Shephard pondered the question respectfully as he turned to the next entry. It was two months later, March 21, 1952:
I’m still having the cramps and jitters inside me. When I think of loving Burt, they get worse and it’s like my mind is trying to forget but my body wants to remember. Sometimes I wake up so hungry for him that my face is wet from tears, and other things are wet too. It isn’t easy for a woman to be alone after being loved by her husband so much. I know that I was not the only woman he made love to, but I know that he never loved her the way he loved me. She is a slut, but I’m not bitter. There is simply no room for bitterness. My heart actually feels like there is something around it, squeezing sometimes. I shopped for two again today, but I felt bad by the time I got to the cereal and had to put my sunglasses on. I still haven’t joined the girls at the hospital yet. But so sweet, some of the letters the patients have written. Maybe when I put some weight back on. Ten pounds down from only a hundred to start with and all the clothes look funny. Still never hungry. It feels so strange when men look at me now.
The next entry, made on March 26, 1952, unnerved him:
Poor Wade Shephard and poor Colleen. Just because bad things happen to us is no reason to forget the bad things that befall others. Wade and I had dinner once last week but we didn’t find much to talk about and it was a very dark event. He got drunk and I did, too, but it was not a cheerful drunk but a gloomy one and over early. People like us should be good for each other. But I would rather be with someone whose life has been easier on them. I’m sure he thought the same of me. Joe was still very nice to arrange it. He has been so good, getting his pharmacist to fill the prescriptions for me, and no charge, even. The pills, they make me feel dumb and warm and forgetful. I guess sadness gets bigger when you share it Wade has lost weight, too. Must have looked funny to the others at the club, two weight-losers and mate losers. At least Burton was an accident. I have no doubt that Azul killed Colleen, he was such a violent and uncaring man. I’ll never understand what so many of the women saw in him. Joe was most helpful in helping me prepare my testimony. Good God, my problems are small compared to Colleen’s. Or Wade’s. Wish I could sleep regular hours. Sleep, now there’s a powerful drug.
Shephard finished the entry and tried to picture his father and Hope Creeley dining in some dark corner of the Surfside Restaurant, forcing conversation and drinking for relief. But Hope Creeley’s cramps and jitters seemed to transfer themselves to his own stomach. The passage about Wade and Colleen was violation. He felt awkward, angry — the same feelings that he had had as a child, a fist-clenching, biting, wildly violent passion to destroy the mention of his mother’s death, yet to preserve her memory inviolate. Shephard lit another cigarette and let the calming nicotine swarm his brain. The memory of his mother was not memory at all, he thought, but the creation of it. He had never known her. Yet he had labored to imagine what he might have known. And the Zaharas and Creeleys of the world were intruders, the memory-wreckers. Safe and warm, he thought. What better judge than me to edit my own past?
A trickle of sweat dropped down his back as he wiped his forehead with a sleeve. Drop it, he thought. Healing waters. Unprofessional, intrusive, destructive. He pressed ahead. The next entry was made one year after Burton’s death, September 26, 1952:
Exactly a year now since Burt drowned. It was a lovely day today but it made me remember because seasons will make us do that Even without the lights and decorations, if December came around you would still think of Christmas. It’s in the blood, I guess. A very busy month, moving to Laguna. The Surfside was simply too haunted for me — having to see the things that made me happy and even the things that didn’t, like Helene. And all the people talking behind my back about her and Burt. Nobody says anything to me. I feel sorry for her. But Laguna is small and beautiful and not so many people know me, so they don’t look at me with those damned pitying eyes. Everything is growing so fast, so many new people. Something inside of me is changing. I don’t have the pains and cramps so often and my bones don’t feel like they’re made of iron anymore. I got out of bed early today. I no longer like my bed so much. Not that I want another man. Think about Burton so much still. Had my first period in a year last week. Think I was bleeding when he died. My new neighbors here are quite nice. The Ottens on the left and Laras on the right. The little Lara girl is so cute, all cheeks and freckles. Of all the things Burt left me, I wish that one of them could have been a child.
He skipped ahead nearly ten years, to May 5, 1962:
Big race to Ensenada today from the Surfside. I’m writing this from aboard Joe Datilla’s boat, the Priceless, which is why the handwriting is so nutty. Maybe the gin too. It’s been a great race and I think we're somewhere in front Joe hates to lose and takes everything so serious. This is supposed to be my turn to sleep, but too much coffee and excitement, I think. Reggie Often said he’d leave his wife for me yesterday, and I told him not to be so silly. Such a sweet little man, and a good neighbor.
December 7, 1963:
Whenever I hear this date my blood seems to go metallic and something rings in my ears. I can still remember what I was doing when we were attacked. I was playing with Skeeter in the front yard and dad had just heard on the news about Pearl Harbor. He was screaming and bellowing at mom, then she was crying and quick on the telephone with her friends. I kept looking up in the sky and wondering if I might see a Zero, and dumb Skeeter just barked. What a horrid winter this has been. I can still hear the drums and see that dark processional at John Kennedy’s funeral, and those pictures of Jackie with the blood on her legs and everyone saying what a coward she was for trying to climb out. Poor, poor woman. The wind blew all day here when they buried him and it was a bad day. I feel so low now, I’ll write another time.
Shephard moved ahead twenty years, to the last entries in the book. Hope Creeley’s handwriting had decayed into a heavy and erratic scrawl, sometimes angling up the page, sometimes down. He could almost feel the pressure of her hand as she tried to keep the pen steady. August 25, the day that Tim Algernon had been killed:
I’ve never had such a feeling of foreboding in all my life. Today I got out of bed and went to the garden. Someone had pulled off two of my best roses in the night Reggie kept following me up and down the hedge yesterday and tried to kiss me by the perennials. He wants an answer about the movies, I know. So lonely since his wife passed away. Then the afternoon paper came and Tim Algernon dead, I went to the bathroom and was sick but nothing came up. Even Skeeter seemed slowed up today. The first Skeeter was a better dog until the trash truck hit him. The new Skeeter is a good dog and I like the way his tail curls and his ears point I like the barklessness of him. A silent dog is almost a perfect dog. Tim kept calling but I never returned them, and now I wonder if the police should know. I want to be left alone, no Tim and no one but Skeeter and me and he can’t even bark. Poor Tim now. One of the old Surfside gang and such a nice big man. So much bad has happened to so many of us from back then. Bad luck hangs in the air like the pyramids at El Giza. The world is so big, but so empty. The wind especially, like the day they buried the president and it just kept blowing like breeze off the ankles of God. I wonder if part of Burton is flying around in it sometimes. I know now, as I look back, that I held onto him too long after he was gone, just as I held onto him too hard when he was with me. It seems impossible that a person might do something so simple as loving wrong. I’m sure Burton is somewhere out there in that wind. He always wanted flying lessons.