Jade turned off the radio when an ad for joining the Army came on.
“I want to thank you,” she said. “I didn’t want to talk about being with Susan today and you knew it.”
“Was it hard?”
Jade nodded. “Very.”
I felt my stomach turn.
We moved off Route 2, drove past an abandoned paper mill, and headed toward home. Jade was driving much too fast for narrow streets. It wasn’t like her. She was a great believer in highway safety; she wouldn’t even turn the ignition if you didn’t fasten your safety belt. I thought about watching the back of her head when she was sitting in Susan’s car, about Susan knocking into our shopping cart, and then an image, vaguely sexual, began to take shape in my mind—hands touching, an embrace. I let it recede. Jade continued to speed along. Her jaw was set forward; she seemed deliberately unblinking; her arms were straight and stiff. I didn’t want to look at her because I didn’t want to know what she was thinking. I put my hand out the window and cupped my fingers. The force of the sweet night air as we sped homeward was forceful, oppressive, something alive pressing against me.
“She frightened me,” Jade said, suddenly. She touched the cigarette lighter with her fingertips and then grabbed the steering wheel again.
“How?”
“By what she thinks. About us. Me. It’s so hard with Susan because she’s always so convinced she’s right. And she is right a lot, of course. She really is perceptive. But sometimes she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about, only you can’t tell because she says it in the same super-convinced way. She takes aim and charges right at you, and if you resist it at all, she pushes that much harder. She’s like Keith in a way. I mean she remembers everything. And she can take power with it. Keith doesn’t do that. Keith will throw it in your face if he thinks you’re trying to hurt him, but he doesn’t try to take power. He doesn’t want it, but Susan does.”
“What did she say?”
“A lot of things. But the thing that made me…I don’t know. Here’s what: She says I use you.”
“For what?”
“It’s complicated. No. Not that. It’s just hard to say. It all has to do with my fucked-up family and my feelings about them. She thinks I use you against my family,” Jade said. “But in the most awful way. To really destroy them. She says you were acting as my agent when you set the fire. She says it was really me.”
“No. It was me.”
“I know. But it was you doing what I wanted. Reading my mind. We always do that anyhow. We always know each other right down to the bottom. I wanted something to happen and you made sure it did. I could have seen it in you from the beginning, the possibility. The way you charmed yourself into the middle of everything and then went wild. You know, even the fact that you could virtually become a member of the family galled me, if you want to know. There always seemed to be room for one more and in the meanwhile we got nothing. They took you right in—Ann did. And still does. But there was no room. There may have been room for me to have a lover but there wasn’t any place for a new Butterfield. And that’s what you were becoming. And I knew you would and I also knew that sooner or later the whole thing would explode.”
“I don’t think you knew that. You’re blaming yourself.”
“I think I did. And I wanted it. Even after it happened. I felt so strange. Grief and all that, but mixed up. I was glad, I think, that the family fell apart. I didn’t know it would end the family, though I should have figured that out, I see now. But for a while I think I was genuinely relieved. The way you are when you finally say the most horrible thing that’s ever wormed its way into your heart, or when you finally lose your favorite ring. The worst was out. The worst.”
“Is this Susan talking or you? You sound convinced.”
“I’m not convinced. I’m spinning. And you being in New York when Hugh got killed doesn’t make it any easier, for obvious reasons. It’s like you were the agent of my murderous spirit again.”
I looked out the window. We’d just sped past our house. Every light was on except in the attic. I turned the side-view mirror and watched the house get smaller. A few hundred feet later, the blacktop turned to gravel; we were heading out toward where a few of the area’s last real farms were. The tires hit the gravel, lifting a spray of stones that bounced and splattered against Colleen’s car.
“Go easy,” I said. But of course all that was really on my mind at that moment was the desire to tell Jade as much of the truth as I knew about Hugh’s death. The pull of that confession was nearly hypnotic, like the urge to leap that sometimes overcomes you when you are on the balcony of a very high building; only now it didn’t seem as if destruction was inevitable, or that it would take a miracle to save me, a violation of nature’s law. It seemed that if I spoke truthfully now I would be doing what was best for both of us, drawing us closer, silencing that persistent hum of ambiguity that droned always between us.
We drove past the growing corn, an indistinct mass in the heavy night. A small farmhouse with the light shining behind gingham curtains. The piercing, suspenseful twitter of crickets. The last of the fireflies, their phosphorescence bleeding into the humid blackness. The gravel was gone now and the road was packed dirt, with ridges and holes. Jade was still pushing fifty and the old Saab rattled like a trayful of china. We came to a fork in the road and Jade veered to the right. She drove up another few hundred feet on a road that was getting progressively rougher and then suddenly she stepped on the brakes and we lurched to a stop. There was a cornfield on one side of us and on the other a vast, plowed field, which rolled gently toward a distant farmhouse, its tiny windows golden and alive. Accidentally, she let her foot off the clutch and the car bucked forward a few times and stalled out.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” said Jade. She leaned forward and rested her head on the steering wheel.
“It doesn’t matter.”
We were silent for a while and someone turned up the volume on the night around us. Then Jade said, “Sometimes I think we have an unhappiness all our own waiting for us. In some love affairs the people do each other in, but I really do think that we’re too in love to do that, too much the same person, and what will do us in will be something quite a bit larger than just you or me. It’s the special unhappiness of mutual love and it really scares the shit out of me.”
I suppose I should have said something to the contrary, comforted her. But we believed we were deep enough to face anything, any sort of death, any shadow of fate. Yet even as I nodded slowly I felt a tightening inside, as if a doctor had just given me a fatal diagnosis.
“It’s still possible for me to believe that it won’t happen,” I said. “And in the meanwhile…”
“In the meanwhile.”
“Well, yes. In the meanwhile we can be together and I think we can promise each other all the future that’s ours.”
“Susan scared me, she really did.”
“People like us are easy to scare. We’re out on a limb.” I moved closer to her but we were in bucket seats and the gearshift was between us. Jade put her head against the steering wheel again and when I touched her knee a teardrop, singular and warm, struck the back of my hand.
I knew I wouldn’t tell her about Hugh and I knew also that if justice had anything to do with the unfolding of the human universe, then I no longer quite deserved to be with Jade. Loving her was not the perfect right of my birth but something I would have to get away with. And if love is a bridge that connects time to eternity, then I would have to slip across in some kind of disguise.