting-out knees and the seatbacks in front of us. It was almost romantic, as though, beneath the falling pink stars and showers of green, there was no one anymore but Ned and me.
Stepping onto the catwalk I remembered parking with a boyfriend senior year, just a few steps from the stadium wall. I knew the moldy smell of the seats in his car, the lacy brown rust along the bottom of the doors, and how we’d thought of the fireworks as our soundtrack—the world was about us. We were sure of that as we made out, moving in the darkness of the car with our long, lean arms and legs bound up in each other, that soft skin tingling over the curves, thrilled by the conviction that this here, this was the only and the all. There was no question, then, that the world had been created as our scenery.
That was the bliss of being young, the pure egoist joy. But if you get old and don’t grow out of it, I thought, looking up at my husband, you are ruined.
Maybe he’d never had a chance for that. Maybe he never had that kind of youth. Maybe he could only feel it now.
I leaned in as though I wanted to kiss him, and though I don’t think he believed or wished for that anymore he must have been surprised for a moment. He’s always assumed I’m harmless, pathetically harmless, and that gave me a couple of seconds’ grace to slam my hands against his chest. I was feeling nothing for him then but a pity that stretched all the way back to his childhood, all the way back to before he was him.
At the second of contact I saw how the guests had been drawn together, dots gathering around a node or birds flocking to a flyway. I saw Ned and his ominous host converging on us like a machine army—even the child in the subway train, even the air in the tires of my car, even the fire that had burned the house, all these were his armaments. I saw in every granule and wave how my husband’s power had seemed impossible, how it had borne the sheen of dark magic for me but was constituted of energy, energy subverted.
And when the heels of my hands came off him again, the images faded.